Bartimaeus

Yes...the difference, I feel, is that past administrations were, for the most part, rational actors. Not always on every issue, and just because they were rational doesn't mean they were kind or just or lawful (just the opposite in many cases!). There are some benefits to having a federal government that's acting like a chicken with its head cut off (there's not much permanent legislation going through, for example - that's both good and bad in different ways), but there are consequences as well (these executive "czars", Trump included, are massively empowered in acting policy in the face of legislative standstill, just as it was the case under Obama - for better and for worse under him, and I would personally say almost entirely for the worse under Trump, but I'm sure people have their own opinions on that). These past three presidents (in all their own ways, starting with Bush and including Obama but now especially Trump), have really proved that we need to reign in the executive branch something fierce...but uh, Congress collectively has shown no interest in doing that, and in fact has pretty much encouraged the opposite...so screw us, I guess?

Don't ever buy anything online from WalMart. They sent me the wrong item, and for whatever reason, they have absolutely 100% steadfastly refused to authorize a return and refund for their mistake over the past month. Thankfully, I never go to WalMart to begin with, but this cements it as policy.

"Oh, don’t forget: He has 962 days left in this term." ****

I remember that dog, surprisingly. It's funny how seemingly totally incidental occurrences can play such large roles in our identities and life courses. A username is a smaller one such of those occurrences, but the realization that such chance events can do so much is difficult to comprehend at times.

Heh, compared to the current state of affairs, it's easy to have your perspective warped to the point of thinking the previous administration was perfect. It doesn't help any of us to not remember clearly, though - to not do so just means things will become more and more far-gone as our standards for normalcy and "rightness" get lower and lower.

was her name "rasputin" by any chance

but the embarrassing visage that is that thumbnail tells me not to listen actually I listened to it and it wasn't that bad

Yeah, I'm more of a 60-70F (16-21C) kind of guy, but the difference between 100% humidity 90F and 0% humidity 90F is the difference between "it's a bit too hot" and "I'm about to die of heatstroke". It's the same thing with sub-freezing temperatures and wind - air is a pretty terrible conductor of heat EXCEPT when it's moving, so I'd always rather have a -10 day with no wind than a positive ten day with anything more than occasional breezes.

And here I am wishing it'd be windy and rain every day. The world's so much prettier...

the real version of this song is blocked on youtube, but this one's not bad

I already said that like 4 replies ago!

That's pretty fair. There's much, much, MUCH more to criticize about Trump than a few seconds of poor posture - that's not much different from the dijon mustard incident.

"At this point"?

Remove all but one stick of RAM and swap it out with the other(s) (also, this can be used to reduce power draw if that's part of the issue). Go to integrated graphics to reduce power draw even more if you can (or stick in a low-end card for much the same effect, if you have one).

Are you on a laptop or desktop? Are you running system repair off of your local copy of Windows, or an external Windows installer (i.e. flash drive/disc).

That's depressing to think about.

Yeah, I assumed you knew what you were talking about more than I did, but those movies were somewhere between bad and really terrible with the exception of Serenity (which I think is simply fine - I'm not really a Firefly fan, most obvious since I'm not raving mad about it).

I don't watch basketball at all, but I like following the various sports subreddits come playoff time to join in on the excitement. I just realized that I should probably be cheering for the Warriors (being part-Californian and all), but I've been quietly cheering for the underdog this entire time. Plus, Houston and the hurricane and all... Decisions, decisions...

Wow, didn't expect it to happen that quickly. Life can be gone in the blink of an eye... RIP.

No, that is terrible behavior. In what world is it alright to try and lift up a lady's skirt? I couldn't even doing that to my wife outside of a private setting. It's completely terrible. I'm not a woman, so I can't pretend to know exactly what it's like to have something like that happen to you (since this sort of thing is obviously viewed differently if you're a man or a woman). The rough equivalent for a guy would probably be getting your pants pulled down* - that's pretty humiliating, especially in a professional setting (which from the sounds of it, this woman was in when it was occurring). He did it enough times that another co-worker had to tell him to stop - I literally can't imagine how embarrassing it would be to continue to take that crap (especially after having your co-workers notice!), because I literally wouldn't allow it to continue. But again, I'm not a woman - from what we've seen in many cases (and from stories our wives, sisters, mothers, etc. have told at least some of us), some women obviously feel they have to take it and simply try to work around it as best they can until they can quietly get away from it. *Very roughly. Generally, for guys that would be done for laughs - there isn't usually a sexual element involved, which there obviously was here.

Yeah, that one's not surprising, especially because there were rumors of him abusing his granddaughter for years (who's now dead, after being brutally murdered by her boyfriend in an attempted "exorcism"). And CNN asking questions without specifically mentioning him and repeatedly getting Morgan Freeman as an answer seems especially damning, though it may depend on exactly how leading the question was.

Wouldn't it have been *better* as a non-Star Wars film, given that it might've actually been somewhat original and not had the outcome already completely known instead of just another sad, desperate retread of some of the things that characters happened to say in the original trilogy? You know, because the writers actually had some ideas of their own when making those ones.

No, but it helps explain why there's still an ongoing fight. For worse or for worse, our president saying players should be deported over kneeling for the anthem (a gesture Kaepernick chose specifically because a veteran he spoke with told him it would be the most respectful way of drawing attention to himself without insulting the anthem - hah!) is something people care about.

It definitely did not warrant the controversy, and almost everyone had stopped caring about the handful of people doing it until Trump suddenly decided to make it a campaign issue (and he's still talking about it...just said today that players who kneel should be deported).

I read someone else sum it up as, "Patriotism is not nationalism, nor is it fascism. We should strive to be a country where people WANT to stand up for the national anthem, not one where where they're forced to." P.S. Trump's summit with North Korea was cancelled. What a shocker.