Loren Petrich

Or create halls of shame for them.

Like Eastern European gardens of Communist statues.

I like it when someone recognizes Duverger’s law.

Also helpful would be to reduce the powers of the Presidency and for much of the Federal Government to be run directly out of Congress.

These zones are mostly in the ex-Russian and ex-Austrian parts, and hardly any in the ex-German parts. This split shows up in other things also: Poland A and Poland B.

Ivermectin.

Supposed miracle cure.

Patients: bony vertebrates from salmon to horses. Nothing on sharks or honeybees.

Targets:
- Arthropods:
- - Mandibulates: flies, lice, fish lice
- - Chelicerates: ticks, mites
- Nematodes
Nothing on flatworms: flukes, tapeworms

“Liberation from Bolshevism”, his soldiers proclaimed as they invaded the Soviet Union. But they turned out to be very horrible occupiers.

He made a nonaggression pact with the Soviet Union, and the next day, he started WWII in Europe by attacking Poland, claiming that Poland attacked Germany.

Nearly two years later, he attacked the Soviet Union.

After Britain and France pressured Czechoslovakia into letting him have the Sudetenland, with its ethnic Germans, he wanted more, and he took over the whole country.

The SA militia that helped him in his early years? When he got into power, he purged the SA’s leaders and ordered the more ordinary members to join the German Army. A purge that involved killing SA leader and good friend Ernst Röhm.

But his career would then be full of metaphorically stabbing people in the back.

His coalition partners in the Reichstag? When he outlawed all parties but his, they meekly folded.

He became convinced that Germany was stabbed in the back by its leaders when Germany surrendered to the Allies on Nov 11, 1918.

In fairness to AH, he did actual military service, fighting in WWI. DT? He got out of the Vietnam War by claiming bone spurs.

Germany’s leaders surrendered when he was hospitalized, and he became convinced that they were traitors who stabbed their nation in the back.

Someone here (or at Threads?) asked for some entertaining label for right-wingers. I have thought of one.

Birch trees.

From the likes of the Economist Democracy Index and Freedom House’s Freedom in the World, the highest-performing democracies have parliamentary systems, usually elected by proportional representation.

They also usually have one legislative chamber or one dominant one out of two.

From Steven Fish’s work, strength of legislature is correlated with strength of democracy. In one of his works, he constructed a Parliamentary Powers Index - the more the better.

The ultimate is a parliamentary system, where the executive branch is run out of the legislature.

More:

Statehood for the District of Columbia, with only the main Federal buildings remaining in the Federal district.

Proportional representation for state legislatures and city councils.

Ranked-choice voting for all elected positions, including proportional RCV for multimember positions.

I can think of some reforms.

Popular-vote election of the President.

Proportional representation in Congress.

Make most Federal agencies run out of Congress, thus reducing the power of the Presidency. More generally, make Congress dominant.

She’s willing to say that cops are lying???

In the Western world, many women have mainly or mostly worn pants for over half a century, and many women wear pants as part of formal business wear, but women continue to grow long hair and to style their hair, often wear earrings and other jewelry, and sometimes wear makeup, like lipstick.

There is a theory that this is a form of social control, Naomi Wolf’s “Beauty Myth”, and some forms of beautification do indeed fit, like Chinese foot binding. But when women have plenty of social freedom, they still like beautifying themselves.

Greater interest in women’s appearance, often by women themselves, is thus an oddity. One expects concern with appearance to mainly be a male feature, and men are indeed concerned with their appearance, but not as much as women.

Women have broader hips, a necessity for giving birth, but they also grow prominent breasts, even though female monkeys and apes are flat-chested by human standards. So are women’s breasts ornamental, like flashy colors, antlers, and manes?

Where are we as a species?

Men grow taller and heavier, they have broader chests, they have facial hair, and they have lower voices.

So far so good, what one would expect.

Social animals are different. Males’ lower investment enables them to compete for females, like growing larger and looking flashier.

Male birds are often more colorful than female ones, male deer grow antlers, male lions grow manes.

Spiders and mantises are predators that eat other arthropods. Female ones are often larger than male ones, and that makes them dangerous to their mates.

This size and strategy difference affects how the two sexes behave and grow.

For solitary animals, the female ones may grow larger than the male ones, because their gametes, eggs, are much larger than male ones’ gametes, sperms.

But if some released cells stay small, they can more easily swim to the larger cells. This is “anisogamy”, and with non-motile big cells, “oogamy”. The big cells are egg cells and the small cells sperm cells: two sexes.

They are initially alike, “isogamy”. But when multicellular organisms release haploid cells that are to fuse with other ones, these cells may be made big to supply material for the fused cells.

But that makes them slow-moving.

Nearly 2 billion years ago, an early eukaryote invented the haploid-diploid cycle:

haploid - cell fusion - diploid - meiosis - haploid

Soon after, “mating types” emerged, as a way of avoiding inbreeding. Two haploid cells must have different ones before they can fuse.

To see why that’s so odd, let us consider the origins of the sexes being different, sexual dimorphism.

The first form of reproduction was asexual: multiplying by dividing. It’s still almost universal among one-celled organisms and the cells of multicellular ones.