Well, we don’t get a lot of easy to find news on Iraq here in the US. You have to go looking for it.

That being said, with the little that I have gone looking for, it really seems like the people of Iraq are busting their asses to recover, and have shown incredible resilience in the face of so much destruction that hit them in the last fifty years. It’s impressive as hell tbh.

And this is the origin story of furries

It’s been a pleasant disagreement :)

That’s the kind of disagreement that is best.

Edit: also, my apologies. When I saw this earlier, I was on my phone and fat-fingered the down vote. I corrected that. Not that votes matter, but this far down a thread it can seem like disrespect.

I love the specificity of this

Dude. You know what I’m talking about, don’t pretend otherwise

So, all I have to do is pump my semen into enough women, get them knocked up, and have thirty votes? Awesome! I’ll be my own bloc!

No, no citizen whatsoever should be able to cast the votes of other citizens, period.

If the kid can’t get in the voting booth by themselves, cast their own vote without assistance, then they aren’t voting, someone else is.

In that regard, they already have representation by their parents’ votes. All it would achieve is giving parents outsized voting power.

Man, it’s a tough one.

In theory, nobody should be disenfranchised by age at all. But at what age would they be able to vote, as in understand what to do, how to do it, and do so without adult supervision?

Until they reach that point, it’s essentially their parents or guardians getting an extra vote.

And then you have to look at other things we limit minors on by virtue of not being able to make informed decisions. So, would we go with driving age, since that’s when we trust them with a ton of death machine? Drinking age? Age of consent for sex (which isn’t always 18)?

If we change it away from 18 to lower, showing that they have the full rights of any citizen, why don’t they get those other rights with enfranchisement? Why is someone able to vote like someone that has the ability to make an informed choice, but they can’t drink? Hell, that’s already a problem since 18 year olds can be sent to fight and die in the military, but can’t have a beer legally.

I would be fine with 16 being the age of majority for everything if the individual wanted it. You wanna step into adult life, with all the rights and responsibilities, I don’t have an objection to that at 16. I had too many patients that were married and working before 18 to pretend that it isn’t realistic for someone that age to step into adulthood. I don’t think it’s the best choice, but I wouldn’t fight it if the world decided that way.

I could definitely made an informed decision for voting at 16. I had access to alcohol, and was able to make the decision to not use it, same with tobacco. I had access to sex, and made the decision to make it safe sex. I was a decent driver, and didn’t have even a fender bender until I was 19, and I wasn’t the one that caused it then. All of the stuff that we limit to “adults”, I know I would have been fully capable of making informed and conscientious decision about any of them.

But I also knew other teenagers that were absolute morons that couldn’t be trusted not to jerk off in the school bathroom. I knew 16 yos that wrecked cars and put other people’s lives at risk in the process. So I’m okay with the age of majority being 18 too; some of those morons would just flip a coin for their vote, and the mock votes we’d have in school were laughable across the board.

Not everyone can make an informed and conscientious decision at 30, much less 18.

So I don’t really think it needs to change, but I agree with you that it sucks that it’s so arbitrary.

Just wait until they find out what they did to the jockstraps Hezbollah ordered last month

I’ve heard similar a lot. Not necessarily the exact phrasing you used, but close enough when it wasn’t essentially a difference in which term was used instead of “stupid”

But I agree. Pretty much any drama is stupid to at least a small degree, because drama is stupid. You handle a problem, or you don’t; drama is just being loud for attention, be it from the people involved, or hangers on.

The scale doesn’t even matter. Small scale family drama is just as stupid as drama around a singer, or some YouTube talking head.

No worries :)

I almost got arrested for punching someone that said that to me

Usually a ball cap of some variety, I have a couple.

It was probably my favorite, a custom one a friend got me that has “Mrs Lovett’s meat pies” on it. Custom because my giant dome made the ones that were available from the show itself look ridiculous lol.

There’s also a pride hat, a pirate hat with “surrender the booty” stitched in small print above the back band, a random ebay find with Bacchus on it, and one that’s just plain black.

I’ve got a boonie hat that I use when it’s raining, and a couple of dressier ones that look nice when I have to/should wear a suit.

After my hairline started receding and I got my first sunburn, me and hats became friends lol.

HR isn’t the employees friend, ever.

But that’s where you start the paper trail. It’s really the safest bet

Magnets

Nah, we’re all southerners

It’s the central pedal force

There’s a couple of ways to approach this idea. Literal and figurative.

Within the myth itself, the oldest version has the theft occurring after Zeus banned humanity from having access to fire because of fuckery with sacrifices (that was instigated by Prometheus). So, if taken is the myth is taken literally, it isn’t about whether or not humans could pick up fire that Zeus created via lightning, or other methods, it was about them not being allowed to. By Prometheus giving them fire, he gave them the means to make it themselves rather than it being something the gods owned exclusively.

While that still has the hole that it was basically trying to play games to bypass the command of Zeus rather than giving something humans could have tried to steal on their own, and ignores that fire is a phenomenon of physics and chemistry rather than only being granted by a divine force; it’s still the gist of that original myth as it existed when Hesiod set it down in writing.

Now, I think we all know that the myths weren’t literal at all. There was no Zeus, and lightning wasn’t the only source of fire for humans at all. There’s not much in the way of hard evidence of how humans first harnessed fire, whether it was from external sources like lightning, or lava; or if it was discovered as part of the flint knapping process (little sparks can fly under the right circumstances), or other options.

And it isn’t like the Greeks necessarily held every myth to be literal truth. They did have a degree of awareness of myth as symbolism.

And that’s where the figurative comes in.

If your interpret the myth as fire being symbolic of technology, of thought and philosophy, of shifting from hunter-gatherer culture to a more stable location that allows for development of technology faster, then what Prometheus stole wasn’t fire, it was the essence of divinity, the spark that made the gods other than human.

In that respect, you have to understand that Prometheus wasn’t just some rebellious underling. He was a Titan, descended from the oldest gods, just as Zeus was. He was a god of fire, and in some myths was the one that made humans, shaping us from clay. Which is obviously not unique to Greek mythology, but it sets up Prometheus as not only our creator, but our champion among the gods and titans.

Indeed, he’s credited in myth with bringing us more than fire. Art and science were credited to him as well.

Taken as a story about our place in the world, and how we exist as thinking beings, Prometheus is our drive to understand the world around us, and fire is our harnessing even the most primal of forces to our wit and will. It becomes a story of humanity being more than reactive, animalistic creatures; of us seeking to understand the world around us in a way that no other animal has been seen to attempt.

That fire is the fire of creation, of science, of poetry and dance and song.

And, it’s also possible to interpret the myth in other ways, but there’s a limit to how much is readable on a screen before the eyes and brain nope out, so I’ll leave it at that.

I will add that most libraries will have a copy of Bulfinch’s mythology. It isn’t necessarily a perfect source on Greek myths, but it does a good job at being as complete as possible at the time it was written, and doing so in accessible terms. With it being the default text for a very long time, it’s also ubiquitous. Even if your library doesn’t have a copy, there’s project Gutenberg, and you can find torrents or other file sharing sources for it, for free. Amazon usually has free versions of it available too, though I haven’t looked in a while.

Well, it’s just a company trying to hype their product, so definitely craze territory.

There is some good stuff in shrooms as others have already covered, and most of that will be present in a broth made from them. So it isn’t totally bullshit. But it also isn’t coffee in any way at all.

As far as making it into a power yourself, you likely wouldn’t get the same results since drying the damn things, then processing them is not exactly a learning curveless thing. Definitely doable, just takes some effort to get nailed. I used to do it to add flavor to stuff without having the actual pieces of mushroom present, since the texture is offputting to a decent number of people I have cooked for. Not worth the effort imo, but maybe if you’ve been recommended to have a specific mushroom by your doctor, it would be worth it.