Did - Lived abroad. Cheap, fun, good healthcare/dental, great new foods
Acquired - electric toothbrush, immediate halt of dental decay
Blech, always hate it when anyone has to morph a taxxon.
Also hate being confronted with tobias' torturer.
Probably not as much as Tobias does, though.
Great inside cover!
Exact same games for me, I started with dead cells and a hundred hours in was like well I guess I do like roguelites after all, Even though I had always thought I didn't.
And then I played Hades and was absolutely blown away, I love the stories inside and the action.
Boy, if you're considering hollow knight, you will have zero regrets, it's so fun and so eerie.
Soulslikes still make me yawn in comparison, dead souls 1, 2 and elden ring.
Maybe one day
Scavengers Reign, very creative sci-fi
That's a vaguely optimistic way to think about civil war, but I'm doubtful that
people perpetually scared enough to find owning guns in urban environments necessary are going to disagree with the fear-mongering rhetoric a president-king invokes.
owning guns translates into any sort of effective resistance
it was worth killing children and civilians for decades in the hopes of an eventual opportunity to fight something
civilians with their own guns won't be choosing their own targets
a sliver of power finally used to destroy a country is more important than the peaceful maintenance of representative democracy.
Mass executions being "barely in" the scope of presidential immunity means that even by your interpretation, mass executions are covered by Presidential immunity
Individual interpretation is the problem.
The president thinks to themselves "yea, that's barely in" and then it's official and covered.
Political suicide? Could be. Maybe not.
At the least, mass executions will be part of the official US presidential record. If they are carried out those people are dead and civil erupts, and if they aren't the president is immune and the person(s) who disobeyed him is subject to execution for treason.
Say the president signs an executive order explicitly stating that any act is considered a presidential duty during the day in which a president conducts a minimum of one official act.
Then literally everything is official no matter what.
Although that's unnecessary with how the supreme Court has defended official presidential immunity:
On page 30-31 of the SC decision, the supreme Court makes it known that because they have decided the US president is entitled to immunity and specifically cannot "be held criminally liable" for "certain official acts"(interpreted however broadly one would like), examining an unofficial act related to an official act, like legally examining whether or not dumps knew inciting a violent coup was illegal, "would permit a prosecutor to do indirectly what he cannot do directly- invite the jury to examine acts for which a president is immune from prosecution"
This means that any unofficial part of any official conduct, both interpreted however you see fit, cannot be legally scrutinized as scrutiny of an "unofficial act" could result in the legal scrutiny of an "official act" for which the supreme Court has decided there can be no legal scrutiny or prosecution anymore.
So, "hey, drowning that bag of puppies doesn't seem very official".
"Yea, too bad we can't do anything about it since he has to sign a bill into law this afternoon".
Yyyup.
Even when dumps was elected or roe was overturned, I was very disappointed but rationalized that voting could turn it around, even with a crappy voting system like the US has.
But granting absolute legal immunity to the most powerful branch of government is so broad and so reckless that I no longer clearly recognize any more safeguards on what can happen overnight to the US government.
Counterargument: The US dollar hasn't budged since the ruling, so for some reason nobody else is worried yet.
I don't really understand that.
Unofficial duties especially are not discreetly outlined or prohibited, so anything the US president does during an official act becomes an official act That cannot be legally scrutinized or prosecuted.
The president is commander-in-chief of the US military.
So ordering the US Navy to bomb Seattle is an official, legal act.
The president receives ambassadors. If they decide to shoot someone while waiting for an ambassador to arrive, or set a wildfire in a field of horses while on a "brainstorming jog" for that meeting, that shooting or arson is part of their official duty.
The State of the Union is an official act, so the president burning the flag while garroting an orphan on national television is now an official, legal act immune from legal liability.
Presidential polls are absurd propaganda at this point, and I guess you're referring to the same two clips fox news hasn't stopped running since the debate rather than to his obvious first term track record of "being old and still reliably and actively passing progressive legislation".
He already won against trump, he regularly passes progressives legislation, you vote for Biden and get Harris anyway if you want a backup.
I can't imagine how abandoning a proven candidate who beat trump before inspires political confidence if you haven't been successfully manipulated to trust in the reliability of conservative media instead of years of reality.
Replacing the major candidate who already passed significant democratic legislation for 4 years is unlikely to result in greater Democratic faith or voter galvanization.
Harris certainly does not have that kind of momentum or support.
Any sort of candidate scramble now is all but forfeiting the 2024 election to trump.
Democrats already functionally control the Senate and have for biden's four presidential years; I can't see how nervously replacing Biden wins them any more seats, even optimistically.
That said, by the numbers, keeping the house majority and packing the court is more likely than a complete constitutional rewrite, a strategy I used as an example to show just how bleak the chance of restoring the us balance of executive power is.
Two salient points:
This has not already happened in Russia.
In Russia, Vladimir Putin does not legally have absolute immunity.
China would have been a better example, since the Communist party is above the law and xi did abolish term limits for himself.
In the US, a president could not pardon themselves for state crimes, and the president murdering someone would have been a prosecutable state crime until this decision.
Not so anymore.
Is this one a "yikes" for everybody?
Maybe they just needed a break from a book every month for five years.
spoiler
Marco's heart exploding, or being exploded, is pretty harrowing, but the helmacrons combined with the trope theme is impossible not to roll my eyes at.
I still like the animorphs themselves within the story and I like Marco's initiative, but this book is odd and somewhat unsatisfying.
Maybe they needed some breathing room to get ready for the final run.
Great point.
We've passed the point that everything "could be on the table", everything is on the table as of that ruling.
Biden is right now absolutely unfettered by the Constitution, amendments, federal and state laws, according to the supreme Court.
Biden immediately made it clear that no American was above the law, but right now he is above the law and choosing not to take advantage of the now unrestricted power of his office.
Not likely to be a tradition in future presidents.
I have one from a band called Massie that says "you work hard, I'll be sexy".
Makes me laugh every time.
I also have a t-shirt with a purple teddy bear under a paragraph of text telling a nihilist horror story in broken english about that teddy bear as if he were a real person.
Both winners.
I owned most of these books and this was one of the ones I reread the most because of how poetic so many difficult personal struggles and fears are faced and worked through so rapid fire, it's pretty overwhelming without being trite.
This book ends perfectly,
Title
the simple act of asking Cassie if she was okay when he didn't ask her like he should have the day before.
I cannot remember the first time I read this series, but I can't imagine thinking anything other than "ah, The power of friendship!"
Which upon this reread is hilarious given how clearly the authors wanted to portray a gay couple in 2000, which wasn't done often in a series fronted by a major publisher.
spoiler
This time, I was like "oh right, the andalites living together, and then I was inundated with the hunts of gardening, super fitness, pink furniture, shunned by society, debilitating incurable illness, cared for by "best friend", androgynes, and especially the poetic language of how the became friends, they were both pilots and their wings tangled together and they crashed to the ground together.
Pretty awesome that when so other few authors were willing to have gay characters, especially in a young adults series, ka and grant went full bore and even named this title "the other".
I always thought the "Marco" being bi what sort of and unsupported gimme afterthought, but they already had an unmistakably gay couple having badass adventures.
I wonder if they made them both pilots because of top gun?
And this title is not merely a showcase of queer culture, the story is as developed and well told as any of the other books, and of course more so than some of them.
I find the thought-speak across great distances very interesting, how visser 3 doesn't want anything to do with either of them because of andalite culture treating difference as an embarrassment, and also how ax is very openly hostile toward both of them.
It's another good book!
spoiler
It is very creepy when the ant begins turning Cassie, but it's downright horrifying when the Buffalo begins to learn how to speak while it's morphed into chapman.
That is so yikes that it makes perfect sense. They have to fry him at the end.
Yikes.
They really get at some horror here.
Credit to "no banana" for the image and Hobbes_Dent for the title.
Zero credit to me for doomscroll.
Ax gets a big ol' crush on
spoiler
A genocidal sort of asshole.
Still, the heart wants what it wants.
This is a great book, testing ax's loyalty again.
A very good example of people insisting they're doing some necessary thing for the greater good by becoming the thing they're fighting against.
The characters and their Dynamics were very interesting in this book, non-stop action.
Elden ring yawwwwn.
It's beautiful, and it seems like an interesting world, but learning exactly how to dodgerollattack for every enemy with deliberately delayed reflexes is not my kinda fun.