[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a democracy and republic when he said, “You have rights antecedent to all earthly governments; rights that cannot be repealed or restrained by human laws; rights derived from the Great Legislator of the Universe.”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...

Here are several questions for biologists and medical professionals: If a person is found to have XY chromosomes (heterogametic sex), does a designation as female on his birth certificate, driver’s license or Social Security card override the chromosomal evidence? Similarly, if a person is found to have XX chromosomes (homogametic) does a designation as male on her birth certificate, driver’s license or Social Security card override the chromosomal evidence? If you were a medical professional, would you consider it malpractice for an obstetrics/gynecology medical specialist, not to order routine Pap smears to screen for cervical cancer for a patient who identifies as a female but has XY chromosomes? If you were a judge, would you sentence a criminal, who identifies as a female but has XY chromosomes, to a women’s prison? A judge just might do so. Judge William Pryor of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit focused on a Florida school district ruling that a ...

Among the blessings for which I was grateful last week: I did not sit down for Thanksgiving dinner with Charles Blow. If you’ve never heard of Charles Blow, that, too, may be a blessing. But since I’ve opened this door, I’m obliged to inform you: He’s a columnist for The New York Times which means he’s among the highest-paid opinion writers in America. His Nov. 27 contribution to the national discourse was headlined “The Horrible History of Thanksgiving.” “When I was a child, Thanksgiving was simple,” he reminisced. But when he became a man, he put away childish narratives, realizing that, “Like so much of American history, the story has had its least attractive features winnow (sic) away — white people have been centered in the narrative and all atrocity has been politely papered over. So, let us correct that.” How helpful of him (or them). Actually, however, among those who “always blame America first” — a phrase used 35 years ago by Jeane Kirkpatrick, a disillusione...