https://www.activistpost.com/2016/01/9-ways-to-stop-cooperating-with-the-ruling-elites-control-system.html

Well, that's good as far as it goes. But how are we precluding THEY from controlling, say, a JFKjr?

The improved answer is to seize control at the local level. Fair enough.

But at that point, one discovers that the system runs backward; the money is borrowed and comes down the food chain, rather than having local taxes fund matters and move up the food chain to fund the government.

Money, we know, is mostly fungible with power. I'd fall short of directly equating them, but that amounts to a quibble.

The rest of The Famous Article is interesting and worth discussion as well.

damn_registrars correctly points out that the NIH is not the NHS. My TLA was AFU, and I suck. That is all.

Smitty, of course

The specific effort here has to deal with his 2 week long fact-free diversion driven by his utterly unhinged hatred for the NIH. Start back here where I pointed out that our broken health care system needs to be completely scuttled to arrive at something that could ever improve outcomes. Then out of nowhere he declares the NIH to be an "epic disaster" , in spite of the fact that they do not have any meaningful role in the patient-provider aspect of health care. Strangely enough he mentions it right after backtracking away from his anti-factual bit about Sweden (perhaps in some alternate reality) abandoning Nordic Socialism.

Shortly after in a different thread we saw his NIH hatred come up again . He came up with a few random musings on the matter, including

Not a single one of which he gave any factual support for. Along the way he kept insisting that I was somehow calling them "perfect", in spite of multiple comments where I very plainly said the opposite of that. He did get in his last posts on the matters, so clearly he won on that dimension.

As I explained in the Maslow-3D model, fustakrakitch, faith is orthogonal to the physical plane of politics.

Besides, if one were to carry out the idolatrous program you allege, it would amount to a theocracy.

Always with the Kafka traps, fusty...

I need to frame this one from fustakrakitch, emphasis mine:

I would argue that Congress and the Executive branches have been swamped by the organizational effects of the last century into a vast, un-elected bureaucratic mass. You can attach pejorative labels if needful; I'm only after the simple, plain, non-partisan, observable point. The SCOTUS teeters on the brink.

Fustakrakitch mostly seems to troll on here. I get that. And maybe with enough yeomanwork and squinting, I can even track "very well under the circumstances". But just chalking it up to "apathy" is zooming out into the stratosphere.

Stay beautiful, Fusty.

How can the Daily Kos say this?

Those Republicans were really going to get around to doing their fundamental job Real Soon Now. They just totally got distracted by watching Barbie all Summer. Couldn't concentrate. Honest.

Less cheekily, if they left me in charge, I'd put down a simple rule: if Congress doesn't do it's basic job on time, then none of the dickheads and dickheadettes responsible can run for their current seat when next next up.

If these losers can't do the basics, our system should force us to find some officials who will.

Draconian? Sure, but if you want Grace, then talk to the Almighty.

And now, back to the carefully orchestrated farce that is our politics.

That breathless prose is quite the allegation: "The message from Main Justice, the DOJ-CRD and the DHS embeds is that too much fraud would be problematic to achieve." One is genuniely curious what traffic (if any) to which "Sundance" is privy that could be paraphrased to say that.

The thrust of the post, if you read it all, is that the DNC is worried that Trump may overwhelm the various rigging measures that were intended to keep Zombie Joe in office. (Not that I wish ill on the fellow, but I doubt that he lives another 14 months.)

I'm not actually sure any of this matters. Even if the Eminence Orange wins the primary (solid possibility), there are any number of other legal/medical shoes to drop. Stipulate that the Citrus Caesar wins the election and is inagurated again: what is the likelihood that the GOPatsies would lift finger #1 to bolster election integrity and curb mail-in ballots (an idea too stuck in foopid for even the French)? Low, I'd say. The Deep State doesn't give a French frigate's fo'c's'le for election integrity, and the peasantry having a say.

Apparently, the readers and writers for outside magazine don't read enough of the writings from Smitty's friends to realize that they erroneously chose a hopeless warzone hell-hole wasteland as one of the "top 15 happiest places to live in the US.

Certainly, Outside Magazine - and the people who wrote for it - must have accidentally visited some other place that they didn't see the "real" Minneapolis where people need to run for their lives and the murder rate exceeds 5,000,000%.

People are claiming that Trump's bit where he says that a Joe Biden re-election would cause WWII is some sort of gaffe. Excluding the standard GOP rant that exempts the infinitely infallible Saint Donald from ever making gaffes, there is a better explanation for what he was saying.

Really, this lines up with the standard GOP conspiracy of the Democratic Time Machine. After all if President Lawnchair had access to a time machine that could have prevented Benghazi, then certainly Biden would know about it as well, wouldn't he?

Too bad for Trump he didn't use that time machine to prevent the January 6th uprising. He'd be in a whole lot less trouble if he had.

I got a big fat BLOCKED screen today trying to post a comment. It had no links, no profanity, and I didn't even use the b!zx word or the Naz! word. Pack your shit, folks

I ran into a situation recently when trying to get a prescription filled for one of my sons recently (he's under 18). We have two main drug store chains here where we live, we'll call them "A" and "B". There are other options but these are the main players.

For no particular reason I've always had my own prescriptions filled at "A". A while ago my wife and I were talking about trying "B" in the future but we never progressed beyond talking about it.

Then we ran into supply issues getting our son's prescription filled at "A". Our son's doctor suggested we try "B" so we did; I asked a pharmacist at "B" if they had his prescription available and they said yes, so it seemed like a good thing to do.

Except I then went there after the prescription had been called in - mind you we had to adjust the dosing to match what was available but that wasn't terribly difficult - only to find that our insurance wasn't accepted there. All other things being equal the prescription would be $15 at "A" or around $50 at "B" (in other words full retail price at "B").

So then I was directed to a different pharmacy, that exists in some other local retailers. I went there and was told they couldn't fill that prescription for new patients currently; hence two different pharmacies that I could use could not fill the prescription while one I could not use could.

I'm sure this make sense to someone. All I see is another way that we are lining the pockets of the wealthy shitheads that run the most morally bankrupt industry the world has ever known.

The Boebert scandal is something to behold. She has apparently laid some claim to Christianity and made a public apology for acting a trifle worldly.

The pressures of politics have apparently broken her marriage. Prioritizing family over power is among the chief reasons why so many qualified people run away, run VERY away, from public service.

May the Lord pour some grace upon the lady.

My electricity costs of $0.11 per kWh plus tax (say, $0.01 per kWh) are my residential rates. That's what I pay at home, and WV doesn't have time-of-day pricing, so I get no discounts for middle-of-the-night usage versus during the day. Things may be different where you live.

The cost calculations I've done are based on that, though I'm still waiting on the permit to get my home charger installed so I'm not charging at home, yet. My county, where building permits are regulated, is running about a 21-day delay in issuing any sort of permit. This isn't unique to electrical or EV-related requests, that's just how overworked they are. As I'm DIY and not hiring a licensed electrician for the install, they're applying a little more scrutiny and it is taking a little longer.

Hyundai has a deal with Electrify America (EA), a nationwide charging network owned by Volkswagen, for 2 free years of charging on a new Hyundai EV. I get a free 30 minute session a day of DC fast charging. The nearest EA fast charger to my house is 22 miles away in a Walmart parking lot, but free electrons are free electrons and I can do my weekly shopping while charging. There are closer chargers than that, both Level 2 and DC fast, but free electrons.

There are basically three types of chargers -- Level 1 (AC), Level 2 (AC), and Fast DC which is sometimes (erroneously) called Level 3. Again, I'm in the US and our home mains comes in at 120 V, single phase AC. If you're in a country that doesn't use wimpy circuits, Level 1 may not exist for you at all.

Level 1 is simple run and extension cord from your car to your wall and plug in. Trickle charging. The car comes with an adapter for doing this and mine will supposedly pull up to 18 Amps this way, charging at a rate of 3-5 miles per hour. Unfortunately my house is over 100 years old and some of the wiring is still what they'd call "pre-War" in the UK, so the closest plug to my driveway was only giving me 6 Amps, or about 1 mile per hour of charging. Almost, but not quite totally useless. Trickle indeed. I have a long-term project to upgrade the rest of the circuits in my house, but this is a bit better than nothing.

Level 2 is what we in the US use for electric clothes dryers and ovens, 240 volt circuits. That's what a "home charger" is if you buy one. They are configurable to a variety of amperages, from 12 on up to 48, giving you upto 19.2 kW of charging power depending on your actual circuit. Circuit breakers are supposed to be rated 20% higher than the amperage draw of the devices on the circuit, so my 40 Amp Electrify Home charger needed a 50 Amp breaker. That's a fairly common size for L2 chargers you see out in the wild. They're often referred to as "destination chargers" and can be found at many hotels, universities, and office buildings. They add about 30 miles of range per hour of charging. In may of those places they are free to use for a couple of hours while you're at work, in class, or staying at the hotel.

DC Fast Charging are those chargers that look like gasoline fuel pumps. They commonly range from 50 kW to 350 kW for charging, though the amount varies based on what your model of car can handle, temperature, number of cars charging at once, phase of the moon, you name it. The ones closest to me are 150 kW and with my free 30 minutes I can go from 20% to 80% in my car. Unfortunately that's because the damn things usually cap out at around 75 kW for some reason. There is a set of 350 kW chargers a little further away at a mall, and I've used those with rates of 280 kW for my car, meaning 20% to 80% in like 10 or so minutes. They are nice. 10 mintues is simply me plugging in, going in the store to take a piss and buy a drink.

But let's talk reality. Where I live in WV is as close as you can get to not WV. I could just release my brakes and roll down the hill into VA and then keep coasting right on into MD. There may not be a lot of EVs in WV, but the Greater Washington DC area has a bunch, which means there can be lines to charge. So far the longest I've waited for a spot is 30 minutes. This is very much due to two factors: lack of enough chargers and free electrons. There are other chargers I could pop off to, but...free electrons. I'm not really in a hurry so the only DC Fast Chargers I've used are those belonging to EA. The Nav in the car (as well as Google Maps) shows chargers as POI, just like gas stations. If I was back in my always-in-a-hurry days, then I'd be checking out other charging stations. But, just like my grandfather would only full up at Shell stations, I'm only using EA for now.

That being said, their rates are NOT $0.12 per kWh. The EA rates are between $0.36 and $0.48 per kWh depending on prime vs non-prime times. So 3x to 4x what I'd pay by filling up at home, or standard big-business fuel rates comparable to gas prices.

The EPA window sticker says I am expected to save $4,500 over 5 years in fuel costs. The fine print around that is "Actual results will vary for many reasons, including driving conditions and how you drive and maintain your vehicle. The average new vehicle gets 28 MPG and costs $8,000 to fuel over 5 years. Cost estimates are based on 15,000 miles per year at $0.14 per kW-hr. MPGe is miles per gasoline gallon equivalent." Adjustments to their numbers based off of my local electric rates and driving habis should get me to $5,000 over 5 years -- almost DOUBLE that compared to the beast of a truck I was driving prior to this, which was getting about 15 MPG.

Finally, I've had one instance where the charger that I pulled in to didn't know the car that was there before me had left. It was still sitting there racking up idle time and I couldn't convince it to stop and let me charge. I called the EA support number (Sunday early afternoon) and it took 17 minutes on hold before they picked up. Once support answered they were able to quickly reset the charger and I was able to charge. For the record the charger was running Windows 10 and they just remotely rebooted it. Sadly, some things never change. I waited because the other spots were in use, and I just waived other people ahead because I wanted the experience with EA support. There were also other brand DC Fast Chargers around the corner, so if I was actually in a hurry, I wouldn't have bothered. Free electrons.

I'm a little over 40 days in with my new Hyundai Ioniq 6 and wanted to share some of my experiences in driving an EV as well as charging. To put things in perspective, I live in the Eastern Panhandle of West Virginia, which means there are no long areas of flat road at all. Everything is hilly with my house being at 660 ft elevation, but the nearest shopping center is at 450 ft and 5 miles away, with a bunch of up-and-down in between.

The official EPA fuel economy estimate for my car is 103 MPGe combined city/highyway with a rated range of 270 miles on a full battery. That works out to 33 kWh per 100 miles, according to the window sticker, or a calculated 3.0 miles per kWh. That's the full EPA estimate.

The car records these numbers in three groups -- all time, since last charge, and current trip. With the settings I have these numbers are in miles per KwH for efficiency. For the rest of the world, except Myanmar, who doesn't use Freedom Units, measurements are in kWh per 100 Km.

My actual usage, 2,950 miles over 40 days (I've been busier than normal), has recorded 3.7 mi / kWh as opposed to the 3.0 window sticker, so I'm getting about 23% better mileage with my driving habits than EPA rating. On short runs to town an back (10 miles roundtrip), I'm averaging between 4.1 and 4.5 mi / kWh. The car is reporting a full charge range estimate of 326 miles when I topped off. I am expecting the difference comes from the EPA calculations are on the "normal" drive setting of the car, which engages both drive motors regularly, and also they don't include any regenerative braking. I routinely drive using the "Eco" setting, which is more aggressive at shutting down one motor when cruising, and use a fairly aggressive brake regen setting. I don't notice the difference in the settings, except when accelerating from a dead stop, or rapid overtaking to pass. "Eco" behaves more like an ICE car, but still quicker off the line than almost anything other than a sports car. A quick tap on a steering wheel-mounted button gets me to "Normal", and a double-tap to "Sport" -- which brings me to around a 4-second to 60 MPH, neck-snapping level of acceleration.

So, for me, not paying special attention to driving, I end up with right around $0.03 per mile fuel cost to drive ($0.12 per kWh local electricity cost, 3.7 mi / kWh) or 120 MPGe. While my car came with the 20" wheels with no option for the 18", switching to the manufacturer 18" rims would up the fuel economy estimate to 121 MPGe combined with a 316 mile rated full-charge range. But if I did switch, it would actually be cheaper for me to buy aftermarket. Fast.ca makes titanium wheels that are 20 lbs(9 kg)/wheel lighter than the stock Hyundai wheels. If I was going to obsess over range efficiency, I think the combination of ligher and smaller on the wheels would easily bump me to a full-charge 350 mile range.

Note: For those who aren't familiar with car wheels, the actual tire size on the 18" and 20" is the same. The difference is the amount of sidewall exposed, with the 20" being physically larger rims. Those larger rims are metal and heavier, but "more aggressive" and "prettier". It is mostly a cosmetic thing, but the smaller wheels provide a smoother ride as well as a more economical one.

For comparison, today's fuel rates in my area are $3.69, $3.89, $2.99, and $6.49 all per US gallon for Regular Unleaded, Highway Diesel, E85, and Untaxed Kerosene.

In code terms, if the government is the operating system, and the law is a programming language, then the legal system is the exception handling machinery.

"Lawfare", then, is an inversion where normal operations are moved to the exception handler.

With all of the resource leakage, the Republic kinda seems to be grinding to a halt.

One rumor that I heard on this Paxton flap is that it's R-on-R:

Which just goes to show that neither end of the Deep State steamer is worth preserving, no matter how stridently fustakrakitch refuses to wield the Article V axe to change matters.