Same here. Hope he is ready for the national stage. Hope he can bring people in too and the Democrats can learn how to talk to more working class people. Lot of democratic messaging is to heady. Folksy and down to earth is important.

Nice. I like Kinsinger as a person and respect him. Have no idea his policies but they are at least sane.

Drones are important sure. I am not sure how important. It is no surprise that Ukraine cannot do large scale combined arms maneuver warfare though. Neither Ukraine or Russia is trained in that and Ukraine does not have conventional air support to a large extent. I would not attribute it entirely to drones.

I think he is trying to say this is the way it is and implies that this is where it is going. I do not buy it. This may just be a run up. We have not seen major powers engage and I hope we do not. I also do not agree with his characterization of the Russia Ukraine conflict.

Never forget that Russia was also an instigator in WW II and stared as an axis power and later partially switched sides but then kept the countries they had conquered so really they were just the surviving axis power.

In that sense WW II never really was completed until the 80s. In fact I have a relative that served in WW II in the 60s or maybe 70s. Now they want to reopen it basically.

Just FYI. By 4th Turning I mean the book. A couple of decades ago there was a book that takes about patterns in US history. The 4th Turning was about 2020 time frame if you followed the book. A turning from the books thesis is a time of political and social unrest. Weakening institutions. Usually a major war. We see signs of this all around us.

Edit: Feels very pre world war 2 too. America retreating into isolationism. Russia planning to expand. Lot of similarities.

It is the 4th Turning. That would be one interpretation.

It is an interesting question. That is, the question if what motivates people to be productive. I think it varies widely.

Nicely put. I just cannot tell if that is how you feel or your just channeling.

For me, I am divided. On one hand people do nothing unless motivated and needing basic necessities is a powerful motivator. On the other, I am curious as to the most cost effective approach. Plus I would much rather spend money on people getting along then police and armies.

Edit: Just thinking, maybe call me a libertarian socialist. Maybe that is why I am always confused.

FOSS related: The Free Software Foundation, The Software Freedom Conservency, The Software Freedom Law Center, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (aka the EFF), Debian, the Mozilla Foundation, the Document Foundation (aka Libreoffice)…

Libreoffice has an HTML mode and also you can take any document and save as HTML.

Another way is use Markdown.

Another is to use a template editor like Bluefish. This is coding HTML but more easily.

Over stating. She supports a national consensus on abortion whatever that turns out to be. Civil War… that is just pandering. Do I agree with her on all things, no.

Keep in mind that national security and rule of law are now the only issues that matter. Everything else is just arranging the deck chairs on the titanic. Politics is the art of the possible.

Edit: Younger candidates that are not age impaired is important too.

No strong candidate. There are three. The most serious is Dean Phillips. He is reasonable but getting almost no votes. Way weaker then Haley is on the other side and Haley is likely to go no where too. Though at the moment Halley to me seems the obvious one to support in the primaries regardless of your usual party.

As an actual point. I will probably vote for Nikki Haley and I can because I am in am open primary state. Each state has different rules. Some you have to belong to her party, some you just have to not belong to any other party, others party affiliation does not matter. Some states do not have primaries but use the caucus process. It is all over the map.

Edit: If Haley makes it to the general election and Biden is the other candidate, I may well vote for Haley. It would be a hard choice but I am fine with both but for different reasons. My view … the best thing a voter can do at the moment is vote on the republican ticket for Haley even if you have to change party to do it. Most people will not though… either to lazy, to uninformed, to unengaged, or too sickened by the prospect.

Harris would be fine.

Nikki Haley would be fine but she is in the other party and will never be Biden’s running mate. Interesting idea though. She probably will not be Trump’s running mate either.

I would rather see a contest between Harris and Haley. Fine with either. Both reasonable people.

Same here. I am a US citizen.

I even have people in my family that voted for this guy and may again.

The options we have are limited. Biden who is really too old. Trump who is too old not qualified and self serving. Nikki Haley who probably cannot get nominated.

Edit: Most people want Biden and Trump to not be running but we will probably be stuck choosing between these two. In the primaries I will not vote for either. In the general election I will never vote for Trump.

People are done with COVID. Declare victory and move on. I was at an event at a local library recently. About 20% were using masks including me. Most people are either stupid or do not care or some combination of the two.

Same over Christmas. We had at least 4 people get COVID one quite severely. Same lack of care. My wife had a hard time getting an urgent care appointment for other reasons too over the holidays just because of all of this. I have still avoided COVID, RSV, and the flu myself but I take steps.

Many cell providers have a mail to SMS gateway. Just sent email to the correct address and you’ll get SMS. As far as sending mail either with bash or with Python. That is quite possible and not hard.

Sorry I do not have the code at hand. Memory is Python standard library has SMTP capability and Bash you can just use the mail command. May have to configure mail on your Linux box too or just use a remote server.

I think you can choose almost any system and be better then what we have.

We have IRV for some offices. I love it. Biggest problem ranking 6 or 7 candidates takes some time and looks complicated.

Frankly open to other systems. Proportion representation seems interesting for example in some cases.

Fix the political system by supporting IRV. Until then vote for the best offered that can win. Be involved in the party process too so the best is better then it is…

Keep in mind that both the Palestinians and Iran and Russia enabled Hamas and are enabling similar entities in Lebanon and Syria. Hamas is the government of the Gaza Strip. They are heavily armed and well entrenched with something like 40000 solders on their side. Until the Palestinian death numbers reach 40000 the Hamas sourced numbers really could be all combatants as they are not broken out nor are they third party numbers so who knows. They also do not care about the rules of war… they will murder anyone. The war would not have stared without Hamas, Palastinians, and their supporters making it so. So hold all of these parties to the same standards you hold Israel.

That said yes. Seems like Israel is over the top. Then again look at what the US did after 9/11 and about 3000 killed. How do we justify that. Consider if 30000 were killed in 9/11. This is roughly proportionally what Israel experienced. What would you have them do instead.