You can charge an EV from a regular household 120V outlet. Sure, it will charge slower than molasses but that’s enough for a lot of people. You might only get 30 miles of range from charging overnight, but if you’re driving less than 30 miles everyday, that’s enough. I know I drive less than 30 miles a day, most of the time. But for those days where you’re driving more than 30 miles, yeah you’re going to need to know where there’re some fast chargers near you, but there’s more of those being built all the time.

And there are some good deals on used EVs, too. And the batteries they have now last long enough that there’s really no worry about having to replace the battery on a used EV.

Wait, this is real?! Holy shit, he’s gone off the deep end.

Better than them e-lectric vehicles. If my car ain’t big, loud, inefficient, polluting and running on ancient fossil goo that’s totally nonrenewable and expensive to pump out of the ground and refine, I ain’t interested!

The allies? Like the US, who didn’t declare war on Germany until after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor in 1941, two years after Germany invaded Poland? Like the Soviet Union, who signed a non-aggression pact with Germany in 1939, a pact that wasn’t terminated until Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941? Those allies?

It needs to be explicitly stated because there are still people who don’t understand that violent regime change is wrong.

Unless that one person is god emperor of the country, no.

No, I wouldn’t like it. No country should bomb another to force regime change. I don’t care how shitty the leader being replaced is. I want Trump gone, but not like that. I know this is a joke, but I feel like this needs to be explicitly stated.

Prosecutors allege the defendants billed Medicare and other government programs for services that were unnecessary or never provided, including enrolling patients who were not terminally ill in hospice to maximize reimbursements. Officials said the cases are part of a push to crack down on fraud in publicly funded health programs, which investigators say account for significant financial losses across the system.

I mean, ok. If the fraud is real, then go after the perpetrators. Sure. It’s beyond stupid to only target blue states, though. Fraud happens in red states, too, I guarantee it.

I see. I just wondered if there was a technical difference, because tribal sovereignty does seem to be more limited than what you would expect of a sovereign nation. We don’t treat them like separate countries. They’re not usually identified on maps of North America, for instance. And I get that most reservations are relatively small, but the Navajo Nation is about the size of Ireland, so plenty big enough to be identified on a map.

But I don’t mean to interrogate you, I’m just curious about this topic. I think I’ll do some research because I’d like to know more.

How is a sovereign entity different from a sovereign nation? If it is different.

“The cheating on mail-in voting is legendary. It’s horrible what’s going on,” Trump said, repeating his false allegations about mail ballots as he signed the order. “I think this will help a lot with elections.”

“And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed—if all records told the same tale—then the lie passed into history and became truth.”

George Orwell, ‘1984’

Time to electrify and become energy independent with renewables. There’s no straight that can be shut down that would stop your solar panels from generating electricity. No government can stop the wind from blowing and wind turbines from spinning.

We have too damn much money and not nearly enough brains.

I pretty much dislike the framing sewn into your comment.

That’s understandable, because I wasn’t talking to you. I was talking to Americans who try to justify the US-Israel attacks in Iran as moral acts done in the name of defeating tyranny. The Iran war is overall unpopular among Americans, but those who do support it do so for this reason. I was hoping I might be able to get a few of them to see that this tactic is counterproductive, especially if they truly care about harm reduction.

But maybe I underestimate how many Americans are just malicious, bloodthirsty barbarians. Of course, by that logic you could be underestimating how many Iranians are equally bloodthirsty. Perhaps the Iranian regime is not just blameless victims of Western pillaging. Anything’s possible, I suppose.

Tehran has said it will “irreversibly destroy” essential infrastructure across the Middle East, including vital water systems, if the US follows through on Donald Trump’s threat to “obliterate” Iran’s power plants unless the strait of Hormuz is fully opened within two days.

That’s why we shouldn’t have taken this tact. When you put a regime that has proven it does not care about civilian lives or human rights into a situation where they have nothing to lose, you are putting innocent lives at risk. Of course Trump and Netanyahu don’t care about human lives, either. So the situation is especially dangerous.

Remember the Waco siege in 1993? The Feds tried to raid the compound of David Koresh and the Branch Davidians, because they thought they had illegal weapons. It turned into a stand off that lasted 51 days, and ended with a huge fire and 70 some of the Branch Davidians were killed, including a bunch of kids. No one is 100% sure who started the fire. Some people think an incendiary tear gas canister thrown into the compound by the Feds started the fire. Others think David Koresh and his people deliberately started the fire themselves. But, honestly, it really doesn’t matter who started the fire, the Feds shouldn’t have put a man like Koresh into a situation like that. By putting a potentially dangerous person into an increasingly no-win situation, where innocent lives were involved, you’re putting those innocent lives at serious risk.

The current situation in Iran is similar, but of course on a much larger scale. By pinning the Khamenei regime in a corner, we are putting innocent lives at risk. Some will say, “well, the regime should surrender to save lives.” Yes, they should, but they won’t. David Koresh should have surrendered to prevent the deaths of those children, but he didn’t. You can try to absolve yourself of responsibility for the tragedy, as the Feds did in the Koresh case, by saying, “if they would’ve just surrendered, those innocent people would still be alive,” but that won’t bring back the dead.

Some people get so caught up in “defeating the bad guy,” that they completely lose sight of the harm they are facilitating. At some point you have to ask yourself, “is this about winning or about saving lives?” Is this about you looking tough and dominant, and not backing down, or is this about protecting innocent people? If it’s the former, how many innocent lives are you willing to put at risk to “win” this battle of masculine wills?

It doesn’t matter whether a monster is killed by someone with noble intentions or a monster is killed by another monster.

It does matter. It matters. And it’s so, so important that people understand that it matters. This attitude of, “the ends justify the means,” is very dangerous. The Iranian nation has had their autonomy taken away from them, first by Khamenei and now by the US and Israel. They are powerless, subject to the whims of people more powerful than them. They don’t make their own decisions about their own nation, the decisions are made for them by people who have enough guns and strongmen to impose their will on them.

Edit: think of it like this: let’s say you’re living down the street from a family with an abusive father. The guy is just cruel to his wife and kids. So one day you decide to take matters into your own hands and you go and shoot the dad dead. That’s good, right? The cruel, abusive father is dead, so it’s good and justified, right? But you didn’t ask the wife or the kids if they wanted their father to be killed. You didn’t care what they wanted, because you didn’t do it for them. You did it for you. You did it because it was what YOU wanted. And if they get mad at you for it, you say oh they’re just ingrates. They don’t appreciate what I did for THEM. But, it wasn’t for them. It was never for them. It was for you.

Edit 2: so what would the alternative be? What could we do to stop this cruel father that doesn’t require us to take matters into our own hands? Law. We need the rule of law. What would any reasonable person in a modern society do in this situation? They’d call the police. That’s what we need: the rule of law. Not countries deciding unilaterally who lives and who dies, but laws. Laws that apply to all of us, equally.

Anyone celebrating this, you HAVE to understand that the US and Israel did NOT do this because it was what the Iranian people wanted, they did it because it was what THEY want. Whether this will actually be good or bad for the Iranian people makes absolutely no difference to the US and Israel. They don’t care about the Iranian people, they don’t respect the Iranian people. This was a selfish act on the part of the US and Israel, not a selfless one.

So will the US and Israel wait and see what ends up filling the power vacuum they just created or will they just go right to installing a new, pro US/Israel regime themselves?

It’s really, really important for people to understand that Iranians wanting Khamenei gone is NOT the same thing as Iranians wanting the US and Israel to bomb their country.

“Crockett is testing out the coarser, insult-comedy-style attacks that the GOP has embraced under Trump, the general idea being that when the Republicans go low, the Democrats should meet them there,” Godfrey wrote at the time.

It might be our only option. If that’s what a majority of Americans respond to, I don’t see any other choice. Democrats have to win elections to accomplish anything. Taking the high ground and losing is meaningless. We can no longer be content with moral victories, the Democrats need to actually win elections. Some liberals and leftists get really irritated whenever I point that out, but it’s the truth, inconvenient though it may be.

That being said, it all depends on whether or not this is actually what a majority of Americans will respond to. 77 some million Americans responded to it when Trump did it, otherwise he wouldn’t have gotten reelected. But, that’s only about 32% of eligible voters. Nowhere near a majority. The vast majority, 68%, of eligible voters didn’t respond well enough to Trump’s behavior to vote for him. However, only about 31% of eligible voters responded well enough to what the Democrats presented to vote for them. That’s not good enough.

The Democrats may never be able to get 68% of eligible voters to vote for them, but it sure would be nice if they could get at least 51%. I mean, if the Democrats could get 51% of eligible voters to vote for them, the Republicans would not stand a chance (obviously).

Does anyone know what 51% of eligible American voters want in a candidate? Whenever I ask this question, I think people just tell me what THEY want in a candidate, apparently assuming that what they want must be what a majority of eligible voters want. I think it’s natural for people to assume that they are indicative of the majority, but it’s not necessarily true. Perhaps asking the American people would give us some needed insights.

But maybe 51% of Americans just can’t agree on a candidate, or a party or an ideology. Maybe we’re too fractured for any kind of majority political consensus to exist.