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Comment Re:Surprised he even bothers (Score 4, Insightful) 637

by GrimSavant (#62298447) Attached to: Russia Attacks Ukraine
Speak plainly. Putin's attacking the whole of Ukraine, not just playing games in the proxy wars he's been running since 2014. He has said that Ukraine is more or less a fake country, an accident of the Soviet system, without a real history independent of Russia, and that it is currently run by a nazi regime that he will denazify. Mind you, all of that is BATSHIT INSANE, completely ahistorical, and the leader of this "nazi regime" is of Jewish ancestry who lost family members to the Holocaust.

If Putin is not a gibbering lunatic who believes the garbage that comes out of his mouth and his regime has been flooding the zone with, then he is playing the old game of conquest and longing for a lost empire of the past. And in that sense, how is he going to win this in the long term, what's the gain? Is he going to occupy a hostile Ukraine indefinitely to rebuild his empire? Is he just going to blow the place up and retreat back to the east and Crimea? Maybe he can conquer Ukraine in the coming months, but what can he actually hold in the long term, and what will he try? And how does he do that without bleeding himself dry to get anything more than he already had before all this? Who will support him beyond those who are already his puppets (see Belarus), and maybe some other revanchists like China? China will be the senior partner in that relationship, and they will extract maximum gain at Russia's expense, as they plainly have no interest in rebuilding the Russian empire, only their own.

The only hope I can see Putin having is Ukraine folding without much of a fight, then he gets to dictate some terms. But trying to rebuild the empire, which really seems to be his intent, seems like a giant pipe dream, and doomed to fail sooner or later. Maybe if Putin had a stooge like Trump in there to blow up NATO before Russia went in he could have gotten quite a bit for himself without having to have a real, brutal war, but that's not the case.

I'll stand by what I said earlier, you'd have to be nuts to think this is in Russia's interests, it's an act that reeks more of desperation than strength. Any gain that isn't fleeting will have to be paid for dearly in blood and treasure.

Comment Re:Surprised he even bothers (Score 3, Insightful) 637

by GrimSavant (#62298139) Attached to: Russia Attacks Ukraine
You have to be as nuts as Putin to think this is actually in Russia's interest. He's going to make the country a pariah state, alienate most of his trading partners, and if he wants to get anything beyond a couple of wartorn puppets in eastern Ukraine he is going to have a long and bloody occupation that'll drain away whatever military and economic strength Russia has left. Maybe China will trade with him still, but they have no real love for him and will have him over the rail in any deals going forward because it's not like Russia will have a ton of alternatives. This is all a fever dream of a deteriorating old megalomaniac longing for a lost Russia/Soviet empire, who is only still relevant because of fossil fuel supplies and a massive nuclear weapon stockpile.

As for the second part, your type sure were lovely back in the 1930s. I mean, who really cares about the Sudetenland and Poland? Not in our interest what happens there.

Comment Re:No Qanon Shaman? (Score 1) 240

From the pardon statement list:

Paul Erickson – President Trump has issued a full pardon to Paul Erikson. This pardon is supported by Kellyanne Conway. Mr. Erickson’s conviction was based off the Russian collusion hoax. After finding no grounds to charge him with any crimes with respect to connections with Russia, he was charged with a minor financial crime. Although the Department of Justice sought a lesser sentence, Mr. Erickson was sentenced to 7 years’ imprisonment—nearly double the Department of Justice’s recommended maximum sentence. This pardon helps right the wrongs of what has been revealed to be perhaps the greatest witch hunt in American History.

I must say that is a remarkably spiteful statement to put out on a pardon announcement. Really doesn't leave much to the imagination as to the real motivations there.

Comment Re:Contact tracing (Score 1) 333

by GrimSavant (#60930170) Attached to: Scraped Parler Data Is a Metadata Gold Mine
If there is any time to refuse to indulge in revisionist delusions like those you are peddling, it is now. The mob had very violent elements in it, and we are lucky that the body count isn't higher than it is now. Elements of the crowd were chanting for the execution of Mike Pence. Real pipe bombs were planted. This guy brought guns and homemade explosives. Dozens of cops were injured, and five people were killed.

The mob's goal, as stated by the current president and his subordinates, was to stop the congress from certifying the electoral college which would make Biden the next president, and end Trump's presidency. In other words, this was an attempt to overturn the constitutional order of the country and the transition of power to keep in office a president who just lost an election. This is fueled by the Big Lie that you seem to be peddling elsewhere, that the election was fraudulent despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, and plenty of evidence that Trump instead was trying to fraudulently overturn the election himself by threatening state and local officials such as the Secretary of State of Georgia.

Given that you have a signature white knighting an insurrectionist killed because they attempted to cross a shoot-to-kill line in spite of being warned as such, when she and the neighboring mob was very close to her reaching the targeted members of congress, I have little doubt that you will consider this with any modicum of intellectual honesty. However for everyone else reading this, this is the sort of enabling and willful distortion of obvious and verifiable truth that provides aid and comfort to this sort of a dangerous reactionary movement.

Comment Re:OK, I'll be Devil's Advocate here (Score 2) 485

You clearly don't know what you are talking about. Some of the mob wanted to kill Mike Pence. Someone in the mob beat a cop to death with a fire extinguisher. This guy brought guns and homemade explosives. There was at least one real pipe bomb planted at the RNC, and there may have been more.

The stated ethos of the mob was to "stop the steal", or in other words, stop the counting of the electoral college votes that gave Biden the win to transition power to him and end the Trump presidency. Doing so by force, as was intended, is overturning the constitutional order of the US in a vain attempt to maintain power for Trump. If they were somehow successful in coercing a declaration of victory for Trump, then an ensuing civil war or widespread uprising and anarchy seems decently likely.

Comment Re: The economy does better under Dems (Score 2) 652

by GrimSavant (#60914862) Attached to: Google Suspends Parler From App Store; Apple Gives 24-Hour Warning
What planet are you living on? Doesn't seem to be Earth.

The "silent majority" is neither silent nor a majority, and what just happened was a fascist insurrection attacking the capitol building. It it included luminaries who wore slogans literally glorifying the holocaust, as well as the wild men and the militia types wearing tacticool gear.

Those guys are the extremist authoritarians bent on overthrowing democracy, with the chant of the Big Lie on their lips. They are a danger to themselves and everyone else, including fools like you who make common cause with them. Several groups of them were literally calling for the execution of Mike Pence, Trump's own VP, because he refused to go along with a coup attempt.

America is definitely in serious trouble, in large part because a sizable portion of the population has divorced itself from reality in favor of comfortable lies. And no clear way to fix it, because they won't listen to anything that would contradict their devotion to the cult of an obviously villainous con man.

Comment Re:I welcome our new communist overlords (Score 1) 485

Inciting insurrection and terrorism are not protected speech, specifically when that speech is to produce imminent lawless action. Which it already has in case you weren't paying attention.

Even if that was protected speech, that's only from the standpoint of the government prohibiting it. Twitter is a private entity and is well within their rights to ban Trump even if he and his associates weren't inciting a violent uprising. Twitter has rights too.

Comment Re:By Feb. 21, he was deemed fully recovered. (Score 1) 139

You might be overthinking it a bit. 99.999% seems pretty obviously just pulled out of his ass. And he's underplaying the notion that this is a virus that has just hopped species and thus is new to humanity, so we don't have the normal level of residual immunity that we have from periodically getting infected by strains of influenza.

Comment Works until it doesn't (Score 3, Insightful) 99

by GrimSavant (#59772210) Attached to: Reddit's Profane, Greedy Traders Are Shaking Up the Stock Market
I'm a bit rusty on my financial mathematics, my recollection is that some of the standard options pricing modeling is based on the concept that an options' price in an ideal world would match a constantly updating of a portfolio of buying and selling (or perhaps shorting depending on the type of option) of the underlying asset mixed with a theoretical risk free interest rate. So the price of the stock should move with the price of the option as the options are traded, not just the other way around. Here's a link to one of introductory models to teach option pricing, the Biniomial option pricing model.

From a practical standpoint, you probably shouldn't put much belief into the notion that some randos on Reddit have found themselves a get rich quick stream that has no real risk exposure. If this could be done in a riskless manner, then you could be sure there would be big players in the financial markets would already be doing it in a heavily automated manner with very low latency, and that would cause the "free money" to almost immediately dry up or some greater breakdown to happen. More realistically they are making some money on their small bets, not thinking too hard about what could possibly go wrong, and that small money they put forward buying calls will suddenly become a lot smaller when there is a downward spike in stock prices for whatever reason while they are exposed.

Comment Re:The transcript (Score 1) 1183

Is this some sort of "who's on first?" routine or subpoena denialism? Because I'm having a hard time making sense as to why you don't think there are subpoenas, even though there's plenty of record about many of the witnesses following or refusing to comply with subpoenas. For example, Giulliani refused to comply with a subpeona, and here's a letter from his lawyer refusing to answer the subpoena. Why would he complain about the subpoena being illegitimate, overbroad, and violating his privileges if the subpoena didn't exist?

Here's the letter transmitting the subpoena for Giuliani's records, and one for Pompeo to produce documents from the attached schedule. Is there some sort of reason why this should not believed, or do you need the attachments to believe them, or what?

Comment Re:The transcript (Score 1) 1183

The House of Representatives and the Senate are the two parts that compose the congress. Are you really going to hang on being a giant pedant about them using the term "obstruction of congress" for purposes of debate and naming? Would you feel better if they were talking about contempt of congress instead?

And where are you getting this misinformation that the House never issued any subpoenas? They issued a bunch of them! Some were answered by the people involved (they included many of the witnesses who testified), but not all. Article 2 lists 9 people who refused to give testimony under subpoena. A couple of the subpoenas were withdrawn or tactically never issued, but that is not at all what you are claiming.

Trump had his letter of defiance issued early on declaring that the impeachment was constitutionally invalid and that he would block cooperation, and some of the executive branch employees followed that guidance while others did not. There is normally a bit of shin kicking between the branches in terms of what documents and materials they have to hand over and that is mediated by the courts, but Trump's complete defiance of the impeachment process and dictates that the process is unconstitutional proves that he has gone way past any plausible propriety and overstepped his bounds such that he needs to be removed from the presidency. He is neither an king nor a dictator.

Comment Re:It's one sentence in the Constitution (Score 1) 1183

The first guy convicted in an impeachment, Judge John Pickering. He was impeached for making unlawful rulings and being a drunk on the bench (as well as being nutty), which was not a criminal offense in the statutory sense of the word. There was disagreement over whether that counted even then since it was not a violation of a specific law, but it is established that there have been convictions on things that aren't specific enumerated crimes. "High crimes and misdemeanors" is a deliberately vague term to cover misconduct of public officials taken from English law, and abuse of power (or trust) had been used in English impeachments before.

I'd say it is is a bit more moot here than indicated, since if there was a DOJ that was willing to indict Trump there are several crimes he could be charged with over this pattern of behavior, even though it doesn't line up 1-to-1 with the articles of impeachment. But impeachment is explicitly a different type of proceeding than a criminal prosecution as outlined in the constitution, and confounding the two is not a good idea.

Comment Re:The transcript (Score 1) 1183

Nixon's articles of impeachment

Article 3

In his conduct of the office of President of the United States, Richard M. Nixon, contrary to his oath faithfully to execute the office of President of the United States and, to the best of his ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States, and in violation of his constitutional duty to take care that the laws be faithfully executed, has failed without lawful cause or excuse to produce papers and things as directed by duly authorized subpoenas issued by the Committee on the Judiciary of the House of Representatives on April 11, 1974, May 15, 1974, May 30, 1974, and June 24, 1974, and willfully disobeyed such subpoenas. The subpoenaed papers and things were deemed necessary by the Committee in order to resolve by direct evidence fundamental, factual questions relating to Presidential direction, knowledge or approval of actions demonstrated by other evidence to be substantial grounds for impeachment of the President. In refusing to produce these papers and things Richard M. Nixon, substituting his judgment as to what materials were necessary for the inquiry, interposed the powers of the Presidency against the the lawful subpoenas of the House of Representatives, thereby assuming to himself functions and judgments necessary to the exercise of the sole power of impeachment vested by the Constitution in the House of Representatives.

In all of this, Richard M. Nixon has acted in a manner contrary to his trust as President and subversive of constitutional government, to the great prejudice of the cause of law and justice, and to the manifest injury of the people of the United States.

Wherefore, Richard M. Nixon, by such conduct, warrants impeachment and trial, and removal from office.

Adopted 21-17 by the Committee on the Judiciary of the House of Representatives.

That's an "obstruction of congress" charge, and impeached him for refusing to provide evidence to congress for their impeachment inquiry. If the House is getting stonewalled on an impeachment inquiry, then it is established precedent that they can and have outright impeached a president for it.

Maybe you should read this stuff before talking about programming.

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