Bay 12 Games Forum

Ukraine is claiming to have shot down a transport full of paratroopers, and there's a separate claim that the units Russia brought from Chechnya were ambushed and destroyed. No conversation on either claim.

No one else brought this up but this this from the US mentioning the offer of extraction for Zelensky also contains two US officials' confirmation of the shooting down of the two transport planes, so at least the US believes it occurred.

My mother's cousins have all had exceptionally bad cases. No sooner than one was let out of the ER (having barely survived, and no doubt owing their life to the first dose of the vaccine they got a few weeks prior to infection), then her husband and son were hit with it, hard (and neither had gotten vaccinated yet). The husband has passed away, the son is in the ER in the room next to where his mother was staying.

On the, uh, brighter side my mother and sister are scheduled for March 11th and 12th, respectively, while I just received mine today. Moderna. Feeling fine so far! Big needle though. Flashbacks to getting vaccinated for Bird Flu as a kid.

I find my mother is 50/50 on "helpful advice/kindness" vs. "non-helpful advice/extremely unhelpful anecdotes (which may or may not be related to my question)/straight-up-blaming-me" when I go to her for help with... anything. Just like, in general. This means I only go in desperation, which means the failures sting all the more for it.

Quote from: voliol on January 20, 2021, 06:05:22 pm

I feel uneasy for the stupidest reason: nothing bad seemingly happened. I had braced myself hard for some state government buildings being occupied, or shootings done by Trump supporters gone insane, but I've heard none of that, only a peaceful inauguration in Washington.

Of course, none of these things are directly consequential for me personally, living across the Atlantic and then some, and worse things than those I imagined are definitely happening somewhere else in the world (read: wars, genocides). 's a strange fixation.

Hate to be that guy, but there's still 11.25 months left for someone to do something shitty. If the Capitol attack didn't uncork all the latent shittiness of the far right in America, it came very damn close.

Oh there was almost no chance of a terrorist attack today, unless you didn't really follow the QAnon and the similar sorts. They thought today was the culmination of THE PLAN. Why would you be a terrorist, if the PLAN is about to come to fruition?

Now, it has failed. Many will deradicalize. Many will self-numb. Some, will radicalize further. A lot of low-level terrorism is gonna happen, it'll be rationalized away I suspect; up until the time it produces a crime on the scale of Oklahoma City Bombing that leads to repudiation. Until then it's just gonna fester.

Now that an Irish Catholic is President can we burn the UK to the ground?

Kamala Harris is accompanied by Eugene O Goodman, who saved the Senate by leading the rioters away. Trump has made touchdown in Florida and is in his final motorcade.

Snowflakes have started to fall as Biden is announced.

Trump will apparently be pardoning Bannon in a last minute decision.

Bannon is under indictment for defrauding people about a "build the wall" scheme.

Quote from: Naturegirl1999 on January 16, 2021, 12:03:29 am

I’ve not heard of the term “pork barrel” money before, what is meant by that?

Let's say you and I are both congresscritters.  You want to expand spending for social security, but you need other congresscritters to vote for your bill.  You come to me, but I don't particularly care about social security, but I might really care about education.  I tell you I might vote for your bill, but only if you put in something extra into the fine print about education.

The bill is obstensively still about social security, but if passed also now does something about education, which makes me happy.

Its a form of compromise but often obfuscates what bills are really about to the public, and who/why people support certain bills.  To the public I might be against social security, but I voted yes on this social security bill, because hidden away was really what I wanted.

I would like to emphasize that as Pork Barrel is traditionally used, it refers to... well again, let us take an example as, oh say, Joe Manchin of West Virginia. Joe Manchin is a Democratic Senator representing a Deep Red state, where Trump won every single county in 2016 and had his largest voting share of any state, at +41.7% in 2016 (down to a mere +38.9% in 2020). There is a debate over a bill in the Senate on the issue of, let us say Social Security as in the example above. Manchin says nay, because Socialism and it puts his voters into a frothing rage.

And so to get Manchin on the side of the bill, it is amended to also include funding for projects in West Virginia; perhaps a bridge, perhaps repairing a highway or other public works project; a special Defense contract of some kind like for building planes perhaps, or agricultural subsidies. This pleases Manchin, and when he goes home he will bring news of the many benefits he was able to bring to West Virginia that he could only get by being a Democratic Senator and not a Republican, and this gives him cover to vote for something West Virginians might otherwise vote him out over. Other popular examples are convincing members of certain house or senate committees (without which a bill cannot advance to the floor) through pork barrel; this is somewhat more common as individual votes are more frequently relevant there.

The issue is, of course, that it means taxpayers fund something for the benefit of one state (or district) and not on the basis of whether they really need it, but instead on the basis of political expediency.  It is an example of the maxim that "All politics are local" in that whatever a senator or representative may believe, they are ultimately elected by a specific locale and thus beholden to the interests of that place over any ideological ones.