Xhieron

Everywhere the GOP has a lock on state government, the looting inevitably follows. Vouchers literally siphon state taxes and pass them to the hands of rich conservatives and their churches who serve only rich, white, privileged children. By design, vouchers work to entrench the upper class; further impoverish poor and minority citizens; and increase wealth disparity, illiteracy, and crime.

That kind of attitude lingers dangerously close to the everything-is-a-conspiracy-by-the-shadowy-cabal line of reasoning. Biden's a Catholic, but it's certainly not "obvious" that he's "intentionally letting the nation slip". You can scroll down barely a page on whitehouse.gov and watch the president commit to restoring the standard of Roe v Wade. It's under the statements in favor of Pride, committing to combating gun deaths, lowering housing costs, and protecting pensions. Joe Biden's executive orders have been the most progressive executive action since Roosevelt.

Here's something a lot of non-religious folks might not know: the evangelical right? They hate Catholics. The MAGAs hate them ideologically, but the ones running the show hate them because the Catholic Church is their competition when it comes to running private schools and otherwise lucrative community support institutions. Biden is absolutely not on their side, theologically or otherwise.

Exactly! In many parts of the country Joe Biden and the federal government in general is the only thing standing between the people and Supply-side Jesus flavored fascist autocracy.

This is why we vote blue down the line. Can't start packing if we don't have the majorities.

Broken clock's right twice a day, etc. A glimmer of light in an otherwise abysmally dark day in US jurisprudence.

At a glance this looks like a subject matter jurisdiction objection (as distinct from personal jurisdiction), which is not waivable and can be raised at any time or sua sponte--so you can keep it in your pocket forever and raise it whenever you're desperate, which seems to be the case here.

Edit: Looked at the motion, and that's what this is. It doesn't necessarily mean the motion is meritorious, but it's timely.

Just cheat? Whatever happened to class cheating? In the old days if the game was too hard and you didn't have a big brother to do it for you, you just put in the godmode code or turned on a trainer or something.

Some games are just hard. That's what makes getting good at them feel rewarding. The Souls games haven't really been for me either (due to the pking--not so much the difficulty), but it's not like the game makers owe me anything.

Really? Didn't stop me...

This is very upsetting to me--more as a point of principle than in fact--but I appreciate that it doesn't bother younger generations at all. I just had a small argument with my 11 year old about how not-a-big-deal-who-cares this is, and it basically ended with us agreeing to disagree since it'll be his problem and his kids' problem.

And the problem is normalizing the notion that an OS doesn't need to include a non-subscription word processor. The entire point of this move is to shift the OS Overton Window in favor of consumers accepting and expecting that features like word processors, spreadsheets, etc., should be installed separately and paid for on a subscription basis despite previous iterations of the same software being feature complete on install and purchased at a set, non-recurring fee.

WordPad hasn't been anybody's first choice for a word processor in years, but it was included with Windows and did the bare minimum for unsophisticated users. Now we're entering an era in which those users will as a matter of course buy off-the-shelf computers that come pre-installed without WordPad, but rather with a trial of Office Fuck-You-Pay-Me Edition. Those users may well discover that after their first six months with their new computer (that has made Microsoft more money selling their data than they paid for it), they suddenly get a pop-up informing them that their trial is up and MS wants $99.99 to release the documents they're holding hostage.

It's a step backwards for consumers in general, so even for the sophisticated of us who are least likely to be personally affected by this change, there's definitely cause for alarm.

This is the best parody I could come up with:

Vivek Ramaswamy is suspending his campaign for the Republican presidential nomination and has informed his team to go fuck themselves because he got his, an official tells CNN. In the early hours of Tuesday morning, the former candidate was spotted in the parking lot of the News Corp. Building offering free handies for any executive who would give him an interview for a cushy political consulting gig.

This story is breaking, but who really gives a shit if it's updated? Ramaswamy was an also-ran when he started, and now he's a has-been. Other possible hyphenated verb compounds include Trump-slurper and woman-hater.

The original article contains 28 words, this summary contains more (and is entirely useless). Saved an arbitrarily large negative percent. I’m not a bot and I’m not open source! I'm just an asshole who hates what these Republican pricks are doing to democracy, and this comment is a parody. Salt grains advised.

The Democrats need to immediately trumpet this thing from the rooftops. The GOP wants to take away Social Security and Medicare. 170 of them put their names on this budget, if NBC is to be believed.

The Republicans want you to never be able to retire, and they want you to never have the healthcare that your parents and grandparents had or that they themselves enjoy. They want you to be poor and stay poor, and they want the same for your children.

My money says this guy can't even close his closet door anymore for all the skeletons.

I know we're all cynics here, but good for him. Even if this is entirely a publicity stunt, the guy is still taking a huge risk that someone might offer to take him up on it. That's a lot of nerve, and that's a lot of faith, either in God or in the way Hamas values hostages.

Either way, to repeat the notion elsewhere in the thread: any of us offering? Maybe it's a low risk--but it ain't zero. It's easy to dismiss these kinds of gestures from the same armchairs from which we solve geopolitics and warfare, but a public figure going on record for selflessness is something to be celebrated, even if the only noble trait is willingness to roll the dice on human nature in the hope of sharing an altruistic sentiment.

"Hurt me instead of her" is something we wish more people of faith would say everywhere.

Yeah no shit. They feel that way because it is that way. You don't need polls for this information. It's economics. "Perceived" or not, it is actually, literally harder for millenials and younger adults to achieve the same level of financial stability as their parents, full stop. That's not a matter of feeling or perception. That's the declining real value of money. Inflation, greedflation, economic contraction at key life milestones, wealth inequality, lower indicators for health, and on and on. Across every metric I can think of off the top of my head, millenials and the next generations perform worse than previous generations due to circumstances entirely beyond their control (and largely the result of the prior generations, including dead hand control and policies directly adversarial to young adults' accumulation of wealth). For many young adults, the best financial windfall they'll ever experience will be when their more affluent parents die, and no active measure they can take on their own behalfs will meaningfully change it.

The ruling class should be terrified of them.

Very optimistic of you.

Joking aside, apathy isn't the problem. That is, the issue isn't that people don't care. Ordinary people care a great deal. The problem is that the cost of the action that would be sufficient to change things is too high personally for those ordinary people to take.

People just don't want to be gunned down by riot police or go to prison for assassinating oil executives. The solution to this problem isn't paper straws and recycling (and it never has been). Further, abandoning cars isn't feasible for stroad-bound Americans. Abandoning beef is, but your family switching to chicken and fish won't even twitch the needle.

Point is, the kind of change that's needed is societal--the kind of revolutionary change that's paid for in streets full of blood. In the "Well if enough people just ..." argument, the enough people is hundreds of millions. We have to become a fossil fuel eschewing society. Whole industries have to collapse.

The companies responsible for climate change can be counted on one person's fingers and toes, and they're names any adult can guess in a few tries.

We're not storming their doors because we don't want to be recipients of the state violence these companies will muster to stop us.

Flooding cities might change our minds, but probably only for the people who actually live there. The sad truth is the rest of us will sooner consign Miami to the depths than orphan our children for their grandchildren's sakes.

Things will change when we starve, but probably not a moment sooner.

I don't have any medical debt at the moment, and I think there are probably some better long-term things we could spend our extremely valuable and limited political capital on, so naturally I strongly support this because I'm not a fucking inhuman monster.

I think the British royal family is a scourge on the earth, responsible for untold amounts of suffering. The UK, British Isles, British people, and world would be a better place without it. I truly hate everything the Windsors stand for, along with their ancestors going back hundreds of years.

But I hate cancer more.

I think it's possible to have complex feelings about this. Nobody deserves cancer. A lot of the kings of England deserve to have had their heads cut off, but none of them deserved cancer, and certainly not this lady who just lucked and schemed and Machiavellied herself into a life of incomparable privilege inside one of the most powerful dynasties still in existence--the same thing anyone would have done given the chance.

Fuck the royal family. But fuck cancer more. I hope she comes out of it alright, because her husband needs to break the British monarchy, and it would be nicer for him if he had his wife with him when he did.

[American here, if it wasn't obvious.]

Outstanding journalism. Say the numbers and say their names. Do not let the water barons hide.

The generational accumulation of massive wealth and its centralization among only a few families is a hallmark of inequality, and it's no different for a farming empire than for a tech or finance empire.

When there is no more water, drink Alex Abatti's blood instead.

This is good news. But you know, just to be on the safe side, let's all go vote for Joe anyway.

Common mistake: When you're ascribing a bad quality to them, "millenials" means everyone born after 1960. If you're ascribing a good quality to them, it only means people born between December 12, 1989, and December 14, 1989.

Crime. That's the answer. I don't suggest or recommend it, but people who genuinely can't survive or achieve any meaningful quality of life while participating in the social order will violate it instead. Some people shoplift; others engage in elaborate plots to rip off their landlords and creditors, but there's no squaring the circle. I'm not in the same boat, but I've been there, and it's only a stroke of good fortune that kept me from a very different road.

If it weren't for the fact that this shit has real consequences, I'd suggest Biden should invite Haley to debate the president just for spite.

Jail them, and jail their "volunteer campaign manager" for conspiracy.

I don't know California politics other than as it relates to national. What's Newsom's angle here? I ask because, at least at a glance, this seems like a loser for him. The best he can hope for is to demolish DeSantis. Let's assume he does--and it's certainly not a sure thing (the deck is stacked against him with the ref playing for the other team, after all)--but so what? DeSantis's fire is almost already out, and if it doesn't die on its own or thanks to Mr. Orange Indictment, the Mouse will finish him. Newsom's already a rising star; if he annihilates DeSantis he's basically punching down, and he's taking a huge risk by even volunteering for this, since if he fucks up he's done in national politics before he even started.

The best I can come up with is that this is a play by the party at large to try to revitalize Florida Man's campaign by getting some free press on him, either to force Trump to spend more to squash him or try to get a repeat of 1972 (i.e., Trump as Muskie). However, that's giving the Democratic party a lot of credit and making some pretty cynical assumptions about their future plans for Newsom.

We need more information. The fact that the details about the victim are currently lacking is a bit of a red flag here. There is a marked difference between "police observed a 17 year old approaching the middle school with an automatic weapon and several bandoliers of ammunition" and "an 11 year old tried to sneak a handgun into the building in his backpack." Neither of those children need to be let anywhere near the school, but one of those situations you might be able to deescalate--maybe both. More pertinent to the subject at hand, if the case were the former, I would expect the police to be extremely forthcoming about it. The fact that those kinds of details are, to my understanding, yet to be revealed leads me to suspect that the cops want some time to get their story straight first.

It's always a good thing when a school shooting doesn't happen, but that doesn't change the sad reality that police in the United States are not to be trusted. This is still a story about a child killed by police, and that deserves scrutiny. Hopefully the action was well justified, but I think anyone would be forgiven for exercising skepticism given the dearth of details about what happened.

I think Joe Biden is maybe the best president of my lifetime, and I'm going to vote for him with my head held high even though I live in a red state where it doesn't matter at all. I wish things were simpler in the Levant, but I appreciate that Joe Biden is between a rock and a hard place with Israel. It's not like he can just take Bibi out. He's not Boeing. That said, even if I laid the entire genocide at Biden's feet (which, while he's not blameless, is absolutely not appropriate), he would still be head and shoulders an improvement over Donald Trump.

For that matter, I'd absolutely let my 12 year old run this country before I'd let Trump have a second term. My kid is brilliant, and more importantly, unlike Trump he listens to advice, can take no for an answer, and gives a shit about having a functional democracy four years from now.

A second Trump term is an existential threat to the nation. Hold your nose, hold your neighbor's nose if you have to, but every able-bodied patriot owes it to their descendants and their patriotic ancestors to prevent a second Trump term.

Article is spot on: It doesn't matter. Let him run his mouth. This is one of the benefits of a bench trial as distinguished from a trial to a jury. The judge can be trusted to make (legally) correct inferences from testimony in a way that a jury could not, so the risk of letting a blowhard ramble is minimal by comparison, whereas the risk of shutting said blowhard down is a finding of error by an appeals court. The only people he's talking to are the minuscule cross-section of the public that is both paying attention and could be swayed by anything Jr says--i.e., no one.

What on earth are you talking about? Joe Biden tried to give 20k to each of them who went to college. And he would have if the--let me check my notes here: oh, right--Nazis in the other party hadn't sued to prevent him from giving away money.

I appreciate that Biden might not be some folks' first choice, but if you think young people believe another four years of Grampa Joe is just barely more tolerable than the deliberate annihilation of the Republic by fascist traitors, you might need to meet one.

Hear, hear! This is fantastic. The people who can change the state of Israel are the Israeli people. I hope their voices are heard.

She sure can't. Sounds like all OpenAI has to do is produce the voice actor they used.

So where is she? ...

Right.

Probably not, but it sure beats $0.

Very happy to see this here. This piece should be mandatory reading in every Health class in America. Attribution bias is absolutely at the core of the debate.

The nepo babies wouldn't serve--same as always. And the political unpopularity of conscription has never changed. The last war draft is still in living memory, and US current military activity hasn't been an improvement in terms of public appetite.

The US introduces conscription again, and there'll be riots--and I don't mean "some kids camped at college and the jackboots locked them up" protests; it'll be government-building burning, widespread-looting riots.

If you want to do conscription, the kids have to trust the government not to kill them for oil.

As a young teenager: Do not start working until you have to. Once you start, you'll never stop.

Thanks to this post I now identify as a lost bat. I consider it a marked improvement.

I really wish we could dispense the myth of "good lawyers" in this context. That's not to say that there aren't such things as good and bad lawyers--there are--but "wealthy clients get away with stuff because they can afford better lawyers" doesn't really tell the story. Even if you have okay lawyers who fuck up a lot, if you have all the money in the world (or they think you do), you can get them to just keep working to try to fix it and throw new shit at the wall until something sticks. Normal people eventually run out of money.

The "every right available to the defense" list is an exhaustible list. If your client is Donald Trump and your goal is to stall, well, many or even most defense lawyers are going to know everything that goes on that list. It doesn't matter whether they charge $100 or $1000 an hour, and it doesn't matter whether they're fresh out of law school or have been practicing 30 years. A public defender can stall a case if he wants to.

Donald Trump and other rich litigants aren't buying "better lawyers". Those lawyers don't know more or have unique, novel trial strategies that work magic on the courts. And you can watch a trial to see that: There isn't a huge qualitative difference between the case that OJ's very expensive defense counsel put on and the case that Marcia Clark (a public servant) put on. Why? Because both sides spent a fortune. They didn't get better lawyers. They just got more of their lawyers' time. Simpson spent maybe $6 million on his lawyers, and the taxpayers of California spent $9 million on theirs. Johnnie Cochran was an extremely effective trial lawyer, but I don't think anyone would say any of Trump's lawyers is a once-in-a-generation talent.

The only reason you don't want a public defender is that the public defender is overworked. He has hundreds or thousands of clients and simply can't devote time to you. The public defenders in my jurisdiction are absolutely the smartest, best experienced criminal lawyers in town. Why? Because they've worked hundreds of criminal trials! But those guys don't have a thousand hours to look up case law in order to exhaust the list of rights for a defendant who needs to put off getting convicted until after November. Even Alina Habba can figure out the whole list if you throw an arbitrarily large pile of cash at her and let her put a room full of junior associates on it for a month.

It's not better lawyers. It's just more lawyer time.

And bribes. It's also bribes.

I say all this because I think a lot of people think that more expensive lawyer = better lawyer, and that's just not true. For many, many cases, hiring a cheaper lawyer can get you much further if it means your money buys more of your lawyer's time. That's the difference between being able to keep your lawyer if you have to appeal and not being able to appeal at all. It's the difference between going to trial and taking a less favorable settlement, and it's the difference between being able to pay for more hearings (say, for example, if you need to jam up the proceedings with frivolous motions) and going straight to the merits.

I don't generally do criminal work, but many, many more of the sad or frustrating "this is the end of the line" talks I've had with clients have had to do with the clients' financial situations than with the actual merits of their cases. At some point it's often just not cost effective for most people to pursue further litigation, and it doesn't matter who the lawyer is. If you're a member of the 1%, however--well, then you never have to worry about that. Just keep litigating forever, and it doesn't matter whether your lawyer is Clarence Darrow or Rudy fucking Giuliani.

Make no mistake: Catholics, Lutherans, Anglicans, Christians Universalists, Christians who happen to vote Democrat, and other Christian or near-Christian faiths will not be spared. This is certainly a religious movement, but it does not have Jesus of Nazareth at its head.

This movement has more in common with the Westboro hate/terrorism group than with orthodox Christianity, and Christians who do not espouse the right political hatred will absolutely be labeled Satanists too.

He is absolutely not certain to lose. If he runs on the GOP ticket, we have every reason to believe that it will be close, and whether it is or not, the GOP will lie, cheat, and resort to violence in order to win, disrupt the process, or, barring either, overthrow the government. The Biden slam dunk narrative is a GOP talking point designed to get needed Blue voters to stay home. The Republic is absolutely at stake, and that means everyone needs to take it seriously.

It's a bad idea. The reason it's a bad idea is the same reason that the death penalty is a bad idea: the US penal system frequently gets it wrong.

Yup. Appeal it, drag it out, mire it up. If it's good for the goose, it's good for the gander.