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Cake day: July 9th, 2023

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  • I don’t think it’s a cop out at all. It’s a very good start and I appreciate the work and the quote. It sets me to thinking of a monstrous demigod by the name of Na’scrivas I’ve had rattling around for some time (I made an anagram of scrivener and changed a few letters. Plus, who doesn’t enjoy a good apostrophe in a fantasy setting.). It’s takes the form of a journal that makes its contents a reality at the cost of slowly detaching the writer further and further from reality. The idea is that by the end of the story the reader should question how much of it actually happened, and how much was simply the protagonist going mad.









  • Just because you don’t agree with criticism doesn’t mean It’s not constructive. You asked how a progressive party would work, the type of local grassroots activism and organizing cutthroat describes is exactly how many nascent parties form. You grow your influence where you can when you can as a bloc that others have to win the support of if they want to win. Once your movement is big enough you either capture the party that has become dependent on you or take your base of power and start your own.



  • “Make or break?” Jon Stewart is on what is essentially the victory tour of his career. He was so popular in his first stint at the daily show that some openly wondered whether the show could continue without him. He retired from that to work advocacy for first responders, for which he was lauded. He’s back now because even a solid decade away couldn’t make the audience forget his heyday. I’ve criticized Stewart in the past, but even I can see that if he were to flub this interview most would shrug “huh, sad how the greats start to slip as they age,” and tune back in next week.



  • Not just McDonald’s, it’s been used by numerous organizations to downplay lawsuits they feel will hurt them with consumers. Tort reform is also trotted out by politicians who want to look as though they’re protecting people from “government overreach” because they know people don’t know what torts are and they can scare them into believing they’re going to be sued if they don’t get outside to shovel their walk early enough after a snow.




  • Bare in mind that the Constitution is just a piece of paper. It only has power when the government and the will of the people give it power.

    There’s a scene from The West Wing that really impressed upon me the great challenge of holding even the seemingly most stable democracies together. Toby Ziegler was working with representatives of a newly forming government and a constitutional scholar played by Christopher Lloyd to craft a constitution. Toby takes issue with the amount of power they are considering vesting in their executive branch, preferring instead a parliamentary system. Christopher Lloyd’s character responds to him with almost this exact point, telling him that their work just then was to instill a democratic spirit in those leaders and through them the broader populace of their country.