Yup, everyone loves a good old-fashioned idiot plot.

The problem is there are no easy safe bike paths directly there; he would have to either ride out of his way to one or travel part of the way on narrow fast roads that have a lot of box-truck and semi-truck traffic. Or get on the freeway for a stretch, which is also bad in different ways.

The bike paths that there are, are pretty nice, but they’re more geared towards ‘enjoy a ride along the river’ and less towards ‘get from the inner city out and back again quickly’.

But yes, when he is willing to take those risks, it’s about a half-hour or so to get to work.

I’ve noticed this a lot in industrial areas; no-one seems to think you’d want to ride a bike there, so they don’t bother with infrastructure. Unless it’s in the inner city, but in that case it’s more a thing of happenstance since there are bike paths already surrounding the area so it’s less work to add a few connecting paths.

But that would disproportionately hit poor people. Generally they have to live farther out, where rents are cheaper, and in much of the US public transit is a pile of shit.

Hell, even in places where it isn’t it’s still painfully inconvenient. I live in a fairly transit-friendly city, and it takes my husband 45 minutes to an hour to get to work by transit, or 10-12 minutes by car.

I probably would despise Star Wars too if I tried to make a good movie in that universe and kept getting micromanaged into the ground at every turn by clueless Disney execs.

He is a very good director, as his other films show. The problem was and still is in no way with him.

On February 8, 1975, following the lineups, police arrested Simmons and Roberts, and they were charged with capital murder. However, Simmons testified that on December 30, 1974, he was in Harvey, Louisiana and spent the day playing pool with friends. His alibi was confirmed by four witnesses.

In January 2023, Simmons’s attorneys Joseph Norwood and John Coylefiled filed an amended application for post-conviction relief which cited the failure of the prosecution to disclose the police report which said that Brown had initially identified other two men and noted that in fact Brown had identified four other individuals during the eight lineup procedures. The motion also noted that in addition to the four witnesses who testified at the trial that Simmons was in Harvey, there were two other witnesses present who were to testify similarly but they did not after Simmons’s defense lawyer denied their testimony as cumulative. The petition included affidavits from five more people who said that they saw Simmons in Harvey at the time of the crime.

So convicted despite plenty of eyewitnesses saying he was somewhere else at the time. In addition, even the trial prosecutor thought he may have been wrongfully convicted:

In 1995, Robert Mildfelt, the trial prosecutor, wrote a letter to Simmons saying that the only witness [Brown] who identified him had wanted to think about the identification “overnight.” He wrote that Brown had described Simmons as more than six feet tall and over 200 pounds, “a physical description greatly different from Mr. Simmons [sic] stature at the time.

No word on why he put the man on trial with no evidence putting him at the scene and plenty of evidence putting him miles away. But really, we can all guess the reason.

Honestly? More education (and possibly more exposure) and less fetishization, although I’m not quite sure how to achieve the second one.

Back when my parents were in school, schools had shooting teams (my high school apparently had an award-winning women’s team), and my dad even brought a gun to school once to show to a teacher (it was an older gun and the teacher was a gun collector). They spent the whole of lunch period talking about how cool that old gun of grandpa’s was.

Because back then a gun was just a tool, and one more people had access to, since a lot of people were still out on the farm and such. My dad learned from a young age that guns were dangerous, and how to properly handle them, and pretty much all his classmates did too.

But then the Republicans started the, ‘we have to regulate!’ and the ‘but think of the children!’ nonsense because that was when the Black Panthers started going around armed, and a bunch of white people were suddenly uncomfortably aware that minorities could defend themselves from racial violence if they wanted to.

And then the Republican Party turned around and started making guns an ‘identity’ thing, so suddenly they became a symbol of Republican so-called ‘values’, and people began obsessing over them like they were rare jewels or some such nonsense. It didn’t help that the Democrats were happy to jump on the bandwagon as the ‘we’re totally against guns so you can tell we’re different from them!’ group to provide a pearl-clutching counterpoint.

And so now we’ve got, well, all the fetishized and forbidden-fruit bullshit. Guns are kind of seen almost like cigarettes on steroids: the cool and dangerous thing that all the rebels and ‘strong independent types’ have.

I’m a bit In despair as to how to get us to stop doing that. Certainly other nations, like Switzerland, have lots of guns and gun access and don’t have our problems. But they definitely don’t build identities around firearms either.

Edit to add: of course Switzerland has actual functional health care, including mental health care, so I imagine that helps.

They’ve done studies, and have found that guard rails actually make the problem worse. Gives people a sense of security and a false sense of bravado.

I did like Spiderman the best, I will admit. It felt a lot more relatable and real.

But then the Gwen-Stacy-as-a-plot-device-and-not-a-person nonsense started, and I was just like… oh, here we go. Again.

At least the manga I read never treated women as fridge stuffing, even if they were regulated to background characters.

I think the thing that grinds my gears the most about Rob Liefeld isn’t that he’s a terrible artist; it was that he’s a terrible artist who was kept on the payroll and allowed to keep making terrible comics. They could have fired him and hired someone else, anyone else.

Hell, at the time there were lots of successful women doing manga in Japan, and I doubt they had the only women in the world who could draw comics. It really feels like he was mostly keeping his job because he was white and male.

Even today Marvel and DC all but body-check women comic artists out the door. Thank goodness for the internet, so they can put their art out anyways, and on their own terms.

Edit to add: I recommend reading Magic Knight Rayearth if you have the time. (Maybe don’t watch the anime. Trying to simplify Clamp’s highly detailed art… didn’t work that well. Although the OAV wasn’t too bad.)

It’s an oldie, but it’s one of the comics that first got me into manga back in high school. It’s by an all-woman team, it’s beautiful (really, pretty much all of CLAMP’s art is, and I recommend checking it out), and not only did it have teenage women as the protagonists, but it was the first story I read where there was no actual villain or hero, and the story was actually compelling!

This This is a funny one. It looks like it was drawn by someone who carves wood with a chainsaw for a living. It even has the dark areas where you’d use a blowtorch lol.

Plus bonus parade balloon muscles.

With the source material, at least for me as compared to western stuff like X-men, Superman, etc, is that one, it crosses all genres and appeals to all genders. Comic books for much of their existence were largely geared to a specific, very male audience, and it was made quite clear by their writing and the actions of people into comics at the time that other genders (and, to a certain extent, skin colors) need not apply to join the club.

Since I’m a girl, when I was a kid I got teased a lot for liking ‘guy stuff’ like Batman and GI Joe. The problem was, well, I liked action stuff for one, but back then there just wasn’t anything for girls. Hell, I remember them even taking Wonder Woman’s power away, because apparently women empowerment reasons?

Those comics were all written by largely out-of-touch white guys who had, shall we say, definite opinions of what a woman could look like and should act like. And as a woman, I was never impressed. Especially by the time I got to the hundredth drawing of a woman’s ass and legs framing a supposedly ‘serious’ scene.

Then I found manga, with all-women writing teams, and artists who wrote well-rounded characters of all genders and orientations (Sailor Moon had many adorable scenes between a lesbian couple, just to name one example). They drew women who were people. They were sweet, they were brash, they were rude and crass, they were funny. And who weren’t afraid to fireball their way out of trouble. Hell, they drew varied guys who were weak, strong, silly, spacey… they felt real, in a way that I’d never seen in western comics.

Another thing is that mangaka tell the story, their characters get a satisfying actual ending, and then the artist moves on to another story. None of this ‘Oh, the X-men found happiness and solved their problems! In our next comic, watch as everything goes back to the shitty status quo because we have no idea how to write different stories!’ or ‘Welcome to the 2,171st reboot of Superman, now with Extra Edge^TM (because we hear that’s all the rage with kids these days). And remember that this iteration specifically references that one part of reboot #1,023, so read that too (if you can find it lol).’

And the third thing for me is it was quite a bit more beautiful and fluid and varied than western animation. Especially in the case of the days of Too-Many-Pockets Rob and his wooden doll faces, or the small beady eyes of, well, every comic character ever. Anime and manga faces were much more expressive, the worlds more varied and creative, and they weren’t afraid to draw regular people as protagonists, without muscles bulky enough to make you think you were looking at a Macy’s parade balloon.

Conservativism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: there is a group that the law should protect but not bind, and a group that the law should bind but not protect.

And the thing is, while there are some people who just go along with this for the benefit of their own grift, the vast majority of these people actually believe that an order like this is absolutely necessary, and if we don’t have it civilization itself will collapse. In their view there must be a strict hierarchy and everyone must ‘know their place’ in it, or we are all doomed.

Because of this, they spend their time primarily in two pursuits:

1. Trying to force everyone to live this way, because it is the One Right Way To Live
2. Proving to themselves and others that they deserve to be in the In Group and at a certain level in that hierarchy, usually by trying to assign people to the Out Group and then put them in a lower position.

You’re just someone they’re trying to stuff in the Out Group, is all.

It’s also why they don’t like the idea of minorities in power; one, in their eyes minorities belong in the lower tiers of the Out Group and therefore their presence will destroy the fabric of society, and two, they think that if minorities are let into the In Group, then they will be forced into the Out Group.

It’s because it’s All About Them. Their (as fragile as spun-sugar) ego is all-important, and anything that threatens it has to go. And since they wrap their ego up in Being a Republican, and Being a Strong White Man, and all the racist bullshit that goes with that stance, that makes Harris is a physical manifestation of everything they hate. Such ‘challenges’ to their ego cannot be allowed to exist.

Thin of those white kids screaming at the little black girls coming into their school (under military escort for safety) back in 1957, those white teens spitting on black teens doing soda fountain sit-ins in the 60s… and remember they’re adults now, with kids and even grandkids of their own.

Do you really think they taught their families to be open-hearted and to respect people of color?

This issue is getting better, but it’s got a long way to go yet. Things like this echo through time.

This is a bit of a silver lining, though:

Anxiety that resolved within the first five years was so unassociated with greater risk that the odds were similar to those without anxiety — a finding that Dr. Glen R. Finney, an American Academy of Neurology fellow, called “a welcome addition to our knowledge about anxiety and dementia.” Finney, director of the Geisinger Memory and Cognition Program in Pennsylvania, wasn’t involved in the study. The results were also largely driven by participants under 70. ”We have known for a long time that stress increases risk for Alzheimer’s disease,” said Dr. Rudolph Tanzi, director of the McCance Center for Brain Health at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, who wasn’t involved in the study, via email. “This study agrees with earlier studies that therapy aimed at alleviating anxiety can help reduce risk for (Alzheimer’s disease). But, it’s the size of this study that is particularly compelling.”

Don’t worry; if he sees jail time (and given how other similar cases have gone, he won’t) he’ll have a nice cushy job waiting for him at the Sheriff’s office the next county over when he gets out.

ACAB.

Probably because it used to be that being ostracized from our towns/clans/whathaveyou was basically a death sentence.

Getting criticized for something could potentially lead to the town/your family driving you out. Either through the people listening to the complaints deciding you weren’t ‘good’ for the town, or others dogpiling on with their own complaints, real or imagined.

You have to remember, there were bandits, wild animals, and deadly weather outside the protection of our small groups. And that’s assuming you got to survive the ostracizing in the first place.

The Bible gives a rather chilling example: if your kid is disobedient or troublesome, drag them to the front of the town and loudly criticize their behavior. Then, it is the moral imperative of the town to assist you in stoning your kid to death.

With things like that being a social norm, is it any wonder we developed a fear of criticism?

My aunt lives in an HOA that was formed because the city wanted to cut down a big forested area to make a cookie-cutter neighborhood. The forest protected a watershed and was home to many native animals.

So the few people who lived there formed an HOA to gain all rights to the area; sold a few more properties to developers with strict rules so the houses built didn’t impact the wildlife or water, and set a large chunk aside as a ‘community park’ that really is a forest with a few walking trails and a nice pond.

The HOA fees mostly go towards maintaining the forest; planting natives, paying top-grade arborists to care for the trees, setting up bird boxes, stuff like that.

That being said, I’m well aware that hers is an outlier, and most HOAs are just excuses for bratty busybodies to harass their neighbors.

Went to Five Guys and made the mistake of ordering the Grilled Cheese.

It was a burger bun, turned inside out, with a sad slab of half-melted American cheese between the pieces.

Never going back.

The last time they tried going it alone they couldn’t either lol.

Parties exist in part because it costs millions of dollars to run. What we really need to do is fix that problem first, or we will always be ruled by the rich, or their bought-and-paid puppets.