it’s up in the air

Or airborne, if you will.

He briefly served as a deacon in the Free Church of England before seeking a position with the Nordic Catholic Church

The Black Hawk helicopter that collided with a passenger plane on Wednesday night was on an annual proficiency training flight

Proficiency: medium-low

Watts has mentioned it being a trilogy a few times, but it’s been quite a gap now. Who knows.

Yup, excellent stuff. I ran into it on his website in like 2012 and thought it was a short story. I ended up sitting there and reading almost the whole thing in one sitting. Very genre-bending, but an awesome exploration of some very cool concepts. Echopraxia is good too. Still waiting on the third installment.

Holy shit this is not a bit

I think liberals failing to understand this is actually at the root of the common refrain of “well of course things don’t get any better–you only elect Democrats for one term! We need to control all three branches of government for 15 years to really make any progress!”

This week has torn that argument to shreds. You need that long if you’re committed to giving everything a committee hearing, 8-12 months of open comments, a different smaller committee hearing, an open vote, a consultation session with your political opponents, and then seven successive rounds of rewrites. Turns out you don’t have to do any of that. You can just do your agenda in a matter of days. I’m hoping that seeing this in action is going to shock awake at least a few people who honestly thought that the Democrats wanted to do good things but were just handcuffed by procedure. I think we’re seeing rumblings of that already.

Yep, exactly. And that even if something does get struck down eventually, a lot of your goals get realized in the short-term if you just go ahead and try to implement what you want. You’ll end up gaining ground, even if eventually you get pushed back a little bit. The value of continuing to drive forward and forcing your opponents to triage as to what to respond to can’t be overstated.

Yep, and having this kind of momentum is (obviously) extremely politically valuable. Trump’s done an amazing job so far keeping his opponents off-balance and on the defensive by just being in constant motion. There are some lessons we can take away from this for sure.

What the fuck

Hilarious that this got repealed before the Democrats even managed to have their next-day “emergency meeting” about it.

I could imagine them setting up a kind of “national civil enforcement” like what they’ve got in Texas, but on a Federal level. Allowing individual citizens to bring lawsuits in Federal court against doctors (or other individuals) for “facilitating abortion” would have enough of a chilling effect that they wouldn’t necessarily need to count on state or local law enforcement.

Believe me, it was on my mind.

It does sort of look like he had his jaw surgically squared off, but that the surgeon went a little overboard and gave him a cinderblock head.

Yeah. One of the coworkers who talked to me has a son who is trans, which is what sparked that conversation. People are (correctly) both scared and angry.

I don’t, but one of them did mention having family in Oregon. Happy to pass the info along as a resource.

“Chuds”

The Mexicans refused to honor our flag