They aren't acting out of the fear that someone is slipping out of their control. They are merely doing what they have always done, except when someone stronger was preventing them, by force, from doing it.

And colonialism, particularly in Africa, is far older than the Ottoman empire and Turkey. Turkey was just following in the long tradition of arab and persian empires.

Well, for one thing, it doesn't involve amending the constitution for every decision that needs to be overturned.

For another thing, 3/4 is not written in stone. It could be 2/3, or 3/5, or whatever.

If we were talking about a state veto over federal legislation, I'd support a low bar, like 1/3, or maybe 2/5.

Unfortunately, Supreme Court cases are binary decisions. Overturning a ruling is, in effect, a ruling for the opposite. Because of that, 3/5 or 2/3 would be more appropriate.

Then again, I'm not concerned with "popular support". Bringing it up suggests that you missed a some important days in your civics class, or, more likely, that your teachers missed those days in theirs.

Who ever said it would be a simple majority?

And you may not be aware, but the 17th Amendment abolished the old system of states appointing their senators. Passing the senate hasn't been synonymous with meeting with the approval of the states since 1913.

rsync with the --compare-dest option will give changed files, and --link-dest will give whole file trees at set times.

You can do it pretty simple, or quite complicated, depending on your needs and preferences.

rsync --link-dest makes a new tree with the current time, using only enough space for the directory tree and the changed files. On my box, I use it in a cron that runs every 5 minutes and cycles through my backup list. If any of them are older than the interval, it fires off the backup script specific to that type of connection (local LVM, nfs, CIFS/SMB, ssh, etc).

A second cron then prunes those directories so that I've got fewer copies as I go back in time. An example would be pulling a copy every 15 minutes and keep every copy for 2 weeks, keep one from each hour for a month, one per day for a year, one per month for 10 years, and one per year forever.

This can be easily adapted to other schemes. --compare-dest will make a tree with just the changed files, which you can then gather up and sort into the archival tree. Run a second (plain) rsync to sync up the comparison directory when done.

Did they not cover the Connecticut Compromise in your high school? Wyoming + Montana already have more say in lots of things than California.

Right now, the Supreme Court has the final say in everything. The only appeal possible is open revolution. Surely that is not to be preferred over peaceful options.

There is no shortage of people leading the push for polygamy now. Why would we need one more?

Just FYI, several of the states had official religions at the time of ratification. "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion" was just as much about preventing congress from abolishing those as it was about preventing them from creating a new official federal religion. "Respecting" here means "regarding" or "relating to", and swings both ways.

One constitutional amendment I've seen proposed before, and after this week I now believe that it is the most important one ever, would allow a majority of states to overturn supreme court decisions by passing legislation within a set window.

Nah, no need to imagine spite when the power vacuum is as plain as day.

European colonialism is on the decline across Africa and the middle east. As a result, the spores of the previous colonial powers, dormant for hundreds of years, are waking up and reasserting themselves.

The slave trade, for example, ran for hundreds of years across those parts of the world under Islamic control, until Europe came within a hair's breadth of eradicating the practice from the world. Now it is back.

Do you know what a word fetish is?

One example would be repeating "science" like a magic talisman to protect you from having to think.

Go back and read the linked article, but this time with your mind open. Pretend that it was written by someone you usually disagree with, someone who has no authority for you. Print it out and use a highlighter to mark each paragraph or sentence that is merely a restatement of the assumptions.

When you see what is left, ask yourself why someone would agree with it, if they didn't already agree with it when they started.

You may want to read that again. First, they are talking about doses 30 times the average annual background level. I don't think anyone is claiming that hormesis applies when someone nukes the city you are living in.

And second, they are using circular logic. Read this quote carefully:

"A comprehensive review of available biological and biophysical data led the committee to conclude that the
risk would continue in a linear fashion at lower doses
without a threshold and that the smallest dose has the
potential to cause a small increase in risk to humans."

You'll note that they aren't saying here that medical evidence supports LNT. Instead they are looking at biophysical data (radiation can harm DNA) and biological data (damaged DNA can cause mutation) to reach the conclusion they started with.

Actually, the paragraph before the one I pulled that sentence from is even worse. They took a page out of the climate change handbook and are now citing their model as evidence in support of their model.

Flight attendants are "strictly regulated" on your planet? Sounds nice.

The only way I can make sense of your arguments is if you are making two unstated, and incorrect, assumptions. I don't like to put arguments in the mouths of others, but I can really see no other way to reach your conclusion. Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.

The first assumption is that the background radiation level is uniform across the planet.

It is not. And cancer rates are not positively related to the average background level of a region. In fact, they seem to be inversely related. Here is one link, the first one I found. Feel free to google as many more as you care to look for.

The second assumption is that life that evolved on a planet with background radiation, but without any mechanism to repair radiation damage.

This is also wrong. Cancer happens not when a cell mutates, but when a mutated cell is not rejected by the body, or not quickly enough. Long living animals, like humans, have lots and lots of repair and rejection systems. We call it hormesis when those repair mechanisms are stimulated by subacute doses.

Also, HWE does not appear to be dominant. See here for example.

Yeah, that table is based on LNT, a "theory" with less supporting evidence than Santa Claus. Actually, that's not fair to Santa, since the evidence directly contradicts LNT. But LNT is mandated by law in many cases, which you should keep in mind the next time someone tells you that the left is pro-science.

LNT is "Linear, no threshold". According to that nonsense, a radiation dose expected to cause cancer in a person, but distributed over 7 billion people still causes 1 "extra" cancer in the world. This dose may not even be detectable, by the way, and would be far smaller than the ordinary background radiation levels.

In reality, people with occupational radiation doses have lower cancer rates than the general population.

I still have, but no longer need, a relay box wired to a parallel port pin on my router.

The router sniffs conntrack looking for recently used peers, and pings them. If they ping well, they get stuffed into a list of good pingers. It then hits a good pingers every few seconds. If it can't hit anything for a while, it restarts DHCP. If that doesn't work, it flips the relay for a few seconds.

Worked like a charm on my cable modem. Now that I have fiber, the ONT is rock solid. If I'm down, there is a fiber cut somewhere, or a router leaking magic smoke in their head end.

P.S. The other pins are wired to an old school LED bar display, cycling lame patterns. One is "cylon".

What is the importance of being 5 years late?

Costs Of Nuclear Power Plants - What Went Wrong?