TheVat

The Catch-22 on ranked choice is a problem. Even Teddy Roosevelt, in 1912, couldn't break through in spite of garnering a large coalition behind his Progressive party. Which resulted in Taft, who would have likely won, losing to Woodrow Wilson. Taft had won easily his first term. ("Bull Moose party" was the nickname of TR's Progressive party) If it actually were Biden v Trump in 2024, as @J.C.MacSwell mentioned, it does seem possible there could be some unprecedented win of a third party. That would be two uniquely poor main choices. A third option like Yang, or maybe Amy Klobuchar, could start to look pretty good.

https://www.npr.org/2022/07/27/1114074697/james-lovelock-gaia-theory-dies LONDON — James Lovelock, the British environmental scientist whose influential Gaia theory sees the Earth as a living organism gravely imperiled by human activity, has died on his 103rd birthday. Lovelock's family said Wednesday that he died the previous evening at his home in southwest England "surrounded by his family." The family said his health had deteriorated after a bad fall but that until six months ago Lovelock "was still able to walk along the coast near his home in Dorset and take part in interviews." Born in 1919 and raised in London, Lovelock studied chemistry, medicine and biophysics in the U.K. and the U.S. In the 1940s and 1950s, he worked at the National Institute for Medical Research in London. Some of his experiments looked at the effect of temperature on living organisms and involved freezing hamsters and then thawing them. The animals survived...

Would be hard to explain how those five retroreflectors got on the moon, for starters. Also, there are quite a few lunar rocks which have distinctively different mineralogical signatures from terrestrial rocks. (and they are also different from lunar origin meteorites)

There is. When I hike in rocky canyons around here, a broad brimmed hat that blocks direct solar rays is insufficient because UV bounces off some minerals in rock and so I get some UV from below. A similar case is walking by water - UV will bounce off the water and come in below the brim. This reflected UV is less than from direct sun, but it is still significant from a dermatological perspective if you are exposed for more than a few minutes. Sand and snow also reflect quite a bit of UV.

Yes, good point, emergent qualities are inherently unpredictable. And that recognition of sentience will require a formidable sort of Turing Test. Something that can tweeze out all the clever artifice that might manifest in a really high grade simulation (or somehow discern what David Chalmers calls a P-Zed).

The important barricades will be around state and county election officials and workers. The "ginger mints" affair was just the beginning. The people who process and certify votes are where the ramparts of democracy are most threatened.

This was pointed out also in Michigan when an angry COVID restrictions protest in Spring of 2020 , a crowd with many men carrying rifles, filed into the State Capitol there and entered legislative chambers. If you look at the crowd shots, it's pretty clear why they were not seen as a threat.

You bloody well deserved it. In the guise of championing relevance, you were incredibly rude to a new member who brings a lot to this forum. This thread helps connect some dots in the Trump strategies to Bannon, and is quite helpful. Like the OP mentioned pigeon, you seem to be crapping all over things, with petty complaints that you're not getting a precise roadmap for discussion. Complaints that turned to bullying. Completely unnecessary.

Excellent contribution, which added to my knowledge of Bannon connections and role in all this. Not being an international affairs scholar like some of our members, I found the context useful.

I've heard more like 30% (not sure about that 40% number, though I know an Axios poll about six months ago did put it around 40) will say Biden didn't win on a poll, but half of them know perfectly well that Biden won, with maybe more like 10-15 percent who are genuinely members of the cult and truly believe. I think the psychology is something like racists who fear black folks moving in and lowering their property values. They will say that black people are crime prone and do drugs and throw trash in the yard, but what they're doing is asserting a sort of group delusion that keeps them in the club and the wagons circled. Many know it's a lie, but admitting it as such threatens the group cohesion. Getting back to the Stop the Steal delusion -- if you ask for evidence, they just deflect or say "people are saying..." A telltale that they know it's not real.

I had a basal cell carcinoma removed recently, a procedure that is quite routine (over half of adults will get one, in the US) for older adults. They are nuisance more than true affliction. My annoyance was at the number of risk mitigating factors I had (not an outdoor worker, never a swimmer or beach bum or lifeguard, dark brown hair, long adherence to the 10/4 rule for yardwork or hiking, wearer of hats) and yet still with the face lumps. LOL the alien baby - Chelsea thing!

The interpretations that allow owning military assault weapons are hardly "literal" or based on the original purpose of allowing state militias. Your last sentence is obvious, and many here have pointed out how slavery led to later Constitutional reform. FWiW, many founders did not see slavery as moral, but lacked the political clout to expressly forbid it to Southern colonies who would have refused to come into the uneasy Union. Hindsight is 20/20. Nor is Dodd v Jackson's ignoring two cornerstones of unenumerated rights and equal protection in any sense an "original" interpretation where Roe is concerned. Roe was settled law for fifty years because of its strong Constitutional grounding in century old amendments. I think you have missed several posts here that clarified the situation with a newly radical RW and conservative Catholic SCOTUS. I feel like this discussion was already done in previous pages, so won't revisit.

I love the smell of red herring in the morning. Smells like breakfast in Trondheim. The concept of pluralistic secular society isn't that esoteric: when moral positions vary between different sects and faiths, the secular society tries to stay neutral and let each sect make choices, with a few guardrails in place so we don't have human sacrifice or infanticide or institutionalized pedophilia. If your sect doesn't believe in abortions, you are free to not have one. The point of secularism is that the sects that oppose abortion, or gay marriage, or cross-dressing your dog or whatever, are not allowed to force their beliefs on others even if they comprise a majority. Alexis de Tocqueville in his influential writings on America noted that the tyranny of a majority, if directed at an unpopular minority, could be very dangerous to freedom and a secular society. Our founders were very aware of this danger, especially in regards to the potential to return to a theocracy, and wrote a Constitution to discourage such a regression.

It's worth noting that a ban on abortion actually violates some religious beliefs and practices, and therefore could be met with a Constitutional pleading in high courts. https://www.brandeis.edu/jewish-experience/social-justice/2022/june/abortion-judaism-joffe.html

Due to heavily gerrymandered districting in about half the US states, a minority view of abortion is now becoming the law there. Simply chiding us "vote better!" is not going to fix this. Real solutions will be complex and difficult and require electoral reform and, before that holy grail is found, underground networks to help pregnant women trapped by various circumstances in states that have gone medieval.

When I lived in Omaha, where STRATCOM is headquartered, there was no point in worrying. At one time, Omaha was the number one in priority as Russian target. Most conversations were along the lines of "well, if there's ww3 we'd all be incinerated.". The whole Prepper basement thing would just get you snickered at there. (So now we live close to Ellsworth AFB, which is probably also in the Top Ten, target-wise. Dammit.) I think Shoes is correct that any attack on Russia would be very dangerous. One reason I'm more open to supporting some sort of moderate coup in Russia (Vlad would look nice on a gibbet) is that the present situation leads to them holding the whole world hostage because of their evident openness to nuke options. Longterm that seems intolerable and insane.

About halfway down this lengthy recap of all the findings by the Jan. 6 special committee (addressing seven points of malfeasance), point #4 is about efforts of Trump and his staff to convince state lawmakers and election officials to alter the election results. I find these actions to be the most fertile grounds for prosecution by the DOJ and various states. https://www.lawfareblog.com/evaluating-jan-6-committees-evidence In her opening statement, Vice Chair Cheney asserted that Trump, Giuliani, and Eastman each had a direct role in pressuring state and local election officials to change outcomes in the 2020 election. “Each of these efforts to overturn the election is independently serious [and] each deserves attention both by Congress and by our Department of Justice,” Cheney said. Cheney reminded the audience that while Trump was calling election officials (and often stoking public threats against them), he had already been repeatedly informed by his own campaign staff and the Justice Department that his claims of election fraud were baseless.... I would think the only defense Trump would have here would be one predicated on his own emotional incapacity to hear true reports of his loss of the election. And a defense of incompetency is probably not a good one for a president, especially one with Trump's narcissism. And such a defense would hurt his political future, perhaps deal a decisive blow to his chances in the GOP primary, as well as undermine his future endorsement of other candidates.

Well they didn't call him Teflon Don for nothing. In a legal proceeding, establishing mens rea is the tricky part, and Trump and his ilk are good at weaseling out of their own words. Trump will argue all day (or get lawyers to do the arguing for him) on what "fight" means, or what "will be wild" means in a given context. He will feign naivete on what the Proud Boys or the Oath Keepers are about. He will say his remarks about what Pence "deserves" are venting, that they are metaphorical, that any gibbet he saw on the Capitol lawn was taken as purely symbolic.

Not when EV subsidies are yoked to a larger plan to move towards carbon neutrality with green power sources. And coal won't be the bridge fuel, because it produces twice the carbon per watt that NG does. And NG plants are much cheaper to build and operate. Coal is dying of natural economic causes, there's no good news for it, and Manchin does a disservice to his WV constituents by pretending otherwise. But as Stringy noted, he is what you get in WV - the voters live in denial.

At this point, the pique is understandable given how many times he moves the goalposts of compromise. Given the fossil fuel money he's raked in - as @zapatos noted - I like to call him Joe Mansion. Mansion is why I get cranky when the Right rhetoric turns to "the Democrats control Congress so why is Biden so impotent blah blah blah..." Democrats don't control the Senate, because Mansion doesn't really caucus with them. He deserves a lump of coal in his Xmas stocking.

And some women with acute medical episodes where an emergency abortion is needed may die, in states where the ban is total.... https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jul/14/texas-sues-guidance-emergency-abortions Texas sued the federal government on Thursday over new guidance from the Biden administration directing hospitals to provide emergency abortions regardless of state bans on the procedure. Those state bans came into effect in the wake of the US supreme court’s reversal of its landmark 1973 Roe v Wade decision. Republican Texas attorney general Ken Paxton in the lawsuit argued the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) was trying to “use federal law to transform every emergency room in the country into a walk-in abortion clinic”. The lawsuit focused on guidance issued on Monday advising that a federal law protecting patients’ access to emergency treatment requires performing abortions when doctors believe a pregnant woman’s life or health is threatened. The guidance came after Joe Biden, a Democrat, signed an executive order on Friday seeking to ease access to services to terminate pregnancies after the supreme court on 24 June overturned the Roe v Wade ruling recognizing a nationwide right of women to obtain abortions. Abortion services ceased in Texas after the state’s highest court on 2 July, at Paxton’s urging, cleared the way for a nearly century-old abortion ban to take effect. HHS said the guidance from its US Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services agency did not constitute new policy but merely reminded doctors of their obligations under the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act. But in the lawsuit filed in Lubbock, the Republican-led state of Texas argued that federal law has never authorized the federal government to compel doctors and hospitals to perform abortions and that the guidance was unlawful.

Hadn't fully realized how "red herring" works as a double entendre. https://www.cnn.com/2022/07/13/politics/john-bolton-donald-trump-jan-6/index.html

My marriage is currently an unholy trinity consisting of husband, wife, and feline she-devil. Where's my chart? I want to READ IT NOW!

Given the current clear danger to democracy posed by the Right, I am not too concerned if Democrats are legitimately pointing out the need for everyone on the Left/Middle to band together. Small niche parties like the Green can hurt Democratic chances in some close contests, and there's nothing wrong with saying so. Is snagging a couple points for your niche group really worth the consequences like another Trumpian president and/or a Republican Congress? FFS we're trying to save the Republic from fascists and theocrats and King Coal? How Green is your country going to be if it's run by Trump, Inc.? You don't sit around polishing your trophies and picking nits from the carpets when the house is on fire.

Anything that raises a middle finger to the religious zealots shoving their beliefs at everyone is good news. It will get ugly, as this state/federal car crash makes its way through the federal courts.