I’ve been following him since 2020 as an NC state representative for a different district because he gave no-nonsense updates about covid and then the Floyd protests.

I just want to clone him and have him in both the federal and state positions, lol. We need more people like him in government, not less.

I highly recommend this 2-min video from Jeff Jackson (NC representative).

He posted it 6 days ago explaining that nothing major was going to come out of the budget passing because the point was never to actually pass it but to get air time yelling about wanting to pass it. He constantly exposes that the extreme right flank in congress is all theater for the public and acts completely different behind closed doors. I greatly appreciate this guy and recommend checking his stuff out beyond just this one video!

Lucky you. I started seeing them months ago. They paint him as this innocent Southern man of humble origins. Tbf, I don’t remember seeing one of them within the past month or so, so maybe they’ve actually died off in some places,

I knew about Angel Flight but wasn’t aware of this. Thank you for sharing, and for flying! My dad was the top contributing pilot for Angel Flight in Texas a few years back. If he was still able to fly, I’d be pushing him to take this on as well.

Unfortunately that doesn’t serve the democrats as a whole, so it isn’t prioritized by the party favorites.

(Note: I am NOT both-sidesing here. I always have and will again vote D this election because they are the most sane option that actually has some human interests at heart. I just accept that they are not all altruistic and are also motivated to keep status quo in some ways that don’t align to my personal preferences for my elected officials. They are still the right choice.)

“What he did,” though, was just take notes as a reporter. He took notes then tried to leave with them, where he was accosted and threatened and told to delete the notes. When he continued to express a desire to leave and mentioned his kids, that comment came out.

I agree that it’s not as bad as the headline makes it sound. But it also doesn’t seem like the reporter did anything that he shouldn’t have done which would have given him reason to be accosted…

Charitable reading, this was just an off-the-cuff comment at the maturity level of, “I know you are but what am I?” where the aide used a quick comeback without thinking much about her words.

I’ve had mine since before I started driving ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I noticed in my late teens I had a lot of freckles on the left side of my body and very few on the right, and I didn’t start driving until I was 22. I did spend 2 years in high school with a much darker tan on my right arm from hanging my arm out the window of a boyfriend’s car with no AC, but still have more left-arm freckles.

“First in Flight” was the original (because the Wright brothers’ first flight was in NC), then they added “First in Freedom”. It’s because NC was the first state to write/sign a Declaration of Independence from England, over a year before the Declaration of Independence.

But it was a fucking slave state. I’ve always thought the “First in Freedom” license plate was insulting.

Also, Mark Robinson is insane and a horrible person. Obviously.

My parents ran a business named my last name and owned the respective reyalilastname.com domain. In the late 90s, my dad had a page on his site with widgets of the top 6 or so search engines. It was a great place to easily jump between Yahoo, AltaVista, Ask Jeeves, etc.

I was in the computer lab with my 6th-grade class kicking off some research project and recommended this page to my teacher who suggested it to all the students. That’s when I learned some classmates didn’t know how to spell my last name, and that removing 1 letter from my last name went to a porn site.

My name is nowhere near anything profane. It would be like McKenzie > McKenie or Saunders > Sanders. Literally nothing that would make you think ‘porn.’

The teachers didn’t notice, but several classmates asked me wtf my parents did. I was an awkward, nerdy kid who hadn’t accepted yet that I would never be popular and I believed providing a really good tool like that would help me achieve the popularity I craved (yeah, helping people do better on their class assignments was what I thought would make me cool—no wonder I wasn’t popular!). I remember feeling that hope just draining from my body as the misspelled page started popping up all over the computer lab.

I was in NC and remember the energy in 2008 (tbf, I was in college so my bubble was definitely all-in for Obama).

I was also in NC in 2012 when the state voted to pass Amendment 1, making gay marriage illegal in the state’s constitution. Everyone I knew was against it, but because that was true for them too, no one could imagine it passing and so they didn’t even bother to vote. 35% turnout with 61% voting for bigotry.

All that to say, if you’re in North Carolina, go fucking vote. It doesn’t matter if your district is gerrymandered to hell and there’s no chance of it going blue; don’t let that make you apathetic. Your vote matters for how the state assigns its electoral college votes!

Sociopathy is the inability to feel empathy. This is not inherently a bad thing, it’s only bad when people use that to harm others.

A common trait for sociopaths is seeking success, which is defined differently in different cultures. In the US, success is usually defined by fame, money, or power, so we see a lot of sociopaths in government, C-suites, and Hollywood. However, in India, success is more defined around family involvement, and so sociopaths there are often seen establishing those strong family ties and working to fit in.

Some studies suggest that 4% of the population have the brain profile of sociopathy. That doesn’t mean 1/25 people is evil. But when someone who is sociopathic uses that lack of empathy to harm people, that’s when they become a danger and should be called out for it.

Source: The Sociopath Next Door by Martha Stout, Ph.D (and my memory thereof)

It wasn’t good phrasing, but I think their point is she needs to take action on day 1, not start researching/planning on day 1. “Trying to find out” being the operative words, versus, “now that I’m in office, I’m going to do X, Y, and Z.”

Ok, it’s worse than I thought. I expect Trump to make comments about it being rigged, that’s normal enough.

What I didn’t expect, even despite the title here, is that he’d claim the White House pushed Facebook to suppress content in 2020, making it a rigged election. But he was the White House at the time!

Zuckerberg also referenced a now-infamous Hunter Biden laptop article in the New York Post. Zuckerberg writes in his letter, “the FBI warned us about a potential Russian disinformation operation about the Biden family and Burisma in the lead up to the 2020 election.”

Trump writes: “Zuckerberg admits that the White House pushed to SUPPRESS HUNTER BIDEN LAPTOP STORY (& much more!). IN OTHER WORDS, THE 2020 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION WAS RIGGED. FoxNews, New York Post, Rep. Laurel Lee, House Judiciary Committee.”

Women are not allowed in this world anymore because they don’t want their husbands and children in this country.

Hmmm.

Have you seen the panda that was raised by zookeepers? The zookeepers had to teach it to break bamboo, which was hard for them so they often grimaced while doing so. The panda learned to make a similar face, seeing it as part of the process. They’ve even caught the panda making the grimace after breaking the bamboo, like it realized that it forgot to do the thing and had to make up for skipping that step.

My dad wrote software in the 90s and developed a pretty good name for his business. He once got a call from Microsoft saying they wanted to package his software in their newest OS builds. Holy crap, right?! That would be a major break!

They told him they needed to do some deep interviews to set the plan in motion. I can’t remember if there were supposed to be 4 calls total or if it was on the 4th call, but after a couple conversations my dad realized the questions they were asking were to reverse engineer his software. They were never trying to make a deal; they were trying to learn what they could so they could rewrite it and not pay him a dime. He told them to pound sand.

There were a few other conflicts he had with Microsoft. I was young and didn’t understand it well, but my whole childhood I knew Bill Gates led a shady as fuck company and thought he was an awful POS. It honestly still kills me to admit that he (now) does some good in this world.

Texas is also a voter apathy state. A lot of the apathy comes from gerrymandering, which I’d call a form of voter suppression, so your point still stands.

Also reminder for every state except Maine and Nebraska: your voting district has NO effect on who gets the electoral college vote for your state. Even if your state is gerrymandered to all hell and there’s no chance your district will go blue, that has literally zero affect on whether your vote is counted for president.

So go vote, even if it’s hopeless for the local races. Your vote can help flip a state!

The blonde girl with a ponytail in the top right and bottom right look like real photos from a rally. The other photos of groups of people with the “Swifties for Trump” shirts all have the plastic sheen and soft background that’s indicative of AI. If you start zooming in there are little oddities here and there that also make them look generated.

So I’ll buy there is one girl out there with her own shirt who got photographed twice at the same event, but I don’t believe any of these other photos for a second.

That sounds a lot like advice I read in some book (maybe Atomic Habits?). What I remember of the point was that your habits will follow your identity. If you’re a “former smoker,” you’re a small step away from becoming a smoker again. If you’re “not a smoker,” you have to consciously defy your identity to pick up cigarettes again, and it is hard for people to change their foundational perceptions of their identity.

I thought it an interesting premise. It seems in some ways opposite to the guidance of Alcoholics Anonymous, which as I understand it is that everyone there identifies as an alcoholic, no matter how long it’s been since they imbibed. That’s supposed to keep them conscious of the choice to not drink (though it might also be intentional to drive the community mindset and participation that’s also foundational to AA…)

Do you not remember all the leaks showing extreme bias towards Clinton, derision of Sanders, and even deals between Clinton and the DNC?

The emails and documents showed that the Democratic Party’s national committee favored Clinton over … Bernie. … The leaks resulted in allegations of bias against Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign in apparent contradiction with the DNC leadership’s publicly stated neutrality, as several DNC operatives openly derided Sanders’s campaign and discussed ways to advance Hillary Clinton’s nomination. Later reveals included controversial DNC–Clinton agreements dated before the primary, regarding financial arrangements and control over policy and hiring decisions. source

Or that DNC leaders argued in court that they didn’t need to hold impartial primaries and could select whatever candidate they wanted?

… DNC attorneys argued that the DNC would be well within their rights to select their own candidate. source

For their part, the DNC and Wasserman Schultz have characterized the DNC charter’s promise of ‘impartiality and evenhandedness’ as a mere political promise—political rhetoric that is not enforceable in federal courts. The Court does not accept this trivialization of the DNC’s governing principles. While it may be true in the abstract that the DNC has the right to have its delegates “go into back rooms like they used to and smoke cigars and pick the candidate that way, the DNC, through its charter, has committed itself to a higher principle. source

At the end of the day, yes, Bernie got fewer votes. But that is a small part of the iceberg, ignoring all the things that led up to it and all the biases at play in the organization putting the vote on in what I would (and did) call a “rigged” primary.