Don’t forget that the Hamas leaders are living in luxury as billionaires in Qatar. If the Israeli response kills a few thousand Palestinians, then Hamas’ leaders will shrug their shoulders and say “sounds like good PR” while lounging in a hot tub.
$175,000 for 50 years? He’s 71 now so he went into prison at 21. That means he spent virtually his entire life in prison. He could have done so many things, but instead he needed to sit in a prison cell. All because he was wrongly convicted.
And because I’m a math geek and need to figure this stuff out, $175,000 over 50 years is $3,500 a year. If we calculate what he would have earned at the federal minimum wage over that time frame (ignoring bank account interest or inflation just to keep things simple), we’d get over $500,000.
They’re giving him a third of what he should have earned at bare minimum. (And that ignores all the other horrible things involved with being wrongfully imprisoned for 50 years.)
Did you read what I wrote? It’s not that they decided they weren’t going to do anything. It’s that the rules of the government limit what they can do with a small majority. They can’t just unilaterally decide that they are passing a new constitutional amendment with a few vote majority in the House/Senate. They could try for a bill, but there they are limited by various other rules not to mention the conservative Supreme Court. If the Democrats had a big enough majority, they could get more bills passed.
And that being said, what’s the alternative? Allow the Republicans to get into power and hope that they don’t take away women’s rights too much? Many Republicans have already declared that they want a national abortion ban. Others have said that they want to criminalize miscarriage and ban contraception.
Voting third party (thanks to our First Past The Post system) won’t work. Sitting out the elections and not voting won’t work. The best thing to do is get as many Democrats in office as possible from local positions to the highest offices. Then, put pressure on the higher up Democrats to get a women’s rights bill passed.
At this point, and with our current political system, not supporting the Democratic candidate is essentially supporting the Republican one.
The Democrats could have passed a bill, but “enshrining it in the Constitution” would mean passing a Constitutional amendment. First, they would need a 2/3rds vote of Congress. That means that the Democrats couldn’t have a slim majority - they’d need a large majority. Or they’d need to find Republicans willing to vote for a Constitutional amendment protecting abortion rights. Basically an impossibility.
Even if the Democrats managed to get the Constitutional Right To Abortion passed, they would need to have 75% of the state legislatures pass it. Democrats don’t control that name state legislatures.
So perhaps the Democrats could have passed a national law, right? Except that the Republicans would inevitably filibuster this in the Senate. The Democrats could have changed the filibuster rules, but not all of them supported changing these rules. (Mainly because it would prevent them from stopping the Republicans if the Republicans regained the Senate.) Any law that was passed would inevitably have been challenged up to the conservative Supreme Court.
You could definitely criticize the Democrats for not pushing harder to pass a law guaranteeing abortion, but a Constitutional Amendment was out of reach.
And this woman also WANTS to have the baby. She and her husband were trying to get pregnant. Unfortunately, the fetus has abnormalities that mean it won’t survive. Without an abortion, she will need to wait until she hits term, have a C Section, and then have a dead baby.
Oh, and thanks to her medical history, she’ll likely be unable to have another pregnancy after that C-section. So it’s either give birth to a dead baby now and have no more or have an abortion now and (after she recovers) try to have another baby. Only one of these options might result in a baby that’s alive and it’s the option that includes abortion.
But Paxton will scream about how he’s “protecting the unborn baby” without caring that the fetus has a nearly zero chance of survival and without caring that the woman faces potential severe (possibly life threatening) medical complications if she’s forced to continue the pregnancy. He’ll force women to carry pregnancies to term even if it kills them!
My contributions definitely had an impact, but it was more local than global. Like I said in my post, I don’t like talking about my day job online, but over the years thousands of people have used the applications that I’ve written. I’ve had many people compliment me saying that the applications helped them out. (As a side note, I wish my Imposter Syndrome would remember those praises when it tries to tell me that I don’t know what I’m doing.)
I guess it’s just hard to see a lot of the things that you’ve worked so hard on over years being taken down one after another.
I do enjoy building LEGO. Not just the boxed sets, but I’ll get minifigures and then design and build biomes for them. After writing about my wife’s crochet, I realized that this is one reason why I enjoy this so much. I design a habitat for a LEGO minifigure using BrickLink Studio (a CAD program for LEGO)., I refine the build - both to improve it and to lower the cost of the build. Then, I order the parts and build it. (And then, I’ll often need to add additional parts to fix issues with the build that weren’t apparent until it was built.)
I’ll need to do some more of that building. Frankly, if I’m going to have a midlife crisis, it’s going to be a “build LEGO” midlife crisis and not a “buy a sports car” one.
Oh, there’s definitely upsides to that. There are posts I made to Usenet in my college years that I’m glad have been swallowed up by time and consigned to oblivion. I would hate it if all of those embarrassing moments were to suddenly resurface and become a permanent part of my present and future life.
But the idea that EVERYTHING that I’ve done will vanish freaks me out. Yeah, this is definitely a midlife crisis coming on.
Yeah, I think a big part of this might be a kind of mid life crisis. I’m not the “buy an expensive sports car” kind of guy, but I’m definitely the “worry that all you’ve done in your life was for nothing” sort of guy.
My wife crochets and I’ve got to admit to being jealous that she has a physical object when she’s done. I love programming. I love being able to take a big and complex problem, break it down, and construct an application that solves the issue. Still, at the end of the day, our works are 1’s and 0’s whose existence will be a lot shorter than my wife’s crocheted house elf.
Some of the MAGA folks are already saying that we should bomb/invade Mexico to stop the drug cartels and immigrants. Of course, they hand-wave how horrible a war would be. They assume that Mexico would thank the US for such a great bombing and ask for more. Because MAGA.
I’ve been using DirectNIC for quite some time.
Weren’t some hostages also drugged so they’d be “happy and smiling” for the cameras when released? I heard that, but don’t know the authenticity.
Edit: I found many news sources that said they were. I know some folks don’t trust anything Israel says so take reports like this with a grain of salt. Still, it’s been confirmed that many of the hostages were drugged while in captivity. Especially the kids - to keep them quiet. (Anyone with little kids knows they can be loud while scared and this must have been extremely scary. As a father, the reaction of “drug the little kids” makes me angry.)