omfalos
Nonexistent good post history.
User ID: 222
omfalos
3mo ago
Annexing Belgium and keeping it would have been enough to make France the European hegemon permanently.
omfalos
4mo ago
omfalos
4mo ago
During the debate, Donald Trump can sound the alarm that the country is in danger because the commander-in-chief is incapacitated, and then demand that Kamala Harris must either agree with him or give evidence to refute his claim.
omfalos
4mo ago
If crime is ultimately a mental disorder, can it be treated by medicating criminals with antipsychotics?
omfalos
4mo ago
Subsets of the population which incline towards the Democratic Party have low voter turnout. The average nonvoter would favor the Democratic Party if voting was mandatory.
omfalos
4mo ago
Gee, how could anybody dislike that particular short story? People are so sensitive these days!
omfalos
4mo ago
It's a short story which parodies the Xianxia genre. It was purposefully left unfinished.
omfalos
4mo ago
Sounds like Harvard and Yale needs to put together a "presidential science" master's program. People in the future will be horrified that politicians without presidential science degrees were allowed to be president.
omfalos
4mo ago
Yeah I'm actually with you on this. This could be a good learning opportunity for the general public- they need to realize that the president is just one man and a human being, not some superhero working 24/7 who personally runs the entire government by himself.
That is one of the reasons I wanted Donald Trump to be president in the 2016 election. I wanted to see if the government would keep running if a person with no political experience occupied the White House.
An analogy to which I often compared it was the TV show "LOST". There is a character named Desmond who lives alone in a bunker with a computer terminal. He believes it is his job to type a specific sequence of numbers into the computer every 108 minutes or else the world will be destroyed. Quoting from the LOST wiki:
Occupants of the Swan station followed a protocol in which they typed a sequence into a computer every 108 minutes. Typing these numbers and pressing "execute" (a.k.a. pushing the button) on the keyboard discharged an electromagnetic buildup, continually averting worldwide catastrophe.
My fear about Donald Trump becoming president was that there would be some kind of highly technical task which the president was obligated to perform—analogous to typing a specific sequence of numbers into a computer terminal every 108 minutes—but which could only be figured out by somebody who had held another political office or who had graduated from Harvard Law School or Yale Law School.
When Donald Trump became president, his lack of political experience and legal knowledge did inhibit him from certain things. He signed executive orders that were dead-on-arrival because he failed to write them in a lawyerly fashion with t's crossed and i's dotted. Some of his appointments and nominations were hamstrung by procedural errors. But the world did not literally end because he typed the wrong number into a computer terminal like in LOST, which I consider to be a positive endorsement of the idea that random civilians with no political experience can become president.
omfalos
4mo ago
If Trump was hit by a meteor tomorrow, would that be antidemocratic
I'm voting for the meteor.
omfalos
4mo ago
Every presidential debate in history has been held in September or October. Who's idea was it to depart from precedent? Donald Trump seems eager to debate any time any place, so the choice was up to Joe Biden and his team. Did the Democratic Party leadership pressure Biden into this unique arrangement as a final test to see whether he will become the Democratic presidential nominee?
omfalos
4mo ago
Nevermind. I was wrong. Seawater also works. There are even power plants that are air-cooled using giant radiators. But it's definitely disadvantageous to build a nuclear power plant in the middle of a desert with no abundant source of water.
omfalos
4mo ago
Nuclear reactors rely on abundant fresh water for cooling. Australia's geography favors nuclear power plants built along the coastline of the Eastern states.
omfalos
4mo ago
Dutton's generally been lambasted for being Voldemort-adjacent aesthetically
There's a general recognition that a bald man could never become president of the US. Becoming a party leader in a parliamentary system seems less conditional on one's physical appearance, because one gets elected by fellow party members rather than by the general public. But since the general public votes on which party leader they like best in the general election, it's probably just a mistake to elect a bald man as party leader.
omfalos
5mo ago
What are the odds for Rassemblement National to win a majority in the National Assembly?
But Native Americans seized land and ethnically cleansed each other. Any surviving Native Americans are descended from the victors of these myriad wars. The email sender referenced being haunted by spirits because only extinct bloodlines are innocent. The only way to be good is to go extinct in this doggy dog world.
omfalos
5mo ago
omfalos
5mo ago
The reentry of the Starship through Earth's atmosphere was the fun part. Skip to the two hour and thirty minute mark of orthoxerox's linked video.
omfalos
5mo ago
Wild animals live in extreme poverty. They are crappy parents by human standards and give birth to stupid kids.
omfalos
5mo ago
I wouldn't say an invasion is likely, but China has an ace up their sleeve which they can use to win a war against Taiwan, and the ability to win affects the probability of invasion. If Taiwanese shore defenses, the US Navy, and the US Air Force are strong enough to defeat China's initial invasion force in a conventional amphibious assault, China can launch a second wave and give it an improved chance of success by DETONATING SUPER EMPS IN THE UPPER ATMOSPHERE OVER TAIWAN TO FRY THE ELECTRONICS OF ENEMY FORCES.
omfalos
6mo ago
What if NASA functioned like the ADA? Every company with more than 50 employees could be made legally liable for failure to launch probes into space to explore the Solar System. The law could be enforced by lawsuits against companies that have "workplaces hostile to space exploration" because they skimp on how many probes they launch.
omfalos
6mo ago
It looks like Russia is developing a giant pincer movement that will envelop Niu-York.
"Thumb on the scale" is the common expression.
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