Ahhhh this is an absolute tragedy. The same thing goes with many movies from the golden age of Hollywood. I love to watch these old films. It breaks my heart that so many are lost forever.

I’ve looked around quite a bit for The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. No one seems to have the complete series. The show ran nightly for 30 years and amassed 6714 episodes so it would be quite a large torrent.

Representation by population vs representation by area. The same kind of arguments made in favour of switching the U.S. to a fully proportional system (getting rid of all forms of representation by area) could equally be made in favour of having one world government with proportional representation.

When we think about it that way (world elections would be dominated by Asia), it’s easy to see why we might not want such a system. Then, returning to the U.S. system alone it’s easier to see why many people want representation by area preserved. Although the cultural differences between states are much smaller than the differences between continents, they’re still very much present and the issues often dominate American politics.

It was a casual remark, not a hill to die on. That’s entirely your read!

Floor to ceiling stalls are much harder to clean. The gaps underneath allow for water to drain out when washing everything.

As a Canadian and former campaign volunteer (and poll observer) this is really weird to me. Federal elections in Canada are always hand-counted. Results at each polling station are counted in front of volunteer observers from each party (as well as neutral observers) and then delivered to Elections Canada where they’re tallied (in front of lawyers from each party) and results are reported to the media.

It’s not a big deal and there’s no chaos.

Did Ben Carson attempt to do surgery on himself? Otherwise I can’t explain at all how dumb he was. Wow! Thanks for the example.

Jill Stein may be an idiot politician with laughably unrealistic positions and a totally unworkable take on foreign policy (even dining with Putin) but she’s also a physician who practiced internal medicine for decades.

She’s not an idiot in general. I think she’s just unbelievably naive about people and their motivations.

This process began long before Reagan. I think it started with the automobile manufacturers, and General Motors in particular, in their war on public transit.

The death of the streetcar brought with it the death of streetcar suburbs and mixed-use zoning, which was the foundation upon which most third places rested (neighbourhood pubs, cafes, and barber shops).

Anyway, definitely watch that video if you have the time. Compare the vast landscapes full of roads and parking lots with the old-fashioned neighbourhood of Riverdale, with its narrow streets and cozy houses huddled together on small lots. It’s easy to see which one is more conducive to community, civic engagement, and good government. The car-dependent landscape looks like some dystopian nightmare by comparison.

That’s because the US is not only deeply polarized by party affiliation, it’s deeply segregated regionally by political stripe. Look at how few “swing states” there are and how all the rest are “solid red” or “solid blue.”

Increasingly, people know and have personal contact with fewer and fewer members of the other side. We’re witnessing the creation of the Morlocks and the Eloi, groups that neither interact with nor understand one another to the point of being separate species.

Maybe if she had access to a professional beforehand things would have turned out differently. We look at the justice system as having failed her but really all of society failed her long before that. We have no sense of community anymore.

Heck, I’ve been learning about all the car-centric urban planning we’ve done over the last century in North America. Look up “stroads” on YouTube and you can see lifeless our society has become because of all the stupidity at city hall.

The justice system is flawed and it’s not a matter of trust. You shouldn’t be trusting people you don’t know in the first place. If you’re looking for something to place your trust in, it’s yourself and your understanding of your own incentives and the incentives of others around you. When those incentives align, things tend to work out better for you than when they’re opposed.

The justice system is a misnomer. It’s not about fundamental justice. It’s the right arm of the state, the monopoly on organized violence. When we celebrate vigilantism and revenge killing, we celebrate the weakening of the state’s monopoly and lean toward anarchy and chaos. If that’s what you want, fine, but now you have a very strong current to swim against.

What happened to this woman was terrible and no one deserves that. But she was no longer under the control of her abuser. She was safe in another town. She could have chosen to get on with her life. Instead she chose to kill the guy. Is she any better off now that he’s dead and she’s in jail? I don’t think so, but you’d have to ask her.

The courts take a very dim view of people taking the law into their own hands. That’s what she did. We can all understand why she did it. But we really don’t want people going around shooting each other for revenge. It creates a spiral of violence that leads to societal breakdown. It’s the whole reason a justice system exists in the first place, going all the way back to the time when the king was the judge.

Zeesh. Rhymes with sheesh!

The reason is brinkmanship. You can see the same thing with the date Christmas season begins at retail stores.

JD Vance isn’t running for mayor though. Property taxes are a local issue. At the federal level the situation is reversed. Bigger families mean more income taxpayers. Nuclear families tend to produce wealthier and more educated offspring than single moms.

The issue for the United States is that the system was designed from the start to guarantee unending political gridlock. Then SCOTUS is the only pressure relief valve to allow legal changes to take place. Thus it has become the focal point for all political energy.

No system can produce an independent court when all of the population is intensely focused on that court as an outlet for political change.

They also had real estate investments and conflicts of interest that were in jeopardy. If everyone stopped coming into the office then the property values in the area would drop off a cliff (no one buying lunch at local restaurants, shopping on breaks, etc). Unused offices close, property values continue to plunge. Bad for anyone who owns commercial property in the area!

I sincerely wish you the best of luck. I really do.

I live in Canada. We had mandatory gun registration passed in 2001. From that point on, the Conservatives used every opportunity they could to scrap the registry and finally succeeded in 2012. Since then, the reintroduction of a gun registry has been off the table.

Canada has nowhere even close to a gun culture the way the US does. The main opponents of gun registration here were hunters and farmers, a much smaller portion of the population than in the US (which also includes substantial gun enthusiast, militia, and survivalist cultures).

So what does all this mean? Gun registration laws are laughably unrealistic in the US. There is absolutely no way you will ever get a gun registry to stick as long as the Republicans have any chance whatsoever of winning an election.