In thinking about America today, please tell me whether you agree or disagree with the following statement:

“The very rich and powerful are above the law and when they do something wrong, they look out for each other, using their power and connections to get special treatment.”

• Agree: 84
• Disagree: 14
• Not sure: 2

This one in particular stands out to me. Most questions can’t seem to get below 30% support for the evil option, but even that group mostly recognizes that the game is rigged in favor of the rich and powerful.

Given the anatomy of a submarine, I’m pretty sure that whale is now Jewish.

The first panel severely undersells the massive progress that renewables have made over the last couple of decades. And unfortunately, that just plays into the myth the things like wind and solar are weak and impractical, which is one of the main narratives pushed by opponents of clean energy.

Nah, I’m dismissing complaints that have no basis. If you want to actually back up your complaint with something then go for it.

I didn’t realize that opinions about shows need to be submitted for peer review before they can be valid. Of course, that also means that your position is equally invalid until you can show that your opinion is based on something that I think is acceptable.

But if you’re not willing to defend your stance then it’s because it’s indefensible.

Or because I don’t have the time to write a dissertation on why two shows I watched several years ago weren’t very good. And because you aren’t coming across as terribly open minded on this subject.

So let me save us both time: I point out the general reasons I thought Discovery and Picard were poorly written. You dismiss the general positions until I can provide examples. I list examples of the things I thought were stupid, poorly thought out, or unsatisfying. You counter by pointing out similar things from individual episodes of any of the previous shows or movies. I explain why I think those things either weren’t bad in that context or why they are easier to overlook in shows that had a different story structure, tone, and so on, and also that the existence of bad episodes in previous shows doesn’t make the writing in future shows any better. You accuse me of having nostalgia goggles and being afraid of anything different. I point out that I am all for different, but I want that different thing to also be good. You fall back to claiming that my complaints are unfounded and we return right back to where we started.

Which means that it isn’t about people being unfair to the newer Treks because it doesn’t match an incredibly narrow view of what the series can be. Nor is it about the fans who give way too much credit to Gene and ignore his very glaring flaws.

You’re just objecting to people not liking the thing you like.

I have no loyalty to Gene or his vision. Both the movies and TNG started terrible under his control and only got better as he became less involved. DS9 directly challenged Gene’s rules and assumptions on numerous occasions and was a much stronger series because of it.

Hell, I’ll defend the first JJ Abrams movie because despite it being incredibly dumb and having only a surface level resemblance to Star Trek, it was still a lot of fun.

And on the flip side, I have a fairly low opinion of Voyager because while it’s Star Trek to the core, it also tends to be very poorly written and squanders most of its potential.

I went into Discovery and Picard with an open mind. I wanted to like them, but they just couldn’t meet me half way by being good. Eventually I decided to stop torturing myself with them because I have better things to do with the finite amount of time I have in this world.

Seems like a nearly impossible number to prove. I would assume they are only counting cases where the accusations can be shown to be false (which will always be a much smaller number than the ones where the truth is simply unknown) and cases where the accuser recants (which will also be a smaller number and will include some women who had been telling the truth). It seems no more valid than the opposite extreme of assuming all accusations are false unless you can prove them true.

But what’s the alternative? Forcing every case into true or false no matter how little information you have to go on? Looking only at cases with overwhelming evidence one way or the other and pretending the rest don’t exist?

And that’s without getting into questions about things like unreported cases, or cases where part of the story checks out and part of it doesn’t. Are we only looking at formal complaints or are we including accusations that are only spread socially?

The whole question is vague and surrounded by assumptions. It’s like asking if aliens are real. The likely answer is going to depend heavily on whether you interpret that to mean “does any form of life exist elsewhere in the universe” as opposed to “are little grey guys practicing proctology on us?”

According to Oklahoma state law, the special election for the remainder of the term takes place during the next statewide primary and general election. However, if the vacancy occurs after March 1st during an even numbered year, the special election gets delayed until the next election cycle after that year.

Source: https://law.justia.com/codes/oklahoma/title-26/section-26-12-101/

So they won’t have to have the special election this year. Though I doubt it makes that much of a difference. If they were going to lose that seat, they were going to lose the senate no matter what.

A direct attack would still be a bad idea. If anything, that risks uniting America and getting it to stop punching itself in the dick for a while.

That said, I wouldn’t want to be Taiwan right now. I wouldn’t trust Trump as an ally in the best of times. I sure as fuck wouldn’t want to rely on him committing to a long and arduous fight that doesn’t provide him with an immediate personal benefit, and then actually following through.

On the other hand, rich and powerful people from influential families are much more noticeable. People will see you not aging, and they are more likely to recognize you if you are caught feeding. It will stand out if you never eat, only show up at night, or don’t have a reflection. Plus, I suspect that people who grew up rich and spoiled will be far less likely to know how to avoid drawing attention compared to people who’ve lived at the mercy of those in power.

A filthy vagrant however can just wander from town to town for centuries without anyone noticing anything too out of the ordinary. Every time you arrive in a new location, it’s a fresh start. As long as you keep a low profile, no one’s going to be coordinating and comparing records looking for a wandering serial killer. Although traveling in a small group posing as a family or merchants would probably be safer since people are less likely to assume you’re all dangerous.

Actually, the more I think about it, the more a circus or carnival sounds like a great place for vampires. You have permanent mobile shelter complete with loyal followers. You have plausible deniability for anything being weird or off, including an easy explanation for only being seen at night (show time). If you sell alcohol and can feed on people without killing or turning them, you’re pretty much set.

And then those files will only be half released and full of redactions because it turns that Trump and the other billionaires have been fucking alien kids too.

Meanwhile, a grand jury in the U.S. determined there was insufficient evidence to charge anyone, including Harrison, in connection with Lucy’s death.

She’s dead from a gunshot wound to the chest. No one disputes that he was the only one in the room and had been holding the gun when it went off. Even if he didn’t intend to fire the gun, this still means he was pointing a loaded gun at her. That alone is reckless enough to be a crime. That he then pulled the trigger and killed her makes it manslaughter at the very least.

Grand juries are rigged heavily in favor of the prosecution. There are only two ways for this to make sense: either the prosecution completely botched the case (intentionally or through unbelievable incompetence), or more than 1/4 of the jury were unwilling to indict a Trump supporter for murdering a family member who opposes Trump.

The majority of eligible voters already don’t vote. Low voter turnout does not embarrass the rich and powerful, it just makes the system easier to control. Fewer voters means fewer people to answer to, fewer people to influence, and fewer people to shuffle around through gerrymandering.

For fuck sake, they are consistently trying to make it harder for people to vote. They want lower turnout. They know their most loyal supporters will still vote. They’d much rather have their base be the only ones bothering to show up to the polls. They don’t care about legitimacy, they care about winning.

This went in a different direction than I was anticipating after reading the first two lines.

Just waiting for them to come up with a version of this bill that keeps all these same restrictions but which adds an alternative of using digital identity verification processes administered by third parties. Then they can just approve Xitter and the like as verification partners, making the easy route available through platforms their side controls, all with no transparency or accountability.

I used to beat myself up a little for dismissing bitcoin early on and therefore missing a chance at being rich. But then I realized that it was like beating myself up for not winning the lottery just because I know now what last week’s winning numbers were. I would have had to dedicate time, effort and money I couldn’t easily spare into chasing an irrational long shot.

Plus, odds are I would have sold it all the minute it was worth a little, which would be much worse. Or that someone would steal it all, as happened to a lot of people early on.

No surprise there. They don’t give a shit about solving the problem. They certainly weren’t going to put any effort into it. This was all about being able to announce that they brought down prescription drug prices. Well, that and to slap Trump’s name on yet another useless waste of time and money.

I prefer to hear it coming from the Banjo-Kazooie character.

Part of the problem is that propaganda has convinced them that solar and wind are just pipe dreams and scams which are too weak and expensive to be useful. That it’s just part of an agenda being pushed by the radical leftist hippy green weenies who want your taxes to subsidize their useless toys. That renewables are all about virtue signalling and aren’t practical because the sun doesn’t always shine and the wind doesn’t always blow, etc.

It’s not just the imbeciles either. I’ve known otherwise intelligent people who simply never bothered to investigate the claims they heard. I have these conversations with my dad on occasion because he knows I’m interested in EVs and solar and he’ll mention the bullshit articles he reads and I have to point out the flaws in those articles. The last time we talked he questioned if a solar roof really works in the northern parts of the country and he had trouble accepting it until I pointed out that all the plants outside are solar powered and they do just fine.

And that’s on a good day, when they aren’t trying to figure out how to even be humorous around the horrific things they need to talk about.