Ironhold

A few months ago someone posted to Reddit claiming that they were a teenage boy, that their twenty-something older sister was doing OF to help the family pay bills, that someone at their school linked the sister to the opening poster, and that he was now being harassed about it. The opening poster was asking if he should ask his sister to stop, at least until he was out of high school, even though it would potentially be a financial hardship on the family. This is in keeping with a number of stories where women ostensibly claim that OF is more about the money and a need to pay the bills than any lurid intent, but when you think about it it's just a modern version of the "I was young and needed the money!" protest of decades past. In other words, new tech, same problems.

Trying to remember. I want to say that it was either Talmage or someone adjacent to Talmage who made the claim, and others weighed in from there.

The problem with Trudeau is that over the last several years he and various members of his government have been engaged in a great deal of morally and even legally questionable actions, such as their brutal response to the Freedom Convoy protests wherein, among other things, known protestors had their bank accounts frozen and law enforcement physically confiscated their petrol supplies; there was even an incident where a group of mounted police officers charged their horses into a group of protestors, knocking down an elderly woman who was using a mobility assistance device. It's to the point now where even a number of Canadians are wishing for international legal experts to weigh in on what Trudeau has been doing.

The United Kingdom is a constitutional monarchy. This means that the Prime Minister handles the day-to-day affairs of running the country, but the monarch has a variety of official duties and responsibilities such as being the de facto head of the military (in fact, it's "heavily encouraged" that anyone wishing to assume the throne spend at least a few years in the service somehow, such as how the late queen was an ambulance driver with a women's auxiliary). The monarch also has a number of diplomatic objectives and so forth.

Point of note: The soldier could only compel the person to travel with them for a single mile, so if someone traveled with them longer than that the soldier (or whoever) would be subject to reprimand from their superiors and thus would likely think twice about doing it again. This has led various individuals to suspect that Jesus was also potentially teaching civil disobedience or otherwise encouraging people to let the existing cultural or legal systems punish those who abused others.

This came to me earlier today. The current SCOTUS roster seems inclined to not just review previous SCOTUS decisions, but has already overturned several decisions that it felt were made in bad faith or on bad logic. Well, I think we can all agree that the anti-polygamy laws of the 1800s were pretty well in violation of the US Constitution given who they were targeting and why. Ever since the 1960s the push has been for "free love" and all that. Nowadays there are plenty of people willing to advocate for polyamory. A part of me can see someone convicted of bigamy actually trying to take it to SCOTUS *because* of how the anti-polygamy laws came about, and if they do go all the way to SCOTUS I can see some or even all of the justices overturning the nation's anti-polygamy laws. Is this something anyone else foresees potentially happening?

Last night a bit on the news noted that the bill going through Congress which would strip convicted felons of Secret Service protection, the bill meant to target Trump, would now by extension target Hunter Biden as well if the bill did indeed become law. This IMHO will likely ensure that the bill doesn't pass, let alone become law.

Ok... https://au.news.yahoo.com/trump-judge-alerts-lawyers-social-212549668.html The judge in Trump's hush money case has issued a legal statement. Someone claiming to be a cousin of a juror in the case posted on Facebook that their cousin, one of the jurors, had contacted them and informed them that the plan was to find Trump guilty. This post was made the day before the verdict was read, and so counts as a significant breach. It's so significant, in fact, that if this is true and a juror did indeed talk then it all but guarantees Trump will get a new trial on appeal.

The thing with wikis is that by their very nature, they're vulnerable to censorship, "pranks", deliberately incorrect material, edit wars, and all sorts of other things. For example, last year someone decided to "prank" Wikipedia itself by going into their featured article for that day and replacing the image at the top of the page with uncensored adult material. Articles relating to the church are often targeted by people who want to put the church in a bad light while making its opponents look more noble, such as how someone scrubbed Martha Beck's page to remove the extensive listing of controversies surrounding her and links to where people were debunking her claims. I myself was once an editor on a popular Transformers franchise fan wiki, and saw firsthand how political things could get on wikis. This included the owner of the site deciding that as the owner he could go against his own rules whenever he felt like.

Thanks. Back in 1992 I had a medical emergency that the doctors came to suspect was the result of a bleeding stress ulcer, but due to their own incompetence (military health care is an oxymoron...) they waited so long to give me an endoscopy that if it was an ulcer it had managed to heal itself. I was put on the restriction back then, and given that I now have some cardiovascular health issues it hasn't been lifted. I actually had to get after my mom in the middle of a CVS because she got it in her head that I needed water pills to deal with some swelling and she tried to hand me a package that was clearly labeled as having caffeine.

IRL I'm on a medical restriction to where I'm supposed to avoid caffeine. I've had a few sodas with it here and there, and can confirm that it does weird things to my blood pressure. So yeah, for me this part of the issue is a moot point. What I was looking at was the vast quantities some people consume over a prolonged period, which they then try to justify.

I was at one point a moderator on a Discord server. A younger user kept trying to use a certain racial slur, and didn't understand why our automatic moderator bot was constantly flagging it. They felt that because it wasn't the *exact* version of the slur that so many people found offensive, it was somehow OK. I told them that just because they hear it in a rap song doesn't mean that it's OK to use. The server administrators informed me I was no longer a moderator. Yeah... 😅 That apparently resolved the issue then and there as this person hasn't tried to do it again, but the decision was made that my response was far from the ideal way of handling things. So yeah, I'm still trying to figure out the fine line between "when to be 'tactful' in my responses" and "when being blunt is the only way to get through to someone".

Transformers fandom. https://tfwiki.net/wiki/Jazz_(G1)/toys All of the toys from the classic 1984 line-up originally came from other toy lines. Most of these were from the Diaclone toy line produced by Hasbro's Japanese partner Takara. One of these Diaclone-era figures transforms into a Porsche 935 Turbo, and when released as a part of the Diaclone line its vehicle mode livery was directly copied from a real-life race car, the Martini Racing #4 vehicle. Hasbro only made minor alterations to the deco before releasing this toy as Jazz. Even as early as 1986 it was becoming apparent that only providing minor alterations was a bad idea, as a version of Jazz that was made available in 1986 as a mail-in offer lacked the faux references to Martini Racing. Ever since then, Hasbro has gone back and forth with Jazz' vehicle mode colors. This includes a plain white vehicle mode and a vehicle mode with music notes and the #1 on the side. Well, IDW Publishing, the company that had the license to a number of Hasbro's properties in the 2010s, started going hardcore "woke" in their Transformers and G. I. Joe books. This caused the fandom to start rifting apart over political differences, with those people who just didn't want to have to deal with real-life politics in their escapism being lumped in with the more conservative members of the fandom as "haters" & such. The then-ongoing culture wars over the 2016 Ghostbusters film, the Disney-era Star Wars movies, and other controversial works, widened the divide. In 2017, Hasbro decided to release another Jazz figure. What nobody at Hasbro initially realized is that the person who designed his vehicle mode design scheme used a text-replacement system created for the franchise to hide the term "MAGA" on the toy's deco. It wasn't until the toys shipped to retail that the first purchasers noticed this. For obvious reasons, this incident caused quite the uproar in the fandom. Most people agreed that this had no place in the franchise, and considered it fair that Hasbro summarily fired the designer responsible for it. However, several of the more left-leaning and "progressive" people in the fandom, including the people in charge of certain prominent fan websites, decided it was not enough. In their eyes, Trump was a bigot, anything related to Trump was bigoted, and since Jazz was a "black" character this represented nothing short of a hate crime. Yes, even though Jazz is a robot, because he was voiced by Scatman Carothers in the 1980s cartoon series, these individuals decided that he was "black". This incident essentially marked the point of no return, and the fandom is *still* split on political grounds. As if that wasn't bad enough, when Hasbro decided to release another new Jazz figure in 2021, he was the #14 vehicle. Cue Jenevieve Franks, whose entire claim to fame is having minor roles at IDW as a "consultant", immediately going berserk on social media and claiming that this was somehow a reference to white supremacy. This left a number of individuals, like myself, trying to tell folks to calm down and wait for Hasbro to explain. Well, remember what I said about the original 1984 Jazz figure having originally been recycled from the Diaclone toy line? In the original Diaclone product catalog, the Porsche 935 Turbo was... item number #14. It turns out that Martini has #1 and #41 Porsches in addition to the #4 Porsche, so the designer went with #14 as a nod to the Diaclone origin. Franks has yet to apologize for the panic she caused. IDW would eventually be stripped of the Joe and Transformers licenses, and it seemed like the world was about to heal. ...Then the cartoon for Transformers: Earthspark had an episode involving pronouns and a robot character declaring itself to be non-binary... Yeah...

It's really bad on Twitter and other social media forums where these "progressive" types like to congregate, to the point that I've seen them metaphorically get up in the face of black women who were involved with white men or otherwise agitate against interracial relationships. Yeah, it's to the point now that the louder someone claims how "progressive" they are the more likely they are to have beliefs that are downright bigoted.

Pretty much. Modern "progressives" are now increasingly demanding that we go back to seeing people as piles of labels, something that even actual progressives are sick of.

Some who register their opposition do so because they subscribe to "privilege theory", the concept that people have different levels of "privilege" on the basis of the various group memberships they have. In their eyes, any sort of interracial relationship is *always* going to be uneven because of this, with heterosexual relationships involving a white man and a woman of another race being seen as tantamount to slavery because of the woman having so little "privilege" compared to the man. Others are essentially racial supremacists or segregationists who feel that people are better off "staying with [their] own kind" for one nonsense reason or another.

The issue is when you have self-described "progressives" who subscribe to "privilege theory" or are all about group "loyalty". In their eyes, an interracial relationship is doomed from the get-go or else "proof" that the partner who has the least amount of "privilege" is in need of some sort of intervention due to either being ignorant or being a "traitor" to their category membership. Hence their panic.

Nowadays, you're more likely to hear moderates and libertarians throw "love is love" back in the face of progressives who are opposed to interracial relationships. Turns out that a lot of self-described "progressives" get the vapors when they see people of two races love each other.

For decades now, my local library has accepted donations of used books and other media which they sell in order to finance their summer reading program. Recently, I picked up two copies of the "revised edition" of the work "Eternity In Their Hearts" by Don Richardson, a Protestant author noted for his work among the Sawi people of New Guinea. The premise of the book is that many peoples in even far-away lands like Papua New Guinea, India, and Africa have theological traditions that in some way, shape, or form mirror elements of Judaism or even Christianity, while others have traditions that lend themselves well to Christian elements. This leads to the author's thesis, the claim that these various incidents of missionaries finding such peoples is proof that God has, indeed, created all people and that these theological and cultural elements represent fragmented memories of God's teachings to the world. On one hand, his thesis fits quite well with church teachings about Heavenly Father having other sheep and how one day the gospel will be restored to them. On the other hand, it's almost hilarious how often the author drops everything to deny the prospect of angelic visitation, either then or now, outside of what the Bible talks about, as some clumsy attempt at drawing a line in the sand to keep from drifting too far into inadvertently confirming what we've been saying despite never mentioning us by name. I wonder how many other mainline Christian writers out there have noted something that seemingly backs us up but couldn't get out of their own way long enough to ask that question.

The way syndicated television worked in the 1980s and 1990s, shows had to put in extreme amounts of effort just to get numbers and financial statements that network TV shows in the 1990s and 2000s just took for granted.

TNG and DS9 were syndicated in an era where syndicated content was even more disposable than facial tissue, while Voyager was the flag carrier for UPN. Big world of difference.

What people forget is that TNG and DS9 were syndicated rather than network. This meant that Paramount (et al) had to front the initial money for the first few seasons with no guarantee of even getting their money back, let alone getting enough money to pay for the next season. As a result, they had to swing for the fences with every single episode despite the incredibly limited resources they had in the hopes that both shows would generate enough momentum for advertisers, individual television stations, and merchandisers to develop enough interest to keep it going. A big part of the reason why TNG got so much better as it went along is because they got enough of that momentum in place to where they were able to devote more money and resources to producing each episode. In contrast, Voyager and Enterprise were network shows, meaning that they had someone with a big wallet backing them up. They could literally afford to be mediocre at best as long as corporate was willing to keep them going. Many fans of the franchise regard Star Trek going back to being network as the reason for its slow decline since the 2000s.

The issue is that due to corporate drama at Paramount (not Disney), a number of legal concerns have arisen regarding the previous entries in the franchise (The Original Series through to Enterprise). This has led to the requirement that the theatrical reboot movies and the new TV shows be visually distinctive from the previous entries even when they involve the same characters and situations. Under normal circumstances, this would be no problem for a group of competent writers, show runners, and set designers. The problem, however, is that the current crop of show runners and writers have, like the people in charge of so many other franchises these days, declared themselves the owners and powers-that-be, and the need to make current Star Trek visibly different has only emboldened them in this regards. As a consequence, current-era Trek has forsaken everything Roddenberry was going for in the name of modern-era sensitivities. Even the Trek comic books are a risky investment these days.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/study-caffeine-nicotine-don-t-090200388.html?guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuZ29vZ2xlLmNvbS8&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAAFZphoKgMkD9lPvWXL9vXL2l7DNRRQyU5bxdQuDMfMgQANSUMzlffD59zjiINrKp9OjtXE5Ks49S7dyOVm1uGF-SldALGTsM-o4ap6dwd_Rd9KPHiE2l70kcE-Fx2YVxSp8wP4PjKTIHMxz8BuOI0mP4iJJ6wBZTxauDyhv6NAlZ The US Navy and Pepperdine College did a study on caffeine and nicotine consumption among Navy service members. What they found is that while caffeine can provide a short-term boost to alertness, prolonged use, especially during high-stress operations, can actually *worsen* the effects of sleep deprivation. Looks like the world is finally catching on to what we already knew...

China's military has a badly flawed logistics system, to the point that it is greatly hindering their ability to project their military very far beyond their own borders. Their navy can harass anyone operating within the so-called "Nine-Dashed Line" and a little beyond it, but they'd be pressed to provide proper support for any marines or soldiers they sent to initiate a ground invasion. Even if such an invasion did take place, Chinese soldiers have such terrible supplies - including miserable rations that are of such inconsistent quality food poisoning is a real concern - that the soldiers would be hard pressed to hold whatever land they take. (For those who have access to YouTube, look up Steve 1989 MRE Info and search for his reviews of Chinese military rations. He did, indeed, get food poisoning off of a Chinese ration, a ration that was so terrible chlorophyll was actually leeching off of the vegetables and turning the pork green.) The big issue with China is that they're a nuclear power, and there's reason to believe they might also have biological and chemical agents. This is protecting them and their buddies (like Iran and North Korea) from any sort of direct invasion, but utilizing these weapons against whatever power they are trying to conquer would risk destroying whatever it is they're trying to seize in the first place. This is especially true with Taiwan and its manufacturing sector. As it is, the Federation of American Scientists once estimated that if Japan changed their constitution to allow for the nation to possess nuclear weapons, they could have their first functional device within a calendar year; this led to the FAS declaring Japan to be a de facto nuclear power. A nuclear Japan (which is also well capable of biological and chemical agents) would throw such a wrench in China's plans that China would have to seriously consider its next steps.