I am technically not a lesbian, but of what I understand about lesbian culture, there’s a tendency to think if I don’t shave tonight then I won’t be tempted to get freaky and for this to turn into a one-night stand. And this is followed by a wild night of extra-curricular activities, only she knows sometimes you don’t shave.

I point out that if she ghosts you, that’s about her issues, not about the conditions of your leg hair.

Anyway, this fit is showing were prepared for all contingencies, and expecting a very good evening.

As a fiction writer, I do research on espionage, sabotage and even methods of assassination all the time. But I’m not going to make a salted bomb and nuke Jerusalem even though that is an entirely viable evil plot that may even create a net negative death toll.

True poisoners, as Agatha Christie notes, use thallium, not arsenic nor cyanide (though ricin is good if you can get it.) Thallium assassins are also self-regulating, like demolitions experts, killing off those insufficiently careful when handling the stuff.

Modern police are lazy until enough of a stink is made to find a culprit for a specific incident, which is why modern assassins targeting VIPs will find a self-radicalized desperado and point them toward the target. This is the sort of thing FBI is looking for in the investigations of Crooks and Routh. They are likely just blue suicides (or green suicides in this case) but finding a operative pointing them towards Trump would indicate an actual plot. But even if those tracks are found, it would unlikely lead to a specific identity.

I know about this not just to write fiction, but also to understand how things happen, how our fall into one party autocracy and societal collapse plays out. And yes, it means I do a lot of web searches that might excite an onlooking behavioral research agent. Sadly, they’d find I’m yet another boring false positive, though if the nation does succumb to autocracy, I’d certainly write for the resistance. FBI may not care so much about that.

We often look up creepy things just so see if we can, and we do that a lot more than because we’re eager to build a bomb or fast-track our inheritance.

She likes a bit of fresh air between her nethers.

And a transformation sequence animation.

And this is why the NSA is supposed to close exploits rather than harvest them for surveillance.

This is why surveillance backdoors are always bad, and you can’t math around that.

Temporary or straw restrictions. The EU has even more byzantine IP laws as the US and they’re just as draconian. Our societies teem with rent-seeking grifts and billionaires who will commit genocide to get their way.

What tools are these? As someone who has frequently been evaluated, I’ve found I get different results depending on the bias of the evaluator, ranging from, functional: able to work to a danger to themselves or others, should be supervised or committed.

Now I totally agree that there is a problem with elected officials when Feinstein is still a senator when she is no longer coherent. Or when Trump’s lawyers and principal staff see he has diminished capacity (the finale of Fear: Trump In the White House by Bob Woodward) they leave him in place because he remains a useful idiot. But I know our psych assessment methods are not yet able to yield consistent results, and it would be easy for political interests to game the system to keep those they like, and flunk those who are too much of a nuisance (say, those who actually want to serve the public).

(President Wilson had a stroke, and spend the end of his tenure in bed with his wife faking his signature. The US is no stranger to staffers faking it when elected officials were to incapacitated to function. )

Sadly in 20-fucking-24, mental illness remains enough of a stigma that anyone who relies on public approval just won’t take the test if they can opt out.

I’m reminded of one of my shower thoughts while Disney was pushing the princess market super hard, specifically that this should segue into teaching girls civics and the fundamentals of good governance. Not that Disney actually wants girls to be educated.

The problem with common women understanding civics and good governance, is they then recognize what bad governance looks like, and when they are being played by the state and the oligarchs that prop it up.

I suffer from major depression, enough that at my worst, I’ve spent the better part of a year stuck in bed with no volition enough to move my fingers. (I checked.)

And yet, parents, bosses, ministers and government officials have asserted this is a character flaw, and I just needed to stand up though sheer force of will. By my bootstraps.

Capitalists assert their work force is lazy while refusing to assure they have sustenance. To the religious community, sloth is a sin and industry is a virtue, and not doing work is serving the devil.

Evidence turned for the people during the 2020 lockdown and furlough, followed by the great resignation. We’re not lazy on average. We can’t couch potato for two weeks without getting cabin fever, and a lot of our hobbies turned lucrative. It turns out we’re human beings and don’t fare well in jobs that are tedious or arduous or in a toxic work environment or are underpaid or micromanaged.

In fact (studies show) treat us well and we become industrial machines, but our ownership class is too busy asserting dominance. Cruelty is the point. Hence, Amazon workers pee in bottles and have their mouths monitored lest they sing. That’s fairy-tale level dystopia.

If you can’t find your place, if you can’t get a leg up or a lucky break, if opportunity knocks only when you’re sleeping or away, that’s not you. That’s capitalism.

Some day we’ll decide we deserve an economic system that works for all of us. But not today.

This is old news from a decade ago, before the US public was aware how the police had long been fabricating probable cause (and gunning down Americans by the hundreds) and SCOTUS had been carving out exceptions to the fourth and fifth amendments to the Constitution of the United States.

Then Trump won in 2016 and we saw what it looked like under mask-off tyranny. And now we’re one election away from one-party autocracy.

The police state is here. It always was. 🌍👨‍🚀🧑‍🚀🔫

There’s actually footage of Jar Jar using Jedi Mind Trick in TPM. He gave up on it by Attack of the Clones, even through Jar Jar was still capable of facilitating the fall of the empire.

As a kid, when reading Fellowship I got slogged down after the incident in Weathertop, and the journey through to Rivendell was just miserable and I couldn’t get through it.

I tried again and read the whole series after the movies came out. That bit was still miserable and a slog but I got to Rivendell, and no part of the rest of the books were as bad as Frodo being dragged through Mirkwood while wraithing out.

So, in Towers in the movie, there’s a notorious seen where the orcs are hungry and the uruks solve the problem by killing the complainer. It looks like meat’s back on the menu, boys! Which implies that orks and uruks have fine dining, but also are content to chew on a raw corpse. It’s one of the more referenced scenes in the Peter Jackson movie series.

Contrast the same (approximate) scene in the book: The company is on the move and one of the orcs hands Pippin and Merry a big piece of dried meat. Merry (I think) is skeptical and asks what it is, fearing it might be someone that walks on two legs. The orc tells him to check his privilege and mutters in black speech.

So…I would totally not be surprised if I’m only getting two-fifths of the story.

Here in the states, even the most progressive Democrats are right of center compared to the industrialized world, and so those who are centrist are leftist by comparison, and those who are left wing are seen as radical, even when we talk about how the justice system, between its false conviction rate, law enforcement brutality or propensity for cruel (if usual) punishments, needs to be either massively overhauld, or disassembled and redesigned from the beginning.

But any state or society that decides it needs to cull the population for any reason has failed as a community, and therefore has failed as a state or a society.

Also centrists, like their conservative brethren, fail to recognize that the misery experienced by the bottom rung strata is extreme and heinous, and the neglect by institutions to act on it as if it were a crisis is heinous itself (and might compare to crimes against humanity). And this is what fuels radical direct action (even terrorism) from the left.

(Curiously, Osama Bin Laden said as much was what drove his own terror campaign, including the 9/11 attacks, though he was also pissed at George H. W. Bush’s gulf war, what he thought he could resolve with his mujahideen army. But the Gulf War from the US position was less about Kuwait and more about securing oil for import to the US.)

(And yes, left-wing violence gets into tankie territory, what is a paradox of wanting to create a functional, peaceful public-serving society that isn’t exploited from the top, and being unable to compute how to get there without breaking one’s own principles. We radical leftists are not good at this yet.)

Loss is the new triforce

Astrology was so important to the Greeks, they figured out the elliptical orbits of the planets (up to Jupiter) and how to compute them without calculus.

In my case, my fractional hip-to-waist ratio.

Also my mole-ridden skin. No one wants to see that.

A lubricant separates moving parts.

However, every Mormon family I’ve know were experienced, skilled family-game sharks.

At least two beers each in front of each other.

Air holes will extend the time to days instead of hours.

A giant hampster bottle of water will extend the time to weeks instead of days.