How is it that I missed seeing this random comment generator before?
19 Likes
Glad I am not the only one for whom it did not make any sense.
8 Likes
Well, the government has been frustrating to see you know, sweet dreams and sleep well as the others do! This is a great read, and I have been working with an architect of art and I have been working with an architect of art and I have been working with an architect of art!
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Three architects of art, or just one but too great to be said merely once?
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It is like the domestic policy of the Republican party and the economic flaccidity of the purported āleftā like Hillary has done them no good, so theyāre just going to burn it all to the ground out of spite.
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An unconsidered factor in this equation: the likely attempts of Trump supporters to ādiscourageā opposition voters from attending the polls through intimidation and violence.
If you think that something like that canāt happen in modern America, you havenāt been paying attention to the last decade of voter suppression across the Confederacy.
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My assumption is heās really a stalking-horse run by the Clintons. Doesnāt matter what he does, or the ultimate outcome, itās good for them.
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Cute, but actually, āMonsantoā.
(Look at the cancer stats vs RoundUp.)
AKA glyphosate, AKA probably the safest effective herbicide ever discovered, AKA that thing that is less toxic than table salt, AKA that thing that has been heavily investigated by the scientific community for decades without ever finding any substantial link to any ill-effects on human health.
(ā¦and now cue the posting of half a dozen scattergun epidemiology studies with lousy methodology and laughable statistical analyses)
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Oh, wow, I see thereās three replies already, but geez, I gotta hit this, where to begin?!?
NOTHING AT ALL! But holy fuck, try being black and actually having that opportunity. Theyāre scarce as henās teeth! Seriously, you think itās that easy? Go get a decent black-face skin-dye job and try applying for any job, anywhere.
Uh, yeah, and if they never have the opportunity to make any to save in the first place, what then? (See points above.)
Why yes, yes they are! And if you can find a path out of the poor-houseā¦
Why yes, yes they are! And if you can find a path out of the poor-houseā¦ (Are we seeing a theme here yet?)
Gah!
Now, before anybody gets all over me, be aware that I am an older white guy who technically qualifies to be one of the ā1%ā. But I didnāt start that way. I started out poor as a church-mouse, literally one of the kids who stuffed paper in his shoes to keep my socks from wearing out against the bare pavement as my soles were worn through. I had shitty haircuts my entire childhood because nobody around us could cut worth a darn and we couldnāt afford the barber but about once every six months. If I ripped the crotch out of my school uniform pants I was up late that night or the next sewing it because I only had two pairs.
I only escaped that environment by being white, extremely lucky on several occasions, (or Iād be dead now), and having an IQ in the top 1% as well. I give thanks every fucking day I wake up that I got out of that shit hole and the few times Iāve returned all I could do was cry for those who couldnāt.
So. Just. Donāt. Go. There.
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Yep, like his best bud Hilary.
Trump is a stalking horseā¦
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I so wish I could like something more than once. 
I guess only a US newspaper would find that a mystery, in a country that has taken decades to brainwash itself of even the remotest understanding of the concept of social justice, to the point were the very phrase could be firmly occupied by a bunch of spoilt college kids to describe their hurt widdle feelings.
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Actually, if you could post a link to a sound rebuttal Iād be very interested. I do keep an open mind and am always ready to incorporate new information. The problem here for me so far is just that Iāve yet to see a proper refutation other than, well, basically what you posted above.
Itās difficult to prove a negative.
For background: I have a PhD in psychopharmacology, with a focus on neurotoxicity. These days I work in forestry restoration; I carry a bottle of glyphosate on my belt every day.
(yes, I know; argument from authority is a fallacy. But itās worth establishing that Iām not talking completely out of my arse)
In normal toxicology testing, glyphosate is astonishingly non-lethal. Itās the sort of chemical where you frequently see a > sign before the LD50 value. What that means, essentially, is āwe pumped as much of this as we possibly could into the rats without making them explode, and they still didnāt dieā.
When you do find an LD50 number for glyphosate, itās generally something absurd like 5,000mg/kg. Think about the maths: 5,000mg/kg is the equivalent of a third of a kilo of it into the arm of a 70kg human. If I pumped that much of almost anything into your veins it would kill you.
The overwhelming majority of epidemiological studies involving glyphosate have found no ill effects, and there have been plenty of them. Proving a negative health impact of such a commonly-used chemical would instantly make the career of whichever researcher found it; theyād be beating off tenure and grant offers with a stick. The scientific community is heavily motivated to go after targets like this.
Itās an easy target to chase, too: it isnāt obviously toxic, so no hassles with the ethics board; it isnāt super expensive or hard to handle, so no hassles with logistics; and itās used everywhere, so there are plenty of natural experiments to observe.
There has been no convincing evidence to date presented by anybody that establishes a link between glyphosate and any negative health impacts. There have been a handful of epidemiological studies that found what might charitably be called hints as to cancer risks, but their methodology is generally extremely poor. There are also some studies showing transient effects on some biological measures post glyphosate exposure, but none of those demonstrate any lasting health impact,
For example: the last one I read involved looking at an area of Central America where glyphosate is routinely aerially sprayed as an anti-drug measure. They looked at the rates of around twenty different types of cancer in the affected population.
In none of these cancers did they find a statistically significant increase in disease. However, with one type of cancer, they got numbers that āwouldā have been significant if there had been just a few more cases (i.e. p = 0.06). They declared this result āborderline significantā and called for further investigation.
However, even if we allow the āborderlineā chicanery, thereās another problem. The way that inferential statistics (i.e. all that p-value stuff) work are by calculating the probability of getting a positive result to your question even when, in reality, nothing is going on.
When they say āp = <0.05ā, what they mean (loosely) is āthere is a less than one in twenty chance of us getting results like this if nothing real were happeningā. But this runs into a problem when you run your test twenty times in a row, or use the same set of data to test for twenty different diseasesā¦
Itās like flipping a coin a dozen times but only paying attention to a cherry-picked selection of the results. If we ignore half of the tosses, I can āproveā that a fair coin is biased.
There are ways to statistically control for this sort of thing; basically, you lower your critical p-value to compensate. The study I read did not do this. Their desire for a publication overcame their scientific honesty.
PS: if you drill down into the links at https://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/glyphosate-the-new-bogeyman/ you may find some things of interest.
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Following up: Iām not saying that there is no possibility that we might, at some future point, find that glyphosate is in some way harmful to human health. Almost everything in nature can mess up a human if applied to the right person at the right time in the right quantity. As the chemists say, the dose makes the poison.
But even if we did, that still wouldnāt necessarily be a good reason to stop using it. The alternatives are generally much worse; āorganicā herbicides are mostly just naturally occuring toxins that are much more dangerous than glyphosate.
Herbicides are important, both for agriculture and for conservation. Without them, much of Australiaās native flora would disappear under a tidal wave of invasive weed species.
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To be fair, the TPP is nothing to sneeze at. Its death would certainly be the silver lining of a Trump presidency.
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Assuming heād kill it. I can just as easily imagine him making ādealsā that would benefit him and keep it alive.
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Worse, Iāve been seeing this sort of rhetoric gain significant traction even in left, shooting down anyone who complains about off-shoring taking their jobs, or free trade and illegal immigration pushing down wages. Iāve seen more than one Democrat respond with: āThey must be lazy and stupid if theyāre letting their jobs get taken by illegals and foreigners lol.ā
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Itās not that every Trump supporter is a racist, bigot, or a xenophobe.
What would be the point otherwise?
His policies?!? 
