memfree

You don’t see them. You are on the ice and so are they. They hunker down and purposefully cover their nose with their paw when you look in their direction. When you look away, they creep closer until your head starts to turn again. They don’t want you don’t see the little black spot getting closer and closer. If you are lucky and looking around while you are out on the ice, you will see a little black spot disappear. If you do. GET OUT NOW. If the spot was big enough to notice, the bear is probably close enough to charge. I hope your snow machines are close and ready to go.

That is the exact problem.

As a society, we don’t want to teach people that it is EVER acceptable for the authorities to break rules/laws. They already have power. Why should they go free after breaking the rules meant to control their reach? At the least, they should get charged and go to trial by jury. Ideally, those juries should then convict in all but the most benign cases.

I remember at least a couple old shows had the good old ‘sheriff’ or whatever break some rule and then had to pay for it. And they did, and good guys accept that despite meaning well, they had done wrong and should have followed the law.

If you ask society at large to accept that breaking the rules is ok THIS time because this time is special and our guy is working for Team Good, then our society starts to allow that in all kinds of stupid real-life situations and you end up with criminal cops, politicians, and all manner of officials. Worse, you might end up with random citizens who think it is ok to break the law just because their leader tells them to.

He’ll say it, but only newsy Democrats will hear him. The Republicans will say the bill didn’t go far enough, cost too much, and blah, blah, blah, glossing over the crazy powers it would have allowed. This isn’t any special ‘5d chess’, this is standard politics. Biden knows Congress won’t do ANY border deal now that Trump told them not to, so it doesn’t matter what concessions it has.

Yeah, that’s not caving, that’s DARING Congress to refuse to pass the bill.

See, they were going to pass a budget bill that has some border funding in it, and Mitch McConnell was telling the Republicans to pass the darned thing – but then Trump said it might be nice to use the border mess in his campaign, and Poof! McConnell spun around so fast, his heels were smoking! (no, not literally) Here’s a link: https://news.yahoo.com/trump-thrown-wrench-mitch-mcconnell-214452142.html

The statement from Biden is a double-dog dare to not pass the bill. Every time Republicans cry, “Waaahh! Border scary! Biden’s fault!”, Biden is going to hold up that statement and point out that he was ready, but they refused to sign it.

Heh! The pointy ones are shallots. I agree that Chinese chives or European Leeks or something equally different would have better rounded out the set.

If I were trying to get quiet aliens to communicate, I would try to get earthlings to clean up their own mess. I can’t imagine an advanced civilization wanting to bother with the sad tragedy of humanity’s self-destruction. There isn’t a day where some random human isn’t killing another, and there’s usually some government that has organized some mass-kill army operation against another country – or, worse, it’s own people. Even omitting the bloodthirsty, power-hungry, greedy, and liars, the general population can’t get together to work for the common good.

Maybe we could start by fixing the climate catastrophe, getting the trash out of the ocean, and then getting food and housing to everyone. If I was an alien that’d been avoiding Earth, that’s the sort of thing that would get my attention.