The fact that Obama didn’t fill the position that Scalia opened when he died is probably one of the biggest missed opportunities in America’s recent history. Had his position been filled with a left-leaning Justice, especially a young one with many decades of life left, much of America’s Fascist changes could have been opposed.
As it is, the SC has become a rubber stamp for whatever the current Fascist/Authoritarianist regime wants.
A rationality check for you, specifically, from a purely biological standpoint:
For a woman, peak fertility occurs between about 16 and 28. After 30, fertility starts dropping more and more rapidly every year, with pregnancies after 35 being classified by the medical system as “geriatric pregnancies” due to their age-related risk.
By the time most women hit 40, they need to put forth up to 30× the effort to become pregnant as they would have when 18, and by 45 most women are considered by the medical system as being functionally sterile.
That’s not to say that women cannot become pregnant after the age of 45, it just becomes highly unlikely without many tens of thousands of dollars of medical assistance.
Natural pregnancies after 45, and without any medical assistance, really only happen to women who have - ironically enough - been pregnant for most of their adult lives, because pregnancy pauses the natural cycle for up to 9 months. This pausing of the ovulation cycle prevents eggs from being expended, and pushes back the decline of fertility by up to as much as a decade if full pregnancies occur often enough. However, since this means carrying a full pregnancy to term each and every year from the teenage years onwards, I seriously doubt that any woman would willingly reach for brood mare status just for a longer fertile window.
So if you have any desire to have a child safely and easily, now would be the time to do so.
Your husband, on the other hand, is likely to continue being fertile until the day he dies. The only risk he faces is a significant rise of mutations in his sperm (starting in his late-40s) that can lead to rates of genetic diseases and birth defects in his children that directly correlates to his age. As in, he ought to be motivated to act soon, as well, but has far less pressure to do so than you do.
Awww… the new one was so much cleaner and nicer.
One of the hallmarks of a destabilizing and imminently pre-collapse ecosystem is when certain fast lived species like insects have sudden surges or collapses in population.
And I’m talking about short-lived species that typically have yearly cycles. Something that can respond very quickly to sudden surges or absences in food or environmental niches, but which does not normally see sudden population fluctuations in a healthy ecosystem.
Invasive species.
My region is absolutely infested with Siberian Elm and Tree Of Heaven (A.K.A., the “semen tree”). You cannot cut them down, because they will resprout like a hydra from the stump. You cannot dig them out, because the smallest root left behind can and will resprout wherever it is, leading to a many-year game of whack-a-mole.
I have near-daily fantasies of going around with a powerful backpack sprayer filled with glyphosate (Round-Up) and an application wand that can extend from 1m to 10m, and hitting everything just as they’re sending nutrients to the roots for winter.
The problem is, Glyphosate is highly restricted to purchase and own in Canada unless you have both the appropriate class of Pesticide Applicator’s License (an agricultural variant, for example) as well as the venue to use it in (own or manage an orchard, for example). Thankfully my family owns an orchard, and I am starting the process for the former.
But still. It’s an absolutely bizarre thing to be obsessing over and I. Just. Cannot. Help. Myself. Every time I drive and see clumps of those disgusting trees, I start to uncontrollably strategize how I could hit them with glyphosate in late September.
Unless the island is in the PNW and it just happens to be the beginning of berry season, pretty fucking poorly. Can assemble and maintain a fire, but would likely need a modern fire starter like a lighter, electric or otherwise. Can also build most basic shelters, but it would be uncomfortable AF, anything more advanced would be trial-and-error. Not well versed in hunting despite being at least moderately decent with a bow and arrow. My best option would be scrounging for fruit and hoping I don’t get hit with diarrhea.
Once again we see the Parasite Class playing unethically with the labour/wealth they have stolen from their employees.
Counterpoint to Sisko: Javier, the Marquis sympathizer. Sisko went after Javier like he had killed half of all DS9.
Science wouldn’t function by this metric. We aren’t in a universe where opinion shifts reality, we can make very solid axioms that are broadly true and testable.
It’s why science relies on the test of disproof. If a premise survives the test of disproof, it graduates to a hypothesis because it is seen as a reasonably accurate description of reality, in that nothing else comes as close.
In terms of public speech, specifically:
Cool to cold. Essentially a cold 3-month winter of sub-zero (0℃ to -30℃) temps and lots (1+m) of snow, a short “warm” summer of only 2 months with temps never exceeding 30℃ at the absolute worst, with most highs not exceeding 24℃ and most nights in the 10-15℃ range, bookended by long spring and fall seasons that are cool and moist with daytime highs rarely exceeding 24℃ and nights never dropping below 0℃.
Thanks to a heat exhaustion event when I was 17, I have become increasingly sensitive to heat over the last 35 years.
As an example, whatever comfort you feel at 24℃, I feel that same level of comfort - while wearing the same general clothing - at 14-16℃. Whatever comfort you feel at 30℃ is what I feel at 20-22℃.
So when local temps spike to 35-45℃ during our (much more frequent, hotter, and longer) heatwaves, imagine being forced to exist and do all normal outdoor activities in 60-80℃ temps.
Yes, it really is that f**king bad for me.
And I sweat just as badly at the lower temps as you would at the higher temps. For heat waves, think wet sauna temps at their dangerous extremes. It’s why I shave myself bald for six months out of the year… because I would look like a drowned rat during that time otherwise. And yes, I still have to carry a “sweat towel” with me during that time to avoid looking like I just stepped out of a shower. I have to wipe down my head and face several times an hour even when temps are in the high 20s, and especially when I physically exert myself.
Climate change is going to be a right b**ch to me as it ramps up into overdrive over the next decade.
I would love to see Europe ban/block the API endpoints that AI communicates over.
Then ban all Meta endpoints if/when meta moves AI communication onto the same endpoints as non-AI communication.
European laws are not perfect, but they at least make an effort to put the needs of the people ahead of corporations and the Parasite Class.
Markup pro tip: to have multiple separate lines appear as a single large block quote, insert the quote signifier (>) into the blank newlines between them as well.
so this
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despite the newlines.
I have been using the same web browser, in terms of ideology, codebase and heritage, since the release of NCSA Mosaic.
That was 32 years ago. And holy f**ck, that dates me.
Sure, I dabbled around with others. There was the original Opera, back when Netscape cratered and the only other real option was IE. Opera’s tab behaviours made me install Tab Mix Plus for FF, and I still find that extension to be the second-most critically important extension FF has, right after UBlock Origin.
And lately I took a shine to Vivaldi, but I have been weaning myself off of it once I realized that the Manifest v2 shutdown was unavoidable for it as well.
And the only reason why I even have Chromium is as a sandbox for any Google services I access and as a “naked” web browser for those websites who implement malware and spyware in the name of “website security”. Which, of course, also means a majority of websites that are “protected” by CloudFlare’s incredibly hostile anti-user practices.
And of course, I also run forks, such as Librewolf and others, also with the appropriate anti-malware and anti-spyware add-ins. It can be useful having multiple web browsers up at once.
But my main will always be Firefox.
Canada.
I think that the bar to owning any projectile weapon should be very high, and have tiers that go progressively higher with the type of weapon requested. Hunting rifles? Comparatively easy. Hip-wielded auto cannon capable of sending 300+ rounds a minute down range? Yeah, that’s a decade-plus of effort to get licensed and approved.
Proactive qualifiers would include psychological testing, social media monitoring, lack of criminal convictions, wait times for both weapons and ammo, tracking of ammo consumption, extensive training and marksmanship minimums, and red flag laws. Any violent ideation such as fascism, accelerationism, religious extremism, or white supremacy would be instant disqualifiers.
On the flip side, once someone passes the thresholds, they should be able to own any damn weapon they want. Even clear up to naval ordinance and other heavy weaponry. Want to romp around your 500ha property with a fully functional Abrams tank? Go right ahead - just ensure that a fired shell never goes beyond your property’s border or there will be legal hell to pay.
Now active carry is yet another issue. At which point, unless the person is in a high-risk job or has been under the receiving end of actual threats to their life, any carry should be highly questionable. If an average person wants to cosplay with live weaponry while out in public, questions need to be raised about their mental stability. A mentally stable person is not going to be wandering about with an AR-15 slung over their shoulder - there is absolutely no need for that under virtually 100% of all cases.
I love how the Streisand Effect works. They just made this app the hottest thing out there.
And here you are, still treating women as a monolith despite noting your wife doesn’t act that way
So engaging with women for who they are, instead of what they are, is somehow “treating them like a monolith”?
Strange, that. Especially since women have been screaming at men for literal decades now to “don’t treat us like objects!! Don’t objectify us!!1!”
And yet. Here I am not treating them as a monolith by ignoring their gender and interacting with them as I would anyone else, irrespective of gender.
You have some very strange pro-objectification-of-women ideas.
You literally implied that women fighting for the right to be included everywhere. Was about supremacy. That feminism is about supremacy. Your own words. Read your previous post. Perhaps you misspoke. But I don’t think so. And neither did most of the other people reading.
This is borderline sealioning, an explicit trolling act.
But there is a chance that your bleeding ignorance might be genuine. So I’ll bite.
The problem is that women are forcing their way into every man’s space, and preventing men from having a space of their own under cries of “misogyny”, while simultaneously fighting to keep their own spaces as women-only.
That isn’t “equality” in any shape or form. That’s gender supremacy.
A perfect example is the Girl Guides of America. Right when the lawsuit against the Boy Scouts had wrapped up and forced them to include girls, the president of the Girl Scouts admitted in private and off the record that she would rather see the entire organization shuttered permanently than allow a single boy admittance.
The same goes for shelters of all kinds, particularly those for Domestic Violence. About 70% of all non-reciprocal DV (only one person doing the hitting) is women beating up men. But of the 2,481 DV shelters in America, only TWO are for men. Nearly all the ones for women are partially to fully publicly funded, but men’s shelters are 100% privately funded because public funding is politically radioactive - the moment any politician tries to support male victims, they get painted as “violently misogynistic” by women’s groups and fail to get re-elected. Most women’s groups also refuse to discuss male victims of DV because to do so is to lead credence to the fact that they even exist.
So yes. Feminism has nothing to do with equality anymore. Feminism is straight-up gender supremacy, full stop.
It’s why I, as someone fighting for true equality, call myself an egalitarianist. I see any man being called “feminist” as nothing more than a pejorative; a mark of anti-equality shame.
Claiming that men/boys need to be separated because “they can’t control themselves”
Where did I say anything even remotely like this? Point it out. Quote it.
But you can’t, because I didn’t.
Quit being intellectually bankrupt - quit putting words into my mouth.
Men’s spaces is what allows men and boys to open up in ways they instinctively and unconsciously prevent themselves from doing when women are around. Males have an autonomic response around women that causes them to be more closed off, more resistant to criticism, and far less likely to demonstrate vulnerability to other men.
Men’s spaces are what allow them to better learn from other men in a space that allows them to better learn more open and accepting.
It has nothing to do with your vacuous and thought-terminating “incel” bullshit.
Everything in the link you provided says that Obama could have done a shitton more to ensure that the Senate Judiciary Committee actually did their jobs.
Instead, they played political bullshit, Obama blinked, and as a result, America is now two good shakes away from a Fascist dictatorship. The midterm elections - or America’s own “Night of the Long Knives”, which seems all the more likely due to the rhetoric surrounding Kirk’s assassination - Will cinch this future in the bag.