Until recently, the Wisconsin state legislature was heavily gerrymandered to give Republicans supermajorities despite it being a purple state with an almost perfect 50/50 split. They were never going to let Wisconsin join since the electoral college gives their party an advantage and gives their state extremely disproportionate influence.

It shouldn’t be. It should be simple and clear cut. Soldiers are required to disobey illegal orders.

The problem is, they are also required to follow lawful orders. And if there’s a dispute, the deck is stacked very heavily in favor of the guys giving the orders, particularly when they are coming from the top. That is an especially bleak prospect with Pete Kegsbreath in command, a man who overtly rejects the idea of rules in war and embraces brutality and lawlessness. I wouldn’t be surprised if they tried to make an example out of anyone who refuses an order no matter how blatantly illegal.

And it gets a lot harder when there is a lot of gray area and incomplete information. The guy pulling the trigger doesn’t necessarily know the full intelligence assessment of the target. If their orders say that they are hitting legitimate military targets, they may not have enough information to conclude that they are about to commit a war crime. And even with all the information, it still might be unclear because, legally speaking, the difference between a legitimate and illegitimate target can come down to specific details and interpretation. When you’re fighting for your life in court and have to prove that no one with half a brain and a shred of conscience would follow that particular order, you really don’t want the answer to ‘is it a war crime?’ to be “well it depends…”

So yes, they absolutely should refuse to commit war crimes. But it’s a lot easier to say that when you aren’t the one potentially throwing their life away by taking that stand.

Some of his supporters will accept anything with a smile as long as it’s their side doing it. Some are so drowned in right wing media bullshit that they might as well be living in a parallel universe. And some will just be so averse to criticizing Trump (particularly in a poll which is likely to have political remifications) that they’ll defend or ignore almost anything bad, even if they do hate it.

That’s what happens when the party repeatedly purges anyone that has any principles beyond self-interest and blind loyalty to a corrupt leader.

I dont believe this (but I’m open to being wrong). I think giving the same amount of money invested into EVs to public transit and ebikes instead, we’d be better off.

I’m all for investing in public transportation, and ebikes certainly have their place as well. But realistically, those will reduce the need for cars, not replace them entirely. We aren’t going to have trains and buses constantly running between every small town in the US. People will still need to haul big items or large amounts of stuff. And even where public transit is readily available, there is still going to be an advantage to being able to go where you want, when you want, in a vehicle you already own. Unless we ban private ownership of cars, people will still buy them because they offer much greater flexibility than public transportation.

I also don’t like that most incentives aren’t set up in a way to support poor people buying EVs. But that wasn’t going to be a realistic possibility until cheaper EVs hit the market and enough older EVs declined in value to the point that there could be truly cheap options out there. Unfortunately, the political will does not exist to simply mandate the switch to EVs. And even if we had done it that way, without developing the market for EVs the transition likely would have meant raising costs at the low end instead of gradually lowering costs at the high end.

Regardless of how we accomplish the transition from internal combustion to electric, it is better for everyone if the vehicles we use are electric. Even if we ignore the environmental side of things, EVs are much cheaper to operate and are much lower maintenance. If that first beat up old rust bucket that someone buys is an EV, that car will cost less to own and maintain, and will be less likely to die because of some hidden mechanical issue.

And of course, there’s also the massive amount that we as a society spend supporting ICE vehicles. There’s the obscene amount of money that goes into finding, extracting, refining, and distributing oil, and the billions in profits that the fossil fuel companies pocket on top of that. And then there’s the added cost to everything else because of the increased transportation costs. And the geopolitical costs. Every dollar saved by someone driving an EV is a dollar not being drained out of us by the fossil fuel industry.

Transitioning to EVs is better for everyone in the long term. Improved technology and greater marketshare among new EVs today means more and better used EV options in the future, with the effect increasing as the economics of scale make budget models more viable.

It’s not that we shouldn’t subsidize solar and EV, it’s that we should also use incentives and regulations to make these options work for renters. We should be requiring rental properties to add outlets to parking spaces. We should be pushing policies aimed at getting solar on apartment buildings for the benefit of the tenants.

Honestly, we should be working towards getting every building to have solar and battery and reducing our dependence on the grid.

The pretense for all this is that we can’t have Chinese cars in the US because they’re all connected devices which China could be monitoring or manipulating. Obviously the only thing they actually care about is avoiding competition.

Personally, I’d find it hilarious if the result of all this was that a couple of Chinese companies released some decent quality, budget friendly EVs with no connected features. It’s the kind of vehicle that a lot of people want but that the big American auto companies aren’t interested in making.

This is why my games always run on the silver standard. Each unit of currency is 100 times the value of the previous unit Instead of 10, and the listed prices that would have been gold are now in silver.

This makes it a lot less weird when dropping coin on watered down ale, stale bread, and a cot. And it also makes finding gold coins for the first time a lot more exciting. And when your characters start getting wealthy enough to actually carry gold and buy big ticket items with it, it actually feels like you’re getting rich.

And then there’s platinum. A single platinum coin becomes an event, the kind of thing that causes the greedy to become reckless and the experienced to become paranoid. It’s the perfect schmuck bait, a massive fortune in a single coin, all you have to do is pick it up. [Cue evil laugh]

In thinking about America today, please tell me whether you agree or disagree with the following statement:

“The very rich and powerful are above the law and when they do something wrong, they look out for each other, using their power and connections to get special treatment.”

• Agree: 84
• Disagree: 14
• Not sure: 2

This one in particular stands out to me. Most questions can’t seem to get below 30% support for the evil option, but even that group mostly recognizes that the game is rigged in favor of the rich and powerful.

Given the anatomy of a submarine, I’m pretty sure that whale is now Jewish.

The first panel severely undersells the massive progress that renewables have made over the last couple of decades. And unfortunately, that just plays into the myth the things like wind and solar are weak and impractical, which is one of the main narratives pushed by opponents of clean energy.

Nah, I’m dismissing complaints that have no basis. If you want to actually back up your complaint with something then go for it.

I didn’t realize that opinions about shows need to be submitted for peer review before they can be valid. Of course, that also means that your position is equally invalid until you can show that your opinion is based on something that I think is acceptable.

But if you’re not willing to defend your stance then it’s because it’s indefensible.

Or because I don’t have the time to write a dissertation on why two shows I watched several years ago weren’t very good. And because you aren’t coming across as terribly open minded on this subject.

So let me save us both time: I point out the general reasons I thought Discovery and Picard were poorly written. You dismiss the general positions until I can provide examples. I list examples of the things I thought were stupid, poorly thought out, or unsatisfying. You counter by pointing out similar things from individual episodes of any of the previous shows or movies. I explain why I think those things either weren’t bad in that context or why they are easier to overlook in shows that had a different story structure, tone, and so on, and also that the existence of bad episodes in previous shows doesn’t make the writing in future shows any better. You accuse me of having nostalgia goggles and being afraid of anything different. I point out that I am all for different, but I want that different thing to also be good. You fall back to claiming that my complaints are unfounded and we return right back to where we started.

Which means that it isn’t about people being unfair to the newer Treks because it doesn’t match an incredibly narrow view of what the series can be. Nor is it about the fans who give way too much credit to Gene and ignore his very glaring flaws.

You’re just objecting to people not liking the thing you like.

I have no loyalty to Gene or his vision. Both the movies and TNG started terrible under his control and only got better as he became less involved. DS9 directly challenged Gene’s rules and assumptions on numerous occasions and was a much stronger series because of it.

Hell, I’ll defend the first JJ Abrams movie because despite it being incredibly dumb and having only a surface level resemblance to Star Trek, it was still a lot of fun.

And on the flip side, I have a fairly low opinion of Voyager because while it’s Star Trek to the core, it also tends to be very poorly written and squanders most of its potential.

I went into Discovery and Picard with an open mind. I wanted to like them, but they just couldn’t meet me half way by being good. Eventually I decided to stop torturing myself with them because I have better things to do with the finite amount of time I have in this world.

Seems like a nearly impossible number to prove. I would assume they are only counting cases where the accusations can be shown to be false (which will always be a much smaller number than the ones where the truth is simply unknown) and cases where the accuser recants (which will also be a smaller number and will include some women who had been telling the truth). It seems no more valid than the opposite extreme of assuming all accusations are false unless you can prove them true.

But what’s the alternative? Forcing every case into true or false no matter how little information you have to go on? Looking only at cases with overwhelming evidence one way or the other and pretending the rest don’t exist?

And that’s without getting into questions about things like unreported cases, or cases where part of the story checks out and part of it doesn’t. Are we only looking at formal complaints or are we including accusations that are only spread socially?

The whole question is vague and surrounded by assumptions. It’s like asking if aliens are real. The likely answer is going to depend heavily on whether you interpret that to mean “does any form of life exist elsewhere in the universe” as opposed to “are little grey guys practicing proctology on us?”

According to Oklahoma state law, the special election for the remainder of the term takes place during the next statewide primary and general election. However, if the vacancy occurs after March 1st during an even numbered year, the special election gets delayed until the next election cycle after that year.

Source: https://law.justia.com/codes/oklahoma/title-26/section-26-12-101/

So they won’t have to have the special election this year. Though I doubt it makes that much of a difference. If they were going to lose that seat, they were going to lose the senate no matter what.

On the other hand, rich and powerful people from influential families are much more noticeable. People will see you not aging, and they are more likely to recognize you if you are caught feeding. It will stand out if you never eat, only show up at night, or don’t have a reflection. Plus, I suspect that people who grew up rich and spoiled will be far less likely to know how to avoid drawing attention compared to people who’ve lived at the mercy of those in power.

A filthy vagrant however can just wander from town to town for centuries without anyone noticing anything too out of the ordinary. Every time you arrive in a new location, it’s a fresh start. As long as you keep a low profile, no one’s going to be coordinating and comparing records looking for a wandering serial killer. Although traveling in a small group posing as a family or merchants would probably be safer since people are less likely to assume you’re all dangerous.

Actually, the more I think about it, the more a circus or carnival sounds like a great place for vampires. You have permanent mobile shelter complete with loyal followers. You have plausible deniability for anything being weird or off, including an easy explanation for only being seen at night (show time). If you sell alcohol and can feed on people without killing or turning them, you’re pretty much set.

And then those files will only be half released and full of redactions because it turns that Trump and the other billionaires have been fucking alien kids too.

Meanwhile, a grand jury in the U.S. determined there was insufficient evidence to charge anyone, including Harrison, in connection with Lucy’s death.

She’s dead from a gunshot wound to the chest. No one disputes that he was the only one in the room and had been holding the gun when it went off. Even if he didn’t intend to fire the gun, this still means he was pointing a loaded gun at her. That alone is reckless enough to be a crime. That he then pulled the trigger and killed her makes it manslaughter at the very least.

Grand juries are rigged heavily in favor of the prosecution. There are only two ways for this to make sense: either the prosecution completely botched the case (intentionally or through unbelievable incompetence), or more than 1/4 of the jury were unwilling to indict a Trump supporter for murdering a family member who opposes Trump.

The majority of eligible voters already don’t vote. Low voter turnout does not embarrass the rich and powerful, it just makes the system easier to control. Fewer voters means fewer people to answer to, fewer people to influence, and fewer people to shuffle around through gerrymandering.

For fuck sake, they are consistently trying to make it harder for people to vote. They want lower turnout. They know their most loyal supporters will still vote. They’d much rather have their base be the only ones bothering to show up to the polls. They don’t care about legitimacy, they care about winning.