That seems highly dubious considering that the only US senator that I am aware of with a history in the KKK was Democrat Robert Byrd https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
As a former high-ranking KKK Recruiter who spent > 50 years in the senate as a Democrat and even spent over 20 years as the chair of the Senate Democrat Caucus(Ie Majority/Minority leader for the Democrats in the senate, Jan 1977 - Jan 1989).

(This makes sense as 'The South' was democrat territory during reconstruction which was when the KKK was active. Some have even gone so far as to claim that the KKK was a militant arm of the Democrat party, much like the BLM movement today)

That sounds great for the rest of the world, but in the US, the nuclear regulatory commission has a policy of increasing required safety levels to prevent any commercial nuclear facility from being cheaper than other power sources. This gives us maximum radiation levels, for example, that preclude some normal building materials(like granite tiles).
(the NRC get dinged for things like 3-mile island, but does not benefit from nuclear power actually being used, so it is in their interests to block or prevent nuclear power for civil use)

Global politics frowns at wars of conquest(remember how everyone grumbled at Russia for Crimea?)

Where exactly the war is being fought does not matter much, so long as the right amounts of money are being spent in the right districts to ensure the incumbents will get reelected for 'protecting jobs'

The media only cares in so far as they can praise political allies or condemn political enemies, so most civilians are not even aware of how many wars are currently being fought. Any wars with an inconvenient slant will just be ignored until they become useful either politically or financially(Scary headlines help sell papers/clicks).

So long as having wars is either politically or financially useful, we will continue to have wars, with just the details changing based on what is most advantageous at the current moment.

If only people would remember that 1984 was a warning, not a guide-book.
(Free speech? Religious freedom? freedom of association? Down the memory hole!)

An entertainer making a political statement that alienates their fan-base has always been a career-killer.
I fail to see how that relates directly to a third party separating an entertainer from their fan-base when the entertainer says something that their fans agree with, but the third party objects to.

In the first case, the audience can always find other, less objectionable entertainers, but if the third party is removing all entertainers with a certain political bent, that is thought-police. In '1984' Big Brother was in the government, in the 2020's Big Brother is controlling social media.

Indeed, now that we have gone from 90%+ agricultural workers to ~1.3% agricultural workers, we have almost 89% unemployment.

There are three reasons a job will be automated instead of manual:
1) To Save Money
2) To Save Money, and
3) To Save Money

The fewer available jobs there are per laborer, the cheaper it is to hire labor, the more available jobs there are per laborer, the more expensive it is to hire labor.

We see this in companies taking factories/call centers to cheaper countries, we see this in low pay for entry level jobs(more available labor if it requires fewer skills), and we see this in highly paid jobs that require more experience, worse working conditions, or some combination thereof.

The only time this fails is when regulations artificially raise the minimum price of labor above the value of a job(as was seen when many low paid or entry level jobs went away after minimum wage laws made them too expensive for the value returned)

*IF* we could build robots today that could replace every single job, it would still take years or decades to build enough to replace the current work-force.

As it is, we have lots of development work still to do before we can get anywhere near that, and so it will be decades or centuries before all of the current jobs can be replaced(if they ever can be).

Between 'artisanal' crafts/goods/foods, e-sports, entertainment, and online 'influencers' how many completely new jobs do you think were created in the last couple of years? The last couple of decades?

Unless and until machine creativity and flexibility eclipses that of humans, there will always be jobs that are not suited for, or cannot be performed by automation.

If people are not smart enough to come up with their own new jobs, they can always go to work for the entrepreneurs that are, just like today.

And just like today, if there are 'unemployable' people, it is due to legal/political reasons, not economic ones(ie minimum wage and labor laws).

Admittedly I don't use Facebook, but my understanding of their primary content was updates from friends and loved ones.
* New parents are hardly going to try to charge their friends to look at pictures of their newborn.
* No one is going to try to charge their contacts to look at the pictures they took of their child's play.
* No one wants to pay money to look at the dinner you just made for yourself
* No one is going to charge people to see their annual Christmas letter
* No one is going to charge their friends to look at their vacation photos.
etc.

The fact that there are occasionally 'interesting' news articles shared in among all of this free content only matters to Facebook in so far as they can mark articles they agree with as 'trustworthy' or ones praising people they do not like as 'untrustworthy'.

It is basically a straw-man argument backed by 'if you argue with me you are clearly racist'.

If you look at the statement closely, you can see how the claim that voter ID laws are racist is clearly a racist stance(in the literal sense of making judgements about individuals based on their race), but it is in the 'approved' category, and therefore anyone who argues against it or tries to point out how racist it is, gets called racist themselves.

It is very similar to the argument 'I am not a misogynist because I love all women equally!' 'You still treat them like trash' 'Misogynist!'

The problem is, the party that claims to be all for unity and tolerance is only tolerant of 'their' unity.
Let anyone not in their little club get any sort of power, and they will get ripped to shreds, even if they must rip apart the country to get to them.

Categorizing those that would vote against them as 'deplorables' or 'not really black'

With such wonderful double-speak as 'Restaurants, Churches, and political rallies will spread the virus and must be shut down, but we must all support these 'peaceful protests''

Trump is not a member of their Cabal, so they had to remove him by any means necessary, including trashing any remaining credibility of the legacy news industry.

Personally, I think the election result is highly questionable, but that probably does not matter much, as Biden is a member in good standing and will do whatever his masters tell him to do. Even if Trump got a second term, it was only a matter of time, after all, 'Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia.'

If you want special privileges, there is generally a price to pay for that.
These are usually called a license, such as a drivers license, a hunting license, a food service license, a catering license, a concealed carry license, etc.
It is *very* common to require a company to acquire a license if they want to provide specific types of goods or services, and those licenses almost always come with restrictions(hunting season, speed limits, no trucks allowed roads, one-way roads, health inspections, hand-washing stations and rules, etc)

It kind of sounds like the government decided that some limits need to be added to something they are currently allowing(like when the federal speed limit of 55mph was introduced in 1974).

It is not donations to candidates(those are limited and recorded as well), but to political organizations(including the parties themselves an political action committees). These organizations may not be able to advocate for specific candidates by name, but they can put out as many attack ads as they want not to mention 'get out the vote' and other operations focused on neighborhoods likely to be favorable to their party.
There is also preferential press(paying to have negative news stifled, or positive news amplified for example), and any number of other methods of indirect contribution.
(if you search for a candidate and the first 5 articles are about fraud or indictments against that party(with nothing about how they were all dismissed with prejudice), while searches for the opposing candidate only shows good news for the first 3 pages(even though they have similar or more bad news in total), that is a lot harder to track or even detect)

Much of the wealth accumulated by politicians is not paid directly to them, it is usually highly paid(often no-show) positions for family members. Hillary Clinton at the Rose Law Firm, and Hunter Biden with his Ukrainian position are both purported to be quid-pro-quo of this sort.

The more corruption moles you whack, the harder it is to track, or even detect corruption. How many non-accountants understand the details of a 'triple Irish' for a tax example?

Unfortunately, one of the biggest draws to power is to use that power for your own advancement, and that is not going to change unless we somehow manage to change human nature.

They already collected all of this data from my wife when she was applying for a green card(in addition to a health screening and other information), and I think they did it again when she was applying for citizenship.
The only difference is they would want to verify who I am as well(as her sponsor).
My finger/palm, face and eye data have been collected just for visiting other countries, both by the US when I return and by other countries where I have vacationed.

I wonder A) who originated this idea, and B) what issue it is expected to address.

Considering how little I had to do for verifying my identity as her sponsor(normal I-9 level verification if I remember correctly), I would not be surprised if there is a fair bit of fraud when they are trying to verify sponsors and this is intended to make that more difficult, or at least easier to track.

Austin has several 'Bat Bridges' the one on town lake is just the most scenic one(but not the largest in the city: https://www.pbs.org/video/the-... ).

Although admittedly the weird quotient did go down a bit when Leslie died.( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... )

At least we still have our colonies of wild parrots ( https://www.austin360.com/arti... )

A quick google search for wealthiest Americans suggests you are wrong: (note: 2019 numbers from Forbes)
Jeff Bezos, Amazon – $114 billion.
Bill Gates, Microsoft – $106 billion.
Warren Buffett, Berkshire Hathaway – $80.8 billion.
Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook – $69.6 billion.
Larry Ellison, software – $65 billion.
Larry Page, Google – $55.5 billion.
Sergey Brin, Google – $53.5 billion.

See that thing after their name? That is the company most of their money is invested in, and it is primarily due to that particular investment that they are considered the richest.
My wife and I have had no difficulty finding stocks and mutual funds to invest in. The NASDAQ *daily* average volume is 4.4 billion, and NYSE is higher than that, so I find it hard to believe that anyone can't find things to invest in.

No one with any financial sense wants to have a pile of cash just sitting there, as it will be losing money to inflation at best.
At a minimum you want a bank or money market account so you can at least generate interest. If you do not need immediate liquidity, you put it in stocks/bonds/mutual funds or other investment properties(such as businesses or real estate) so that you can generate income from that money.

I find it hard to believe that your described complete lack of financial sense is highly prevalent among those with a lot of money, because if it were, they would never have accumulated that much wealth to start with.

Note: even money in a bank account is not actually sitting in a vault, as the bank only needs to have ~10% on-hand and the rest is given out in loans, helping to circulate it more in the economy.

That would be the difference between a straight democracy and a representative democracy.
In a straight democracy whoever receives the popular majority is the victor.
In a representative democracy the election is broken into smaller pieces and whoever wins a majority of those pieces is the victor.(in this case, states, and I am not aware of anyone claiming that *state* borders have been gerrymandered)

Straight democracy was shown to readily fall into the tyranny of the majority, and eventual collapse. So the founders of the United States decided to try something a little different to try and get something more stable.
As few historical democracies managed to survive beyond a couple hundred years, and as it has been some 232 years since the constitution was ratified, it would suggest that their efforts seem to have improved the longevity of the nation over what would be expected by a straight democracy.

Even if you want to assert that the current leadership does not count as elected by the rules set down in the constitution(Something which I may have heard from protesters, but not in any serious case working its way though the judicial system), that is still 228 years of peaceful transitions as directed by an election of the citizenry.

Sounds like they are making an effort to get in under the wire while they can still use this excuse for giving money to the companies that lobby them. If they don't get it done before Starlink becomes globally available, they may not be able to convince their voters that 'it was needed at the time'.