Laboratory planner by day, toddler parent by night, enthusiastic everything-hobbyist in the thirty minutes a day I get to myself.
Well then I hope I can have your vote, because my platform will be to use the sweeping new executive powers carved out by the current administration to throw every member of said administration along with every employee of ICE ERO into the “unextraditable foreign gulag detention” black hole, and only then work with Congress and the courts to make that impossible again.
Got a reference? Pro-UBI and anti-billionaire as I am, I’ve done the math and I don’t think that checks out. Meaningful UBI has an annual price tag in the trillions, and even if you assume 90%+ top bracket tax rates there aren’t enough billionaires in the US to foot that bill. Other programs would have be discontinued and/or rolled in, and tax rates increased across the board.
As ever, working to build the post-apocalyptic wasteland that would finally justify their insistence that they need 500 guns and a fleet of milsurp Humvees to traverse the miles of crumbled roadways between their compounds and the last operating Fortress Hospital in the Dakotan Oil Wastes.
And of course this would be a massive harm to their own voters, because Medicaid expansion has been the only thing keeping most rural community hospitals afloat for a long time. If they cut it, then it’s likely that many small towns are going to lose their only medical providers within a hour’s drive or more.
Can’t wait for the inevitable companion pieces: one from Conor Friedersdorf entitled Actually You Are Wrong And I Am Very Smart and the other from Jeffery Goldberg, with the headline This Will Be Catastrophic For Israel’s Capacity To Bomb Palestinians.
We already can’t economically build ships for the navy because we’ve so dramatically hollowed out our steel refining and commercial ship-building industries. We’re looking at a future where the US military is primarily a client of the international arms industry for everything but guns.
Eugh, daylight.
When the base is mad enough to throw them out if they don’t. The Florida special elections didn’t flip any seats, but they showed a 15-point swing away from the GOP in deep red parts of the state. That’s gonna make them sweat. Unless they can sufficiently rig the midterms or sway Trump off his current “crash the economy for lulz” trajectory, it may well be a bloodbath, and that’s the sort of math that starts peeling sycophants away from Trump.
Back in my day us hermit types just did our grocery shopping after 9PM, this is a whole other level.
The Zionist factions that were foundational to the establishment of the Israeli state saw the Holocaust as proof of two things: first, that the Jewish people would never truly be safe in the world without a country of their own, and second, that the horrors visited on Jews by the Nazis, and European antisemites before them, and the Cossacks before them, demonstrated that no extreme was unjustified in the establishment and protection of that state. Those attitudes have been at the bedrock of modern day Israel from its founding. To those who adhere to them, “Never again” is short for “Never again to us,” and damn anybody who doesn’t fit their narrow (conservative, religiously observant, largely white Ashkenazi) vision of Jewishness.
To these folks, ethnic cleansing of Palestine was always the goal, and they’ve been waiting decades for an international order that would look the other way while they purged, displaced, and slaughtered their way to complete Israeli control of the land they saw as theirs to take. Now they’ve got it, and they’re not wasting any time.
In anything like a competitive district, a progressive Independent challenger is more likely to split the vote for a milquetoast Democratic incumbent and hand the seat to the Republican challenger. Working within the Democratic primary system has its challenges, but also clears the field so that there’s one clear choice for left-leaning voters rather than two.
First past the post sucks ass, but it’s what we’ve got to live with until we’ve got enough power to change it.
Given how buddy-buddy he is with Erdogan and Modi, I don’t think that’s strictly true – but no, with a name like Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedow (really!), perhaps there are some prejudices at play…
Last I checked, Turkmenistan’s entire economy had been turned towards the project of sucking off their former president (who is the dad of the current president) by building lots of garish statues, museums, hotels with his name and face on them. One would think that sort of thing would be right up Donny’s alley.
Have you seen who’s writing code these days? Everything is computer, computer is transgender, ergo everything is transgender.
I won’t lie, the fact that Americans got a taste of this and then voted to go back for another bite of the apple (not to mention the global rightward shift that’s been happening along with it) has soured me a bit on representative democracy. Democratic modes of government seem to be fundamentally incapable of defending themselves against demagoguery, and too large a percentage of the population prefer to be told what to do and who to hate rather than put in the work of engaging seriously with the civic duties required to make a democracy work. I’m at a loss as to what a viable alternative might look like – various forms of autocracy are what we’re trying to avoid, and I’ve never seen any anarchist ideas that seem like they could work at scale, but clearly democracy falls apart when too many of the people participating in it refuse to participate in good faith.
Worse than that… The commercial weather services aren’t doing much more than repackaging or (questionably) refining NWS forecast data, which is derived from a global weather simulation that runs on a supercomputer cluster four times a day, incorporating data from NWS radars, government weather satellites, ground stations, etc. Musk and company want to blow this up because providing all that sophisticated data free of charge undercuts the ability of commercial services to charge for the same thing, but there’s no private infrastructure capable of generating the data underlying the base NWS forecast. Unless they plan to simply privatize all of that (a distinct possibility) destroying the NWS just means that there will be no high quality national forecasting at all, and even if they do privatize the infrastructure the expertise to make it all work won’t necessarily follow.
If there were quick and easy pathways for that to happen, my family and I would be gone already. Unfortunately, for most places you’d want to move to, the options are pretty much:
Past that, you can either take your chances overstaying a tourist visa or waiting for things to get bad enough to claim refugee status.
737s don’t have RATs. According to some 737 pilots I’ve seen commenting, the APU is operable in flight, but doesn’t kick in automatically and would have required ~60 seconds to start. The main electrical generators don’t automatically restart after tripping, either, so a scenario where electric power is hypothetically available, but a panicked or overloaded flight crew don’t take the steps to bring it online, is plausible.
Time to bring back gibbeting!