Even the smallest owls have to stay fierce!

It was hard to post today, but I told myself that I still wanted to try to give you guys what I could, so I put up some of the best I had in my stash of posts.

I try to keep politics out of it, but as I focus on habitat preservation and animal protections, it’s hard to stay totally out of it.

I do have stuff ready to start Owl of the Year. I was going to do a preliminary round this week, but I’m going to let people deal with their emotions for a couple days, I think.

To anyone feeling nervous by the results, know I care about of all you guys, and most of the people I love are potentially affected as well. Anyone who cares about nature is always welcome to come and enjoy the owls with me.

Stand on Zanzibar (1968) is set in 2010, at a time when population pressure has led to widening social divisions and political extremism. Despite the threat of terrorism, U.S. corporations like General Technics are booming, thanks to a supercomputer named Shalmaneser. China is America’s new rival. Europe has united. Brunner also foresees affirmative action, genetic engineering, Viagra, Detroit’s collapse, satellite TV, in-flight video, gay marriage, laser printing, electric cars, the de-criminalization of marijuana, and the decline of tobacco. There is even a progressive president (albeit of Beninia, not America) named “Obomi”.

Have we ruled him out as a time traveler? 😆

I’ll have to add this to my reading list. Thanks!

I had him in my mind writing my original comment. I don’t know much about him before the war, but he seems to be doing admirable if anyone had concerns at his election.

It’s fun to turn back the clock and read old news:

BBC: Ukrainian comedian Volodymyr Zelensky has scored a landslide victory in the country’s presidential election. 22 APR 2019

“I will never let you down,” Mr Zelensky told celebrating supporters.

Russia says it wants him to show “sound judgement”, “honesty” and “pragmatism” so that relations can improve. Russia backs separatists in eastern Ukraine.

Mr Poroshenko, who admitted defeat after the first exit polls were published, has said he will not be leaving politics.

He told voters that Mr Zelensky, 41, was too inexperienced to stand up to Russia effectively.

Mr Zelensky starred in the long-running satirical drama Servant of the People in which his character accidentally becomes Ukraine’s president.

He plays a teacher who is elected after his expletive-laden rant about corruption goes viral on social media.

He ran under a political party with the same name as his show.

With no previous political experience, Mr Zelensky’s campaign focused on his difference to the other candidates rather than on any concrete policy ideas.

NPR: Comedian Wins Ukrainian Presidency In Landslide 22 APR 2019

“What’s amazing is that despite Zelenskiy being a household name, people don’t really know what he stands for,” NPR’s Moscow correspondent Lucian Kim told Morning Edition. “During the election campaign, he was very vague about his positions, and in that way he really became a blank slate for people to project whatever they wanted on him.” The fact that voters chose Zelenskiy shows how desperate people are, Kim said.

But Ukraine’s outgoing president cautioned that the Kremlin is celebrating the election of an inexperienced candidate. Russia believes that “Ukraine could be quickly returned to Russia’s orbit of influence,” Poroshenko said on Twitter.

According to The New York Times, many voters said they had supported Zelenskiy “not so much because they thought he was a good candidate but because they wanted to punish Mr. Poroshenko for deflating the hopes raised by Ukraine’s 2014 revolution and for doing little to combat corruption.”

The Washington Post notes that Zelenskiy is just the latest comedian to win public office in elections around the world. In Guatemala, the former comic actor Jimmy Morales won the presidency on an anti-corruption platform with the slogan, “Not corrupt, not a thief.” In Iceland, comedian Jón Gnarr ran for mayor as a joke candidate and won, serving one term before he stepped down in 2014. And in the U.S., Saturday Night Live comedian Al Franken became a senator from Minnesota.

Maybe laughter and self-reflection is what the world needs right now. The comedians seem to be picking things up when everyone else is dropping the ball.

Wow, that was a ride! I read the Wikipedia synopsis and saw there was a documentary made about it with Orson Wells as the narrator and it was on Youtube and only about 40 minutes, so I checked it out. The intro was so trippy, with brash visuals and loud, violent sound effects combined with a generic John Carpenter synth soundtrack. It was like a deleted scene from Clockwork Orange!

I don’t know how much the content differs from the book, but it was a nice insight to my parent’s generation and their feelings to the future, or our now I suppose. It was somewhat eye-opening hearing them talk about built by number babies and cloning years before the first IVF baby was born, and things like an interview with a polyamorous couple. The idea of things like changing race at will is still somewhat crazy, but I guess one could carry thing over to confusion about gender fluidity.

It was a crazy mix of 'Member Berries, Old Man Yells at Cloud, but also with some empathy one can actually relate to less mentally flexible people experiencing the titular Future Shock. Where I lose a bit of that sympathy though is in reading the Wiki entry on Toffler himself, it quotes him:

“Society needs people who take care of the elderly and who know how to be compassionate and honest,” he said. “Society needs people who work in hospitals. Society needs all kinds of skills that are not just cognitive; they’re emotional, they’re affectional. You can’t run the society on data and computers alone.”

I got to spend a lot of time with all 4 of my grandparents from the Greatest Generation. To varying degrees, all seemed to eventually accept, if not embrace the modern times of race equality and even bits of homosexuality. None used computers or much advanced tech, but they didn’t seem to begrudge it either. I certainly never heard them complain about too much electric lighting, air conditioning, or running water.

My parent’s generation, the Boomers, seem to be going kicking and screaming into the future though. My mom was, and still at heart is a hippie, so she does not have these issues for the most part. My dad and all his friends though seem deeply upset we are not in 1970 anymore. If they didn’t have it then, they don’t need it now. There seems to be no desire to learn, or to accept new things or ways of seeing the world.

Perhaps life has sped up faster than our minds have changed to handle that. Those rooted in tradition perhaps had more time to adapt in the past. But I don’t think my generation has just turned our backs on our parents. They just do not seem to be accepting the embrace we are offering, and I don’t know if we can make them.

It’s definitely a deeper topic to continue to explorer that can go far deeper than writing it off with an “OK, Boomer,” but it’s an unfortunate circumstance when you reach out a hand to someone you care about and they just smack it away. My immediate family is not close for a number of reasons, and as they age, I fear how tense things will get whenever the point arrives where they are forced to start relinquishing some control to my brother and me.

The fact this isn’t localized to the US is the part that has me sweating. We’ve moved on from a lot of terrible things in America’s past, but with so many countries experiencing much the same thing at once, I don’t know where we find the good influence in the world.

I hope this will end up being a great wake up to the responsibilities of democracy, but I’ll probably be long gone before the ripples of the event of Bush v Gore are done shaking the system. It’s going to take a long time to clean things up even if we start tomorrow since the power hungry have gotten away with so much up until this point.

Scary to think that in the future, some parts of the country may talk about the 2020 election the same way they do about “The War of Northern Agression.”

I thought it was touching where he discussed his worries about using his last opportunity to speak before the election, and that he could be left wondering if there was something else that he could have said to change the outcome if it ends up going bad. I imagine there has to be a good bit of pressure when you have such a large platform.

For a show that points out so many wrongs with our country, it’s easy to look at things negatively. But for now, at least, we are able to point out those wrongs and still have a hope we can do something about them. Not even 5 years a citizen, I imagine it could be scary as well that if a re-elected Trump goes for a type of “media reform,” Oliver is likely going to be high on the list of people to be looked at.

I hope tomorrow goes well for America. I’ve been disappointed the last few elections that the comedians have been more critical than the mainstream journalists, but right now, I’m glad we’ve had them if nothing else, motivating us to still be our best.

Oh totally, it’s like, we got your actual vote right here!

I live here and replied to this post you linked. The TL;DR of the comment there is:

I do feel the lawsuit is valid, but the delays he’s complaining are caused by Republican efforts to make early/mail-in voting harder during COVID when they didn’t want people to easily vote in a hurry. Now that they do, they’re mad they got what they wanted.

It’s just more of them trying to “prove the system doesn’t work,” and the main proof they have is the stuff they themselves broke.

They’re anti-education for a reason…

Yup, same nonsense as when they sabotage the Post Office and talk about how that doesn’t work. The votes against immigration reform and then the yelling about that not working. Won’t cut spending or raise taxes but complain about deficit spending.

They want you to want to throw out our current system so they can replace it. That’s why it’s important to understand the right people to be mad at. If you get mad at anyone other than them themselves, they win.

Rest easy now, friend. The battle is over.

From The Guardian:

The queues for late mail ballots were a result of Pennsylvania not having an early on-site voting system at designated spots, as is the case in some other states. Instead, voters can apply for ballots on demand at election offices before filling them out and submitting them on the spot, a procedure that takes about 10 minutes.

The flood of late applicants overwhelmed electoral workers in Bucks county’s administration building in Doylestown, leading to a long queue, which was cut off at about 2.45pm on Tuesday

I went to drop off my ballot on Saturday and when I got there, not to the main office in Doylestown, but one of the smaller remote offices, and there was a huge line all the way across the front of the building and I was wondering what the heck was going on.

As I was getting to the end of the line, a person came over and asked if I already had my ballot, and when they saw it, they said I could go right in and drop it off. There was only one couple ahead of me there.

I had been wondering what the line was for, and now that makes sense. The Republicans had made the mail in ballot more complicated than necessary during COVID, so now they seem to feel it biting them as their potential supporters have been screwed by it.

“Democrat election officials are seeing our numbers. They’re seeing our turnout. They are seeing us breaking early vote records across Pennsylvania,” he said. “They are terrified. And they want to stop our momentum. We are not going to let them suppress our votes.”

Pennsylvania does not start counting votes before election day. Nobody has any clue as to who is voting for whom.

They’ve broken the system and want to say “look at this broken system, we can’t trust it!” To me that just shows we can’t trust you!

I really hope Pennsylvanians do the right thing. These people need to be stopped.

Well, he is talking about the Alien Enemies Act as an immediate action on taking power. There’s only really one way to round up what he’s saying are millions of people at once, and it’s what the Alien Enemies Act was last used for, setting up concentration camps.

I reeeeeeally try to stay hopeful most of his supporters are ignorant of what they’re going along with, or we are in serious trouble as a nation no matter who wins.

That would be amazing! No need for 2% to be the end goal instead of just a good start. A good government serves all its citizens, not just the ones with big bank accounts.

I know 2% is fairly laughable when we’re talking normal people money, but this is 20 million per 1 billion.

when simply considering the 10 biggest fortunes in France, the tax would bring in no less than €13bn for the state.

A country can do a decent bit of good for people with 13 billion.

Agree with you wholeheartedly!

While it wouldn’t have been policy, with the spoils system still remaining, plus what all rich people get away with at any point in history, I feel there still would have been some choice bits taken for the North, but if it was given to all now free Southerners, I would hope civil rights and racial equality would be decades ahead of where we are now.

The only counterpoint is that while Germany was punished pretty hard after 2 wars, they are still more far right than I think many would hope in even less time than we are now from the US Civil War…

Using genealogist-verified historical data and financial data from annual congressional disclosures, we examined members of the 117th Congress, which was in session from January 2021 to January 2023.

Of its 535 members, 100 were descendants of slaveholders, including Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Republican Sen. Mitch McConnell.

Legislators whose ancestors were large slaveholders – defined in our study as owning 16 or more slaves– have a current median net worth five times larger than their peers whose ancestors were not slaveholders: $5.6 million vs. $1.1 million. These results remained largely the same after accounting for age, race and education.

Wealth, these studies find, often stays within rich families across multiple generations. Mechanisms for holding onto wealth include low estate taxes and access to elite social networks and schools. Easy entry into powerful jobs and political influence also play a part.

But members of Congress do not just inherit wealth and advantages.

They shape the lives of all Americans. They decide how to allocate federal funds, set tax rates and create regulations.

This power is significant. And for those whose families benefited from slavery, it can perpetuate economic policies that maintain wealth inequality.

Beyond inherited wealth, the legacy of slavery endures in policies enacted by those in power – by legislators who may be less likely to prioritize reforms that challenge the status quo.

I’m curious the ratio of those who have had former family members that have been politicians to those that are actually political outsiders. This article points out that the status quo is less of what society as a whole wants, but rather more what a select group of families has felt has worked for them to stay in that upper echelon.

If the South has been forced to give everything up after the war, I don’t know if it would have been any better as far as if rich Northerners actually would have just bled off the best spoils of war and still left the South impoverished, but leaving the aristocracy get away with playing things like it never happened does not seem to have been the best choice either.

It would be interesting to see where things would be if all that wealth and land was divided up between all southerners of all races evenly, and those who lead the Confederacy had been punished. I feel many of today’s problems stem from the North turning the other cheek to the defeated South.