That is the way that the police work in the United States yes.

We’re not talking about the police, we’re talking about the Secret Service protecting the President-Elect of the United States… at a golf park Not only that, but a park where people have to be super rich since access to Trump (leader of the GOP and now President-elect) is figured into the membership fee.

And while the police are happy to gun down the rest of us shlubs, they treat rich people like they treated OJ Simpson after he hacked up Nicole Brown. When they don’t and they actually shoot a rich person, then high-powered (blue-haired) lawyers come and sue the precinct and county for enough money to collapse the GDP.

But I do hear you. Police in the US are bastards to the last.

Some basic information about teen sex in the United States:

All 50 states have Romeo & Juliette laws allowing exceptions for statutory sexual assault crimes when sexual activity is between peers of similar age. The typical threshold is 5 years.

However, the floor of R&J statutes is typically 14 or 15. So a 13 year-old having sex is conspicuous. But also, teenage dating and boyfriend / girlfriend relationships often do not feature or even imply a sexual relationship. (When I was fourteen, I and a 10 year old family-friend decided we were bf/gf, even bathing together and having sleepovers, though doing nothing more risqué than Parcheesi.)

As a note, R&J laws often omit allowing for same sex intimacy. So if you’re a teen exploring your LGBT+ side and want to keep it legal, check your state and county ordinances to see what is allowed.

That’s assuming I actually look like a threat, rather than someone infatuated with the weird robot dog.

It’s a golf park full of rich old people. I bet the dog-hecklers will come dozens per hour.

The ones at Mar-A-Lago are unarmed.

My approach to the armed ones, particularly the TASER-equipped ones used by some US law enforcement departments, would be very different.

I don’t see downvotes here on Blåhaj, but I’ll respond to rumors of them with LGBT+ memes.

Here it comes.

So in 2016 when Trump got elected the first time (by EC, still leaving everyone scratching their heads), a history teacher friend of mine started an activist group on Facebook based on The White Rose ( on Wikipedia ). Here in the States, we still have a considerable respect for the right to free speech, even though people speaking in defiance of the current tyrannical state may get attacked by nazis (id est MAGAs, alt-right militants, the usual run of official and unofficial Trump-enthusiasts).

Now the White Rose itself is not a great example, since they were all hunted down by the Gestapo and executed, but true to the mechanics of revolution, they made resistance sympathists of onlookers, and activists of sympathists (and militants of activists. No fewer than 42 plots to assassinate Adolph Hitler^† are known to have occurred, and it’s likely we’ve missed some including the time-travelers who could retroactively cover their tracks.)

In fact modern resistance tactics (which includes those used by BLM during the 2020 George Floyd protests) highlight the same methods, by not being aggressive and letting the authoritarian forces initiate violence. It helps in an age where that stuff gets captured on phone camera and disseminated online, and the next thing you know, ICE is contending with a line of moms and another line of dads using leaf-blowers to disperse CS gas.

It’s still a long journey between frustrating Trump to silliness and actually getting some relief to the public, but I’m willing to wear out my shoes trying.

† All the assassination attempts were from within. The Allies saw Hitler as a weakness, since he often would override his generals strategies and ignore technological developments that disinterested him. Hitler was also fond of attacking when it was astrologically auspicious, which the Allies used to effectively predict them. Never interfere with your enemy when he is making a mistake. – often attributed to Napoleon.

Bonded servitude (the superset of slavery) has been a universal thing throughout civilization, even though we have been dreaming of non-stratified societies at least since the enlightenment, and the occasional heretic / blasphemer / impious philosopher since the classical age.

So when we talk about peonage (bonded servants) in civilizations, we compare like to like, say slaves as they were regarded under Roman law vs. serfs during the middle ages. It’s messy. We don’t have slaves officially in the modern United States, but we do have forced prison labor (which we treat worse than Roman slaves) and we have child labor and immigrant labor, but these are thanks to blind spots in law and enforcement… but that means we have blind spots in law and enforcement were atrocity can (and often does) hide.

So slaves were better off in the Roman age than they were, say, during the Sugar plantation age here in the Americas. Peasants in the middle age had more rights but were just as bonded, and modern court systems emerged because letting the local lord adjudicate based on his gut feeling (oft while he was inebriated) resulted often in miscarriage of justice.

In the meantime, yes, we still fantasize about creating a system in which the lowest laborers can actually enjoy their work, and don’t have to worry about precarity of food, housing, health, etc. We’re totally not there yet and should be further along than we are.

Coo at them. Pet them. Call them a good doggie. Drop a treat on them, all in defiance.

As someone who doesn’t get the gender feelies at all, dresses and sarongs are cool (as in, good for warm weather). High socks are so amazing that everyone wore them for much of the middle ages (they’re warm!). Called hosen wool socks and a tunic was ordinary commoner attire. (And yes, your nethers and janglies were free to the open air underneath. Laundry without machines was too labor intensive for non-nobles to have underwear.)

Makeup is weird, but looking amazing is fun. (My experience with it was on stage, and putting on eyeliner was hard to do without flinching.)

While I can appreciate a cool tool (say tweezers with a magnifying lens attached) tactical stuff painted black doesn’t make sense in contrast to stuff painted a bright color that can easily be seen (on the assumption that I’m not in combat hidden in cover), bright pink is fine except when everything else is also bright pink. (A lot of beach dayglo colors are meant to be well offset against the ocean greens and blues).

Now that’s on the practical side. Some folks get a HUGE buzz from representing according to their gender identity. Trans folk know this because wearing the stuff they like is [regarded by others as] weird in contrast to the stuff that mom bought them while they were growing up, so they’ve had cause to actually explore this aspect of themselves.

But there are guys who like to double down on butchness and gals who like getting ready for the night out more than the going out, itself. And then there are dudes who, no matter how masculine they represent, feel inadequate and wussy, which likely informs alpha male rhetoric and the far-right man-o-sphere pundits.

To be fair, if we look close, we see ecosystems within ecosystems, including a buttload of predation and two buttloads of parasitism. Parasites capitalizing on other lifeforms to utilize their energy and resources for their own growth and reproduction, as far as the eye can see.

And that’s what human society is. It’s much less prone to top-down parasitism in tiny societies (less than 500 members) but when we have communities of millions and states of tens of millions, it’s pretty easy for religious ministries and ideological politicians to take over the system to make giant militaries that hammer other, less-captured societies.

Every once in a while some of us get the idea, what if we make a system that doesn’t involve parasitism. I bet we can make everyone pretty happy. And this is true, except that the parasites really like having ridiculous amounts of wealth and power, and would rather render the entire species extinct than be confined to being a (well-to-do, comfortable) commoner.

This is why, even though there have been successful anarcho-communist organizations, they are often attacked by state law enforcement acting not in enforcing law, but in preserving political power.

No war but class war.

Death to monarchists.

We started with an unlimited workweek (often 12+ hours a day all day) and reduced it to 40 hours with a weekend and a paid lunch. (Remember the movie 9 to 5 that was typical. Then it became 9-6 with unpaid lunch.)

Around the Reagan era, Osha got defunded so it didn’t have time to deal with all the labor violations, which was part of the enshittification.

Who knew it would lead to a nazi uprising?

Turns out everyone did. The industrialist intellegentsia actually warned this would happen based on historical precedent, but the boomer generation was all fuck the future including their own kids. To be fair, prior generations hating later generatiobs was the norm by the time it was their turn.

Wait, didn’t this all get turned into a rock musical on Broadway?

Ice Cream (1964)
Evelyne Axell
Banned on Facebook

Rage like California wildfire.

Yes, for us, a gram of caffeine is a double-whopper of a dose (about seven cups of strong coffee). Meanwhile a termite eating caffeine-laced wood gets a dose far greater in proportion to its body weight.

Just remember as much as humans suck, there’s something in nature doing something as perverse, or as heinous. Sure, we have limited empathy, so are inclined to sometimes know better. But we generally don’t know better enough.

EVOLUTION DOESN’T CARE ABOUT HAPPY

Appreciate your gut bacteria. They love you too.

Caffeine is the same thing. A poison to termites ( HUUUGE BUZZZZZZZ! ) that gives us a rush when we microdose it.

While I’m totally behind a world where Frank Zappa lives longer, the political problems of the US federal government are systemic. The Democratic party moved left out of necessity to oppose the Republican party, who has been trying to restore autocracy since the 1933 Business Plot failed, and FDR implemented the New Deal to prevent Communist revolution (because anything is better than living in cardboard boxes and eating flour paste to live.)

The card / board game Chrononauts expansion The Gore Years imagines an alternative in which the GOP delays of the Florida Recount were not successful, allowing Gore to win, but Andrew Looney posits a result of a Palin administration in 2008. To be fair, he also imagines avoiding WWII (hard to do) might create a period of European peaceful prosperity, so YMMV.

The 2024 election is an indictment not just of Americans but of the viability of democracy in a world where billionaires exists who can create disinformation campaigns that can convince the masses to make uninformed decisions against their own personal interests. In fact, the entire 20th century in the US has been a master class in how to subvert democracy, so even if we were able to reform federal elections (eliminate the EC, insert ranked choice voting or some other non-FPTP election model) elections may continue to be controlled by demagogy and massive propaganda machines.

We don’t know (all of) what must be done, but we do know neither US major political parties will willingly relinquish power to move towards public serving government. Considering how much it appears someone is fucking with a time machine to meddle with the past since at least 2000, Frank Zappa may yet live again.

I am left handed and enby.

Though the correlation intersection is between enby (or peripheral to gender norms) and ASD, which is a broad intersection. It also informs my penchant for over-explaining things.

I’m not mansplaining, it’s that the connectedness excites me like dinosaurs excite a toddler!

ETA Re: Anbidexterity, when I was in kindergarten I could, for a very short while, do letters with either hand and it was so cool. Then, in a playground accident, I broke my right forearm, so I learned to write while my right hand was in a cast. But yeah, I played piano (out of practice, now), and while I do mouse stuff with my left hand, I still joystick with my right hand due to early gaming on someone else’s computer.

That said, for fine work or throwing, I do that with my left hand.

PSS: That all said, computer input devices come in three flavors: Right handed, ambidextrous and rare, often not great left handed devices I don’t like. Usually I do ambidextrous options.