Peterkin

Do they? Last I heard, the congregation got a tiny cracker, while the priest paraded the wine in front of them but didn't share. In the old country, there was a comic chant, made to to sound like a Latin incantation, that translates to "You can see, you can see, but you cannot drink it!" At least the Protestants give you a bite of bread and sip of wine. The poor little Jewish boys only get a drop for all their pain, while the parents get all the rest.

We used to celebrate the Christian holidays centered on children - Christmas and Easter - when we had children. We kept up a casual nod to those holidays - a festive meal, some decorations, a few gifts - as long as my mother was alive and we had older friends with whom to visit back and forth. When they were gone, we dropped all pretense of those remnants of a story that had been barbaric and in very bad taste from its inception. Our general rejection of superstition is not evenly distributed: some religions are more invasive, pervasive and repressive than others; only a few affect our current society. The old dead ones are fodder for anthropological study, not a threat to personal freedom.

Seems we're already down to finger-waving in the usual direction:

He's already withdrawn the objection, trying to pretend it was his idea all along to make it public. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-08-12/trump-calls-for-release-of-search-warrant-documents-used-in-raid ...And it came to pass, in those final days, that the affairs of powerful nation-states were conducted in the idiom of schoolyard taunts...

Should you admit to knowing this?

You mean, it's not? Of course, at MoMA, it wouldn't sand out. They wouldn't need a search warrant. But it's not too late for an exhumation order. Now, I wonder... would that legally cover a look under the mattress?

Oh, say.... That's a lot of ground to dig up!

Sold? Likely. Shared? Never!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=32JFfCm37R8

Because he intended to remain president or be president again, and either use them to control/threaten/ruin other people, or retain control (however illusory) over some aspect of governance, or conceal transactions/exchanges of a criminal/treasonous nature by himself and various minions. It's quite possible he intended to, and thought he could sort out those documents and choose the ones he actually needed, then perhaps return the rest, or arrogate them to his own "library" for that long, rambling, utterly unreadable ghost-written Trump's Compf - but lacked the requisite level of literacy to complete the task. Just speculating! He has lots of toilets in that big, pretentious house, right? Good thing they contained it! Otherwise, we might be still be hearing the W word.

Yes, Minister! Despise the civil service as we may, that's who runs the government. Break up the government agencies, as the constitution-changing red states https://www.npr.org/2016/02/04/465593798/rewrite-the-constitution-several-states-are-trying-to intend to do; decapitate them and put incompetent cronies in charge, as some presidents do; defund and defang them as some administrations do - and the country simply stops working. There are two further complications: the layers and separate powers of governments - municipal, regional and national jurisdictions - alongside the public-private divide of responsibility means that many issues fall through the gaps between them. An even bigger one: Co-ordination and prioritization of policing efforts. That is a huge problem in all government business everywhere. Downloading their responsibility on a for-profit (for sale!) agent. Whereupon, everything from health-care to road construction to dam maintenance and garbage collection declines in quality as it increases in cost.

The whole process of electing representatives needs to be reorganized. Drastically. Nobody who got there by the method in place is willing to do that. Nobody who didn't has the power to do that.

It shouldn't be up to them to deal with the problem directly. It should be a police matter. Elected officials should enact effective and up-to-date laws, then empower and equip their justice system to deal with criminal activity as it occurs, without any further interference from legislators. That's the theory. In fact, the officials are not up to date on new technology or trends in the kinds of threats and the concerns that citizens may be facing from day to day. Law-enforcement also tends to be considerably behind organized crime. If they have adequate specialized advice, they either don't understand it or ignore it ... or simply never get 'round to acting on it. The systemic error - it seems to me - is the emphasis on elections, campaigning, propagandizing, canvassing, fund-raising, party-building, polling, strategizing, boozing and schmoozing, rather than the actual daily work of governance. The sojourn of any faction in power is too short and the process of getting there is too complicated, so they never have time to keep their eyes on the five dozen actual balls in play at any given moment, because they're already looking toward how to win the next scrum, the next challenge to their power, the next game. They have very little time - and, let's face it, with all the power-struggles, back-stabbing, backstage dealing and face-saving that saps their political stamina - very little ability or inclination, to do their actual job.

Okay, I take it back. You are unique! But that novelty is no longer sufficient to hold my attention. BtW: the answer is 42

Quote three examples.

It's because soft Democrats!

Or, here's an idea to save time: Reply to posts with supporting evidence. A novel approach, I grant you, but might be worth a try.

Don't you wonder sometimes whether they might have been justified? But, no: it never happened. And it's not likely to. I suspect it's because they're too "soft" on the weakness of the Gregs and mindful of their male allies.

And that's only one factor. When one allocates funding, one must also take into account the methods of diagnosis and treatment, and the cost of each available option. But why is prostate cancer compared to breast cancer in the first place? The more appropriate analogy of prostate would be to cervical. If you were to compare breast cancer to breast cancer, given that men do get it, though less frequently, you might have a more realistic comparison. But that would require that actually care about the medical aspects, rather than just throw out random accusations of sexism.

There's always cloning...

So? It's the small investors who'd be left without their homes and pensions; the rich would have their 9 mansions, 19 luxury cars, yacht, jet, furs, jewellery and all those off-shore accounts to fall back on. Plus, of course, they could swoop in buy all the cheap real estate and small businesses from bankrupt small investors. In the 1970' and into the early '80's, our city hospital was doing 2-3 prostate currettings a week, histological examination of each consisting 36 slides, on average. That's roughly equivalent to the number and size of cervical sections. There were more ovarian cancers than testicular - as is still the case, at approximately four times the incidence. As for breast cancer: it is vastly more prevalent in women, but the male ones are not being ignored. Fact checking is easy. Anyone can do it. Anyone at all!

https://fortune.com/2016/12/02/aig-study-billionaires-wealth-gap/ The picture is worth visiting. https://ec.europa.eu/clima/eu-action/transport-emissions/road-transport-reducing-co2-emissions-vehicles/co2-emission-performance-standards-cars-and-vans_en https://www.argusmedia.com/en/news/2231434-eu-draft-exempts-private-jets-cargo-from-jet-fuel-tax

1912 https://qz.com/817354/scientists-have-been-forecasting-that-burning-fossil-fuels-will-cause-climate-change-as-early-as-1882/ Like the economic recessions, who coulda seen it coming - right, Right? Ignorance? Ah! So it's the quality control? Fair enough.

Seeing no threat where a real and practical threat exits (i.e. you can be dismissed, replaced as leader or demoted) and seeing a threat where none actually exists (the unqualified person will fail in their assignment) sounded like a mismatch to me. But then my hearing is no better than my sense of humour. Thank you for explaining.

I've been told otherwise. But humour wasn't the point here. I was really curious about the difference in perception between status-threat form someone who is, in either fact or your own estimation, qualified to displace you (an actual threat), and from someone you do not consider a serious contender (not an actual threat). It seemed to me a kind of conceptual mismatch, and I wondered whether it bore any relation to the mismatch to which CharonY was referring. Which would be an interesting psychological phenomenon... Otherwise, 🤣