Keep being strong, not_Bridget, I hope to be back mentally and physically "someday". Not much I feel I can do now other than work up an ulcer + send $ the few plausibly functional organizations out there. Keeping track of each time a wrong goes un-righted is worse than useless, it's actively making me ill. Raise the…

Well, there's your problem right there. Clearly they are not "the base". The base is progressives with a graduate degree that are passionate about social justice. Feminists. Black Lives Matter. Consumer rights activists. Environmentalists. Union members? Do they still exist?

It's voting your values, not your pocketbook. And their values are, "don't let Those People get any help from the government at all, even if it means I have to get by without it too".

That is a sensible stance to take, for the country. Is that basically saying FU to a group of voters? You're right. It is. She took a principled stance and didn't tell a pretty lie. But not smart? Yeah, maybe not, maybe incredibly dumb. And it wouldn't have thrown women or minorities under the bus to have made that…

I wasn't the one scared of that, that was my right wing friends. They are happy now, yes, FEMA has less power. And, as they noted, Obama really DID try to ban one type of ammunition. It failed, but he did try to do it, they weren't worrying about fake threats that turned out to be phantoms, not 100% of the time.

2018 will have the same gerrymandering and hate memes and a full acceptance by all people that news from any source at all might be fake (that happened quickly, didn't it?). Also a 2nd party that has "at least we aren't them" as their slogan. Their actual official slogan.

It makes me feel OK (or actually proud) about many Americans. But not about America.

Not courted, either taken for granted or written off, yeah. I wouldn't put it the way you did, but maybe because I automatically assume that means "she should have embraced the ideas of people that are motivated primarily by their anger". Maybe I just need more examples of how that could have been done with a group…

It's "only" 30% of people who are like that. Not a majority. But enough! And, yeah, WAY more than I would have thought.

What keeps people from protesting and / or calling their reps, regularly? Fear or apathy?

Huh.

Gerrymandering isn't going away for decades. The Census for 2020 is already being fucked with. It's not a level playing field. That's life, right? The powerful take all the advantages they can get away with. No less frustrating.

A ballpoint banana?

Back in January, a few of my friends insisted my deep despair was just as irrational as Obama Derangement was for others. That time would show concerns about Russian influence and plans to dismantle the Great Society and in fact the "deconstruction of the administrative state" were just as baseless as people thinking…

So you send the medium now (the "paper") at whatever speed is possible now (a very tiny fraction of light speed), but you can decide what your message will say later? And the effect is that the message itself is transmitted faster than light speed? OK, that matches my original understanding, and would indeed be…

Science: the cause of, and solution to, all of life's problems

No jet packs, not soon, probably not ever. They use a ridiculous amount of power. Also, relatively small mishaps with them tend to leave you dead.

How long would it take, at that rate, to "teleport" the information contained in a single 140-character tweet? Also, you still have to send your message out in to space. With a fixed content. You can't use this principle to send a message out faster than the speed of light (it would actually only go at speed of…

He first appeared as Hamilton B. Urglar

TIL Billy Dee Williams' full name is "William Darlos Williams"
(source: Twitter. I'm not that creative on my own)