Ingesting lead can and will kill you, and it will impair your cognitive functioning in the meantime. Lead was banned from automobile gasoline in 1975, but it was too late. There are small amounts of lead in the air and water, almost everywhere, that will remain for centuries and that were not there before cars,

The insurrection took place on January 6, 2021, which was three years ago.

Over 700 people have plead guilty or been convicted for crimes they committed at the capitol that day. Others have not yet been apprehended or gone to trial, and some others have not been identified. https://apnews.com/article/capitol-riot-jan-6-criminal-cases-anniversary-bf436efe760751b1356f937e55bedaa5

Trump has also been charged for his actions three years ago, but has delayed the trial with repeated appeals all the way up to SCOTUS. https://thehill.com/regulation/court-battles/4468789-trump-special-counsel-jack-smith-supreme-court-jan-6-trial/

I don’t know what Brazil has to do with January 6. In the United States – as in many countries with “decent legal system” – a defendant is presumed innocent until proven guilty. Anything less than proving Trump guilty beyond a reasonable doubt will be taken as a complete victory for him, and very possibly catapult him to re-election in November.

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This strikes me as a particularly ahistoric take. I’d like to make two points in that regard.

News Radio was the biggest gig yet for both Joe Rogan and Andy Dick, who played main characters on the show from the start. Jon Lovitz was already well known from his time on Saturday Night Live – arguably a higher-profile position than the one he took on News Radio.

Jon Lovitz wasn’t spawned by News Radio, is my first point. To the contrary: Lovitz was brought onto the show as an established big-name talent after (his friend and fellow SNL alum) Phil Hartman died.

And how did Phil Hartman die? Phil Hartman was shot and killed by his wife, Brynn Omdahl, who struggled with substance abuse. According to Lovitz, Andy Dick was said to have shared cocaine with her at a Christmas party at Hartman’s house.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/lovitz-speaks-out-on-dustup-with-andy-dick/

“[Andy] was just complaining and really giving me a hard time for no reason. Phil told me that they had a Christmas party and Andy was doing cocaine and he gave it to Phil’s wife Brynn, who had been sober for 10 years. So Andy said to me, ‘Well, you shouldn’t be here,’ and I said, ‘Well, I wouldn’t be here if you hadn’t given Brynn coke in the first place.’”

After this on-set exchange, Lovitz and Dick were said to have made up and were able to work professionally together on News Radio. Later, however, when Lovitz was out at a restaurant, Dick came over to his table and invoked his ostensible involvement with Hartman’s murder:

“He’s standing there with liqueur dripping down his chin and he says, ‘I put the Phil Hartman hex on you, you’re the next one to die,’” said Lovitz. “And he’s smiling, and my blood just went to my head. I wanted to smash him, but if I hit him he would have gone flying into the table behind him. He was really drunk.”

My second point is that, while Jon Lovitz maybe be a “character,” he’s an entirely different class of character than Andy Dick. (Or Joe Rogan, for that matter, just to pretend this whole long reply still has something to do with the actual OP topic.)

Russian emails? Are you thinking of the Wikileaks stuff, with the hacked data from Clinton’s campaign staffers? I am pretty sure those are different and separate from the emails that Comey was investigating for the FBI.

There are two “Hilary’s emails” stories. It is easy to confuse the two – Republicans worked very hard throughout 2016 to make it easy to confuse the two – yet they are two different series of events and almost totally unrelated to one another.

The original “Buttery Males” story: Comey and the FBI investigated emails that were stored on a private server owned by the Clinton Foundation, a server that Hilary had used for official business while serving as Secretary of State. In July of 2016, Comey announced that while they did find a small number of documents marked “classified” stored on the server, this violation was obviously inadvertent and should not be prosecuted. “Sloppy but not criminal,” or something like that. Then later in October (after taking a few months of heat from his fellow Republicans for not going after Clinton harder) Comey announced that there may be files on a laptop owned by Hilary’s assistant, Huma Abedin, that the FBI had not yet had a chance to review. Comey announced this privately to a congressional committee and it was leaked almost instantly, about a week before election day.

The “From Russia with Love” email story: Meanwhile, Russian hackers infiltrated Hilary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign and stole thousands of personal emails and other data from her staffers and people they’d communicated with. None of these emails were classified and the FBI never investigated the Clinton campaign in this case (except as the victims of a crime). Wikileaks and Julian Assange got in on the action and built up lots of hype. That’s when, in the middle of a campaign speech, Trump made his famous on-stage plea: “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing. I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press.”

Trump was clever, mendaciously associating the original “classified documents on your private server” controversy with the “Russia stole your data and is about to release it on Wikileaks” controversy, but the two stories don’t really have anything to do with one another, at all, and they never really did.

It may even be to their advantage, as the new candidate receives Trumps blessing and gives Trump clemency.

I also have been wondering what the race will look like in six months, when all this speculation about Trump’s trials (and potential prison time?) will be upon us for real.

Legally (so far at least) they say Trump can run from prison. If he were to win, as POTUS he’d have many options available to clear his name, dismiss his accusers, and attack his opponents.

I don’t think Trump will give another candidate his endorsement, even from prison. If he does, it won’t be without that other candidate publicly swearing fealty and promising to grant clemency, as you say. The way I see it, any candidate who’d be willing to do that will look weak and subservient, and probably look worse than Trump’s going to look, even from prison, by the time they get to the general election.

I think the only way another candidate wins the GOP nomination is by taking it from Trump – not by Trump lending it out to them.

A pastor usually leads a Protestant church. Catholic churches are led by priests.

Confession of sins to (God though) a priest is a rite in the Catholic church, but not in Protestant churches. Protestant churches often encourage members to ask forgiveness for their sins directly to God through prayer.

There are more Catholics than protestants in the world, but there are more protestants than Catholics in the U.S. The type of Christianity most often associated with socially conservative Republican/MAGA primary voters is Protestant “evangelical” Christianity.

Evangelicals are a hardcore subset of Protestants who take the Bible literally. They’re sometimes called “Born-again Christians” because of their belief in the importance of personal conversion. That is, you’re not really a real Christian until, as an autonomous adult, you willingly choose to surrender yourself, mind body and soul, and devote your life to (your pastor’s teachings about) the teachings of Jesus.

Anyway, now I’ve done an eight-hours-later four-paragraph TED-talk riff on what is otherwise quite a fine and clever comment. I mean no offense and hope none is taken. I mostly just wanted to note that when Nikki Haley talks about “pastors,” she isn’t talking to Catholics; she’s talking directly to the GOP evangelical voter base.

Again, I acknowledge your point about accessibility.

When you say something like “I wouldn’t count Windsor,” however, it suggests to me that you’ve never been to Detroit and that you still don’t understand what I’m talking about.

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EDIT to add:

I don’t think you’ve been to Detroit, but I’m not sure that you’ve been to New York City, either?

It seems as if you are thinking of Manhattan as all of NYC, or at least as the center of NYC. Geographically, it is not.

I’d agree Manhattan is “central” to NYC, in terms of culture and politics and money. But it could not be – it would not even exist as it does today – were it not for the other four boroughs. It takes all five boroughs to make New York City. The shape of the whole city is as irregular as any other city built on the water, and the center of it is nowhere near Central Park or Manhattan.

In fact, the only way that Central Park is close to being geographically “central” to the whole city is if you include Newark NJ as part of the city. But New Jersey is a totally different state from the State of New York. (I mean sure, you don’t need a passport to go across bridges or through tunnels, but still: You see where I’m going with this, don’t you?)

Detroit is laid out differently from NYC, more like the spokes of a wheel or a spiderweb, instead of a grid like Manhattan. Downtown Detroit (the most “urban” area of the city) and Belle Isle are both at the center of the wheel.

Not sure you’d get a sense of that by “looking at it” on a map, but Belle Isle at least as close to downtown Detroit as Central park is to lower Manhattan.

You do have to take a bridge to get there though, since it’s an island, so you may have a point about accessibility in that regard.

Nevertheless, Belle Isle is a large park in the middle of an urban area. Especially if you bring Windsor into the mix.

Giant food stores in Mid-Atlantic US

What does that mean though, “anti-war party,” “anti-war politician”?

Did your “anti-war party” stop being so because they’d ended the war we were in? And if so, wasn’t that a good thing, for those with an “anti-war” outlook?

Back in the late 1930s, I’m pretty sure America’s “anti-war party” was mostly isolationists and some Nazi sympathizers. It was FDR, one of the most progressive Democrats ever elected to the office, who led the country to war back then.

If your entire political belief system is based on avoiding war at all costs, you deny yourself any real-world context in exchange for that purist ideology.

Those who are anti-war above all else lose everything they have and everything they stand for, the first time someone (anyone!) else decides to threaten them with war. The first time that someone sneak-attacks their Pearl Harbor, or crashes planes into their Twin Towers, or whatever else.

Maybe war is like abortion (in this singularly metaphorical political sense). Nobody ever really wants it to happen, and most people do their best to try to avoid it for themselves and others. Yet sometimes, despite everyone’s best efforts, it ends up being the safest and healthiest way, sometimes the only way, out of an untenable situation not completely of our own making.

I’m not arguing that World War II was a “good” war and that W. Bush’s Iraq was a “bad” war. That may comport with my personal beliefs, but my real point is that everyone has their own personal beliefs. Everyone has something that is most important to them.

If you say that war is never justified for any reason, then you are also saying that your call for pacifism is more important than whatever the reason for the war may be. Not just more important for you, but for everyone else too.

There is a phone app, that pretty much allows you phone to work like the scanner gun. I’ve used it before and it works fine, but my phone’s camera is not as good as the guns at scanning barcodes.

Also, as much as I realize I am trading privacy for control, I figure there’s no need to have the grocery store’s app living on my phone, when it is just as easy for me to use the dedicated device they provide in-store.

In the produce section, they have scales that print out barcoded price stickers. I look up the item I’m weighing (or enter the PLU) and it gives me a sticker I can scan.

In the bakery section, where you can pick out individual muffins or donuts, they have barcodes printed on the self-service case above each item. I can just scan the barcode for whatever I take.

(I do also have the option of checking things out at the end, if I didn’t scan them with the gun.)

==

EDIT to Add:

Ironically, the only time I remember taking something from that store without paying for it was a time that my self-scanned order had been flagged for an audit. I was trying to buy a watermelon on sale, but the sale price didn’t come up when I scanned it, so I set it aside to figure out at checkout.

When I got to checkout, my order was flagged for an audit. (Maybe even precisely because I had scanned the watermelon but then removed it from my cart when it came up at the wrong price.)

The guy running the self-checkout saw the flashing light at my register. Without comment, he came over to perform the ritual of scanning the certain number of items in my cart to reset the transaction and allow me to pay and be on my way. He and I had both been through this procedure many times. He probably performed it several times each shift he worked there.

I was distracted by the audit, however, and I forgot about the watermelon. When he scanned enough items and punched in his code, the register came up with my total and asked me how I was going to pay. I stuck in my credit card, clicked “yes” to the transaction amount, and made my way out of the store with a pilfered watermelon.

The grocery store I shop at has handheld scanner guns for customer use. I check out a gun by scanning my loyalty card, then make my way around the store, scanning each item as I put it in my cart. When I’m done, the handheld scanner displays a barcode that I scan at the self-checkout scanner. My entire order shows up on the screen there, along with the total cost. I pay, take my receipt, and head out to the parking lot.

I like scanner-gun shopping a lot. I like it because it’s efficient, but also because it puts me in control. I can see the real price of everything I take off the shelf, in real-time. If something doesn’t ring up at the price it’s marked, I know instantly. The device keeps a running total as I shop.

Most days, my entire grocery experience involves no direct interaction with any store employee whatsoever, except maybe to exchange pleasantries with a stockperson. I do 100% of the work of checking myself out. I imagine the money the store saves on me in labor might make up for a lot of the money it loses in shrink.

But the store gets something else from my use of its scan-as-you-shop service. It gets to collect a huge amount of data on the way I shop. Not only does it record everything I buy, but it knows when and where I buy it. It knows the patterns of how I move through the store. It can compare my patterns to the patterns of all the other shoppers who use store scanner guns. It can analyze these patterns for useful information about everything from store layout to shoplifting mitigation.

One of the ways the store mitigates shrink from scanner gun shoppers who might accidentally “forget” to scan an item they put in their cart is point-of-sale audits. Not usually, but every so often and on a regular basis, my order will be flagged for an audit when I go to check out. When this happens, the cashier running the self-checkout area has to come over and scan a certain number of items in my cart, to make sure they were all included in my bill.

My main point in all of this was to offer a narrative that runs counter to the narrative I picked up from the article. I prefer to have more control over my checkout experience, and I will willingly choose to surrender personal information about my shopping habits and check-out procedures in order to gain that control, every chance I get.