gehringer_2

everything has limits. There is no intrinsic law of the Universe that just because a particular set of words got put into the US Constitution they are necessarily the best rule for all societies for all time. TBH, I think the rise of the mass media in the 20th century and now the rise of mass communication of any media in 21st has created a fundamental paradigm shift between the danger of suppressing speech and the danger of truth becoming impossibly hard to tease out of the avalanche of falsehood. I'm not sure what the all the answers should be, but the idea that 18th century implementations can be the only just ones for all people for all times is an impossibly naive view of history. Core values may remain but details are local. The core value here is not speech but truth. If your rules of speech do not support truth, you need to think about your rules again.

None of the rights in the "Bill of" are absolute here either even though we like to talk to ourselves like they are, and liberal democracy (small 'l' small 'd') in Europe has manage to evolve pretty well without the more explicit kinds of statements we put in the Constitution. And to this particular point, Europe has more reason to remain circumspect of lofty pronouncements because they experienced political speech in Hitler that succeeded in producing 6 million+ murders and a war that destroyed most of their continent. If that had been our experience, it might have changed our views about the rhetoric we allow in the political sphere too.

Other than the normal farsightedness my vision has been near perfect all my like - and then a couple of years ago the 'floaters' started. It's a little similar as your brain learns to ignore them too, but I've found I've had to start looking twice - especially when driving, because if there happens to actually be something there behind by the floater, you may not see it at all on a quick glance and are not going to know it. (You already have a small blind spot in each eye where your optic nerve originates, but with two eyes they are not in the same spot in your binocular vision. A floater is usually kind of spindly, but still, add another spot in one eye that moves around, and if it a piece of it happens to line up with the optic blind spot in the other eye, that's going to be a little gap in your total vision and you will not be able to sense it. Or the opposite happens: you think you see something but it turns out you only caught a glimpse of the floater moving a bit. In fact I'm thinking these things are where a lot of 'ghost' sightings used to originate. They move a little bit in your eyeball and it is very much like seeing a ghost because your brain doesn't understand the sudden shift in illumination on small bit your retina and tries to interpret it as something real.

exactly. Sister Wives, Wive's Sister. Sounds close enough to me.

Ever heard the one about you get 2 economists in a room and you get 3 opinions? Here is Fed Governor Micheal Barr on 2/17: Speech by Governor Barr on artificial intelligence and the labor market - Federal Reserve Board

and speaking of riots. The '68 convention mess probably cost the Dems that election more than any other single event beside the War itself.

🎉🎆

thank-you for the effort!

It probably had some effect, everything has some effect and it was a close election and maybe it was enough - but I think it's also easy to overestimate it because there is always such a strong bias to want to blame more stuff on bad people like Nixon. So some of the things I think you have to add to the mix: -Revisionist history in the US about VN is strong. By 1980 everybody was always against the war, but that just isn't true. In 1968 most Americans still wanted a 'win' not just a peace. The WWII mindset that the US was invincible was still very dominant. The idea of walking away without victory was still hard to swallow, even after Korea (maybe especially because of Korea). The anger at Johnson was as least as much over him being unable to win the war as for having gotten into it. -Everyone knew Humphrey was a stronger 'peace' candidate than Nixon and that a deal was going to be more likely under Humphrey, so I'm not so sure how much difference the existence of any preliminary announcement was going to make. Humphrey had already said publicly that he was willing to go further to get a deal Johnson had been. I think that actually hurt him with the hawk part of the population - he was an appeaser! -S.V. didn't want a deal on N.V. terms so it was not going to be an easy needle to thread in any case. I was still pretty young but I liked HHH. The problem is a lot of people saw him as a caricature - it was a big problem for him.

maybe shouda just joined the LDS?

that's even better.

do a terrible job for 10 yrs, waste money on possibly fraudulent activities, featherbed your buddies, but then get fired for who you sleep with? As American as apple pie and.....baseball.

A friend just put one in his basement rec room. They call the powder 'sand' but it's a mix of things that are softer than beach sand type sand as you don't want it to scratch the table.

Looks right now that getting Maxwell sent up is more than these folks are going to do about anything. And she could have blown them all out of the water and wouldn't either. And now they've apparently sent her to Club Fed. The problem with this whole mess is that there is still way more smoke than fire. They had enough to charge Epstein for a 2nd time, they had enough to give Maxwell 20yrs. The rest is still buried in charges, countercharges and redactions.

I remember seeing that and hoping it might actually be true. Sadly not so much....

I think Gore hurt himself more that Clinton helped or hurt him. His campaign was pretty artless - esp early on. And even the liberal press was writing nice things about W's time in Tx. Plus W caught the afterglow of GHWB's rapid rehabilitation from re-election loser to fondly remembered ex-prez. It certainly never entered my mind that with all the legacy, expertise and connections that W had available to him that he would end up running the most outright incompetent WH since --- probably before Herbert Hoover.

And Nixon just barely edged Humphrey in the popular vote. I think the conventional wisdom is Wallace drained more votes from Nixon than Humphrey, but who really knows? The South was still pretty nominally Democratic at that time so without a favorite son how many of those votes might have gone to Humphrey by habit?

the Presidential nominating system has been like the NBA draft, every reform they have made has produced worse outcomes. Of course, the NBA still has a chance to make changes in a positive direction if they figure them out because they don't also have to cope with Citizen's United.

what else can you expect from a guy with a silly beard? ✂️✂️

If you haven't heard it, last week Vicky Ward was on Fresh Air. She was one of the first investigative journalists to work on Epstein, initially before anyone knew anything about the sexual abuse side. She began to uncover more stuff and Epstein got her reporting on him spiked. At the time for various personal reasons she took her work in a different direction. But one of her interesting holdings is that Epstein had never been into under age girls until he hooked up with Maxwell. In not so many words she's saying it was Maxwell who first cultivated Epstein's proclivities. Doesn't make that much difference in the overall scheme of the larger public issue this has all become and efforts for accountability, but interesting to hear someone who did a lot of earliest research hold that Maxwell was as much or more the driver than Epstein.

fair question. I have no problem with the hammer falling wherever it may on those that covered for any of this in the past. But action can only take place in the present, and someone is in a position to do something about it now. If the past were an adequate excuse for the future we'd all still be caves.

the shoe finally dropped. I hope this becomes an opening for better future outcomes.

that fact that it hasn't happened in the post media campaign age is probably significant. The parties don't like sending retreads into the media mill. Trump is the exception because there was nothing left of his party but him.

To me, when you refuse to act civilly, you forfeit the right to be treated civilly. On an individual level, there may always be an ethical imperative to "turn the other cheek" but for society as whole, the first obligation is to re-establish justice, equity and protection of the powerless, and if accomplishing that requires that those who turned their back on civility be treated uncivilly, so be it. The 'ends' doesn't justify the 'means' is wonderful social theory, but at a societal level it only works when there is a consensus to stay in the system. By definition, the approved rules of constraint in the system may be powerless on those that have taken themselves out of it, while the moral imperative to stop them remains.

well, we've got one guy preventing that from happening. Can this stuff be the one thing that sticks to him with his supporters when nothing else has? Who knows, but judging by how long he's kept the lid on it so far, I'm not holding my breath.