They're also less vulnerable to parasites, fungi, and other diseases than a monoculture, because the greater distance between trees of the same species makes it harder for contagion to spread.

If your city has an urban forester and you ever hear them recommend fewer than four species as "perfect trees to plant," campaign to get them fired and replaced by someone who actually knows how to do their job.

I'm not going to blow smoke up your ass and say that I know that you're wrong, but that doesn't seem to me to be the way that it's gone in the past, at least not here in America. This last decade feels a lot like the 1850s to me, or the 1930s. And remember that evangelical fundamentalism was founded as a reaction to what came after the rubble stopped bouncing in 1865 and then again in 1945. Both of those disasters left the public with an intense distrust of ideologues and partisans, and Christianity changed both times to become more social-gospel and less partisan, people flocked out of the mainstream churches, and into either secularism or mainline denominations.

After the chaos of the last 60 years, I think we're due for decades of the American people remembering what ideological purity and hyper-partisanship cost us or almost cost us and reacting against that, not burrowing deeper into it. At least, that's what I expect.

What you're seeing is the last gasp of the boomer generation. Someone forwarded me a column the other day, by an evangelical lobbyist who'd seen the cross-tabs on the 2022 mid-terms, lamenting the fact that the millenial and "zoomer" generations are "completely lost to us," permanently alienated. (He blamed the schools, unsurprisingly.)

What you're chalking up as victories for them are more like desperation plays. They're willing to stretch for any short-term gain, however unpopular or unsustainable, because they know they've got maybe 4-6 years before they're so small they're not even useful to the Republicans any more, and then their movement is over.

Not necessarily. Assuming current trends continue, in about 30 years, Americans with no religious affiliation will outnumber Christians, and in a little over 50 years, they will become the actual majority.

Furthermore, the "Gilead" denominations (white evangelical, white Catholic) are the ones experiencing the fastest rate of decline, because they are having record-low success evangelizing non-Christians and because record-low percentages of white evangelical and white Catholic parents are forcing their children to go to church.

You get a job managing inventory. As stuff comes in, you steal it, and ship it to a warehouse you rented. Once it gets there, you sell it back to the company at a bargain rate, cheaper than any of their other providers.

> For one scheme, prosecutors said Prasad arranged to have Apple components shipped to an outside vendor's warehouse, where they were repackaged and eventually sold back to Apple.

Are you kidding me? That scam was in my textbook on computer-related crime in 1979, after somebody pulled it on AT&T. It's the kind of thing that even rudimentary accounting controls should catch, these days.