Don Edwards

There is no state in the US that is not known to have tornadoes. Frequency varies wildly, though. I remember some years ago the state of Washington set a new mark, for the first time on record it had two tornadoes in the same day. That's, ah, rather ordinary in several states. (And the total reported damage: one confused horse and some discomfited fish.)

Actually, I would prefer that nobody be the next to die in that fiasco... but that isn't an option. Putin is almost certainly the least-bad choice.

Another Freefall reference:

From Freefall : Google Translate says: Tibi irascor, ergo tu es.

You're singling out individual nutcases. Although I may have been slightly unfair to the Democrats, in the sense that maybe (probably) the Republicans are generally letting them take the lead in imposing government mandates and regulations on stuff that should not be mandated or regulated, and positioning themselves to be seen as opposing them while actually merely nitpicking over exactly what the mandates and regulations will say, and being careful to not actually impede anything very much. And only rarely do they undo any of the horrible results - more often they try to fix the consequences by enacting something closer to what the Democrats initially proposed. In the US Congress, a compromise usually consists of the Democrats getting half of what they want in exchange for a promise to not demand the other half for a year or two. And that promise is often broken, followed by a new compromise in the same pattern. But I'll point specifically at Hillarycare. This isn't just a single nutcase, a large part of the Democrat leadership at both national and state level joined in. The Washington state legislature, with a solid Democrat majority at the time, enacted Hillarycare - some pages of the bill originally went to the House floor bearing marks showing that they were faxed from the White House. Critics predicted, before it was even formally proposed, that it would be a disaster, and fairly quickly. Turned out the critics were overly optimistic. It was a worse disaster, sooner, than they predicted. A year after it took effect, in about half the counties in the state it wasn't possible for an individual to acquire medical-care insurance. Several large insurers abandoned the whole state. In the next election for the state legislature, I don't think there was a single candidate who (a) did not pledge to repeal it and then (b) won, against an opponent who had pledged repeal. The replacement plan, designed to empower individuals and make medical-care insurance reasonably affordable rather than designed to transfer power from individuals to government, worked pretty well until the Obamacare law invalidated it.

Well, I only disagree with the last word. I would change it to "more so."

Darth, I would add two things to Kiwiwriter47's rant. 1) Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. - George Santayana 2) Those who try to make us forget the past intend to repeat it. - me

If you take your blood pressure cuffs to a fire station, and the paramedics happen to not be busy at the moment, they'll probably be willing to check your blood pressure using their professional equipment and skill - and then you can use your cuffs on the spot, right afterward, to see how accurate those devices are.

We've been getting a lot of rain lately. I doubt it's related to the hurricane that Florida's dealing with, though. Considering that we're in western Montana.

Also, read all of the first two chapters of Genesis to answer one question: were women created before cattle, or after?

But they aren't process cheese, so don't feed the babies any process cheese food.

Proof the world is not flat: if it were, cats would have pushed everything off the edge by now.

The state of Washington used to have open primaries. All candidates for party nomination (and all candidates running non-partisan) appeared on a single primary ballot. You could vote for candidates from eight different parties, if you wanted to. In order to also appear on the general-election ballot, a candidate had to (a) be the top vote-getter in their specific party and (b) get a certain minimum percentage of the total number of votes for that office. And, again, every candidate went on a single ballot. It was nothing unusual to see a general-election ballot with four or five parties having candidates for the same office, even for statewide offices. Occasionally three for state legislature and local-government positions. Then the issue of hostile voting, to cause a party one dislikes to nominate a less-suitable candidate, was raised. By the Libertarian Party. WHY?????? Who would bother to spoil a minor party that way? The courts actually declared the existing system unconstitutional. The replacement system basically made it impossible for a third party to appear on the general-election ballot.

I'm stumbling over the thought of a french horn in a woodwind quintet. ...there was a poster here advertising a performance by a (presumably vocal) quartet, and the picture of the group had 5 guys. Apparently either they can't count, or I can't.

Kudos on having not progressed. Please continue to underachieve in this regard.

I would say that I know, but that's in a different universe.

The Librarian of Congress funded publication of a Braille edition of Playboy from 1970 through 1985 when Congress tried a back-door ban on it (because all those lurid photos that weren't in the Braille edition obviously were encouraging the blind people who didn't receive them and couldn't see them anyway to become promiscuous), and then from mid-1986 (including picking up the missed issues) to at least 2018 after the courts lambasted Congress for violating the 1st Amendment in a way that targeted handicapped people. The Librarian of Congress currently funds the publication in Braille of over 100 magazine titles; Playboy (no longer among them, as it is now online-only) was at one time the 6th most popular. I am not finding any references to a Braille edition of Hustler.

Ah, I specifically said Trump was *impeached* on charges that Biden boasted of. Specifically, he was accused of using his position as President to manipulate a foreign government (Ukraine, if I remember correctly) into doing something for his personal benefit. The stuff about his election shenanigans (including where he incited a riot by explicitly calling for peaceful protests) is separate, and not what he was impeached over. (Aside: if you hear "dog whistles" you might want to reconsider the question of who is the dog.) Biden boasted of threatening, as Vice President, to withhold US aid from another country if they didn't fire a prosecutor who was investigating possible corruption relating to the employment of his son Hunter Biden at a very high salary in a position he had no qualifications for. ... oh, and if you're wondering about my political positions, I figure that anyone who actually wants to be President is either too corrupt, too power-hungry, or too insane to be permitted anywhere near the White House. Which applies to any particular such person is open for discussion but not really important. I'm not notably happier with people who want to be in Congress.

The power of the Russian Army is much more clearly and accurately established than was formerly the case. (Also at a rather lower level.)

I still think that if Trump is guilty - which he probably is - an argument of selective prosecution could be very helpful for him. After all, he was impeached on allegations of doing things that Vice President Biden publicly boasted of having done, and is now being prosecuted for offenses that were not a problem worth prosecuting when Secretary of State Hillary Clinton committed them on a much larger scale (in spite of the fact that there were and are people in prison on convictions of having done the same thing on a minuscule scale as compared to either Trump or Clinton).

Aside from sex, Elliot and Ellen really look like identical twins. Which is weird. Yeah it could happen naturally... each child would have to inherit the *same* chromosome from each of the mother's 23 pairs, and from 22 of the father's (the other one being the sex chromosome pair, where they obviously have to *not* inherit the same one). So it would happen once per 2^45 (approximately 32 trillion) sets of twins. (And that's an overestimate, because it doesn't take recombination - where the two chromosomes in a pair swap parts between them - into account. But I'm going to ignore that.) The total number of humans who have ever lived is (estimated) only 117 billion, and most of them weren't twins. Even if all of them were twins, there'd be only about 1 chance in 550 that a pair of so-close-to-identical twins has ever yet existed; and if one had, there'd only be about a 7% chance they'd be alive now.

Well, if Putin really believes that Ukraine is part of Russia (even though his logic better supports the notion that Russia is part of Ukraine), then in his mind it's improper for Ukraine to defend itself from Russia. Not that many people care that much about what's in his mind, given that he himself apparently isn't.

Pharoah, that explanation is really cheesy.

Is anyone keeping track of the awards /me hands out?

"Impossible." -- sorry, can't remember which comic-strip youngster I first heard that one from.