The frustrating thing is that Trump didn’t even get more votes this election than he did last election. There wasn’t a bunch of new Trump voters that came out of the woodwork and turned the tide. He was absolutely beatable. He only won because 15 million of the people who voted for Biden last election just didn’t bother this time.

It’s always a grift with these people.

It’s not even surprising anymore. Oh… wow… the Scooby Doo villain’s mask came off again… crazy… who ever could have seen that coming… crazy…

It’s just tedious.

I was so disappointed when Kamala came out strong for Medicare For All and then pretty much immediately caved and walked it back.

I have a strong suspicion that there is enormous pressure from the business world to keep the healthcare system the way it is. I’d bet almost anything that the instant healthcare is no longer tied to employment there is going to be a mass exodus of people from their jobs, and an absolute explosion of people starting their own businesses. I mean, I’ve had about half a dozen good scalable business ideas waiting and ready to go for years now, and the only reason I haven’t pursued them is because it would probably mean giving up my health insurance. I can’t possibly be alone in that.

And I bet if we got socialized health care, a lot of the problems we have right now with suppressed wages and poor working conditions would suddenly have a way of working themselves out.

I went back and replayed some of the OG Metroid games (Metroid, Super Metroid, Fusion, and Zero Mission), and I’m happy to report that they are still rad a/f.

They fucking better, because he’s definitely going to.

Bezos: “Hey Donald, I stopped my Washington Post editors from endorsing Kamala for you. Didn’t I do good, daddy?”

Trump: “Fuck you! Lawsuit! Fuck you!”

I’ve seen her a bunch of times going back to the '90s, and I’ve never seen her put on a bad show. She’s one of four musicians I’ve ever seen live that managed to be charismatic and engaging while sitting down behind a keyboard, and one of two who weren’t miming.

Where I live we have a thing called BallotTrax. You sign up once and it automatically sends you notifications for that stuff so you don’t have to remember to check. I really like it.

In the Wizard of Oz, Glenda the “Good” Witch is actually a ruthless drug kingpin.

She used her magic powers to summon a tornado and then merks the Wicked Witch of the East with Dorothy’s house. She then puts WWotE’s shoes on Dorothy in order to make her a target for WWotE’s sister, the Wicked Witch of the West. Glenda then uses Dorothy as a stooge to bump off WWotW, thereby putting herself in control of Oz’s vast fields of opium poppies, and cornering the entire opium trade.

It doesn’t make sense any other way. Glenda could have told Dorothy to use the ruby slippers to get home at literally any point, but instead sends her on a wild goose chase, and uses her as a blunt instrument to take out the only other bases of power remaining in Oz: the WWotW, and the Wizard, who Dorothy exposes as a fraud. Only then does she tell Dorothy to click her heels, and poof: everything is all wrapped up with a bow, and Glenda’s hands are clean. Her two main rivals are dead, and the Wizard is fleeing Oz in disgrace.

It’s some fucking Kaiser Söze level shit.

My knee pain is associated with arthritis, unfortunately. I wish stretching helped. I’m even a couple years younger than OP, but when I walk up stairs it sounds like I’m crinkling two big balls of cellophane.

I could still do without the knee pain though.

In my state (Colorado) early voting works exactly like regular voting, just, you know, earlier. Registered voters get their ballots automatically sent to them in the mail. You can return your ballot by mail, drop it off at an official drop box, drop it off at a voting location, or you can show up at one of the early voting locations in your county and vote in person the traditional way if you prefer that. Right now in my county there are six locations where you can do in-person early voting. There will be orders of magnitude more in-person voting locations open on the day of the election, but I think most people choose return their ballots by mail or drop box.

Every voting/counting location is staffed with a bipartisan team of election judges, and election observers. I believe the locations are run by paid county officials, but largely staffed by volunteers who have completed a training program. I’ve never heard of there being a shortage of volunteers

The voting drop boxes are big reinforced steel boxes which are securely anchored into concrete. You would need some seriously heavy duty cutting tools to get one open without the key. They are placed in front of city offices like City Hall, the Department of Motor Vehicles, or the city library. They’re usually in open high traffic areas, and are under 24/7 video surveillance. I believe they’re also emptied multiple times per day. I wouldn’t say they’re impossible to tamper with, but it would be extremely difficult to do so and get away with it. To my knowledge, so far nobody has tried. I’m not actually sure what it would really accomplish. I guess you could destroy ballots, but stuffing one with counterfeit ballots would probably be caught almost immediately.

There’s a pretty robust system in place to track who has cast a ballot, how, when, and where. If multiple ballots show up in the name of the same voter, that gets automatically flagged and triggers a fraud investigation. Also there’s signature verification system. Every ballot that’s returned by mail or drop box must be returned in its security envelope, which has the name of the voter and several unique QR and bar codes containing information tying that envelope to that specific voter. This envelope must be signed by the voter for the ballot to be counted. If the signature on the security envelope doesn’t match the signature on file, the ballot gets flagged for investigation, and doesn’t get counted until the voter can be contacted to verify it was them casting the ballot and not someone pretending to be them. Voter fraud is really pretty rare here, but it’s taken very seriously, and gets seriously investigated. When it does happen it’s usually someone trying to cast the ballot of a deceased spouse, or family member, and even that usually gets caught.

There are a lot of safeguards and redundancies in place here that make getting away with voter fraud extremely difficult, but lot of the reason why our system works as well as it does is that people genuinely care about their votes being fairly counted and so are willing to staff and fund the offices who investigate voting irregularities. Our voting system is considered kind of the gold standard for the United States, and I’m lucky to live in a place that has that. Voting systems in other parts of the US are unfortunately not run with the same vigilance or sense of equity.

According to the caption under the picture, it’s Emily Blunt…

I don’t know if they officially count as grindhouse, but when I was a kid I loved a ton of the B-grade action movies that the Cannon Film Group put out in the 1980s. American Ninja, Delta Force, Cobra, Bloodsport, the Death Wish movies, Enter the Ninja, Revenge of the Ninja, etc. And, of course, the greatest ninja movie ever made:

Ninja III: The Domination.

Just gonna leave this here.

Well yeah, nobody will be able to make fun of them for typos like this if nobody is allowed to learn to spell in the first place.

I keep getting served some supremely mediocre eastern European hip-hop in Release Radar and other Spotify-generated playlists because of some guy who performs as Devo. Same with guys performing as Slayer, Poe, etc.

A lot of the time they’re listed on the track along with two or three other people, so I go to the pages of those associated acts and tap the “don’t play this artist” option in the three dots menu, and that usually cuts down on how much I see them in my feeds. At least until they do a new collab.

And while we’re on the subject, if Spotify could also stop lumping several artists of the same name together on the same profile, that’d be great. There’s an old surf-rock band called the Astronauts that I listen to sometimes, and at one point there were albums from at least four different bands included on their discography page. There’s still at least two.

Sounds like someone is trying to immanentize the eschaton.

They criticize everything the Democrats do. Literally everything. They double down on anything that catches traction. The more traction it gets, the harder they push it.