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Cake day: July 6th, 2023

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  • Farscape is a very soft sci-fi, but it has a mostly consistent world that mostly follows its internal logic. It has muppet aliens and the supernatural along side more traditional TV space tropes, but the narrative makes sense as presented, and it doesn’t do much to hurt your suspension of disbelief.

    Doctor Who is the opposite of consistent. It makes shit up as it goes along and isn’t even consistent in the kind of bullshit it’s throwing at you. It can be tropey nonsense, comedy overriding reality, fairy tale reasoning that breaks down when you try to think about it to much, or whatever other idiocy it feels like being today. Instead of building a world that you can understand, it basically just says “don’t worry about it, assume we already did the boring set up stuff, and just run with the fact that plastic can be alive and chasing after people because that’s what we’re doing this week.”






  • They need a format that breaks the debate up into sections and actually includes fact checking, and a cross examination after each section. Have a team scrambling to find the records, studies, video clips and other evidence that they can bring up. Someone who is mostly honest gets lay ups and affirmation. Someone who lies constantly gets called out and put on the defensive.

    Wouldn’t happen of course. Even if the hosts were down to have someone take on a more adversarial role, Trump would never agree to something that actually holds him accountable for spewing nothing but bullshit. It’s his entire strategy, if he can’t sell snake oil he has nothing to sell at all.


  • This means that anyone who doesn’t like a particular rule or regulation can pick a venue with a friendly judge, challenge it in court, and likely get the outcome they want. Even if judge shopping wasn’t a major problem right now, this would still be a bad idea. The reason Chevron told judges to defer to agencies in matters where the interpretation is ambiguous is because those agencies have the experience and and expertise to understand the issues involved far better than a judge who has to try to master the subject from inside the courtroom.

    This is all the more crazy in light of the recent racial gerrymandering decision, where Alito not only ignored the deference that appeals courts are supposed to show to trial courts (where the case is actually experienced and not just summed up in a brief) but then says that the judicial branch must defer to the legislators when they claim that they are being fair. So judges can just override the executive branch in subjects that they likely do not understand, but they can’t actually contradict the legislature over something like whether a policy is violating someone’s constitutional rights, despite that being one of their core functions for the past couple of centuries.





  • Everyone who is alive today is descended from slave owners, thieves, rapists, murderers, conquerors and oppressors. They are also all descended from people who were the victims of slavery, theft, rape, murder, conquest and oppression. If people are responsible for the actions of their ancestors, then we are all guilty of damn near everything, and it’s basically just original sin without all the Catholicism.



  • Seems like the first step should be taxing those personal loans that are being used as income. That seems like a simple fix (simple by tax code standards, I’d still expect such a law to be ridiculously complex).

    I do worry about the unintended side effects a of a wealth tax targeting stock ownership directly. That just gives the rich an incentive to squeeze more value out of their investments in order to cover their tax bill. And it seems like it would likely push private companies into selling out more as they grow since the money has to come from somewhere, thus giving even more incentive to cave in to investors who just want to make a quick buck and don’t care about the long term survival of the company.


  • Sounds to me like a way of backing down from their saber-rattling and threats of invasion while trying to not look like they are backing down from anything.

    [Realizes he’s talked up a war that would be disastrous, win or lose] “We’re not going to do that, it’s exactly what they want us to do”

    Of course, that could also just be Xi being full of shit for diplomatic reasons. It’s not like he’d be bound by this in any way. “We’re not going to be tricked by their provocations” can always be followed by a “but now they’ve forced our hand.”




  • I find it interesting that guys like this who want to start a race war always think that this is the thing that’s going to do it. Like we’ve made it through all the other hate crimes, injustices and large scale protests without erupting into a race war, but one more incident will do the trick.

    Also interesting is how closely his plan is tied to the election. He isn’t just trying to send a message before the election, he specifically thinks that his side needs a specific outcome in the election for his plan to succeed. This plan seems to be a direct consequence of current political environment and the messages coming from his preferred candidate and his supporters.

    Now the article doesn’t actually say which candidate needs to win in order to embolden violent white supremacists. But if you need 2 guesses, you should probably consider going back into the coma you’ve been in for the past decade, you’re not going to like the future.