A thread for Democrats Only
POSTED BY: THGRRI
UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 15:36
VIEWED: 755368
PAGE 647 of 725
Quote:Judge Alito said that if a rich person doesn't want to follow a law then they don't have to follow the law if their "religion" says they don't have to. Alito's justification? The Federal government can take over the responsibility that the rich person does not want. Alito moved the responsibility from the rich person to the Federal government just because he felt like it. Alito didn't point to any part of the Constitution or to laws or to culture or anything justifying what Alito was doing. Alito felt good and that was good enough for him.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Where is the stopping point to the ‘let the government pay’ alternative? Suppose an employer’s sincerely held religious belief is offended by health coverage of vaccines, or paying the minimum wage, or according women equal pay for substantially similar work? Other costly mandates are landlords’ obligations to keep premises safe, or employers’ duty to purchase expensive safety equipment. And what about religious people who object to paying taxes?
This is a paragraph meant to influence stupid people.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:Judge Alito said that if a rich person doesn't want to follow a law then they don't have to follow the law if their "religion" says they don't have to. Alito's justification? The Federal government can take over the responsibility that the rich person does not want. Alito moved the responsibility from the rich person to the Federal government just because he felt like it. Alito didn't point to any part of the Constitution or to laws or to culture or anything justifying what Alito was doing. Alito felt good and that was good enough for him.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Where is the stopping point to the ‘let the government pay’ alternative? Suppose an employer’s sincerely held religious belief is offended by health coverage of vaccines, or paying the minimum wage, or according women equal pay for substantially similar work? Other costly mandates are landlords’ obligations to keep premises safe, or employers’ duty to purchase expensive safety equipment. And what about religious people who object to paying taxes?
This is a paragraph meant to influence stupid people.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
There is no federal law doing what the article claims.
If you don't like it, stop having butt sex with random strangers you met on Grindr without wearing a condom or get another fucking job.
The paragraph I was referring to is full of false equivalencies and is designed to manipulate stupid people, such as yourself.
Mission accomplished, I see.
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Falsus in unum, falsus in omnibus
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The world is not a debating club
by Kevin Drum
Pamela Paul introduces us to Bo Seo, a two-time world debate champion. He thinks we have a problem:
Quote:You may think I have no standing to disagree with this. Au contraire! It so happens that both my parents were university debate champions back in the day, and I'm quite sure that both of them would disagree with Bo Seo in the strongest possible terms.
“We disagree badly: Our arguments are painful and useless.” We spend more time vilifying, undermining and nullifying those we disagree with than opening or changing their minds. If more people took their cues from the world of competitive debate, he argues in a recent book, it would be easier to get people to reconsider their views or at least consider those of others.
(What do you say about that, mom? Give me a call.)
Formal debate is all about introducing facts — as many as possible — and then refuting them. In real life, this is not called debate, it's called the most boring thing in the entire world. It persuades no one. I've been doing it for 20 years and, as far as I can tell, have persuaded virtually no one of anything.
Donald Trump, on the other hand, almost literally doesn't know any facts. Nor can he refute them in any rational way. But he is practically a cult leader.
Sadly, people are not persuaded by facts. They are persuaded by emotions. They are persuaded only when they're listening to someone who shares their worldview. They are persuaded by "arguments" that are beneficial to them — perhaps monetarily, perhaps in conferring status, perhaps in vilifying people they already didn't like. This is how you win in real life.
And don't make the mistake of thinking that you're the exception. Oh, you might be. The odds are a thousand to one against, but there are a few of you. The other 999, however, from PhDs down to ninth-grade dropouts, have no interest in dull facts and have no way of evaluating them anyway. They just want their biases confirmed and their status in the world elevated. Do that, and you too can win the presidency.
https://jabberwocking.com/the-world-is-not-a-debating-club/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Aaron Sorkin was a writer for The West Wing TV show.
Sorkin is not perfect, but his understanding of the Republican party has always been spot on:
"I promise you, [The Republican Party] is not the least bit interested in solving it. [They are] interested in two things and two things only: Making you afraid of it and telling you who's to blame for it. That, ladies and gentlemen, is how you win elections."
Aaron Sorkin's The American President (1995) - The Final Speech
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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The Next Trump may not be an Idiot — Ron DeSantis' Martha's Vineyard stunt is straight out of Stormfront and 'border militia' rhetoric
For months, Republican governors eager to get a piece of Donald Trump's ability to get attention through race-baiting have engaged in a bizarre stunt: Sending busloads of often deeply confused refugees to places perceived as "liberal enclaves."
Since its inception, a huge obsession on Stormfront has been this notion that "elites" — though they often just come right out and call them "Jews" — want to impose "diversity" on working and middle-class neighborhoods, while living in white-only enclaves themselves. Their slogan for this is "diversity for thee, but not for me." Just a casual search of the forum shows how much the users obsess about "the hypocrisy of rich liberals who promote 'diversity' but who also live in 99% white neighborhoods," as one user griped.
Or, in another typical Stormfront rant about "limousine liberals": "Hey scumbags! How about sending your kids to the 'inclusive' public schools or living in the 'diverse' neighborhoods you patronizing bastards created!?"
As one can imagine, the posters at Stormfront are ecstatic to see their ideas mainstreamed in Republican circles by Carlson, Abbott and DeSantis. As one poster said, "White people are waking up and the fact that news anchors at Fox News are pointing out liberal hypocrisy on things like rich liberals living in the Whitest neighborhoods possible is a good sign."
More at https://www.rawstory.com/ron-desantis-martha-s-vineyard-stunt-is-strai
ght-out-of-stormfront-and-border-militia-rhetoric/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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George Will’s perfect column: Why Mastriano’s candidacy presents a special danger to the nation.
“His motives are frightening because they are pure: He has the scary sincerity of the unhinged whose delusions armor them against evidence.”
Pennsylvania is on fire. Since 1915, the Red Ash colliery has been burning beneath the hills near Wilkes-Barre, and dozens of other fires smolder in abandoned coal mines. This year, however, the important heat is on Pennsylvania’s surface, in the contest to become the state’s next governor, the 2022 election that poses the most risk to the nation. Risk assessment involves weighing the probability of an event against the event’s potential destructiveness.
Suppose voters pick the Republican candidate, Doug Mastriano. And suppose that late in the evening of Nov. 5, 2024, Gov. Mastriano thinks Pennsylvanians picked the wrong person to receive the state’s presidential electoral votes. Today, candidate Mastriano promises that, as governor, he will have the executive power, and a mandate, to intervene, thus plunging the nation into chaos.
A member of the House of Representatives is 1/435th of one half of one of the federal government’s three branches. A senator is 1 percent of the other half. There are limits to how much actual, as opposed to aesthetic, damage a rogue legislator can do to the nation. A governor, however, can do important things on his own, especially if, as in Pennsylvania, he appoints the secretary of state, who administers elections.
A plucky disregard for public opinion has its charms, but Mastriano perhaps too wholeheartedly embraces John Quincy Adams’s 1825 injunction that politicians should not be “palsied by the will of our constituents.” In this nation, Mastriano’s indifference to the parameters of the possible is apparent regarding abortion, which he wants to outlaw, with no exceptions for rape, incest or the mother’s life, a policy pleasing to (per a Pew Research Center poll) 8 percent of Americans. He opposes same-sex marriage, which (per Gallup) 71 percent support.
Mastriano easily won (by 23 points) a nine-candidate Republican primary, receiving 43.8 percent of the vote. He is a human cafeteria dispensing ample portions of all the spicy fare that causes many Republicans to salivate, and gives most voters indigestion. He was at (but apparently not in) the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, having used campaign funds to rent buses to bring some supporters to the goings-on that President Donald Trump promised would be “wild.” Mastriano has raised money on a social media network frequented by antisemites, including the one who is accused of murdering 11 at a Pittsburgh synagogue in 2018.
But what makes Mastriano more than an especially exotic political exhibit is his vow to appoint a secretary of state “who’s delegated from me the power to make the corrections to elections, the voting logs and everything. And I can decertify every [voting] machine in the state.” In the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections, Pennsylvania was decided by 0.7 and 1.2 percentage points, respectively. In 2024, the state probably will again be closely contested, and its electoral votes could determine the national winner. So, imagine Mastriano, who has neither evidence nor doubts that Trump won the 2020 election, decreeing “corrections” to the election. His motives are frightening because they are pure: He has the scary sincerity of the unhinged whose delusions armor them against evidence.
His state senate Republican colleagues, weary of his hair-on-fire approach to advocating his monomania, removed him as chair of the pertinent committee. It would be more difficult to deal with him as governor while a nation on tenterhooks is a horrified spectator to his keeping his campaign promise to prevent a recurrence of the 2020 enormous Pennsylvania voting fraud that never happened.
Fortunately, Mastriano’s Democratic opponent is two-term Attorney General Josh Shapiro, 49, who when reelected in 2020 received about 3,000 more votes than Joe Biden drew in carrying th
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Ridin' with Biden?
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What Joe Biden Knows That No One Expected Him To
We need better technologies to enable better politics. But we need better politics to create better technologies. Maybe, just maybe, we’re on the verge of getting both.
On Monday, President Biden announced that Dr. Renee Wegrzyn, a biotech executive who previously worked at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, better known as Darpa, would be the first director of the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Health, ARPA-H. The alphabet soup here obscures the ambition. Darpa is the defense research agency that was critical in creating the internet, stealth technology, GPS navigation, drones and mRNA vaccines, to name but a few. The record is remarkable, and it’s built on the agency’s ability to do something unusual in Washington: Make big, risky bets.
Shortly after winning the presidency, Biden persuaded Congress to fund an analogue focused on medical technology: ARPA-H. Why do we need an ARPA-H when the National Institutes of Health already exists? Because the N.I.H., for all its rigor and marvels, is widely considered too cautious. ARPA-H will — in a move some lament — be housed at the Institutes, but its explicit mandate is to take the kind of gambles that Darpa takes, and the N.I.H. sometimes lets go. Wegrzyn, Biden promised, is “going to bring the legendary Darpa attitude and culture and boldness and risk-taking to ARPA-H to fill a critical need.”
Here, two facets of the Biden administration reveal themselves, one of which I don’t think gets enough credit, the other which I worry doesn’t receive enough critique. The first is that the Biden administration has put technological advance at the very center of its agenda. Every big bill Biden has passed has carried a theory of how better policy could lead to better technologies that could lead to a better world. The second is that the Biden administration’s technological optimism is paired with an institutional conservatism: Too many Washington agencies proved too cautious during the pandemic, and little has been done to make them more daring.
Let’s start with Biden’s ambition. Four major bills have passed during his presidency: The American Rescue Plan, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill, the CHIPS and Science Act and the Inflation Reduction Act. Every one of them, at a core level, is about creating or deploying new technologies to solve ongoing problems.
The American Rescue Plan deployed vaccines and widespread testing and genomic surveillance to stifle the pandemic; the infrastructure bill is thick with ideas to make broadband access universal and develop next-generation energy and transportation technologies; CHIPS is an effort to break our reliance on Taiwanese and South Korean semiconductor manufacturing and keep ahead of China in fields of the future like artificial intelligence and quantum computing; and the Inflation Reduction Act uses tax breaks and loan guarantees to supercharge the wind and solar industries, build up advanced battery manufacturing, develop cost-effective carbon capture systems, and give the auto and home-heating industries reasons to go entirely electric.
Much attention, in recent years, has revolved around how technology can coarsen politics and denude communities. Look no further than the disinformation enabled by social media or the factories closed and towns wrecked by the communication and shipping advances that supercharged globalization. But new technologies can also create new possibilities. The politics of climate change would be impossible if solar panel costs hadn’t fallen by 89 percent and onshore wind costs by 70 percent in 10 years. California’s decision to ban the sale of cars running on internal combustion engines after 2035 would be unthinkable without the rapid advances in battery technology. Vaccination can curb the threat of disease in ways that social distancing can’t, as vaccinations can be sustained, but lockdowns become economically, politically and educationally ruinous.
And we are far from either the political or technological frontier.
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Quote:
Originally posted by JAYNEZTOWN:
Ridin' with Biden?
Yup.
And there were more stories written about Kyle in one day than there will ever be about the
Democratic psychopath. Hell I'd have to look up his name right now if it wasn't on the picture
you posted. There's no chance that Second or Ted know what his name is without asking Alexa.
And Alexa might be programmed not to tell them.
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Falsus in unum, falsus in omnibus
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Quote:How many drunken murders have occurred in East Texas in the last month? A hundred, but the national news didn't cover any of the them because the weapon was a gun, not a car. This particular murder is interesting, not because drunks were arguing about politics at 2:35 AM but because a car as a murder weapon is kind of unusual. I remember one story where the wife caught her husband cheating at the Hilton Hotel on Clear Lake. Old story that has ended with murder a million times and does not become national news but this particular time the wife ran her husband over with her car. That made national news and the wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_David_Lynn_Harris
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Yup.
And there were more stories written about Kyle in one day than there will ever be about the
Democratic psychopath. Hell I'd have to look up his name right now if it wasn't on the picture
you posted. There's no chance that Second or Ted know what his name is without asking Alexa.
And Alexa might be programmed not to tell them.
Clara Harris, Who Killed Cheating Husband With Her Mercedes, Released From Prison
Originally sentenced to twenty years for first-degree murder, the former Houston dentist has been paroled. (If there was true justice in Texas, Clara should have gotten a medal for marital merit by killing that worthless husband.)
https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/clara-harris-released-from-
prison/
News Flash! Deaths that were NOT covered by the national news! It seems so unfair that you can be squished by a car and nobody on fireflyfans.net will be aware of your death nor will they blame the Democrats for a dead Republican:
https://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-texas/crime/article/hous
ton-pedestrian-killed-driver-flees-17466922.php
Four pedestrians were hit and killed by cars this weekend in Houston, bringing the total number of deaths in 2022 up to at least 74, according to the crash records database maintained by the Texas Department of Transportation.
Last year, a record 106 pedestrians were killed within the city, 72 of those in the first nine months of the year.
Since Jan. 1, 2021, the most pedestrian deaths have occurred along Interstate 45, FM 1093 — which is Westheimer Road in Houston — and Loop 610.
The Houston area ranked 36th among 101 U.S. metropolitan areas for highest pedestrian risk, in a “Dangerous by Design” 2022 report by a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit,
The 2022 report used data from 2016 to 2020.
The report said there are 2.23 pedestrian deaths per 100,000 people per year in the Houston, Woodlands and Sugar Land area. It marked 779 pedestrian deaths from 2016 to 2020.
Here are the four separate deaths from the weekend in Houston.
4600 Bellfort Ave.
A pedestrian died after being hit by up to two cars late Friday on Bellfort Avenue.
A car was traveling east on Bellfort Avenue and hit the pedestrian, according to the HPD Vehicular Crimes Division. The driver pulled over into a parking lot and paramedics took the pedestrian to the hospital, where he died.
The driver was not impaired and the investigation thus far indicated that the pedestrian may have been struck by an unknown vehicle first, according to the HPD Vehicular Crimes Division.
The driver who stayed at the scene was arrested for outstanding unrelated warrants.
9400 Main St.
A 53-year-old woman was killed at about 5:20 a.m. Saturday while crossing Westridge Street outside of a crosswalk.
The driver of a white Honda Civic struck the woman at 9400 Main Street and remained at the scene after the incident. The Houston Fire Department found the pedestrian dead on scene.
The driver was questioned, determined to be unimpaired and released. No charges have been filed and the investigation is ongoing.
9400 North Freeway
A 28-year-old man died in a hit-and-run after trying to cross a freeway exit ramp Saturday morning.
The pedestrian was struck at about 8:30 a.m. by a southbound vehicle on the West Mou
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