rmtodd
3mo ago
Eh. Oklahoma IIRC doesn't allow write-ins at all, and comes damned close to not allowing third-party candidates either -- last time I looked, the requirement was that they had to gather petitions with signatures of 3% of the voting population to get on the ballot. (I recall an old SSC open thread where someone from Romania was complaining about how strict the election laws were there, where it took signatures from 1% of the voting population to get a new party on the ballot. When even ex-Commie-Block countries have more liberal election laws than your state does, that says something.)
Personally, if I was in charge, I wouldn't allow write-ins either (having preprinted ballots that can be scanned by machine is a good thing), but I wouldn't have any requirement other than "the candidate meets whatever eligibility standards (min. age etc) are set for the office and pays a fee to cover the share of costs printing the ballots attributable to adding his entry."
rmtodd
4mo ago
I was and remain of the opinion that with Contragate, Oliver North should have been shot as a traitor to the uniform.
And I'm a conservative, so that's my view on doing things that are indeed a threat to democracy.
More libertarian than conservative here, but I'm with you on this one.
I still find the response of Our Nation's Leaders to Iran-Contra to be intensely surreal. The Republicans IIRC thought everything was just fine, and the Democrats were mostly upset about Ollie funneling the proceeds from the arms sales to the Nicaraguan Contras, and nobody seemed to much care that US military officers had been selling US military hardware out the back door to an enemy nation.
rmtodd
7mo ago
That and, if the conversations in question are of any sort of sensitivity (if not necessarily "classified" under one of DOD or some other agency's Top Secret/Secret/etc. schemes, just something you'd like to keep quiet), you probably don't want to leave those emails lying about on systems admined by a third party (Google, in the case of gmail). While I gather Google/gmail is somewhat better than average as ISP goes when it comes to admin access controls and keeping audit trails on admin access to user data, there's still the possibility of such admin-snooping happening. If the President really needs a second email account under an assumed name, he should probably be doing this on an account somewhere on a system run by .gov IT.
rmtodd
8mo ago
Surely a "danger man" would be a secret agent . Just don't try to resign your position, or you might get imprisioned in a village somewhere in Wales....
rmtodd
8mo ago
Seriously, how many happily married main-character couples exist anywhere in fiction?
The example that comes to mind immediately for me is Midsomer Murders, with the main character couple of DCI Tom Barnaby and his wife Joyce (in the first half of the series), and later DCI John Barnaby and his wife Sarah (in the 2nd half of the series). I recall an interview with the actor who played Tom Barnaby about how much he liked, and how unusual it was, that he played a detective who was a happily married man and not, you know, some lonely dysfunctional wreck who spent most of his off hours in a bottle or something.
rmtodd
11mo ago
The terminal end result of harshly applying IP restrictions is preventing someone who has a sufficiently accurate memory of a copyrighted work from conveying any portion of the work to anyone else outside of a 'fair use' context.
Well, we've already had lawsuits asserting that people can be found guilty of subconsciously plagarizing someone else's music: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Sweet_Lord#Copyright_infringement_suit
rmtodd
1yr ago
well okay she missed the third time but only because octavian was as cold as they come.
Or, more cynically, because the position of "woman who got romantically involved with Octavian to insure success for herself and her son" was already filled -- by Livia.
rmtodd
1yr ago
109 Premiata Forneria Marconi – Per un amico (1972)
When most people think of progressive rock’s attempts to marry rock and classical music, the first thing that comes to mind is probably any of Emerson, Lake, and Palmer’s ham-fisted attempts at rocking the classics. Or maybe King Crimson’s avant-garde adventures. If nothing else, the spirit of most prog is Romantic; maximalist, emotional, daring. But PFM take a different tack, settling on the Baroque instead; intricate, complicated, sensitive.
Per un Amico is okay, but the real standout album in this subgenre is il Rovescio della Medaglia's Contaminazione (1973).
rmtodd
1yr ago
Lactating women (and aliens) will save the world.
...
The last one is in the Ringers' home system
Wait a minute. So this alien species name is the Ringers, and some of them are lactating. In other words, we have lactating Ringers. Are we quite sure the point of this novel isn't just to make a bad IV-fluids-related joke?
rmtodd
1yr ago
That'd be my guess too (although I'd argue "rural", as they spent most of that time living in Vegas and Flagstaff, unless you're thinking of a different reality show/polygamist family than I am). One wonders if the sentiment will shift now that 3/4ths of said polygamist family relationship has now been loudly detonating, catching fire and leaking radiation all over the tabloid press...
rmtodd
1yr ago
Also consider: we have a Drug War in this country. We have lists of chemicals that are banned because of their psychoactive effects. We have lists of chemicals that are banned because they are too similar to chemicals on the first list and thus might be psychoactive. Florida notoriously passed a drug-control act so wide-ranging it banned one of the amino acids in cheese as a controlled substance ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyramine#Status_in_Florida ).
Adrenochrome, as far as I know, is not on any of these lists. If people as notoriously paranoid as the US drug warriors never got around to banning adrenochrome, it probably doesn't do much of anything.
rmtodd
1yr ago
Gorillas, cows, etc all digest cellulose. The bacteria in their guts turn that into protein that they absorb.
Um, how can that be? Protein contains nitrogen, and cellulose, being a carbohydrate, doesn't.
rmtodd
1yr ago
Look at a globe. Seriously. The surface of a sphere is one of the classic examples of non-Euclidean geometry, a geometry where Euclid's 5th postulate doesn't hold. The exact description of the 5th postulate is a bit arcane (look it up on Wikipedia if you care), but it turns out to be equivalent to saying that all triangles must have corner angles that sum to 180 degrees. On the globe, if you choose a triangle with these corners: the north pole, 0 degrees E on the equator, 90 degrees W on the equator, that triangle will have all its corner angles 90 degrees, for a total of 270 degrees.
That was the approach taken by Isreal in Dean Ing's novel Systemic Shock, book one of the Quantrell trilogy: when World War IV [1] broke out, America was too busy with other concerns to worry about helping defending Israel from its neighbors, and Israel eventually ended up doing a hurried evacuation to Cyprus as temporary residence while they prepared their ultimate destination colonies at the L-5 points.
[1] What about World War III? Well, that was in somebody else's book,,,
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