"We wanted to see how far we could push Trump's loyal supporters," says Triumph the Insult Comic Dog. So his team invited a group of Trumpkins to attend a focus group meeting where they were shown some fake Trump campaign ads, voiced by a convincing Trump impersonator.

The attendees were not told that the commercials were fake, even though the ads had proposals that were crazy, even by Trump standards: outlawing abortion everywhere except in depressed areas like Atlantic City, trapping Mexican day laborers in porta-potties and shipping them back to Mexico, locking shock collars on the neck of every Mexican citizen in Mexico so they'd get zapped if they tried to go past an invisible electric fence on the US-Mexico border.

The focus group members seemed a little surprised at first, but quickly came around to the seeing the logic of these proposals, and expressed their support. One woman was concerned about the dog collar proposal, though. She said the Mexicans were likely to cut off the dog collars and sell them.

This video is like a scary Milgram experiment.

Source: The Washington Post

The Obama administration on Tuesday finalized new fuel-economy standards for large trucks, buses and other heavy-duty vehicles, the latest in a series of efforts aimed at slashing greenhouse gas emissions and weaning the nation from its dependence on fossil fuels.

The new requirements affect a class of vehicles that includes school buses, large pickup trucks, delivery and passenger vans, garbage trucks and long-haul tractor-trailers. These heavy- and medium-duty vehicles represent only about 5?percent of total highway traffic but account for 20?percent of transportation-related fuel consumption and carbon emissions. Administration officials said they expect that when the new standards are fully implemented in coming years, they will cut more than 1 billion tons of carbon pollution from the atmosphere, save nearly $170 billion in fuel costs and reduce oil consumption by an estimated 84 billion gallons.

“The standards promote a new generation of cleaner, more fuel-efficient trucks by encouraging the development and employment of new and advanced cost-effective technologies through model year 2027,” said Gina McCarthy, administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, which developed the new rules in conjunction with the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration. “These standards are ambitious and achievable, and they will help ensure the American trucking industry continues to drive our economy — and at the same time protect our planet.”

The White House previously has undertaken efforts to curb pollution from cars and light trucks, aircraft, power plants and air conditioning and refrigeration units, in an effort to meet pledges to reduce overall emissions in the United States by at least 26?percent by the year 2030, compared with 2005 levels. During his first term, President Obama also put in place the first national policy to increase the fuel economy of medium- and heavy-duty trucks with model years between 2014 and 2018. Tuesday’s regulations build on those early measures.

There is horror in the Nauru files and then there is banality: countless records documenting squabbles between children, lost possessions, late buses and toilet blocks running out of soap. In the engineered society of an offshore immigration detention centre, there is drama, tedium and the unrelenting surveillance of Big Brother or The Truman Show – but without the cameras rolling.

The Nauru files catalogue an inordinate amount of suffering, abuse and anguish among the detained asylum seekers, but these are not the only stories. Because of the requirement that staff file reports on every classifiable incident, the thousands of entries document what everyday life is like in the dystopian world created by the Australian-backed companies running the camp.

How notable incidents were defined and graded was vague and changed over time. Strict reporting timeframes meant a worker sometimes had to choose between responding to a major incident and rushing to file a report within 30 minutes, to avoid a financial penalty to their organisation. As a result many incident reports designated “minor” make for horrifying reading

The files are littered with reports about children – in particular a core group of troubled kids under the age of 10 – fighting, throwing rocks and acting dangerously by leaning out of bus windows and running across the road. Much of it is mundane.

More than 2,000 leaked incident reports from Australia’s detention camp for asylum seekers on the remote Pacific island of Nauru – totalling more than 8,000 pages – are published by the Guardian today. The Nauru files set out as never before the assaults, sexual abuse, self-harm attempts, child abuse and living conditions endured by asylum seekers held by the Australian government, painting a picture of routine dysfunction and cruelty...

..."The reports range from a guard allegedly grabbing a boy and threatening to kill him once he is living in the community to guards allegedly slapping children in the face. In September 2014 a teacher reported that a young classroom helper had requested a four-minute shower instead of a two-minute shower. “Her request has been accepted on condition of sexual favours. It is a male security person. She did not state if this has or hasn’t occurred. The security officer wants to view a boy or girl having a shower.”

Some reports contain distressing examples of behaviour by traumatised children. According to a report from September 2014, a girl had sewn her lips together. A guard saw her and began laughing at her. In July that year a child under the age of 10 undressed and invited a group of adults to insert their fingers into her vagina; in February 2015 a young girl gestured to her vagina and said a male asylum seeker “cut her from under”.

In the files there are seven reports of sexual assault of children, 59 reports of assault on children, 30 of self-harm involving children and 159 of threatened self-harm involving children.