Mr engineer, when there are two parties, sentence structure demands you use plurals….both sides have THEIR share of undesirables. An engineer should see grammar as a clearly defined structure that follows simple rules and just get it. Spelling is different, but grammar should be a no brainer….why is it so hard for you? Have you never seen it that way, or was engineering incredibly difficult for you too?

The difference being one side is all undesirables, and the level of undesirability. One side openly calls for an end to American democracy, death for their political rivals, death for anyone who disagrees with today’s talking point. One side has no party platform, no stated goals, and exists solely to stop any legislation the other side puts forth, even when it was something they want or that would benefit them. They are the same side.

We found another point of agreement.

Term limits are a must, and will never happen because our system does put the regulatory onus on those who need regulating….absolute insanity. It also lets them set their own salaries, ethics, and benefits.

Divestment is another must. Perhaps a bigger must. Total divestment across the board. Not just blind trusts that aren’t really blind, and absolutely not what we have now…the “honor” system run by the honorless. Allowing legislatures to write horrific laws because they can personally financially benefit is a recipe for disaster. That should (but never will) change.

Campaign finance is a third must. Corporations should have the same donation limits individuals have, which should be more like $100 each so every person can afford to have a voice, and we should return to an equal time on broadcast tv for free situation and deny the media as a political platform to give candidates a boost….no more Fox News interviews indistinguishable from campaign commercials, no more media smear campaigns, with severe penalties for violations, like $10 mil the first time, $25 mil the second, loss of fcc license the third. Another non starter….but needed badly.

PACs should be outlawed, or regulated into obscurity.

Some reasons often brought up in opposition to term limits can be traced back to Maddison who wrote "[A] few of the members of Congress will possess superior talents; will by frequent re-elections, become members of long standing; will be thoroughly masters of the public business, and perhaps not unwilling to avail themselves of those advantages. The greater the proportion of new members of Congress, and the less the information of the bulk of the members, the more apt they be to fall into the snares that may be laid before them,"

I think we have proven at this point the cons of self serving representatives legislating for personal gains outweigh the benefits of professional legislators, especially seeing as we have the internet and huge staffs to ostensibly level the playing field of knowledge.

One fix would be the creation of an ethics branch, completely non partisan, not self regulatory, with rules against former candidates (winners and losers) and lobbyists too from serving and strict rules about how they operate, and bans from running for office or being a lobbyist afterwards so it doesn’t become a campaign platform or tool for industry. Maybe even ban close family members from the same. Won’t happen, only the best people intentionally limit their powers, and they are few and far between in Congress….all but absent on your side.

I’m waiting.
Bring it! My Halloween costumes have included Mr Clean, Blue Man Group, and Homer Simpson (had to add hairs). I can take it.

Smith lost a lot of fans right there….me included.
If you don’t have a sense of humor about yourself, don’t go to awards shows where the audience is fair game for jokes at their expense. Same for your wife/husband.
If being bald is a touchy subject, wear a wig. (Coming from a bald guy who’s been bald by choice for 25 years and never once got mad at a Mr Clean or penis head joke).

Will can fuck right off with his violent tantrum (or pretend tantrum if this is some scripted ploy). Chris should have decked him back in the face, kicked him in the balls, and kicked him off stage head first. What a child. I hope charges are pressed and lawsuits filed….he deserves them. If there aren’t repercussions, that’s a good indicator this was scripted to boost dismal ratings, which IMO might be worse.

Poor Mr Wellington having to follow that….unless he goes full death metal in rebuttal.

We are not hoping Putin will reverse his course, we are hoping (rich elite and military) Russians will decide they would be better offf without war and threatening to destroy the world.

Switching of SWIFT is not a total ban on transactions but is very annoying for russians.

Dependency of Europe on Russian oil and gas is a direct security danger, they do use it to extort (and bribe - see Mr. Schroeder) the west.

China gets paid mostly in dollars, it would be a pain for China to use anything else to buy oil and gas. But nothing is ever certain forever.

Russia will need dollars in any form, even if they have to be black market dolars so they will gladly take Chinese payments in dollars. Also their stock market and currency is... f***ed.

Howdy - I don't know if "addressed" is the right word. Commented on, but not given sufficient perspective. Having said that, the problem is incredibly complex, so there should be no expectation that Mr. Oliver's video or any other single thesis on the topic could possibly suffice.

Your "one chemical bond difference" is an appropriate consideration, but with recognition that once we reach on the order of C20-C40 length dispersable or emulsifiable molecules as surfactants / surface energy modifiers, the insoluble polymers come into play, with not 30'ish bonds growing one at a time, but leaping to 20,000 or more. No doubt the pool has already been irreversibly pissed into by the irresponsible producers that convert small molecules into very, very large ones, but with some control, responsibility, and integrity in our industrial process owners (yes, hell just froze over) there is no reason why we could not safely continue to produce the polymeric forms of PFAS. We do so for substantially more toxic chemical conversion processes today.

It's interesting to note the (usual) examples brought forward by others in this post (Teflon cookware), just waiting for someone to mention Gore-Tex, but by far the biggest impact won't be on consumer goods that we all touch regularly and recognize the name brands of, but will be on the industrial / commercial uses of these polymeric families that are pervasive in the systems / processes that we all derive benefit from every day. Ironies exist, that perhaps confuse the "all PFAS are bad" premise ... consider - effectively every seal, gasket and control valve in a water purification plant is most commonly made of a PFAS polymeric compound, PTFE included, all tested to rigorous specifications and compliance by specific agencies that do nothing other than deal with potable water (thankfully not the EPA - it's National Sanitation Foundation (the other NSF), or Water Research Advisory Scheme (WRAS) in the UK etc.) .

So my contention and the view of many in the end user community is that it's not the final form of some of these compounds that are bad, it's the horrendous messes we leave producing them. We can't unwind our Clock of Dumb, but killing the entire crop just to get rid of the long ago seeded weeds doesn't solve the actual problem, it makes it much, much larger.

Thanks for your comments.

There is no spoon, Mr. Wick. But there is a pencil.

No answer Bob? Typical. It’s ok….we knew you didn’t have any.

You can’t say what’s a half truth or what’s spin, you just know it is because if this were true (hint, it is) it means you blindly follow someone who clearly tried to subvert democracy to turn America into a despotic monarchy and was stupid enough to use emails and texts to coordinate his coup, leaving a massive pile of evidence of his crimes. After all, he thought his violent mob would be successful at ending democracy in America and he would just erase all traces of his crimes along with anyone investigating him once he was king for life.


Oh no! Mr My Crackpipe’s cyber symposium with the best cyber guys around, after getting hacked and starting way late, has fallen apart with absolutely no evidence of mush brain’s claims, just his little factless movie, but did include Lindel running off stage crying when he learned that the $1.5 billion lawsuit against him and the other election fraud fraudsters will proceed (an order that came with a scathing rebuke from the judge).
Edit: Er Mer Gerd!…and he revoked his $5 million prize for anyone who could prove him wrong before it started, likely because his cyber security expert Josh Merritt had already said his “evidence “ was utter nonsense and proved nothing in interviews, and others he hired said he didn’t even have these “data packets” he claimed to have, only his video representation of what such packets MIGHT look like as raw data…which would be impossible to decrypt and wouldn’t have the evidence Lindel claimed if you could, even if a Chinese hack had occurred. ROTFLMFAHS!!!

More good news, cyberninjas has reportedly stolen the ballots and data they were reviewing (it was never an audit) and (illegally?) taken them out of state to Montana almost two weeks after missing their deadline to report to the AZ congress on July 28. Good thing they didn’t get their hands on all that other personal information they requested because what they have is not secured and ripe for identity theft already, and they wanted basically all the personal data the county had on every resident, including addresses, employment, family members (mother’s maiden name), social security numbers, medical records, bank accounts, assets, criminal history, …..everything the state had.

Even you can’t spin the refusal to provide their conclusions (now what, almost 5 months into their 3 week review) and fleeing the state with state property as some indication they found something, and you were so gullible that you bought their blatant lie about “suddenly appearing unregistered mail in votes that had no record of being sent out” that turned out to be early in person voting numbers, but they were too incompetent or dishonest to say so and instead pretended they found fraud….and continue to pretend they found fraud after being debunked, and are using that obvious bold faced lie in their efforts of trying to go door to door in large groups of Trumptards to force people to tell them who they voted for in a clear, blatant case of text book illegal voter intimidation.

D’oh!

Vote fraud is a maximum of .00073%…, that’s 24 questionable votes for every 3.3 million votes, as found in actual audits nationwide.
...that’s the maximum amount of possible fraudulent voting, not even the actual amount of fraudulent votes, but the number of questionable votes. So impossibly small there’s absolutely no way it could sway any election even if every single questionable vote was fraud, and in reality <5% of questionable votes are found to be fraud, others are names misspelled on rolls from typos, people who retook their maiden names after registration, people purged from rolls improperly, even people voting as Mrs. X when Mr X was dead. Should tens of millions, 10-15% of legal registered voters, be punished by having their votes denied over a .00073% maximum possible fraud rate (<5% of which turn out to be fraudulent)? You say yes, absolutely….as long as they’re mostly Democrats.
Death from getting COVID is 54800 times more likely than actual vote fraud.

Those are decent points, but have absolutely zero to do with the mass abandoning of their positions. It was 100% due to one of their own being charged after beating nonviolent protesters. They originally admitted exactly that, and now that they aren't being supported in their walkout, they are coming up with excuses that didn't matter to them the day before the officer was charged.

I think they should have to pay for the training and equipment they now refuse to use.

What are you talking about? You think budget cuts caused time off to be cancelled?! It costs double to not rotate in other officers, because you pay those on duty overtime, it doesn't make it cheaper. Budget cuts were not the issue when these cops were doing crowd control, only now that they're suddenly called to account for their own actions. No time off temporarily, because of extreme circumstances, was not an issue until one of their own was charged. It's certainly not abnormal, and absolutely not because of budget cuts, it costs more.

No prosecutions is the norm, if I recall, over 98% of charges levied at protesters have been dismissed nation wide, mostly because police had no evidence to back the charges they brought. You might note, as described in the article, "Mr. Schmidt immediately announced that he would focus on prosecuting cases of violence or vandalism; protesters who simply resisted arrest or refused to disperse after a police order would not necessarily be charged." They are taking a stand against anarchic violent protesters, but not the peaceful protesters with a legitimate gripe about violent, racist, deadly police acting as an anarchist gang that believes rules only apply to you, not them.

There are few prosecutions in large part because police declare riots when all participants are peaceful and not causing damage, and police are almost always the one's giving the orders to remove the people they declared "rioters", and in most cases they have zero evidence to back up their declarations, and are as violent as possible, beating peaceful videographers and reporters who were trapped and could not disperse, then charging them with refusal to disperse and resisting arrest, even violence against police for attacking police batons with their faces.
(Edit: remember the freeway shutdown when they marched on the freeway, and police blocked them from exiting or continuing while a second group of police came from behind, forcing them into a small fenced in area with no exit, then charged them all with refusal to disperse and the few that tried to disperse were charged with attacking police officers who blocked every escape route, violently attacking anyone trying to leave...all on live tv?)
Many peaceful protests became riots only after police moved in to violently disperse protests, fully 1/2 were riots because counter protesters and bad right wing actors like proud and boogaloo boys were planting bombs, shooting crowds, starting fires, driving through crowds, and murdering police in an effort to paint protesters as violent anarchists. That is verified fact directly from the DOJ investigation.

It's not a Portland only thing, police abandoning their communities because, as they indicated to the DA, "“It was like, ‘There’s our team and there’s their team, and you are on their team and you’re not on our team. And we’ve never had a D.A. not be on our team before,’” Police assume they are on a team against citizens, and won't do their jobs if, by doing them wrong with bias and malice, they might be prosecuted. They are used to immunity, and don't know how to do their jobs without it because they are abusers of power.

One day after charges were levied they quit in solidarity with the criminal abusive cop, and came up with fake excuses later.

You seem to have missed "the Justice Department said that the city’s Police Bureau was violating its own use-of-force policies during crowd-control operations, and that supervisors were not properly investigating complaints." part.

Neil Armstrong's Last Words On The Moon-

When Apollo Mission Astronaut Neil Armstrong first walked on the moon, he not only gave his famous “One small step for man; one giant leap for mankind” statement, but followed it by several remarks, including the usual COM traffic between him, the other astronauts, and Mission Control. Before he re-entered the lander, he made the enigmatic remark “Good luck, Mr. Gorsky.”Many people at NASA thought it was a casual remark concerning some rival Soviet Cosmonaut. However, upon checking, [they found] there was no Gorsky in either the Russian or American space programs.

Over the years, many people have questioned him as to what the “Good luck, Mr. Gorsky” statement meant. On July 5, in Tampa Bay, FL, while answering questions following a speech, a reporter brought up the 26- year-old question to Armstrong. He finally responded. It seems that Mr. Gorsky had died and so Armstrong felt he could answer the question. When he was a kid, Neil was playing baseball with his brother in the backyard. His brother hit a fly ball which landed in front of his neighbors’ bedroom window. The neighbors were Mr. and Mrs. Gorsky. As he leaned down to pick up the ball, he heard Mrs. Gorsky shouting at Mr. Gorsky, “Oral sex? Oral sex you want? You’ll get oral sex when the kid next door walks on the moon!”