Not really. Looking at the presidential races, we have (percentages indicate the net popular vote that went to the listed parties):

• 1788-1792: George Washington
• 1796-1816: Democratic-Republican v Federalist. Other than the 1796 election, a Democratic-Republican won every presidency.
• 1820-1824: Democratic-Republican v Democratic-Republican - Monroe ran away with 80% popular vote and 218/232 electors in 1820. In 1824, the Democratic-Republican splintered into 4 factions netting a total 97% of the popular vote.
• 1828-1832: Democratic v National Republican. Notably, this is really a splintering of the Democratic-Republican party.
• 1836 - 1852: Democratic v Whig - I’ll give you this one. After a 40 year run, the Federalists were replaced by the Whigs
• 1856 - Present: Democratic v Republican - And 20 years after that, the Whigs were replaced by the Democratic party

There has been a couple of strong showings by third parties since then, but for the most part, US politics has been Democrats vs Republicans since 1856.

Congress followed a very simmilar tragectory.

In short, of today’s current 2 political parties, one of them goes all the way back to Washington stepping down, and the other one showed up in the first 70 years. Both parties survived the Civil War.

During the time since 1856, there has been several massive political realignments, but the two parties remain dominant.

Literacy is also about English (at least as commonly reported in the US). About 1/3 of functionally illiterate adults in the US are foreign born. I have never seen literacy stats that measure “literate in any language”.

Or that you are self aware about being bad at punctuality.

If we are diagnosing people over the Internet based on their memes, my first instinct is to say that OP suffers from time blindness, likely caused by ADHD.

Not to say that there are not people who are late as a narcissistic power play. But it is far more common for people to simply not be good at being on time.

In the same way that Americans speak English.

Sure, their language is mutual intelligible with English, but if an Englishman comes over here and asks for some chips, they’re going to get a bag of crisps. They’ll mess up verb conjunction on a bunch of collective nouns.

And bless the souls of my Australian mates who come here and call everyone a cunt.

There’s a continuum between nothing ever changes ever, and through away everything and start again from scratch. In practice, actual little-c conservatives are often called incrementalists, because no one is all the way to one end of the spectrum.

The point here is that Conversatism is not actually a conservative ideology. They actually want to change a lot. In fact, the current administration might be the least conservative one we’ve had. They are much more in the “move fast and break things” camp, which is at the opposite end of the spectrum.

I think what happened with conservative movements, is they tend to adopt genuinely conservative positions. But then as the world changes around them they are conservative in updateing their positions, so end up having a collection of regressive positions.

The actual conservatives in America’s current political environment is the conservative wing of the Democratic party.

Just public key cryptography. All your actual posts and comment history are already shared. What is missing is a way to authenticate yourself to anyone but your home server. If the protocol included every profile having a public key, you could then use that to authenticate to any server. And managing that private key is no more complicated than managing your private key in a block chain context.

Non public info like subscriptions is a bit more complicated, because there is an actual policy question of who you share it with. You would either need to make it publicly available, keep a copy yourself, or have your home instance give it to you/the other server at the time you want to migrate.

India has a population of 1.4 billion people. There being 3 horrific stories within a day does not say much. You seeing 3 such stories says more about your media than India.

Didn’t have anyone representing Hamas or Israel.

I guess Biden has started to be a bit more careful about how he phrases things now, after the “Israeli” deal he announced a while back, that was immediately rejected by Netenyahu.

Mostly potassium salt, although with some other recipe changes to account for the different flavor.

The good news is that potassium is well understood nutritionally. Most Americans do not get enough of it. To a first approximation, it is anti-sodium health wise, so it is a double win in that it both reduces sodium intake, and counters the effect of a still high sodium intake.

Plant based meats are bassically the definition of highly processed food.

Unironically, yes. A common substitute for table salt (sodium chloride NaCl) is potassium salt (potassium chloride KCl).

The good news is that the health problems with table salt is the sodium, not the chloride. Potassium actually has the opposite effect on the body, so a higher potassium intake would actually help treat a high sodium intake.

The us also has a $14,600 standard deduction that effectively adds a 0% bracket and increases the lower thresholds by that amount (people in the higher thresholds would probably itemize, decreasing their effective tax even further).

The IRS does index the tax brackets for inflation.

Also, that table does not include state taxes.

This isn’t progress. It is actively incentiving having compensation be tips in the tax code.

No, we don’t know that. First, not even the military claims that all of the detainies orchestrated 9/11 (which is a much stronger claim then merely being involved).

Second, do we really trust the portion of military that violated domestic law, violated international human rights law, lied to congress about it, and fought for decades against bringing cases to trial?

Is it more likely than not that a given inmate there is a terrorist? Probably. But that is not the standard for indefinite imprisonment.

Egypt has been an ally for decades, even if public opinion in Egypt has forced the government to keep the relationship out of the spotlight. Anyone who claims that Israel has no friends in the region is woefully out of date. The region is bipolar, and Israel is firmly in one of the two camps.

The crazy thing is that most of the 9/11 comparisons have been coming from Israel and proponents of the way Israel has been handling this.

I seriously do not understand how someone can look at the history of the US’s response to 9/11 and come away thinking it supports Israel’s actions. Although, in fairness to Israel, at least they got the (quasi)country correct.

Moral of the story: get nukes (see also, North Korea)

Also, the US has been regularlu conditioning its weapons supplies to Ukraine on them not being used in Russia proper; while calls to put any conditions on Israel’s usage of them have been a complete non-starter.

And what happens after you kill the Houthi leadership? Do all of the Houthi forces turn over their weapons and go home? Get taken over by a more radical leadership? Split up into a bunch of cells with no centralized leadership?

The Houthis are not a force for good on the region. However, compared with other terrorist groups, they are relatively rational and constrained. If even half of their forces want to go more extreme, they will have a proximate reason to do so, and no leadership to stop them.

The likely result is the Gaza war expands into having a full war on the Yemen front (which is, admittadly, on track to happen anyway), against an enemy that no longer has the capacity to negotiate or surrender.

As a fun side note, a bunch of those cells are also going to be freshly angry at the US, which is very much not in her interest.

We’ve tried killing terrorist leadership before. It tends to not end well.

The Israeli Minister of Diaspora endoresed the anti-semetic National Rally candidate in the recent French election.

Israeli Prime Minister Netenyahu has been aligning with the anti-semetic Trump in the US elections.

There has always been a significant amount of anti-semetism in the Zionist coalition. Hitler’s “final solution” was his solution to the “Jewish question”, which had been explicitly talked about in Europe since at least the mid 1700s, but was popularized in 1843 with the publication of Bruno Bauer’s book “The Jewish Question”.

Before Nazi Germany came up with it’s final solution, they considered a more modest proposal of resettling their Jewish population outside of Germany, including some support for Zionist movement. Their only major opposition to Zionism was a concern that it would destabilize the region. Otherwise, it would get Jews out of Germany, thus solving their Jewish Question. Ultimately, Nazi Germany settled on a much less well structured approach of “voluntary emigration” by making life intolerable for their Jewish population, before finally settling on their final solution.

Once Israel was established, her anti-semetic neighbors seized on the opportunity to resolve their Jewish question by finally forcing out their Jewish population (who now had somewhere to go).