The Voting Rights Act of 1965 is a landmark piece of federal legislation in the United States that prohibits racial discrimination in voting. It was signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson during the height of the civil rights movement on August 6, 1965, and Congress later amended the Act five times to expand its protections. Designed to enforce the voting rights protected by the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution, the Act sought to secure the right to vote for racial minorities throughout the country, especially in the South. According to the U.S. Department...
Shelby County v. Holder, 570 U.S. 529 (2013), is a landmark decision of the Supreme Court of the United States regarding the constitutionality of two provisions of the Voting Rights Act of 1965: Section 5, which requires certain states and local governments to obtain federal preclearance before implementing any changes to their voting laws or practices; and subsection (b) of Section 4, which contains the coverage formula that determines which jurisdictions are subject to preclearance based on their histories of racial discrimination in voting.
On June 25, 2013, the Court ruled by a 5 to 4 vote...
Well, I mean, these measures are indirectly anti-democratic, but I wouldn't say they would prevent an unpopular president from being voted out of office next elections?
We need the restoration of: "certain states and local governments to obtain federal preclearance before implementing any changes to their voting laws or practices".
@Cerberus They've been very carefully vetted by the Heritage Foundation to make sure they align with their principles. They've been grooming the judiciary for this purpose for decades now, playing the long game.
Yes, he becomes a lame duck then unless he twists his supremes into granting him a third term or president for life or whatever it is he wants there. Maybe the can give him president for life but not a third term: his second term last forever.
@tchrist I'd say ideologically more like Bannon, but they'll need to be at least slightly competent at their jobs, so probably not at his level of crazy.
Yes, I mean the people on the Project 2025 list. Trump's actual employees won't be like Bannon--i.e. believing more in some sort of ideology. His real picks will be people he sees as personally loyal to him, regardless of what they believe.
We expect him to have learned what got in his way, what kind of people and why, from his first term to make sure that cannot happen again this time around.
He's a constitutional officer who does not serve at the pleasure of the president, unlike every other member of the Executive Branch (civil service possibly excepted; for now).
@Cerberus Did I not say Vance? :(
Yes, I said and meant Vance. Vance was elected on the ticket. That makes him super special.
Trump might be able to get him hung though, if he tries hard enough. Didn't quite work with Pence, but only barely. He just can't fire him.
@tchrist Don't blame me. If raccoons are known for anything, it's for never stealing anything and constantly upholding you humans' property rights.
(Obviously I had nothing to do with this, but I suspect it may be some sort of bug related to the "ignoring" system since this doesn't seem to happen to anyone else.)
Does anyone know of a browser extension that can be used in dark mode to put a thin colored border on the window so that it makes the window distinguishable from other apps? Or that works on all windows? I really can't distinguish where the overlap starts.
@think_meaning_builds Thus paving the way for the upcoming requirement that all legal immigrants sign a binding oath: "Yes, I'm really a vegan and shall remain so for howsoever long I remain within the sovereign boundaries of the United States of America, so help me God." Oathbreakers will be summarily and immediately deported with no right to appeal nor return.
"Give in your will."
or
"Give, in your will"
The context is one of giving money in your will, rather than handing in your will to someone.
The sentence is an instruction, so I feel, the the word Give should have a comma or a colon after it.
Give, in your will
Give: in your will
There is an od...
Why are words like bluffer, buffer, coffer, differ, fluffer, gaffer, heifer, hoofer, proffer, puffer, quaffer, scoffer, sniffer, staffer, stiffer, stuffer, suffer, zephyr so much more common than words like cipher, gopher, wafer are?
> From Middle English ryver, from Anglo-Norman rivere, from Early Medieval Latin rฤซpฤria (โlittoral, riverbankโ), from Latin rฤซpฤrius (โof a riverbankโ), from Latin rฤซpa (โriver bankโ), from Proto-Indo-European *hโreyp- (โto scratch, tear, cutโ). Unrelated to Latin rฤซvus (โstreamโ) (whence rival, derive). Doublet of riviera and rivière. Displaced native Old English ฤa.
At least in Latin. Unclear what the Normen were doing.
Oh my, Tolkien stealth-resurrected Old English ฤa for river: ëa was the Quenya noun for the entire universe, meaning all that "is", itself a nouned version of the verb ea meaning to be, the very first word spoken by the Creator from which all creation flowed, as in "let it be".
@CowperKettle Same here.
@CowperKettle We had 6 below centigrade early this morning. It was supposed to get colder but did not.
@M.A.R. OK now my non sequitur to start off the morning... how about instead of caffeinated coffee we selectively breed some plant to have excess methamphetamine.
The International Fixed Calendar (also known as the Cotsworth plan, the Cotsworth calendar, the Eastman plan or the Yearal) was a proposed reform of the Gregorian calendar designed by Moses B. Cotsworth, first presented in 1902. The International Fixed Calendar divides the year into 13 months of 28 days each. A type of perennial calendar, every date is fixed to the same weekday every year. Though it was never officially adopted at the country level, the entrepreneur George Eastman instituted its use at the Eastman Kodak Company in 1928, where it was used until 1989. While it is sometimes described...
@CowperKettle It's been suggested to me, by the owner, that I try out a goiter-gaiter one of those loose lycra neck things that I can also pull up to cover my nose. I've been told (by the owner that they are really really warm and somehow make your whole body warmer.
> In 1849 the French philosopher Auguste Comte (1798โ1857) proposed the 13-month Positivist Calendar, naming the months: Moses, Homer, Aristotle, Archimedes, Caesar, St Paul, Charlemagne, Dante, Gutenberg, Shakespeare, Descartes, Frederic and Bichat.
For in the heavenly pantheon there are but twelve houses to house its gods, so to add a thirteenth divinity would trigger a housing shortage and ensuing theomachy.
@tchrist Yeah...all those chemical cycles like ATP<->ADP and fatty acid cycle and Krebs cycle et al. are a tiny bit lopsided in different organisms and while on average they usually metabolize every lost drop of everything from one step to the next, some organism leave a little on the table, eg fruity plants tend to overproduce sugars in the Krebs cycle.
All I'm suggesting is that somewhere in our metabolism there is some natural methamphetamine or amphetamine analog which we can prod a coffee plant, through plant husbandry or CRISPR, to produce a little more meth than it can use.
My wife, who is something of a Jane Austen expert, says that what is meant by "gratitude" there is more like "gratification." To quote her directly:
Emma is kind of a snob, valuing good looks and so-called refinement over authenticity. She is nudging Harriet to that way of thinking rather than r...
@CowperKettle On an entirely different note, I was talking with someone the other day (you know in real life), and they said that they had taken the Trans-Siberian railway from Moscow to Vladivostok...
Marie François Xavier Bichat (; French: [biสa]; 14 November 1771 โ 22 July 1802) was a French anatomist and pathologist, known as the father of modern histology. Although he worked without a microscope, Bichat distinguished 21 types of elementary tissues from which the organs of the human body are composed. He was also "the first to propose that tissue is a central element in human anatomy, and he considered organs as collections of often disparate tissues, rather than as entities in themselves".
Although Bichat was "hardly known outside the French medical world" at the time of his early death...
So many African students are working in food delivery here. I came across one, wearing an ushanka hat. I wonder how many are there in Yekaterinburg. Feels like a true explosion in numbers. I'm too shy to ask them directly, because they must be all tired from answering this to other students.
To see any person with a really dark African skin was something extremely rare just several years ago.
Anyway, the point being, I am now convinced that he was being truthful about his assessment of the food on the Trans-Siberian. So now maybe the sfor thplanat trip have moved a bit higher on 'the list of places to go'.
I think there is some background process on my macbook air that is mixing up the packets from the keyboard, because, sure I make typos and mix adjacent letters, but not entire words parts.
> Bichat's figure was of great importance to Arthur Schopenhauer, who wrote of the Recherches physiologiques as "one of the most profoundly conceived works in the whole of French literature."
Interesting.
Dostoyevsky was at times immersed in reading heaps of anatomical and medical texts, trying to understand what caused his epileptic seizures.
Do macbooks use bluetooth? I have a plain office store logitech bluetooth keyboard that sometimes does something similar with Linux on a PC; it almost makes me see blue spots when it acts up (sometimes for several seconds at a time, without echoing anything and then suddenly spouting random letters from the string I typed meanwhile).
I'm using an old Microsoft Natural, which has a PS2 connector (the round one); and is connected to my laptop via a PS2-USB adaptor. And it acts up too.
Sometimes it produces a long line of keypresses when I had only pressed a button a single time.
@Mitch I use one of those to ride in the winter. It works well, and it's not warm exactly, but it takes the edge off and when you're riding that's enough.
I am astounded that so many Wisconsinites split their vote between Senator Tammy Baldwin and Trump.
> A New York Times analysis of reported county-level results shows a uniformly red shift across the Eastern, Southern, and Midwestern United States, permeating across urbanity, age, race, and education.
Pretty sure those are all "eastern" designations.
In any event, that this apparently occurred only in easterners but not in westerners is curious enough to raise questions whose easy answers elude me.
Apparently the greatest Trumpward shifts were from counties who were >25% Latinx + >%50 Whitx which were also more Urbanx while those with the least shifts Trumpwards were from counties over >90% Whitx + >50% Collejx which were also less Urbanx.
@MetaEd I've seen some analysis that no presidential incumbency has ever survived with so great a cost-of-living change across their term, that this "always" triggers a partisan flip.
@MetaEd There's also Sanders's charge of the Democrats having abandoned the working class.
also on the primary contest key, but the key is right, he didn't follow his own system there.
on the economy, "no recession" is his proxy for short-term economy. And that's inadequate.
however I recognize the Lichtman keys are analyzed against all presidential elections since 1860. so that's just me saying something without having gone back and re-examined.
the Democrats would have had a better shot at retaining the presidency if they had not renominated Biden.
@MetaEd They're so subjective that you can use them to generate any "prediction" you want, making it easy to "prove" that they worked for all past elections.
@Robusto My suspicion is that it's mostly because of the two issues voters said they cared about the most: inflation and immigration.
@alphabet they appear to have clear, objective definitions. For example key 1 is "After the midterm elections, the incumbent party holds more seats in the U.S. House of Representatives than after the previous midterm elections." That's either true or false, taken from the public record, nothing subjective about it.
@alphabet Right. Most of the keys are quantitative, but a couple are qualitative.
"Charisma" is apparently defined as having "an extraordinarily persuasive or dynamic personality that gives him or her broad appeal that extends to voters outside their party's base." That requires a qualitative judgment. If memory serves, Lichtman characterized neither Trump nor Harris as having that sort of broad appeal outside their base.
A lot of people voted Trump while holding their noses. Whereas a lot of people who voted Reagan or Obama were kind of in love.
@tchrist The idea that Americans won't do certain jobs -- I don't buy that.
My high paying IT/programming job moved to India the year of, and because of, the dot-com crash and 9/11. I repaired printers and did yard work for a living for I think 20 months until I could get something better. You do what you have to do.
The normal argument against unenslaving them and paying them the minimum wage is that it would be too expensive. I've never had any respect for that argument. And I don't mean to change the topic to something that doesn't apply here.
Mostly it's that I'm really tired of rabid anti-immigration rhetoric from politicians stirring up trouble and hoodwinking the impressionable. They're making almost all of it up, and doing so in coded signals from the very worst historical contexts, too, and not just spitting on the Irish, either.
Understandably, Kim will need to rattle his sabres pretty loudly to steal some of Trump's attention away from being constantly otherwise occupied by catering to and furthering the interests of Putin, Xi, and Khomeini, as well albeit to a lesser extent as those of Lukashenko, al-Assad, MBS, and Orbán. The quisling has already begun.
Trump doesn't have the attention span needed to mentally juggle three pins at once, let alone the seven or eight I just listed above.
> It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them. First, it was the white working class, and now it is Latino and Black workers as well.
> Will the big money interests and well-paid consultants who control the Democratic Party learn any real lessons from this disastrous campaign? Will they understand the pain and political alienation that tens of millions of Americans are experiencing? Do they have any ideas as to how we can take on the increasingly powerful Oligarchy which has so much economic and political power? Probably not.