Mrs Whiggins

In a spirit of deliberate obtuseness, I do believe I could have a lot of fun with this should I encounter someone with this emblem. I mean, I love trees and I have been known to plant them, water them, and even hug them and it is so nice to find a kindred spirit. And who doesn't wish to fellowship with someone who believes that the Almighty should dispense justice. No need for weapons when he protects and provides. I love trees.

You had to know this is/was in the works/a possibility. Whoever controls the medium controls the message, and Gab, Parler, and Truth while good at keeping their target audiences sated and frenzied, were unable to shut down dissension on other platforms. In some ways it is harder to counter that censoring than pre tech. In other ways with tech, if you can get around it and broadcast your message via workarounds it can spread faster. But as in other authoritarian countries you have to be willing to risk everything. In the timeline of our modern reality, one has this poster and all it represents created by the design team for a company whose owner is actively donating for GOP representation in the state of Oregon.

Here is a short excerpt: Here are your book talk questions of the morning: Which states will ensure that this book is required reading and why? What would happen if a drag queen storytime participant decided to read this book aloud? How do you suppose the author chooses to end the story? Not including mandatory educational institutional distribution, how many copies do you think will be sold to single individuals not named Michael Flynn nor affiliated with the GOP or any PAC bulk purchasing to drive sales?

From social media following episode 10:

I have been encouraging all the young people I know and my children have as well to get their vote on the record:

Aemond has a chip on his shoulder similar to Daemon, and their various parallels are leading up to conflict between the two I am sure. There have been enough hints about it with the scenes in which they seem to get the measure of each other. Aemond is a bad ass of a slightly different make-up so it's interesting to watch. His character is going to rationalize this action as the means to an end, IMO and fits his nature: pragmatic but with a useful outcome (somewhat like Daemon's former wife breaking her back and then perhaps succumbing to death by rock but we don't really know do we?). In that regard, they are perhaps similar. Muddies the waters quite nicely for story telling purposes.

The excerpted quote from your article spot on and combining this sequence of events with the (eventual) overturning of Affirmative Action by SCOTUS, and rendering Brown v Board of Education of Topeka essentially a footnote in history of when America tried to do the right thing. Once private schools dominate then de facto segregation based on race and socioeconomic status will as well not that it hadn't already based on boundary/zoning and other methods.

Two scenes where I thought the actors performances were well done w/o saying a word were D'Arcy wrapping the body of her baby and then Toussaint in the scene where he enters the War Room (or whatever it's called) and prior to announcing House Valeryon's loyalty, pauses and watches his grand-daughters and takes note of their allegiance. His expression was quite eloquent and following after his talk with Eve Best regarding war/peace it was further revelation (to him) about the impact of war on those who are not soldiers in battle.

Team Legs. They really put the question of mobility to the front of the victim's mind. Can it? Will it?

Seems to me that Martin prefers to depict many of his characters with the ambiguity and uncertainty that many humans have with respect to our decision making. Daemon's moral compass hews to whatever values he holds as important, and given his pragmatism (dreams didn't make us kings, dragons did) his decision making, like all of us, depends upon the situation. Although, his frustration in general (both with his brother and likely with Rhaenyra) regarding the reluctance for going on the offensive is perhaps due to his lack of awareness of Aegon the Conqueror's dream. Alicent has her own guidestar, as did the recently deceased Vaemond Valeryon. I lean into supporting Team Black mostly due to Otto Hightower (Greens) and his manipulation. Perhaps he is correct to want his grandson to be king given the tradition throughout the kingdom of male progeny being the preferred ruler. But he would not have had that grandson were it not for his maneuvering, and perhaps the entire scheme does not play out according to what he thinks it will. Yet, there are likeable enough qualities about some of them, just as there are decisions and actions from Team Black that are not admirable. In Daemon's defense, he does seem loyal to his House up to a point, and will defend it with his life. He behaves differently in his role than his parallel character, Aemond, and I find that fascinating. Edit: @billfromlaketravis was of similar mind I see.

This one? You know, the type of person you can count on.....

All I know is: if my father dies, I have a miscarriage, and one of my sons dies in the space of a week, I am going to have enough hormones in my bloodstream to personally rip off Otto Hightower's tiny testicles and stuff them down his throat as the answer to Alicent's request. Judging by the look on Rhaenyra's face, Alicent better sleep with Aegon's knife under her pillow. Overall, it was an entertaining first round of the series. With respect to the budget remark above--each episode was slightly under 20 million, so yeah about 200 million total and they spent a lot on marketing. The Lord of the Rings series has a budget twice that amount apparently. Lot of money being spent all around.

Thanks for the post about Xi. I read the tweet thread, and that was informative.

Lol, the creativity of people is one of the nice things of social media:

Ivy League graduate Ted Cruz criticizing Ivy League graduates for not using taxpayers' dollars as efficiently as he did for his campaign.

That was great.

So that's where she went. Back before Twitter locked down the ability for non account holders to really dig around the twitterverse, I ran across this woman (I think it is the same one but I'm not going to scroll back pre-Covid tweets because she posts too much) when looking up stuff on RW bots, bloggers, and other disinformation agents and influencers. At that time, I can't recall exactly where she was if it was in Cali or Hawaii (her bio says she is a Cali transplant, but IIRC she posted a lot about Hawaii--like Tulsi Gabbard stuff and indigenous rights and so on. Like a lot of people, I got the impression she deduced that there are more opportunities for 'influence' and profit in the RW arena than in the left. Her schtick was one of leaving the political left to support Trump as a moral decision when reading through her posts it was pretty easy to discern that she was a political weathervane or a plant all along. As a Turning Point Ambassador, she has moved to the Dallas area for more fertile ground to assist in the focus on young people. Edit: just looked her up. It's the same person.

Vitamin D huh; can't get that when you're all covered up cowards.

Here is another string from the rally. One might think the numbers of supporters aren't great enough to mean anything, but we know how mob violence and terrorism work and the momentum this is getting, aided by Fox News et al is frightening. Blending elements of QAnon:

I could put this in the Evangelical Christians Thread, but it really belongs here because they are just one group in the authoritarian umbrella. Here is a long cat thread, not spoilered and as long as I've been a ledge dweller, this just confirms so much of what I see in the school board races and the rhetoric even among people I thought (but am increasingly avoiding) were somewhat rational. Most of what I am embedding below has to do with Michael Flynn and I know other threads have info about him, but here is a very timely organized look by Anthea Butler (author of White Evangelical Racism, B.A. in Theology from UH-Clear Lake and now chair of U-Penn Dept of Religious Studies ) and it is worth a read. Really. I'm opening with a post by Kaylor because Locke will be familiar to some of you as one of the angry white preachers: Below, Butler opens her thread with a video retweet from another angry white preacher, this time Julie Green: I have heard enough people call Democratic supporters and candidates leftist scum, worshipers of Moloch, and so on. I don't know if it will happen this November, but by 2024, the landscape could be grim.

If I don't want my blood pressure to go dangerously high, sometimes I have to treat Tucker as the entertainment he claims to be. I know what he is doing, but seeing how he does it is informative. It is actually useful when disarming people who recite his talking points. Real facts and history do not tend to change minds and frankly, I'm not optimistic that many minds will actually be changed, but I am around a fair number of young people and pulling away the curtain is useful to them (young adults don't watch Tucker, but they do get targeted with propaganda, etc.).

The polls are showing his opponent Moore at +32

I don't watch his show so I don't know what he said, but given Rwanda's long and complicated history, I would be interested in reading a transcript to see how he managed to make an analogy.

No, I was making a lame joke that probably sounded better in my mind. The game is Six Degrees of Separation, but this is a different Kevin Bacon than the actor thus Seven Degrees.

This person gets it. The way I see it, these three were using that good old southern maxim of "do unto others as you had done unto you," which is not to be confused with The Golden Rule.