Hiking and fishing, mostly. It doesn’t take much to get a tick. If they get near my feet they can latch onto my ankle if I don’t catch them soon enough.

I’m the opposite. No matter how hot it is, I’m wearing full-length jeans. It’s never bothered me, and I’ve had significantly fewer instances of finding ticks on my body compared to my friends.

Sounds to me like the kid is also having some feelings surrounding the breakup and subsequent remarriage that aren’t being addressed. Why does he want you to come too? Is he hoping it might bring you and his mom back together? Does he feel uncomfortable around the new stepdad, and wants you around because he’s more comfortable when you’re around? I think if you have a conversation with him as to why he’s asking for you to come too, it might influence how you approach the situation, or at least give you a better way to explain why you can’t come due to your own reasons.

I know this is a difficult decision on your part for how it affects you, but your son is also in a very vulnerable position right now, and needs both of his parents paying attention to him and the feelings he’s having, even if he doesn’t know how to express them directly. My parents broke up suddenly due to cheating when I was around the same age, and it was a traumatic time in my life because my parents both assumed I was old enough to “get it.” I wasn’t. Family is one of the main sources of stability in a young person’s life, and to have it fall out from beneath you isn’t something you get over on your own very easily.

Which is why the people who decide what they think steer them toward worries about the nuclear family and abortion.

That’s a lot of Dong

Hardly semantic. The way you fix a broken system is by working within the system to gradually shift it back to normal. The way you destroy a working corrupt system is by literally tearing it down French revolution style. Which path are we going to take? It’s only semantic if we ultimately decide to take no path at all, and simply lay down and die.

Stage 2 generally means that the cancer hasn’t yet spread, except maybe to very nearby lymph nodes, meaning treatment can be very successful so long as its somewhere accessible by surgery and you don’t wait too long. Stage 2 treatment is very different from stage 4 treatment, but if you wait, that’s where it’ll get to.

Dang, I just started playing a couple weeks ago. But I guess that means I made it just in time to be one of the people who stop playing in solidarity!

While that’s true, it was mostly just because Mondale was from Minnesota, and even then he only won by 0.18%.

I always liked the name Woodrow, but I hate the nickname Woody, so it’s a bit of a wash.

So… You cum here often?

Would you be arrested? Probably not, but you’re more likely to be than Trump. See, committing a crime isn’t the only factor that influences whether or not you get slapped with the punishment for that crime, even if it’s plainly obvious to everyone you committed it. Another major factor is whether or not someone is going to go through the effort of ensuring you get punished - if nobody does, or if they try, but can’t get to that finish line of getting a judge to declare you to be guilty in court, then you walk away scot-free.

So, the thing that’s keeping you from being arrested is your relative insignificance. You’re just some person, so it’s unlikely that anyone will go through the trouble of ensuring you receive the punishment for the crime you committed, even if it’s a relatively easy thing to do. Now, if you were to go on TV and say it, that would significantly increase your risk, since now more people are seeing you and someone who gives a shit might decide to go after you. That would be damning for you, since it would require very little effort to punish you - you clearly committed the crime, and you have no way to influence the court to make you harder to punish.

For Trump, his protection isn’t insignificance - there are plenty of people who would like to ensure he’s properly punished; instead, his protection comes from making it really difficult for someone who wants to punish him to be successful in that endeavor. He has a lot of money and influence, so he can hire good lawyers that can drag out the expensive legal process - something he can afford, but a lot of people who might try to go after him can’t. His lawyers are also good enough to find loopholes in the law to avoid punishment, so even if you can afford a cheap lawyer for a long time, he’ll likely still walk away unscathed. He’s also shown that he has the ability to influence what judge gets put on trials he’s a part of, which is another factor that influences whether or not he might get punished for the crime.

Ultimately, you’d have to have a rock-solid case presented by a team of very good lawyers working non-stop for months to years in order to bring Trump to justice, and the only people who reasonably have that power are almost exclusively on his side to begin with. Trump has knowingly committed multiple major crimes, and has shown that he has the ability to prevent them from hurting him, so he knows that he has virtually no chance to be punished for minor crimes, and commits them openly all the time.

Correct - every government eventually welcomes corruption that needs to be flushed out, and if it gets too strong of a hold on the country, it may need to be forced out. When the US was founded, it was prosperous for the wealthy and non-wealthy alike, and continued to be prosperous for a while. There were ups and downs, but it slowly got worse for the common citizen as the wealthy used their power to influence the country in their favor over time. It came to a head about 100 years ago, and we were able to get through it nonviolently back then.

It’s happening again now, and we might be able to pull through democratically again, but we might not. 100 years ago there was much more of a sense of solidarity against the rich and powerful, but now that we live in a world with a much better understanding of human emotion and motivation, a huge percentage of the country has been thoroughly convinced to fight for their own exploitation by the wealthy. Pair that with all of the war going on right now that we’re more aware of than ever given the technology that globally connects us, and we’re a lot more divided than we were back then.

I hope that we don’t need violence to solve our current political issues - democracy has certainly worked before - but it’s always been the backup plan when civility doesn’t get the job done.

Again, it’s not necessary, but it did work. I hope we can resolve the issues in our country democratically, but I’m mentally preparing myself for the violence that will inevitably follow if that doesn’t work. If our country falls to fascism, it’ll take a real fight to get it back.

I mean, our country was founded through a bunch of people getting really uncivil and violent. Sure, it still needed - and still needs - a lot of improvement to be fair for everyone who wasn’t part of the “in-group,” but the same could be said for most countries at the time ours was founded.

I certainly don’t believe that it’s necessary to be uncivil and violent to achieve a fair and civil society, but it has shown past success at ridding a country of leaders who don’t have the people’s best interests at heart.

Yeah, that’s the family history of inbreeding that I was talking about - if you continuously have children within the family for multiple generations then the risk continues to rise so long as the trend continues. It’s generally only the risk of getting 2 copies of some familial recessive condition or other issues that arise from getting identical copies of genetic information from both parents, though, so breaking the chain and having a kid with someone outside of the family removes that risk; even if someone has a family history of inbreeding, it doesn’t put their potential children at risk so long as their partner isn’t related to them.

Inbreeding generally stops being a notable factor around 4th degree relation between parents. Even first cousins, 3rd degree relatives, only have about a 6% risk of an anomaly at birth when having a child together, compared to the 3% normal rate for all pregnancies. There’s likely been a LOT of inbreeding in any one person’s family history.

The nice thing is that once a new non-relative is added to the mix, the risks associated with past inbreeding largely go away; you only pass on 1 copy of your genes to your kid, so even if you’re personally affected by a family history of inbreeding giving you a bunch of identical copies, if your kid’s other parent isn’t related to you, their copies should be different from yours, and the kid will have 2 different copies just like anyone else, helping protect them from recessive familial conditions and the like.

Nah, it’s referring to the first space by grouping the first and second words, “Pig” and “And,” and then referring to the second space by grouping the second and third words, “And” and “Whistle.”

“Thank you I came in 30 seconds.”