Musk won big (though thanks to Twitter it may have been no gamble.) But now will urban, blue riders avoid his robotaxis? What happens when the government flips again?

Ok, No, the Republicans certain take first blame for not standing up to Trump when he took over their party. They have been cowards. But because of that failure, it fell to the Democrats to do what it takes to stop him returning to the White House, and the election remains a dead heat, which it shouldn't be, and only they could have stopped that. I hope they don't fail, but it shouldn't even be close.

I made this graphic because I find the information collected in it striking. How did Trump get control of the GOP when every single former VP or Presidential nominee living or recently deceased (except Palin) opposes him?

To my various Republican and conservative friends, it's time to talk about Donald Trump. In particular it's time for hard thinking on whether, for the sake of the GOP and conservatism, it's past time to cut him loose. Not for any of the arguments made by your leftie friends, but because it's the right thing for you. It's also time to leave the sinking ship.

In election season, we regularly see references in the USA to "The popular vote" as well as nationwide polls comparing presidential candidates. These are self-destructive, and ideally should be curtailed.

Did you know that the Bible doesn't just condone abortion, it actually requires it in the case of infidelity, and gives (bad) instructions on how it is to be done? It's all in Numbers Chapter 5, starting at verse 11. I wonder if it would be possible to set up abortion clinics which perform abortions with a modernization of the method described in the Bible, for the subset of women who qualify.

In shock like most of us, I am trying to play out the various options for Ukraine and the west. None are good. What others can you suggest?

Capitulate

Ukraine quickly surrenders, Putin installs puppet government. Much repression, modest insurrection, if that, as in Crimea.

West wimps out: Russia walks away with success, looks for next target. Extreme sanctions: Russia toughs it out, or Russia capitulates, restoring a battered Ukraine. Or Russia goes nuclear.

A frequent lament is that the design of the US constitution has created a system where voters are highly unequal. Most of all this is seen in the Senate, where the nearly 40 million residents in California have 2 seats in the Senate, and so do 550,000 in Wyoming. Indeed, if you take the 20 smallest states, they have fewer people together than California and get 40 seats in the Senate compared to the two. That same fact also means a smaller but real bias in the electoral college, with the smaller states having a bit more say in how the

The overwhelming of the vote of the World Science Fiction Society to send the 2023 convention to China created controversy and not for the first time. They had a similar problem with the Hugo award nomination process which is even easier to overwhelm with a much smaller concerted group. They solved this problem by making the nomination rules much more complex, with an algorithm to attempt to de-rank candidates that appear in "slates" on many ballots.

I used to be a lot more involved in the annual science fiction Worldcon and the Hugo awards, but have drifted away of late. One of the reasons is that, even more than before, they have become more about politics than science fiction or community. There was a huge controversy over an attempt at bloc voting to change the Hugo awards, which both succeeded and failed, and had somewhat faded into the past. But the intrigues continue.

Turns out the actual cat filter used by the Texas lawyer is 11 year old software that only runs on Dell webcams, so I used another.

Most votes in legislatures are done by open ballot, often by calling of the rolls. Everybody's vote is very public. Since legislators work for us, it is important we know how they vote.

As we do every 4 years, people are lamenting about the crazy system of the electoral college. It is archaic and should be replaced, but that's far more easily said than done.

When elections are close, they get chaotic. If the flip of a single vote, at the tie-point, can cause a massive change, like who runs a country, things can go nuts. People will do everything, from legal battles all the way up to the supreme court, to voter suppression, to voter fraud, to fake claims of voter fraud, all to move the needle a tiny bit around that tipping point.