[Bread and Circuses - Politics and other Silliness]

  Bryan Fischer The Supreme Court has taken up a case from Washington state on “faithless electors,” that is, electors who pledge to vote for somebody then vote for somebody else. Many states have laws against doing that and prescribe fines for going rogue. The case is about whether states are permitted to do that. In order to answer that constitutional question, we first must understand how the Electoral College is supposed to work in the first place. Most Americans don’t have clue one. The electoral process designed by the Founders reflects the fundamental character of America’s republican form of government, in which the vast majority of decisions are not made directly by the people but rather by the people we have chosen to make these decisions for us.  America is a republic, not a democracy . Donald Trump is president because he won the Electoral College by trouncing Hillary Clinton 304-227. At the same time, Trump lost the popular vote by 2.8 million...

During President Donald J. Trump’s impeachment trial, we’ll hear a lot of talk about our rules for governing. One frequent claim is that our nation is a democracy. If we’ve become a democracy, it would represent a deep betrayal of our founders, who saw democracy as another form of tyranny. In fact, the word democracy appears nowhere in our nation’s two most fundamental documents, the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution. The founders laid the ground rules for a republic as written in the Constitution’s Article IV, Section 4, which guarantees “to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government.” John Adams captured the essence of the difference between a democracy and republic when he said, “You have rights antecedent to all earthly governments; rights that cannot be repealed or restrained by human laws; rights derived from the Great Legislator of the Universe.” Contrast the framers’ vision of a republic with that of a democracy. In a democracy...

Debunking racism narrative re: Natives, slavery, WWII, South Africa, etc. Literally all of it. See Ron Unz and Stefan Molyneux for an easy overview

“Food desert.” When I hear that phrase I think of nomads riding bactrian camels across the Nefud in search of ancient grains. But, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, it means that you live more than one mile from a store that sells fresh produce or meat. Hardly the image most of us in tree-covered suburbia think of as a desert. The term, which has only been around about 25 years since being coined in the U.K., has recently attracted the attention of many local politicians who believe they can “out zone” free market forces. Unfortunately for them, Adam Smith’s invisible hand usually tends to win in these situations. The controversy started several years ago when all the cool kids decided that Walmarts were bad for communities. Using various forms of convoluted reasoning, many local governments essentially banned large super stores by enacting zoning size limits. Too big was bad. The stated goal was typically to save small stores from the competition of lar...

From Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Tony-Ratagick-1 I’ve read through this entire thread, and the many responses, and am going to choose this one to chime in with my two cents and side with Paul Losleben and Harry Horse . Before I begin, let me say that I’m not responding to any of the political sides of this debate, only the technical. Paul Sutton , in several of your responses you bring up your background in the industry, so I’ll briefly summarize my experience as well. I have over 40 years in the telecommunications industry. I was initially trained by the US Army in long line and satellite communications, have done the same for offshore oil platforms, and been critically involved as a contractor for the Department of Defense and a few of the “alphabet agencies” of the federal government. I am currently employed in the commercial sector as a pre-sales solution engineer for a company that provides call recording, speech recognition, transcription and v...