US Politics Mega-thread - Page 7370

"Follow the trail of dead Russians": Senate hears testimony on "cyber invasion"

On April 21 2017 06:12 GreenHorizons wrote:


Yeah, the large case-control study conducted by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is totally an alternative fact bro.

On April 21 2017 06:12 GreenHorizons wrote:


Yeah, the large case-control study conducted by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is totally an alternative fact bro.

On April 21 2017 09:07 ChristianS wrote:

Not to be the guy using anecdotal evidence to discount a well-controlled study, but if you've been in the car with someone driving before and after they got really stoned it could not be more fucking obvious. I don't know how the NHTSA study found what it found, but you shouldn't need a large controlled study to tell that pot can make you worse at driving.

My guess is that a couple confounding variables interfered. Like at low doses the effect is probably minimal, and for very habitual users it might actually help compared to getting sober. I've definitely known people who smoked every morning and night, and they were very out of it on the rare occasion they were sober. That said, I haven't read the study and couldn't say for sure how they found what they found.

But if extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, "pot doesn't negatively impact driving safely" is an absolutely outlandish claim.

On April 21 2017 09:31 Liquid`Drone wrote:


Really agree with this. I really think that legalizing pot is one of the biggest no-brainer political choices we should make as a society, but I think it's equally reasonable to say that you can't drive stoned. I've smoked a lot of hash and weed and I've been in cars with stoned drivers, and I just don't believe for a second that reaction times are not impaired for example. Now, I'd much, much rather be in a car with a stoned than a drunk driver - that's not even remotely close, but I think it is completely, 100% fair to say that neither should be permitted.

I can also buy that people who are habitual smokers might not experience a similar decrease in reaction times, that it might even 'normalize' them in a sense. (alcoholics and heroin addicts can also improve their function through drinking or shooting up), and I can buy that small doses entails a negligible difference in ability (much like most countries permit you to drive after drinking 1 beer - norway doesn't though).

Two-thirds of Americans believe that guns should be restricted in many public places, according to a study published on Thursday.

The study, by a group of leading public health researchers, found that at least 64% of those surveyed did not support carrying guns on college campuses, in places of worship, government buildings, schools, bars or sports stadiums. Even among gun owners, a majority did not approve of guns in bars or in schools. The survey published in the American Journal of Public Health comes as a number of states have passed laws to expand where guns can be carried in public.

“That’s an important finding because it goes against the general trend of what lawmakers are doing,” said Julia Wolfson, a professor of public health at the University of Michigan and one of the study’s co-authors.

Already in 2017, Arkansas has passed a bill allowing guns on college campuses, in government buildings, and in bars. Georgia’s governor, Nathan Deal, is considering a proposal that would allow concealed weapons at colleges. And state legislators in New Hampshire, North Dakota, and Iowa have passed so-called constitutional carry bills, eliminating permitting requirements for carrying concealed weapons.

The new findings by researchers at Harvard University, Northeastern University, and Johns Hopkins University are the latest in a set of studies that are painting the most definitive portrait of American gun ownership in two decades.

The authors asked nearly 4,000 respondents whether they thought people should be allowed to bring firearms into nine public places: restaurants, schools, college campuses, bars, government buildings, sports stadiums, retail stores, service settings such as barber shops, and places of worship.

Only 9.4% of respondents said they supported allowing guns in all nine public places. Restaurants, service settings, and retail stores were the only locations in which more than 30% of respondents said that people should be allowed to carry firearms.

The survey was conducted online in 2015 on behalf of the academics by GfK, a market research company, as part of a larger inquiry into the habits and attitudes of American gun owners. The survey, which oversampled for veterans and gun owners, asked respondents to specify if they owned a firearm or lived in a household with one.

Support for carrying guns in public was higher among gun owners than among those who did not own firearms.

A majority of gun owners surveyed supported carrying guns in restaurants, service settings, and retail establishments. But three out of four gun owners said they did not approve of carrying guns in bars, and two-thirds said they did not feel firearms should be allowed in schools.

The survey found that support for guns in public places did not vary by region of the country. Controlled for gun-owning status, respondents who live in the south, where many states freely permit carrying guns in public, were no more supportive of the practice than respondents in the north-east, where gun laws are generally stricter.

Two of the study’s co-authors, Deborah Azrael of Harvard University and Matthew Miller of Northeastern University, conducted a similar survey on attitudes to guns in public in 1999. Generally, Americans have become more accepting of guns in public places over the last 18 years: while in 1999 just 4% of respondents said they supported guns on college campuses, 22.5% now approve of campus carry.

But the authors point out that the different language used could account for that change. The earlier questionnaire asked how respondents would feel about “people in your community” carrying in select public places. The new survey asked about attitudes toward “people who are authorized to carry firearms in your community”, which in some states states requires training and approval from law enforcement.

It’s difficult to account for the growing acceptance of guns in public, the authors said. “It’s the $64,000 question,” said Azrael. “What’s happened in the past 15 years? Many more laws have made it possible to carry guns anywhere. More people own handguns than did in the past. It wouldn’t surprise me if they also wanted to carry them more places.”

In the nearly two decades between the surveys, many states have made laws around carrying guns in public more permissive. In 2000, seven states had an outright ban on carrying concealed weapons in public, and only Vermont allowed its residents to carry a gun without a permit. Now, all 50 states allow some form of concealed carry, and a dozen states have scrapped their permitting requirements for carrying firearms.

Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards has declared a state of emergency over the state's rapidly eroding coastline.

It's an effort to bring nationwide attention to the issue and speed up the federal permitting process for coastal restoration projects.

"Decades of saltwater intrusion, subsidence and rising sea levels have made the Louisiana coast the nation's most rapidly deteriorating shoreline," WWNO's Travis Lux tells our Newscast unit. "It loses the equivalent of one football field of land every hour."

More than half of the state's population lives on the coast, the declaration states. It adds that the pace of erosion is getting faster: "more than 1,800 square miles of land between 1932 and 2010, including 300 square miles of marshland between 2004 and 2008 alone."

The governor estimates that if no further action is taken, "2,250 square miles of coastal Louisiana is expected to be lost" in the next 50 years. He emphasized the importance of the land to industries such as energy, maritime transportation and trade.

Lux says the governor hopes this will pave the way to move ahead with coastal projects:

"The state has a plan to implement more than 100 restoration and protection projects — like rebuilding marshes and barrier islands — but some of those projects are getting slowed down by federal environmental permits."

Those projects are part of a 50-year, $50 billion master plan that was unanimously approved by a state panel on Wednesday, according to The Times-Picayune. The newspaper says the plan "relies largely on money from settlement of the 2010 BP oil spill litigation to speed restoration of coastal land and wetlands and protect them from hurricanes."

Now Edwards is asking President Trump to declare the erosion of Louisiana's coast a national emergency and "provide appropriate federal attention and cooperation" to assist the state. The emergency declaration also asks for Congress to "consider legislation to provide for means by which to expedite all federal permitting and environmental review."

Almost half a million veterans gained health care coverage during the first two years of the Affordable Care Act, a report finds.

In the years leading up to the implementation of the ACA's major coverage provisions, from 2010 to 2013, nearly 1 million of the nation's approximately 22 million veterans didn't have health insurance. Almost half of all veterans are enrolled in the VA health system; others get health care through employers or Medicare. But some don't quality for those options, and others don't know that they have them.

Two years after the ACA's implementation, 429,000 veterans under the age of 65 gained coverage, which is a 40 percent drop in vets without insurance from 2013 to 2015. The vets were covered for the most part through Medicaid expansion, privately purchased plans and marketplace coverage, according to the report.

The number of insured veterans rose across demographics like age, gender, race and education level. "The gains in coverage were really broad," says Jennifer Haley, a research associate at the Urban Institute, a research group based in Washington, D.C., who was an author on the report

On April 21 2017 11:49 {CC}StealthBlue wrote:
Yeehaw!!!



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On April 21 2017 13:00 {CC}StealthBlue wrote:
In the heart of Trumpland will be, more than likely, the first to start suffering from climate change.



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