Shadow Hawk

The Metropolis Supers. Roger Goodell is not one to let a city's non-existence stand it the way of The Brand.

George Will Leaves GOP Over Trump, Changes Voter Registration To "Unaffiliated"

It was so hot here yesterday that two hobbits threw a ring into my backyard.

It was so hot here yesterday that two hobbits threw a ring into my backyard.

It was so hot here yesterday that two hobbits threw a ring into my backyard.

And somewhere, Adam West sobs uncontrollably.

Squirrel!

"Na Na Na Na Na Na Na Na Na Na Na Na Na Na Na Na -- FOXBAT!"
 
(Someone had to get that out of the way....)

I would have preferred Sanders, however I'll wind up voting for Clinton because I see her terms to be functionally equivalent to Obama.  Everything bad would get rubberstamped by a republican, and some good will happen.
And I don't have my backup plan of having a cross country vehicle capable of fending off hordes of mutants ready yet.

The Soft Sexism Of Hating On The New GHOSTBUSTERS 

How old are Granny Weatherwax and Nanny Ogg?

The problem is that he's going to lose, he knows he's going to lose...but he keeps telling his supporters that victory is achievable, that the system is rigged against him, and that the Democratic establishment(including his opponent) is deceitful and hopelessly corrupt. It's mid-May. The primaries will be over in 4 weeks. The convention is in 2 months. If he really wants to advance his policy ideas and defeat Trump, how does he bring this plane in for a smooth landing?
 
I voted for him, for the record. But if you are going to work within the system, you need to continue doing so. The runner-up endorses the winner so that the winner has the best chance to defeat the ®ival party's nominee in November. If the runner-up doesn't endorse the winner and work to defeat the rival party, and the winner doesn't prevail in November, the runner-up shares in the blame for the defeat, and the faction they represent loses power and respect and trust in the next few go-arounds. If the winner prevails anyway, then the slight is remembered, and the runner-up's power over policy is diminished considerably.
 
These are hard truths which a lot of people are not yet ready to hear, but it is what it is.

At least your car was built this century. Next up for Stacie is a new oil pump. Which is behind all the belts and pulleys on that side of the engine, including the timing belt.
 
I hear Applejack is a pretty good pony.
 
Back on topic, in my opinion Sanders needs to do a better job controlling his supporters if he's going to keep running. I get that part of his platform is that the system is rigged against him, and I think he may even be right, but this hooliganism is only going to hurt his chances.

Is there any real evidence that Hillary is going to go on a gun seizing rampage once in office? I note that Obama's Plan To Take All Our Guns is about seven years late. (Perhaps because it's just a gun lobby marketing ploy. )

Spidey is abit of a glass brick. Strong? definitely, but a bullet can do significant damage

2 is also a frelling awful predictor of risk. The number of Muslims travelling to the USA is huge compared to the number who have actually committed terrorist attacks on your country. It's simple xenophobic nonsense spouted by a demagogue for his crazed constituency. It's simply mind-boggling that there are citizens of the USA who even passingly entertain the option. Your borders are not impermeable; if fanatics of any stripe want to get in and do you harm, they will, and picking on their religion will only fuel the desire of that vanishingly small minority of the Umma which wishes physical harm to be inflicted on your people to find those cracks in your borders, as well as fuelling the propaganda machines of Daesh and the Taleban whose purposes are only aided by demonstrating such mindless hatred.
 
Are the US border agencies going to investigate every single person coming to the country who claims not to be a Muslim? Just to check that anyone isn't lying? No. So it won't even work. Trump is just feeding his trolls. Or at least dangling morsels in their cages so they get all riled up.

Ultimate Cap is also a prick.  I like Movie Cap much better.

I'm sorry to return to this, because it looks like I'm taking issue with Sinanju, whereas in fact you will notice that I have clipped his hopeful codicil. What I want to say is that I've read these guys, too. Or to put it another way, We know these Papenheimers.
 
I'm returning to it, above all, because there's also a substantive issue. It has been very convincingly argued that this age of secular stagnation we live in (also known as: the reason you haven't had a real raise in thirty years) is due to a shortage of public debt. As incomprehensible as it may seem to people raised on a steady diet of deficit scolding, the amount of public debt around the world has been shrinking for years. The only reason America is an exception is that you've cut your tax rates so far. (Leaving the argument about whether that was a good idea or not aside.) So this pose of world-weary, cynical wisdom grounded in historical knowledge is dangerous to the public weal, even before you tancy that you see seven flavours of awfulness in it from the pens of Jerry Pournelle, Heinlein and H. Beam Piper. 
 
Because it's a terrible argument. It's wrong everywhere! It's actually not even just wrong. It's like anti-truth! It's like someone taking you aside and telling you, "Hey, kid, you're young and I'm wise and old, and I know science. Trust me, the Moon is made of green cheese." Almost literally so.
 
i) Two hundred years? There are precious few regimes that last two centuries. Dynasties fall; civil wars happen; invasions succeed. Mostlly, it is monarchies and tyrannies that fall this way. But! But! But! But! I'm sputtering here because singling out democracies is such a terrible move to make in this argument.
ii) Because, well, for one thing, there aren't that many historical democracies. The Death Tribble notes that Britain's democracy has lasted more than two hundred years, but that's not really true. Britain was an oligarchy with representative institutions until some point during the long road of parliamentary reforms made in the course of the Nineteenth Century. I don't know where in the progress of freedom you want to place the magic moment of breakthrough to the sunny uplands of true democracy, but it wasn't in 1816! 
iii) Given this, the whole pose of objective-data-driven-social-science is just completely wrong. What historical democracies are we singling out? There aren't that many of them, and the examples we single out: Rome, Athens, Venice --they all lasted a lot longer than two centuries. For the most part, they didn't even fall to internal tensions! In fact, if we're looking for examples, we need alleged Greek democracies of the sixth century BC, about which we know absolutely noting, and what we know is almost certainly wrong; the Roman republic (two centuries, not so much); and, I don't know, I guess Florence? Machiavelli was all upset about that, so I guess it counts. But if you're going to make some kind of point about democracies being particularly unstable, I've got a longer list right here of Chinese dynasties (alone) that fell. Though most of them made it three centuries, so good for them, I guess? Actually, I bet you could make a longer list of states-of-the-island-of-Java-that-fell-in-less-than-two-centuries than you can make of democracies that. . . 
 
iv) This is just another numbered point, but I'm separating it off because of the whole rich and deeper cray-cray factor. Not only have there not been many democracies in the world in history, there are a lot more now. Right now, and for the last two centuries, the pattern has been for dictatorships and anarchies to fall and be replaced by democracies. And the number of democracies which have fallen in that time is . . . . Hungary, maybe? Thailand's had some rough patches, too. But, overall, the clear, the very clear trend, has been the opposite of this historical insight presented above. Oh, maybe we're due at the magic two centuries mark, but until then, where's the freaking evidence?
 
So that's democracies failing. Now, the bit about the crowd realising that they can vote themselves money out of the treasury. Public debt is a feature of the modern age, ever since the Habsburgs of Spain (accuracy note: note a democracy!) started borrowing to fund their wars in the Sixteenth Century. The Habsburgs of Spain also pioneered national debt repudiation, which is clearly not a good thing, but in no way the end of the world, as we can see on account of the world not ending. 
 
The Habsburgs having set a precedent, everyone started borrowing large amounts of money to fund their wars. And stuff: Like, for example, corruption. Right down to today, the entire list of countries which have repudiated their public debts since the French Revolution consist of: the Weimar Republic (by stealth); and, assorted dictatorships and anarchies. Not a single democracy has repudiated its debt since 1815, to the best of my knowledge.
 
Why? Because, in the mid-seventeenth century, two regimes which fought the Spanish a lot realised that they had to put their national-debt-raising on a solid footing and establish proper taxation to pay for it. And you know what countries those were? Two republics! (Dutch, English.) Then, in the Eighteenth Century, in a particularly bad episode of public debt repudiation, the French monarchy's handling of it led to a revolution which established a republic , which, in turn, put French finances on the right path.
 
One of the more interesting things about this was that they did so by getting rid of the rich and connected rentier class which took a large share of the public debt as private payment. It turns out that monarchies last until aristocrats realise that they can privilege themselves a fortune out of the public treasury. . . 
 
Meanwhile, in the second decade of the 21st century, we see public debt shrinking everywhere. It is projected that the American debt will stop shrinking and start growing at some point in the future, but this is because the projections assume that Americans will  never raise taxes, ever again. For example, you will not raise your social security taxes by, for example, eliminating the tax preference for private retirement plans that have so dramatically failed their investors. I --never mind. Of course, that tax break has served at least one purpose: it has put a lot of money in the hands of the American financial industry, and, since some of it comes back in the form of lobbying money, into the hands of its politicians. 
 
Something about public largesse?

Look, America, I know you were in a hurry this morning.  An early appointment, slept in, forgot to buy milk for breakfast. There's lots of good excuses for missing your meds this morning. I get it. I'm not judging. All I'm saying is, you have to go home, sit down, and take them now.

Hillary will make a pretty good president. I have policy disagreements with her, but she isn't going to build a wall or repeal Obamacare or disband the EPA and IRS, which her opponents have plainly stated they intend to do.  And she won't do anything about gun control either, despite the hysterical rantings of the gun lobby.* 
 
Oh, and she won't appoint a lunatic to the Supreme Court of the United States.  There's already one seat that's at stake, plus almost certainly RBG's in the next few years.  One party is going to get a 5-4 or 6-3 majority in the SCOTMFUS.  If that's not enough to get people to hold their nose and vote, I don't know what is.
 
 
* Obama's administration has been a record-setting sales windfall for the gun industry.  The local gun stores love Obama.  I have no doubt that the gun lobby will crank up the same marketing campaign if Hillary wins, despite the fact that the GOP has an unbreakable stranglehold on the House until at least 2020.

Only if the movie was any good.

Wouldn't he then end up beat up all the time?

Keep him a blond, white guy, but make him an Australian trained as a ninja deep in the outback who wears red slippers instead of yellow.

Well, it would be a big boost for the long suffering guillotine and tumbrel industry.