The founders did anticipate direct democracy, the two-party system, and demagoguery. These were much discussed.

...and notably not a part of the constitution they eventually drafted, which was my point. Rather than try to build a democratic system with effective safeguards against demagoguery, they chose to have a system where only "the right sort of person" got a say in the running of government, and assumed that the separations and limitations of power they wrote in to the rest of the document would be sufficient protection against bad actors in that scenario. Now, we have (more or less) representative democracy, but with no additional guardrails to protect against someone like Trump, and SCOTUS is peeling away what we do have day by day.

The argument, such as it is, is that impeachment is the remedy for a Mad King Trump situation, rather than the courts. In fairness, this is not a completely unreasonable reading of the Constitution, but the framers' intent is almost completely irrelevant to the reality of our current political system. As originally written, the federal government was basically designed to be a vaguely-representative oligarchy, with states free to appoint senators and presidential electors however their legislatures saw fit -- the majority of states did not consistently hold a popular Presidential vote until the 1820s, for example. Impeachment by 2/3rds vote is not an unreasonable bar to set when it's assumed that everybody in government is going the part of the class and social structure, and the President acting as a class traitor would put all of Congress into uproar. The founders did not anticipate more direct democracy, the two-party system, or the vulnerability to demagoguery that those things would introduce into the system.

So here we are now, with a nakedly partisan Supreme Court majority holding that the only way to interpret the law is to ignore the world as it is and instead imagine things are still as they were at the end of the 18th century (mostly because that philosophy plays into the hands of the right wing) and pretending that a 2/3rds vote in the Senate is still a reasonable bar, when in fact the present political reality is that you will never peel 12+ sycophantic Senators away from a dangerous demagogue's camp for long enough for an impeachment process to succeed in removing him from power. Of course that's by design, but textualism and originalism paved the road to this ruling.

At this point I'm not even ironically suggesting that Biden should call their bluff and start offing prominent right wingers. The Roberts court is clearly working in the assumption that Democrats won't play dirty with the tools they're laying out for their incipient god-king, and it's looking increasingly like the only way to keep those tools out of their hands is to strike first.

The qualifier of propellor-driven-ness aside, gun kills were very much a thing through the Vietnam War, and there are recorded gun kills from modern aircraft in the 90s (an A-10 downed an Iraqi Mi-8 with its 30mm in 1991, and Venezuelan F-16s are recorded knocking down prop-driven recon and close air support aircraft with their 20mm cannons in 1992. It's only been relatively recently that missiles and IFF systems have become reliable enough to obviate the need for dogfighting capabilities and weapon systems.

If anything, standout thing here is the kills being achieved by a backseater with an assault rifle of some variety. "Lean out of the cockpit and shoot your service weapon at the other guy" aerial combat hasn't been in vogue since the earliest days of World War 1, but given the low speed and predictable flight profiles of the drones these guys are targeting, it's not a bad choice.

Here's the weird part though-

Four in 10 hiring managers said they always contacted workers who applied for made-up jobs. Forty-five percent said they sometimes contacted those job seekers. Among companies that contacted applicants, 85% report interviewing the person.

Does that part make sense to anyone?

This strikes me less as fraud and more as a way to stay open to talent that you may not need immediately but still want to be able to add to your organization, in an era when basically nobody sends unsolicited resumes anymore. Like, maybe you don't have a project in need of a Whatever Specialist right now, but it's a field your company works in, and if a really exceptional Whatever Specialist is on the market, you don't want to miss the opportunity to bring them on.

My high-school friend group adopted "it goes" from our French class ("Comment ça va?" "Ça va!", roughly meaning "How goes it?" "It goes!" being the common neutral greeting taught in French classes) and I slightly resent it being described negatively here.

The context of those passages, as I recall, is basically that "Jesus is gonna come back any second now, so don't bother with worldly concerns like marriage and making babies. Just devote your life to being a good Christian and leave the fornicating to the heathens, unless you absolutely can't live without getting laid on the regular." It's hard to understate the degree to which the early church was basically a doomsday cult. They were certain that the Rapture was going to happen in their lifetimes, and that short time horizon had a big impact on how they thought their society should be organized.

I wonder if the lack of decisions in some of these cases may betray a three-way ideological split on the court that makes it impossible to write a true majority opinion?

Something like Kagan, Sotomayor, and Brown Jackson off in one corner saying "actually we shouldn't burn it all down for no reason," Alito, Thomas, Kavanaugh, and Coney Barret in the other chanting "NO CHEVRON DEFERENCE! NO WOMEN'S RIGHTS! BURN IT DOWN, BURN IT DOWN, GIL-E-AD, GIL-E-AD!" while Roberts and Gorsuch are sitting in the middle asking both sides "won't one of you just sign on to this opinion that only burns it down a little bit? We'd like to go home to our nice comfy lives as wealthy white men who aren't affected by any of this, please."

It's the Chicago mob all over again!

Federal authorities raided a home belonging to Oakland Mayor Sheng Thao early Thursday as part of a California investigation that included a search of at least two other houses, officials said.... Agents also carried out searches about three miles to the south at two homes owned by members of the politically influential Duong family that owns the recycling company Cal Waste Solutions, the Chronicle said. The firm has been investigated over campaign contributions to Thao and other elected city officials, the local news outlet Oaklandside reported in 2020.

This one isn't all that far, geographically speaking from the megachurch down in Springfield that brings in tanks and armored vehicles for their conferences on "christian manhood" (pardon the reddit link...)

By sweeping low-population states that, by design, have more voting power in the Electoral College than is proportional to their size.

The American electoral system is turbofucked.

The average American house on a basement will have something like 40 m^3 of concrete in its foundation. If all of it could be utilized, that's still ~12kWhr of storage capacity. Nothing to be sneezed at.

It's French (on account of Exocet and Storm Shadow/SCALP both being French-made) and Exocet is saying "but what would you say to side-by-side with a friend?" To which Storm Shadow replies, "Ah, yes, I could do that."

Yep, but it doesn't change the fact that the most noteworthy targets of Exocets were British, with the missiles being launched by Argentinians.

Double funny that the Storm Shadow is part french, too...

Insert Legolas and Gimli meme here, except it's an Argentinian Exocet and a British Storm Shadow.

Their numbers are declining, but it's leaving primarily those who are most psychotically zealous in their commitment to fundamentalism and Christian Dominionism. Those few who don't toe the line completely are either finding themselves pushed out of their communities, or their communities are having to make adaptations to allow mutually-incompatible views of theology to coexist, to at least temporarily.

So far a fair number have actually come out against the verdict, including Lindsay Graham... which makes me think there are a number of Republican legislators who own guns and enjoy partaking in a little nose candy from time to time, as well.

Different Vance. Cy Vance was the prosecutor who treated Epstein with kid gloves. J.D. Vance is the author of Hillbilly Elegy, who was briefly the darling of liberal media types for showing how the folks of Appalachia and the Rust Belt have been abandoned by those in power, before realizing he could do better for himself by gargling spraytan-orange mushroom dick and riding Trump's coattails into right-wing demagoguery. He's a Senator from Ohio now.

PT Cruiser people are weird.

The play-by-email mode was broken to the point of uselessness in Civ5 and I don't think they fixed in it in 6 (you had to have an always-on Windows desktop system running the server, and because the game logic was integrated into the graphics engine you couldn't run it headless, and then on top of that there was basically no working system to coordinate active DLCs between players so most of the time people couldn't join even if you did get the damn thing running) so my friends and I tried once and gave up. I would love for 7 to have a robust PBEM system so that we can play together without needing to spend hours a week watching paint dry while everybody else plots their turns, but I'm not holding my breath.