I went to look at your comment. I’ll be polite and summarize it instead of sharing the exact quote.

I was 18 and had a 17 year old girlfriend and we had a ton of sex. That’s what 17 year olds do.

If you don’t understand how the power dynamics are different between 2 nobodies of similar age vs a 17 year old and a 38 year old federal representative and his local gov buddy, you may want to read some things written about consent written in the last decade.

When I was 17, someone almost 40 was considered old as hell.

Edit: Article on coercion vs consent

They had her out of state, where she likely didn’t really know where she was, likely had no one to get help from if she felt she was in a bad situation, and was there with very much more adult authority figures, and there were drugs at the party, so she may have also been under the influence.

You also can’t fault someone for taking time to want to testify. She probably felt at least partially responsible, and he is a national figure. It takes time to get up courage to open yourself up to the whole world getting a chance to say things like you must have wanted it or did something to deserve it.

I was thinking today we’re not far from having a new Fugitive Slave Act, only with migrants. At this point, I don’t think we can really say anything is off the table. I don’t know any check or balance that isn’t currently compromised or 1 executive order from elimination.

Different job, but same scenario. I hook things up to a machine, run it an hour, swap the next units in, repeat until done. Sometimes there’s other stuff to do, but the basic job is mostly waiting.

North Carolina is a lovely state, and I hope you’re able to bring a little more sanity back to it!

Thank you for voting, fellow battleground stater! My voter sticker went through the wash, but I cast my vote in PA as soon as I could in October.

Stand on Zanzibar (1968) is set in 2010, at a time when population pressure has led to widening social divisions and political extremism. Despite the threat of terrorism, U.S. corporations like General Technics are booming, thanks to a supercomputer named Shalmaneser. China is America’s new rival. Europe has united. Brunner also foresees affirmative action, genetic engineering, Viagra, Detroit’s collapse, satellite TV, in-flight video, gay marriage, laser printing, electric cars, the de-criminalization of marijuana, and the decline of tobacco. There is even a progressive president (albeit of Beninia, not America) named “Obomi”.

Have we ruled him out as a time traveler? 😆

I’ll have to add this to my reading list. Thanks!

Second for TP Link. I’ve been on TP Tapo lights for the last year and they’ve been pretty painless. Amazon puts them on sale pretty often. I mainly use them as a wake up light and to turn on the inside lights when I’m carrying in stuff at night.

I had him in my mind writing my original comment. I don’t know much about him before the war, but he seems to be doing admirable if anyone had concerns at his election.

It’s fun to turn back the clock and read old news:

BBC: Ukrainian comedian Volodymyr Zelensky has scored a landslide victory in the country’s presidential election. 22 APR 2019

“I will never let you down,” Mr Zelensky told celebrating supporters.

Russia says it wants him to show “sound judgement”, “honesty” and “pragmatism” so that relations can improve. Russia backs separatists in eastern Ukraine.

Mr Poroshenko, who admitted defeat after the first exit polls were published, has said he will not be leaving politics.

He told voters that Mr Zelensky, 41, was too inexperienced to stand up to Russia effectively.

Mr Zelensky starred in the long-running satirical drama Servant of the People in which his character accidentally becomes Ukraine’s president.

He plays a teacher who is elected after his expletive-laden rant about corruption goes viral on social media.

He ran under a political party with the same name as his show.

With no previous political experience, Mr Zelensky’s campaign focused on his difference to the other candidates rather than on any concrete policy ideas.

NPR: Comedian Wins Ukrainian Presidency In Landslide 22 APR 2019

“What’s amazing is that despite Zelenskiy being a household name, people don’t really know what he stands for,” NPR’s Moscow correspondent Lucian Kim told Morning Edition. “During the election campaign, he was very vague about his positions, and in that way he really became a blank slate for people to project whatever they wanted on him.” The fact that voters chose Zelenskiy shows how desperate people are, Kim said.

But Ukraine’s outgoing president cautioned that the Kremlin is celebrating the election of an inexperienced candidate. Russia believes that “Ukraine could be quickly returned to Russia’s orbit of influence,” Poroshenko said on Twitter.

According to The New York Times, many voters said they had supported Zelenskiy “not so much because they thought he was a good candidate but because they wanted to punish Mr. Poroshenko for deflating the hopes raised by Ukraine’s 2014 revolution and for doing little to combat corruption.”

The Washington Post notes that Zelenskiy is just the latest comedian to win public office in elections around the world. In Guatemala, the former comic actor Jimmy Morales won the presidency on an anti-corruption platform with the slogan, “Not corrupt, not a thief.” In Iceland, comedian Jón Gnarr ran for mayor as a joke candidate and won, serving one term before he stepped down in 2014. And in the U.S., Saturday Night Live comedian Al Franken became a senator from Minnesota.

Maybe laughter and self-reflection is what the world needs right now. The comedians seem to be picking things up when everyone else is dropping the ball.

Wow, that was a ride! I read the Wikipedia synopsis and saw there was a documentary made about it with Orson Wells as the narrator and it was on Youtube and only about 40 minutes, so I checked it out. The intro was so trippy, with brash visuals and loud, violent sound effects combined with a generic John Carpenter synth soundtrack. It was like a deleted scene from Clockwork Orange!

I don’t know how much the content differs from the book, but it was a nice insight to my parent’s generation and their feelings to the future, or our now I suppose. It was somewhat eye-opening hearing them talk about built by number babies and cloning years before the first IVF baby was born, and things like an interview with a polyamorous couple. The idea of things like changing race at will is still somewhat crazy, but I guess one could carry thing over to confusion about gender fluidity.

It was a crazy mix of 'Member Berries, Old Man Yells at Cloud, but also with some empathy one can actually relate to less mentally flexible people experiencing the titular Future Shock. Where I lose a bit of that sympathy though is in reading the Wiki entry on Toffler himself, it quotes him:

“Society needs people who take care of the elderly and who know how to be compassionate and honest,” he said. “Society needs people who work in hospitals. Society needs all kinds of skills that are not just cognitive; they’re emotional, they’re affectional. You can’t run the society on data and computers alone.”

I got to spend a lot of time with all 4 of my grandparents from the Greatest Generation. To varying degrees, all seemed to eventually accept, if not embrace the modern times of race equality and even bits of homosexuality. None used computers or much advanced tech, but they didn’t seem to begrudge it either. I certainly never heard them complain about too much electric lighting, air conditioning, or running water.

My parent’s generation, the Boomers, seem to be going kicking and screaming into the future though. My mom was, and still at heart is a hippie, so she does not have these issues for the most part. My dad and all his friends though seem deeply upset we are not in 1970 anymore. If they didn’t have it then, they don’t need it now. There seems to be no desire to learn, or to accept new things or ways of seeing the world.

Perhaps life has sped up faster than our minds have changed to handle that. Those rooted in tradition perhaps had more time to adapt in the past. But I don’t think my generation has just turned our backs on our parents. They just do not seem to be accepting the embrace we are offering, and I don’t know if we can make them.

It’s definitely a deeper topic to continue to explorer that can go far deeper than writing it off with an “OK, Boomer,” but it’s an unfortunate circumstance when you reach out a hand to someone you care about and they just smack it away. My immediate family is not close for a number of reasons, and as they age, I fear how tense things will get whenever the point arrives where they are forced to start relinquishing some control to my brother and me.

The fact this isn’t localized to the US is the part that has me sweating. We’ve moved on from a lot of terrible things in America’s past, but with so many countries experiencing much the same thing at once, I don’t know where we find the good influence in the world.

I hope this will end up being a great wake up to the responsibilities of democracy, but I’ll probably be long gone before the ripples of the event of Bush v Gore are done shaking the system. It’s going to take a long time to clean things up even if we start tomorrow since the power hungry have gotten away with so much up until this point.

Scary to think that in the future, some parts of the country may talk about the 2020 election the same way they do about “The War of Northern Agression.”

I thought it was touching where he discussed his worries about using his last opportunity to speak before the election, and that he could be left wondering if there was something else that he could have said to change the outcome if it ends up going bad. I imagine there has to be a good bit of pressure when you have such a large platform.

For a show that points out so many wrongs with our country, it’s easy to look at things negatively. But for now, at least, we are able to point out those wrongs and still have a hope we can do something about them. Not even 5 years a citizen, I imagine it could be scary as well that if a re-elected Trump goes for a type of “media reform,” Oliver is likely going to be high on the list of people to be looked at.

I hope tomorrow goes well for America. I’ve been disappointed the last few elections that the comedians have been more critical than the mainstream journalists, but right now, I’m glad we’ve had them if nothing else, motivating us to still be our best.

Intensity is a good word to describe that element. I feel the show is willing to bump off characters, but 2 of the leads have survived too many close calls and it lowers the stakes a good bit.

The individual that showed up with the surprise faction really threw a wrench into things that I enjoyed though!

I don’t recall how I heard about For All Mankind, and I never see it mentioned very much, but I have had such a great time watching that.

It’s an alternate history of the space race from the 60s onward, and it’s so exciting to watch what could have been. Each season jumps forward a decade, so the advances in missions and tech keep leaping forward.

If you grew up thinking we should be pioneering space by now, you will probably enjoy it.

Oh totally, it’s like, we got your actual vote right here!

I live here and replied to this post you linked. The TL;DR of the comment there is:

I do feel the lawsuit is valid, but the delays he’s complaining are caused by Republican efforts to make early/mail-in voting harder during COVID when they didn’t want people to easily vote in a hurry. Now that they do, they’re mad they got what they wanted.

It’s just more of them trying to “prove the system doesn’t work,” and the main proof they have is the stuff they themselves broke.

They’re anti-education for a reason…

Yup, same nonsense as when they sabotage the Post Office and talk about how that doesn’t work. The votes against immigration reform and then the yelling about that not working. Won’t cut spending or raise taxes but complain about deficit spending.

They want you to want to throw out our current system so they can replace it. That’s why it’s important to understand the right people to be mad at. If you get mad at anyone other than them themselves, they win.

Rest easy now, friend. The battle is over.