TheVat

A first year law student could poke holes in Ornato's credibility. Ornato was so pro-Trump that the president removed him from the Secret Service and made him his political adviser, then deputy chief of staff. Ornato helped orchestrate that infamous moment where riot police gassed peaceful Black Lives Matter protesters from in front of the White House so that Trump could have a photo op in front of a historic church. He also helped plan many Trump political rallies before later returning to the Secret Service. But what we really have are anonymous hacks feeding fantasy rumors to the Fox News bubble. They do this because they know how truly damning a lot of the testimony has been. Anything to sow seeds of doubt, and to repeat as often as possible.

I also wondered, as Phi did, if bringing in Cassidy was setting up some action by Garland. She had not only damning testimony but looks like she wandered off the set of The West Wing, yet not at all trying to put on a show or dramatize. And the allusion to attempts at witness tampering before her deposition - "they reminded me a couple of times that Trump does read transcripts..." - adds to her power as a sympathetic figure standing up to intimidation.

Throwing lunch against the wall? Attacking security staff and attempting to take the wheel of a limo to drive yourself to the riot? Suggesting turning off the magnetometer and letting people with guns join the crowd in order to maximize its size and make it more like your own personal coup army? And the most damning quote, imo: You know, I don’t even care that they have weapons. They’re not here to hurt me. Very credible portrayal of Trump.

Definitely not helminth, given the size. Given the segmentation in the closer image, I have doubts about the uric acid crystals theory. If it's a fiber, I would lean towards something that got into the clothing and transferred to the outlet opening. It's not cotton, though. Might be worth checking micro images of mineral wool (fiberglass, in the US) or other sorts of batt insulation, if the donor was working around a building site, that kind of thing. Might be a help if @Qwerty2022 could update with a little more info on the pee source.

Wondered if the mall attack helped give Turkey a nudge towards the signing table today. They have agreed, finally, on accepting Finland and Sweden into NATO.

In keeping with the Roberts Court's embrace of originalist interpretation, Justice Thomas will, per Article One, section two, acknowledge the great tradition of the 3/5 Compromise (1787) and declare himself 3/5 of a person, and allow Biden to appoint another jurist to supply the other 40% of his vote. I wanted you all to have this breaking news.

Federal law cannot do what you think it can, because they are constrained by Constitutional law. So, even a reasonable compromise (which Casey v PP, 1992 opened the door to) can be shot down by Dobbs v Jackson WHO until another court reverses it. The official federal Constitutional position in my country is now that there is no fundamental right pertaining to abortion, in any form. Which means, for quite a while, only state legislators, backed by state judiciaries, can do what you suggest. Which means the new patchwork, and poor women struggling to afford trips to another state, etc. You Canadians are so nice and reasonable it may be hard to grasp what a colossal goatfuck we have down here. We have two Supreme Court justices who it now appears lied in their confirmation hearings.

Again, the thread comes down to the debate in American courts over something called substantive due process. To make sense of Roe v Wade, or Casey v PP, one must grasp substantive due process and unenumerated rights. And the implications of 5th, 9th and 14th amendments, as courts have put certain fundamental rights beyond government interference, i.e. beyond legislative tampering or regulatory orders. Some rights must not be at the mercy of whichever partisan hacks can shout the loudest. Or change at state lines. The point of SDP is to protect people in states against majoritarian policy enactments that exceed the limits of government authority. That's why legal people (like my former coworkers in that county courthouse many decades ago) speak of fundamental rights -- they are liberties which cannot be taken away by a pack of gerrymandered political hacks, or restricted because some tv personality on Fox News or Newsmax got the audience all riled up.

One reason infanticide sidebars are a red herring here is that they are substantially a different topic in bioethics: euthanasia. Specifically, for severe birth defects. Mothers who have carried for 24+ weeks aren't saying, "wow, this is boring and I'm tired of lower backaches and pissing every thirty minutes - let's yank that sucker outta there!". Only in lurid RW scare stories is that happening. In reality, that behavior is indicative of mental health issues and patients are referred for psychiatric help. Usually for depression. And/or substance abuse. The issue of this thread is if the right to abortion is an unenumerated right given Constitutional recognition by a 1972 SCOTUS landmark decision, then clarified on the matter of a viability criterion by a 1992 decision, thus establishing stare decisis, i.e. law settled by precedent. And, if so, on what Constitutional grounds could it be reversed? I strongly recommend this as a good read, laying out all the faulty arguments... https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/06/roe-overturned-supreme-court-samuel-alito-opinion/661386/

Do not be swayed by pubic opinion. Could be a fragment of a urine mite or other parasite. Maybe Candida albicans. Wouldn't hurt to show to a urologist.

I am not an advocate for frequent changes in laws and Constitutions. But laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths discovered and manners and opinions change, with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also to keep pace with the times. We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors. Thomas Jefferson

Could the red herring be let go? No one is having abortions of sentient babies. The extremely rare abortions later than 22 - 24 weeks are allowed in only six states (and DC) and have generally been of anencephalics, or similar conditions where there can be no viable sentient existence and any "life" postpartum would be brief and horrible. There is no support for abortions of healthy babies at 25-40 weeks, not anywhere on the mainstream political spectrum. This is a controversy manufactured by media RW shock jocks to draw devil horns on the heads of pro-Choice Liberals.

Yes. Damn, you were doing so well with Constitutional Law 101, now this. JK. Yes, a small incredibly vocal, sometimes violent, activist wing of the Republican Party is sufficient to push the whole party to take up the cause, and even get some thumbsucking Independents to come over by relentless pounding of the infanticide red herring (red herring because almost nowhere are abortions post-viability being performed in this country, and the vast majority are done before 15 weeks). So we have a nation overwhelmingly pro-Choice being controlled by a minority that does indeed drown out a quieter majority. This was sorta my point, referring to Living Document. But you elucidated it neatly, which I did not. Yes, many cases aren't heard precisely so that Congress may have reasonable time to act, and lower level courts can handle cases where the path is clearer and the heavyweight nine aren't needed.

To interpret the Constitution in a nonpartisan manner, unswayed by public opinion. The Court was founded to be entirely independent of the legislative branch. The will of the people is supposed to manifest through the elected bodies, Congress and the Executive branch. The Court was founded to be something set apart from all that, answerable only to the principles codified in the Constitution. As you might imagine, this rather scary formula has moved many people to push the idea of the Living Document, and that interpretations by SCOTUS must follow changes in society and growth in human knowledge. What a shitshow Originalism (the rival to Living Document) has proved to be, especially on this day. Wow, a Canadian did their homework! Now if we could just get Congress to do ITS job and affirm the will of the people.

Justice Thomas's note on how this opens up the reversal of other (some very old) decisions on contraception, gay sex, and same-sex marriage, was chilling. He has basically said out loud what conservatives across the country were vehemently denying after the Alito leak this spring: that a Roe/Casey reversal would put other well-established rights in the crosshairs. Oops. (Welcome! Nice to see another fellow veteran of SCF.) Also ironic to hear Conservatives stress the importance of the Second Amendment as an overarching federal protection, but then just shrug and say "ehhhhh, it's up to the states to decide" when it comes to rights clearly protected in amendments like the 9th and 14th. More ironic still, given that the original purpose of the Second Amendment was to protect the autonomy and rights of individual states. Let me put this delicately: the decision today is taking a large smelly bowel movement on a cornerstone of constitutional law, the concept of stare decisis, one that is flouted only in the case of horrendously awful decisions like the infamous Plessy v Ferguson (which established legal race segregation).

Where public policy crosses borders, I would say therein lies the appeal of treaties - Kyoto, Paris, etc. The fossil fuel industry makes sure, via extensive lobbying, ad campaigns, carbon capture pipe dreams, and political campaign donations, that such treaties are usually toothless if not DOA. Unfortunately, the "we are all responsible, break out the bicycles and rakes" ethos doesn't really penetrate past a small minority that have a certain amount of free time and idealism to implement. Culpability is also elusive to calculate when wealthy nations partly rely on agri production in faraway lands. One example is rice consumption - when I eat methane-producing basmati rice, some of it comes from India. Indian paddies burble methane, oil they purchased from Russia or the ME helps harvest and ship it, plastic made from an ethylene plant in Alabama packages it, etc. And don't forget that a monoculture style of growing means that crop fields capture and retain less carbon. The webs of responsibility are so tangled, for almost everything, as to defy clear assignments of parties.

Some good replies to the OP. Worth noting that sweating often accompanies exercise, so it's possible the real benefit is how you came to be sweating, not the sweating itself. Sweating, btw, tends to lead some to more tapwater consumption, which increases chlorine or chloramine in the GI tract. While the hydration is good, it may help to use water that has been dechlorinated with a home purification system, or use water that has sat (in a safe place where foreign materials can't settle in it) for at least 24 hours. This is the same advice aquarium hobbyists get, btw, as many fish species are sensitive to chlorinated water. Also, sweating does deplete electrolytes. Sodium is not a concern, as most diets have more sodium than the body requires. But for heavy sweating, potassium should be recharged, with potassium-rich foods. And, btw, if you're retaining water, try not eating wheat, rye, barley, and oat products for a few days. These grains cause mild water retention in the muscle tissue. Every Python fan knows it's the randomly dropped sixteen ton weight that may get you in the end.

Wow, you are confused. At this website, it's not up to you to dictate people's comings and goings. Or how they should act on their feelings about another posters content. You are here to get feedback, and I see ZERO evidence of a good faith effort to understand our points of critique. Or even engage with questions of how terms are defined. Nonetheless I will post, or not post, as the spirit moves me, not because some arrogant newbie has decided to dictate terms of engagement.

Design is not being used in the sense of implied teleology. You can stop pretending you don't see that. And, given that human cognitive processes cause computers and artificial neural nets, it takes no great insight into the chain of causality to assert that, if there is no design to the human mind, then whatever arises from that mind and is implemented in a different substrate, also is not designed. IOW reductio ad absurdum. This absurd conclusion is what you get when you insist on a narrow definition of design. Again, neither you, nor the paper you keep insisting already answers all these objections, really addresses the blind watchmaker. You can't erase design because the causal origin is natural variations and then just drop it in later when those natural processes give rise to engineered structures that seek to replicate the natural ones. So knock off the strawman where you accuse of us "inserting teleology" and recognize the deeper broader meaning of design. And answer these points, instead of insisting (incorrectly) that they've already been preemptively dismissed.

Partial limits on destructive (ballistic) testing would make as much sense as partial bans on pedophile rape. There is no ambiguity on the immense danger of satellite debris. Or the existential threat to a modern tech society if satellites are taken out. Seems to me the nations have to come together on this and treat such weapons as on a par with nerve gas, nukes, or engineered pathogens. New START should be modified to include non-nukes, and ASW added to the menu, with an international UN monitoring team assigned to enforce a ban. Think about this: what if, unilaterally, a nuclear power develops an excellent laser system that not only kills satellites but also can reliably fry an ICBM? Not necessarily a big leap from the former to the latter.

In terms of comparatives we are somewhat limited by the reality that human experimentation is forbidden. Darn! (JK) We cannot, for example, give a random group from the general population puberty blockers and compare their outcomes to trans people who got PBs. I say this, not to advocate illegal mad scientist experiments, but to point out that it's hard to say if delaying puberty has positive psychological markers for everyone, not just possible candidates for GRA. IIRC, there are some studies that correlated later puberty (not artificially delayed) with better academic performance. I think most were questionable in their conclusions because later puberty also correlated with certain ethnic/cultural groups, and thus there were confounding factors from cultural valuations on certain study habits, as well as socioeconomic factors. And later puberty (the natural kind) also correlates with greater average stature, among males, which in some countries correlates with more job promotions and success. Again, I'm just trying to point out how muddy the waters are when we try to isolate causal determinants of happiness and well-being.

I think, to be fair to those questioning the basic psychology and wisdom behind all this, it's okay to ask how these correlations work. For example, does puberty blocking improve overall health because they are fitting in with their subculture in, say, California, and so their decrease in social stress is improving physical markers and decreasing suicidal ideation? Or is it because they are fundamentally a different gender than the birth one and this is a genuine improvement of physical functioning? Does the improved health effect show the same degree in Vickburg MS as it does in Berkeley CA? Is it roughly the same in Houston and Stockholm? (actually Stockholm wouldn't work now in such comparatives because Swedes have banned puberty blockers due to, cough, ahem, unresolved scientific questions) Causation is important here. If I reduce a child's suicidal thoughts and boost their health by raising them in a Truman Show simulation, that might not be worth it. I might choose some other therapeutic path for them to feel better, in spite of the positive correlation between Truman Show fake reality and "overall health." So it's fair for @MigL et al to ask if there are other solutions to alienation and depression of gender dysphorics that might lie in other domains than the pharmaceutical. Maybe there are no others that can work, but it's still worth exploring before seriously altering a child's body (or later on, removing pieces of it).

Maybe some uncertainty about hormone treatments and such is that most people don't understand, as they would with oncology say, where the expertise lies and why listening to the expert is vital. If you have a patient who would like chemotherapy, but the doctor vetoes it, then they don't get chemo - with a purely physical condition, we generally understand there's a clearly defined person or group who can determine the best interests of the patient. But if you have a ten year old boy who has been putting on dresses and insisting you call him Betty, there is an array of psychological and cultural perspectives vying for attention. So the decision to have Betty hold off puberty while many of B's friends are starting to get new hairy places and deeper voices, has all kinds of ramifications that aren't as clearly about the healing process or a single branch of medicine. To many people, the claim that a child can best find happiness by changing their gender is one subject to Sagan's Law, i.e. an extraordinary claim that requires extraordinary evidence. And yes, that may be hard for the kid who would really benefit from a big gender makeover. But many parents are going to be reluctant to do anything so life-altering just because a doctor says so. Anyone who follows modern medicine is aware of the fallibility of doctors, even doctors with the best intentions and latest science.

If there's an aspect of science that's relevant, it may be in developmental psychology as well as medicine. And there may be some debate there as to how determined gender identity is early in childhood. And how much culture influences body dysphorias. And to what degree children play with alternative identities before finding their way towards a firmer sense of self. If puberty blockers allow more time to look before they leap, or snip, that may be a good thing. I still have personal reservations about GRA, while trying to support as much as I can the quest for identity. Sometimes it seems like our society has expectations of gender that make it difficult to fully embrace either set of traditional roles. Gender dysphoria is an understandable response.