A number of times. Once to me specifically. Big bump on the highway at full speed because the highway dept had basically created a small cliff cutting across the road, but hadn't put up any signage.

Well, I'm not super concerned about that for myself, specifically. In general though, I do recognize it as a safety issue that has actually killed people. I am not sure how you don't see how that has to do with flush-mount exterior handles though. Actually, maybe I do because there's no article in the summary (there is a link in the story header, but it's not super obvious and the summary is really lacking). This story is exactly about China doing the "easy to solve" thing you suggested. From an actual article about it:

It's unrelated to being an EV. Modern ICE vehicles can have the exact same kind of door locks. Honestly, this has something I have thought is a safety concern ever since all car windows became power windows and didn't have a crank any more. Of course, if you had something to break it (and they sell car multi-tools that have a window breaking tool as part of it) that wasn't necessarily a problem. Now though, a lot of the cars have window glass that you can't break. I mean, you can shatter it, but it's laminated so that it still remains as an intact barrier.

Ultimately, these are not show stopping issues. Sure, they will kill people, but not that many statistically. Still people tend not to be too happy when they or a love one die because someone thought that a locking mechanism that relies on electricity being available would be cool.

You presented preventing monopolies as the only reason the SEC would step in. I pointed out that, while the regulations the SEC enforces might stop monopolies from forming, that is not what they're actually for. In this case, a logical reason for the SEC to step in is because the whole thing stinks to high heaven from a securities standpoint. First, Musk took one unprofitable company, X, and merged it with xAI with a made up valuation of X. This was a clear attempt to rescue X from its unprofitability under Musk and to rescue the Tesla shares he backed his position with. xAI buying X is problematic because that means the investors in xAI are trading their shares for an over-valued security. Now, some of the investors might have been investors in both, but not all of them. Now, very shortly after, SpaceX and xAI/X are merging and it appears to essentially be for the same reason. This is just a continuation of Musk completely abusing his position and ignoring his fiduciary responsibility. Just like when he uses resources from one of "his" companies in another one of "his" companies. Since he's not actually the owner of both, just part owner, it's stealing. Or, when he blackmailed Tesla directly, shamelessly in public, to give him tens of billions of stock and additional control over the company, or he would use another company to directly compete. These are insane, and frankly criminal, violations but we seem to be through the looking glass now.

So, this clearly _is_ a matter for the SEC even though it is not about the merger creating a monopoly position in any one industry. There are very good reasons the SEC should be involved, but it has basically allowed Musk to get away with just about anything.

That statement is true. The rest of your post is based off that statement. However, for the rest of your post to be valid, that statement would actually have to be: "The SEC only protects against monopolies". That statement, however, is not true. For example, the SEC protects against various forms of financial fraud and insider trading as well as producing and enforcing securities regulations. While those things could be used to reinforce or build a monopoly, no present or future monopoly is actually required for those to exist. A lot of their function is in the actual name. Securities, for example, are things like stocks, bonds, and options. Companies over a certain size that utilize securities have to be registered with the SEC whether public or private. The companies in question are not sole ownerships (no matter how much Musk likes to make everyone believe so and acts like he is the sole owner) or family businesses, etc. They have investors who own stock in the companies. So SEC rules apply.

As another poster has pointed out, in many EVs these rely on the 12v system. The 12v system, in turn, relies on an antiquated technology: the 12v lead-acid car battery. While the technology has its up sides, like reliability in extreme weather, it has a downside that no other modern electronics in cars have. That's the connectors. Those would be an anode and cathode post usually on the top. There are alternatives like side post and terminal screws, but lots of EVs still use plain old top post lead acid batteries. The connectors on the batteries are cylindrical posts, and the connections that go to them hold on with tension by squeezing. They can pop off if the car gets a bad bump. No other modern automotive electrical connector is like that. They almost universally clip on and are designed so that they will still cling on even in a bad bump.

Basically, if your car doors rely on the 12V system to open, a bad bump could leave you stuck and unable to open the doors.

I'm not confused, or at least I wasn't. I wasn't referring directly to any court cases. I was referring specifically to what you wrote where you brought up both civilian and military RADAR.

It actually still applies since many of the details apply to any line of sight RADAR and the other details establish that, for basically any relevant land-based RADAR installation, the top of the wind turbines are over the horizon or very close to it. The "wall of text" that you apparently failed to read actually addresses details of both.

There's nothing magical about military radar. The concepts are the same as other forms of imaging. It's either line of sight, or you're bouncing the signal off the sky, in which case you're going for a greatly extended range, which means that you completely pass over this wind farm so there's no interference. These wind turbines are tiny obstacles at that range. I pointed out in another post that the apparent height of these turbines, at the distance of 15 miles would be about the same as 1/3 inch at the distance of an outstretched arm. In other words, they would be appear about the height of a pinky nail. At the 35 miles to the mainland, they would appear about the same size as something 1/18 inch tall at the length of an outstretched arm. That's about the height of dime seen edge on. That's basically a speck. Even then, that's only if you can see its entire height over the horizon. At 35 miles, you would need a vantage point from an altitude over 800 feet to see the base of the wind turbine tower. The highest point in Cape cod is about 300 feet above sea level. If you exclude Cape Cod, the mainland is about 45 to 50 miles away and the nearest military RADAR installation in that direction even further. The simple fact is that there are very limited circumstances where land-based military RADAR could even "see" these because the horizon is in the way for line of sight, and they are not in the beam path for over the horizon either.

Also, are you really playing the game where you start out making technical claims about military RADAR, even though you are not a military RADAR expert and then, when I point out the flaws in your technical claims you turn around and say: "Are you an expert in military radar? No, no you are not."? I mean, really? Are _you_ a military RADAR expert? If not, your own reasoning should preclude you making your original claims.

The "far onland" I was positing would be further than that. Basically I was referring to the inexplicable scenario where, for some reason, the over the horizon systems were placed so that their range stopped around where this wind farm is. I thought that was clearer it was meant to be an absurd scenario. Why did you think I wrote it?

In other words, you have no idea what you're talking about WRT military RADAR and don't have any basis for a complaint against offshore wind turbines.

Well, thank you for noting my opinion oh great gatekeeper of knowledge who demands credentials but oddly provided none of their own. I am not a credentialed expert in RADAR specifically, but I have worked professionally with interferometric laser microscopy. Plus, you know, the basic knowledge of geometry and geography to know that these are almost, or totally out of line of sight of land based RADAR systems and that systems like OTH RADAR bypass them. Oh, also I know that the point of surface wave systems is that they rely on the conductivity of the water and aren't going to react with the moving blades that, at their lowest pass by over a 100 feet in the air. They will interact with the tower. Of course, they will also interact with boats. There's nothing special about a wind turbine to that sort of system relative to any other object of similar cross section.

I mean, I've covered all the other reasons it's irrelevant to the land based RADAR systems due to range, the horizon, etc. and covered the fact that, being an effectively stationary object at a known location, it could be compensated for. I even covered this already. If it were really necessary to try to see through the wind turbines taking up a tiny part of the field of view, and not just combine views from different angles, modern systems could use digital filtering and pattern recognition to determine the speed and orientation of the blades and filter out the results from them. You are making mountains out of molehills and you have simply dodged addressing the fact that, whether or not parts of boats are moving at high speed, they block the view much worse than wind turbines.

Oh, well, so much for this only being about military RADAR. There's basically no range from the wind turbines where this is ever going to be and more of a problem for boats than other boats would be. Aside from RADAR, they have charts. I went over all this already.

I have thought this through, unlike you. I have mentioned over and over that a combination of methods will allow a complete view around the wind farm as well as how tiny an obstruction the wind farm is in the first place. You just obtusely ignore everything I've said and focus on each little thing as if it exists in a vacuum. Masking the areas with known obstacles does not exist in a vaccuum. We have already discussed comprehensive systems that can see past the wind turbines in the air, on the water, and under the water as well as see things inside the area of the wind farms, as well as past them. You are trying super, super hard to make them into a big problem, but they just are not one.

OK, sure, we'll just ban boats then. Got it. You don't like them any more, so no more boats for others.

Anyway, do you mean the generators in the nacelle at the center of the blades, 500 feet in the air? Well, it is called a generator, but I don't think it's the kind of generator you're talking about. More specifically, it's an alternator. The alternator itself is actually very quiet. You seem to be thinking of generators that are compound units containing a noisy internal combustion engine. As I have already pointed out, and you appear to be ignoring, the noise produced underwater by offshore wind turbines is actually very low volume compared to boats, and mostly in a very low frequency range usually only used for deep water, long range SONAR. It is not going to interfere with SONAR in any appreciable way.

You realize that we're talking about ones you could mount on the wind turbines to cover a small area that might be shadowed by the land-based RADAR, right. Pretty much what any of the boats passing by will have too?

Right, but then you argued like that wasn't just a pretext that, if it had ever been a real concern, would have been handled out of public sight for national security reasons? If something is already mostly built anyway, and it actually is a real security risk, it's just basic security _not_ to yell about it in public.

Right, but all the possibilities for why that may be turn out to be either total non-issues or, where there might be some tiny issue, easily handled. But then you're writing about how it will apparently allow concealed nuclear weapons to sneak in and EMP the country.

I generally only get up on my high horse when the other person is on theirs. Your initial response to TheMiddleRoad and then to me both seemed fairly high horsey. Honestly, while I may have come off a little sarcastic about boats being as big or bigger of an issue than wind turbines, if I look through my responses, I have not done much other than answer your questions and address your concerns and ask my own questions. I did perhaps over-react to your comments about nuclear power/breeder reactors, but that's because it was a bit triggering that it seemed so familiar from all the times I have had long discussions with people about renewables where they, over and over again, just ignored what I wrote to voice some exaggerated concern and then it finally comes out that they are just arguing against renewables because they are pro-nuclear and will accept no substitutes. Also, to re-iterate from earlier, it seems a bit odd to accuse me of being on a high horse, when you started demanding credentials despite presenting none of your own.

Anyway, to be clear on my position, I think that any actual concerns are overblown because, cases where the turbines are in the way are rare, the turbines do not block much at all, and there are numerous methods to work around that, only some of which I have detailed. The Trump administration's "concern" about interfering with military RADAR is exaggerated nonsense drummed up to retroactively excuse the action.

Right. Approximately, anyway. Varies by arm length and pinkie nail size obviously, but would appear somewhere in the neighborhood of a third of an inch tall at around average arm length. Now, I could still certainly see something that relatively thin on my fingernail at arms length, but maybe not if I wasn't looking right at at. In my peripheral vision, I might have trouble noticing it. Then, as mentioned, the color, atmospheric effects, etc.

I am not sure about the light. Like you said, they may be below the horizon if the numbers you saw were correct. I don't know much about the exact requirements for lights though. Would they have lights at the top for planes? Either way, there's the scaling due to the distance, so even bright lights would presumably get pretty faint even if visible over the horizon. Of course, it is an area of the sky that should get pretty dark normally, so maybe they stand out at night. Not sure. Of course, boats have lights too.

So, generally, I quite agree, regardless of a person's opinion on their aesthetics, since they mostly can't even really see them, not an eyesore.

Exactly. Ground based RADAR has to deal with the inconvenience of the area it is surveilling not being flat all the time.

Right. At 15+ miles, depending on where you were viewing from, the very tip of a blades would still reach 760 feet above the horizon with maybe the bottom 100 feet hidden. However, that would look about as big at that distance as a pinkie nail at arms length. Add to that that it is a spindly thing made of stick-like objects and painted a non reflective light gray. Depending on conditions in the background, atmospheric haze and other weather conditions, you would expect them to be barely visible if at all against the daytime sky.

Interestingly, one of the reasons Obama cancelled it to start with is because of a perception that it was a bad deal for the US and a much better one for Canada. Then Trump uncancelled it. Then Biden cancelled it again. Then in this administration, Trump has a major grudge going against Canada (I mean, he did in his first Presidency too, but not as bad as now). This Presidency, though he has done a little towards reviving it, he hasn't fully yet and we''ll have to see how well it deals with his issues with Canada. Of course, it looks like he is trying to stir up revolution in Alberta to get it to become "independent" (I am assuming this will be like "independent" republics that Russia "liberates" then annexes) in which case, the equation will change. Of course, the actual market interest in developing it isn't there any more anyway especially with the probability that the US will slap tariffs on the oil swinging from 0% to 100% on an hour by hour basis. Also with the certain knowledge that even a signed treaty written up into law and voted on and signed by the President won't actually affect those fluctuating odds one bit. A controversial project that can't be build within a single presidential administration was enough of a boondoggle when the major factors affecting it only changed every 4 years. When they change every 4 hours, there's no hope for the project.

In the end, it's a bit different for the wind farm though because, aside from being Canadian, the pipeline required a huge number of very unpopular takings. The wind farm, on the other hand, is technically in International waters, but is in the EEZ, which is a region basically made up by the US to claim territory (and recently, they invented the ECS to extend their claimed rights even further). In any case, from the point of the US it is federal "land" (I guess) and doesn't require any takings. On the other hand, although it's not Canada, it is Massachusetts (not really because not in their waters, but it does connect to Massachusetts and Trump won't see the difference) which may be worse in Trump's eyes.

So, your memory of that starts with the Democrats attacking Trump over egg prices? You don't maybe remember any attacks related to egg prices before that? Maybe coming from another source and attacking someone else?

I suppose you also don't recall why egg prices went up and then eventually down either?

What civilian radar? Do you mean Civilian boats? This doesn't create a problem in the range those need to work at. On the ground, other than weather radar, all there really is to consider is airport radar. The wind farm in question is 15 miles off Martha's Vineyard and 35 miles off the mainland. The highest point the rotors reach is 860 feet, which means that, viewed from sea level, they vanish below the horizon at 36 miles since distance in miles for something to vanish over the horizon is 1.22 times the square root of the height in feet. So, the only civilian airport in range (at least if they are at sea level) is the Martha's vineyard airport. It is a small, regional airport that handles small regional flights. It doesn't have its own radar that can see planes as far as the wind farm anyway. Nantucket airport does, and it can see about 69 miles and is located about 15 miles from the wind project. At 15 miles, only the bottom 100 feet of the wind turbine towers is visible. However, planes descending to an airport typically descend on about a 3 degree slope. (approximately 3 nautical miles of travel for every thousand feet of drop). At the 15 mile (13 nautical mile) distance to the wind farm, that would put them at approximately 4,333 feet (it appears that you can pretty much make a direct descent to that runway if coming from the direction of the wind farm, unless you have to circle and land the other way, in which case you would be even higher), which is well above the wind farm, so not obscured by line of sight (which civilian RADAR uses). So, the question is if a plane would be obscured at 69 miles (regular miles, btw, not nautical, it's more like 60 nautical miles). So, at that distance, it would be 20,000 feet. At that 69 miles, the bottom 3,200 feet are cut off by the horizon, so the plane would still appear to be at 16,800 feet. In other words, well above the 760 foot apparent height of the highest point of the wind turbines. So, at the absolute edge of the range of the Nantucket airport RADAR, the wind turbines would not obscure planes by line of sight. It is worth noting that this is all assuming that the Nantucket RADAR is at sea level, when the airport itself is at around 50 feet and the RADAR is probably higher. However, this actually makes it even harder for the wind turbines to obscure planes.

Anyway, that pretty much does it for civilian RADARs, while elevation might let civilian airports beyond 36 miles see a little bit of the wind farm over the horizon, the altitudes of the planes and the range limits of the RADARs make that irrelevant for all civilian radar systems close enough for it to be possible.

So, in other words, even without specialists (unless we're talking about the kind of specialists whose job it is to get any RADAR system anywhere that has terrain to avoid returning signals from the terrain), civilian radars are not a problem. The same is true of most military line of sight RADARS. Maybe on ships, they can't as well past the wind farms, but if they are actually on patrol, they will patrol beyond the wind turbines. For stationary military RADAR systems, it's basically just a matter of treating those distant objects as terrain features. Possibly, with more advanced techniques, the rotors can be accounted for and the towers themselves produce a very tiny RADAR shadow. One that should be essentially completely eliminated with systems like JADC2 and other, less all encompassing systems to combine information from physically separate RADAR systems. There is also over the horizon RADAR that actually bounces off the ionosphere. Only that is specifically over the horizon (literally since it bounces off the sky) so there's no way that this wind farm would get in the way unless the RADAR system were, for some reason, far onland.

In short, these are negligible problems for either civilian or military RADAR with relatively simple workarounds. Also, let's not forget that there are tons of boats off the coast. Thanks to parallax, they take up just as much of the horizon as the wind turbines do. Considerably more, in fact. They also block or scramble the radar signal just as badly or worse. Not to mention that they are actually MOVING. Not as in spinning in place, but moving around all over the place. Uh oh. Looks like we can't have boats because they will interfere with military RADAR!

Neither does the profile of a wind turbine. You can mask out a big circle with a small stalk at the bottom and voila done. Or, you can go beyond that and take advantage of the fact that, unlike a mountain, a wind turbine is 99% not actually taking up physical space in that mask. Depends on the capabilities of your RADAR system and what you can do digitally, but with work you can see pretty much right through it, which you can't do with a mountain. Also, as I already mentioned. BOATS!

Dear Jebus, you are right. We absolutely need to ban boats!!! I mean, not only are they vastly, vastly louder underwater than boats, but the frequency ranges they produce actually interfere with SONAR unlike the underwater frequency range off offshore wind turbines!!! Technically, wind turbines could produce sound that interferes with long range sonar specifically, except that A. boats can too. B. the wind turbines are not that loud compared to other sources like boats and C. that kind of SONAR is used in deep water and we're talking about water from about 115 to 170 feet. Seriously, you think the waters below Nantucket are a "quiet zone"?

If by surface hugging missiles, you mean cruise missiles. Uh, well, yeah. By infrared mostly, but visual detection too. As for submarines. Yes there too. Traditional methods can spot submarines at around 60 feet. A Russian Kilo class submarine, which is one of their smaller ones (there are smaller, but most of those are pretty specialized) is about 43 feet. The water we are talking about is 115 feet to 170 feet. Navigating safely requires being typically at least 30 feet off the bottom. You might be able to do better if you operate your own SONAR, but then, even if the ridiculous logic that nearby active SONAR systems couldn't see you (and it is ridiculous), but then your SONAR pings would be detected. So, that means 30+43+60=133, which puts you in detection range of older satellite detection technologies in most of the area. Of course, modern systems could see the submarine at a depth greater than the sea floor there. So, yeah, satellites would be able to spot both. Of course, even if there really were some blind spot there (which is still preposterous) other non-satellite methods would be able to see them coming and going from that blind spot.

Also, just an addendum. Do you really, really think that a submarine attacking the United States is going to come to the surface and put up its periscope around that area? Why? What would be the point aside from possibly revealing its location? What would it see?

I mean, it already is. We all pay taxes. They might have various tax breaks on building the turbines, but the long term economic activity gets taxed in various ways. That's the social contract, we pay our taxes and the military is supposed to protect the country. The wind turbines are part of the country. Since any areas in "shadow" will be small anyway. We're not talking about major RADAR installations here in any case.

Ugh. There it is. So the whole thing is just because you don't like renewables and want nuclear power instead and you're just grasping at straws to find excuses for why wind power is bad?

What on Earth does that have to do with wind turbines, magical RADAR blind spot or no? Such an attack would not need a RADAR blind spot, it would just be coming in on a civilian vessel.

I'm sure. OK. So if I get you right... offshore wind turbines equals apocalypse because... reasons?

Part of their primary mission is coastal defense, which includes protection of coastal infrastructure. My point was that it is strange to make the argument that coastal infrastructure should not be built because it will supposedly interfere with the mission of building coastal infrastructure.

A similar situation to what I am talking about occurred in many walled medieval towns and cities. They would build a wall for defense, but then it would restrict growth of the cities with rules in place to prevent building outside them because a clear defensive zone was required outside the walls. This lead to a direct conflict between expansion of town and protection. Often, expansion eventually happened outside the protection of the walls until eventually there was enough of the town _outside_ the town proper, that they needed to expand the walls. It's a bit of a paradox. One that can be avoided with a little foresight in city planning by expanding the walls in advance to provide protection while also allowing the city to grow in the opened up space. The same principle applies to the wind turbines, if they interfere with defense, the solution is not to forbid building them, but to expand the defenses around them, just like the solution in those medieval cities and towns wasn't to ban growth of the town.

I am not sure what you're confused about. SoonerC was the one who wrote: "Mitigating their interference has apparently become something of a specialty field." I thought it was pretty clear that this clearly pointed to the problem being one that could and was being mitigated. It's really not that hard to understand. If the argument against wind turbines is that they present an insurmountable problem for military RADAR, then the fact that the problem is surmountable after all negates the complaint.

That's just in your head though. Quite aside from being base hypocrisy. I've already said I can accept that it's possible you don't consider yourself MAGA. In other words, I am clearly not adopting a binary position. My position though, is that you clearly are parroting almost exclusively MAGA talking points. I stand by that, because it is quite obvious.

No duh. I have never claimed that it is. You're the one hypocritically insisting that I am tethered to some false dichotomy paradigm.

I am not 100% sure what you are trying to say there. Politically, he obviously isn't. He was a Republican, a member of the Independance party (note, that's not an Independent, it's a political party), a Democrat, an independent, and a Republican again. He's a chameleon politically. As a Republican President and candidate, he has taken actions and made statements that cross pretty much every political line that comes up: anti-abortion, pro-abortion, pro-2nd amendment, anti-second amendment ("I like taking the guns early... Take the gun first, go through due process second"), anti-war, pro-war, capitalist, marxist, fascist, authoritarian, pro-democracy, anti-democracy, etc., etc. He has no solid political positions that are guaranteed. The only guaranteed positions he will take related to those things that benefit him directly.

This is why partisanship is a stupid accusation to make towards me. I have never been an adherent of most Republican/US Conservative positions. Not the social ones, generally. Most of the fiscal ones either, though I am generally in favor of free trade (a position that Republicans have always been heavily insistent on and heavily promoted... except now suddenly it's "globalism" and bad and all the fault of the "other side"). Of course, now the classic Republican party is basically dead and they have few coherent positions. It's not all due to Trump, of course. Whatever has been going on with the Republican party has been going on since at least Gingrich and company. Part of the big tent strategy really. Even classic Republican partisans have been realizing slowly that their party is gone, or at least in a coma while the MAGA party is ascendant. I am not a partisan for the Democrats. I have leanings towards liberal ideologies, libertarian ideologies (not so much US libertarians who mostly seem to be gun nuts who don't want to pay taxes), some conservative ideologies, etc., etc. Ultimately, I am a pragmatist who sees most "-isms" as deontological traps. As such, within the current broken electoral system in the US, which limits real choice, the Democrats are the clear "lesser evil" out of the viable (there are really only the two) choices. They best align (still fairly poorly) with how I believe government should be run and my tax dollars should be spent.

Yet, somehow, you keep regurgitating the shit that comes out of just one of those parties. Are you surprised that people conclude that, despite your claims, you really are basically just a MAGA?

I was literally replying to you writing: "Nope. Independents notice it all the time." referring to the made up "Trump Derangement Syndrome". That's you speaking for independents, a group that includes me, as if they were a homogeneous group that all think alike.

What was the misrepresentation? In what way was I supposedly misrepresenting things? Also, you're just dodging that you still don't seem to be able to give specific examples.

Sorry, I'm confused... actually, that's just a turn of phrase, it's your answer that's confused. You seem to have simply dodged addressing the chronology. When Obama was first elected, he was running against McCain. Remember McCain? While there were some personal attacks from the Obama campaign against McCain, they were pretty much exclusively counterattacks attacking the attacks that McCain's campaign was making against Obama. There were no legal actions. As for investigations of the 2016 election. There were no public claims of Trump campaign collusion from the DOJ, etc. before Trump was actually already elected, just general information about Russian interference in the election (which we know for a fact happened, and you have admitted was real, even if you dismiss the scale of it as minor).

But you haven't actually cited anything! Is it that you don't know how this works? Do you not know what citing is? It doesn't mean (to paraphrase my impression of what you are doing): "there's this document, I think it agrees with me." The fact of the matter is that the Mueller report never claimed there was no Russian collusion with the Trump campaign. Not once. It very specifically says that the term collusion is not a legal term, so it avoids it. That is very much not a claim of "no collusion". What it did say is that there were "numerous links between the Russian government and the Trump campaign" and that the Trump campaign "expected it would benefit electorally". The claim that the Mueller report claimed "no collusion" originated with Barr and Fox news amplification, not from the report itself. This is yet another indication that your claim that you get your information from "primary sources" rather than right-wing main stream media doesn't hold water.

Asking someone to look up some undefined, ambiguous piece of information for you that supposedly proves your point is not a rational argument, it's mental illness.

Aside from the fact that you seem to think that the "left, right, and independent perspectives" are three distinct things, I need to point out here that you are talking about "perspectives" I was talking about actual supporting facts and arguments. I am getting worried that you don't actually know the difference.

Google for the supporting argument for _your_ position because you won't provide one!

The easy test of whether is was an illegitimate investigation or just a political scheme was if they got successful, legitimate prosecutions. Oh, it turns out they got a bunch of them.

Yep. Because that's what innocent people do all the time. Lie to law enforcement. Sure, it will get them thrown in prison, but it's worth it to... um... to... darn, what's the reason for an innocent person to lie to federal agents in an investigation again? There's got to be some legitimate reason, right? Plus you're simply sweeping aside the convictions for actually being agents of a foreign government.

Oh, got it. Obstructing an investigation has nothing whatsoever. Let's try a thought experiment. How about obstructing a murder investigation. If someone provides a false alibi for a murder subject, the resulting obstruction of justice charge would have nothing to do with the murder? It's completely separate? Oh, sure that's totally not crazy.

Check your "primary sources". I am pretty sure you are talking about Sussmann. He was tried by Durham, btw, and was acquitted in a case that was not about the Steele dossier, but about potential Trump ties to Alfa bank. That had nothing to do with the FISA warrants where the Steele Dossier was used for probable cause aside from the fact that Durham was broadly investigating both.

At this point, I think we need to clear something up. The Steele Dossier was used only for very specific FISA warrants into Russian collusion by one individual: Carter Page. Page was already under investigation as a potential foreign agent before he ever appeared in the Steele Dossier, it was just used as additional motivation for probable cause. While he wasn't convicted, there's a lot suspicious, including him being quoted as saying that he was an informal advisor for the Russians.

Also, I should point out that, even if a Clinton attorney fraudulently presenting it to the FBI were actually a thing, that would have nothing to do with it being presented to the court. There's this thing called mens rea. It's not fraud if the person presenting it isn't doing so fraudulently. Warrants are held to be valid all the time when informants turn out to be lying. It's whether the person applying for the warrant knew or should have known that they were lying that's the issue.

How do you not understand that the warrant application is not the actual trial. It comes before the indictment. The context is that it was not used in court in the actual criminal trial where a different standard of evidence exists.

First of all, it is a highly dubious claim that there is never any "fraudulent evidence" except in 0.03% of warrant applications. Aside from that, you are, yet again, either misunderstanding or intentionally misstating the claim. The claim is that 99.97% (although I used higher precision and this is rounded up) of FISA warrant applications, the warrant is granted, indicating an extraordinarily low bar for granting warrants (also note that the tiny fraction rejected probably only needed minor amendment to be accepted).

Look at that last sentence. If it is "BS" as you claim, find the number of FISA application warrants and the number of them granted and work out the percentage yourself. Am I off by a factor of more than 0.1%?

Another unsubstantiated, ambiguous, uncited claim. The "DOJ" said that? Who at the DOJ? A spokesperson working for Trump? Other? Also, ambiguous. What does it mean to "bring before a judge"? What is the context? If it is a criminal trial, then sure. If it is as supporting probable cause evidence in a warrant application to a FISA court, then no, it's not. Far less reliable information is brought all the time.

I am sure there are crazies outside this thread who claim it is "fraudulent". The context was in this thread. I understand that information presented as unverified raw intelligence is only "fraudulent" if it isn't actually unverified raw intelligence. It very much was exactly what it claimed to be, so it is not "fraudulent". Neither Clinton, McCain, or any of the funders of the dossier ever brought any legal claims of fraud against Steele.

They did not state that specifically. They made some face saving statements about metadata related to the Dossier not being provided. There was a complaint that a heightened sense of candor was expected in FISA warrant applications. It was all nonsense since they went right back to rubber stamping them. The fact of the matter is that two out of four warrants specifically for Carter Page and only for Carter Page were invalidated. It had no effect on the rest of the investigation, or on any criminal trials. It's ultimately a big nothing burger.

You're confusing a list of the kinds of evidence that are regularly accepted in courts, including FISA courts as probable cause for a warrant. I did not substitute that scenario for the scenario of the Steele Dossier. I provided that as one example of the type of evidence normally accepted and then gave specific reasons why the Steele Dossier would actually meet and exceed that typical standard. Consider. A police informant is almost always a criminal, and usually a desperate one. Steele was an intelligence consultant who formerly worked for British Intelligence. A police informant mostly gives up dribs and drabs of information that they overheard or on what the criminal orders (that they followed) were. An intelligence agent collects information from a broad array of sources in which they are normally not directly involved (some intelligence agents are, of course, spies working undercover, but Steele was not in this case). A criminal informant may be informing for the money and, quite frankly, often they need the money for their next fix. An intelligence consultant is working for the money too and, while they also might need the consultancy fee for their next fix, it's less likely and they are generally a lot more professional. If they are not doing it for the money, then criminal informants are usually doing it for immunity for crimes they have committed, are currently committing and will comitt in the future, not to mention sometimes to eliminate the competition so that they can commit worse crimes (for example, Whitey Bulger). An intelligence consultant is not normally doing any of that. That is not a straw man.

FISA judges have never referred to it as fraud. Most of the complaints from Judges were about details external to the dossier itself. They are also just a little bit of noise about things that FISA warrant applicants do all the time and just get a rubber stamp for. The FISA courts are very secretive and largely unaccountable most of the time. They have released a number of generalized, aggregate statements about severe problems with evidence provided by applicants in many cases, but the statistics show that they granted the warrants in virtually all (if not all) of those cases all the same.

As I just pointed out, the FISA judges have actually pointed out that they are given not credible evidence by applicants a lot. The statistics still show that they essentially always approve the warrants anyway. Rejection is vanishingly rare.

But what you were supposed to be responding to was about agents of a foreign government. You just changed the subject to avoid dealing with the actual topic in that part of the conversation.

Since people were convicted and sentenced for it, it was not insignificant and you are just dodging there in any case. You are attacking the legitimacy of an investigation that found wrongdoing. You can wave away the actual crimes if you like, but you can't pretend that they did not exist and crimes, especially around a topic like potential espionage, require investigation. Also, for someosne who keeps claiming to be a non-partisan independent - in other words, essentially neutral - seems to keep taking things from the Mueller report that were neutral conclusions and turning them into supposed statements in the affirmative or negative. The Mueller report was specific that it was not making a claim either way that Russian interference affected the election either way.

The ACA report, the bipartisan senate intelligence committee report, and the Mueller report all indicate that Trump was Russia's favored candidate, regardless of other activity. All credible assessments have shown that. Even Trump tacitly admitted that the Russians had hacked the Clinton campaign when he publicly asked them to hack her emails.

Which it very explicitly does not claim! It is hard to tell at this point if you are lying or misinformed or just truly unable to grasp the concepts involved. The Mueller report was explicit that it was not making any claims one way or another about "collusion".

I heard that it was because - or at least the final straw was that - his father found out about his switchblade collection.

HAH!!! Seriously! Commonwealth is massively overoptimistic about potential near-term success. Helion... I think we need to face the facts that Helion is pretty much in scam territory right now. I mean, they do have a lot of people who seem to legitimately want to make fusion work, but you can only make so many claims about how soon things are going to be working with it turning out that you were just making it up before rational people doubt your honesty. Maybe outright scam is not the right term, but they sure still seem to be in the "faking it" realm with no visible route to the "making it" part. I mean, they are a huge leg up from, for example, David Grammer and his Boydoplex or any of hundreds of others. I wanted to show you what I am talking about but trying to look up specific ones on YouTube to show how pathetic the "Demo" machine was fails because it brings up far, far too many fakes that "they tried to erase" or that "they don't want you to see" or the inventor "vanished mysteriously" or, ummm, are "light-infused water machine[s] inspired by Genesis" ??? I am not sure that last one is actually for energy generation since it seems to offering "longevity". OK. Just checked and, yeah, that one claims: "In the Bible—the literal word of God—those Hebrew words are distilled into numbers and those numbers create a code. That same code is found in the light wavelengths of lobsters, which never age.” So, lobster light wavelengths... uhhh. I'm going to stop now.

The point is, Helion isn't necessarily a scam, but it does seem scammy. The legit researchers working there know that they have no realistic roadmap to their goals and that their public relations is writing checks that they can't cash.

Don't get me wrong. I am enthusiastic for advanced power generation methods to work someday. But I remember, on Slashdot, defending that that fusion power could potentially be 20 years away (although I recall even I wasn't very confident then) nearly thirty years ago. At this point, I'm not confident enough in it even being yet another 20 years, let alone confident enough to put off building other forms of power generation until it is ready. Plus, I have had decades more to think about it and get beyond the initial wonder at "wow, look how much power you can get out of a tiny amount of material" to "wait, regardless of how much power you can get out of it, how do you practically use it?". It hasn't escaped my attention that to within a reasonable margin of error, the solar system is a massive fusion reactor already. Yet, we have people talking about how fusion power will totally be better than fusion power (from the sun) basically because of the issues of extracting the actual power from the sun regardless of how much it produces. In the end, I have not been convinced that, even if we get fusion power working tomorrow, that it will be any more practical or any less expensive than existing fission power.