“The Putin dictatorship may kill me, but it cannot force me to abandon my fight against it. Wherever I may be, I will continue to call on honest Russians to join the Armed Forces of Ukraine. I will continue to advocate for strikes on military targets deep within Russian territory. I will call on the civilized world to inflict a strategic defeat on Nazi Russia. I will argue for the necessity of the military destruction of the regime of the new Hitler.”
“I’m sure there have been times that I attributed too much to DEI when I didn’t get an opportunity,” he says. “Maybe I didn’t come across well in an interview and I could do more introspection.”
“Last year, researchers at the Public Religion Research Institute and the Brookings Institution found that more than half of Republicans support Christian nationalist beliefs, including that “being a Christian is an important part of being truly American,” that the government should declare the United States a Christian nation and that “God has called Christians to exercise dominion over all areas of American society.” They have also found that Christian nationalists were roughly twice as likely as other Americans to believe that political violence may be justified. Those who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6 with wooden crosses and Christian flags did not see themselves as insurrectionists overturning democracy but as patriots defending the will of God. They had been spurred on by years of rhetoric that recast political debates as spiritual battles with apocalyptic stakes.”
“The Kennedys played a central role in the history of normalizing and supporting disability in American life. As president, John F. Kennedy transformed the federal government’s approach to supporting people with intellectual disabilities. His sister, Eunice Kennedy Shriver, founded Special Olympics. U.S. Sen. Ted Kennedy was a principal sponsor of the Americans with Disabilities Act. All three were profoundly influenced by their sister Rosemary, who had an intellectual disability, and was forcibly institutionalized and lobotomized by their parents. They vowed to do better for future generations, and did. Today, Eunice’s children carry on the tradition: her son Timothy runs Special Olympics, her daughter Maria has been active in many campaigns related to disability and mental health, and her other son Anthony founded Best Buddies, which pairs typical kids and disabled kids to help them build friendships. It works.”
“At a county fairground in Wise, Va., I witnessed people standing in lines that stretched out of view, waiting to see physicians who were stationed in animal stalls. The event’s organizers, from a nonprofit called Remote Area Medical, told me that of the thousands of people who came to this three-day clinic every year, some had health insurance but did not have enough money in the bank to cover their out-of-pocket obligations.
That shook me to my core. I was forced to come to terms with the fact that I was playing a leading role in a system that made desperate people wait months or longer to get care in animal stalls, or go deep into medical debt.”
Electing a person who has promised to implement policies that will destroy the American economy was not the smartest choice the American people have ever made.
“One aspect I may not have much of a grasp on is how people’s faith affects their views on these things. White evangelical Christians have a view on death that is, frankly, impossible for me to understand from outside. They regularly talk about welcoming death, and see things like eagerly encouraging the deadly final reckoning of everyone in the world as a positive that they want to accelerate. This leads to oddities like supporting Zionism because they’re in a hurry to have Jews die in an apocalyptic final battle, which they think is being nice to them? I will readily admit that I can't coherently explain this position; it is hard for me to understand death cults.”
“If there are flaws in the system, the last thing the governor should be doing is pushing forward to kill people before those flaws are fixed,” said Nicholas Sarwark, executive director of the Libertarian Policy Institute.
If the Governor of Arizona wants to restart killing people with taxpayer dollars, she must first release the report prepared by a Federal judge describing the serious & troubling issues with how Arizona executes prisoners.
☀️
Lead with the truth, don't hide it from the voters.
“The supposed management dynamic of maximizing shareholder value was to make money, by whatever means are available. Self-interest reigned supreme. The logic was continued in the perversely enlightening book, Hardball (2004), by George Stalk, Jr. and Rob Lachenauer. Firms should pursue shareholder value to “win” in the marketplace. These firms should be “willing to hurt their rivals”. They should be “ruthless” and “mean”. Exponents of the approach “enjoy watching their competitors squirm”. In an effort to win, they go up to the very edge of illegality or if they go over the line, get off with civil penalties that appear large in absolute terms but meager in relation to the illicit gains that are made.”
When it comes to medical care, children are guided by physicians and parents to make good choices, even if they don’t understand them in the same way as adults.
Legislators and bureaucrats are not needed or wanted in between patients and doctors.
“The only people taking this as "gospel" have been members of the media unwilling to ask the tough questions and AI founders that don't know what the fuck they're talking about (or that intend to mislead). Generative AI's products have effectively been trapped in amber for over a year. There have been no meaningful, industry-defining products, because, as economist Daron Acemoglu said back in May, "more powerful" models do not unlock new features, or really change the experience, nor what you can build with transformer-based models. Or, put another way, a slightly better white elephant is still a white elephant. ”
“Anyway, there’s something Abe did during The Failed War to Preserve Slavery, which was celebrated in his day as one of the greatest things any president has ever done with their power, and which is still celebrated in those terms today.
He issued a presidential proclamation—Proclamation 95, which emancipated all the enslaved people within the states that were (in the interests of their supremacy) fighting to destroy the union. Proclamation 95 was a tactical document in many ways, designed more to destabilize the traitors’ ability to wage war than to end the institution of human slavery. It was designed to weaken the opposing armies, and to give Abe and the armies he commanded space to win the literal fight before them—the thing that was immediate and urgent.”
“It’s very important,” said Taylor, the 73-year-old conference organizer who speaks with a difficult-to-place patrician accent. “These people can lose their jobs. Their girlfriends could jilt them. I mean, that's the kind of society we live in."