But what got me was the subhead: "It’s unclear how the Justice Department will respond to the request." Do you morons not know? It's not a request. It's an order! Not that the Trump administration recognizes the distinction.
If the search bar here is any indication, I have twice mentioned politics and feud in Medieval Iceland in relation to discussions here. Once was in response to regime cleavage and the corruption of the Supreme Court, the second was in response to CharlesWT discussing libertarian capitalism as a governmental philosophy.
Here's number three, and to quote the Violent Femmes "Third verse/Same as the first."
Checks and balances only work if the people in charge actually care to follow the law. You see this all the time in Icelandic saga, when a goði [a political leader in a district] had enough sway over the local politics it was nearly impossible for anyone who was not allied with that goði to get satisfaction within the law, usually leading to extra-judicial solutions (bloodfeud) being pursued.
Basically, you had to join a party to get enough power and influence as a collective to sway the local courts, and you had to have enough wealth and land to even be entitled to legal status in court. Tenant farmers were stuck with whatever their goði or their landlord decided, or else either leave and find a better landlord or take matters into your own hands and risk becoming an outlaw. (Jesse Byock's Feud in the Icelandic Saga is fascinating reading. I pulled most of this info from his chapter on "Feudeme of Advocacy." If you have no advocate, you are exposed to the whims of those with entrenched power.)
This administration is definitely in the place where they think that no one exists with enough compulsive power to make them follow the law. It doesn't matter to them if something is an order. They are going to force a confrontation and dare the opposing party to try to force compliance.
Someone needs to find a way to enforce consequences or else we are in a de facto tyranny.
2025-08-03 17:46:33
It seems like the lit there is suggesting that sexual selection *might* have a role in development of language, but given that the evidence shows that more intelligent mothers have lower infant mortality rates, it could be that it's actually natural selection having an effect that looks like it could be sexual selection - that is, it's not the selection of mates that is the mechanism for the trend, but rather the survival of the offspring that is the driving mechanism. I'd guess it could be kind of hard to tell if it is mate/mate communication or parent/child communication that is the dominant factor. Seems like a bit of a black box and a set of assumptions.
2025-08-01 22:12:00
The BLS has been struggling a lot as of late, most all of it caused by staffing shortages. They've stopped collecting inflation data in a number of places as well and are imputing (modeling) a lot of the data for those measures. This from June, but getting more play at the WSJ in the last few weeks: https://www.npr.org/2025/06/05/nx-s1-5424367/inflation-data-cpi-government-job-shortages
The vandalism of the federal government continues apace. It's not being shrunk and drowned, it's being given the Khashoggi treatment and leaving one bag at a time.
But what got me was the subhead: "It’s unclear how the Justice Department will respond to the request." Do you morons not know? It's not a request. It's an order! Not that the Trump administration recognizes the distinction.
If the search bar here is any indication, I have twice mentioned politics and feud in Medieval Iceland in relation to discussions here. Once was in response to regime cleavage and the corruption of the Supreme Court, the second was in response to CharlesWT discussing libertarian capitalism as a governmental philosophy.
Here's number three, and to quote the Violent Femmes "Third verse/Same as the first."
Checks and balances only work if the people in charge actually care to follow the law. You see this all the time in Icelandic saga, when a goði [a political leader in a district] had enough sway over the local politics it was nearly impossible for anyone who was not allied with that goði to get satisfaction within the law, usually leading to extra-judicial solutions (bloodfeud) being pursued.
Basically, you had to join a party to get enough power and influence as a collective to sway the local courts, and you had to have enough wealth and land to even be entitled to legal status in court. Tenant farmers were stuck with whatever their goði or their landlord decided, or else either leave and find a better landlord or take matters into your own hands and risk becoming an outlaw. (Jesse Byock's Feud in the Icelandic Saga is fascinating reading. I pulled most of this info from his chapter on "Feudeme of Advocacy." If you have no advocate, you are exposed to the whims of those with entrenched power.)
This administration is definitely in the place where they think that no one exists with enough compulsive power to make them follow the law. It doesn't matter to them if something is an order. They are going to force a confrontation and dare the opposing party to try to force compliance.
Someone needs to find a way to enforce consequences or else we are in a de facto tyranny.
It seems like the lit there is suggesting that sexual selection *might* have a role in development of language, but given that the evidence shows that more intelligent mothers have lower infant mortality rates, it could be that it's actually natural selection having an effect that looks like it could be sexual selection - that is, it's not the selection of mates that is the mechanism for the trend, but rather the survival of the offspring that is the driving mechanism. I'd guess it could be kind of hard to tell if it is mate/mate communication or parent/child communication that is the dominant factor. Seems like a bit of a black box and a set of assumptions.
The BLS has been struggling a lot as of late, most all of it caused by staffing shortages. They've stopped collecting inflation data in a number of places as well and are imputing (modeling) a lot of the data for those measures. This from June, but getting more play at the WSJ in the last few weeks:
https://www.npr.org/2025/06/05/nx-s1-5424367/inflation-data-cpi-government-job-shortages
The vandalism of the federal government continues apace. It's not being shrunk and drowned, it's being given the Khashoggi treatment and leaving one bag at a time.