Yeah, I'm not sure this is some sort of cipher you're trying to imply.
Section 5: "The Congress shall have the power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article"
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2383
A simple majority could certainly change the Code to make Insurrection broader, narrower, better or worse... but it would only apply from the date it is signed into law.
That's the point of changing the ECRA in 2022. [Now Title 3, Chapter 1, Section 15 of the US Code]
Not since Congress passed the New Electoral Count Reform Act in 2022.
The real question is whether under the new Act one-fifth of Congress could object to electors from States that banned a candidate. My simple reading is, No. But I'd expect that objection to hit the floor and then hit SCOTUS.
I could envision SCOTUS affirming that Section 3 does apply to the President -- squashing the most frivolous defense offered by Trump in CO -- while also asserting that Section 5 reserves to Congress what constitutes Insurrection under which someone is to be charged and convicted.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2383
A minimalist approach to Trump would have been to prove (if possible) direct communication between him and the Proud Boys who were charged under the sister act of Sedition and then merely fine him $5k under the Insurrection Act.
My question to legal folks would be that it appears a conviction of Sedition doesn't carry the ban from office... so wouldn't that imply that Jan 6 was Sedition and not Insurrection? How would you climb the ladder using an actual conviction?
Agreed on the fresh herbs... but for these winter months and to finish sauces I like to have some quality mixes on hand. The Fines herbs from Spice House are really good too.
Interesting. My theory is that the V8 is a substitute for the sofrito or mirepoix which is hard to add-in to crock-pot cooking. Besides the obvious tomatoes (not part of mirepoix) it's concentrated Carrots and Celery (and other things). Plus it adds a fair bit of acid in addition to the Worcestershire Sauce. Could see how it would really boost that kind of stew. Good find.
Since you're de rigueur on herb blending... one of my go-to's are Pot Herbs in soups and sauces that I want to have a French flair. https://www.thespicehouse.com/products/homestyle-herbs-soup-blend
+1 on the bouillon... love the bases to augment stocks.
Yeah; my wife an I were just talking about this. The likely next iteration of Homeschooling will have more uniform and easier to abide by standards of accreditation, progress testing and graduation tests.
We think this is coming and are fine with it in theory... as long as public schools are subject to the same tests and everyone should have to take a HS Graduation test.
The primary objective, of course, would not be to set HS Graduation at the Median, but to set the requirements at - pick a number - the 10th percentile. Most *should* graduate, but 10% (5%? 1%?) won't. The difference is that while we're all tested to be above the 10% bar... no institution can just handwave folks through a process and force testing on institutions not themselves.
Similarly, accreditation is standards based and not brick/mortar based; this is 80% of how colleges operate (you can even *pick* who accredits you) and it works fundamentally as a check on process, not on content. I think most people imagine that accreditation implies a stamp of approval on content, but it really only focuses on whether the school is meeting basic requirements for reporting on how their processes work and line up with their mission and some baseline criteria.
So yes, opening-up multiple layers of access to education funding would reasonably be based on these sorts of principles -- if you wanted the extra funding.
The 'danger' the homeschooling folks anticipate is a sort of 'testing for thee but not for me' combined with the sort of regulatory regime we see a lot in Farming -- that is, step 1 of the regulatory guide is how big your parking lot must be and where the state inspector's parking space has to be in relation to their office and private bathroom...
An additional 'danger' though would be the content policing... and here you have to abide by 'The Great Truce' and stick to basic skills testing... so Yeshiva students would need to learn English, Algebra, some Natural Sciences, and some social studies -- enough to master what 10% of the population has to master -- but other than that? It teaches what other subjects are important to that community.
Yes, I expect people to focus on EXACTLY WHAT YOU MUST READ TO BE AN AMERICAN ... and no, I don't care that they are wrong before I see their list. And yes, the lists at some schools will be lists that I wouldn't send my kids to.
The funny thing is that there would potentially even be support for new ideas to address certain concerns about exclusivity... like lottery enrollment for qualified applicants and access to extra funding for special needs.
"The issue is of course that every dollar sent to a private school is a dollar taken out of the public common good."
This is not accurate. A common good is an educated citizenry; public and private schools participate in this objective. A dollar spent on education advances that common good. It's wrong to frame the Public Schools themselves as the primary objective.
Which isn't to say that we oughtn't fund public schools, but framing them as THE common good we're funding and that any other dollar spent on a correct common good (Education) as a zero-sum loss is a misuse of the term common good and bad public policy.
We subsidize all sorts of Private Education, especially at the collegiate level... there's no public policy reason that the only possible Dollar spent has to be spent on the Public School system we currently have.
"2017 TANF had 2.6 million monthly participants on average. those 301 positive tests amount to 0.0116% of all recipients"
Hold on... you can't infer that from the article. The article is taking a sample of samples and isn't able to determine any sort of statistical assessment.
For example, here's what they report for one of their selected samples:
"Of the 28,828 applicants for WorkForce, North Carolina’s TANF benefits program in 2017, 258 were given drug tests by the Department of Health and Human Services, after receiving a score of eight or more on weighted 10-question survey about drug use. Of those tested, 31 tested positive; another 20 refused to take the test and 171 did not show up to do so."
As far as I can tell it is a survey of twelve states programs which include inconsistent methods for testing and the ability to refuse the test (as noted above).
Basically both the 10% number and the 0.0116% are useless.
Exactly. And yet, whatever loss to 'Prestige' some may imagine, it has no meaningful impact on US ability to project power near or in Yemen, if needed. The Houthis gamble little because they have little to lose. But 'Prestige' has little to do with how the US will or ought to shape a response.
"So much of international relations is based on confidence and belief. Changes in those beliefs can destroy the image needed to credibly project power abroad. When London was shown to be a pushover at Suez, it rapidly snowballed, accelerating the loss of Empire and cementing the nation’s new status as a junior partner to Washington."
This is fundamental misunderstanding of 'Prestige' in foreign affairs. Prestige never reduces capability, it only increases or decreases costs. Either you have the ability to project and sustain power or you do not; if no-one believes you have that power, but you do... they gamble incorrectly. If you don't have the power, no amount of prestige will give it to you; at most it gives you a bluff or two. The value of maintaining prestige is in reducing the costs of other nation testing your ability or resolve. There's value in that, to be sure, but it is a value measured in treasure and blood, not in ability to project power.
The article implies a weird causality that has never existed and is never taken as such by any practitioner or
student of foreign policy.
Half of the intelligence apparatus also believes that the lab leak is more plausible than zoonotic.
This isn't 'fringe' it's debated among and by experts.
No one is 'asserting' conspiracies... people are reporting on what actors in the Covid-19 response team responsible for getting their 'view' of the origins published in the Lancet said behind the scenes based on documents provided by the US Government.
You should read it, it's good investigative journalism.
What's happening now is closer to History of Science work. The pandemic has come and gone and nothing will alter that event. As this moves into the rearview mirror of history, it's easier for people who were committed to 'The Narrative' that made the proximate origins an important political position to take. Good Guys: Zoonotic / Bad Guys: Lab Leak.
And what we're seeing now is the unraveling of the cover-up. And it really goes back to an origin story of the principle actors in the cover-up going way out over their skis -- beyond any plausible Scientific claim -- that the origin *had* to be Zoonotic. One by one the actors in that bad episode -- the Lancet episode -- have been shown to either doubt their certainty (obviously) and worse to have distinctly conflicting interests in shutting down any possible inquiry into the origins.
The 'trove' of documents are just the official records that historians (and journalists) use to build new inquiries into 'what happened' and ask more questions.
EcoHealth's position is *not* that they *weren't* proposing to do the work of synthesizing SARS-CoV spike proteins that would bind to human ACE2 for testing purposes while collaborating with WIV/UNC and others... its that it wasn't funded, so the plan for doing so could never have ever been acted upon in any possible way. QED.
But, we know that this isn't entirely how 'science' works and we have a confounding vector in that WIV is, well, a Chinese institute that may have its own set of goals and objectives.
We should note that the goal of the DEFUSE project was NOBLE... identify via predictive models how Bat Corona Viruses in S.China could turn into something 'like' SARS-COVID-2 and then proactively immunize the bats by synthesizing spike proteins.
The DEFUSE proposal is linked and available... I'd suggest reading starting at p.9: SARSr-CoV _QS detection, sequencing, and recovery_
It certainly doesn't prove that a lab leak happened, it just shows that the people who published the Lancet Article that became the 'backbone' of the Zoonotic Narrative were interested in doing 'gain-of-function' research on the very virus that developed a unique furin cleavage particularly amenable to ACE2 receptors in humans.
But, as Ecohealth points out, the project wasn't funded... so it never happened.
And, given the stakes, I doubt the Chinese will ever allow for a 'trove' of information to be searched via FOIA requests... but as the need for the Zoonotic Narrative to have political salience fades, prepare for the 'everyone knew' it was a Lab Leak phase.
This is the organization that Eco Alliance is referencing:
https://usrtk.org/about-u-s-right-to-know/
Multiple other organizations are going through the FOIA releases... hopefully one that you approve of will also go through the documents. Maybe one that pushed the Lancet letter as 'True Science'.
There's more coming out ... and seriously, Occam's Razor is sharp.
Heh, fair enough back at you... but if SCOTUS cites Section 5 and the Sedition act of 1948 as the main reason why the decision is overturned, then I reserve the right to say, "yes it was."
I prepared a response... but rather than bumble along in my own words, I found that Justice Samour's dissent starting on p.146 and particularly the discussion of Section 5 (starting p.167) and the congressional legislation of 1870 and 1948 to be a much clearer, and presumably legally artful, articulation of what I was getting at above.
It's a minor point, but among the many messaging failures associated with Covid, it probably would have been better to revive the slightly antiquated term, Inoculation.
Sure, vaccination and inoculation are nearly synonyms, but vaccination has become associated with immunization against Polio and other diseases rendering immunity. And, further, a strategy of eradication based on immunity.
Whereas a public policy of inoculation to protect individuals against severe cases would have helped with the messaging, and changed the second half of the public policy debate/fiasco from zero covid to personal risk mitigation covid.
Yeah, as to how the courts work, I'll defer... but I'm not seeing how a district court in Colorado is capable of making a finding of fact on whether Trump 'engaged in' 'insurrection' based on portions of congressional reports.
I was curious on the logic the court used to make the determination.
As far as I can tell on page 9 it asserts three points:
1. The district court based determinations on portions of Congressional Report
2. The district court determined that Jan 6 was "insurrection" [quotes theirs]
3. The district court determined Trump "engaged in" [quotes theirs]
Just don't see this withstanding the tiniest scrutiny outside of Colorado. I'm not sure Colorado has the power to declare 'general' insurrections against the United States a'la the Civil War... much less assert that someone 'engage in' a particular one without a trial and a verdict.
I suppose the two-step dance is to cite the Proud Boys conviction for Seditious Conspiracy and then ... Trump. But IMO you can't dot dot dot Trump. You need a conviction for Seditious Conspiracy against Trump. Connect the dots and I'm fine with it. But you can't OpEd your way to disqualifying candidates. Not without future iterations on this.
We do the same thing with our credit cards, and I'm a home finance accounting nerd from back when I was a kid helping my dad with our small business books. I was doing payroll at 14, by hand, looking up withholding on charts, calculating Union dues, and balancing the totals on a punch crank adding machine, in the snow, both ways. Anyhow...
Pulled the reports from 2019 and 2023 -- I'm not fool enough to say how much we spend on groceries because we spend a lot!
2019: 8 souls, 2 teenage boys under 20.
2023: 5 souls, no teenage boys.
On “Supreme Court To Hear Trump Primary Ballot Challenges”
Yeah, I'm not sure this is some sort of cipher you're trying to imply.
Section 5: "The Congress shall have the power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article"
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2383
A simple majority could certainly change the Code to make Insurrection broader, narrower, better or worse... but it would only apply from the date it is signed into law.
That's the point of changing the ECRA in 2022. [Now Title 3, Chapter 1, Section 15 of the US Code]
"
Not since Congress passed the New Electoral Count Reform Act in 2022.
The real question is whether under the new Act one-fifth of Congress could object to electors from States that banned a candidate. My simple reading is, No. But I'd expect that objection to hit the floor and then hit SCOTUS.
"
I could envision SCOTUS affirming that Section 3 does apply to the President -- squashing the most frivolous defense offered by Trump in CO -- while also asserting that Section 5 reserves to Congress what constitutes Insurrection under which someone is to be charged and convicted.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2383
A minimalist approach to Trump would have been to prove (if possible) direct communication between him and the Proud Boys who were charged under the sister act of Sedition and then merely fine him $5k under the Insurrection Act.
My question to legal folks would be that it appears a conviction of Sedition doesn't carry the ban from office... so wouldn't that imply that Jan 6 was Sedition and not Insurrection? How would you climb the ladder using an actual conviction?
On “Weekend Plans Post: Beef Stew and a Knife you Need”
Agreed on the fresh herbs... but for these winter months and to finish sauces I like to have some quality mixes on hand. The Fines herbs from Spice House are really good too.
"
I think there are some onions floating around there in the recipe... just not sauteed or browned.
"
Interesting. My theory is that the V8 is a substitute for the sofrito or mirepoix which is hard to add-in to crock-pot cooking. Besides the obvious tomatoes (not part of mirepoix) it's concentrated Carrots and Celery (and other things). Plus it adds a fair bit of acid in addition to the Worcestershire Sauce. Could see how it would really boost that kind of stew. Good find.
Since you're de rigueur on herb blending... one of my go-to's are Pot Herbs in soups and sauces that I want to have a French flair. https://www.thespicehouse.com/products/homestyle-herbs-soup-blend
+1 on the bouillon... love the bases to augment stocks.
On “Conservatives Should Know What They’re Conserving”
Yeah; my wife an I were just talking about this. The likely next iteration of Homeschooling will have more uniform and easier to abide by standards of accreditation, progress testing and graduation tests.
We think this is coming and are fine with it in theory... as long as public schools are subject to the same tests and everyone should have to take a HS Graduation test.
The primary objective, of course, would not be to set HS Graduation at the Median, but to set the requirements at - pick a number - the 10th percentile. Most *should* graduate, but 10% (5%? 1%?) won't. The difference is that while we're all tested to be above the 10% bar... no institution can just handwave folks through a process and force testing on institutions not themselves.
Similarly, accreditation is standards based and not brick/mortar based; this is 80% of how colleges operate (you can even *pick* who accredits you) and it works fundamentally as a check on process, not on content. I think most people imagine that accreditation implies a stamp of approval on content, but it really only focuses on whether the school is meeting basic requirements for reporting on how their processes work and line up with their mission and some baseline criteria.
So yes, opening-up multiple layers of access to education funding would reasonably be based on these sorts of principles -- if you wanted the extra funding.
The 'danger' the homeschooling folks anticipate is a sort of 'testing for thee but not for me' combined with the sort of regulatory regime we see a lot in Farming -- that is, step 1 of the regulatory guide is how big your parking lot must be and where the state inspector's parking space has to be in relation to their office and private bathroom...
An additional 'danger' though would be the content policing... and here you have to abide by 'The Great Truce' and stick to basic skills testing... so Yeshiva students would need to learn English, Algebra, some Natural Sciences, and some social studies -- enough to master what 10% of the population has to master -- but other than that? It teaches what other subjects are important to that community.
Yes, I expect people to focus on EXACTLY WHAT YOU MUST READ TO BE AN AMERICAN ... and no, I don't care that they are wrong before I see their list. And yes, the lists at some schools will be lists that I wouldn't send my kids to.
The funny thing is that there would potentially even be support for new ideas to address certain concerns about exclusivity... like lottery enrollment for qualified applicants and access to extra funding for special needs.
The pie will get bigger; wetter, and wilder.
"
"The issue is of course that every dollar sent to a private school is a dollar taken out of the public common good."
This is not accurate. A common good is an educated citizenry; public and private schools participate in this objective. A dollar spent on education advances that common good. It's wrong to frame the Public Schools themselves as the primary objective.
Which isn't to say that we oughtn't fund public schools, but framing them as THE common good we're funding and that any other dollar spent on a correct common good (Education) as a zero-sum loss is a misuse of the term common good and bad public policy.
We subsidize all sorts of Private Education, especially at the collegiate level... there's no public policy reason that the only possible Dollar spent has to be spent on the Public School system we currently have.
"
"2017 TANF had 2.6 million monthly participants on average. those 301 positive tests amount to 0.0116% of all recipients"
Hold on... you can't infer that from the article. The article is taking a sample of samples and isn't able to determine any sort of statistical assessment.
For example, here's what they report for one of their selected samples:
"Of the 28,828 applicants for WorkForce, North Carolina’s TANF benefits program in 2017, 258 were given drug tests by the Department of Health and Human Services, after receiving a score of eight or more on weighted 10-question survey about drug use. Of those tested, 31 tested positive; another 20 refused to take the test and 171 did not show up to do so."
As far as I can tell it is a survey of twelve states programs which include inconsistent methods for testing and the ability to refuse the test (as noted above).
Basically both the 10% number and the 0.0116% are useless.
On “What’s a Christmas Movie?”
Would've said a nice capape tray of vinegared sponges.
On “Suez 2.0?: The Houthis v. International Shipping”
Exactly. And yet, whatever loss to 'Prestige' some may imagine, it has no meaningful impact on US ability to project power near or in Yemen, if needed. The Houthis gamble little because they have little to lose. But 'Prestige' has little to do with how the US will or ought to shape a response.
"
"So much of international relations is based on confidence and belief. Changes in those beliefs can destroy the image needed to credibly project power abroad. When London was shown to be a pushover at Suez, it rapidly snowballed, accelerating the loss of Empire and cementing the nation’s new status as a junior partner to Washington."
This is fundamental misunderstanding of 'Prestige' in foreign affairs. Prestige never reduces capability, it only increases or decreases costs. Either you have the ability to project and sustain power or you do not; if no-one believes you have that power, but you do... they gamble incorrectly. If you don't have the power, no amount of prestige will give it to you; at most it gives you a bluff or two. The value of maintaining prestige is in reducing the costs of other nation testing your ability or resolve. There's value in that, to be sure, but it is a value measured in treasure and blood, not in ability to project power.
The article implies a weird causality that has never existed and is never taken as such by any practitioner or
student of foreign policy.
On “Open Mic for the week of 12/18/2023”
No... just would want to understand which process was the weak link and how the virus escaped.
"
Half of the intelligence apparatus also believes that the lab leak is more plausible than zoonotic.
This isn't 'fringe' it's debated among and by experts.
No one is 'asserting' conspiracies... people are reporting on what actors in the Covid-19 response team responsible for getting their 'view' of the origins published in the Lancet said behind the scenes based on documents provided by the US Government.
You should read it, it's good investigative journalism.
"
Yes, I'm confident that I understand what I've read and that what I've written on the subject is accurate.
But, It's a pity you haven't read what I've written nor what has been published.
"
What's happening now is closer to History of Science work. The pandemic has come and gone and nothing will alter that event. As this moves into the rearview mirror of history, it's easier for people who were committed to 'The Narrative' that made the proximate origins an important political position to take. Good Guys: Zoonotic / Bad Guys: Lab Leak.
And what we're seeing now is the unraveling of the cover-up. And it really goes back to an origin story of the principle actors in the cover-up going way out over their skis -- beyond any plausible Scientific claim -- that the origin *had* to be Zoonotic. One by one the actors in that bad episode -- the Lancet episode -- have been shown to either doubt their certainty (obviously) and worse to have distinctly conflicting interests in shutting down any possible inquiry into the origins.
The 'trove' of documents are just the official records that historians (and journalists) use to build new inquiries into 'what happened' and ask more questions.
EcoHealth's position is *not* that they *weren't* proposing to do the work of synthesizing SARS-CoV spike proteins that would bind to human ACE2 for testing purposes while collaborating with WIV/UNC and others... its that it wasn't funded, so the plan for doing so could never have ever been acted upon in any possible way. QED.
But, we know that this isn't entirely how 'science' works and we have a confounding vector in that WIV is, well, a Chinese institute that may have its own set of goals and objectives.
We should note that the goal of the DEFUSE project was NOBLE... identify via predictive models how Bat Corona Viruses in S.China could turn into something 'like' SARS-COVID-2 and then proactively immunize the bats by synthesizing spike proteins.
The DEFUSE proposal is linked and available... I'd suggest reading starting at p.9: SARSr-CoV _QS detection, sequencing, and recovery_
https://drasticresearch.files.wordpress.com/2021/09/main-document-preempt-volume-1-no-ess-hr00118s0017-ecohealth-alliance.pdf
It certainly doesn't prove that a lab leak happened, it just shows that the people who published the Lancet Article that became the 'backbone' of the Zoonotic Narrative were interested in doing 'gain-of-function' research on the very virus that developed a unique furin cleavage particularly amenable to ACE2 receptors in humans.
But, as Ecohealth points out, the project wasn't funded... so it never happened.
And, given the stakes, I doubt the Chinese will ever allow for a 'trove' of information to be searched via FOIA requests... but as the need for the Zoonotic Narrative to have political salience fades, prepare for the 'everyone knew' it was a Lab Leak phase.
"
The Daily Mail isn't the source.
This is the organization that Eco Alliance is referencing:
https://usrtk.org/about-u-s-right-to-know/
Multiple other organizations are going through the FOIA releases... hopefully one that you approve of will also go through the documents. Maybe one that pushed the Lancet letter as 'True Science'.
There's more coming out ... and seriously, Occam's Razor is sharp.
On “Colorado Supreme Court Disqualifies Trump From 2024 Primary Ballot”
Agreed, I'm not really 'predicting' what SCOTUS will do once it gets thrown into the SCOTUS legal blending machine.
"
Heh, fair enough back at you... but if SCOTUS cites Section 5 and the Sedition act of 1948 as the main reason why the decision is overturned, then I reserve the right to say, "yes it was."
"
I prepared a response... but rather than bumble along in my own words, I found that Justice Samour's dissent starting on p.146 and particularly the discussion of Section 5 (starting p.167) and the congressional legislation of 1870 and 1948 to be a much clearer, and presumably legally artful, articulation of what I was getting at above.
On “Open Mic for the week of 12/18/2023”
It's a minor point, but among the many messaging failures associated with Covid, it probably would have been better to revive the slightly antiquated term, Inoculation.
Sure, vaccination and inoculation are nearly synonyms, but vaccination has become associated with immunization against Polio and other diseases rendering immunity. And, further, a strategy of eradication based on immunity.
Whereas a public policy of inoculation to protect individuals against severe cases would have helped with the messaging, and changed the second half of the public policy debate/fiasco from zero covid to personal risk mitigation covid.
On “Colorado Supreme Court Disqualifies Trump From 2024 Primary Ballot”
Yeah, as to how the courts work, I'll defer... but I'm not seeing how a district court in Colorado is capable of making a finding of fact on whether Trump 'engaged in' 'insurrection' based on portions of congressional reports.
"
I was curious on the logic the court used to make the determination.
As far as I can tell on page 9 it asserts three points:
1. The district court based determinations on portions of Congressional Report
2. The district court determined that Jan 6 was "insurrection" [quotes theirs]
3. The district court determined Trump "engaged in" [quotes theirs]
Just don't see this withstanding the tiniest scrutiny outside of Colorado. I'm not sure Colorado has the power to declare 'general' insurrections against the United States a'la the Civil War... much less assert that someone 'engage in' a particular one without a trial and a verdict.
I suppose the two-step dance is to cite the Proud Boys conviction for Seditious Conspiracy and then ... Trump. But IMO you can't dot dot dot Trump. You need a conviction for Seditious Conspiracy against Trump. Connect the dots and I'm fine with it. But you can't OpEd your way to disqualifying candidates. Not without future iterations on this.
On “It’s The Economy, Stupid, But That Depends on Your Definition of “Economy””
We do the same thing with our credit cards, and I'm a home finance accounting nerd from back when I was a kid helping my dad with our small business books. I was doing payroll at 14, by hand, looking up withholding on charts, calculating Union dues, and balancing the totals on a punch crank adding machine, in the snow, both ways. Anyhow...
Pulled the reports from 2019 and 2023 -- I'm not fool enough to say how much we spend on groceries because we spend a lot!
2019: 8 souls, 2 teenage boys under 20.
2023: 5 souls, no teenage boys.
We spent 5% more in 2023 than we did in 2019...
On “Rasmussen’s Cheaters”
Heh... then we use technology to create a 'safe bubble' for remote voting on your mail-in ballot.