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So multiple Supreme Court justices will also receive the signed letter from the president about their $90 one-time Medicare payment?

#caturday Don’t touch my belly.

Gedankenexperiment … there is super intelligence… how much do you really need to ask it on a daily basis?

Annie Dillard. I loved your work. Blessed sharing.

Happy #caturday Resting, conserving precious calories for 🇳🇴 v 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿

Double nutmeg goal. That looked cool.

More LLM wisdom: “If foreign central banks raise interest rates while the U.S. Federal Reserve holds its rates steady, it creates a monetary policy divergence that primarily triggers capital outflows from the U.S., a weaker U.S. dollar, and upward pressure on domestic inflation.”

Asked a LLM if entertainment viewing preferences aligned with personality traits… “Higher narcissism scores correlate with preferences for competition-based reality TV…”

Happy #Caturday

It is kind of fascinating how committed Trumpies are to “doing their own research.” Vaccines, climate change, electric vehicles, “just war”, prosperity gospel, white supremacy, unitary executive,…The common thread seemingly being that their “research “ is super lazy, stupid and self serving.

President Jefferson’s charge to Meriwether Lewis for the famous expedition is so smart, thoughtful, comprehensive, … it’s from another universe when we had intelligence and wisdom in the presidency. A good (long) read about what we were and could be again. www.monticello.org/lewis-and-cl...

Turns out fossil fuels have an intermittency problem

2002, Lexx episode Prime Ridge about U.S. gun culture. Lexx, a Canadian sci-fi show that had some things to say about guns and Disney World. archive.org/details/lexx...

90% of the population of Greenland is Inuit. Why would they want to be under white nationalist rule?

Great article in politico www.politico.com/news/magazin...

Dune - surprise attack by fat, depraved baron captures Duke, occupiers mine spice.

A bit negative, sure, but what would be the one word that describes your feelings/thoughts about our U.S. Supreme Court? Mine: “fatuous “

We should be more polite when we travel on planes, like orange guy. “Quiet piggy.”

Black tie dinner at the White House tonight!!!! Billionaires dining at taxpayer expense. Sweet.

Thinking back many years now my son was more mature in 1st grade than the U.S. president is now.

I’ve always wondered if in Rucho vs Common Cause, SCOTUS members had had programming experience, had used Monte Carlo methods, if they would have seen how simple the solutions were. For them it was inscrutable. They could sincerely try to be humble, lifelong learners and revisit. Pls.

In today’s SCOTUS dissent wtf does this mean? “And if the Government prevailed on it’s sovereign-immunity argument, neither respondents nor any of the recipients of their services would have suffered any unlawful consequences.”

Hey Canada, in case you don’t know, you’re the best! One example: way back in 1986 you donated $28K to help a very rural West African high school add classrooms. And when done, your Ambassador flew in from Liberia the night before and then a 12 hour very bumpy ride to attend the opening. Big hearts!

Ukraine, heads up! If any contract you agree to on minerals can be reassigned to another party, or in anyway interpreted that way, it well could be. And that assignee could be a hostile country. B careful!!

Taliban army of max 200K beat the U.S. in a 20 year fight. They had no planes or tanks. Ukraine army is 900,000, is well educated, high tech, motivated. Musk thinks that’s weak? Meanwhile here there were over 70 million anti Trump voters. Tyranny hating voters. “Quantity has a quality all its own.”

My wife proposes a name change for DOGE to DICK, Department of Institutional Corruption and Kickbacks.

Wisdom of a Returned Peace Corps Volunteer, me: Tribal and corrupt = weak, poor, and sick.

It’s an old idea, similar to an ancient Greek idea, but it gets us to a good place fast. (And we need proposals of reform to fight for right now as winning the next round of winner-take-all party politics run by oligarchs for oligarchs won’t work for long.) What do you think Bluesky peeps?

This process gets the goodness of us into our representatives without the cunning games that have destroyed our system: dark money, coercion, rich donors, campaign consultants, gerrymandering, billionaire owned media,…and does it with no required U.S. amendments.

2. For offices filled by jury duty selection, the board of elections shall randomly select registered voters of that office such that on election day of that year eleven are em-paneled. These voters shall be sequestered and shall select from among themselves by majority vote the office holder.”

“1. For each office in this state, voters shall decide in January of that office’s election year if that office will be filled by normal general election procedures defined in existing state election law or be filled by the jury duty selection procedures defined in this Act.

So, a solution (and it’s not a new one, but this is my version of it updated to filter out crazy) is we focus on getting elected state legislators these next cycles that change how our elections are performed to follow the two step process below (straw person state legislative language):

I came away convinced our political system was able to take good people and turn them bad. Our political system can not retain the goodness and thoughtfulness found at people’s front doors. The incentives are to be bad. And we are!

So, what to do? A few years ago when I was knocking on doors for an independent candidate, I found that almost all of us are way, way more reasonable and thoughtful than “as seen on TV.” Only about 5% of us are “Bat s*** crazy.” It was a truly inspiring experience.

In theory, we can amend the constitution to fix the problem, but in reality that is not possible: the parties would have to replace their ongoing constitutional suicide pact with a suicide of themselves…totally not consistent with their behavior.

We know how we got here: our founding didn’t foresee political parties and the profound switch in allegiance away from laws to parties and money. But to change the rules hits the solid wall of judiciaries and state legislatures who are … captured by parties and money.

My first posts on Bluesky, a positive place, so I want to put forth a way to escape our broken governance legally and quickly and ask the big brains and hearts of Bluesky, can we? First the problem, then a trial solution for you to ponder...