With respect to foreign policy and our role as the leader of the free world and the only force of power that can defeat dictators, despots, and genocide.
Now with such assclowns as Rand Paul and the pro-Russia, anti Ukraine crowd of the entire GOP base (well, the Freedom Caucus and the Trumpsters and the America Firsters), and with that Floridian dwarf characterizing Putin's gambit as a a "border dispute", what has the whole point of the las t100 years of world history been? Has the obsession with building a wall rendered the fight against communism and totalitarianism just a charade? Orban, Kim Jong Un, Erdoğan, such wonderful men.
Now all that was herculean.
Just reading them and paying solid attention might qualify as herculean for Andy, but that's a special case. Most folks should be able to do it with just a good, solid effort and a few cups of strong coffee.
history are notoriously tricky. We were assured that Iraq in 2003 was Munich 1938 all over again if we let Saddam survive. Well, no, the analogy couldn't have been more misleading, so much so you're tempted to say it was offered in bad faith as a moral bludgeon. You don't write this in bad faith, that I know. Those of us who from the get-go have been apprehensive about going all-in for support of Ukraine have worried about out of control escalation, to ends that we don't want to think about. I'm not interested in engaging in a detailed discussion of how much armed support we should be giving, when it should have been offered, etc. I don't have the info at hand to do that. Maybe more useful is how people think it will end. My own view is that the most likely outcome of this war is the cession of territory to Russia, starting for sure with Crimea and then to the parts of the Donbas already occupied. I am ready to eat crow if that outcome should be no more a resolution than was the cession of the Sudetenland. In the meantime, my personal red line is the NATO duty to defend the Baltics. I'm glad NATO got no further east than that.
One further comment: we will have to disagree how serious a guide George Weigel is about the moral health of western Christianity. He reached hack status a long time ago in my book. As for Carl Trueman, never heard of him.
for the attack on government officials and their families?
--I just tried sending you an email but it's bounced. Russians jamming the frequencies?
On numbers alone they will continue to overwhelm Ukraine, likely not challenged in any meaningful way w/out an influx of new weapons from the West.
The rape of Ukraine (literally and figuratively) when Vlad prevails, will be a crime against humanity for which Trump (and the West more broadly, but to a less extent) should be deeply and forever ashamed. I can't really see Putin forgoing the pagentry of a Holodomor 2.0 event.
We are a bastion of nothing especially good or hopeful at the moment.
Even more so when the conscripts are sacrificed by inept leadership and tactics.
From the linked Forbes article this evening:
On Saturday, the Russian army launched what may have been one of the largest-scale tank assaults of Russia’s 25-month wider war on Ukraine.
It ended in one of the largest-scale tank massacres of Russia’s 25-month wider war on Ukraine. When the smoke cleared, the Russians had left behind—on a road west of the ruins of Avdiivka in eastern Ukraine—a third of their tanks…
“Sometimes it is amazing the amount of stupid, mindless amount of meat that dies in bundles due to the ambitions of a small [man],” the Ukrainian air-assault forces’ 25th Brigade mused in a social-media post following the Saturday battle west of Tonen’ke on Avdiivka’s western outskirts. That small man is, of course, Russian leader Vladimir Putin.
Thirty-six tanks and 12 BMP fighting vehicles from the Russian army’s 6th Tank Regiment—part of the 90th Tank Division—attacked along a road threading from Russian-occupied Tonen’ke toward the free village of Uman’ske, two miles to the west.
The Ukrainian 25th Brigade spotted the 48-vehicle column—and hit it hard. “Twelve tanks and eight BMPs were taken out,” wrote “Kriegsforscher,” a drone-operator with the Ukrainian 36th Marine Brigade. “Pure madness.”
And inflation makes sustaining your autocracy more and more difficult.
First, I’m one hundred percent with you until the end. I’m just not sure how trans day being on Easter has anything to do with Ukraine policy. I didn’t even know a trans day existed until this year but here is something I learned after a google search:
1.Trans day of visibility has been a thing for a few years now
2. It’s always been celebrated on March 31st
So it’s not so much that trans day is raining on Easter’s parade as the opposite. Much like Valentines Day was ruined by being Ash Wednesday this year. The issue is more to do with Easter and its day being determined by a lunar calendar which makes it look like it staggers around like a drunken sailor on our solar calendar.
Supports trans athletes being allowed to compete against girls or women at any level and in any sport. It was trans day. It would have been nice for him to be asked such an important question.
Some left leaning town board of supervisors in an affluent suburb in Virginia passed a resolution supporting Trans Visibility Day, and it generated news. As it happens, every March 31st for the last 15 years has been Trans Visibility Day. I was not outraged in the slightest. It's a progressive town, with liberal elected officials, so whatever.
But, let me ask you something...
Do you think it was smart politics in an election year for President Biden to tout the holiday and issue a proclamation declaring March 31st a day for Transgender visibility when it happens to be on Easter Sunday this year?
If you were his advisor, would you have told him to make the same announcement, or maybe leave Trans Visibility Day off the docket this year?
has released proclamations, acknowledgements and recognitions of whatever 'Day', 'Week', or 'Month' it happens to be. The list is lengthy (see link below). Today also happens to be Cesar Chavez Day (so, to all who celebrate, enjoy!).
But, is it your suggestion that the White House single out the trans community and exclude them from normal practices because Christians think they're creepy?
it. Stupid effort to virtue signal that does nothing except to justify those who already think the administration is the creature of the far left.
The White House released a proclamation acknowledging it. Was that virtue signaling too? What about when Easter falls on National Tartan Day?
such that some recognize Visibility day in March while others celebrate the month of Awareness (November), during which there are the particularly high holy days of the week, culminating in the Day of Remembrance? If so, when did this schism happen?
And while we're talking about shared holidays, is no one going to mention that today is also International Asexuality Day?
celebrate accordingly.
wax up dentures. My lab partner HAD a rather impressive fro. Leaned a little too close to the bb and the fro went woosh and was gone.
research on plant DNA. I was basically a lab tech, collecting leaf samples from corn plants and doing phenol extractions of the DNA for the researchers to use.
I was reaching for a reagent bottle one day, not realizing someone else had left a burner on. The flame was so clean, and the sun coming through the windows made it almost impossible to see. I reached right through the flame and took all the hair off my forearm. Smelled horrible, but somehow I wasn't injured at all.
Meep meep meep.
In high school we were working on an experiment in chemistry and were using Bunsen burners and those small evaporating dishes that lie on top of the flame. We were sharing a crowded table with 2 other Bunsen burners and had to bring our dish to another table so that it could cool. My klutz of a lab partner was holding the dish with tongs and while transporting the dish with his two hands he moved the tongs to an angle so that the dish began to fall to the ground. Instinctively, I went to grab the hot dish and upon catching it with one hand was so engulfed by an immediate burning pain that I brought the dish shoulder high and in one motion angrily threw the dish to the floor like I was Roger Clemens having a roid rage. I believe a curse word or two was said. The dish easily broke into a thousand pieces instead of maybe breaking in half if dropped from the waste level height where my partner was carrying it.
Luckily preserving the evaporating dish was only a small part of my overall class grade.
When you are a candidate for national office, that you maintain as broad of an appeal as possible.
And that when you need to win Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, you don’t gift your opposition easy lay-ups.
I be willing to bet though that one of Biden’s staffers framed it exactly as you did.
Easter is on 4/20, so it's that, official weed day, and Hitler's birthday. I think they should move the Trans Visibility day to 4/20 next year just to have a nice venn diagram that allows everyone to celebrate - from all quadrants of the political and social spectrum. True unity!
Simple as that.
Ignoring Trans Day of Visibility because acknowledging trans peoples’s existence might piss off people who celebrate Easter is pretty much at the heart of why such a day is needed in the first place. Because everyone’s feelings get prioritized over a trans person’s right to exist.
There is a yawning chasm between making a presidential proclamation and … not recognizing a person’s right to exist, and that sort of rhetoric is not effective argument and just serves as a way for people who already agree with you to pat themselves on the back and cast anyone who doesnt agree with you as essentially transcidal/not recognizng trans people’s right to exist.
People are presumably upset because 1) Biden acknowledged Trans Day of Visibility and 2) that happened on Easter this year.
The whole point of the day is to acknowledge that trans people exist. So it’s deeply ironic that the argument seems to be Biden shouldn’t acknowledge this because of people who might be offended by the acknowledgement. That’s pretty much the point of having the day in the first place.
As to the rest of your nonsense I haven’t accused anyone of being transcidal.
Your original post talks about people’s preferences being put over trans people’s “right to exist.” Your response to me says you never said anything about people being transcidal. Either I do not understand what a subjugation of a “right to exist” means (surely possible, but right to exist seems to have a clear meaning), or you used hyperbole that does not match your intended meaning.
Of his presidency. Not having it this year would send a message that we value trans people except when it might hurt us politically.
I could see your point if this was the first year. But it'd be conspicuous to not do so this year.
(Namely, a subset of outraged Christians) matter more than the worth of trans people. Fundamentally that’s the argument, as far as I can tell.
My post was expressly not about the merits, on which I tend to agree, but about the way in which the poster I replied to argued it
to acknowledging a trans person's right to exist... Biden had plenty of other days to choose from.
Are people who wouldn’t vote for him anyways. Trans people are marginalized, I think they should get their day.
But Biden should be careful not to motivate people that wouldn’t vote for him (or either candidate in this cycle) to show up at the polls and vote against him.
In other words, remember the lessons of 2016.
I find it exceedingly unlikely that this declaration will change even a single vote, but as long as we're speculating, it seems just as likely to motivate a disaffected leftist to pull the trigger for Biden rather than Kennedy or Jill Stein.
Easter has two features which make it jump around on a solar calendar: (a) it's determined by a lunar calendar and (b) it must be on a specific day of the week (Sunday, in this case).
There are dates determined by (a) but not by (b): Passover
There are dates determined by (b) but not by (a): Labor Day
There are dates determined by both: Easter, Ash Wednesday
to it. I refer to the argument over the dating of Easter. It passed through several stages, beginning with the so-called Quartodecimans (if you're a stickler for Latin grammar, Quartadecimans) of the late second century, who kept Easter with the Jews when they observed Passover, the fourteenth of the (lunar) month of Nisan. They were opposed by an apparent majority, who kept Easter on Sunday after observing the death of Jesus on a Friday. You can read about it in Book 5, sections 23-25, in the Ecclesiastical History of Eusebius of Caesarea, which includes pertinent (if selective) documentation. The issue was still unresolved at the time of the Council of Nicaea in 325, where it was alleged to be the other reason for the Council beyond the controversy associated with Arius, as you can read about in Eusebius' Life of Constantine. It was resolved to hold it on the first Sunday after the first full moon after the Vernal Equinox. Western Christians were still fighting over it when the Venerable Bede wrote his Ecclesiastical History of the English People in the early eighth century (too many places to mention). I pass over the Eastern Christians who have clung to the Julian calendar.
Edited for writing lapses. I should "pretty close" to earliest in the sense of issues that emerged outside the writing and canonization of the New Testament.
Easter is the first Sunday after the first full moon after the Vernal Equinox.
At least that's what I was always told.
the first full moon of spring, as you noted.
There are three main calendar systems in use. We're familiar with the solar calendar.
A lunar calendar, such as the various Islamic calendars, has 12 lunar months in its year of approximately 342 days. Each month of 28 or 29 days follows the same cycle of the moon - some based on local astronomy and some based on Mecca's moon appearance. The "short" year explains why the month of Ramadan drifts around on our solar calendar. Beside the drift of seasons a given month doesn't have the same number of days year to year and it's nearly impossible to calulate the number of days between two dates + your birthday comes around a bit faster.
The lunar-solar calendar, such as the Hebrew calendar averts some of these shortcomings by adding a lunar month during various year to keep it closer to the solar calendar.
Then, of course is the Ethiopian calendar. I think it's still Julian and the year is off by 8 years IIRC due to a disagreement when Christ was born
On our solar calendar, Independence Day is always celebrated on July 4.
On the Jewish lunar calendar, Passover always begins on Nissan 15.
That's why I think of Passover as being determined on an actual lunar calendar while Easter is lunar-related but not exactly the same thing.
While we redo European history we can participate in the new version of the co-prosperity sphere Japan wanted, but now with the CCP instead of the emperor. Even the language is similar