Just in time for me to report that I finally got around to the early voting that I mentioned in my last post. Now I’m eagerly awaiting the results ten days from now.
No storm troupers checking papers. I didn’t really expect any since I live in a pretty safe Republican congressional district; but I brought my passport with me just in case. 😎
It’s all marked up. Needless to say, it was easy this time. We have no-excuse early voting in Missouri, and I plan to take advantage of that on the way to the grocery store this afternoon. I’ll let you know if I see any goons cosplaying as storm troopers checking peoples’ papers.
I live in Missouri’s 2nd Congressional District; and there’s an outside chance, although I wouldn’t bet on it, that my U.S. representative, Ann Wagner, could lose to a Democrat, Fred Wellman, this time. Wagner has really ugly ads all over the TV claiming that Wellman supports “gender mutilation of minors” which he doesn’t, of course. At least she’s running scared, which is better than nothing.
Also on the ballot is state Constitutional Amendment 3 which would repeal a pro-abortion amendment already passed by citizen initiative. The TV ads for this one also go full-bore anti-trans trying to scare people into thinking that children are being forced to transition. “Gender mutilation of minors” is already illegal in Missouri, and in any event, doesn’t, in fact, happen. The only actual effect the amendment would have is to stop all abortion in Missouri.
I’m also against state Proposition A which would put back in place the mid-term gerrymandering, which the Missouri Supreme Court threw out, breaking the leans-Dem 5th Congressional District (Kansas City) into two leans-Rep districts.
The one state amendment that I’m in favor of is Amendment 6 which would protect the citizen initiative process that our deep-red state legislature has been trying to eviscerate ever since the pro-abortion amendment passed a while ago.
Thanks to PZ Myers for getting freethoughtblogs.com working again. A week without my daily FtB fix was making me very depressed. (Yes, I’m a boring person.)
There’s a half-hour English-language telecast from Deutsche Welle News on the PBS World Channel in the U.S.; and almost the whole program today was about the landslide win for the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party in the German state of Saxony-Anhalt. Many people seem to be freaking out in ways that make the AfD sound as extreme as the MAGAts on my side of the Pond.
I’d appreciate comments, particularly from some of our European bloggers and commenters, to help me better understand what’s going on.
I just heard on my local TV news that the Misouri Supreme Court has thrown out the Trump-requested electorial maps which changed the 5th Congressional District (around Kansas City) from leans-Democratic into two leans-Republican districts, the effect being to likely change Missouri’s representation in the U.S. House to 7-1 from the current 6-2.
This is “interesting” because the districts that were in effect for the primary election a month ago will be different from the districts in effect for the general election; and some Republicans are complaining that the candidates that they voted for in the primary won’t appear on their ballots in the general.
It was speculated that the matter might go to the U.S. Supreme Court, and it’s not hard to imagine that SCOTUS’ gang of six could invent some apologetic to the effect that states don’t really have control of elections; but the ballots have to be printed in five or six days. Stay tuned…
joelgrant had an interesting comment to a post I wrote about three weeks ago, so I thought I’d bring the issue briefly to the top again. Folks who aren’t interested in civil time geekiness can ignore this.
Sorry to link to the New York Post, but I thought this was funny.
A certain prideful, self-satisfied narcissist (who shall remain shameless) wants to put his name on another building. Why am I not surprised?
The was a message today in a C++-related e-mail list saying that the October meeting of the General Conference on Weights and Measures (CGPM) will consider getting rid of leap seconds and adding a leap hour every few thousand years.
At present, because of the Earth’s variable rotation around its axis, atomic clocks (which UTC is based on) are getting ahead of astronomical observations. To keep the two more or less in sync, one second is added to or subtracted from UTC every so often. In principle, this can happen to the last minute of June or December in any given year; but in practice, it happens much less often. Twenty-eight leap seconds have been added since December of 1971; but there hasn’t been one since December of 2016; and so far, there has never been a negative leap second.
Unfortunately, there’s lots of software out there that pays no attention to this; and leap seconds (23:59:60 should be considered a valid time) have caused outages even though it’s been happening for over fifty years; and it looks like we might have a negative leap second before long (23:59:58 should jump directly to 00:00:00 on some date known in advance) which could cause even more craziness.
We’ll see what CGPM decide to do …
The Missouri primaries are coming up two weeks from Tuesday*, and there will be a couple of state constitutional amendments on the ballot.
Amendment 4 changes what it takes for future citizen-initiated amendments to pass. At present, if there are enough signatures to get the issue on the ballot at all, passing the amendment takes only a simple majority state-wide. Amendment 4 would require separate majorities in each of the U.S. congressional districts. This would make it virtually impossible for citizen-initiated amendments to ever pass again. (Republicans are still upset about an amendment passed in 2024 that protected the right to reproductive freedom.) Of course, there are no changes in the requirements for amendments initiated by the Republican-controlled state House and Senate.
Amendment 5 phases out the state income and property taxes and replaces them with sales taxes. The goal is to have a tax cut for rich people and a tax hike for poor people.
If you haven’t guessed, I’m against both of them.
We have open primaries in Missouri: when you get to the polling place, you tell the official whether you want a Democratic or a Republican ballot—it’s that simple; and there’s a cogent argument that, in a heavily gerrymandered district, the only election that actually matters is the favored party’s primary.
I’ll probably get a sample ballot in the mail in a week or so, at which time I’ll know who all the candidates are. I doubt that I’ll have a good reason to vote in the Republican primary because I live in Missouri’s Second Congressional District which is gerrymandered safe-Republican, and I can’t imagine that my U.S. Rep., Ann Wagner, will have any serious competition. I’ll probably vote in the Democratic primary for the most progressive candidates in the hope of sending a signal, in my small way, to professional Democrats.
*Two days after my 80th birthday. I’m looking forward to the election, but not to being an old fart (although that ship has already sailed).
I’ve been a civil time geek for a while, and I follow an e-mail list relating to IANA’s tz database. It looks like the tz-art.html file in the next release will contain a link to Wednesday’s xkcd. 😎
There’s been a lot of discussion on the list about the proposed “permanent daylight saving time” law that just passed in the U.S. House of Representatives. It sounds simple: the proposed law doesn’t change the time zone names; it just changes the offsets from UTC and makes them permanent. For example, “eastern standard time” would become UTC−4:00 year-round. But states would be allowed to opt out, so for example, Hawaii could keep its UTC−10:00.
So what if Arizona decides to keep its UTC−7:00 year-round but doesn’t call it Pacific standard time? Mountain standard time would mean different things in tz’s time zones, America/Phoenix (Arizona except Navajo Nation) and America/Denver (generic mountain time).
Furthermore, it turns out that there’s lots of legacy code out there that hard-codes offsets to abbreviations like “MST”. All that code happens to work at present; but it’s been wrong for decades and so will likely stay wrong.
I’ll bring the popcorn. 😎