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Tuesday’s Forum
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17 responses to “Tuesday’s Forum”
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Yesterday was the first day of early voting in Texas. Some results.
Harris County (Houston): 104,660 votes cast. Previous midterm record 63,118 in 2018. In addition to 24,794 mail in votes received. Presidential years have had more. Harris County has about 407,000 more registered voters than in 2018.
The other big cities/counties in Texas have not had much reporting yet.
It was a beautiful fall day
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California voter here.
I received my ballot the first week in October. I reviewed my handbook, completed my ballot and mailed it in on Saturday October 10th. A few days later I received a text from the County indicating that my ballot was received. Not long after that I received a second text indicating that my ballot was tabulated.This is the way our system in CA has functioned for a few years now.
Attestation: To my knowledge I did NOT commit voter fraud.
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Continuing from yesterday’s thread in reply to @JohnSF .
I sat down one day and made up rules that follow the laws of physics as we know them. And in particular the issues with radiation and collisions with stray atoms, dust, and even larger bodies like pebbles in the interstellar medium. I came up with this:
Max realistic speed for crewed spaceships is 0.05 c (5% the speed of light). this gets you to Alpha Centauri in 90 years. there is some measurable time dilation, but it’s more like abad joke. that is, you’d arrive in like 89 years and six months ship’s time. Clearly not practical for interstellar tourism or trade, but good enough for generation ships.
Why generation ships? Because the next rule is hibernation, stasis, or suspended animation of humans is not possible past the embryonic stage.
Third, max speed for uncrewed ships is 0.1 c. That’s Alpha Centauri in 45 years, with a bit better time dilation. Not that machines care how much they age. But this allows you to send ships ahead loaded with frozen animal embryos, seeds, and self-replicating machinery that could, for instance, build a copy of itself, plant seeds, grow farm animals (artificial wombs are allowed), reap seeds and collect more embryos for the new ship. they could also build and deploy satellites the colonists will need when they get there 45 years later. And crucially large parabolic antennae in stable orbits to keep in touch with Earth. All trade will be knowledge and information.
Last rule, simple life is relatively common in the galaxy. complex life is not. So there are lots of bacteria and viruses, but not much in the way of even microplancton and much less large, visible, multicellular lifeforms. This allows human colonists to take over suitable worlds with some oxygen in theri atmosphere.
Story? Not yet.
But there’s an inevitable wrinkle. earth can launch colonies every century or twice per century, say, and the colonies themselves might do so as well. So in a few millennia, absent another extremely rare sapient life form, the galaxy will be filled with humans. But these will be physically isolated from each other, living under a wide variety of planetary conditions such as light, radiation, insolation, temperatures, etc. eventually they’ll begin to drift apart genetically, as will their domesticated plants and animals.
Despite the automated ships building infrastructure ahead of the colonies, some may malfunction or otherwise get things wrong. So maybe a few planets are occupied by humans, but they don’t call home or contact other colonies. So maybe one colony ship gets to what they think is an empty world pre-set up five thousand years ago, and they find a couple billion people living there already. And, curiously, none of them have green skin or a prehensile back tentacle like normal humans in the year 455,000 CE (or whenever).
Hey! We found aliens!
Oh, wait. The library has records of primitive humans like this… Hm.. Oh, We’re the aliens now!
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We Americans are so insular, I doubt anyone actually noticed this good news.
Alberta separatists lose vote on leaving Canada
Canada’s province of Alberta rejected a plan to hold a binding independence referendum, results showed Tuesday, a win for unity as the country faces worsening ties with the United States.
Public broadcaster CBC and leading private network CTV projected a clear win for the federalist side, with official results showing more than 76 percent support for Alberta remaining in Canada with nearly 45 percent of ballots counted.
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It’s probably effectively less than this. It wasn’t a vote on separation but a vote on whether to have a vote on separation (why? no idea). In the last months the pro-separatists changed their message to, “even if you are not pro-separation, please vote for the vote to send a message”. So some amount of yes voters would have actually voted no if the separatist vote came about.
Oh, and now some of the separatist leaders are claiming vote fraud. Lying liars gonna lie. Basically, the Canadian version of Republicans
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Trump is bragging about being able to recognize a giraffe on a dementia test again.
Also, can any of our Texas folks verify that this happened? If so, this feels pretty close to illegal, especially if the group that is masquerading as an officially recognized group isn’t registered with officers, etc. Dirty politics.
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Interesting.
Something tickled in my brain when I read about this, it reminded me of a tactic Ted Cruz used when he was running for president. This is the sort of thing that Axiom Strategies pulls, so I looked it up, and yep, Axiom is working for Ken Paxton.
“The political orbits of Cruz and Paxton have significant overlap. Axiom Strategies — the GOP firm run by Jeff Roe, who led Cruz’s 2016 presidential campaign — has long worked with both men. Nick Maddux, senior adviser to the Paxton campaign, was a key staffer in Cruz’s 2018 and 2024 reelection efforts. Sam Cooper, a longtime Cruz adviser, is now a senior strategist for the pro-Paxton Lone Star Liberty PAC.”
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More on this from Houston Chronicle:
Mysterious group behind transgender mailers formed weeks ago in Wyoming
Mailers from a mysterious group purporting to represent transgender students have riled up voters in Texas as early voting gets underway.
But the Texas Transgender Student Union that sent the brochures and similar text messages that went out to voters earlier this month appears to have been created just weeks ago — and is registered as an LLC in Wyoming.
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The Texas Transgender Student Union LLC that sent the mailers was registered in Wyoming on Sept. 2, according to the Wyoming Secretary of State’s website. Requests for information sent to an email address included on the LLC filings got no response Tuesday.The Sheridan, Wyo., address for the group is the same address used by 26 commercial registered agents representing close to 300,000 of Wyoming’s 830,000 limited liability companies, according to The Sheridan Press.
BTW, population of Wyoming: 590,000. But that is another issue.
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Last week I couldn’t make up my mind what to cook. I wanted to use some of the frozen chicken stock I made two weeks ago, so I thought bean soup plus milanesas in chipotle sauce, or plain, or mixed with creamy pasta, or chicken and bean stew instead.
So, without a definite shopping list, I headed to the store and browsed several areas to see if an ingredient would inspire something.
I found ground turkey, so I decided to make turkey burger patties and fries.
I thought turkey is somewhat more cohesive than chicken. Well, not really. ground chicken feels more like sticky paste than ground meat. Ground turkey is more like firmer sticky paste. So I mixed in beaten eggs just to be able to shape patties.
But air frying them was quick and easy, and from the second batch on I got them right (the first batch was a bit overcooked). I also browned some onions and added some balsamic vinegar when they were nearly done, for use as a topping.
The stock remains safely frozen.
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I think this explains a lot.
The relevant bit:
On Tuesday, the nonpartisan Public Religion Research Institute released its annual American Values Survey. The survey found that white evangelical Protestants are the only religious group in which a majority does not agree that empathy is foundational moral value (42%). Instead, a majority (54%) say empathy can be dangerous when it leads people away from a society guided by God’s truth, PRRI said.
So, some of the most strident adherents to a religion largely based on the command to love your neighbor as yourself, thinks empathy is contrary to this purpose?
Seen this way, locking people in cages in unsanitary conditions, denying them medical care, and sending them to dangerous countries they ave no ties to and don’t even speak the language of, counts as love.
It must.
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Maybe instead of playing his masculine fantasies, Hetsghe should use that money to raise troop pay so they can afford to feed their families.
