The frustrating thing is that Trump didn’t even get more votes this election than he did last election. There wasn’t a bunch of new Trump voters that came out of the woodwork and turned the tide. He was absolutely beatable. He only won because 15 million of the people who voted for Biden last election just didn’t bother this time.

And also objecting to Tom Morello making a political statement as if he wasn’t an honors graduate in Political Science from Harvard University.

In my state (Colorado) early voting works exactly like regular voting, just, you know, earlier. Registered voters get their ballots automatically sent to them in the mail. You can return your ballot by mail, drop it off at an official drop box, drop it off at a voting location, or you can show up at one of the early voting locations in your county and vote in person the traditional way if you prefer that. Right now in my county there are six locations where you can do in-person early voting. There will be orders of magnitude more in-person voting locations open on the day of the election, but I think most people choose return their ballots by mail or drop box.

Every voting/counting location is staffed with a bipartisan team of election judges, and election observers. I believe the locations are run by paid county officials, but largely staffed by volunteers who have completed a training program. I’ve never heard of there being a shortage of volunteers

The voting drop boxes are big reinforced steel boxes which are securely anchored into concrete. You would need some seriously heavy duty cutting tools to get one open without the key. They are placed in front of city offices like City Hall, the Department of Motor Vehicles, or the city library. They’re usually in open high traffic areas, and are under 24/7 video surveillance. I believe they’re also emptied multiple times per day. I wouldn’t say they’re impossible to tamper with, but it would be extremely difficult to do so and get away with it. To my knowledge, so far nobody has tried. I’m not actually sure what it would really accomplish. I guess you could destroy ballots, but stuffing one with counterfeit ballots would probably be caught almost immediately.

There’s a pretty robust system in place to track who has cast a ballot, how, when, and where. If multiple ballots show up in the name of the same voter, that gets automatically flagged and triggers a fraud investigation. Also there’s signature verification system. Every ballot that’s returned by mail or drop box must be returned in its security envelope, which has the name of the voter and several unique QR and bar codes containing information tying that envelope to that specific voter. This envelope must be signed by the voter for the ballot to be counted. If the signature on the security envelope doesn’t match the signature on file, the ballot gets flagged for investigation, and doesn’t get counted until the voter can be contacted to verify it was them casting the ballot and not someone pretending to be them. Voter fraud is really pretty rare here, but it’s taken very seriously, and gets seriously investigated. When it does happen it’s usually someone trying to cast the ballot of a deceased spouse, or family member, and even that usually gets caught.

There are a lot of safeguards and redundancies in place here that make getting away with voter fraud extremely difficult, but lot of the reason why our system works as well as it does is that people genuinely care about their votes being fairly counted and so are willing to staff and fund the offices who investigate voting irregularities. Our voting system is considered kind of the gold standard for the United States, and I’m lucky to live in a place that has that. Voting systems in other parts of the US are unfortunately not run with the same vigilance or sense of equity.

According to the caption under the picture, it’s Emily Blunt…

I don’t know if they officially count as grindhouse, but when I was a kid I loved a ton of the B-grade action movies that the Cannon Film Group put out in the 1980s. American Ninja, Delta Force, Cobra, Bloodsport, the Death Wish movies, Enter the Ninja, Revenge of the Ninja, etc. And, of course, the greatest ninja movie ever made:

Ninja III: The Domination.

Just gonna leave this here.

I keep getting served some supremely mediocre eastern European hip-hop in Release Radar and other Spotify-generated playlists because of some guy who performs as Devo. Same with guys performing as Slayer, Poe, etc.

A lot of the time they’re listed on the track along with two or three other people, so I go to the pages of those associated acts and tap the “don’t play this artist” option in the three dots menu, and that usually cuts down on how much I see them in my feeds. At least until they do a new collab.

And while we’re on the subject, if Spotify could also stop lumping several artists of the same name together on the same profile, that’d be great. There’s an old surf-rock band called the Astronauts that I listen to sometimes, and at one point there were albums from at least four different bands included on their discography page. There’s still at least two.

Sounds like someone is trying to immanentize the eschaton.

Given Tesla’s usual build quality I feel like it’s pretty much inevitable that there are going to be an enormous amount of skull and limb injuries from those gullwing doors.

Because they still have guns in Star Trek, and Spock and his crewmates carry them all the time? Those TOS phaser pistols don’t even have trigger guards, so it’d be logical to think trigger discipline would still be a thing.

Maybe you need something like a motorized tie rack.

Patriot cells.

Hitchhiker’s guide to the Galaxy. Both the books and the radio shows.

Boss makes a dollar, I make a dime

That’s why I poop on company time

You should watch the actual Only Connect show (a lot of them are up on YouTube). It’s absolutely bonkers what some of the players are able to figure out. You’ll be like, who are these people, and what laboratory were they grown in? How the fuck did they get that? But after you watch enough episodes you actually start to get the hang of it and start solving them yourself. A lot of the time just knowing that there’s definitely a connection is more of a clue than you might think at first.

If we’re going to be running minor celebrities for the Irish presidency, the only real choice is Blindboy Boatclub.

He’s taken many too many blows to the head. Listen to interviews with him early in his career and compare them to his interviews now. The level of brain damage he’s endured is pretty obvious.

Did the mushroom learn to control a robot, or did the scientists figure out how to connect a robot to a mushroom in such a way as to make the regular processes happening inside the mushroom trigger a set of robot legs? Because the article makes it seem like the mushroom is intelligent and has agency, and was thus far only lacking the proper robot body in order to express that; but the video makes it look like the legs were all pumping in unison, and the resulting movement was more or less coincidental.

The thing that’s going to stick with me forever about this conflict is the accounts from the doctors working in Gaza describing all the small children who died from a single rifle shot to the head or heart. I just can’t imagine what has to die inside of you before you can sit behind a rifle scope, specifically pick out a child, and then murder them for funsies.