Yet this horrible person managed to do the singular thing the previous person was unable to do - and that is to gain control over and close the Southern border!

Also, for the first time in years we are starting to see deaths due to drug overdose decline.

There is truly a lot to hate Trump for. But hate for a guy does not mean anything. Results do.

The point was not the firearm charges. The point was the Burisma dealings of Joe Biden who at the time was running for presidency.

The amount of outright censorship about the laptop was also legion. Countless accounts were banned who dared to mention that the laptop was real.

Your narrow focus on one issue surrounding the laptop exemplifies the dismissiveness of the outright truth telling by various people who do not align with the Democrat party.

I like a lot of progressive ideas. But I do not believe in using censorship to obtain them or putting the thumbs on the scales to win an election - which the censorship amounted to.

This is the most hilarious comment made yet. The U.N. sucks on the U.S. governmentâ(TM)s teats more than any other entity.

Of course Russia and China are going to disapprove because they have lost a customer of their hand-me-down weapon systems.

Whatâ(TM)s interesting here is that as a professional musician, this guy is a public figure and the âoeactual maliceâ standard for defamation applies â" a standard that was designed when defamation could only be done by a human being.

This requires the defendant to make a defamatory statement either (1) knowing it is untrue or (2) with reckless disregard for the truth.

Neither condition applies to the LLM itself; it has no conception of truth, only linguistic probability. But the LLM isnâ(TM)t the defendant here. Itâ(TM)s the company offering it as a service. Here the company is not even aware of the defamatory statement being made. But it is fully aware of their modelâ(TM)s capacity to hallucinate defamatory âoefactsâ.

I think that because the tort is based in the common law concept of a duty of care, we may well see the company held liable in some way for this kind of thing. But itâ(TM)s new law; it could go the other way.

The laborious, linear interface is of course another limitation of all kinds of tapes -- digital or analog. But getting rid of this also changes human behavior. People don't listen as much to long form collections; they don't even necesssarily listen to entire songs.

A mix tape is essentially a long format program manually and personally curated for you by another human being, unmediated and indeed untracked by any third corporate party. Losing the mix tape was a real cultural loss. Sure they didn't sound great, but they didn't have to.

I suppose every technological advance is potentially double edged. When people get books and literacy, verbal storytelling declines. That doesn't make books bad. the technical limitations of verbal stories -- say limited repeatbility -- are real limitations, but that doesn't mean something wasn't lost.

Everyone knows poop flinging monkeys are better!

Very good analysis. And he did modulate some rather draconian "bathroom bills." I can't help but wonder how many Democrats are actually registered as GOP so they can help keep him in office!! - past the "caucus system"!

Good on them!

The demographic that helped put Trump into office was actually Hispanics. Do you think they cared if his opponent was black or not? Or the fact that his opponent came off as a clown that only cared about abortion as the single greatest issue facing the nation?? Or that "new arrivals" were taking the very jobs that they work at?

I'm pretty sure there's a list of reasons where race was not a primary factor. Not to mention that Obama, a black person, was elected president.

When everyone cops out and single mindedly puts their scapegoat excuses front and center, 'demented' people who actually vote will continue to vote for the 'wrong' person.

:

The dementia reaches across party lines. The GOP is insufferable in some areas, but the question needs to be asked "exactly how did they get elected?" The reason is a person who was really suffering from dementia wrongly decided they could run and win the presidency a second time.

So just keep that in mind when you throw the "demented" word around. Spoken as a political infependent.

PBS is primarily (85%) privately funded. It will continue to produce shows like Masterpiece, Nova, Frontline, and Sesame Street and people in places like Boston or Philadelphia will continue to benefit from them.

What public funding does is give viewers in poorer, more rural areas access to the same information that wealthy cities enjoy. It pays for access for people who don't have it.

By opting out, Arkansas public broadcasting saves 2.5 million dollars in dues, sure. But it loses access to about $300 million dollars in privately funded programming annually.

Seriously, the idea that we know all the practically important physics there is is the kind of thing only somebody who's never done science or engineering would believe.

Industrial R&D is important, but it is in a distrant third place with respect to importance to US scientific leadership after (1) Universities operating with federal grants and (2) Federal research institutions.

It's hard to convince politicians with a zero sum mentality that the kind of public research that benefits humanity also benefits US competitiveness. The mindset shows in launching a new citizenship program for anyone who pays a million bucks while at the same time discouraging foreign graduate students from attending universtiy in the US or even continuing their university careers here. On average each talented graduate student admitted to the US to attend and elite university does way more than someone who could just buy their way in.

Republicans equate being pro-market with being pro-big-business-agenda. The assumption is that anything that is good for big business is good for the market and therefore good for consumers.

So in the Republican framing, anti-trust, since is interferes with what big business wants to do, is *necessarily* anti-market and bad for consumers, which if you accept their axioms would have to be true, even though what big business wants to do is use its economic scale and political clout to consolidate, evade competition, and lock in consumers.

That isn't economics. It's religion. And when religious dogmas are challenge, you call the people challenging them the devil -- or in current political lingo, "terrorists". A "terrorist" in that sense doesn't have to commit any actual act of terrorism. He just has to be a heathen.

no problem.

I'm actually responding to the AC above you. He is arguing that the attack wouldn't make any sense for either country to make, based on *national* interest. I'm pointing out that's not the only framework in which *regimes* make decisions.