Make it before October. By October 1, a large percentage of ballots -- a substantial majority in the western states -- will have been frozen and being printed. This year, in the 13 states of the American West, >90% of all regional ballots cast will be distributed by mail well in advance of election "day". Here in Colorado, Oct 4 is the day county clerks are required to be in physical possession of the printed ballots. For the ten or so large population counties, that means the ballots have been folded and inserted in properly addressed envelopes. I believe the corresponding date in California is at least a week earlier.
A half-century ago, Disney comes in and says, "We will invest billions to improve the land. We will generate very large tax revenues. There will undoubtedly be long coattails with other parks, conventions, conferences, etc. But we insist that we have control over the utilities and roads, with the normal taxing authority you give special districts, so we know they are managed up to our parks' standards." The counties and state fall all over themselves to do the deal.
If I were Disney I wouldn't have made it a First Amendment case. I'd have sued on the grounds it was an illegal taking, and asked for the state to pay back billions worth of investment for backing out of the agreement.
(In large parts of the country, the accommodation isn't unusual. See, for example, Highlands Ranch south of Denver, an unincorporated area with >100,000 people (density about 4,000 people per square mile, urban density by almost everyone's standards), run by a glorified HOA and special districts.)
For what it's worth, Boebert came off badly in the Republican straw poll in the Colorado 4th District, and in the polls I've seen Lake loses to Gallego whether Sinema runs or not. That may incline either of them to be more willing to drop their Congressional plans to take the VP slot. Noem in South Dakota is term-limited out in 2026. Sanders is two years into her first term and is not term-limited out until 2030.
Plus, as I mentioned in the time capsule comments, I don't believe Trump will pick anyone from west of the Mississippi River. He has always -- and this goes back to when I lived in New Jersey 40 years ago -- been a walking talking version of the famous New Yorker cover. As President, he visited six foreign countries before he set foot west of the Mississippi, and that first step was a couple of hours stop in Iowa less than a hundred miles from the river.
Trump will be the candidate. The Supreme Court will weasel the primaries, most likely holding that states can disqualify someone where it's an absolute matter (the candidate is old enough, or not) but not on matters that are subjective (like, you know, was it an insurrection). The court cases will drag out past the convention, and once he's the candidate the RNC isn't crazy enough to try to remove him.
The Republican VP candidate will be someone from east of the Mississippi River. Trump hates/ignores the western half of the country and won't pick someone from there.
Biden/Harris win the national popular vote by 10M+. The EC decision comes down to 100,000 votes in the right places.
Democrats hold the Senate seats in Arizona and Montana. Sinema drops out and the Democratic margin there is surprisingly wide.
Abusing edit privileges to add: Lauren Boebert doesn't make the ballot in Colorado.
I expect that Vince resigning in the face of another nasty lawsuit means Rock -- now a TKO board member -- will be keeping a low profile. In particular, no public media appearances where reporters can ask what the TKO board is doing to fix the problems.
But the important part, is that the struggle never be over. That there is always and forever a hated EastAsia or yellow horde or some other enemy who keeps the base in a frenzy of fear and hatred.
Climate change pretty much guarantees a steady stream of economic refugees for the rest of the century. Sort of a side note to that: climate change is driving the drought in Panama that has forced the Canal Authority to reduce operations, from about 38 ships per day to 24. The solution that's being pushed is to dam a river and drill a five-mile water transfer tunnel, costing billions of dollars.
Don't have to rush a decision about Priest as a heel or a face. Get him a singles belt then let him beat a couple of faces and a couple of heels and see what works.
I hate stretchers. Pick a pay per view. Priest and Bálor win a tough tag team match. A tough match for whichever belt Priest is getting. Then when Priest cashes in the contract, no squash but a good 10-15 minute match with every finishing move the two guys have before Priest wins.
Then on Monday night following Priest leaves Judgement Day and takes a few weeks off. The new version of Judgement Day gets settled, then we'll worry about Priest (see first paragraph).
I may be biased on Ripley simply because they don't have any other women who could pull off keeping the male members of a faction in line and making it believable. Those shoulders certainly help, but her acting is first rate.
WWE damn well better have someone on staff who worries about nothing besides getting audience engagement during the opening bits. The crowd sings for Rollins while he wallows in it. You can see the audience anticipating their two syllables in the Cody Rhodes' entrance music. Drowning out Mysterio. My understanding is that years ago management wanted to dump Daniel Bryan and absolutely hated that he could go out and get the audience to do "Yes! Yes! Yes!" for minutes.
If I put on my booker's hat and think about the hints...
Start from Priest's the only one of the four who can pull off a face turn. Ripley goes behind Priest's back and nearly messes up his chance to use the Money in the Bank contract. Priest, with a major singles belt in hand despite Ripley, says he's out of there. He resigns his half of the tag titles, slams the belts in Bálor's chest, and wishes him the best of luck. Bálor goes hat in hand to Drew McIntyre and offers him the tag belts to finish McIntyre's heel turn.
I'm never right when I try to write these things. But they're wasting Damian Priest and none of the things they've tried to sell a McIntyre heel turn have worked.
The problems are that Ripley is the best female talker in the company, Mysterio now has a comic angle that translates into immediate audience engagement, Bálor is so technically good in the ring he needs a belt at least on and off as a reason to work with other top talent, and Priest is probably the best all-around Black performer they've got. (Yes, I know he's Puerto Rican, but other than the "Señor Money in the Bank" bit they haven't used it (eg, no accent).)
Breaking them up without wasting all that talent is going to be tricky.
You’ve got Damien Priest who has the Money in the Bank suitcase… why bother?
Watching off and on for the last several months, my impression is they were ready to push Priest and gave him the Money in the Bank contract, then Judgement Day turned out to be more popular for longer than they thought. They drew the line at having one group of heels hold the tag titles, the women's belt, and the men's belt. I still think they're trying to figure out how to write their way out of their Judgement Day dilemma.
Humans aren't very good at working through long lists of things in order and doing exactly what they say. Foxconn is using robots for assembly in China now, not because they're cheaper than the humans but because the robots are really good at that kind of repetitive thing.
While Manchin and Sinema took most of the heat in public over not getting rid of the filibuster, I believe Angus King also said he would vote against such a move. I suspect there are a number of other Democrats who would vote against if it ever got that far.
Being a Senator seems to endow them with a belief in complicated privileges for themselves and the body. To get the 17th Amendment through the Senate and sent to the states required being on the verge of calling a constitutional convention.
But she can probably raise enough to run staff if she avoids big TV buys. So she keeps doing the grunt work to be on all the ballots and depends on the mainstream media to keep mentioning her. We're still ten months out and there's a lot of legal proceedings against Trump. Something may be the breaking point (eg, if a bunch of evidence surfaces that he literally sold US security secrets to China, or the New York civil suit bankrupts him). It's a long shot, but you can't win if you don't play the game.
Recall the fairly regular headlines from 2012: "Romney Finishes 2nd in State X, Increases Delegate Lead." Every time it looked like someone was going to make a run, it turned out they hadn't done the paperwork and weren't in the next couple of primaries.
I think the next major hurricane that hits a heavily populated part of Florida is going to be a whole 'nother kind of disaster. Not just the damage, but the collapse of Florida's residential property insurance business taking down the whole real estate bubble. If it happens before Ron is term-limited out, he'll take the blame.
Lots of the girl groups got started as teenagers. The four in the original Shangri-Las were 15, 16, or 17 when their parents signed the first record deal for them. Mary Weiss was the 15-year-old lead singer.
Colorado mandated Covid-19 vaccination for health care workers. Denver mandated Covid-19 vaccination for city employees and school teachers. Colorado State University mandated that students, faculty, and staff at two of their campuses be vaccinated for Covid-19.
Most of them had medical and religious exemptions, but those required filling out and filing paperwork. IIRC, the only way out of the healthcare mandate was 100% work from home.
But, of course, insufficient masks used improperly ain’t that much better than no masks at all...
There was one case where a woman was using a homemade multiple-layer mask religiously, never washed it and never let it dry thoroughly. It became a breeding ground for the Legionnaires disease bacteria, which killed her.
My father worked for an insurance company and for years was a field safety engineer. At dinner he used to rail about Americans who would routinely risk their life because doing something the right way was inconvenient.
Most people hate those sorts of answers. Consider just masks... "We know that wide-spread public mask wearing slows the spread of some viruses, it may help slow Covid-19. But you'll have to do it right. N-95 or K-95 or disposable surgical masks. Nose and mouth. Men, no more facial hair than a mustache because it ruins what seal there is. Don't wear the same mask for more than a couple of days. If you have to, have multiple masks and cycle them often enough that each gets completely dry for a day or two before you use it again. OTOH, if y'all do masks widely, there will be in effect a run on masks. Workers who need them for dust protection and surgeons who need them to reduce infection risks in both directions won't have any either. The supply chain for most of those masks runs through China, whom we expect will stop exports, so this advice will be increasingly impractical for weeks/months."
Some of this is because we generally lack recent experience with epidemics of truly serious diseases. We got rid of smallpox by mandating vaccinations. We've nearly gotten rid of polio by mandating vaccinations. We made good progress on eradicating measles by mandating vaccinations, but by that time the memories of smallpox and polio were fading away and we let people get away without vaccinating their children. Covid-19 is a poor candidate for eradication because (a) it mutates readily and (b) there are animal reservoirs.
I get a yellow fever vaccine, I don’t get yellow fever if exposed to the disease.
The WHO reports that the yellow fever vaccine is 99% effective, and that there are regularly small numbers of breakthrough cases. The Covid-19 mRNA vaccines are 95% effective, and there are correspondingly more breakthrough cases. The current version of the mumps vaccine is 96% effective, but breakthrough cases are very rare simply because (almost) everyone gets vaccinated and exposure is very rare.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “Open Mic for the week of 1/29/2024”
Probably worth including that the sanctions are against four specific individuals.
On “The Joy Of Opening Time Capsules: 2024 Election Edition”
Make it before October. By October 1, a large percentage of ballots -- a substantial majority in the western states -- will have been frozen and being printed. This year, in the 13 states of the American West, >90% of all regional ballots cast will be distributed by mail well in advance of election "day". Here in Colorado, Oct 4 is the day county clerks are required to be in physical possession of the printed ballots. For the ten or so large population counties, that means the ballots have been folded and inserted in properly addressed envelopes. I believe the corresponding date in California is at least a week earlier.
On “Disney Lawsuit Against DeSantis Dismissed: Read It For Yourself”
A half-century ago, Disney comes in and says, "We will invest billions to improve the land. We will generate very large tax revenues. There will undoubtedly be long coattails with other parks, conventions, conferences, etc. But we insist that we have control over the utilities and roads, with the normal taxing authority you give special districts, so we know they are managed up to our parks' standards." The counties and state fall all over themselves to do the deal.
If I were Disney I wouldn't have made it a First Amendment case. I'd have sued on the grounds it was an illegal taking, and asked for the state to pay back billions worth of investment for backing out of the agreement.
(In large parts of the country, the accommodation isn't unusual. See, for example, Highlands Ranch south of Denver, an unincorporated area with >100,000 people (density about 4,000 people per square mile, urban density by almost everyone's standards), run by a glorified HOA and special districts.)
On “Who Will Be Trump’s Running Mate?”
For what it's worth, Boebert came off badly in the Republican straw poll in the Colorado 4th District, and in the polls I've seen Lake loses to Gallego whether Sinema runs or not. That may incline either of them to be more willing to drop their Congressional plans to take the VP slot. Noem in South Dakota is term-limited out in 2026. Sanders is two years into her first term and is not term-limited out until 2030.
Plus, as I mentioned in the time capsule comments, I don't believe Trump will pick anyone from west of the Mississippi River. He has always -- and this goes back to when I lived in New Jersey 40 years ago -- been a walking talking version of the famous New Yorker cover. As President, he visited six foreign countries before he set foot west of the Mississippi, and that first step was a couple of hours stop in Iowa less than a hundred miles from the river.
On “The Joy Of Opening Time Capsules: 2024 Election Edition”
First, note that I'm terrible at these things.
Trump will be the candidate. The Supreme Court will weasel the primaries, most likely holding that states can disqualify someone where it's an absolute matter (the candidate is old enough, or not) but not on matters that are subjective (like, you know, was it an insurrection). The court cases will drag out past the convention, and once he's the candidate the RNC isn't crazy enough to try to remove him.
The Republican VP candidate will be someone from east of the Mississippi River. Trump hates/ignores the western half of the country and won't pick someone from there.
Biden/Harris win the national popular vote by 10M+. The EC decision comes down to 100,000 votes in the right places.
Democrats hold the Senate seats in Arizona and Montana. Sinema drops out and the Democratic margin there is surprisingly wide.
Abusing edit privileges to add: Lauren Boebert doesn't make the ballot in Colorado.
On “Weekend Plans Post: The Royal Rumble”
I expect that Vince resigning in the face of another nasty lawsuit means Rock -- now a TKO board member -- will be keeping a low profile. In particular, no public media appearances where reporters can ask what the TKO board is doing to fix the problems.
On “MAGA Isn’t Serious About the Border”
But the important part, is that the struggle never be over. That there is always and forever a hated EastAsia or yellow horde or some other enemy who keeps the base in a frenzy of fear and hatred.
Climate change pretty much guarantees a steady stream of economic refugees for the rest of the century. Sort of a side note to that: climate change is driving the drought in Panama that has forced the Canal Authority to reduce operations, from about 38 ships per day to 24. The solution that's being pushed is to dam a river and drill a five-mile water transfer tunnel, costing billions of dollars.
On “Weekend Plans Post: The Royal Rumble”
With no justification, Kelce for KC and McCaffery for the 49ers (and their respective coaches) put on clinics in tight games.
"
Don't have to rush a decision about Priest as a heel or a face. Get him a singles belt then let him beat a couple of faces and a couple of heels and see what works.
I hate stretchers. Pick a pay per view. Priest and Bálor win a tough tag team match. A tough match for whichever belt Priest is getting. Then when Priest cashes in the contract, no squash but a good 10-15 minute match with every finishing move the two guys have before Priest wins.
Then on Monday night following Priest leaves Judgement Day and takes a few weeks off. The new version of Judgement Day gets settled, then we'll worry about Priest (see first paragraph).
"
I may be biased on Ripley simply because they don't have any other women who could pull off keeping the male members of a faction in line and making it believable. Those shoulders certainly help, but her acting is first rate.
WWE damn well better have someone on staff who worries about nothing besides getting audience engagement during the opening bits. The crowd sings for Rollins while he wallows in it. You can see the audience anticipating their two syllables in the Cody Rhodes' entrance music. Drowning out Mysterio. My understanding is that years ago management wanted to dump Daniel Bryan and absolutely hated that he could go out and get the audience to do "Yes! Yes! Yes!" for minutes.
"
If I put on my booker's hat and think about the hints...
Start from Priest's the only one of the four who can pull off a face turn. Ripley goes behind Priest's back and nearly messes up his chance to use the Money in the Bank contract. Priest, with a major singles belt in hand despite Ripley, says he's out of there. He resigns his half of the tag titles, slams the belts in Bálor's chest, and wishes him the best of luck. Bálor goes hat in hand to Drew McIntyre and offers him the tag belts to finish McIntyre's heel turn.
I'm never right when I try to write these things. But they're wasting Damian Priest and none of the things they've tried to sell a McIntyre heel turn have worked.
"
The problems are that Ripley is the best female talker in the company, Mysterio now has a comic angle that translates into immediate audience engagement, Bálor is so technically good in the ring he needs a belt at least on and off as a reason to work with other top talent, and Priest is probably the best all-around Black performer they've got. (Yes, I know he's Puerto Rican, but other than the "Señor Money in the Bank" bit they haven't used it (eg, no accent).)
Breaking them up without wasting all that talent is going to be tricky.
"
You’ve got Damien Priest who has the Money in the Bank suitcase… why bother?
Watching off and on for the last several months, my impression is they were ready to push Priest and gave him the Money in the Bank contract, then Judgement Day turned out to be more popular for longer than they thought. They drew the line at having one group of heels hold the tag titles, the women's belt, and the men's belt. I still think they're trying to figure out how to write their way out of their Judgement Day dilemma.
On “Thursday Throughput: Boeing Edition”
Humans aren't very good at working through long lists of things in order and doing exactly what they say. Foxconn is using robots for assembly in China now, not because they're cheaper than the humans but because the robots are really good at that kind of repetitive thing.
On “A Pitiful Display in New Hampshire”
While Manchin and Sinema took most of the heat in public over not getting rid of the filibuster, I believe Angus King also said he would vote against such a move. I suspect there are a number of other Democrats who would vote against if it ever got that far.
Being a Senator seems to endow them with a belief in complicated privileges for themselves and the body. To get the 17th Amendment through the Senate and sent to the states required being on the verge of calling a constitutional convention.
"
But she can probably raise enough to run staff if she avoids big TV buys. So she keeps doing the grunt work to be on all the ballots and depends on the mainstream media to keep mentioning her. We're still ten months out and there's a lot of legal proceedings against Trump. Something may be the breaking point (eg, if a bunch of evidence surfaces that he literally sold US security secrets to China, or the New York civil suit bankrupts him). It's a long shot, but you can't win if you don't play the game.
Recall the fairly regular headlines from 2012: "Romney Finishes 2nd in State X, Increases Delegate Lead." Every time it looked like someone was going to make a run, it turned out they hadn't done the paperwork and weren't in the next couple of primaries.
On “Meatball Ron, We Hardly Knew Ya”
I think the next major hurricane that hits a heavily populated part of Florida is going to be a whole 'nother kind of disaster. Not just the damage, but the collapse of Florida's residential property insurance business taking down the whole real estate bubble. If it happens before Ron is term-limited out, he'll take the blame.
On “Open Mic for the week of 1/22/2024”
Lots of the girl groups got started as teenagers. The four in the original Shangri-Las were 15, 16, or 17 when their parents signed the first record deal for them. Mary Weiss was the 15-year-old lead singer.
On “Open Mic for the week of 1/15/2024 (belated)”
...but there are no gatekeepers ‘telling’ heterosexual men what they should and shouldn’t like.
Hugh Hefner's ghost would like a word.
On “Saturday Morning Gaming: A Steeplechase in D&D”
Isn't "glittering emerald eyes" a trope?
On “Vaccines Are A Billion Miracles”
From memory...
Colorado mandated Covid-19 vaccination for health care workers. Denver mandated Covid-19 vaccination for city employees and school teachers. Colorado State University mandated that students, faculty, and staff at two of their campuses be vaccinated for Covid-19.
Most of them had medical and religious exemptions, but those required filling out and filing paperwork. IIRC, the only way out of the healthcare mandate was 100% work from home.
"
But, of course, insufficient masks used improperly ain’t that much better than no masks at all...
There was one case where a woman was using a homemade multiple-layer mask religiously, never washed it and never let it dry thoroughly. It became a breeding ground for the Legionnaires disease bacteria, which killed her.
My father worked for an insurance company and for years was a field safety engineer. At dinner he used to rail about Americans who would routinely risk their life because doing something the right way was inconvenient.
"
Most people hate those sorts of answers. Consider just masks... "We know that wide-spread public mask wearing slows the spread of some viruses, it may help slow Covid-19. But you'll have to do it right. N-95 or K-95 or disposable surgical masks. Nose and mouth. Men, no more facial hair than a mustache because it ruins what seal there is. Don't wear the same mask for more than a couple of days. If you have to, have multiple masks and cycle them often enough that each gets completely dry for a day or two before you use it again. OTOH, if y'all do masks widely, there will be in effect a run on masks. Workers who need them for dust protection and surgeons who need them to reduce infection risks in both directions won't have any either. The supply chain for most of those masks runs through China, whom we expect will stop exports, so this advice will be increasingly impractical for weeks/months."
"
Some of this is because we generally lack recent experience with epidemics of truly serious diseases. We got rid of smallpox by mandating vaccinations. We've nearly gotten rid of polio by mandating vaccinations. We made good progress on eradicating measles by mandating vaccinations, but by that time the memories of smallpox and polio were fading away and we let people get away without vaccinating their children. Covid-19 is a poor candidate for eradication because (a) it mutates readily and (b) there are animal reservoirs.
"
I get a yellow fever vaccine, I don’t get yellow fever if exposed to the disease.
The WHO reports that the yellow fever vaccine is 99% effective, and that there are regularly small numbers of breakthrough cases. The Covid-19 mRNA vaccines are 95% effective, and there are correspondingly more breakthrough cases. The current version of the mumps vaccine is 96% effective, but breakthrough cases are very rare simply because (almost) everyone gets vaccinated and exposure is very rare.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.