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Why the heck were two of my posts in this thread were deleted as trolling?
Can't we even write innocuous jokes now because Trump cultists might get offended?

This should have been bumped because of the second case in Michigan, not to dunk on the raw milk lobby. The two Americans who have gotten H5N1 so far got it because they got into direct contact with cattle while on the job, not because they drank raw milk.

A couple of things that I am surprised have not been brought up at all by the Republicans...

Donald Trump signed the First Step Act. By and large, it is a liberally-minded law aimed at ensuring that prisoners do not reoffend on release. Where Donald Trump's great achievements are discussed, it is cited among them. (Not like they are, anyway. Democrats ignore them and Republicans would rather talk about today's news.) But I have not seen it brought up as an issue once in the three elections since it passed, which is rather amazing.

Ideally, Donald Trump would talk about the FSA on a consistent basis. He would say how it's gotten people back into society living decent lives. He would get ex-cons to endorse him and talk about how the FSA changed them. He'd start hammering Biden on his lead co-sponsorship of the Crime Bill, like he did with Clinton's "superpredators" in 2016. He might even promise criminal justice reform, which is much less controversial now than it was immediately post-Floyd.

I do not know why he is not, in fact, capitalising on this. Trump is the only major candidate in this election with experience of standing shoulder-to-shoulder with prisoners (and was even before the ruling).


Also, it is astonishing that the latest I've heard about the failure of the IRA-funded EV charger installation program was in a syndicated Newt Gingrich column called "Biden's War on Medicare." The Republicans talked for years about the failure of Solyndra, a single green energy start-up whose collapse had no effect on the wider market, on the grounds that the Obama administration had just unthinkingly thrown oodles of money at it. They still talk about it every now and then.

The link between the EV transition and the fight against climate change, in the US and elsewhere, is well-known. The stances of the two parties on climate change are also well-known. A vast EV charger network is necessary to facilitate the transition. Yet the return on each charger installed has been something close to a billion dollars. This is not a single doomed-to-fail business - this is literally the touchstone of America's climate transition.

If Solyndra was anything to go by, Republicans should have been talking about the failure of charger subsidies far more often than they ever talked about Solyndra. Instead it's a sideshow issue and. If Republicans everywhere do not start thinking about how best to approach the election, it will be dominated more by "but he's a Convicted Felon!" and less by "Joe Biden is wasting your money on EVs you don't want and can't afford."

Wasn't heatcharger a moderate Democrat and Biden supporter in 2020 (specifically the primary) or am thinking of someone else?

So Trump is only facing 82 felony counts now?

88 I think. It was 91 before the judge struck 3 in this case.

Do we say it's 54 now? lol

34 down, 54 to go.

https://twitter.com/james_holzhauer/status/1796322163366195274

While the ANC+DA coalition (or confidence-and-supply arrangement) looks most likely, ANC+EFF isn't far off a majority. Which of the minor parties would most likely be tapped to complete coalition if ANC's left does win out?

PA, Al Jama or GOOD. De Lille of GOOD is currently minister of Tourism.

While the ANC+DA coalition (or confidence-and-supply arrangement) looks most likely, ANC+EFF isn't far off a majority. Which of the minor parties would most likely be tapped to complete coalition if ANC's left does win out?

What does the DA get out of the arrangement?  Autonomy for the Western Cape Province?

Keeping Zuma out for another 5 years. He is 82 and MK would collapse into infighting without him.

[snip]

Is that orange thing in Northern Cape Orania?

Yes.

It’ll be close but I think Webster holds on.

He has some highly erroneous arguments when it comes to textual criticism. Outside of those though I don't know much about him. General impression though is HP.

Bart Ehrman is a New Testament Scholar who has read the source documents in their original language. It's actually much more likely that you believe erroneous arguments.

I am not contesting his skill in understanding Greek. What I do contest is his assertion that textual variation equals corruption. His base assumption (when it comes to textual criticism) is that the fact that there are more textual variations in the New Testament  than words, is a proof unto itself that the text is corrupt, and that we cannot therefore know what the original text of the New Testament was to any degree. However, only when pushed by other experts in the field will he admit that well over 90% of textual variations in the New Testament are non-meaningful (such as spelling differences) and have no impact upon what the text actually says. He never mentions this fact whenever popularly presenting his material.

Similarly, his assumptions that textual criticism equals corruption (even when the vast majority are non-meaningful, and even the significant textual variants are themselves limited in their impact on Christian doctrine and the overall text of the books themselves such as the textual variant at John 1:18) would never be accepted in any other scholarly circle about any other text of the ancient world. No scholar of Ovid, Cicero, Thomas Aquinas, Aristotle or any other scholar of ancient texts would uphold his methodology with the New Testament when it comes to their own texts. Even the more so, because apart from other works of the ancient world, the extant copies of the text of the New Testament are far closer to the originals in terms of date of composition than the copies of almost, if not every other ancient text is to their original source material. Likewise, it is not only from early Greek witnesses that the text of the New Testament can be constructed from, but also from the numerous very early translations, all of which can be compared to the Greek witnesses to verify the veracity of the text (unless you want to create a grand conspiracy wherein unknown corrupters had control of all known witnesses and manipulated all of them, and that all known witnesses today are descended from only the conspiratorial corrupted editions, perhaps something like an "Orthodox Corruption of Scripture") which is an obviously ridiculous proposition for a text with such a large volume of early attestation from such a variety of witnesses.

Sabatini wins.

Laki, should Ecolo/Groen be combined here when I do the calculations? I see they seemingly ran together last time but I haven't found anything saying whether they will be doing so this time around.