There was rioting going on for several days in MN when the police were ordered to stand down and not make any arrests.

Four days later, on Friday there were something like protests in 13 states, and riots broke out in exactly every city that a protest was organized in. Prior to Memorial Day, I don't believe there were any riots in the US in all of 2020, and riots are rare in the US.

The above makes me believe that whoever organized the riots had also organized the protests, probably as cover for the riots that were to follow. I think it is hard to argue the protests were anything other than planned.

Almost immediately, there was massive amounts of BLM propaganda on various social media once the riots started. There was another race incident in New York that went viral on social media the very same day that Floyd was killed. There was also what is likely BLM propaganda about Breonna Taylor circulating in the days/weeks prior to when Floyd was murdered. This may or may not be related, but a DNC PAC was/is using military technology against US citizens to counter Trump's coronavirus messaging on social media.

He was hired not long before Trump's first meeting with Kim Jun Un. It was speculated at the time that the purpose of bringing him on was to show Kim that Trump was willing to go to war with NK, or otherwise pursue military action if necessary so to get Kim to agree to denuclearize.

Bolton basically says in his book that Trump should be removed from office and that Democrats could have gotten Trump removed from office if they looked at his other foreign policy. However, Bolton's name also came up during impeachment and he could have gone to the press at that time and/or testified. Instead, Bolton waited months to publish a book and likely made millions doing so.

Bolton's book deal was made public on November 9, 2019, but two days earlier, much of the substance of the impeachment inquiry was already public, and the substances of the testimony was public. This timeline indicates that Bolton might have crafted his book pitch based on what was being said during impeachment rather than based on the whole truth.

You are taking what Bolten is saying that is damaging to Trump at face value. Many in the media also assume anything Trump says to be a lie/fabrication without irrefutable proof. This is a bad double standard to use, and basically prevents any substantive discourse. I blame social media giving incentives to reporters to make crazy claims to get more likes and views.

In addition to the US publicly being against concentration camps (a standard set by the administration), Trump's history on religious freedom removes credibility to this claim.

Even if this statement was shown to be true, I would want to know how specifically the translators described the concentration camps, and the specific language used by Xi. In 2001, the US basically used an alternate translation of words to get several airmen released from China after a military plane crash. You could use a worse case assumption to conclude that Xi was referring to the concentration camps, but Xi may have described them not as harshly.

I would also point out that many of Trump's critics personally profit from what amounts to slave labor out of China, and may even be profiting from these very same concentration camps. I would be interested to see their comments on this particular point in Bolton's book.

It is probably safe to say that the images you see when solving ReCAPTCHA have never been seen via any kind of camera lens, and they are of places that do not actually exist. It is not terribly difficult to create a model that can identify which images contain a fire hydrant, a taxi, a boat, or one of hundreds of other classes. If you can't create a model that can identify the above, there are numerous freely available models that can accurately identify any of the above. It is also probably a safe bet that a subset of the images you see when solving a ReCAPTCHA will fool many advanced classification models using one or more techniques that add "noise" to images that the human eye cannot see.

Without the latter, it would be very easy to create a bot that can beat ReCAPTCHA, and without the former Google would run out of images to display. Google could use images from Street View for example and get users to form a consensus as to how each image should be labeled, however, someone working on a large scale could manipulate this process, and it would be easier to simply create many images out of thin air.

The whole point of ReCAPTCHA is to make it difficult to tell if each of the 9 images can fit into the requested classification. Sometimes there is a small part of an object in one of the images. You could create a bot that combines the 9 images and tries to detect where the bounding box of the object that is the class being detected is, and if the bounding box is sufficiently close to the cutoff to two of the adjacent images, the bot could select both images to contain a traffic light, for example.

ReCAPTCHA uses multiple, distinct countermeasures to detect non-human interaction on different sets of images being displayed. If you perform better against one set of images than another that uses different countermeasures, you may stick out more.

It is possible to increase the resolution of an image, so making an image blurry will do little to prevent AI from being able to detect an images class.

You are not training AI for google when you solve a recaptcha.

Google will present images that sometimes has patterns that are similar to another type of image. For example, they may display paint of a cross walk at a certain angle when asking you to select all instances of stairs. The images have already been labeled and are known to google. There are many freely available datasets that are labeled, such as Imagenet. Google can also create additional images using that dataset.

I don’t know how good this service in the OP is at hiding the class of what each image is.

I think the claim, if believed would have caused Trump to lose votes in January during impeachment. It would have been a stronger argument that Trump engaged in a Quid Pro Quo with Xi.

Bolton was free to talk to the press about this during impeachment, even if he had not been asked to testify. Bolton going to the press about this would have given enough pressure on Senate Republicans to allow him to testify.

I have doubts about the accuracy of Bolton’s account. If he thought this was wrong or illegal, he should have immediately resigned, instead he waited months to get fired. He also could have gone public with his claims, but instead waited 5 months to make probably millions off a book. All this diminishes his credibility and should make voters question his motives.

The purpose of the lawsuit was to stop the book from being published. Based on the fact that WSJ has reported some of the books content and what I assume is the most damaging part, it would be more difficult to argue for stopping the book from being published.   

Bolton is claiming in his book that Trump asked President Xi to buy up farm goods to help his re-election campaign.

I have no idea if this is true or not but this will be damaging to Trump politicallynot sure about this. Bolton has always wanted the US to basically be at war with nearly every country that isn’t our ally and even argued that a preemptive nuclear strike against NK would be appropriate. This is approximately the polar opposite of Trumps position on American wars. Bolton may be trying to get revenge for pulling troops out of Syria and/or Germany, he might be trying to get on the anti Trump bandwagon to make a few bucks, or it may be true.

I would expect Trump to get impeached again over this, however I doubt anything will come of it. I doubt impeaching Trump ~2 months (based on an estimate as to when this might happen) before an election probably won’t look good for Democrats, especially considering Trump was just acquitted for doing basically the same thing with another country earlier this year. I am not sure this would even be illegal.

The Trump DOJ sued Bolton yesterday to stop his book from being published on National security grounds, but what I assume is the most damaging excerpt was just published in the newspaper, probably making the suit moot.  

Maybe this is why so many businesses have pandered to them and are so intolerant of criticism of BLM. They are hoping their business will be sparred. 

BLM is a terrorist organization that is also a black supremacy group. They only care about black people who have been killed by white people, even though these killings make up a smaller proportion of killings than populations of both would indicate.

I strongly suspect they are currently receiving foreign support, as their ability to spread propaganda has grown much too much, much too quickly. Even if they are not receiving foreign support, I believe something nefarious is going on.

He was not running away. He turned towards the police office, pointed the tazer towards the officer and either shot the tazer or was indicating he was about to shoot the tazer. The tazer would have incapacitated the officer, and the person would have been able to take the officer's gun.

The use of force was 100% justified. Anyone who says otherwise is either uninformed or dishonest.

Happy Birthday Theymos

Theymos has the same birthday as Trump. Maybe theymos will finally build a filter to get all the spammers out, and have the bcash devs pay for it.

The CBO has reported that amounts withheld from paychecks in May fell by 15%, and said this is because of declining wages and certain provisions in the CARES act, such as businesses being able to defer payment of certain taxes.

The labor participation rate fell about 3% from February to April, and rebounded a bit in May. The average number of hours worked is largely unchanged. I don't think the unemployment rate factors the 'gig economy' type workers such as Uber drivers, and hair stylists (who are apparently often independent contractors), who are likely doing especially bad for the most part.

I believe the sharp reversal in the change in the number of jobs from April to May, in addition to the pent up demand from the stimulus payments and the 2/3 of unemployed making more on unemployment means that once states reopen, jobs should quickly come back. We may not get back to employment levels of early this year for quite some time, but 3-4% unemployment is I believe above full employment and not sustainable.
There is about $130 billion in PPP funding remaining out of about $660 billion in total funding. I don't see this running out anytime soon.

The $1200 payment I believe likely was put in the bank for the most part. The personal savings rate was 33% in April, which was probably a combination of the $1200 stimulus, added income from enhanced unemployment benefits, and people being unable to spend money in most social settings due to government-mandated closures. I believe once people are getting back to work, they should be willing to spend some of this money they have in savings, which should fuel demand for additional workers.

The problem with enhanced unemployment benefits is it gives workers a disincentive to work, and an incentive to get laid off. It is also likely funding some of the civil unrest that is causing a lot of long term harm to the poorest of communities. I believe not extending the enhanced unemployment will get the protests and more importantly, the riots to stop, which should be more important to Trump's election prospects. Not extending the enhanced unemployment also gives Democrat governors and local officials political cover for keeping their economies closed longer than is necessary (while allowing political convenient protests).

I would have thought that Harris' attack on Biden's stance on busing in one of the debates would prevent her from getting the VP pick. Harris' policies on crime have also negatively affected africian-Americans disproportionately, which wouldn't do any favors to the ticket.  I would consider most elected Democrats as authoritarian tyrants, especially after the coronavirus lockdowns, and even more so after the riots.

I would say that either Val Dennings or Atlanta mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms are most likely to be Biden's VP pick. Either of these would help Biden play the identity politics card, and would help him ignore that it was democrat governors and mayors who allowed the riots to do so much damage to poor neighborhoods.

Pelosi is not in charge of presidential politics, she is only in charge of Congress. If Democrats win both the presidency and the Senate, I would expect the Supreme Court to get packed, and for fair elections to be removed.

If Biden is pandering to far leftists, I have no reason to discount that his administration would not be a far-leftist administration. Keep in mind that Biden lacks the mental capacity to make actual decisions, so whoever is his VP will likely be the one to actually making decisions the president would normally make.

If Biden is pandering to the crazy leftists, he will likely turn off moderate voters in the 2020 election. The response to the coronavirus and the civil unrest has shown Democratic leaders' tyrannical tendencies, which I believe will hurt Democrats down ballot.

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Local officials appear to have decided to not enforce their laws against rioting and related violence. Sending the violence will inevitably lead to deaths given how violent these rioters are. My guess is Democrats are hoping to force Trump to send in troops who end up killing Americans (who are presenting an immediate danger to other Americans via the use of frozen water bottles, guns, explosives, or otherwise) that will be described in the media as "peaceful protestors".

The protests and riots are clearly being organized and funded by outside group(s) (probably foreign), there is just no other way that there were "protests" in 13 US cities 4 days after an event that all turned into riots on the first night. Trump had said that Democrat governors and mayors needed to take control over their cities and that other countries were laughing at us and within 2 days protests popped up in other Western countries.


One thing that has stuck out to me about the Trump Presidency is the number of institutions that have managed to thoroughly discredit themselves. For example, a NY Times article that W Bush will not vote for Trump was apparently completly made up. This makes it difficult to trust some of these polls. Calling negative polls 'fake news' may also be a strategy to keep his base enthused.

There is also BLM propaganda that is telling people to basically disown any friends or family members who will not be "anti-racist" which is going to cause some people to be afraid to admit to being a Trump supporter.

Normally, unemployment benefits will only pay for about enough to pay for basic necessities and maybe enough to pay for gas to go to job interviews. The enhanced unemployment benefits have resulted in over 2/3 of people who lost their jobs making more on unemployment than they were making, softening the blow of losing their jobs. Last month, the economy added ~2.5 million jobs, when the expectation was nearly 8.5 million jobs lost, a swing of nearly 11 million jobs. Those that have a government-insured mortgage are able to receive 12 months of forbearance. I think most of the economic pain is going to be kicked past the election; I think this was probably by design.

I am uncomfortable with the Floyd situation. The video spread far more quickly than I would have expected, and there was another video, that of the woman with her dog in NY from the same day that also went viral. The four officers involved were fired before any of the protests started.

Whoever Biden chooses to be VP will effectively be the president on Feb 1 2021 if Biden is elected. They will probably have the title of President by the end of 2024. I would reserve judgment until Biden announces his VP pick, however since effectively winning the nomination, Biden has been pulled further to the left by Bernie Bros, so who knows what kind of presidency a Biden administration would be.

Create a new thread with the relevant evidence. Don’t make it self moderated.

You cannot open a flag against anyone using a self moderated thread. This is to ensure the accused is able to respond.

Pretty much no matter what, what happened was murder any way you look at it. If they butt heads, this pretty much proves it wasn’t racism, IMO.

My statement about resisting arrest was in general and not in reference to Floyd. Floyd was already restrained and no longer resisting.

If you are trying to resist arrest, you are potentially fighting to the death if you are not going to be arrested. The police will attempt to arrest you, but if unable to do so, they are authorized by law to use escalating amounts of force.

There is a reason why you don’t see reports of people getting killed by the police who are surrendering (except when it is fake propaganda).

Also what happened in this case likely had nothing to do with the killer being a police officer. Most likely the killer knew the victim and did not get along with the victim. In other words, this was likely a personal dispute if local reports are to be believed.

If a thread is bumped, under current circumstances, it is not possible to know how many bump points have been given to a thread or how many bump points other threads have, so any potential purchaser won’t know how effective bumping will be. They also have no way of knowing the total bump capacity via the use of multiple sock puppets.

If the identity of who bumped a thread is public, then someone can prove their ability to bump threads. If this is secret, anyone buying this service would be risking paying for snake oil.

Making the data public would also subject people to witch hunts and that is the last thing we need more of.

I have found it strange that someone could choke via pressure on the back of their neck. That is not something I have heard of until about two weeks ago.

Sadly, this probably doesn't matter. Chauvin has already been tried in public. There had been about 20+ police officers stationed outside his house protecting him when he turned himself in (before he was charged), and I have heard that "protestors" were stopping multiple food deliveries to his house. Ben Crump, the ambulance chasing attorney representing the family, was calling for Chauvin to get the death penalty I believe before there was any type of medical report on Floyd's death.

If you are right, the root cause of death is really that one person was having to train two new Police officers. Cutting police funding is only going to cause more of these types of situations, not less.