GeorgiaDon

Nothing to worry about. It'll disappear as soon as summer comes. Just like that other disease (cough cough cough).

It's just symbolic pissing in the wind. It won't have any effect unless it also passes in the House, and Johnson won't ever let it come up for a vote. I wonder if the House budget has a line item for knee pads for Republican members. They can sure use them.

That's fair. Also more sea turtles than I could have imagined. I feel quite privileged, as I get to teach a course there every year.

You can do that in the Galapagos, and the weather's a lot better than Antarctica. Probably cheaper too, although not inexpensive. I'll be back there in a couple of months.

For example, the color line that is terminating every female or non-white person from senior levels of command in the US military, and replacing them with white males. MAGA begs the question: when you say "make America great again", when exactly do you want to return to? When was America "great"? What year do you have in mind? 1950? 1925? 1850? It certainly seems that for a large number of MAGA devotees that was a time when women and minorities knew their place, which was far from any position of leadership. When even being able to vote was a bridge too far. When medicine consisted of leeching and cod liver oil, not vaccines or any science-based elitist crap. Maybe back when real leaders like Andrew Jackson (who Trump so admires) were willing to force the Cherokee off their land, to die on the Trail of Tears on their way to some God-forsaken patch of semi-desert in Oklahoma. Except of course when that land turned out to have a lot of oil, that had to get taken from them too. When, exactly, was America "great" in the eyes of MAGA? What is the destination? Because as you go back, and you don't have to go back far, it might look better for white males but it sucked for everyone else. That's what all this anti-DEI bullshit is about, a desire to return to the past when all those "other people" knew their proper place.

I'll be damned if I kneel before your color line.

Measles also has an even more important secondary effect. It's long been known that people who get measles have a highly significantly increased risk of dying from other infectious diseases for up to 5 years after the measles episode. A couple of years ago it was discovered that the measles virus kills or inhibits B-cells, the cells that produce antibodies, including memory B-cells, which are responsible for much of the immune memory you develop after vaccination or after exposure to infectious agents. The immune response is suppresses to a degree similar to HIV for about a year, and it takes up to 5 years to recover normal immune function. It is estimated that before widespread vaccination, measles was involved, directly or indirectly, in as much as 50% of childhood deaths from whooping cough, rubella, and other serious infections.

What's up next?? Ontario raises surcharge on electricity. Trump raises tariffs, and Ontario cuts off electricity. Trump declares national emergency and martial law, orders invasion of Canada to take control of electricity (hydro and nuclear) and just for good measure the Alberta tar sands in order to protect American national security. Also under guise of martial law, Trump suspends habeus corpus, freedom of the press, and all elections until further notice (in other words, never). Additionally, he declares the USA to be Christian-only, just for good measure. What do you all think? Insane conspiracy theory, or entirely possible?

Musk and Trump are "trimming waste and inefficiency in the government" in the same way that Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease only ablates the parts of the brain you don't really need. I suspect the motivation really is to render most of the government (the parts that actually deliver services to the people) unable to function, in order to then abolish them altogether. It's not a coincidence that the people driving this destruction are either oligarchs who stand to profit off the wreckage, or Christian Nationalists (such as Russel Vought and Pete Hegseth) who see evangelical Christian churches taking over once secular government is out of the way.

Who gets to judge those things, though? Currently it is a crew of inexperienced 19-23 year old coders who might be able to write script but clearly have not a clue about anything else. Cuts are being made on the basis of what Elon Musk thinks is useful to himself. He is of course well known for his lack of ability to care about anyone except himself and his 10,000 offspring (or so I infer from his statements and behavior), so condemning a few million people to die of malaria, HIV, or starvation is a small price to pay if he gets his tax cuts and trip to be the king of Mars. When Congress creates programs and allocates money, the Executive Branch has no constitutional authority to kill or defund those programs. The Executive can lobby Congress to get rid of such programs, but to do so they would have to convince Congress to take responsibility. Unfortunately the current cult formerly known as the Republican Party is all too happy to let Musk, who doesn't have to worry about re-election, take the heat for killing programs and ruining many lives, at least until he goes after Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid (which will begin any day now) and 2/3 of the people who vote R suddenly find themselves in line at the soup kitchen. I fear, though, that virtually every Republican congresscritter will discover that they have no idea where to look for their cojones after Trump and Musk cut them off and fed them to a drove of pigs.

Business is about making a profit for the owners or shareholders. Government is (or should be) about providing services that are not inherently profitable, such as protecting peoples rights and safety, regulating business to limit their tendency to maximize profit by screwing over people, supporting basic research that isn't profitable in the near term but eventually may lead to advances that can be picked up on by industry to develop products such as new drugs, and so on. It's infuriating (to say the least) to see the US government being taken over by grifters who clearly seek to personally profit, either by direct means or indirectly by eliminating the ability of government to prevent them from running roughshod over everybody else. "it's just the way it is" is just a slightly different way of saying "fuck anybody who I don't like".

And somehow that made him the best choice for president?

Hard to believe I’ve been coming here to Speaker’s Corner for 20 years for my daily dose of enlightenment and aggravation. It’s really been the best place to hear a diversity of opinions from real people, a diversity I can’t encounter at work or the drop zone where it would be inappropriate to talk about so many of the topics we can kick around here. I’ve learned something from all of you, and I’ll really miss getting perspective from you even if sometimes it makes me gnash my teeth. So I’d like to wish all of you fair winds and following seas. Don

I’m sure it’s entirely a coincidence that they chose a young white woman as their fake victim.

I’m sure it’s entirely a coincidence that they chose a young white woman as their fake victim.

I believe he already dismissed those motor vehicle laws as stupid nanny state laws (post #10).

The 15-year-old staged the scene, then called 911 and claimed his 13-year-old brother was the killer and that he survived by hiding in a bathroom. He thought everyone was dead, but his 11-year-old sister was wounded and survived by playing dead, then escaped through a window. If she had not survived, it's conceivable the killer might have gotten away with it. I have a vague recollection that years ago someone who used to post in SC murdered her parents and tried to frame her brother for the crime. Does anyone else recall that story, or is it just some fever dream of mine?

A long time ago I read about a guy in England during WWII who was branded a coward and ostracized by the townspeople where he lived because he wasn't obviously in the military (didn't wear a uniform/wasn't deployed). It turned out he was a scientist involved in developing radar. Hard to argue that developing radar wasn't a useful contribution to the war effort. Also hard to work on developing radar (or any new technology) while at the same time fighting on the front lines. Perhaps you can explain to the rest of us why nothing any of us could possibly be doing, no matter how essential, is as important as military service?

I think it's part of his pathology, that he has no concept of a sense of humor, so he often seems to substitute cruelty.

Regarding a more mundane application of “AI”, I help to moderate a forum that is largely devoted to fossil identification. Lately we are getting lots of posts from people who are confused by identifications given by a google ap. Most of the ID suggestions are so far off as to be comical. One poster was concerned that google misidentified a common fossil as a toxic mineral, and was insistent that they needed to go to the hospital immediately. I’m sure it’s a challenge to get an algorithm to parse out the meaningful data from a poorly photographed image, make appropriate comparisons to hundreds of thousands (or millions) of possibilities, and make a plausible suggestion as to an identification. However we have many humans on the forum who are excellent at doing just that.

Actually this is a good example of perhaps the biggest threat of a Trump presidency. He may be blind, or at least unable to see beyond his own grievances. However he is surrounded by truly malignant people who will easily manipulate him, putting themselves in positions of power to do enormous harm to the country, and to the world. They were not prepared last time, as they did not expect to win. Project 2025 is enough to show they won't make that mistake again, and it's likely even worse is being planned by people who are smart enough to keep things under wraps until it's too late to stop them.

It seems to me many conservatives are hung up on conformity. We all should be straight, gun-toting, country music loving, American-speaking evangelical Christian baby-making machines. Maybe we don't all have to be white, but it's expected that we should all act white (no "ghetto music", no funny hair styles etc). Maybe it's a control thing, any life choices or actions that are different from theirs is somehow threatening, and must be eradicated. Personally I would find a society that has total uniformity to be painfully boring.

I have a nephew who suffered from gender dysphoria for many years, beginning well before their teens. Now in their 20s, they went through hormone treatment and recently underwent surgery to complete the transition to female, at least externally. Although they still have work to do psychologically, it's mostly to deal with damage done by years of dysphoria and the social stigma that comes with that. At least we no longer have to worry constantly about suicide. I find it interesting that before any hormone treatment was started it was determined that the male bits they were born with were never able to produce sperm, which suggests that they were never a fully functional male and the dysphoria may well have had a physiological basis. I know that I, personally, never made a choice as to my gender identity, it was "built in" by a combination of genetics and hormone environment during development. I assume the same is true of everyone else. It is absurd to assume that other people consciously choose their gender, and even more so to assume people choose an identity that often results in a lifetime of suffering.