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.

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.

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.

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.

Given Tesla’s usual build quality I feel like it’s pretty much inevitable that there are going to be an enormous amount of skull and limb injuries from those gullwing doors.

Brian and Bob were walking through the forest when they came across a set of tracks.

“Those are cougar tracks!” Bob exclaimed.

“Hell, no! Those are coyote tracks.” Brain said.

“I’m tellin’ you, I’ve been out in these woods since I was little, and those are cougar tracks!”

“There’s no cougars in this part of the country. Those are coyote tracks!”

Then they both got hit by a train.

Yeah, the saltpeter (potassium nitrate) is really the key ingredient here. It’s the rapid oxidizer compound that gives your anti-Gorn cannon its boom boom. Without that, mixing all the other stuff together is just going to be smelly and disappointing.

The thing I’ve always loved about the Labor party is how they really set themselves apart from the Tories. I mean, it’s just night and day. Really makes you feel like things are going to change for the better. So inspiring.

I mean specifically a cloud storage account. Setting up the computer required me to supply an email address and set a password for microsoft.com. There was nothing in that process that I recall mentioning OneDrive, or that would have suggested every file on my C drive was about to be indiscriminately uploaded to a Microsoft server somewhere. I didn’t even know OneDrive was a thing until I had to google how to stop it.

Thankfully I noticed what was going on before it got to that point, but when they start vacuuming up all your files and data like that without telling you and without giving you control over it, you kind of have to assume that whatever is going on is not being done for your benefit.

This bullshit was basically my first experience with Windows 11 when I got a new PC last year. Literally, “Why is my internet so slow? What’s this OneDrive thing? Oh, holy shit fucking stop Jesus Christ!”

Just automatically started uploading everything on my hard drive to an account I didn’t set up, without even a prompt telling me it was happening, and no obvious way to make it stop. I didn’t even know Windows had added a cloud storage option. I actually had to completely uninstall OneDrive to finally make it stop.

I might have liked having a native backup service in Windows if it was like, “Hey look at this handy cloud storage tool we’ve added to Windows! Would you like to pick some files to save?” But as it is, it might as well just be another piece of spyware.

There’s a big long list of reasons why I hate Windows 11, but this OneDrive shit is the thing that’s making me think maybe it’s time to ditch Windows for good.

From the Wikipedia article:

“Early chiropractors believed that all disease was caused by interruptions in the flow of innate intelligence, a vitalistic nervous energy or life force that represented God’s presence in man; chiropractic leaders often invoked religious imagery and moral traditions. D. D. Palmer said he ‘received chiropractic from the other world’. D. D. and B. J. [Palmer] both seriously considered declaring chiropractic a religion, which might have provided legal protection under the U.S. constitution, but decided against it partly to avoid confusion with Christian Science.”*

Why would a chiropractor tell you that? Nobody selling you a quack remedy is going to just come out and tell you it’s quack remedy. That’s rule #1 of selling quack remedies. But the history of chiropractics isn’t a secret, Neither are the statistics on vertebral artery dissection and other injuries caused by chiropractic adjustments. But look, I’m not your mommy. You don’t have to believe me, and you’re free to go do what you feel. It’s your own neck you’re risking.

For people who don’t know, the theory of chiropractics is that the light of God somehow shines into the human body through the top of the head, travels down the spine, and on through the nerves. If you can just fix any blockages (aka “subluxations”) in that flow then it will be impossible for disease to exist in the body. Because God’s light.

The founder of chiropractics was told this information by a ghost.

I know some people swear by chiropractic adjustments, but this is information I wish I’d known when I had my back injury because going to a chiropractor set my recovery back by at least three years. And the money I lost to that quack could have paid for not only the legit physical therapist that actually got me feeling better, but probably a decent massage chair too.

No problem. They’re one of those bands whose sound changes a lot over their career, and you wouldn’t necessarily infer their beginnings from their later stuff, but if you go back and listen to their early albums like Ballots, or Pictures of Starving Children Sell Records, their punk cred is a lot more obvious.

Most people only know them from that one single that got popular back in the day. They’ve never been a pop band though. They’re actually an anarchist art collective that’s been around since the early '80s. The podcast Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff did two episodes on them. It’s worth a listen. They’re much cooler than you think they are.

Same for me too. Reddit, for all its other faults, is still just about the only place you can still get candid opinions on products in a place where it’s discussed by a large group with a deep knowledge base. Especially with niche things like fountain pens, goodyear-welted boots, and stuff like that.

Not sure how long that’s going to last though. The search engines are already hip to that trick, and even in just the last few months I’ve noticed a change in how many Reddit links I get vs product links when I add Reddit to my search query. Reddit is hip to it too, and with recently becoming a publicly traded corporation they’re probably going to wring every last cent out of that until every post mentioning a product is a bot-infested sewage fire like everything else.

I’m not sure if they’re still around, but PostSecret and the Internet K-Hole were sites you could spend hours on.

The privilege is being able to choose to eat that way out of a sense of morality or fashion rather for the reason that it’s literally all there is to eat. The privilege is being able to turn your nose up at perfectly edible food for no other reason than that it’s got a bit of egg, honey, or butter in it without having to worry about starving to death. The privilege is also having access to such an abundance and variety of food that you can maintain a vegan diet year round and not have to fear that you won’t meet all the calorie, protein, and vitamin requirements you need to stay alive and healthy while much of the world is in a constant struggle to scrape together enough calories of any kind to stay alive.