These are the same people that kept asking what do we have to worry about if we have nothing to hide during all the Patriot Act renewals and other monitoring and privacy violating bills, right? I just want to make sure… 🤨

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.

Not everyone can pull off the Edna look.

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.

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.

The referenced article from Cardinal News goes into much more detail.

In an interview with Virginia State Police on Feb. 8, Bell portrayed his second visit to the polls as a joke, according to the special agents who testified. In a recording of the interview, he said, “I was messing to see if they were gonna let me vote again to see what kind of fraud was going on.”

He told the agents, “But I went in and gave them my ID and then it showed up [that] I’d already voted.” He added, “So I was doing a little detective work.”

Commonwealth’s Attorney Daniel Rutherford took a dim view of Bell’s account, and noted that he was not authorized to test the system. The crime, Rutherford pointed out, is “attempting to vote twice, not voting twice.”

Would punishment fix this guy? Probably not. But now that this judge opens the door for other people to conduct their own tests, where does this stop? How many Trumpies do we let test the system? The poll workers have real jobs to do, and they don’t need guys like this there. Laws like this are supposed to be good laws because they deter the action, rather than have to actually punish someone for doing one dumb thing, but if you allow the dumb thing, you negate the law itself.

Lots of great stuff in the Cardinal article too, like this nugget at the end that is very interesting:

The jury deliberated for an hour and came back with a not guilty verdict. When the seven women and five men were polled about the verdict, Juror 12 said, “That’s not my verdict.”

Judge Michael Doucette sent the jury back to work on the verdict, and while they were out for about 10 minutes before coming back with a unanimous decision, Rutherford said he’d never seen a juror announce that he did not agree with the verdict. Juror 12 declined to comment after the jury was dismissed.

A senior Taliban official told The Telegraph of frustration from moderates with the more hardline elements of the regime.

“Someone should stop the supreme leader. Many within the Taliban are angry and worried that, with everything the leadership is doing, we could lose Afghanistan as quickly as we took it,” he added.

“They are worried that as soon as an alternative to the Taliban appears, the people will revolt, and the West will bomb us again,” the official explained.

I don’t know if any country is eager to return after the failures of Russia and the US. The worry about another warlord type offering even a few lost freedoms back though absolutely seems like a valid concern though to the current regime.

From The Guardian:

The queues for late mail ballots were a result of Pennsylvania not having an early on-site voting system at designated spots, as is the case in some other states. Instead, voters can apply for ballots on demand at election offices before filling them out and submitting them on the spot, a procedure that takes about 10 minutes.

The flood of late applicants overwhelmed electoral workers in Bucks county’s administration building in Doylestown, leading to a long queue, which was cut off at about 2.45pm on Tuesday

I went to drop off my ballot on Saturday and when I got there, not to the main office in Doylestown, but one of the smaller remote offices, and there was a huge line all the way across the front of the building and I was wondering what the heck was going on.

As I was getting to the end of the line, a person came over and asked if I already had my ballot, and when they saw it, they said I could go right in and drop it off. There was only one couple ahead of me there.

I had been wondering what the line was for, and now that makes sense. The Republicans had made the mail in ballot more complicated than necessary during COVID, so now they seem to feel it biting them as their potential supporters have been screwed by it.

“Democrat election officials are seeing our numbers. They’re seeing our turnout. They are seeing us breaking early vote records across Pennsylvania,” he said. “They are terrified. And they want to stop our momentum. We are not going to let them suppress our votes.”

Pennsylvania does not start counting votes before election day. Nobody has any clue as to who is voting for whom.

They’ve broken the system and want to say “look at this broken system, we can’t trust it!” To me that just shows we can’t trust you!

I really hope Pennsylvanians do the right thing. These people need to be stopped.

Well, he is talking about the Alien Enemies Act as an immediate action on taking power. There’s only really one way to round up what he’s saying are millions of people at once, and it’s what the Alien Enemies Act was last used for, setting up concentration camps.

I reeeeeeally try to stay hopeful most of his supporters are ignorant of what they’re going along with, or we are in serious trouble as a nation no matter who wins.

I’ve had Impossible from Red Robin and Burger King, which both grill their burgers, and have found them to be pretty darn indistinguishable, and I’m a big time burger fan.

The Beyond I find to be very distinct. I haven’t been around “raw” Impossible patties, but I’ve made the Beyonds at home a number of times. They smell like cat food to me before they’re cooked up, but I absolutely love the flavor of them so much! They have this vegetal background taste, but whatever it is, it tickles my taste buds in a very pleasant way for someone not usually the biggest veggie fan. I could see people not liking it, but I get periodic cravings for it now, since it is such a distinct flavor that nothing else matches.