vortic

Where did you find the note? I can only find articles that dissect it without its context.

Any grave is a gender neutral bathroom if you want it to be.

People are giving you somewhat bad information. This may differ in other states, but they do need to have practiced law in Georgia for seven years prior to being allowed to run for election.

Its a dumb system but not completely unregulated.

Other states have various methods of selecting judges. In Colorado, the governor appoints them for their first term, then they are subjected to a retention vote every few years. They rarely lose their retention votes.

Agreed. It takes more than Trump, his cabinet, and MAGA to get here, though. It requires complicity and complacency from a ton of other people.

I need to get back to listening to podcasts. I’ve taken a break since the election because many of my favorites were political and I’m currently burying my head in the sand and screaming “I CAN’T HEAR YOU!”.

Maybe I’ll dive back in with BTB. That seems mostly safe…

I agree that governments should be careful about what medical treatments they make mandatory. I think the US government has been pretty judicious with their decisions, though. The vaccines that are mandated for school attendance are wildly effective and have been shown to be safe, both via scientific studies and decades of dispensing many of them.

I 100% agree.

I think that is true for some of the people involved, but I think it is much more complicated than that. There are many people who think vaccines do more harm than good because they believe conspiracy theories and junk science. Not everyone against vaccines is malicious. Some must be, though, for such bullshit to keep propagating the way that it does.

If you want to know more, go read the lawsuit he is associated with to remove FDA approval of the polo vaccine. Essentially, he believes fraudulent research that indicates that vaccines cause autism.

Then, before you take what he says at face value, go read a history of polio.

If you give the materials an honest read, you’ll find that polio is horrific, that the vaccine was one of the greatest medical achievements of the 20th century, and that the evidence indicating that the vaccine causes autism is all junk.

It is amazing to me how short our memories are as a species. There are people who are still in congress who had polio. There are an estimated 300,000 people still alive in the US who survived polio. Even with that, the nominated head of Health and Human Services wants to do away with the polio vaccine.

I don’t know what the problem is. Is it a lack of empathy? Is it willingness to swallow the bait surrounding conspiracy theories? Is it just a lack of education? How did we get to the point where it is even remotely okay for the future head of Heath and Human Services to be against the polio vaccine?

If being pro-polio isn’t disqualifying for being the head of HHS, and if he gets confirmed, the U.S. will have very clearly shown that it is in rapid decline. It will have shown that the government is corrupt to its core and is irredeemable.

So, $130M donated to Trump’s legal defense fund. $55K to Luigi’s.

So, the other arguments given here are disingenuous. The real argument that would be made (not by me) is that they don’t trust the government to run something as important as health care. They think the government would be more wasteful and capricious in its decisions than the current system. They’ve been convinced that nationalized health care systems are simply worse.

Hey, does that guy look like a terrorist?

The one in the middle? Yeah, kinda!

Right then, blast him and his friends. They’re probably terrorists too!

This is just a slow coup by foreign actors at this point, isn’t it?

Oil and gas are the apple that will get us kicked out of Eden.

I carry around PowerPoint presentations that contain huge loops of satellite data. I love my 1TB USB stick.

And the statewide margin was still a 14 point margin. Too much to overcome with 12 stolen ballots.

You’re right, it is. In 2020 not a single race in Mesa County was competitive. Likewise, none of the state-wide races were competitive enough to have their results changed even if everyone in Mesa County voted the same way.

You’re probably right but I don’t really get it. Mesa County is so red that Trump won by 28 points in 2020. What was this person trying to achieve? For that matter, what was Tina Peters was trying to achieve? I just don’t understand how either of them could have made a difference when, in 2020, Trump won by over 25K votes out of a total of 91K votes cast and 107K registered voters.

I’m sure this is true. I wish there was a way to communicate it better, though. People have been sounding the alarm for so long that stories like this fall flat with most people. I don’t have a solution, I’m just lamenting that most people will just scroll past because we’ve been hearing dire warnings like this for decades.