Is that Hanford, CA? lol, I remember the drinking water problem there.

All they have to do is, instead of calling it a “law”, call it “militia regulation” instead. “Militia” is the entire arms bearing populace; if you own a gun, you are, by definition, part of the Militia. And the 2nd amendment doesn’t merely say “everyone has a gun”; it does so in context of maintaining a “well regulated militia”. All the right to “keep and bear arms” does is prevent them from requiring we store our arms in a central armory (which was one of the controversies over the matter in England when the right was in development).

I would say we also have a right to own a car. That doesn’t prevent them from requiring we maintain the capacity to bear responsibility if we should accidentally exercise that right improperly.

Very midwest. Sounds like my grandmother’s jello with celery in it.

Donald Trump and his followers look more like Doctor Who villains by the day. I half expect them to unveil a new military unit that is vaguely salt shaker shaped.

“I did not have sex with that woman.”

“Well, technically, college kids don’t consider a blowjob to count as ‘sex’.”

Actual libertarians should take note: their right-wing allies were never pro-freedom, just antigovernment. And their opposition to government was never based on the principle of a less authoritarian society, but rather due to the government’s role in restraining their own power and authority. Now that they see a path to their traditional role as society’s power brokers, they have abandoned their so-called “libertarianism”.

I was a Libertarian, with a capital ‘L’. I was secretary in my local party. I held signs, knocked on doors, circulated petitions, and was otherwise politically active. I was never particularly comfortable with the low-key racism, patriarchism, corporatism, landlordism, and feudal and monarchial apologism, and otherwise nongovernmental forma of authoritarianism, that always seemed to be present in the movement, in one form or another. But for a long time I figured they were an anomaly in an otherwise decent movement.

But I eventually realized that they were not the anomaly that didn’t belong; I was.

It would make for an interesting lawsuit if this agreement were active and someone who was disqualified from certain state ballots nevertheless won the popular vote. I doubt that’ll be Trump (he didn’t even win the popular vote before he tried to steal an election). But it would be interesting.

If it were my place to rule on the matter, my take would be that because the agreement was between state governments, only states who are part of the agreement have standing to pursue the matter in court. In other words, the campaign couldn’t sue over the matter, only another state government that was also part of the agreement.

In case you didn’t already know, I’m pretty sure the agreement isn’t active yet. It doesn’t activate until there are enough states with enough electoral votes to decide the outcome. To the best of my knowledge, that hasn’t happened yet.

There isn’t any onioning here. It’s just a heavily editorialized headline.

I don’t think you know what “eating the onion” means.

Is the ban on genetic modification a Federation thing, or is it just a Starfleet thing? They may not be the same thing.

No, show her your Bionicle collection.

If people really want to save the bees, they need to replace lawns with fields of wildflowers.

Re: Username: I’m not sure I want to see your planet’s fjords.

I agree with everything he said. But I’ve also been saying things like that for thirty years. I remember when Morrowind came out complaining about companies using extra processing for shitty 3D graphics instead of sticking with high quality 2d that works perfectly fine and putting that extra processing power to work on better AI or something.

I think the problem is that better graphics is the one thing they can do that will please a mass audience. Sure, there are plenty of other things they could be doing, but I would bet that each of them has a niche appeal that will have fewer fans to spread the cost among. Thus producers of “AAA” titles pretty much by definition have to pursue that mass audience. The question is when they reach that point of diminishing returns and be becomes more profitable to produce lower cost niche titles for smaller audience. And we also have to factor in that part of that “profit” of pleasing that assumption our society has that anything with niche appeal is necessarily “lower” in status than mass appeal stuff.

I think we are approaching that point, if we haven’t already reached it. Indie stuff is becoming more and more popular, and more prevalent. It’s just hard to tell because indie stuff tends to target a smaller but more passionate audience. For example, while I am looking forward to trying Starfield out, I may be too busy playing yet more Stardew Valley to buy it right away, and end up grabbing it in a sale. (I haven’t even really checked if it’ll run on my current gaming laptop.)

Please not that the reason this is even possible is that neither Wisconsin, nor the United States as a whole, has an anti-SLAPP law. (Though it would be better if we just adopted the English Rule.)

It’s a bit of a read, but I would say the most important takeaway is to hammer the message that the Republicans, when they complain about “Critical Race Theory”, aren’t complaining about a real thing. Actual Critical Race Theory is a legal theory you won’t find outside academia. Republican “Critical Race Theory” is just another example of how Republicans don’t care about truth, even a little bit. They just lie, lie, and keep on lying in order to advance their evil interests.

The Democratic Party is split between people who think that somehow this would provoke Republicans into behaving even more egregiously than they already are, and Democrats who secretly favor the situation either because they are closet authoritarians, because they are looking forward to milking the fight for political benefits, or both.

Maybe Biden will stack the courts in the last year of his second term.

Not only does the article say far more than this, not only is this not the focus of the article, this isn’t even in the article. If you want to save people reading, you have to do the reading for them.

Also, “illegally”? Leave the false charges of illegitimacy to Donald Trump and his followers, please.

Actually, originally it was to protect small states (which were also less populous), like Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and so on, from the larger, more populous states, many in the South. The concern was that Virginia and New York could dominate the entire thing together if they wanted to.

I actually don’t disagree with this kind of federalism, if state borders actually correspond to demographics. If you can get whet you need from the state, you don’t need it from the feds. But our state borders are colonial borders, making little more sense than the borders found in places like Africa and the Middle East. Multinational states like California don’t function all that well at the state level.

You could even do something like snap your finger in the middle of your field of vision, and then use your hand as an interface.