I'm watching through the show again, and noticed a lore thing that I thought was worth making note of. In Spike at Your Service (yes, that horrible episode where Spike is depicted as clumsy and incapable of things like cooking and cleaning that he's been shown to be skilled at in most other episodes), Spike has this personal "Spike the Dragon Code" card. But what's interesting is where it comes from: He breathes it out with his fire to materialize it, and then breathes fire on it again

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...When you're just looking at the latest stories, and suddenly there's a propagandist promotion of an extremist who advocates against democracy and openly admires the worst dictator in history in the description of what you naively thought was a shipping story?

...When an avowed Communist asks for money as though that isn't inherently hypocritical?

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The NYC area is bracing for yet another hurricane (or at least everyone living here should be). Supposedly they're rare here, but we seem to be getting them pretty regularly now. I'm not in the center of the track, but I expect to lose power for at least several hours even if we only get peripheral wind, because the electrical grid is held together by hopes and wishes. More concerning is one report I saw that compared the rainfall potential to Irene. Where I live, Irene was a record-level flood

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I've voiced my thoughts on the whole concept of transgenderism a few times previously, sometimes in blogs, sometimes in comments. A lot of misunderstandings tend to follow, which on the one hoof are never completely unavoidable, especially when saying something that other people might not want to hear, but on a second hoof, perhaps could have been headed off, if just a little bit, if I was a bit more upfront with why I care. It's not that I've been hiding it, exactly; more, I haven't always had

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...when you have a great soundtrack, amazing visuals, compelling acting, and fascinating ideas, but a director who can't tie it all together? Loki. Loki is what you get. Take that as you will.

The national Black Lives Matter organization just released a statement on Cuba.

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"All people have the right to protest and to live in a democratic society. I call on the Cuban government to respect opposition rights and refrain from violence. It’s also long past time to end the unilateral U.S. embargo on Cuba, which has only hurt, not helped, the Cuban people."

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"Later, about 300 pro-government protesters arrived with a large Cuban flag, shouting slogans in favor of the late President Fidel Castro and the Cuban revolution. Some assaulted an AP videojournalist, smashing his camera. AP photojournalist Ramón Espinosa was then beaten by a group of police officers in uniforms and civilian clothes; he suffered a broken nose

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1. "Mob justice" never, ever, serves a legitimate need. It's amusing (and disturbing) to see the people who spend so much time claiming to be the champions of minorities and the oppressed unironically claim that mob justice is a useful tool, when by its very nature, it is a tool of the majority, the group that can call up the bigger "mob". Moreso, it necessarily comes into play only when the actions the mob wants to take are sufficiently horrible that the actual laws as written by

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Moderator who spent the last two years giving his friends a pass when they violated the rules on hate speech and personal attacks is upset that those people continued to foment hate speech and make personal attacks; proposes the solution of no longer calling them his friends, because as a mod that's clearly the only thing he can do.

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