gehringer_2

I rest my case.

Maybe if you had been closer you'd appreciate the critique more. Besides, if you live and work a major metro, most the church work you come into contact with is likely to be old school Protestant and Social Service Catholic and none of of those people are the political voice of Christianity in the US today.

interestingly enough, when the board re-emerged the investing thread went right back into the politics header like it was on the old board. The intersection is pretty unavoidable I guess.

The picture being painted of Christians in this thread is the one that fits the US public/political Christians who have claimed the mantle of speaking for Christianity in the US today. There are still millions of Christians in America who look at the public face of Christianity in American and despair. But they are also largely people who believe in the separation of church and state, and so do their political advocacy largely through party and other secular means and without trying to claim divine revelation in their arguments.

I don't know if I would even call what happened in 2018 substantial, but be that as it may, I would guess you that when they started to tighten you had half the banksters who didn't want to hurt Trump's re-election and the other half cowed by any accusation that that is what they were trying to do. IIRC correctly Trump raised holy heII about the FED at the time. And then on the heals of that came COVID so they pumped even more.

but it's OK for us to assuage our consciences by leaving the poor and less resourced at the mercy of our hypocrisies while we buy our way out of the inconveniences, but sleep well in our surety we have made the world safer for the unborn. Sorry I'm not buying that version of moral rectitude.

yup. Morality for thee but not for me. Same as it ever was.

I hear a lot of denial, I don't see much evidence that would refute Chasf scenario. Most women getting abortions are poor (and the poor are disproportionate of color, so that inference doesn't need explicit statement even if the report avoids it) single, already have children they are trying to take care of and have become overmatched by their circumstances. You wouldn't have abortions to ban if these women had had the options they needed to gain better control over their lives. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/12/14/upshot/who-gets-abortions-in-america.html

a LOT of drum banging about Putin declaring war or try to go to a general mobilization. I have to wonder how much of this is Western Psyops aimed into Russia and how much is serious intel analysis. I guess we find out in ~6 days.

No there won't, there will be an adjustment and people will work longer so that the ratio of worker to retirees stabilizes. It's already happening in the US and we don't even have nearly the demo dislocation of other places. There will be no crises and no massive tax increases. The idea that you can be retired for 30 yrs after working for 30 will certainly go away for sure, but that was an unsustainable transient anomaly created by the oddity of the baby boom the first place. The truth is that any species that can't survive at stable population numbers can't survive at all, so at some point Homo Sapiens might as well get with the program the Universe has set for it because the Universe has a talent for snuffing out any organism that doesn't learn to play by the rules.

actually a good chunk if it is true. Who do you think it's going to be who is denied abortions? It's going to be poor girls, mostly of color, who are exactly going to have limited life prospects grow even more limited - will be cast onto a welfare system that those same white men who denied her an abortion are trying to throw her off of. What world are you seeing if you don't see this as the result?

the very model of the modern GOP - just pull something out of your asz, throw it out there, have the MAGA slurp it up.

I’m perfectly serious. It bullshit. Germany and Japan illustrate well that a nation can cope with declining as well as expanding population. China may have thrown themselves into a tougher adjustment problem than others but they will cope. The whole thing is based on a fallacy that fails to parse the difference between gross GDP and per capita GDP. The later is actually all that matters to social well being and it need not/will not fall even with contracting population.

Sounds like the Great Eastern pincer campaign is already bogging down.

the world does not have too few humans anywhere or under any economic conditions. "Baby Shortages" are nationalistic pearl clutching fantasies. There is no place on this planet that wouldn't be better off with a lower titer of Homo-Sapiens.

there are a lot of ways to spin this. If the hard core right guys thought they had the win and then Roberts and Kavanaugh or Barrett started acting like they were going to peel away, maybe you leak this to try to force them back, or so that even if it does goes against them in the end, Alito, Thomas, and Gorsuch can plead their purity and argue the perfidy the conservative turncoats. That would be big for GOP fundraising. It's probably also a way over optimistic reading of the possible outcome, but the point being that there can be a lot of angles to this particular leak. Getting a jump start on the 2022 fundraising effort for the Dems is still the more straightforward take.

Have to know what Goff looked like this season first....🤔

IDK, I think it comes down to whether you can show the state has any rational basis for being interested in a particular behavior beyond arguing that it "contributes to immorality" by some religious sects definition of same. Gay Marriage and sexual activity between consenting adults fail that test, Predatory sexual behavior toward children does not. Reproductive choices by a woman does. That is the basis for my launching point. There are always questions at the margins and we have courts and legislature to help define those to acceptable civic agreement - when they work. But I don't think it's that hard to figure out - the 1st big clue is when the argument is that it's the tenets of someone's religion that have to be protected. The second is when some business cries they have some information interest they must protect. I'm pretty confident those simple criteria can get you to the right answer on most privacy issues. Or, if you can't make the argument without invoking God or money, i'm gonna be real sceptical.

What proportion do you suppose have to end up in prison before those economics come out negative?

I have more the impression that the charge by Collins and Murkowski is that representations were made in their private interviews that were lies.

It is deeply rooted in history...

yeah - I thought going in that 2016 was a trap election for whichever side won it. But who really knows, Hillary might have surprised us all and been good. Look at Zelensky. ....nah...

HaHa - "I know it when I see it"

Wow, and that and 5 bucks will get you a Vente at Starbucks.

sure, in the sense that where it is being dealt with today is surely a highly undemocratic one where the action of the court speaking for the whole nation is clearly not a reflection of where the whole nation is on the issue. The question of how much granularity we can have in the law on a state to state basis and when the voice of the national majority needs to trump state prerogative and at what level what rights are defined are much more fair questions to argue differences over IMV. I have linked concerns in that area. I am a very big believer that the logical sense of the Constitution, not to mention the overwhelming view of the current American population, is strongly supportive of the kind of privacy rights embodied in Griswold. The state has no business telling me who I have what kind of relationship with etc. In that sense I worry more about the conservative Court's antipathy to Griswalrd et al in general as the mechanism for rejecting Roe. No-one with their eyes open can deny that the agenda doesn't end with abortion, it goes to gay rights and civil rights and the continuing expansion of corporate rights in their stead in general. That leads a lot of us to feel the need to play defense across the board.