My dad was a contractor and he had a big sheet of it in the garage that was leftover from some job. It looked kind of like a sheet of drywall, but was grey and rougher. I used to take it into the back yard with a little blow torch and and lay on it while I melted metal things. I was probably ten to twelve at the time.

It was a different time.

In case anyone thinks it’s not real, or it’s an artifact of the candid photo, here’s a pic from the other day that he posed for. It was posted by the Republican that he’s standing with.

He must not have a mirror with the side panels. They must push his face through a hole in a bib and then blast it with a spray can. It’s ridiculous.

That being said, that’s not the reason to hate him, there are many other valid reasons for that

The flip side is that people who live in states with a big land area but relatively small population have a way oversized vote compared to people who live in high population states. Why should a small number of people in the Midwest be able to outvote the majority?

Let’s be real: very few of us have the talent or skills to make anything approaching those

Either the ‘N’ in “sandwich” is backwards or it’s a large, lowercase ‘n’

I was dumbfounded

There are just so many factors that go into a person’s experience of life. Even something as simple as being on the older side or the younger side when you first start school can have a giant impact.

When our youngest was just at the age where she was allowed to get up and turn on the TV by herself and watch something while we were sleeping, 9-11 happened. I left the house early for work that morning. When my wife got up, our daughter was terrified. They had repeatedly interrupted Nickelodeon to show the planes hitting the buildings, and she was too young to understand that it was the same planes being shown over and over - she thought planes were falling out of the sky all over and crashing into buildings. She was waiting for one to hit our house. It took a long time before we realized that’s what she was thinking. At 27, it’s still left lasting issues. If she had been younger, she wouldn’t have seen it, and if she had been older she would have likely understood better.

And it’s even more true with plants. Pretty much every one we eat has been crossbred and/or genetically modified.

According to the article, he was cloning generic material from a species of sheep that’s banned in the state he was doing it, and he was forging inspection reports to move the sheep in and out of the state. Not sure the creation of the hybrid species was really the crime.

I only partially agree. Yes, with the recent debates featuring Trump frothing at the mouth and saying completely insane and hateful stuff, if a debate doesn’t have that it’s worth connecting on. But people do care about content.

With this debate as an example, lots of people commented on the “sanewashing” that Vance was doing - trying to give plausible explanations for things Trump has said or done - but it’s just not as outrageous as what we’re used to. And the Republican base was largely happy with that he said, even when it was demonstratively false.

I think people care, but it’s twigs being added to a pile of logs.

Seems hard to believe that this debate moved the needle much on either side. They both performed well, there were no big gotcha moments, and each said the stuff that their base would want them to say. Neither seemed unhinged, both were well spoken.

Vance said some stuff that was total crap, but that’s not a problem for anyone considering voting for Trump. I just don’t see that there’s any way anyone’s mind was changed.

You know, it was very different than I expected. There were quite a number of times when one of them said “Well I agree with most of that he just said.” Vance is pretty smooth, too. Much of what he said was total crap, but it wasn’t the Trump-style hateful vomit. It was the most cordial debate I’ve seen in a while, though there were some strong disagreements.

It’s interesting, they used to think that having a big vocabulary or knowing multiple languages delayed having Alzheimer’s. It turns out that family often first become aware that a person is developing Alzheimer’s because the person starts regularly forgetting common words, but people with big vocabularies can come up with alternatives when they can’t remember one, so their family doesn’t recognize it as early. When those people are diagnosed, they end up being further along.

Right, that’s the thing.

I honestly believe part of the problem this country is in today started when the news media felt they had to give equal time to every issue. I remember lots of segments on climate change where they had one person on each side, and I could understand most people coming away believing we just don’t know. And it’s not just climate change, they did that with everything.

So here we are, polarized like never before, with so many believing that every opinion is legitimate. Sure, you can believe what you want, but if you believe the world was created 6000 years ago, you’re just wrong. You’re entitled to believe something wrong, but that doesn’t make it valid. A legitimate news site should reflect that. A climate denier or a creationist shouldn’t get equal time. Same with do many issues.

Lol, “one side of the climate debate.” There isn’t debate among scientists - there’s like less than one percent of climate scientists who don’t believe that humans are putting our climate in a terrible place. So just that part the tells you the bias. It’s just like when they talk about the debate between evolution and creationism: the only debate is with people who reject the data to further their own agenda.

See, this is an example of why he likes Putin. If you publish negative stories about Putin, regardless of truth, you’re going to fall out a window. Trump wants that.

The point is that if the rules aren’t grounded in science, it’s not science fiction. You can have the trappings of science, like space travel or whatever, but if people are moving objects and doing impossible acrobatics by using a magical force, it’s fantasy.

Though not mine, I personally think that definition works better than most. Still, if you pin me down, I’d say that there’s a spectrum, with hard SF (where everything is rigorously anchored to scientific principles) at one end, and pure fantasy (with magic and such) at the other. There are lots of things between those endpoints, with some being closer to one or the other, and some being very much in the middle.

Oh, it’s fantasy

I always liked the distinction (I forget who originated it) that science fiction is a story set in a world where the rules are defined by physics and fantasy is a story set in a world where the rules are defined by the author.