Well, yeah. “House” no longer means “Place where people live”. It’s now defined as “long-term investment/passive income generator”.

I mean, he could, but wouldn’t he need Congress to confirm his appointments? They’d just do what they did while Obama was in office and block any motion for a vote, especially since the Democratic party doesn’t hold a filibuster-proof, 60-member Senate majority. Although, Obama had that and still blew it, the price of believing one can still engage in good faith negotiations with bad faith actors, I’m afraid.

They’re already declaring their intentions to not negotiate with Harris in good faith, should she win the election, and to block all Presidential appointments. Hopefully she will go ahead and do it anyway. SCOTUS does get the final say in what does and does not constitute an “Official Act”, but they don’t have any enforcement mechanism. All they can do is send a strongly-worded letter, asking her to stop, but they can’t force her to stop.

Not surprising. The Israeli government also bans services like 23AndMe or Ancestry.com from operating in their borders unless a doctor seems it medically necessary. DNA is a store of information, just like a book.

Yeah. Every city in America will have a skid row. Ever seen the movie “District 9”? They kinda want that for America’s homeless and immigrants

And to get ahead of a new law they passed in California, they’re already putting it on the screen before check out that you’re buying a license to the game, not the game itself. Of course, I think just like Prop65, it will be too broad. Prop65 is the law that says that anything with even a trace amount of carcinogens has to have a warning that announces the presence of carcinogens.

Not even Empty G?

And he can send the US Marshals to bring them in. They can be handcuffed and dragged into the Chamber. I believe Kevin Spacey’s character in House of Cards did this. Wonder which ones will get into a shootout with Marshals telling them the President needs them to come in and do their job?

Biden should do it, anyway. Do it and declare it an official act, force a Constitutional crisis when SCOTUS tells him its not an official act. The Judicial Branch, by design, has no enforcement arm to make POTUS do anything. They cannot send a brute squad into the White House to apprehend him and Harris. They can say it’s not official, but they can’t actually make him stop. Now, Congress does have armed goons they can send in, but they would immediately be confronted by Secret Service agents with itchy trigger fingers.

Exactly. You get what you give. You give the bare minimum to society, and society will give it right back. You want more, give more. Go help your community. Take out your elderly neighbor’s recycling. Volunteer at your local shelters/soup kitchens. Attend some local events. Sit in on city council meetings. When I moved out of my small town a couple years ago, I learned that real life is a lot like online forums. You have to lurk before you can post. Learn the language, the local etiquette and taboos. Watch the people in your neighborhood, their interactions. Blend into the background, and observe. Talk little, hear and see much.

Eyeball every single purchase the Israeli government makes. If they start buying Zyklon B or any of its precursors, and building showers in these camps, then we know. I guess when they said “Never again” after WW2 they meant “Never again, to us.”

It’s funny. I have a blog post from Ken Arneson who talks about “The Right to be an Asshole” and here’s how he defines an asshole:

An asshole is a selfish person whose selfishness causes foreseeable indirect collateral damage to the people around them.

He goes on:

Assholes take risks that provide upside to themselves, but transfer the downsides of those risks to other people.

But the true test case for the limits of freedom is the asshole. Philosophically speaking, assholes walk the line between intentions and consequences. Assholes form the boundary between freedom and control.

Assholes don’t intend to do direct harm. They just don’t think about, and/or care about, and/or believe, and/or comprehend, that their actions can or will have negative consequences for other people beyond their direct intentions.

He goes on to recount the tale of COVID Patient 31 from Seoul, South Korea. Shortly after receiving her diagnosis, she decided to seek comfort at church. Hundreds of deaths and thousands of infections were traced back to her through contact tracing. So, now we come to intentions vs. consequences. Patient 31 wasn’t intending to make anyone sick or die, she was merely seeking comfort through faith. Any reasonable non-asshole could have told her and probably did tell her, that attending church while infected would cause others to be infected and possibly die. How should this asshole be judged? If we judge her by her intentions, then she’s as much a victim as anyone. But if we judge her by her consequences, then she’s a mass murderer.

So the question we have to ask as a free society is: What the fuck do we do about assholes?

Assholes have a very clever trick that allows them to keep being assholes.

If you try to stop them from being an asshole, they will declare you to be an asshole who, although perhaps intending to prevent some bad thing from happening, causes harm by denying some very fine people, who have no intention of harming anyone, their freedom. So who’s the real asshole here, anyway?

They are a real group. They’re part of a coalition with the White Women for Harris, who raised between $2-$8 million for Kamala Harris. Pantsuit Nation is rising up and New Balance Kingdom is going to match their work.

I’ve read her book “Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man” and I have to say, the insight it gave into how Donald Trump came to be was astounding for such a short book. It’s 250 pages, but well worth the read.

Hell, the Chicago PD had a blacksite modeled after CIA blacksites, called Homan Square. More than 7,000 people were detained there, and only 68 of them were ever allowed access to an attorney.

deleted by creator

Honestly if we could get space elevators figured out, the best place to put solar panels would be in the upper atmosphere. Tethered to the ground by massive columns that feed the energy they collect to massive capacitors on the ground?

I want everything SiegedSec found. I intend to copy it and store it for safekeeping.

There were also icemen at one point. Then we invented refrigerators. Nobody seems to miss having a giant block of ice delivered to their house to keep the food we buy at the stores cold. But one thing I think a lot of people miss is appliances that didn’t need to be thrown away.

Your point? The USA became the model for the western world in many respects after WW2, I would not be surprised if French billionaires make their money the same way American billionaires do.

People who make money by investing. In the USA, the top 1% earn their income through investments, usually the purchase and sale of stocks. These are not taxed the same as regular income because they made the argument that you can’t really tax unrealized gains on investments that are sold, and it takes a while for the gains to actually materialize. Also, they tend to store their money, their liquid assets, in countries with looser tax laws, called tax havens. Much of their net worths are tied up in investments. Businesses, homes, art, classic vehicles, precious metals futures, oil futures, boats, etc.

Assessing the value of all of that is a chore, and they also pay lobbyists to keep the IRS defanged so that they don’t have the resources needed to go after the 1%. And don’t get me started on how much more speculative the stock market has become. Investors buy stocks, not on the expected dividends they’ll receive as a share of the profits of the business, but on their ability to flip the stock and sell it at a higher price to another investor, who is only buying because they anticipate flipping the stock. It’s like if a whole neighborhood of single family homes gets bought up buy a few house flippers, who make renovations, then put the houses up for sale, and sell to new flippers, who are only buying so they can make further renovations, increasing the value of the property again to sell to yet another flipper, ad nauseam.