Lol, yep. Oh you spray lots of stuff that’s designed to kill bugs? I think it might be killing lots of bugs!

Gods I hope so. The amount of damage he did convincing people that vaccines cause autism is incalculable. Especially to people on the spectrum.

In 2018 then-President Donald Trump pulled the United States out of the [Iran nuclear] deal, reimposing sanctions on Tehran that slashed its oil sales and battered its economy. In 2019, Iran started breaching the restrictions on its nuclear activities and then pushed far beyond them. It has now breached all the deal’s key restrictions, including on where, with what machines and to what level it can enrich uranium, as well as how much material it can stockpile.

$215,200, which includes $30k for environmental testing and monitoring. Tebuthiuron doesn’t readily break down and so will continue to kill plants in the area until it’s either physically removed or diluted somehow, which will likely take multiple years. Unless they excavate and replace the soil, no trees will grow there for quite some time. And even then it’ll take 30-40 years for them to get anywhere close to their original height.

Also boomers are both buying retirement homes and holding onto their previous homes, rather than letting them go back on the market and alleviate some of the shortage. They have more purchasing power than any of the younger generations because they have decades of equity built up, and they’re trying to keep their previous homes to pass onto their children. Both are contributing to the upward price pressure.

Indeed. Also, Republicans have already proposed dramatic cuts to the IRS, so we should be under no illusions about what will happen to this loophole and Direct File if Trump & Co. take control in November.

That article has given me a huge amount of information to think about. Thanks for sharing.

I think you’re right. I don’t think we’re far removed from a computer being attached to a firing pin such that electrical impulses cause microvibrations which force a firing pin into a cartridge with unimaginable rapidity. In that case, there’d be no trigger mechanism at all except a button and a microprocessor, and so our definitions will have to adapt rapidly to avoid unimaginable bloodshed.

There’s a lot in your comment that’s not necessarily right or wrong, it’s just harder for me to untangle, so instead I’ll address this very salient point:

you could also easily say constitutional organizists want to strip back any equality or progress our society has made via the courts.

The argument of originalists is very specifically that progress shouldn’t be made via the courts in the first place. It’s not the judiciary’s job to push us forward as a society, it’s their job to interpret the Constitution as it’s written. As soon as you open the door for a judge to push us “forward”, you invite them to define for themselves what “forward” means. I don’t think I can understate the damage that would do to this country if the shoe were on the other ideological foot and Christian nationalists were free to decide that “forward” means putting women in the kitchen as subservient partners in a heteronormative nuclear family. And you’re right that the really sinister problem with this particular SCOTUS is that they seem to pick and choose when they want to abide by their stated principles, but on its face originalism is more in line with what the Framers had in mind. It’s just that they also had a lot of other understandings about the American experiment which turned out to be laughably naïve.

The only way to get out of the moralizing doom loop you’re describing is to revert back to judges/justices being neutral arbiters of written law. It’s not foolproof, mind you, because it’s subject to the whims of overt partisans like Thomas and Alito, but it does have a certain philosophical consistency that’s hard to deny.

That’s not actually true. It’s certainly a trigger, but it’s not the trigger of the firearm. The trigger assembly responsible for activation of the hammer and firing pin would remain unaltered, but the button would activate some kind of rotating and/or vibrating apparatus which engages the trigger assembly over and over and over in rapid succession. They go into a lot of detail about this in the opinion, including the definitions they’re referencing with the word “trigger” (pp 7-14).

They’ve been doing that a lot, and for good reason. The whole gist of originalism, and the legitimate gripe conservative scholars have with substantive due process, is that during the latter half of the 20th century the judiciary usurped Congress’ power in actualizing new legal concepts and theories by creating rights out of thin air. Even RBG admitted that Roe was on shaky ground, because in a representative democracy the only entity capable of making laws is Congress. If the law says “the sky is red”, and that law creates obvious societal problems, it’s not the job of the judiciary to say, “no, the sky is blue”. The job of the judiciary is to say, “the law says ‘the sky is red’” and that’s the law that shall be enforced, and then to interpret the words if there’s any disagreement about what “red” means. A functional Congress elected by a sensible electorate in a healthy democracy free of corruption (HA!) would see the obvious error and pass an amendment that changed the law on the books into “the sky is blue.”

In striking down Roe, they clearly signaled that the only remedy would be Congressional action. From Kavanaugh’s concurrence in Dobbs:

The nine unelected Members of this Court do not possess the constitutional authority to override the democratic process and to decree either a pro-life or a pro-choice abortion policy for all 330 million people in the United States.

RBG herself on Roe:

The ball, one might say, was tossed by the justices back into the legislators’ court, where the political forces of the day could operate. The Supreme Court wrote modestly, it put forward no grand philosophy; but by requiring legislative reexamination of once customary sex-based classifications, the Court helped to ensure that laws and regulations would “catch up with a changed world.”

Roe v. Wade, in contrast, invited no dialogue with legislators. Instead, it seemed entirely to remove the ball from the legislators’ court.

And Roberts in Shelby v. Holder (a decision which I loathe):

That is why, in 2009, we took care to avoid ruling on the constitutionality of the Voting Rights Act when asked to do so, and instead resolved the case then before us on statutory grounds. But in issuing that decision, we expressed our broader concerns about the constitutionality of the Act. Congress could have updated the coverage formula at that time, but did not do so. Its failure to act leaves us today with no choice but to declare §4(b) unconstitutional.

In short, the only suitable remedy to legal conundrums is a new and updated law. The fact that our democracy has deteriorated to the point where Congressional representatives are really just mouthpieces for interest groups and have insufficient dignity to even attempt overt moral judgments about how to form a more perfect union, explains why the judiciary keeps very clearly reminding them what their job is. Political compromise is hard and takes immense amounts of work and sacrifice, and SCOTUS is reiterating that they’re not going to bail a dysfunctional Congress out by legislating from the bench.

The NFA says “by a single function of the trigger”. A button that activates a trigger rapidly with a motor would be legal, because the act’s definition is limited to the function of the trigger, not the action of the controller or the mechanics of the activation. Like it or not that’s the law as it stands, and that’s the only definition that matters unless and until we elect a majority of Congressional representatives who want to change it.

That works for American football/gridiron, doesn’t it? Since there’s no female alternative? I don’t think I’m seeing any actual NFL players here, but they’ve certainly made it to the collegiate level:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_female_gridiron_football_players

Not until it gets to a Circuit Court or SCOTUS, unfortunately.

Your mistake is assuming it’s your speech they care about.

It’s sad how true that is.

😁

You laugh, but that’s exactly what they’re claiming, without a hint of irony:

“The businesses in our state, including those in manufacturing, have a proven track record of supporting North Carolina’s economic vitality and doing so responsibly. It is important that we do not hastily pass regulations without fully accounting for both the positive benefits and potential negative impacts proposed rules would have on the state and its business community.”

Yeah it’s potentially a much higher cost, depending on how class-action lawsuits play out, but that study doesn’t necessarily say it’s coating the surface of the ocean. It’s diluted into the ocean itself, and because it likes to stick to foam it tends to accumulate at higher concentrations close to the surface. That study is documenting that air particles have a much higher concentration than what’s typically seen diluted in sea water, so it’s essentially congregating in the air-water interface zone.

But yes, your point is well taken that they’re facing catastrophic liability costs from a combination of past health impacts and future cleanup/removal.

Yeah it’s pretty squarely in their wheelhouse.

Does it do the following?

• the contaminant may have an adverse effect on the health of persons;

• the contaminant is known to occur or there is a substantial likelihood that the contaminant will occur in public water systems with a frequency and at levels of public health concern; and

• in the sole judgment of the Administrator, regulation of such contaminant presents a meaningful opportunity for health risk reduction for persons served by public water systems.

If so, then:

• the Administrator shall publish maximum contaminant level goals and promulgate, by rule, national primary drinking water regulations under this subsection.

Wham, bam, thank you ma’am.