GeorgiaDon

Not surprising that you would stoop to using the death of the leader of Isis as a cudgel to beat Biden. Tell you what, since you seem to be so upset about al-Qurayshi's death I will gladly contribute $100 towards your expenses to attend his funeral in person. All you have to do is offer proof that you were physically present (not Zoom or anything like that). Perhaps you could wear your old military uniform, just to show your respect for the man.

I wish there was a way to make everyone who is refusing to get vaccinated due to some perverse notion of "Freedom" read this.

Personally I think he should mingle as much as possible with all those truckers clogging up Ottawa streets and looting soup kitchens. In disguise of course.

News to me too. However, you would still be responsible for the consequences of your speech. If you intentionally cause a panic and people are injured or killed as a result, you will be charged. Don

Attenborough must be 1,000 years old by now. I've seen some other statements he has made recently that are easily disproven, which suggests to me that his cognitive abilities are not what they once were. I suspect he is being used by some groups seeking to take advantage of his reputation and gravitas. And yes, there is propaganda on the left as well as the right, and intelligent consumers of information are aware of that. I don't see much of a moral equivalency though, if we are comparing hyperbole regarding the impact of reckless endangerment of the environment to installing a one-party state where only Republicans can be allowed to win elections.

Lawyers with an agenda, and virtually unlimited money from right-wing supporters. A while ago I read that there was literally millions left over after all his legal expenses, and some of his lawyers wanted to return the balance to donors and some (especially one who he fired, and who is also a big name pushing the Trump lie) wanted to keep it for themselves. It's well known that in the US (and I presume elsewhere) there is one law for the rich, another for people in the middle, and yet another for the poor.

But, that's completely different! Dr Seuss depicted black people as apes, which is just free speech and sort of true. Except that they vote just like Americans do (but we're fixing that). Those smut books depict LGBTQ people as humans, and that's just communism, or woke-ism, or pervert-ism. /sarcasm (just in case anyone doesn't get it). Once again I am reminded that these days Republicanism=rank hypocrisy.

Newt Gingrich is largely responsible for everything that is wrong about Congress and the Republican Party IMO. Even if he didn't start some of the pathology, he gave it a huge shot of steroids. He is a perfect example of the class of politicians who will pursue any course of action, no matter how destructive to the country, to secure his own power, again in my opinion. Trump would probably not have happened if Gingrich hadn't already degraded what used to be the Republican party so thoroughly. He orchestrated the Clinton impeachment, built around Clinton's (exceedingly ill-advised) affair with Lewinsky at the same time he was shagging his own mistress, which illustrates the degree of shameless hypocrisy he is effortlessly capable of. I would not waste piss on him if he was on fire. He is, to my mind, evil incarnate. If I had more time I'd tell you what I really think of him!

Wow! Phished in! Sucker (or moron).

Rank hypocrisy is pretty much a defining feature of Republican politics these days.

It's understandable that people are impatient with the slow pace of "justice". Certainly I feel that way. However the biggest disaster would be a rushed prosecution that results in acquittals. That would allow the crooks to claim that the whole investigation was a politically motivated witch hunt, with some validity in the eyes of many people who are not already rabid Trump groupies. Of course they would also permanently escape having to account for their crimes. Biden was elected to bring back a sense of normalcy to government, and "normal" should mean that the Justice Department operates independently from the White House and only prosecutes based on evidence (sufficient to have a high chance of securing a conviction) not political expediency. I do not know from personal experience how hard it is to put together a really strong case, but I imagine it is very complicated especially in a situation where you are investigating crimes involving many politically powerful people who can muddy the waters, or use credible threats of retaliation if/when Republicans regain control of Congress. For those reasons I am not ready to toss Garland just yet.

People have a long history of repackaging repugnant policies to make them more palatable, and even to fool the unwary into supporting those policies. Slavery was repackaged as "states rights". It's a lot easier to convince people that states should be free to enact policies they decide is in the best interests of their citizens, than it is to convince them to support slavery. So you create a couple of degrees of separation; now you're not talking about buying and selling people, you're talking about states being free from Washington bullying. Similarly, in the 1960s the California Realtor's Association found their practice of adding racial covenants to property deeds under attack from civil rights advocates (see this article for example). Realtors found that they could drive up property values by adding restrictions to deeds to make white-only developments and whole neighborhoods. It got to the point that in many communities there were literally no homes that non-whites were allowed to buy. This was supported by the courts; in one case the California Supreme Court ruled that a black family could not be blocked from buying a property, but they could not live on the property due to the covenants. When the Federal government moved to block racial covenants, the realtor's association responded by repackaging the issue as "freedom to do as you wished with your own property". Now they could talk about freedom and property rights, and leave segregation out of the conversation altogether. They pushed an amendment to the California constitution to protect the "right" to enforce racial covenants, which passed with over 60% of the vote pretty much because it was sold as a personal freedom issue not one of legally enforced segregation. Although the California amendment was later voided as in violation of Federal law, the many all-white communities established under the system remain almost entirely white to this day. The lesson was learned well by Regan as Governor, and persists strongly today in Republican Party tactics to fight efforts to combat Covid, poverty, voting rights, or anything else they decide to adopt as a wedge issue. Now we see censorship and efforts to "whitewash" (a perfect word to describe the effort) history repackaged as an effort to protect children from feeling badly about how various racial groups have been treated. Never mind that doing that robs students of any hope of being able to understand why the country has many of the problems that it has. If you can't talk about slavery or Jim Crow or the California Realtor's Association, how do you explain the vast differences in average wealth between white and black (or hispanic) families, or incarceration rates, or any of the other structural issues that fall along racial lines? All you are left with is that non-whites have less wealth, or are more likely to be incarcerated, because they are lazy, or stupid. I see evidence that the same repackaging is happening for religious issues. In the Supreme Court both Thomas and Alito have written about same sex marriage and abortion as being offensive to people with strongly held religious (IOW fundamentalist Christian) beliefs. They seem to be setting up a new constitutional right: the right to never be offended by other people "living in sin". "Freedom of religion", I fear, will soon be twisted to mean that no-one can do anything that might offend someone else's religious scruples. You don't have to pass laws that say everyone has to believe in fundamentalist Christianity, if you can pass laws that say that everyone has to behave just like fundamentalist Christians.

Polarizing because she is a she, plus she refused to stay in the kitchen and bake cookies as I recall. Also she's a demoncrat I suppose. Have I missed anything of actual significance?

We can only hope. Hopefully Merrick Garland will get around to it before 2024. Maybe they'll serve a day or two in prison before Trump pardons them.

We all know that cherry picking data to give a misleading impression is just what he does. Same as in the climate change threads. No-one should take anything he posts at face value. For that matter, it's not a bad idea to double check whenever anyone posts numbers, especially if they are presented to tell a one-sided story. Thanks for the link. That's exactly the information I was wondering about. It might be a bit early to compare 2022 to earlier years though. Still, so far the numbers seem pretty much normal. I don't see anything untoward about people in their 70s, or who have been in Washington for decades, choosing to retire. Especially considering how toxic it has become.

The songwriter John Gorka has an interesting commentary on privilege, and being ignorant of that privilege.

It's a felony, punishable by up to five years in prison, to make or use a fake Covid vaccination card. Why does the same not apply to making and attempting to use a fake electoral college vote?

I'm aware that the 3/5ths compromise and the EC were enacted in order to entice the southern colonies to join the union. I thought my post was already long without getting into all that.

When the EC was first set up electors could "vote their conscience" and were not tied to the popular vote. If they felt the "unwashed masses" got it wrong, they could cast their vote for the other guy. Since then, laws were passed to compel electors to vote according to their state's popular vote. Since they can no longer "correct" bad choices by the general populace, and there are no slave-holding states, none of the original functions of the EC remain. All the more reason to get rid of it IMHO.

I agree that that is one of the functions of the electoral college, but not the only one, at least at the start of the country. The 3/5ths compromise was put forward to address concerns of the southern colonies that they would be dominated by non-slave states because they would only count votes of white males, making their population much smaller than it actually was. For non-American readers, the 3/5ths compromise was an agreement to count slaves as 3/5ths of a person. Of course slaves still could not vote, so 3/5ths of nothing is still nothing. To go along with the 3/5ths arrangement, some mechanism had to be invented to turn that 3/5ths into presidential votes. The electoral college filled that role. Each state would be allocated some number of electoral college votes in proportion to their population, which in the case of slave-holding states was all the non-slave population plus 3/5ths of the total number of adult slaves. The electoral college allowed slave states to derive political power in proportion to the number of slaves, without actually allowing the slaves themselves any power. So I would say the electoral college had two functions: to keep power in the hands of the wealthy elite, and to allow southern slave owners to profit politically as well as financially from their slaves. Today the system may not favor slave owners, but it ensures that residents of some states have a disproportionally large voice in presidential elections, and other states have their voice diminished. For example, voters in Kansas have 3 electors, or about 1 for every 180,000 people. On the other hand, Texas has 1 elector for every 763,000 people. Are people who happen to live in Kansas really worth 4 times as much as people who happen to live in Texas? Texas has about the same population as Alaska, Colorado, North and South Dakota, Idaho, Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, Nevada, New Mexico, Montana, Wyoming, and Utah combined. Texas has 38 electoral votes, and all those states combined have 63. You could make similar comparisons if you substituted California for Texas. So much for one person/one vote! The electoral college serves no useful purpose, it was conceived in order to support evil and it is deeply undemocratic. It's past time for it to be abolished.

At the time the Constitution was written there were no political parties (although they appeared soon after) and several of the "Founding Fathers" wrote against political parties in the Federalist Papers (although some of them later became founders/leaders of early parties). They hoped that those elected to public office would act as well-meaning individuals, concerned about good government and not about personal power. They hoped that ideas would be presented and debated, and legislators would then vote on positions that they believed were in the best interest of the country. I don't know if they were really so naive, or if they really believed that could become reality. At any rate I think they would be horrified to discover that one of the two biggest parties in the country has given itself over to grabbing power for itself, to the extent that they are quite willing to dump the spirit of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, just to install themselves and their pathologically narcissistic dictatorial leader into a permanent position of power. As far as the SCOTUS is concerned it's power has grown far beyond what the Founders imagined, or intended. Today most of the Justices are products of the Federalist Society, dedicated to (or at least strongly influenced by) ideas that favor putting political control in the hands of a few wealthy people. After all if they are rich it must be because they more qualified to govern than the unwashed masses! The judiciary may not write laws directly, but they can strike down anything that doesn't conform to their political leaning.

I miss them both. I didn't always agree with them, especially Lawrocket, but they both always made me think about my position on things.

The "scientific" idea that Adam and Eve were real people came up back in the 1980s out of early studies of mitochondrial haplotypes. Basically the idea was to sequence the mitochondrial genome of a large sample of people from all over the world, then use mathematical tools to arrange these sequences to look for commonalities and arrange them in a phylogenetic tree (somewhat like a family tree). The sequences closest to the base of the tree would be presumed to be the closest to the original ancestral sequence, and the geographic source of the sample that gave that sequence would be presumed to be the geographic source where humans originated. When the analysis was first run, it generated a phylogenetic tree that had at its base a single ancestral sequence that came from Africa. This was interpreted as "mitochondrial Eve". It was "Eve" because we inherit our mitochondria from our mother as there are mitochondria in the egg but not in sperm. The study generated a huge controversy when it was published. It was quickly determined that the analysis that was used is highly sensitive to the order in which the sequences are loaded into the calculation. Basically the analysis takes the first sample, compares it to the next, then compares the "sum" of those two to the next sequence, and so on. It was just chance that an African sample came out as the lowest on the tree and so "ancestral" to all the rest. When the order of the sequences was changed, the analysis gave a different "mitochondrial Eve", sometimes from Asia, sometimes from South America, etc. That it always resolved down to a single "Eve" was also an artifact of how the analysis ran. In the end this approach can only generate a fairly large number of phylogenies, each as likely as any of the others. The idea that there could have been a single female and a single ancestor of the human species is biologically nonsensical. There is no evidence that species ever evolve that way, and plenty of evidence that too small of a population size will cause the population to completely crash (leading to extinction) due to lack of genetic diversity. There are many examples of the adverse effects of excessive inbreeding.

The Catholic church has been somewhat accepting of evolution for quite a while, albeit with an "intelligent design" slant. Many years ago I spent a couple of years in a Catholic high school taught by Jesuit Brothers and our science classes included straight-up evolution without a whiff of Book of Genesis creationism. By "intelligent design" I mean that evolution was presented as a process, a mechanism that was presumed to inevitably result in some sort of intelligent species although not necessarily of the anthropoid ape flavor, as God was an intelligent mind without physical being (much less an elderly northern European male). Pope Francis is really just stating a long-standing view within the church. That being said, there are some interesting twists or conflicts between Judeo-Christian theology and straightforward acceptance of evolution. At the simplest level, there is an obvious conflict between believing that the Bible is literally true in every word, and believing in evolution. Catholic theology has long been comfortable with "interpreting" the Bible, not reading everything (especially the old testament) literally but rather looking for the "deeper meaning". Other more fundamentalist variants of Christianity have more of a problem because they think every word of the old and new testament are true exactly as written, or rather as translated in the King James version. There is a deeper problem though, as I learned while discussing the subject with a student who happened to be an orthodox Jew as I recall. Bear with me as I try to explain this. The problem is that the "big picture" of Genesis is that God created humans as just a step below gods themselves, for example in being immortal (no death in Eden!). Humans rejected God though (Adam and Eve eating the apple) which led to the "Fall" (fall from God's grace) and expulsion from Eden. In this view it is the Fall that brought death and disease and suffering into the world. After the Fall, it is the mission of humanity to struggle to return to the position they enjoyed before the Fall, by choosing to put God ahead of everything else. From this perspective, the theological problem with evolution is that it eliminates the Fall, and with it the whole nature of the relationship between God and humanity. We have been gradually (very gradually) becoming more "in the likeness of God" by a slow step-by-step process of evolution,instead of starting out god-like and taking a giant step backwards, then having to "earn" our way back to where we used to be before we decided that apples were tasty. Of course all this seems like nonsense to me, but then again I am an evolutionary biologist by profession. The discussion with the student did highlight an interesting difference in world views though. I believe that the world we can see and touch, manipulate through experiments, and derive logical conclusions about, is the real world. He believed that everything we can experience (see, touch, manipulate) is the illusion, and the "spiritual world" is what is actually real. He could never accept evolution because that would negate the entire message of the old testament about the fundamental relationship between humanity and God. In the end I told him he could believe whatever he wanted but he still needed to understand evolution well enough to explain it in an exam, even if he didn't believe it was true.