The big problem I have with this is the "ground of being" idea. In one case you're describing it as laws of physics, and that's not really "the foundation from which all of existence springs". It's more of a description of what things do when there are things. Unless future physics takes a turn I really don't expect, it won't explain why there is a Universe (anthropic principles are not laws of physics). It isn't clear to me that "why is there a Universe?" is actually a real question instead of a confusion of ideas.

This doesn't seem to me at all similar to even a basic idea of God, even a very mechanistic version. I don't see that it's worth applying the same name to the concepts.

Moreover, it's perfectly possible to come up with something that really resembles most ideas of God that isn't a ground of being. To give one, suppose that God is the Universe (Sundays are my days to be a solipsist, and solipsism is logically equivalent to pantheism). In that case, the laws of physics and the laws of mysticism run the Universe, and neither may say why anything exists.

Religions often say nothing that is falsifiable, and in that case can't disagree with science. Lots of religious people (probably most) are happy to believe things about the world we exist in when given the evidence.

Look up the Nicene Creed and try to disprove any part of it. None of it is actually falsifiable, which means it's completely compatible with science.

Religious belief also depends on experience. Scientifically, we know some things about these experiences, but there's no scientific way to tell if they're artifacts of evolution in the human brain or actual divine perception.

Other nitpick: aside from the wrong plural, it was in a place that doesn't take a plural. "Our new virus overlords" is grammatically correct, if trite. Compare "our new viruses overlords".

He's a senator because he got very slightly more votes than his opponent, as determined in a painstaking recount that took months. This recount was overseen by a three-judge panel, and then examined at length by the Minnesota Supreme Court. Half of those judges were Republican appointees, and only two were DFL appointees. The Republican governor then signed the election certificate without any demur.

There were some problems found in the voting (most notably that the absentee ballot instructions didn't conform to absentee ballot law), and these were largely corrected later on.

Minnesota does tend to elect kooks and one-of-a-kinds.

I'd also like to nominate Rudy Perpich (governor, kook), Keith Ellison (IIRC the only Muslim in Congress), and possibly Michelle Bachman (representative) and Paul Wellstone (senator). It can get pretty colorful on the lower levels, also.

In defense of Jesse "the governor" Ventura, he did a pretty good job at running the state, although I never thought he had a real vision for where it should go. The guy hired competent advisers and listened to them, always a good thing in a politician.

The NDAA is the appropriation act for the entire military, and at times in the process a legislator must vote yes or no on an entire bill without chances for amendment. A lot of crap gets through that way. I'd like to see strict limits about germaneness of amendments in both Houses, but we don't have that.

I wasn't following that. How did the detention get into the bill? Was it ever voted on or discussed in the Senate? (For all I know, it could have come entirely from the House of Representatives, and left in by the conference committee.) What's Franken's record on that issue itself?

He's stated that his ambition this election is to double, maybe even triple, his margin of victory.

About 97% of the US public was in favor of joining WWII after the Pearl Harbor attack. That may have been the most popular war in US history, clearly more than the 90% after the Tonkin Gulf Resolution. The support was also deeper, since nobody thought WWII was going to be quick and easy.

In WWII, the US also had lot of surplus food. That didn't prevent food rationing, although it was never as bad as it got in some countries. We sent a lot of farmers overseas as soldiers, and a lot of food to other armies (IIRC, approximately enough to the Soviet Union to feed the Red Army for a year). In a war that big (assuming one could exist) the Victory Gardens would come back.

The US went to a centrally planned economy with the War Production Board. They had pretty arbitrary powers, including requiring manufacturers to license designs to other manufacturers for specified compensation. Again, I'd expect this in case of a similar war.

However, WWII was a war to utterly defeat other world powers (the Allies forced Germany and Japan to pretty close to unconditional surrender, and the terms Germany was willing to accept from Western Europe were not far from it). If this actually happened nowadays, the losing countries would probably start a nuclear war.

Military organizations have very good means of dealing with large numbers of people who *really* don't want to be there, and have for a long, long time. For much of the modern era, recruiting in many places was basically grabbing people and forcibly enlisting them, regardless of their personal situation and even nationality. In the 60s, the military was at a disadvantage, since it actually had organized opposition to the draft and the current war, but it didn't stop them from drafting a whole lot of young men who really, really didn't want to be soldiers and probably sent to Vietnam, training them, and sending them to war.

FWIW, Selective Service didn't seem to keep track of addresses shortly after our participation in the Vietnam War. I moved in 1974, sent in my change of address like it said to, and that letter returned because there was no such addressee. I tried to find where I should send it in to, failed, and forgot about it.

(My wife tried registering with the Selective Service, thinking that, as a civil rights issue, both sexes should register. They refused it, on the grounds that she was female.)

An ancient system with millions of lines of COBOL is probably a crawling horror. Individual COBOL statements are usually easy to read, but that doesn't mean a program will be. (I used to do this stuff. I have worked with unintelligible COBOL, although not on this scale.)

One issue is that COBOL works in decimal places. You change the year format to 9999 in one place, and hope it gets through a sequence of programs that have different names for everything, and that you can find the one that defines that variable as format 99 when it screws up. It'll truncate nicely. Also, the file formats will have to change. A two-digit date is two bytes (whether COMPUTATIONAL or COMP-3), while a four-digit date is four bytes (if COMPUTATIONAL) or three (if COMP-3).

There are things I do not allow in my house, like violence, illegal drugs, and COBOL compilers.

From the fall of France to the attack on the Soviet Union, about a year, the UK was the only European country at war with Germany for any length of time (Yugoslavia and Greece weren't fighting the Germans long). The UK was also at war with Italy, although Italy was at war with Greece for some of this period. In this time, the UK received support from Commonwealth countries, and increasing support from the US (including support that was illegal for the US, as a neutral, to provide).

I'm counting that as "stood alone in Europe against the shackles of tyranny", myself, although the OP did short the Scots and Irish (although Eire was neutral throughout the war, a lot of Irish enlisted in the British armed forces). While there were a lot of individuals from other countries helping (the RAF had a lot of Polish pilots during the Battle of Britain), that isn't the same as an actual country.

Outsourced customer service is generally paid by the call. This means that the ideal call is a short one where the customer is satisfied enough not to raise a ruckus, but will run into problems and have to call back. Even if there is any way to pass feedback to the software vendor, it isn't in the customer service's interest to provide it, as clarifying a confusing thing in the software could lead to serious loss of revenue. That also means that the software vendor doesn't have the information to either fix things or even figure out what team is making confusing things.

This is also effectively true when a badly run software company runs its own customer service. A well-run company, however, can get useful information out of customer service, and has the ability to actually solve problems. It has incentive to fix difficult problems and data to find them. It's more expensive up front, but if you can reduce the number of calls, by reducing the number of customers with problems, you can save money in the long run.

If a company actually cares, it can also use excellent customer service to keep customers. I still have warm feelings for Apple based on a customer service call several years ago, in which I was quickly talking to somebody who understood what I was talking about, proposed a solution that worked, and provided useful supplementary information. You don't get that from outsourced service from Bangladesh.

You're providing absolutely no evidence that there is any "creep". Or that you'd expect uniform hemispheres.