The spotted owls had long known of the impending demolition of Earth and had made many attempts to alert mankind to the danger…The last ever message was misinterpreted as a surprisingly sophisticated attempt to hoot “The Star-Spangled Banner”, but in fact the message was this: “So Long, and Thanks for All the Mice.”

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.

Somewhere between suburban and rural Pennsylvania here. I think it was about 2 hours the time voted for Obama’s second term. Another presidential election was about an hour. Presidental elections have lines outside of work hours because nobody gets off to vote. Non-presidential elections are a few minutes to maybe a half hour tops.

I’m so glad they didn’t get rid of early voting after COVID, but I wish the drop boxes were around for more than a few hours on 2 weekends. I like dropping it off rather than trusting the mail, but they’re only open 8-5 on weekdays and 10-2 on the last 2 weekends.

These are the same people that kept asking what do we have to worry about if we have nothing to hide during all the Patriot Act renewals and other monitoring and privacy violating bills, right? I just want to make sure… 🤨

Not everyone can pull off the Edna look.

Intensity is a good word to describe that element. I feel the show is willing to bump off characters, but 2 of the leads have survived too many close calls and it lowers the stakes a good bit.

The individual that showed up with the surprise faction really threw a wrench into things that I enjoyed though!

I don’t recall how I heard about For All Mankind, and I never see it mentioned very much, but I have had such a great time watching that.

It’s an alternate history of the space race from the 60s onward, and it’s so exciting to watch what could have been. Each season jumps forward a decade, so the advances in missions and tech keep leaping forward.

If you grew up thinking we should be pioneering space by now, you will probably enjoy it.

It’s funny, as I typically do not like attention, especially from strangers.

I do like researching and teaching people things though, so it is really fun to hear people say “wow, I never knew this was that interesting” or when they ask me questions I don’t know the answers to and I end up reading about something I never thought to look into. I got asked some especially good questions this week, and it was a lot of fun coming up with good answers to share, so we all got a little smarter together. Fun stuff!

The referenced article from Cardinal News goes into much more detail.

In an interview with Virginia State Police on Feb. 8, Bell portrayed his second visit to the polls as a joke, according to the special agents who testified. In a recording of the interview, he said, “I was messing to see if they were gonna let me vote again to see what kind of fraud was going on.”

He told the agents, “But I went in and gave them my ID and then it showed up [that] I’d already voted.” He added, “So I was doing a little detective work.”

Commonwealth’s Attorney Daniel Rutherford took a dim view of Bell’s account, and noted that he was not authorized to test the system. The crime, Rutherford pointed out, is “attempting to vote twice, not voting twice.”

Would punishment fix this guy? Probably not. But now that this judge opens the door for other people to conduct their own tests, where does this stop? How many Trumpies do we let test the system? The poll workers have real jobs to do, and they don’t need guys like this there. Laws like this are supposed to be good laws because they deter the action, rather than have to actually punish someone for doing one dumb thing, but if you allow the dumb thing, you negate the law itself.

Lots of great stuff in the Cardinal article too, like this nugget at the end that is very interesting:

The jury deliberated for an hour and came back with a not guilty verdict. When the seven women and five men were polled about the verdict, Juror 12 said, “That’s not my verdict.”

Judge Michael Doucette sent the jury back to work on the verdict, and while they were out for about 10 minutes before coming back with a unanimous decision, Rutherford said he’d never seen a juror announce that he did not agree with the verdict. Juror 12 declined to comment after the jury was dismissed.

A senior Taliban official told The Telegraph of frustration from moderates with the more hardline elements of the regime.

“Someone should stop the supreme leader. Many within the Taliban are angry and worried that, with everything the leadership is doing, we could lose Afghanistan as quickly as we took it,” he added.

“They are worried that as soon as an alternative to the Taliban appears, the people will revolt, and the West will bomb us again,” the official explained.

I don’t know if any country is eager to return after the failures of Russia and the US. The worry about another warlord type offering even a few lost freedoms back though absolutely seems like a valid concern though to the current regime.

Lol I ask myself this all the time!

Just hit 3200 this week, and I get maybe 1-2 posts a month not from me. I get so excited when someone else does one!

I only started posting daily because I really love what I share, so I’d be sourcing all the stuff just for me. If you’re doing this as a job, you’re going to burn out. I try to post 3 or 4 things a day and have a week or 2 of posts built up in a drafts folder for slow news days or days where I feel like crap and I can keep it going. That’s a labor of love though. If it’s something I wasn’t all in on, it would suck to do all that work for free.

Check out the !fedigrow@lemm.ee community if you want to discuss the growing pains here. It’s mainly us crazy dedicated few talking about growing our communities.

Very interesting. There seems to be a lot of rules, but they all at least make good sense and look after the birds.

What do you do with what they catch? Is it mainly rodent and birds, or do they catch stuff like rabbits or squirrels that people eat?

I’ve had Impossible from Red Robin and Burger King, which both grill their burgers, and have found them to be pretty darn indistinguishable, and I’m a big time burger fan.

The Beyond I find to be very distinct. I haven’t been around “raw” Impossible patties, but I’ve made the Beyonds at home a number of times. They smell like cat food to me before they’re cooked up, but I absolutely love the flavor of them so much! They have this vegetal background taste, but whatever it is, it tickles my taste buds in a very pleasant way for someone not usually the biggest veggie fan. I could see people not liking it, but I get periodic cravings for it now, since it is such a distinct flavor that nothing else matches.

I’ll share a comment I left on another post a few weeks ago because I think the message is important. It’s my own story of how people can change, and also comments from someone more directly in the eyes of current extremist supporters. I got a few downvotes for being naive or overly sympathetic in some opinions, but I still stand by my opinions.

Will I be skeptical of conservatives after this election? Of course, since I was well before the MAGA era. Will there be some people I never associate with again? Of course, since some really revealed themselves to be bad people. But most really just seem ill informed or unable to relate to things beyond their own spheres of influence. But just as people were mutable to become this way, they can get out of being this way. It’s up to each person though to determine what level of effort they’re willing to put into it though.

If things get worse after the election, I may harden my stance, but I’m still hopeful for now. Most of my loved ones though are liberals and gay people though, and when push comes to shove, they will always win out with me. I won’t condone hateful behavior and people can get lost as long as they’re going to do things to spread that crap, but if they decide to be receptive and compassionate again, they need people that will be there to receive them back to normalcy.

Margaret Killjoy was recently talking on one podcast about mutual aid during the recent hurricanes. She was talking about how her neighbors probably have starkly opposite views as she does as a trans anarchist, but she believed that in a situation like this where it could mean life or death, that they would be able to set differences aside and work together for their mutual benefit.

She also went on to say that she didn’t hate them and wish them any harm, she just wished that they would stop holding on to hateful and hurtful beliefs.

Most of my family and my girlfriend’s families support just about all of this MAGA crap, but I don’t know if I could call a single one of them a bad person. Some of them treat me differently in what I feel are very obvious ways, but I don’t believe any of them would let me suffer on purpose. They all seem to not have problems sympathizing with people or situations they are personally familiar with, but with concepts that they are unfamiliar with, they can find them unimportant, and develop bad takes on those things.

As my family is almost all conservative, I was raised that way, and until my later 20s, I had a lot of the same beliefs. As I met more people, learned more things, and developed opinions of my own, I am now mostly the opposite person I was. I can see how wrong I was about just about everything.

I feel it’s ok to hate the beliefs, and dissociate with people while they hold those beliefs, and especially while they act on those beliefs, which includes giving power to those pushing those values on others. I don’t think we should turn our backs totally to them as people though, if that makes sense. If they were hurt, I would still help them. If they needed something, I would help them to get it. If they want me to meet them somewhere in the middle ideologically, most likely not. But it’s part of my humanity to not leave someone to suffer just because they’ve got some dumbass beliefs.

You have every right to associate or not with whomever you wish. You can believe the opposite of people and think they are wrong for what they believe. But I think most people are inherently good. Some make it much harder to keep that belief, but I don’t think many are lost causes or irredeemable.

Can you actually buy raptors? I was under the impression they were all caught wild, and then had to be released after a certain time period.

I did see though when I looked up “wild take” that means removing pre-fledged birds from the nest. They can’t be sold though.

The state regulations I pulled up said out of state birds could be brought in, but not released. Do people just import birds from other countries with poor rules?

Summit is a wonderful app, and the dev is super helpful. Can’t recommend Summit enough.

It isn’t perfect, and there are a number of reasons content can leave. I know a few of my favorite channels have had issues dealing with content getting pulled due to things like it having certain World War 2 imagery in historical context, or analysis of music theory of modern songs for having too many seconds of copyright music. People can also delete their accounts and things will disappear. Some is also just plain pirated content.

But for how much content there is on YouTube, the vast majority stays there, at least compared to more traditional media. Many things I’ve been watching lately have been over a decade old. It really helps in repairing older things for finding lessons on things that haven’t changed much in recent years.

As for privacy, we’re all at least moderately tech savvy people here. We know we’re dealing with an advertising company here and what that entails. That doesn’t thrill me, but that’s the deal to get the content. Google does make at least some data available to view and delete, so that’s still a bit better than most places tracking us.

While there is room for improvement, I still feel it beats most everything else legitimate on cost vs what you get.

Stop, you’re being too safe! 😂

The only times anyone is to be criticized for signally is if it is waaaay before where you’re actually turning so that people think you just bumped the stalk or if you just leave it on and don’t know it.

Not only this annoyance you mentioned, but my personal little saying is that turn signals aren’t just for the benefit of who you see, but more importantly for anyone you don’t see!

You should have already made sure you’re clear of everyone before you think about leaving your current path. Using the indicator is a preventative measure for the sake of yourself and anyone in a blind spot or that you failed to notice.