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Cake day: July 9th, 2023

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  • If Trump wins, all these idiots that voted for him because “thuh conomee was better” are going to act all shocked when he actually does all the really insane stuff he’s promising to do and tried to do in his first term but the handful of rational Republicans around him stopped him from doing.

    I saw interviews with voters recently that basically showed people don’t believe he’ll do all the crazy stuff he’s promising, that it’s just a negotiation tactic or to “keep the base onboard” or to “generate attention.”

    When things really go to shit, I guarantee the people that voted for him will take no responsibility for it.



  • Byron Donalds, a black Republican Representative from Florida, said Democrats need to stop talking about Project 2025, a policy document created by hundreds of people who literally worked for Trump during his term, because it’s “dangerous.”

    But he also thinks Trump calling Harris a communist dictator who literally wants to destroy America, take your guns, force everyone’s children to undergo surgical sex reassignment surgery against their will, flood the country with millions of noncitizens so they can vote, among hundreds of other extreme and completely false accusations, are all perfectly fine and fair game.

    They all know it’s not consistent. They all know Trump’s rhetoric is worse, but they see a cynical opportunity to gain a political advantage and they take it. Assholes.


  • The pardon power is explicitly given to the president by the Constitution. Therefore it’s a core power with absolute immunity.

    The president is also given the clear authority to direct his subordinates in the executive branch as the “chief Executive.” The SCOTUS has ruled that the president has almost unfettered power to hire/fire/order anyone in the federal government to do just about anything he wants with no restrictions.

    So logically:

    1. The president can order an agency head to issue a new rule that’s probably unconstitutional.
    2. Someone sues in a district court to block it.
    3. A court issues an injunction preventing its enforcement.
    4. The agency head ignores the court order and enforces it anyway.
    5. The court finds the agency head and/or other employees of the agency in contempt for violating the injunction.
    6. The president pardons anyone subject to the injunction (and this pardon power is absolutely immune from criminal prosecution or investigation).
    7. The rule goes into effect and gets enforced despite being enjoined by a federal court.
    8. We now have a constitutional crisis because courts no longer have any way to check on the Executive because the president can simply neutralize any criminal penalties with a pardon even if that pardon is clearly issued as part of a conspiracy to violate a court order.

    I guarantee this is not what the Framers envisioned or wanted, but this is what “conservative” judicial extremists on the SCOTUS have given us. Although I would be entirely unsurprised if they decided to roll this power back somehow if ever a Democratic president were to wield it.


  • They also like to complain about the “crime in blue cities,” but somehow never seem to acknowledge that if it’s a problem that’s so easy to solve, why do red states with red legislatures and red governors not just fix the issue in their blue cities?

    5 of the top 10 cities with the highest violent crime rates are in red states with Republican legislatures and Republican governors. They sure as hell act like they know the simple solution to violent crime in cities, but for some reason they don’t seem to implement those obvious solutions in their own states. Instead, they blame the Democratic mayors.

    It’s almost like it’s a lot harder of a problem to solve than Republicans let on and they’re being disingenuous about knowing how to fix it…


  • The vast majority of elected Republicans are opportunists willing to use any opportunity to advance their narrative even if it’s clearly blatant lies or bullshit.

    Vance pushes the “eating pets” crap to anyone who will listen, and when he gets hard enough pushback from someone and can’t bullshit his way out of it, he falls back to the “okay, maybe it’s not true, but it represents real concerns people have so it’s valid for me to talk about it.”

    Which is exactly what happened with the election results in 2020. They pushed the stolen election crap until it was pretty much irrefutably disproven, then went around saying they had to make it harder to vote because their voters, for some strange reason, thought the election wasn’t fair.

    DeWine is one of the very few Republican politicians left that has any sense of principle and isn’t a cynical opportunist, even if most of those principles are pretty shitty.


  • It’s a definition from a well-respected global standards organization. Can you name a source that would provide a more authoritative definition than the ISO?

    There’s no universally correct definition for what the ≈ symbol means, and if you write a paper or a proof or whatever, you’re welcome to define it to mean whatever you want in that context, but citing a professional standards organization seems like a pretty reliable way to find a commonly-accepted and understood definition.



  • “Approximately equal” is just a superset of “equal” that also includes values “acceptably close” (using whatever definition you set for acceptable).

    Unless you say something like:

    a ≈ b ∧ a ≠ b

    which implies a is close to b but not exactly equal to b, it’s safe to presume that a ≈ b includes the possibility that a = b.