I didn’t say they were equally stupid. I said one explanation was most likely correct, but thr other wasn’t completely implausible.

Yes, faking an attempted drugging for attention/politics/whatever is less likely to get someone killed. But it’s so a really fucking stupid plan that had to actually be completely premeditated. Just look how well it worked out for him.

The potential child abuse plan is monstrous and risks killing them, but pedophiles do risky and horrible things all the time. And at least the part of the plan that involves showing the cops the drugs can be seen as a bad decision made in the moment by someone panicking and not thinking clearly.

The article says that he did both of those things, but it isn’t clear on what happened between those two events. Did he put the pills in and go straight to the cops? Did he give the ice cream to the kids? Were the pills clearly visible or were they buried?

I agree that the most likely explanation is that he was trying to create a story and/or attack DQ and its employees. But it isn’t totally implausible that he might have been trying to drug the kids and pivoted when they found the pills. He has to be an idiot either way, they are both terrible plans.

This administration and the Supreme Court have been systematically shredding the constitution and destroying the rule of law. They have declared the president to be above the law, are eroding the limits of executive power at every opportunity, and have essentially declared that the rights of the people can be ignored without consequences.

This might seem great to an authoritarian when they are in power, but the flipside is that it fundamentally changes the moral equation faced by the opposition. Normally those who actually have principles and want to maintain the rule of law are going to show restraint and reinforce the norms. But when the other side responds by becoming an even bigger threat, there must be a tipping point after which the danger of using unjust powers against your opponent are outweighed by the danger of allowing them to continue damaging civilization and risking their return to power.

The gerrymandering situation in California and Texas is a perfect example of this. In principle, gerrymandering should not be allowed. But if we want to protect democracy, it is more dangerous to let one side cheat than it is to respond in kind.

I would like to believe that we will be able to close pandora’s box and return to something resembling normalcy some day. But with each new abuse of power and each attack on the laws and norms that are supposed to keep the government in check, it gets harder to see a way out that isn’t horrific in its own right.

The context is important, but all that needs to be said is that she is a main character that died in the first season. It’s actually the firsted episode with Tasha that I saw when Istarted TNG and how I’ve introduced others to the show. There’s no details needed, no history, just the knowledge that she is dead.

Depends on what you are looking for. Trek does a lot of different things and can appeal to people in different ways.

I like measure of a man and yesterday’s enterprise for TNG. Both work as examples of a lot of the best aspects of star trek, and come early enough to jump into the series while skipping the crap in season 1, at least until they know they like the show.

For context, it’s incredibly rare for a grand jury to not indict someone. The bar is incredibly low and there is no one representing the defense. Failing to secure an indictment once is an embarrassment and a stain on someone’s career. To fail a second time in the same case basically guarantees beyond a shadow of a doubt that the case is utterly without merit and that everyone involved should be fired immediately.

To put this another way, this is like a surgeon amputating the wrong limb twice on the same patient. The first time is undeniably bad and raises serious questions about how it could happen. The second time it happens, we don’t need to bother with all those questions before concluding that the people responsible need to go.

Voting will still be necessary. Gerrymandering can’t directly affect statewide races. But it can determine control of the House of Representatives and state legislatures.

The long term solution to gerrymandering has to happen at the federal level, but unfortunately the current Supreme Court is going out of its way to dismantle voting rights and protect Republican gerrymandering schemes. And congress isn’t going to do anything to stop it while Republicans are in the majority… a majority that only exists because of gerrymandering and voter suppression.

I don’t like it, but having partisan gerrymandering on both sides is better than doing nothing and letting Republicans cling to power because they get to play by a different set of rules.

They aren’t bad movies, just not great. Better than Lost World, but not so good that I would be lamenting the terrible sequels if it weren’t for the far superior installments.

All I’m saying is that there isn’t a hell of a lot of difference between being disappointed in the terrible sequels that came after the first movie vs the terrible sequels that came after the second movie, especially when you aren’t all that attached to the first movie.

It’s all a matter of perspective anyway. Yes, Jurassic Park never got a good sequel but then it never really needed one. It was a complete story that did not call for any kind of follow up. To me, that makes the sequels less disappointing, because I don’t expect anything more.

Aliens ends with unanswered questions and lots of obvious potential for follow up stories. Star Wars gave us an entire universe full of potential stories to tell, whether it followed directly from the original trilogy or did something new in the same world. That the potential is wasted by making terrible movies makes them so much worse to me.

Personally, I’d argue that Alien and Terminator weren’t amazing either, and it’s only Aliens and Terminator 2 that were actually great movies. They’re still franchises with one really awesome installment followed by utter trash. And honestly, I think I’d take Jurassic Park 3 and Jurassic World over anything else the Aliens franchise has produced since.

I’m not saying they are definitely worse than the JP franchise, just that they’re close enough that reasonable people could disagree.

Alien and Terminator have both had nothing but shit since their second installments.

If you look at only the movies, Star Wars is at least as bad after the original trilogy. Rise of Skywalker is bad enough to make me wonder if there was intentional sabotage going on.

But for my money, the best example of a franchise that starts strong and then turns to absolute garbage in the sequels is Highlander. The original is a classic that was never meant to have a sequel. Then it got a bunch of sequels, the majority of which have been frequently cited as among the worst movies ever made.

• Highlander 2 is a ridiculous betrayal of the original that wanted to be cyberpunk and retconned the immortals to being aliens, which just gets dumber the longer you think about it,
• Highlander 3 is an apology that erases 2, but also negates the original’s ending for no reason other than to do the exact same plot over again… poorly.
• Highlander 4 erases all the movies and instead follows the TV show, killing the hero of the first movie as a poorly realized attempt to pass the torch, butchering the lore of both the movie and the show, and just being so awful that they chose to spend their time and money making deceptive ads with stuff that was never going to be in the movie instead of finishing the movie. Seriously, they released it with unfinished effects shots and missing scenes that were vital to understanding the plot.
• And then there’s Highlander 5, which was a straight to Syfy channel movie that actually makes all the previous ones look good by comparison, Listing everything wrong with it would just be describing the entire movie.

Hell, the anime is the most faithful movie follow up, and it doesn’t have any of the characters, takes place in a post apocalyptic wasteland, and introduces God, destiny, reincarnation, ghosts, druid magic, cyborgs, giant robot spiders, etc.

And because even if it did get released, it would only have info used to get an indictment of Maxwell. Damaging info on clients and associates would not be included.

“Texans have a God-given right to know what’s on their plate…

If this was about knowing you would have been passing labeling laws.

…and for millions of Texans, it better come from a pasture, not a lab.

You don’t need a law to stop people who already don’t want to do something. This isn’t for millions of Texans it’s for a few rich assholes who want to shut down competition.

It’s plain cowboy logic that we must safeguard our real, authentic meat industry from synthetic alternatives.”

If we’re talking about the kind of cowboys that get a corrupt government to back them up as they crush their rivals and bleed the people dry, then sure.

If God is talking to bronze age goat herders, what kind of knowledge is going to be useful to them? What will they manage to pass down to future generations without mangling it horribly? If they were to be given information about scientific concepts so advanced that only God (or aliens or time travelers) could have given it to them, they wouldn’t have the foundation of knowledge to grasp it, the vocabulary to explain it, or the technical means to exploit it. Anything they can actually understand and act on is necessarily going to be something that is not beyond their means, and therefore we are right back where we started with stuff they could have figured out on their own.

Suppose God did explain something far beyond human understanding, and they wrote it down as best they could. Even if it wasn’t completely incomprehensible to the guy writing it down, it’s still going to be totally lost on future generations if it isn’t anchored in a more comprehensive understanding of how things work. Without context, it will lose all meaning and will be reinterpreted by later scholars who will try and find a meaning that they can understand. It would become a part of mythology and folklore, and would be unrecognizable by the time science catches up to the original ideas. You might have people point out similarities, but they’d probably be taken as seriously as the ancient aliens guys.

The lower trust in their own media might have something to do with how blatantly dishonest those sources are. But it also likely means that their viewers have lowered any standards they might have ever had. They aren’t going to be shocked if they see the lies exposed, they can just shrug and say that everyone lies but the other side lies more.

Obvious falsehoods are dismissed as hyperbole, close enough to the truth that it doesn’t matter if it’s not entirely accurate. Omissions are just distractions cooked up by the other side to keep us from talking about the real issues. There’s no expectation that reporting should be factual and follow journalistic standards, the only measure of the quality of the news source is how much they agree with it. They’ve been inoculated against reality.

She broke up with him this February when she learned he had a second girlfriend from national news reports—the second girlfriend had reported Mills to police for allegedly assaulting her at their Washington, D.C. condo…

He was supposed to be arrested on domestic violence charges, but Trump’s acting US attorney for DC Ed Martin refused to allow it. This woman should be afraid because the psycho she was dating could make good on his threats and easily get away with it.

It’s almost exactly what a jury determined he did to E. Jean Carroll.

Reasonable doubt is not a low bar, and you can’t bypass it by just believing. Yes, we need evidence to support accusations. People are supposed to be innocent until proven guilty.

Not that this would ever go to a criminal trial, because at this point the only way Trump is facing justice is if half the government is heading to the gallows along with him Nuremberg style.

That said, it doesn’t take much for allegations against Trump to be credible. If we just believe the shit Trump himself has said unprompted he’s a sexual predator that molests women and peeps on under age girls. There’s a reason a jury found that he probably sexually assaulted E. Jean Carroll despite having almost no evidence of the specific incident. He’s made it abundantly clear how he treats women, and it doesn’t help that he got caught in obvious lies.

There was a lawsuit over the previous giant pay package. And I recall at least threats of legal action over Elon siphoning resources from Tesla to his other companies. However, the move to Texas allows them to require at least 3% stock ownership to sue as a shareholder.

At this point, anyone who chooses to own Tesla stock is unlikely to sue anyway since they’d have to be completely unaware, an idiotic true believer, or just someone who is fully aware and is betting that the bullshit inflating the stock price will be able to push it even higher. The first two wouldn’t know to sue and the third would only be bursting the bubble their trying to ride.

Logically, this combined with their insistence that they can revoke legal status means that no one’s citizenship is guaranteed. Everyone born in the US is descended from people who weren’t citizens. And those who went through a process to become citizens can apparently have that yanked away if the current administration get its way.

If I were the next president and had to try and undo the damage these fascists are inflicting, I’d start by deporting the bastards behind this shit in all three branches of government, starting with the the Supreme Court. Maybe just drop them all off in Antarctica.

Are we not going to acknowledge how fucked up it is that someone was behind bars for five years before getting a trial?