Don Edwards

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.

More than most people his age, Tedd has been hiding things from most people for years.

DGB doesn't necessarily need all of Tedd's data (e.g. his friends' clone forms), and there has been no statement by anyone which strongly implies that they got all of it. Yes, they got Tedd's notes - but even a single clone form is likely to be vastly more data than a human can put into notes in one lifetime. Particularly if that lifetime is, to date, about 18 years. If DGB got a set of devices - a scanner and a TFG - and any necessary software, they can build their own collection of data.

It's explicit that he CAN see through the illusion, but Lavender is currently using a clone form - not an illusion. Can't definitely comment on that, because Lavender would have privileged access to it - considering she works for MIB and is dating Tedd's dad. But we know that Tedd has built several TF guns, and it's reasonably likely that MIB took one or more and replicated them. So I'm guessing that quite a lot of Uryuom - at a minimum, the ones near Moperville - have access to it. Also, I'm guessing that the ability to see through the illusions comes automatically with being a seer (but may or may not be limited to them).

While others are a loaf.

I've read a story where that plan was actually taken out and used. (Not on Earth though. And with extensive adjustments - no plan of battle survives contact with the enemy - because the zombies weren't human even before they were zombified.)

(Recheck thread title, you misspelled "Thursday". )