This is where windfall taxes come back into basic utility. Also it becomes the basis for antitrust action on price collusion if all the sellers coordinate

I met my wife while I was shrooming That was 23 years ago We’re still together

Gruesome.

I’m not convinced the death penalty is worthwhile except to feed someone’s wrath.

What if, (and hear me out,) we did for corrections the sort of thing that countries with low recidivism do? Like, not use for-profit prisons with incentive to turn out re-offenders, and not use prisons that turn out hardened criminals that aren’t equipped to function in the world without resorting to crime, and actually take the ‘corrections’ or ‘rehabilitation’ parts of their nomenclature seriously?

If all we do with our prisons is punish and humiliate (and squeeze slave labor out of) convicts, we’re just creating future crime and all that’s left at that point is killing convicts at industrial pace unless you can figure out that crime is more driven by poverty than anything else, and the USA just doesn’t want to figure that out because it just doesn’t want to solve poverty or crime, it wants to make money creating and punishing both.

mmmm, smells like freedom

When churchmen confess their churches are organized crime syndicates

The torches, pitchforks, guillotine, tar, and feathers aren’t going to reach a billionaire. They’re going to be used on whoever is around.

The point, of course, is that the cost of being a billionaire is that you can’t go out in public- if the public is mad enough about it

The catch is that if they pay taxes and life gets better for other people we agree to not bring out the torches, pitchforks, and guillotines or tar, feathers, and such

When doing the right thing, or even doing right by your conscience, is a crime… you live in a place and time in which politicians haven’t been tarred or feathered and run out of town on a rail in too long

Yep this is the logical consequence of turning your state into un-free shitholes ruled by petty authoritarians

He’s mad that there’s a move afoot to sell seized Russian assets and use the proceeds to fund Ukraine’s defense. The signal is: if you buy these things (yachts, real estate, whatever) Russia will see to it as a matter of official policy that you will fall carelessly out of a high window somewhere. The quiet part said out loud, tho, is that Russia now claims that anything it ever held, whether as the USSR or imperial Russia, or the current Russian Federation, is theirs forever no takebacks.

Basically the read on this should be: Russia is having trouble laundering rubles into non-sanctioned currencies (those foreign assets are basically conduits to do that) and is now saying essentially that if they can’t keep our offshore loot they’ll just seize all of Eastern Europe and demand tribute from their vassal territories

…of course, if Russia could actually do any of that it already would have

They’re not the ones being affected by the boomers.

My dude, they’ve been riding us our whole lives

Rhetoric of this sort just promotes distrust in election systems, which of course prompts demagogues like Trump to promise voters they can fix it if they gain power. The fun thing here is that the right here needs you to believe things that aren’t true in order to justify them doing a coup, the stupid thing is that stupid people take this kind of talk seriously.

But seriously, American voting is relatively secure- it’s just that where lawmakers don’t want voters deciding the ‘wrong’ way they’ve gerrymandered them into districts to prevent them doing it, and they’ve done things to strip voters of their voting rights and to suppress voting and to make it inconvenient or difficult to vote. This has been a bipartisan thing in the past, but today the GOP are the chief offenders.

Also, Putin’s Russia is in the stage of democracy where elections are an exercise in flaunting the death of democracy itself, and nobody should ever take his talk about elections as being in good faith, ever

It could, depending on how the court is feeling about it that day, and on whether or not congress writes legislation to provide specifics to just what Article IV, sec4 means. (This seems to have been one of those clauses the framers left as a to-do for future legislators to fill out)

Article IV, section 4 : “The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government, and shall protect each of them against Invasion; and on Application of the Legislature, or of the Executive (when the Legislature cannot be convened) against domestic Violence.” [~https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/artIV-S4-1/ALDE_00013635]

The ‘guarantee clause’ was both a promise that the federal government would help suppress state-level insurrections and protect member states from foreign attack, and a requirement that in order to be a member state, you had to have a government in the form of a republic (i.e., no monarchy-states, no dictatorships). This can be read to mean that democracy of some sort is required, as republics implicitly derive their public authority from the people living in them.

“Can’t tell if obviously-criminal things are illegal”, and “still thinks he should be president” 🤡

It’s wild to me that when the phone companies need to bill for a phone call they know exactly who to bill for it, but when it’s something like this everyone is helpless because you can’t track these things

Religion is America’s original sin

It’s worse than that. Religion was co-opted into the maintenance of slavery, and it caused schisms in multiple sects, including the Baptists, Presbyterians, and Methodists

Generation after generation, Southern pastors adapted their theology to thrive under a terrorist state. Principled critics were exiled or murdered, leaving voices of dissent few and scattered. Southern Christianity evolved in strange directions under ever-increasing isolation. Preachers learned to tailor their message to protect themselves. If all you knew about Christianity came from a close reading of the New Testament, you’d expect that Christians would be hostile to wealth, emphatic in protection of justice, sympathetic to the point of personal pain toward the sick, persecuted and the migrant, and almost socialist in their economic practices. None of these consistent Christian themes served the interests of slave owners, so pastors could either abandon them, obscure them, or flee.

What developed in the South was a theology carefully tailored to meet the needs of a slave state. Biblical emphasis on social justice was rendered miraculously invisible. A book constructed around the central metaphor of slaves finding their freedom was reinterpreted. Messages which might have questioned the inherent superiority of the white race, constrained the authority of property owners, or inspired some interest in the poor or less fortunate could not be taught from a pulpit. Any Christian suggestion of social justice was carefully and safely relegated to “the sweet by and by” where all would be made right at no cost to white worshippers. In the forge of slavery and Jim Crow, a Christian message of courage, love, compassion, and service to others was burned away.

https://www.politicalorphans.com/the-article-removed-from-forbes-why-white-evangelicalism-is-so-cruel/

Give Boeing a choice- retain 25 hours of flight records, or pay a billion dollars for every incident where the data is requested but was destroyed to save disk space that costs about nothing to keep

Yeah when I visit boomer relatives they seem to think retail stores in big cities are war zones- and they vote, which kinda tells me there’s political support to put S.W.A.T. teams in every retail store

Where the first speech absolutists at?

They’re buying social media platforms and censoring speech they don’t like