Ranxerox

Hmmm. 
 
“As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.”
― H.L. Mencken, On Politics: A Carnival of Buncombe

I just got back from getting a dose of the new, omicron-targeting, bivalent Moderna vaccine.  To date, I have had very little adverse reaction to Covid vaccines.  I am hoping that my good luck continues.🤞 

I just read it as “skip to next post”…  

I remember terror birds kicking Atomic Robo's butt. he does not have a good track record against creatures that should be extinct but arent
CES 

I would totally watch that.

I'm enjoying She-Hulk. A great deal.  The actress is funny and breaks the fourth wall smoothly and then slides back into the scene again. The writing is clever with only one mistep in the first episode that bugged me and then I moved on.
 
Wong's guest appearance was hilarious in a lot of ways
 
 

So many flaws.
I'm over 60, never particularly muscular, and these days, the usual aches and pains don't help.  In many cases, I could offer up some defense to a knife wielder, tho...while I scream my head off.  Your only notion of defense is the counter-attack...escalating the situation.  DARN well better hope my attacker can't disarm me or I put myself MUCH, MUCH worse off.  Against a knife, I might be able to find something for defense in many places...but I'll have to find my gun if I'm at home.  Depending on the nature of the disability, do we really want a disable person with a gun?  Do we really want a LOT of people to have guns?  With people with anger triggers?  Escalation from words to *shots* does happen.  
 
Go back to the summer of 2020.  Numerous incidents where Trump supporters actively tried to intimidate or disrupt Democratic rallies.  And things were very tense.  Now throw in 15-20% of the attendees having guns, and the enormous anger of that summer.
 
Protecting the vulnerable is a major problem, I completely agree, but you wouldn't just be arming the vulnerable.  You're also jumping straight to the highest degree of personal escalation without ever considering if some middle ground is possible, and ignoring both the difficulties in using a gun, and the risk of misuse.

OK, I can only answer this in terms of the Australian federal system. States and Territories each have their own quirks. Also, I will use the Australian terminology of preferential voting - essentially ranked choice or instant run-off voting. This will be long.

First of all, Australia has a different party system to the US. Parties pick their candidates through their own internal processes. There are no primaries.

As a result, there is only one candidate per party in lower house elections (House of Representatives - name stolen from the US, of course).

This reduces the number of candidates. 5-8 is fairly typical. That's usually the major parties, a couple of "minor" parties that have a real chance of getting people elected somewhere, if only in the Senate, a couple of minor parties with no chance, and an Independent or three.
 
At times, some states have used "optional preferential" systems, where you can vote for as many candidates as you like and still have your vote counted. So a major party supporter might only vote 1 for the candidate of their own party. A minor party supporter might vote 1 for their candidate, and then 2,3... for other unobjectionable candidates, finally ending with the major party they hate the least. Some people might allocate preferences for all candidates, if only for the pleasure of putting the most obnoxious candidate last.

Most of the time though, including in federal elections, you have to allocate a preference for each candidate. That means, for example, you have to list each candidate from, say, 1 to 8.

That's no big deal. In theory you could have 20 candidates, but in practice you don't.

So far, so good. Now we get to the Senate...

I'm going to skip the Territories (Australian Capital Territory (Canberra) and the Northern Territory (where Bazza lives)) and focus on the 6 States.

Each State has 12 Senators. Usually half are up for election each time. (There are times when all 12 are - but this is exceptional.)

Senate elections use a mix of proportional and preferential voting. Typically, that results in the election of three candidates each from the "left" and the "right". It's rare these days for any party to have a majority in the Senate - getting legislation through involves negotiation and accepting amendments.

Because of the proportional element, it's easier for minor parties and independents to get elected to the Senate. Using the "typical" 3-3 split I mentioned above, that often means that the major parties will get two candidates up each, with the remaining seats going to minors or independents on the left or right.

That relative ease of election means that a lot of candidates run for the Senate. Ballot papers can be up to two metres/yards long! Most of these candidates are complete unknowns with no chance, single issue candidates and so on.

This is also where parties run multiple candidates. Typically these are listed in columns on the ballot paper, in an order chosen by the party. A candidate at the top of the list usually has a better chance of being elected than one at the bottom, although upsets are possible.

With (say) 132 candidates, most of whom you've never heard of, listing them from 1 to 132 is a chore, and fairly meaningless when you have no basis for ordering them.

At that point, there is the option of voting "above the line" or "below the line".

"Below the line" voting is fairly rare in practice. Basically, you chose a minimum of 12 candidates in the order in which you prefer them, and your vote is valid. Yes, you can vote for all 132 candidates this way. Or you can vote for a party candidate that's at the bottom of the list, and so on.

"Above the line" works on the fact that the candidates are listed in columns. Even the independents. (There's an "ungrouped" column or two for people who aren't running alongside anyone else.)
 
When you vote above the line you are allocating preferences between different columns. I think you have to choose at least six such groups. In that case, the order of candidates in each column matters - your vote goes initially to the first candidate. If they get elected, surplus votes go to the second candidate and so on.

The maths here gets weird, and I'm not going to go into the details of quotas and such. It takes a lot longer to count Senate votes than House of Reps ones, but you can usually guesstimate the results on election night with reasonable accuracy.

Well that's all as clear as mud, but yes, there are ways to deal with huge numbers of candidates without brain bleed or resorting to two rounds of voting.

And "third/fourth/fifth parties" have a reasonable chance of getting elected where they have genuine support.
 
 

I don't call Gorbachev a failure.  He was head of a government when, through its own internal structural problems that he inherited, it fell apart.  Many others in his position would have tried to sustain his own power by force, and with resulting civil disorder and grabs for power by multiple factions.  The transition from Soviet Union to CIS was far smoother and far less disorderly than anyone would have predicted, I think.  Yes, the economic problems in the former USSR were horrendous for at least a decade, and probably not yet fully recovered even now; but civil war did not happen and only under its current dictator has Russia resumed conquest of its neighbors by force.  I think it will be decades before a full analysis will appear, but I think a case can be made that Gorbachev was the greatest world statesman of the last quarter of the 20th Century.

Trump should be given the harshest sentence we can give him and be made an example for everyone like him. It doesn't matter about conservatives are evil, or anything like that. If we do that to the poor, we should do it to the rich too
CES 

India man wins 22-year court battle over 25 cents
https://www.msn.com/en-au/news/other/india-man-wins-22-year-court-battle-over-25-cents/ar-AA10xUXX?li=AAgfYrC
 
Man who built ISP instead of paying Comcast $50K expands to hundreds of homes
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/08/man-who-built-isp-instead-of-paying-comcast-50k-expands-to-hundreds-of-homes/

The preliminary news information is just a bunch of uninformed conjecture which is what one would expect.  Merrick Garland's DOJ doesn't let anyone know squat about what they have found or are about to do, until they do it.  

The preliminary news information is just a bunch of uninformed conjecture which is what one would expect.  Merrick Garland's DOJ doesn't let anyone know squat about what they have found or are about to do, until they do it.  

The preliminary news information is just a bunch of uninformed conjecture which is what one would expect.  Merrick Garland's DOJ doesn't let anyone know squat about what they have found or are about to do, until they do it.  

The preliminary news information is just a bunch of uninformed conjecture which is what one would expect.  Merrick Garland's DOJ doesn't let anyone know squat about what they have found or are about to do, until they do it.  

Olivia Newton-John has passed away. 
 
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/obituaries/olivia-newton-john-pop-singer-who-found-stardom-grease-dies-n1045376

Feldercarb!

You can always go the route of the Middleman.
 
"Oh, phooey."
"Dag-diggity!"
"Jeepers!"
"Not a gosh darn chance in Heck."
"Gob smack it!"
"Dag nabbit!"
"What the monkey?"
"Sands of Zanzibar!"
"Jumping bananas, we're in Dutch."
"Sweet mother of Preston Tucker!"
"Hot flaming pork buns!"
"Sweet Molly Brown!"
"My Little Pony!"

That would be a betrayal of the hate that Fox and Hannity and so on have been putting in them, even though many people will still feel 'they are nice enough'.  But the best thing we can do is be kind and helpful to the people who are being devastated by this stuff.  We can't be 'higher than thou' - we could have been fooled in the right circumstances ourselves.

Didn’t they try that in Texas last winter?