Without Voter ID, This Happened

I used to live in a state that did not require ID to vote. Here's what happened.

The polling place was near my neighborhood. In some years, it was at a school or in a garage within walking distance. It was rare to wait more than 20 minutes, and often there was no wait. Upon arrival, I told the poll workers my name and address. They found me in the list of registered voters, and I signed my name next to my listing. Then I got my ballot and voted.

Would it have been possible for fraud to occur? Sure, if someone knew my name and address and got there before me (or if I didn't vote that time, which never happened) they could have pretended to be me. It would be very difficult to perform fraud like that on a large scale, because you would need a large number of of imposters successfully impersonating people who hadn't voted. It's a crazy idea.

 

The Things They Say

Imagine that President Biden is making a campaign speech. In the midst of the speech, he could be talking about almost anything: the need to repair and improve our infrastructure, the challenges posed by climate change, the high cost of health care.

It doesn't matter what he's talking about, because, suddenly, he mentions a well-known movie character. "The late, great, Forrest Gump," he says. "Have you heard of him, Forrest Gump? He's got that box of chocolates. If you sit next to him, he'll start telling you about a box of chocolates. Forrest Gump. Don't sit next to him or you'll hear a long story about his mother and the chocolates. Forrest Gump, incredible." And then he goes on with the speech.

If this happened, people would be all over social media, claiming that this is all the proof we need that the man has completely lost his mind, that he's obviously been senile for most of his life, and he's out of touch with reality. The mainstream media, pretending to be neutral, would put it in the form of questions: "Does he have a medical problem? Is it time for him to stop campaigning? Will his party tell him to step down?" They'd claim, "Alarms are going off in Washington as the president's strange remarks have his team struggling to explain what's going on," and so on.

Yet, oddly enough, when donald trump repeatedly digresses into ramblings about his beloved movie character, Hannibal Lecter, hardly an eyebrow is raised. For years, the lord and master of the Republican Party has made many very strange public statements. The news media rarely comment, and never suggest that his bloviations about indoor plumbing, batteries, wind turbines, or imaginary history are signs of mental deterioration.

The double standard is real. The question is why. Why do the news media, who were threatened and vilified by trump and treated kindly by the President, want to undermine the President's re-election campaign?

This vile T-shirt, promoting the lynching of reporters, was popularized by trump supporters after trump imitated Hitler and labeled the news "The enemy of the people." Maybe trump's threats against their lives has made reporters too terrified to tell the truth. Yet that would seem a good reason for them to prefer a President who has not incited violence against them.

"With regard to the forest, when trees fall down, after a short period of time, about 18 months, they become very dry, they become really like a matchstick. And they get up, y’know there’s no more water pouring through, and they become very very, uh, they just explode, they can explode."
- donald trump, September 14, 2020

"These millions and millions of people that are coming from prisons, coming from prisons and jails, you know there is a slight difference okay. They're coming from prisons and jails, mental institutions and insane asylums like Silence of the Lamb, the press always says why does he ramble about si- Silence of the Lamb, the late great Hannibal Lecter, he'd like to have you over for dinner, do you ever, don't do it, if he suggests I'd like to have you for dinner, don't go. But these are the people, these are the people that are coming into our country."
- donald trump, June 28, 2024.

“No water in your faucets. You ever try buying a new home and you turn on. You want to wash your hair or you wanna wash your hands. You turn on the water and it goes drip, drip the soap. You can't get it off your hand. So you keep it running for about 10 times longer. You trying, the worst is your hair. I have this beautiful luxuriant hair and I put stuff on. I put it in lather. I like lots of lather because I like it to come out extremely dry because it seems to be slightly thicker that way. And I lather up and then you turn on this crazy shower and the thing drip, drip and you say I'm gonna be here for 45 minutes. What? There's so much water. You don't know what to do with it. You know, it's called rain. It rains a lot in certain places. But, now their idea, you know, did you see the other day? They just, I opened it up and they closed it again. I opened it, they close it, washing machines to wash your dishes. There is a problem. They don't want you to have any water. They want no water.”
- donald trump, June 22, 2024

"Millions of people from places unknown, from countries unknown, who don't speak languages. We have languages coming into our country, we have nobody that even speaks those languages. They're truly foreign languages, nobody speaks them."
- donald trump, Feb. 28, 2024

 

The World is Never Enough

This story is a smaller version of what has been happening and is still happening throughout our country and the world.

A wealthy couple living in a very nice house above Camden Harbor in Maine noticed that their potential ocean view was blocked by their neighbor's big, beautiful trees. They decided to poison the trees. The plan worked, and the trees died.

In the meantime, the herbicide they use leached into a nearby park and contaminated the town's only public beach. The product that was used, Tebuthiuron, does not break down, so it continues killing plants for years. The only way to get rid of it is to remove the soil (tons of soil) or to try waiting for it to be diluted over time. The couple ended up paying a $1.5 million settlement to the tree owner and around $214,000 in fines and fees related to the environmental damage. They haven't been jailed, and apparently are still members of the Yacht Club. And they got the view they wanted.

It seems like just another story of people with too much money and a sense of entitlement arrogantly taking whatever they want with no regard for anyone or anything else. The same thing happens on a much larger scale, too, and it affects everyone. Big corporations do this to us regularly. By "big corporations" I mean the greedy, short-sighted rich people who run them. Assisted by corrupt politicians, they eagerly poison our air and water and contaminate our soil, just so they can make more money.

Like the tree poisoner who didn't care that marine life would be killed for years to come as long as he could get a little more pleasure from his mansion, the oligarchs and robber barons are willing to destroy the future in exchange for the temporary gratification of acquiring more and more paper profits. A CEO might be able to buy another $20 million yacht or another private jet, while workers and their children can't afford the drugs the oncologist prescribed. It's not just that they have so much while others have so little. It's that they are never satisfied, and getting more, always more, requires them to take away the very little those others have.

Read the orginal story here: Poisoned trees

Read about another pollutors' triumph here: Court supports pollution

Update: Here is a long article fromVanity Fair.

 

A Question Answered

You may have noticed Magadonians saying things like, "I don't care if trump is a pedophile who sells nuclear secrets to to Russia, I'm still gonna vote for him because it'll make libruls cry."

They have many variations on that theme, but it all boils down to, "It's okay if trump ruins the country, because that will ruin the lives of those nasty liberals, and that will make me happy." They may or may not realize that if trump ruins people's lives, their lives will be among the ruined, but they don't care. Their hatred of "the left" is so powerful, they will give anything, risk anything, sacrifice their grandchildren if necessary, just to punish liberals for existing.

And that is the answer to the question, "Why do they vote against their own best interests?" They do it because it's against your best interests, too.

 

Real Life

My high school friend Colleen sometimes imagined that, if her mother, Maggie, had married a different man, she (Colleen) would have had a better life.

I thought that if Maggie had married someone else, Colleen would not exist.

Maggie grew up in a small town in Ireland, and told Colleen many nostalgic stories of her youth. There had been a charming boy who used to walk her home from school, even though, as she later realized, it was two miles out of his way. Colleen saw that boy (Davy) as her potential father. Young Maggie had had other ideas. As soon as she could, she sailed to New York, where she met and married the handsome sailor who eventually became Colleen's father.

Born when her parents had been married nearly twenty years and her mother was turning forty, Colleen often suspected she wan't really a wanted child. She dreamed of a livelier existence in Ireland, perhaps with playful siblings, and a dad who didn't spend so much time sitting in his easy chair, reading the paper, while the grandfather clock ticked away the days. Her name would be Kate.

If that alternate universe existed, I imagine Davy spent his evenings at the pub while Maggie sat at home, listening to the clock tick. Colleen/Kate would have found small-town life as stifling as her mother had and she, too, would have escaped.

In the current universe, Colleen and I were roommates for a while after high school, but we had too many differences, and we soon parted. She moved from California to Oregon to Florida to New York. I don't know whether she ever found what she was looking for. She never married. In her fifties, she finally changed her name, but not to Kate. She became Eileen, and took her mother's maiden name. At fifty-five, she died of a heart attack.

 

A Free President

If the Supreme Court decides that Presidents and ex-Presidents have full immunity for any crimes committed while in office, it would lead to some exciting scenarios.

Imagine a vengeance-crazed chief executive, racing through the White House corridors with a deer rifle, hunting down terrified staff members and visiting Senators. Later, the President boldly robs Fort Knox, loading a stolen limo with gold bars. When the limo driver hesitates, the President shoots him and forces one of the Mint Police to drive.

On low-crime days, he just jaywalks, sprays graffiti on the Lincoln Memorial, and orders fast food without paying.

 

More Teachers With Guns

I've written about teachers and guns before, but it's a topic that just won't go away. As Tennessee passed a law allowing teachers to carry concealed weapons on campus, people on social media reacted:

At my university, there was a math professor who got fired after repeatedly urinating on another math professor's office door. I can only imagine the scenario if the two of them had guns.

On another occasion, there was a student in one of my classes who got very angry at the professor, and they started arguing. The student was a tall, muscular young man; Prof was middle aged and flabby. Student was intimidating, looming over Prof and getting really loud. Prof stood his ground, but from my front row seat, I could see he was afraid. I hate to think what would have happened if Prof was armed and felt the need to defend himself, or if Student was armed and felt the need to eliminate what he sincerely saw as someone treating him wrong. Fortunately, the confrontation ended peacefully when another student intervened verbally, inspiring the angry student to leave the room.

Finding the Perfect Soulmate

Not long ago I read an article by a young man who had been amazed when he learned that many people from his grandparents' generation had simply chosen spouses who lived nearby, rather than conducting extensive searches for ideal soulmates.

The author of the article was convinced that these old folks had missed out on something important. Nearly everyone he knew was using dating apps to seek the perfect mate, and they were willing to spend a lot of time and travel great distances to find exactly the right person.

Rather than "settle" for the cute girl who just happened to live next door, these guys had very specific lists of what they wanted. Details were important. For example, the profile of a beautiful young woman with an impressive list of interesting and desirable attributes was quickly rejected just because she was a fan of the wrong baseball team.

The sense I got from this article and from others I have read is that many people think they can find true love only with someone whose personality is a near-clone of themselves. The ideal partners will not only have a similar sense of humor, but will have identical taste in food, art, music, and sports. From the very beginning, they'll be able to finish each other's sentences. There will be no disagreement, no disappointment, no discontent, because they will always be on the same page.

It is pretty exciting to discover that both of you can quote all the dialogue from The Princess Bride, take your coffee with triple soy milk and no sugar, enjoy mountain biking, want a pet iguana, have a secret crush on Edith Piaf, and hate green Skittles. And when you both spontaneously recite the same quote from the Dalai Lama at the same time, there is a spark, and the deal is sealed. Nobody else in the world could be such a perfect match. It's destiny.

Five, ten, fifteen years later, it's not unusual for those magical soulmates to find themselves no longer on the same page. One of them spends too much money on useless junk. The other one is a tightwad. They can't agree on whether to have another baby. One of them is lazy, and the other is a control freak. Somebody spends too many nights working late. Somebody gets drunk at parties and flirts. One of them screams a lot, and the other refuses to talk. Neither one can understand how someone who once seemed so perfect turned into this unpleasant stranger. They both want out.

In the meantime, the old guy who married the girl next door has been happily married for sixty years.

Grandpa didn't choose that girl just because she happened to be conveniently close - although that helped. Their families knew each other; they'd lived in the same neighborhood for years, maybe for more than one generation. He and she went to the same schools, knew the same friends, watched each other grow up. He knew who she was before their first date.

Maybe her favorite color was purple and his was green. Maybe she liked chocolate and he preferred butterscotch. The details didn't matter. What mattered was that they shared the same basic values.

Her ice cream preference wasn't important. What was important was that she was kind-hearted and honest. The music he played on the car radio was trivial. What mattered was that he worked hard and she could trust him. They forged a powerful bond, not by seeing the same movie ten times, but by holding hands all night as they watched over their sick baby.

They cared about their kids, and about each other's families. They had plans for the future. They could talk to each other about what was on their minds. Sometimes they argued, but they always made up. They had a few ongoing disagreements, but nothing that kept them from working together to build a life that meant something to both of them.

They might not have thought of themselves as soulmates. But over time, that is what they became.

_{reposted by permission}

 

Your Children's Future Health Care

Imagine that you're in your seventh or eighth month of pregnancy and you go into labor. It's frightening, because you know this is too soon.

You rush to the hospital. Fortunately, you don't live in a neglected rural area where there are no hospitals and you're lucky enough to get there on a day when they aren't overcrowded, at a time when the nurses aren't in the middle of a shift change, on a day that's not a holiday. You get seen right away by the best obstetrical team in the region. Your baby is born very prematurely, weighing less than two pounds. She's alive!

Your tiny child is given the best available treatment, and spends many weeks in the NICU. There are several close calls, but the great doctors and nurses are heroic, and your baby survives, despite being very weak and sick. Finally, she's strong enough to come home. You have a long list of special instructions for her care and feeding. Fortunately, there are no major emergencies. The hospital expenses were huge, but you were lucky enough to have a good health plan that covered almost everything.

As time goes by, your daughter still has some health issues, but she keeps getting stronger, and by the time she is ten years old, you would never guess she was a preemie. One day when she's 15, she falls off her bike and breaks her leg. This is a fairly normal problem, so you are shocked when your health plan refuses to pay for her treatment, because she has reached her "lifetime limit". It's not easy, but you manage to pay the bill.

You start looking around for a new health care plan, but you find out that your daughter can't get coverage because she has "pre-existing conditions."

"Wait a minute," you say, "I thought pre-existing conditions don't matter because of the Affordable Care Act."

The insurance agent replies, "Don't you remember? The ACA was repealed by the Republican majority in Congress back in 2028, right after the Supreme Court installed trump as President For Life. We can now exclude anyone who's ever been sick. In fact, we are about to declare that being female is a pre-existing condition. Your daughter will never have health care coverage. Even if she somehow lives to be 85 - the new retirement age - she won't be eligible for Medicare, since it was privatized and operates under our rules. Sorry." He's not sorry.

 

What is Contraception?

“Conception,” as it relates to pregnancy, is not a medical term. It has become customary to use this term to refer to fertilization, the coming together of egg and sperm. Some people use “conception” to mean the beginning of a pregnancy.

Fertilization by itself does not constitute pregnancy. For a pregnancy to exist, the fertilized egg must implant itself in the lining of the uterus. It is not unusual for fertilized eggs to pass out of a woman’s body without implanting.

Contraception is any method that is used to prevent pregnancy. Contraception is sometimes referred to as “birth control”. Some well-known contraceptives are condoms and birth control pills.

Barrier methods of contraception prevent the sperm from reaching the egg, so fertilization cannot occur. These include condoms, diaphragms, cervical caps, sponges, and spermicides.

Hormonal methods of contraception use medication to prevent ovulation. That means that they stop eggs from being released. These include pills, injections, patches, and implants.

An intrauterine device (typically called an IUD) is a device that is placed inside the uterus. IUDs use hormones or copper to prevent sperm from fertilizing eggs.

Emergency contraception, sometimes called “the morning after pill”, can be used after unprotected sex has occurred. This is a hormonal method that delays or prevents ovulation: no egg is released. Some people confuse emergency contraception with abortion, but they are not the same. An “abortion pill” is used to end a pregnancy, whereas emergency contraception prevents pregnancy. They are NOT the same medication.

Behavioral methods of birth control include “withdrawal,” whereby the man withdraws his penis from the vagina before ejaculation; and “fertility awareness,” also known as the “rhythm method,” whereby a couple attempts to avoid intercourse during the days the woman is most likely to be fertile.

Sterilization is a permanent form of contraception, that removes a person’s ability to produce a pregnancy. Methods of sterilization include vasectomy for men and tubal ligation (sometimes called “tying the tubes”) for women. In some cases, these methods can be surgically reversed. A woman who has undergone hysterectomy (removal of the uterus) cannot get pregnant. This is not reversible.

Note that there are some additional methods of contraception not mentioned here. See the links at the end for more detailed information.

Abortion is not a method of contraception. Abortion ends an existing pregnancy, whereas contraception prevents pregnancy.

Some people believe that it is wrong for women to engage in sexual intercourse for pleasure or love, but that they should have sex only for the purpose of getting pregnant. These people oppose the use of contraception, and advise women to remain celibate if they don’t want pregnancy. Thousands of years of human history demonstrate that this is an unrealistic idea.

Article from Medical News Today explaining conception: https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/conception

Article from Cleveland Clinic explaining birth control: https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/articles/11427-birth-control-options

Article from WebMD on the history of contraception: https://www.webmd.com/sex/birth-control/ss/slideshow-birth-control-history

Article from History on reproductive rights in the U.S.: https://www.history.com/news/reproductive-rights-timeline

 

Freedom?

I grew up in a region known for being politically and socially conservative. The churches displayed American flags inside the sanctuary. We pledged allegiance in school every morning. People talked a lot about patriotism and freedom, especially freedom as in, "America, land of the free." Freedom meant that we could choose any religion (or no religion), that we could read (or write) any books we wanted, that we could listen to (or perform) the music we liked, and enjoy (or create) whatever artworks we chose. It meant we were free to choose where to live, whether or not to marry, how many children to have (including none), what kind of career to pursue, what clothes to wear, what food to eat, etc.

A saying that was popular in that time and place was, "Your freedom to swing your fist ends where my nose begins," meaning that we were free to do what we wanted, as long as we didn't interfere with someone else's freedom to do what they wanted. We were taught to "tolerate" the existence of other religions and people whose way of thinking or way of living was different from ours. "Freedom" was a concept that applied to everyone.

Today, those ideas seem to have changed within the "conservative" community. Many people now define freedom as not tolerating those who are different They seem to believe that the existence of someone whose beliefs or choices are different is an affront to their own beliefs and choices. They want to swing their not-always-metaphorical fists squarely into the noses of those whose very being offends them. They will not feel free until everyone else complies.