My non-joke answer is apprenticeship. Kids could actually learn how to do a valuable job rather than graduating from high school with almost no useful skills.

Hah, I expect that Mitch McConnell is still going to vote for him.

defense attorneys argued that Manhattan prosecutors had placed “highly prejudicial emphasis on official-acts evidence,” including Trump’s social media posts and witness testimony about Oval Office meetings

It’s unclear to me why an official act cannot be used as evidence that a different unofficial act occurred. Let’s say candidate Trump shoots Bob on Fifth Avenue and then, after being elected, threatens to “kill Joe the way [he] killed Bob” during his State of the Union address. He can’t be held accountable for threatening to kill Joe, but he did just confess that he killed Bob while he wasn’t president. Why couldn’t this confession be used as evidence in his trial for killing Bob? Or, for that matter, in his trial for killing Joe if he went on to kill Joe after he was out of office?

Dwarves literally only want four things and it’s f—ing disgusting.

Technically it would be a cat spitting a fish out.

Note that the song is banned by at least one festival. It isn’t illegal.

The use of the song by the far right is thought to have begun in late 2023

Is that really so long ago that it even counts as a song associated with them? This reminds me of Pepe the hate symbol…

I wonder if Watergate would have been an official act according to this new doctrine.

My theory is that psychosis due to self-imposed sleep deprivation causes some of the crazier things Elon Musk does.

lots of ads and mailers before the election that when they show their ID to vote they’ll be arrested and taken away

I’ve seen a mailer providing false information that a certain very liberal group (out-of-state college students) wasn’t allowed to vote, but I’ve never seen something like this. Do you have a link to an example of it?

The funny thing is that a basic understanding of the Bible is actually important for making sense of American history - the people making that history were strongly influenced by the Bible and so unless you know at least the major “plot points”, their actions (and a lot of literature) won’t make much sense.

With that said, I don’t trust Oklahoma to teach about the Bible in a manner appropriate for historical analysis rather than religious dominance.

the Catholic Church is their competition when it comes to running private schools and otherwise lucrative community support institutions

I generally agree with what you’ve written, but I think you’re assuming more pragmatism here than is actually present. Bitter hostility between Protestants and Catholics is as old as Protestantism (and much older than the institutions you mention).

Also, as a side note, there are plenty of Catholic Republicans. (37% vs 44% that identify as Democrats, according to Pew.)

Then it becomes “okay, call this prick the c-word. Now I need to also cite this fact that is part of my border security answer. And then I need to talk about… jesus christ are we actually talking about global warming right now?”

That would be an understandable reaction from the average person but the president should be a lot more capable than the average person. Even if this specific sort of thing isn’t something he needs to be able to handle, he still needs to handle things a lot harder than this and his performance here isn’t reassuring me that he can. Trump is so predictably rude that Biden should have been totally ready for it.

I should clarify. I’m not saying that most people who distrust the justice system are going to like Trump more after his conviction. I’m also not saying that I think he’s likely to reform the justice system in a way that helps people affected by racial bias.

However, many of Trump’s supporters consider his conviction evidence that he’s genuinely an anti-establishment candidate rather than proof of wrong-doing. (See the variety of “I’m voting for the convicted felon” merchandise.) This attitude requires a distrust of the justice system. We’ve already seen that Trump’s conviction hasn’t hurt his poll numbers very much and that he currently has more black support than he did in '16 or '20 so I’m saying that his conviction might actually lead to a small increase in support for him from black people (the majority of whom are still never going to support him) because more of them distrust the justice system.

No, I’m saying that we know black people are less likely to trust the police than white people are, and so it seems reasonable that they might also trust the courts less too. That doesn’t imply some supervillain-like love of crime.

I wonder if there’s actually some truth to his claim. The experience of blacks with the justice system is quite different than that of whites, so I wouldn’t be surprised if their attitude towards a candidate with felony convictions would also be different. Perhaps they’re more likely to believe the narrative of an unfair prosecution than white people are.

Aren’t souls canonically real in the Marvel universe? I expect that only the piece with the soul regenerates.

I’m not old and I think I might forget some of the words, especially since I would be so anxious.

I don’t know if I would call this ruling a mistake since I’m not an expert in matters of standing, but I regret that the court will not act against a serious threat to free speech. Members of both parties have made statements directed at social media companies which I consider well over the line between a request and a threat.

Not the same thing, but I still have my old Voodoo 2 3D-accelerator card (not the same thing as a video card back then).

TLDR version: not actually 11 commandments, just an extra line break in the shall-not-covet commandment.