My grandmother is using her retirement to educate the fuck outta her retirement community. She hosted a meeting today on "Limitatianism" and extreme wealth, she's working on forcing a historical site she helped fundraise for to use the funds to create an exhibition about the history of the site and its use of slaves, she helps run a TV show for the community that's teaching people not to be racist or sexist or any other ist/ic, she helps run a human library where you can borrow people and hear their life story, things like growing up gay in the 40s and 50s. Some people get annoyed with her. I love it.
wait what. this retirement community has it's own tv programming??she helps run a TV show for the community
Oh yeah it's wild. It's basically a small city. Place has to have over 1500 residents. Primarily independent living/apartments, but also has higher levels of care and 24/7 physicians. It's a massive campus. They've check on you every day to make sure you didn't die overnight. They've got multiple dining room options. Since it's in a location that gets both really hot and really cold, everything is connected too by heated/cooled bridges so you never have to go outside and risk slipping on ice or having heat stroke. Place is absolutely bonkers.
Life is moving fast. Family is good - my son will come home from Brazil in 6 days - the first time I've seen him in two years. Work is good - I like the people I work with and like what I'm doing. If I could get this startup profitable... it'd be that much better to not worry every quarter will be my last. Work is good - another startup I'm a part of, more part time - is super fun and engaging. A great group of creative people who are doing a cool thing. Creativity is ok - I've been a little stagnant in this area for a bit, but just kicked off an audio project with a friend that should hopefully scratch an itch. Homeownership is ok - It's great and all... but sometimes things like "stabilizing and leveling basement floor slabs" becomes a project you have to do - and it's $10k and then you roll in new paint and new carpet and a few other things and that adds $5k and the next thing you know you've wiped out some savings... but in the end... the house is in better shape for it. Life is good. On balance - I am privileged, I am blessed, I am fortunate. All of the downs don't overwhelm the ups. I love all of you.
I've been trying board games again. Between being pretty good at chess and annoyed into quitting Go, taking time to get serious about learning shogi seems like a nice goal. Oh boy, what fun two days had it been. And because I'm ahead on work and await responses to a metric bitchload of letters, this week is basically learning how to play and rewatching Star Trek TOS in the background. So, first of all, my brain is incapable of holding Kanji. I see that "王将" and "飛車" are different symbols, but despite just copying them... I can only tell you that the first one is King because that stylized ][ is the piece I tried to frantically locate amidst the gibberish. No idea what's the other one. A rook, perchance? This alone, knowingly irrationally, makes me want to get defensive and prove I'm not a total fucking idiot. OK, so use simpler symbols? Yeah, sure, but then I lag even harder translating the move cheatsheet symbols onto piece symbols. No, I don't know why it's so difficult for me. Yes, it's been annoying me to hell and back. "Then why won't you use the 'westernized' pieces?" For the same reason why I wouldn't expect to see even a mediocre chess essay use the author's favourite dinosaur-themed pieces: any literature that's worth a shit uses kanji. I'd rather bank on acquiring familiarity over the years than be forced to unlearn a crutch as an intermediate player. Oh, there are pieces with move pictograms and simplified Kanji! Happiness and jubilation! Thank Cthulhu - may his sleep be eternal - someone figured this game's lingo is plenty difficult for bakagaijins fumbling over every little thing, no need to complicate this shit for tradition's sake. Bitchin', let's do some puzzles! Did you know everyone begins with 1500 as a provisional rank in all categories? But wait. I'm approaching this all wrong: everyone sucks at the beginning. That's normal, no need for a bruised ego. Also, learning chess from my father was like surviving Pai Mei and Zhukov, so this should be fun with kid gloves on. Training, theory, and gaining experience by getting my proverbial ass whooped should be the key. Well then, looks like I'm at least on track with the "ass whoopin', received" quotas. But you know what? This is legitimately fun, unlike Go, where I'm often more confused by winning a game thought lost than frustrated at losing a game thought victorious. That silly game got me wondering how I can possibly rank 3 kyu (~1700/3rd cat. chess) despite my strategy being little more than "this place could use a stone 'cause, dunno, symmetry or something." Shogi? I already understand why I'm losing.
Hope the DNC gets themselves a new ticket. I’ve been the annoying chicken little with family and friends warning about what happened last night. Related, I feel like the internet, the median and social part of it, is mostly bad for people. We read and debate garbage all the time. It adapts to us, and attempts to make us incorrect. I’m deleting apps and spending less time on it.
Did you watch? I haven't been able to bring myself to watch a Trump debate since the infamous Clinton stalking debacle. And throwing Biden into the mix just doesn't increase my enthusiasm, believe it or not. The analysts this morning are pretty blah on Trump but down right killing Biden.
Yes. I watched. It was a bloodbath. Biden came out of the gate with a stumbling non-sequitur that ended with him saying he stopped medicare. It didn’t get much better. He’s clearly in mental decline. https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-presidential-debate-some-undecided-voters-see-disastrous-biden-night-2024-06-28/ Those can’t be non-partisan analysts.
It was like "...AND DEMOCRATS ABORT BABIES EVEN AFTER THEY'RE BORN!" "Thank you president Trump, now I'd like to ask president Biden about his position on something entirely unrelated" We learned 8 years ago what a fascist will do in a "neutral" setting like that. It is media complicity. Simple as. I'd rather vote for a small, empty, brown paper bag than Doanld Trump. Biden's age is a thing, obviously. What, do you think the DNC experienced the same thing recently, like with a dem Senator? Maybe from California? Or something? The thing about Weekend at Bernie's is that Sanders is doing great, ironically, but pretty much every other dem geriatric is an uh-oh. (edit: Schumer is ok sometimes) It'd be really nice if Biden stepped down, but he won't. Sucks. I think he might step down a year or two into his next term, but I don't think he'll make it back into office. gulp Also seems like the MAGA coup of SCOTUS is almost officially complete. Neato. With Chevron gone, so much for the entire backbone of environmental regulations, apparently. edit2: Anything that relies on deferring to expertise in legislative enforcement is now potentially gonna go through a federal judge? I guess they're not busy.? lol some guy on twitter who specialized in conservative Chevron doctrine in law school is pretty pissed off. Holy hell I cannot wait for the presidential immunity ruling on Monday. Guys: it is going. to. be. nutzo. The SCOTUS right-wing has already proven to themselves that they are beyond consequence.
Here's a paradox that I can't get my head around, and I hope that necroptosis can weigh in if he's lurking around somewhere. If it's illegal for a soldier to disobey a legal order, and also illegal for a soldier to obey an illegal order ("I was just obeying orders" is never a legal defense, e.g.), then what happens when the commander-in-chief, who now by definition can't given an illegal order, orders his subordinate to torture a child to get a confession out of the parent, say? I don't think Roberts thought this one through. It seems like, contrary to all available evidence, he just penciled in the maxim that the president always acts in good faith. Remarkable dense.
The mistake everyone is making is the assumption that the Roberts court is attempting to set precedent. They aren't. They're attempting to return the Republicans to power at any cost. What was noteworthy about Bush V. Gore was the amount of dancing the Rehnquist Court did around the precedent they were setting - they made great pains to write out any possible future outcomes because really, all they wanted was for Bush to win. Logic-based political parties suffer from the requirement that their moves make sense and are a part of historical continuity. Allegiance-based political parties suffer from the fact that their only cohesion comes from affinity and opportunism. The Democratic Party is and has been a logic-based political party. The Republican Party started transitioning to allegiance-based after Eisenhower but really nose-dived into pure fealty with Trump. The move for the Democrats is to do Democrat things in order to maintain their Democratic base; the move for Republicans is to amp up the passion for their base. The problem, of course, is that their base has peeled away from the middle. They end up in a doom spiral that has a very real chance of sucking us all down with them. I'm making my way through Second Hand Time. It's fucking rough. The through-lines, though, are crystal clear: 1) There is no Russia only Moscow 2) Every republic except Russia hated the USSR 3) Muscovites prefer to dominate others - even if they suffer - over actually knowing their place in the world pecking order I see a lot of Republicanism in it. The Republicans have cooked up this imaginary past when everything was great and the Blacks and Mexicans knew their place and if we just own the libs hard enough we can return to 1952. When a Trump administration with both wings of government fails to get any traction? It's because the libs aren't being owned hard enough. If they just believe harder they'll be able to return to a utopia that never existed, when they didn't have to deal with the fact that other people have feelings and that there is no "away" in "throw stuff away." "Trump is king" is the logical end result. There is not a speculative fiction writer out there whose basis of government was anything other than "we'll have a one-world government run dispassionately by people we agree with." The complications of actually running a country aren't interesting to that line of thinking. (1) Make Trump King (2) Whatever Trump wants is good for the country (3) If you don't like it learn to suck up better. The USSR was corrupt. The people who ran it were the ones who most benefited from the corruption. Then Gorbachev tried to root out the corruption and the USSR collapsed. The people who came out on top were the opportunists, the people who lost were the idealists, the people who were crushed was everyone else. The Roberts court is at "theocracies are simpler." Your soldier? Needs to carry out his illegal orders in hopes he does it well enough to get a pardon so he'd best please the King. That's simple strongman logic, which is exactly what the Republicans want.
I'm not as sure as you are about that for two reasons. Firstly, they could have decided the case narrowly to simply say that Trump is immune. They didn't. They said The President is immune for any official act, then went on to define "official" so broadly as to make almost anything official in some conceivable way. And secondly, this dumb fucking "unitary executive" hypothesis has been kicking around for decades. Nixon himself wasn't the one who first opined that when the president does it, it's not illegal. Largely, however, I agree with you that Roberts has gone out of his way to try to twist himself in knots to sound intellectual while basically holding the party line to the greatest extent possible. I think he'll go down as a great villain of 21 c. America. You expect that out of the other lackeys, but he tries to position himself as above the fray, and he's not fooling many people.The mistake everyone is making is the assumption that the Roberts court is attempting to set precedent.
To clarify, this is the scenario I think they envision: 1) president crimes 2) Congress whines about said crime 3) Complications ensue; case goes before the Supreme Court 4) Supreme Court decides whether the President is Republican When I say they "aren't setting precedent" I mean that they do not intend to create any case law that stands on its own. They absolutely want to cement their powers as the ultimate arbiters of all law and jurisprudence. Which means your ability to slow walk, obfuscate and delay will absolutely be dependent on the political makeup of congress and the courts. Populist regimes around the world are doing a banner job of demonstrating why that "appointed for life" bullshit associated with the courts is a terrible fucking idea. I suspect it will go away a piece at a time. Fundamentally, the more parliamentarian our courts become the less sense it makes for them to be political appointees. Fuckin' run for election like every other choad.
Agree with an amendment in favor of parliamentary systems. Or even re-writing much of the constitution, but I'm not gonna pretend like we're in any position to hold a constitutional convention in the current political climate, even if the will was there. Same for an amendment, I guess. The other thing I haven't seen discussed here yet is that Alito and Thomas want to retire, but won't step down unless the president is GOP/Trump. How much that motivates the decisions of Roberts and the rest of the Trump-appointed SCOTUS is a fair question, but it probably explains at least a bit.
Oooof, dark. Had to look that one up. Maybe I'll just stick with my "MAKE SCOTUS SCARED AGAIN" pink hat (w/ inverted Alito face on the back). It's no wonder all of the MAGA celebs and pols demonize cities so much, they're too scared to show their face in public inside a metroplex. I'm all for reinforcing that. Did you see the evening shots yesterday of the crowd barricades put up outside of SCOTUS, with zero people around? Unfortunate. Maybe folks saw what happened to the kids on university lawns.
Here's how it will go. JD Vance really gets it. Biden would do best to realize that they'll try to jail him regardless of what he does or doesn't do. And speaking of the latter, I'm looking very much forward to the SCOTUS ruling, in a veneer of intellectual prose, explaining why Biden's inaction on immigration law is not considered an official act. Like "inactions, in fact, are non-official". That'd be perfect, especially after Trump had his House puppets scuttle the immigration reform talks earlier this year. Honestly I can't think of anything a future Trump admin would try to prosecute Biden for that's based in fact, and since anti-immigration xenophobia is the #1 motivating animus of MAGA, that'll probably be what they go for.
Disregard what I just said in chat. You get it. I just want to be so, so wrong when I worry that our transition to post-democracy could all come in one fell swoop before January 20th via the judiciary. But I can assure everyone that the transition from election subversion and denialism into actual rigged elections will be more seamless than anyone imagined, should Trump get back in office. If he even decides to uphold a facade of "elections". They're attempting to return the Republicans to power at any cost.
Anyone unwilling to comply, people like Mark Esper, would be purged from the military, obviously, if they refuse to carry out orders. We already know Trump will pardon anyone willing to do his bidding. The idea that the chief justice of SCOTUS doesn't understand that he's rubber stamped a dictatorship is pretty funny, honestly. It's more likely that he knows exactly what he's doing, and he knew that Biden's position would be exactly what Biden announced yesterday in response to the ruling: "I will not abuse this power". Weak. Pack the court, bro. I'm generally considered "alarmist". I have found it to be a reliable way of thinking (nailed it in the third paragraph). Immunity for "official acts" is effectively blanket immunity. It's already emboldened Trump to call for repealing his NY state-level conviction, wherein we will be expected to accept that committing financial fraud to obscure hush money payments to help him win the election is an official act of the presidency. And you watch: Cannon will use this to try and throw out the classified docs case, regardless of the fact that all of the obstruction was committed after he left office. It's Trump's SCOTUS. More so than I thought a few months ago. They'll only continue to help him win the election. Kicking the immunity case back down to the lower courts to puzzle over what constitutes an "official" act and further delaying any prosecutions is step 1. Not exactly sure how far they'll go, but I'm sure that if Trump manages to appeal a 2024 election case up to SCOTUS late this year, they'll do anything they can to help. "It's not illegal when the president does it". But literally. Fuck SCOTUS. edit: SCOTUS throwing out the "obstruction of an official proceeding" charges against J6 criminals last week is another huge tell. They. are. telling. Trump: "anything goes, do your worst".
"God changed his mind", is the usual go-to, I think.