Given they were warned this would happen and did nothing to prevent it, and when it did happen they didn’t competently warn anyone, I hope they take seriously the task of gearing up for this happening again.
”Rudy Giuliani had nothing to do with this,” said Robert Costello, Giuliani’s attorney. “You can’t attach Rudy Giuliani to Sidney Powell’s crackpot idea.”
“Just landed back in DC with the Mayor huge things starting to come together!” an employee from the firm Sullivan Strickler, which was hired by Sidney Powell to examine voting systems in Coffee County, wrote in a group chat with other colleagues on January 1.
Former New York Mayor Giuliani was consistently referred to as “the Mayor,” in other texts sent by the same individual and others at the time.
“Most immediately, we were just granted access – by written invitation! – to Coffee County’s systems. Yay!” the text reads.
Props to the authors of the article, Zachary Cohen and Sara Murray, for the excellent comedic structuring.
Lol you gotta love how they have to write in a way that doesn’t blatantly say “Giuliani obviously lied through his teeth when denying the claims” and instead come up with fun and creative ways to be like “he denied it and here’s the written proof that he’s full of shit.”
Helmets do not protect against concussions. Even if this fluff piece says so.
You have a soft squishy brain floating in a hard case. Your helmet would need to be comically large to properly soften the hits to the head in football.
You’re not understanding the fundamental issue - the helmets being used are causing more concussions than necessary due to their weight. No helmet will completely protect against 100% of all concussions, but the number of concussions in football is greatly worsened by heavy helmets adding mass to the equation.
I read the article. I don’t see what your talking about.
I even searched the article for “helmet”, “mass”, “weight” but didn’t see a single hit. What article are you talking about that details how lighter helmets would reduce CTE or concussions?
Start from this bit and read on. There are breaks in the page that may have made you think you’d gotten to the end.
“A helmet’s weight is at the core of Simpson’s research. Simple physics says the head moves when the body is struck, and the heavier the head, the more it travels. The brain is the passenger.”
Do rugby players suffer concussions as frequently as American football players? If they don’t, could the helmets be making the problem worse - encouraging players to hit with their heads more, like a false sense of security? Sorry if this is a stupid question, I don’t know anything about American football and not much more about rugby!
EDIT: it seems like rugby players are more prone to concussions than NFL players, but I might not be completely off the mark about helmets offering a false sense of protection:
“Rugby players are believed to play more aggressively when using scrum caps; however, studies have shown these make no difference for protecting against head injuries.”
Yes, merely having the helmets does increase the risk of concussion. Partly because a player feels natural need to protect their head so they’re willing to take risks, and partly because a helmet converts what would have been a really bad injury into just a concussion.
Ultimately, if they are serious about reducing concussions and other injuries, they’ll ban leading with the head (already done, I think) and hits to the head (already done for “defenseless” players, not sure what that means). Hopefully next is eliminating the three-point stance to further reduce head hits. Ideally they’d also find a way to eliminate hard tackles to the ground, but I can’t think of a way to do that without banning tackles entirely.
You guys are 31 trillion in debt. You aren't rich, you're just borrow money you can't pay back and keep increasing your debt limit.
It's nice spending money that's not yours until the lenders get fed up about the lack of payments and you default and go into bankruptcy. I cannot wait until the US debt situation explodes, watching from half way around the world.
And yes I'm aware pretty much every nation is in debt, but not to the extent the US is. But the US is by far the most in the hole.
I don't know why Americans think they're hot shit. You're literally just an echo chamber the rest of the world laughs at.
The worst part is the US is in so much debt but it’s citizens see none of the benefits of that spent money.
I think your downvotes are from fucking liberals that think the US has regained international respect because their team is now in charge. MAGA or BlueMAGA are cut from the same cloth as Republicans and Democrats.
This statement is trying to go for neutrality in the same way that asking a woman clutching a black eye “What did you say to him?” is just gathering information.
That is: it’s not, we see through it, and we’re tired of it.
It’s so fucking strange too. It’s like they brought this new TV and they’ll be damned if they’re going to be told it doesn’t work as well as advertised. I would think we could all unite about this, and we could show the world that not even the president can evade justice. But instead they’re still selling him hard.
Republicans: {smacks Donald’s ass} “This baby here can fuck up at least 10 democracies.”
A big part of many Republicans’ mindsets seem to be “how dare you tell me I’m wrong! Just for that, I’m going to double down!” Like I’ve seen it in things as petty as Republicans being told they’re using a comma the wrong way and then continuing to use it that way out of spite.
Bit of an aside, but one the smartest things I've ever done was after my dad brought his new TV and had just hooked it up, I quickly used the parental controls to delete Fox News from the channel lineup while he was looking away. He never even noticed, and he's in a much better mental state now.
Ever hear of the documentary “The Brainwashing Of My Dad”
It details how a sweet man became a monster when he started watching Fox, and went back to normal when the family intervened and stopped him from watching it.
It’s a recurring thing, people become terrible when they watch Fox, they snap out of it when access to Fox is blocked.
People treat political parties like sports teams, taking credit for all their victories while distancing themselves personally from every loss. WE won vs THEY blew it. I my anecdotal experience it’s especially bad on the right. Most conservative voters I know proudly say they’re a Republican but liberal voters will only say they vote Democrat, not that they are one.
That oft repeated claim of parallelism between the US Democrats and the CPC might have been more true in the past. I think there are significant differences nowadays as Poilievre plays with populist rhetoric and policy ideas. Considering the voting base the CPC is attempting to court, I’m not sure those two political parties are really in the same boat.
The outcome of FPTP-voting is naturally a two party system, the ancient wealthy romans designed it so deliberately in order for them to easily manipulate regardless of election outcomes to maintain their wealth and power. Everywhere it is used politics degenerate into voters being reduced to pick between “business as usual” and “tax cuts for the rich.” Wealthy donors play both horses and don’t really care about the outcome except when some progressive candidate appears and they find themselves forced to run some interference behind the scenes to help even the odds back to the usual bread and circus’ that they prefer.
We watched Trump go on national TV before the election and asked Russia to help him win the election. A foreign hostile country was invited to interfere with our democracy.
And Russia complied. That day.. How anyone thinks Trump and his supporters aren't traitors is mine boggling.
And then a number is Republicans went to Moscow on the 4th of July a few years later. I've never seen such an obvious case of someone's handler making a statement.
After Crimea was invaded by Russia? Later when he was trying to convince everyone Russia was going to do exactly what they did last year? “setting the stage for war” is something you do before a war.
yes he will be first against the wall, mainly because he spoke out about them, the self purging doesn’t start until after the fascist takeover.
and yes an.6 was an attempt to depose the democratically elected government, and yes it had planning, why do you think they had the gallows put up so fast? why do you think the people who broke in were armed and had cable ties? you know, the ones literally caught on video
America needs a new conservative party so that the republicans who are still sane don’t feel like crazy town is their only option to avoid being disenfranchised.
Jezus America are you ok? So about half your country are traitors as far as the other half is concerned? I’m not condemning or anything but fighting amongst yourselves like this is not going to work either.
It’s not half, more like about 1/3, but it’s also a little more complicated than that. Basically it’s all the fault of the first past the post voting system. Because of that, the only winning strategy is a two party system, any party beyond the main two only functions as a spoiler for one of the two. As such, a lot of different policies that aren’t really connected in any way end up mashed sort of arbitrarily into one of those two parties. Republicans due to events in the Nixon presidency ended up latching onto evangelical Christians, policies that favor the rich at the expense of the poor and middle class (usually spun as fiscally responsible), and racists (lots of overlap between evangelical Christians and racists, so that’s almost redundant). Over the years the economic policies have gotten a fresh coat of paint by way of the debunked trickle down economics theory which was used as a rallying cry to oppose any regulations such as environmental and pollution controls, or policies that favored the public at the expense of corporations because the “free market” would solve all problems. Democrats then embraced essentially the opposite of all of those positions, so wound up with socially progressive policies almost by default as reactions to the policies being pushed by the racists. This is for instance how Democrats ended up being pro-choice, as the Republicans had taken an anti-abortion stance at the urging of the extreme elements of their Christian demographic.
Ironically we’ve come full circle now with Republicans ending up with many policies by default in reaction to policies being pushed by Democrats. The Republicans of today are mostly defined not by any particular policy or goal other than their historical ones and a broad opposition to all policies pushed by Democrats. They general don’t have a stance on a policy until they hear what the Democrats position will be at which point they take up whatever the opposite of that is. This is part of how Republicans ended up as the party of the gun nut. The Democrats in the late 80s and early 90s attempted to pass some gun regulations which angered the largest gun manufacturer lobbying group, the NRA, who then spent the decades since then painting the Democrats as wanting to repeal the second amendment and disarm the American public. This in turn has led the Republicans to fully embrace removing and opposing any regulations on guns.
As the generations that grew up in a segregation era US are dying off though the Republicans are finding themselves with increasingly diminished support for their racist policies. Compounding that is that decades of free market policies and consistent push back and removal of regulations has demonstrated that the “free market will sort it out” claims are complete bullshit and just leads to things getting worse, not better, at least to anyone who has been remotely paying attention. As a result we’ve recently seen the Republicans pivot to embrace anti-diversity policies such as opposition to pro-LGBTQ policies (once again driven at least initially by their religious extremists) as well as policies designed to white-wash past racism and push a revisionist American history that paints the American civil war as primarily being motivated by disagreements about the structure of the US government rather than about opposition to ending slavery.
Forty years ago the Republicans were an even mix of racists and conservative economic policies. These days they’re mostly just the racists and a small minority of true believers in trickle down economics. Since they no longer have the numbers to win elections legitimately they’ve increasingly embraced various anti-democratic policies that allow them to retain control. Until recently, relatively “normal” tricks like gerrymandering and voter suppression in conjunction with a generally lukewarm support for Democrats (who have had their own issues of late, mostly around running profoundly milquetoast candidates) have allowed the minority of Republicans to maintain control. Now that even that no longer appears to be enough to keep them in power they’re increasingly turning to outright illegal activities like voter fraud and as we saw on the 6th, insurrection. While not every person who votes Republican takes part in or even supports such illegal activities, it’s quickly approaching the point at which they will need to confront the fact that those tactics have become a core part of their parties policies, so continued support for the party is tacit approval of such tactics. Many of them no doubt will continue to support the Republican party under a ends justifies the means stance, but hopefully the misguided ones who legitimately believe in trickle down economics can be convinced that such tactics are a bridge too far.
If he wasn’t before he was elected, he certainly is now. He put personal profit ahead of absolutely everything while he was President. The grift is strong with this one.
She didn’t even accidentally vote twice, she was sentenced to 8 years for the crime of completing a provisional ballot while the state figured out if she was eligible to vote or not.
I mean, I don’t disagree with your sentiment but Ive some pretty big reservations. Everywhere in your essay you say America you can sub in NATO, Japan and the rest of the Five Eyes. We’re all implicit. It’s been a coalition of the willing. There’s guilt all around.
That said;
For some, Pax Americana has been a blessing. For most, actually. Billions out of poverty, the most peaceful time to have ever existed, still, today, even with anachronistic territorial war, and crimes of desperation increasing. As of now, 8/23, 86% of the world owns a smart phone. That’s 6.9 billion people.
Thats a long way. I never thought I’d see the day, honestly, where the whole world is online. I just might yet…!
But we’ve blazed quite the path, thru our atmosphere into space and just our atmosphere in general, and we’ll be dealing with that for generations to come.
And as unfortunate as it is, that’s how society has always been built. Recklessly. We strive for better as a species, I consider this a feature not a flaw, but then it makes a mess cuz we don’t know what we dont know, then some of us go big brain, figure it out, fix it or we adapt. It’s endemic. Cultural heros journey.
But yo, if America splits, there will never be peace on the North America continent ever again. America is OP because we span the distance and bridges the gap. We got a dozen deep water ports where other, major, players maybe have one. Other countries have riverS. We essentially got like, One. But it’s navigable, stretches DEEEEEEEP into almost the entire interior. And we’re resource independent.
The idiots who think we’d be better off breaking up deserve their genetics removed from the gene pool so the collective IQ isn’t drug further down by their idiocy. We’re like a giant Madagascar, who folds that hand?
At the same time, id mourn none if it fell. I think we need to federate regionally, and reduce the current fed government down to a combined armed forces and a round table or presidents, not a single one. Fucking Cascadia Unite (Canadas barely holding their shit together too, BC would totally be down).
Shit id get behind giving the cosplaytriots, err, I mean, fascists, err, I mean republi…no, fascists is more accurate. (Republicans know as much about Republicanism as they know about their bible, which is jack.fucking.shit) the south too, no need to secede! Name it Kekistan, forcibly send them all there, and let them build their wall. Fucking we should volunteer to pay for it for them, just to make sure it’s more DMZ and less Y’all Quida Convoy tail gating and shooting at sharpie hurricanes.
Wall off their Internet too, like the Mormons in heaven.
But in reality, the problems you speak of, and our inability to address them aren’t due to culture, it’s due to capitalism. Every capitalist country is teetering on the brink right now, because with nothing to keep it humble (like comparing itself to the Soviet Union) capitalism went from a more mixed economy to neoliberalism, which is the rich, generally under the legal catfish called a corporation, cannabalizing any and all value from the world.
Rage is justified. Both sides are in agreement that the upper crust needs to be cut off. Ain’t no war but the class war. #eattherich
I feel like you have a poor understanding of a lot that you talk about. So let’s just focus on the current politics and if America can heal.
This issue isn’t a east coast vs west coast thing. This is a rural vs urban issue. That’s reflected in voting in major cities vs rural areas of the same states. For that America isn’t the only place suffering from this issue. It’s why you can see fascism in general on the rise in a lot of countries. The same reason it has always worked, really. It makes life easier to blame someone/anyone else for issues. Which is the lifeblood of fascism.
It’s not that young people are leaving rural areas because they feel like there’s limited opportunity, but it’s the liberals corrupting them. It’s not that their industry is dying, but people in the cities are attacking them. It’s not that pay is poor and the work is hard so people will look for other jobs, it’s migrants/lazy workers/greedy people wanting more.
Fascism is able to latch onto these and say we’ll punish the X so that your issues go away, and once they’re gone life will be perfect. Oh X wasn’t the issue, well it’s really Y, and so on. All that’s ever needed is the correct person to stand up saying elect me and I’ll punish the X,Y,Z and it’ll make us better again, but always tends to ignore/help the real issue.
We need to increase opportunities in the rural areas, there will still be push back but it’ll help the pain of people leaving and industries dying. Need to raise working standards so immigrants aren’t abused, but also may attract other people. That way it can’t be so easy to blame them. And need to fix where wealth is leaving well nearly everyone. A poor town stays poor if most of the goods and services are imported and the people providing them don’t reinvest into the area.
All of that is still a simplification, but as I said these issues aren’t local to the US. It’s just consuming mostly US news it’s easy to miss other countries struggling with the same issues.
So if you acknowledge that it’s a rural versus urban issue and not a geographic East versus West issue then how does splitting the country up into two or three other countries help?
This might be because you are not clearly conveying what you mean. You brought up east vs west and north vs south but didn’t really say in what they don’t understand each other. You should consider taking the hostility down a notch.
The actual ‘rural’ population of the us represents 18% of the population. So the theory that ‘rural vs urban’ is the defining demographic of the political division in this country has a math problem.
If it wasn’t for the electoral collage and the house being locked at 435 seats… I think this would be a more compelling argument.
I live in Ohio, there were 647,284 votes for Joe Biden that were invalidated because there were 713,546 votes for Trump. There are an estimated 12 million people living in Ohio. That’s less than 2 million votes.
It’s not “rural” vs “urban”, it’s “rural voters” vs “urban voters” plus all the other stuff. If we went off popular vote, we never would’ve had a Trump presidency; Clinton won by almost 3 million votes.
The US is already 50 countries. The states have an incredible amount of power over their citizens. They’ve always been a confederation. States engage in trade wars with each other. California, for example, has used its massive economy to influence interstate trade and declare de facto federal laws on several occasions. We have expiration dates because of New Jersey. Some counties entire economy relies on sales to people from neighboring states where certain goods are banned. Texas, infamously, has its own electrical grid and throws a tantrum about seceding every few decades. Utah is one pair of magic underwear away from being a theocracy.
The states have factions and inter state pacts. The thing you’re missing is that constantly fighting with each other is what keeps them together. The US was never and will likely never be a homogeneous culture, and the people who founded it knew that, and encoded laws in such a way as to use that conflict as a source of opposing-force balance.
Everything you said was sophomoric garbage masquerading as informed thought. I gave it far more attention than it was worth, and I’ve given you far greater time than you deserve.
AI has been a part of stories since before the idea of computers. In the (really incredible in terms of worldbuilding) 1930 novel Last and First Men, Olaf Stapledon writes a section where humans build giant artificial brains which end up taking over and making humans their slaves.
So this is at least 93 years too late and there could be earlier examples.
Regardless of the method, carbon capture is not going to work fast enough to make meaningfully change. The only realistic solution to keep earth from going runaway warming and becoming perhaps even another Venus, is to radically increase earth’s albedo to a point where the energy balans goes from +2W/m² to -2W/m², using brightening agents like sea salt for instance. In the mean time more realistic methods to manage CO2 en especially also methane levels in the atmosphere can be devised for the longer term.
I’m a fan of Lagrange Point solar shades that double as solar power collectors. Decrease sunlight and shitloads of solar energy that can be microwave-beamed to dirtside collection arrays.
I’m also a fan of science fiction-like solutions but only in the “oh that would be so cool!” sense, not as a viable solution to the current problem of what could be a runaway greenhouse heating cycle that turns earth into “Venus the 2nd”. Keep dreaming, though because what seemed like science fiction just decades ago is becoming reality today and as a future method to regulate earths temperature it seems at least worth a look.
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