iNow

It doesn’t seem this way at all, but there is a certain deference offered to those already in power and in positions of party leadership. It’s extremely rare for a sitting president to get challenged during the primaries, and the incumbent has enormous power and ability to win. Gavin Newsom Gretchen Whitmer Pete Buttigieg Josh Shapiro JB Pritzker Andy Bashear None of whom will matter unless Biden voluntarily leaves or unless there’s a messy bunch of backstabbing and infighting and self immolation at the convention in Chicago.

Countries don’t make chips. Companies do, and they’re generally multinational

Yes, but candidates aren’t picked based on the wishes of SFN commenters How old and tired he looked

I watched it live and in total, as I have every debate including those for primaries for decades Her chances are poor despite her obvious capabilities. She’s consistently polled worse than Biden since they took office. We’re still very much a misogynistic and racist country, at least in the swing electoral college states where a coin flip and a stiff breeze is all that’s required to change the outcome overall.

Both videos I shared covered that. They find heat even in extreme cold

There really weren’t any challengers. It was like one overly ambitious idiot from Wisconsin and nobody else. The media didn’t cover it bc he was the only person on the ballot Others are helping him, too. Beyond the right-wing media echo chamber, there’s help from autocrats around the world pushing these stories like they have specific views on Gaza and Ukraine.

It’s a reverse air conditioner. This video goes into a bit more detail:

That’s for impeachment, which was done to Trump twice, but his cultish party let him off the hook both times. Many like Mitch McConnell encouraged that so convictions could be brought instead in a court of law. Now, we see SCOTUS declaring presidents to be above those laws and Trumps team trying to dismiss cases regarding actions he took even before becoming president.

Alex may or may not have an agenda, but he’s been calm and rational and fact focused and I find the suggestion he’s spinning crap hyperbolic and unrepresentative. It’s ok to disagree, but he’s hardly deserving of this type of reply, IMO. Bc as good of a president as he’s been, his weakness is the perception of his advancing age. He called this early debate to assuage those concerns and have a performance strong like his SOTU address a few months ago. Everyone was watching, inside and outside the US. Instead of extinguishing this perceptual fire, he poured gasoline on to it. It’s a problem bc it amplified what people globally were already feeling. The debate wasn’t the problem. It was how this was one of the first and only opportunities we’ve all had in months to see him off a prompter and he shit the bed with 60 million people watching, and hundreds of millions more consuming clips of it the days after. Trump is benefiting, despite his own shit performance. He is being held to a different standard, and that’s why the people who desperately want him to lose are so worried and focused about grandpa Joe spacing out.

Both can be true at once. There can be authentic organic concerns about his age while in parallel those concerns can get annoyingly amplified and made far more salient by media coverage. If the media didn’t cover his debate performance at all, people would still have reluctance due to Bidens age. However, now that said coverage has turned into a feeding frenzy, the cycle self-reinforces. It’s not either or. It’s both and.

Testing planes powered by hydrogen is more common right now, with batteries as the next great hope, AFAIK. Challenge is batteries are heavy so currently are not as plausible for commercial planes as they are for sport tuned and smaller aircraft. Biodiesel planes have been flown for a long time, including by Iowa farmers using them to spray the corn they’ll be later selling for ethanol.

Fair. I may have undersold his activity level. Still, nothing compares with being president

Without dismissing valid concerns with Biden, I don't find this to be a fair comparison. In the previous week, Roger Waters was likely sipping wine and relaxing on a veranda with wealthy friends listening to gentle acoustic guitar music in between snacking on food prepared by master chefs, whereas Biden was flying back and forth to Europe multiple times to meet with world leaders and try to quiet a war in Gaza, a war in Ukraine, trade wars with China, civil unrest and killings in Africa and South America and Haiti and elsewhere, cyber attacks on US infrastructure, and in parallel address multiple natural disasters in multiple states at home and scores of other things that neither you nor I have the clearance nor access to understand. It's like saying that a retired quilt knitter looked better rested than an ER doctor in a warzone, IMO. Well, yeah. No duh... of course they were better rested. They've actually been able to rest. Again, concerns with Biden are valid, just wouldn't put too much weight on comparisons like this one given there is no comparison to sitting in the Oval Office as the POTUS (which to say again is itself precisely why the concerns with Biden are valid).

Shocking, isn’t it, that so many who feel climate change is a hoax, or that wearing masks during a pandemic is tyranny, or that peaceful protests against police killings of black citizens need to be put down with police and dogs… would so easily fall victim to highly coordinated consistent feeds of propaganda

Getting the masses to believe this has been the central project of Russia and China and a handful of others for many years now. Their investments are apparently seeing returns. The idea that democracy doesn’t work is finding traction

They’re also seizing more power for themselves and away from agencies by reversing chevron deference.

They always could, but chose not to for fear of consequences and breaking of historical norms. They still can, but now with a reasonable expectation that there won’t be any consequences. Any hit team who refuses on principle or bc it breaks some law will be pushed aside until a different team is found and agrees to proceed as ordered by the supreme ayatollah commander, his excellency the exhalted king in chief of the USA that the SCOTUS has just created.

Not really, no. Mayflies only live 24 hours and then die, yet reproduce before they do.

A significant portion of the Democratic base comes from African American voters. Dropping Harris would not be well received by that critical voting group

The Misanthropocene could work

I suppose it’s easy to “forget” that given how Biden actually ran for president in 1988, again in 2008, wanted to in 2016, ran again in 2020, and now is running yet again here in 2024. Except for those five (5) distinct times, yeah. He “didn’t want to be president.” 😂 I mostly agree with most of the rest of your post, though.

Survival isn’t what matters in evolution. Reproduction and creation of offspring is.

Nobody has suggested it doesn’t

no

Plasmodium, snakes (lost all limbs), Axolotl... the ostrich, emu, dodo and kiwi bird have lost the ability to fly... yeast, horses lost their thumbs and all but their middle fingers... the examples of evolution favoring simpler over more complex are literally endless. The core point is you're representing a false version of how it works. There is no direction in evolution, and definitely not toward more complex (even though that is one possible outcome). You can dig your heels in all you want, but you're wrong and I'd advise you adapt your understanding to a more accurate one. Perhaps it is, but it's not one necessarily favored by evolution