Icarus27k

The original British version, that is. Premired in February 1999. The U.S. version would come the following year. Queer As Folk at 25: Russell T Davies’ groundbreaking show was a gamechanger The Nineties series was sexy, shocking and incredibly fun — and it changed gay representation on British TV forever https://www.standard.co.uk/culture/tvfilm/queer-as-folk-russell-t-davies-gay-representation-tv-25-anniversary-b1140685.html Both are among my favorite TV shows of all time. I was a teenager and it was a "forbidden show". The sneaking around to watch it was part of the fun.

I somehow collected all the Pops from Voltron: Legendary Defender. I don't even like the show that much.

Balloon The U.S. is tracking a high-altitude balloon flying over the Western part of the country, U.S. officials told CBS News. Military aircraft have spotted the balloon and determined it is not a threat, but its origin and purpose are still unknown, the officials said. Sources familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity said the balloon was drifting east in the jetstream on Friday at an altitude of more than 40,000 feet. Its presence prompted enough concern that the military sent aircraft to investigate. One official said the balloon was over Colorado earlier in the day and was expected to be over Georgia by Friday night. The official said the balloon appeared to be made of Mylar and had a small cube-shaped box, about two feet long on each side, hanging below it. https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/news/military-tracking-balloon-western-us-military/

What Trump owes the state of New York with interest.

The Artemis missions are going to be exciting. Artemis 2, scheduled for 2025, is going to be the first manned space flight passed and around the moon.

There are nuanced differences though. Nazi Germany was definitely the strongest army in the world at the time. Putin's Russia is not. It's being held in place by a smaller country that it just tried to absorb but failed at doing that.

The plan now is to keep Russia at bay until Putin leaves power.

We were treating Russia as a normal country, an aspiring liberal democracy. And then, a candidate for the president of Ukraine gets poisoned and then an anti-Putin Russian writer gets murdered. And we thought, "huh, that's weird but it's not enough to make a big case out of". This continues till 2014 when we were alarmed by the Russian annexation of Crimea but still thought "okay that's bad but hopefully that's all".

The Vice President has at least one now.

Interesting thought. Polls this early (February of an election year) are useless. They're not predictive, so I just don't read them this time of the year. In addition, there is some evidence to suggest polls have gotten more inaccurate over a period of years. I heard political scientist Larry Sabato argue this point recently, and how his famous "Sabato's Crystal Ball" publication has begun to de-emphasize polls for what he calls "dynamics" (how a state/district has voted in the past, for how long, and by what margins; as well as economic indicators).

Biden is in campaign mode now apparently.

That's almost as dark as my coffee. Before I fill it with a ton of sugar and milk.

I need a "guilty and regretful for all the dumb and evil things I've ever done" forgiveness plan.

I disagree with Trump being last. As bad as he was, I think Buchanan and Andrew Johnson were worse. One for allowing the country to slip into Civil War and the other for botching Reconstruction leading to the South being as bigoted as it is even today. I don't think the consequences of Trump's awfulness will last 100 years.

In honor of Presidents Day, there's another list of them complied by scholars, usually historians and political scientists. The abridged version of this 2024 edition: #1 Lincoln #14 Biden #45 Trump

To put a timeline on it, I first concluded Trump would go to prison back in 2017, a couple of months after Trump was inaugurated. I also posted about it online. The specific thing that gave me that realization was news stories about Trump meeting with then-FBI director James Comey in the Oval Office and ordering him around about what criminal investigations the FBI should be pursuing. That was when I realized Trump is an actual criminal and him having power is going to be much worse than even I thought.

Former President Donald Trump will likely be sentenced to between one and four years in prison if convicted in the Stormy Daniels hush money case, an attorney and former ambassador said. Norm Eisen said that he and his team at the Just Security think tank analyzed "hundreds of comparable cases" and calculated that Trump can expect a sentence of between one year and four months on the lower end and four years on the higher end for each of the counts in the indictment. Each sentence would likely run concurrently, he said. https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-stormy-daniels-payments-manhattan-new-york-trial-sentencing-jail-prison-1870309 Interesting because I had considered the Storm Daniels case to be unlikely to include jail time if convicted. But 34 felonies certainly seems like the thing you should be in jail for when convicted. This trial starts at the end of March and is expected to conclude by the end of April. I was once called mad for claiming that Trump would go to prison.