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The primaries are phony distractions, the real purpose being to launder dirty money through their 501(c)s. Too often the most popular candidate is not the nominee. And now you sure can't trust the count [not that you ever could]. There's no transparency.

If any liberals want to be on the ballot, they have no choice but to go indie. Like anyone else, they can win if enough people vote for them. That's just how simple things can be.

Windows 10 vs. Ubuntu Linux Performance On A $199 AMD Ryzen Laptop

This $210 AMD Ryzen laptop may well be the best-value business notebook ever

Motile 14" Laptop: Ryzen 3, 1080p, 4GB RAM, 128GB SSD ($199)
Motile 14" Laptop: AMD Ryzen 5, 14" 1080p, 8GB RAM, 256GB SSD ($299)

MOTILE 14 Review $299 RYZEN 5 3500U Performance Laptop Amazing Value! (10m40s video)
$299 MOTILE 14" Performance Laptop Emulation Test - RYZEN 5 3500U (11m50s video)
External GPU On A $300 Walmart Laptop! MOTILE 14 + Radeon RX590 (10m52s video) (lol)

These $200-$300 laptops have a stellar reputation compared to the $80 landfill-tier EVOO 10.1 tablet that Walmart is associated with.

The main problems are probably single-channel RAM (although at least it can be upgraded), apparently a crappy Wi-Fi card, no USB-C charging, and they are Zen+. It's possible that Zen 2 "Renoir" could allow 4 or 6 cores in place of what is currently 2 or 4 cores, although it would take a while for prices to drop down to these levels.

Personally, I might take a break from laptops and try building a small form factor PC using Zen 4 (AM5 socket), which may be released in 2021. AM5 should support "mainstream" CPUs with at least 24 cores, possibly 32 cores.

Also, @krishnoid, Lenovo 100e is at $99.

Anybody hear from Iowa?

Paper please...

Saginaw and Bay City News

Saginaw woman who led anti-violence march faces gun charges

SAGINAW, MI - Months after organizing an anti-violence march in the wake of a several shootings in the city, a Saginaw woman faces gun charges after police allege she threatened an employee at a salon.

Sparkle N. Roby, 34, on Wednesday, Sept. 18, appeared in Saginaw County District Court for arraignment on three counts of felony firearm and single counts of felonious assault, carrying a concealed weapon, carrying a dangerous weapon with unlawful intent, and felon in possession of a firearm.

Prosecutors say Roby on July 22 had an altercation with an employee at Unique Styles Beauty Salon in Saginaw and said she’d come back with a gun. She left the business, then returned with a pistol and waved it around, yelling for the employee, prosecutors allege.

Roby left the salon when she heard police were being called, prosecutors said. No one was injured, but police said several people were in the salon at the time.

Authorities issued a warrant for Roby’s arrest on Monday, Sept. 16. The next day, police arrested her during a traffic stop.

Roby, speaking with MLive on Thursday, said she expects the case against her to be dismissed.

“They’re all false claims,” she said. “I don’t know the person who made the report.”

Earlier this year, Roby organized the Take a Step Walk. The June 1 march was in response to several shootings and two homicides that occurred in Saginaw in a few weeks’ time.

In May, she told how her life has been affected by violence in Saginaw.

In 2005, her best friend Brandy Boose, 20, was killed in a drive-by shooting as she slept in bed with her infant. Two years later, Roby’s 26-year-old sister Tekisha R. Curry — a mother of five children — was fatally shot during a late-night birthday party in 2007.

In 2015, Roby found herself in legal trouble for witness intimidation for twice threatening a female who was a witness against her brother, Brandon Sims, who is serving 26-50 years in prison for the 2014 shooting death of Keyonus Mobley.

“When I was put in that situation, I had never been in that situation, and I learned that I never wanted to be in that situation again,” Roby told MLive in May. “I was able to grow and learn from the experience.”

She ended up pleading no contest to one count of intimidating a witness by committing a crime and/or threatening to kill or injure. As a convicted felon, Roby is prohibited from possessing guns.

In 2018, she regained custody of her sons, who had been removed from her home in 2010. They also became motivation for her.

“I learned to use my time more wisely and started doing more positive things and ever since then things have been going more positively for me,” Roby said.

Roby, who has bonded out of jail, is to appear for a preliminary examination at 2:15 p.m. on Oct. 2.

https://www.mlive.com/news/saginaw-bay-city/2019/09/saginaw-woman-who-led-anti-violence-march-faces-gun-charges.html

U.S.A. – -(Ammoland.com)-“A Saginaw woman who organized an anti-violence march has accepted a plea deal her felony gun case,” Saginaw and Bay City News reported Saturday. “Sparkle N. Roby, 34, on Wednesday, Jan. 22, appeared before Saginaw County Chief Circuit Judge Darnell Jackson and pleaded no contest to single counts of felonious assault, felon in possession of a firearm, carrying a concealed weapon, and carrying a dangerous weapon with unlawful intent.”

As part of the deal to get the plea, prosecutors agreed to drop three “felony firearm” counts stemming from an incident where witness testimony said Roby returned to a beauty salon with a gun to threaten an employee she’d had an argument with moments before.

That hardly lives up to the “authoritative” lecturing Roby gave the media when interviewed for her “Take a Step Walk.” Perhaps if “reporters” giving her free publicity had been more interested in doing a balanced job, they could have asked her on camera about her prior deal after threatening to kill a witness against her brother, now serving 26 to 50 years for shooting a man to death. She pled out on that too, making her a “prohibited person,” forbidden by law to have a gun. And just to re-emphasize, she had faced two charges for the death threat.

Roby evidently learning nothing makes Judge Jackson’s decision to allow her to be free on bond pending sentencing all the more curious. Based on results she has demonstrated extreme anger and cognitive dissonance issues and has shown a penchant for threatening to kill witnesses. Allowing a demonstrable menace unrestrained access to others is irresponsible and dangerous, although hardly unexpected considering how prosecutors and the courts have continued to show leniency to this repeat offender.

What’s also hardly unexpected is that so many “anti-violence” activists are violent themselves, particularly the ones who rail against guns and then end up using them. Cases in point:

        The anti-gun Democrat politician charged with shooting her husband to death.
        The “school shooter” who advocates for citizen disarmament.
        The “Stop the Violence organizers” who beat a man so severely he vomited blood.
        An “anti-violence” pamphlet distributor, working for the State of Illinois, who “accidentally” shot his accomplice in the head during a home invasion.
        The “anti-gun advocate” busted for illegally selling firearms.

Hell, for that matter, look at Leland Yee, or all those criminal Bloomberg mayors.

There are plenty more examples. Here are some I talked about 15 years ago for a GUNS Magazine column:

        The gun and ammunition straw purchasers for the Columbine killers who apparently decided going full anti-gun would make things easier on them.
        The Million Mom March sponsor who got a .45 and paralyzed a man she wrongly thought had killed her son.
        Another Million Mom Marcher, this one a chapter president, who was busted with drugs and a gun with a filed-off serial number by police investigating a drive-by shooting.
        “Long Island Lolita” Amy Fisher, who had her anti-gun epiphany after shooting her sex partner’s wife in the face.

Then there’s my personal “favorite” for insane hypocrisy, Columbine killer Eric Harris, whose “Guns in Schools” report concluded, “a school is no place for a gun.” And guess who agreed with him:

        “First, we believe in absolutely gun-free, zero-tolerance, totally safe schools. That means no guns in America's schools, period … with the rare exception of law enforcement officers or trained security personnel.”

The projection in the gun-grabbers is strong, and it’s fair to surmise how much of not trusting others with guns arises from knowing what’s in their own hearts. In any case, that should not be allowed to have any bearing on the rights of those who suffer no such moral defects and impulse control issues, and the bottom line and undeniable truth is, anyone who can’t be trusted with a gun can’t be trusted without a custodian, a concept that evidently escaped Judge Jackson in the Roby case.

And unlike the gun-grabbers, “our side” even insists on full due process before meting out legal consequences.

https://www.ammoland.com/2020/01/anti-violence-organizer-pleading-out-on-gun-charge-reminiscent-of-others/

In conversations on the sidelines of a DNC executive committee meeting and in telephone calls and texts in recent days, about a half-dozen members have discussed the possibility of a policy reversal to ensure that so-called superdelegates can vote on the first ballot at the party’s national convention.

Oh, we don't call them "superdelegates" anymore. Now they are "automatic delegates".

The party doesn't have to worry. Sanders isn't a threat. The DNC can count the votes any way they want, and nobody will say boo

Oh, almost forgot

I'm pretty far along in my ultra-compatible, ultra-accessible web forum. When I was just starting out, I was naive and innocent: I imagined that if I just write clean, basic HTML, there won't be much to do in terms of tweaks. I underestimated how every browser has quirks, requires testing, tweaking, and re-testing. I also underestimated just how long the long tail is outside Chrome monoculture.

I moved the goalposts a little bit, now going for JavaScript support for even the oldest browsers, like Netscape 2.0 and Internet Explorer 3.0.

Well, it's taken a couple years, but I can now claim support for basically every browser out there! A couple of features, like the modular UI, and client-side PGP-based message signing cut off around 2008 and 2012, respectively, but all the base features—reading, writing, commenting, voting, and optional user profiles—are working in everything from Mosaic to Lynx to IE3 to Netscape3 to Opera3. Yay!

Justice Gorsuch Compared Nationwide Injunctions to the One Ring From ‘Lord of the Rings’

Justice Neil Gorsuch invoked J.R.R. Tolkien’s tri-part epic “The Lord of the Rings” in a Monday concurrence that suggested the Supreme Court may need to curtail the use of nationwide injunctions.

Gorsuch likened nationwide injunctions to the One Ring, an artifact of malevolent power whose destruction is the driving action of Tolkien’s saga. The justice alluded to the ring as he reviewed the history of litigation regarding the Trump administration’s public charge rule, which will take effect after the high court lifted two injunctions entered against it Monday afternoon.

A lengthy inscription on the band proclaims that the One Ring shall “rule them all.” Gorsuch found that domineering promise an apt descriptor for nationwide injunctions, which remain in force regardless of the outcome of other lawsuits on a given subject.

“Despite the fluid state of things — some interim wins for the government over here, some preliminary relief for plaintiffs over there — we now have an injunction to rule them all: the one before us, in which a single judge in New York enjoined the government from applying the new definition to anyone, without regard to geography or participation in this or any other lawsuit,” Gorsuch wrote.

Nationwide injunctions exceed judicial power, Gorsuch says

Gorsuch argued that nationwide injunctions raise fundamental questions about judicial power. The Constitution does not give federal judges freestanding authority to strike down laws or award damages. Instead, the courts are empowered to resolve specific “cases and controversies” that unfold in the real world between adversarial parties.

Since the judicial power extends to those particular disputes, it follows that courts only have power to bind the parties before them, Gorsuch said. But when a judge-ordered remedy reaches beyond a particular case, Gorsuch suggested courts are transformed from venues for dispute resolution into something else entirely.

“When a district court orders the government not to enforce a rule against the plaintiffs in the case before it, the court redresses the injury that gives rise to its jurisdiction in the first place,” Gorsuch wrote. “But when a court goes further than that, ordering the government to take (or not take) some action with respect to those who are strangers to the suit, it is hard to see how the court could still be acting in the judicial role of resolving cases and controversies.”

What’s more, Gorsuch said nationwide injunctions are contrary to our legal tradition. When new legal questions emerge, many different lower courts reach their own conclusions — sometimes divergent — over a long period of time.

In turn, higher courts review those results, then announce controlling principles for future cases. The hope is that higher courts can issue quality, well-informed decisions with the benefit of multiple inputs from the lower courts.

Nationwide injunctions interrupt that process, Gorsuch said, turning ordinary disputes into emergencies.

“By their nature, universal injunctions tend to force judges into making rushed, high-stakes, low-information decisions,” Gorsuch wrote.

“The rise of nationwide injunctions may just be a sign of our impatient times,” he added. “But good judicial decisions are usually tempered by older virtues.”

Justice Clarence Thomas, who joined Gorsuch’s Monday opinion, sounded similar notes in a concurrence to the 2018 travel ban decision. Like the public charge rule, the administration’s travel sanctions were subject to multiple nationwide injunctions.

“These injunctions did not emerge until a century and a half after the founding,” Thomas wrote. “And they appear to be inconsistent with longstanding limits on equitable relief and the power of Article III courts. If their popularity continues, this Court must address their legality.”

Trump administration searches for solution

Nationwide injunctions have beset the Trump administration since the president took office. By the Justice Department’s telling, the federal courts have entered about 40 injunctions against the executive branch since 2017. In contrast, only 27 nationwide injunctions were issued in the entire 20th century.

Vice President Mike Pence said that the administration would look for an appropriate case to challenge nationwide injunctions in the Supreme Court during a May 2019 speech to a Federalist Society conference in Washington, D.C.

The question cannot reach the high court on its own. Rather, the justices can only address the question if it is part of an ongoing dispute.

That could leave the government in something of a bind, however, as it raises the possibility the administration would have to lose a case on the merits in order for the justices to reach the injunction question.

That’s because the high court has no reason to decide on an injunction when the government wins and successfully defends its policy. If the challengers lose, they aren’t entitled to anything. Only after the challengers prevail is the question of a remedy relevant.

Liberals and conservatives alike have obtained nationwide injunctions to attain their litigation goals.

Republican state attorneys general used such orders to good effect in the waning days of the Obama administration. Those injunctions, obtained from right-leaning trial courts in places like Texas, blocked an Obama-era policy on transgender bathrooms and a companion initiative to the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program.

– – –

Kevin Daley is a reporter for the Daily Caller News Foundation.
Background Photo “The One Ring” by Rodrigo Olivera. CC BY 2.0.

https://tennesseestar.com/2020/01/29/justice-gorsuch-compared-nationwide-injunctions-to-the-one-ring-from-lord-of-the-rings/

The blame game still works like a charm.

Mrs. Clinton also drew a sharp distinction between her efforts in 2008 to bring the party together after her bruising primary battle with Barack Obama and the efforts by Mr. Sanders in 2016: "Night and day," she said.

Say whaaa?

Night and day, you are the one
Only you beneath the moon and under the sun
Whether near me or far
It's no matter, darling, where you are
I think of you night and day, day and night

Sorry for the Times link

Which is the most worsest?

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Other, please specify in comments.

(Somehow I didn't think this one would work very well as an SN Pole question.)

SpaceX Starship just aced another explosive tank test and Elon Musk has the results [video]

SpaceX has successfully repaired a leak in a Starship prototype, filled the giant tank with an ultra-cold liquid, and pressurized it until it (spectacularly) popped — and Elon Musk has the preliminary results.

[...] Musk recently revealed that the new steel Starship and Super Heavy designs will require tanks pressures of at least 6 bar (90 psi) to survive the stresses of orbital flight.

[...] We’ll have to wait for dawn tomorrow to see the extent of the damage, but it appears that Test Tank #2’s demise was dramatically more violent than its predecessor — a largely expected side effect of performing the pressure test with a cryogenic liquid. In fact, just minutes after it appeared to fail, Elon Musk revealed that the second test tank had burst around 8.5 bar (~125 psi), soundly trouncing all records set by earlier tests and suggesting SpaceX is unequivocally ready to begin building the first orbital Starships. Critically, Musk had previously indicated that if Starship’s tanks could survive up to 8.5 bar, SpaceX would have the minimum safety margins it needs to deem Starship safe enough for astronauts.

SpaceX is ready to build the first Starship destined for space after latest tests

As Musk himself noted on Monday, he is now confident that SpaceX can immediately start building the first Starship destined for spaceflight and further revealed that two of that particular Starship’s three tank domes are already nearing completion.

Known as Starship SN01 (serial number 01), there’s a strong possibility that the massive spacecraft will never reach higher than a 20 km (12.5 mi) flight test SpaceX intends to perform. The company’s rapidly changing strategy may very well mean that SN01 – now ‘go’ for production – could also support suborbital spaceflight testing and maybe even the first orbital Starship launch, although orbital launches will require a Super Heavy booster. Elon Musk, for one, has already christened Starship SN01 an “orbital vehicle”.