I say we take off and drop the ring from Gandalf’s eagles. It’s the only way to be sure.

And many of the most stubbornly ignorant potential voters in swing states declare smugly, from their ivory tower of lazy truthiness - which they refer to as “purity” and “enlightenment” - that bOtH pArTiEs ArE tHe SaMe LoL aMiRiTe.

Insisting against all reason and evidence that their absence from the 2016 election sent a clear message, made them the opposite of insignificant… when what they actually did was drop a goddamned pellet of cyanide into their own drinking water, along with everyone else’s.

Demanding a charismatic messiah god-king, willfully ignoring that what they are electing (or not electing) is a system of governance with thousands of employees at all levels. Like a pathological, medieval peasant mindset that they seem unwilling or unable to transcend.
“Massage me with a single voice, who cares about the rest.”

Shitting like monkeys on the importance of the Supreme Court, unable to grasp the far-reaching importance of it.
Unable to grasp how massive coordinated republican stonewalling and sabotage can be to scuttle the best intentions of whatever charismatic messiah god-king might happen to try and arise.

They keep giving the keys to the kingdom to republicans, keep them powerful, then get pissed at Democrats when they can’t clean up the mess fast enough, with one hand tied behind their back.

You can’t change a system overnight, you nudge the inertia one election at a time, but judging from the mediocre seesaw of the flaky, lazy and petulant electorate, it seems no momentum can ever be built.

Don’t forget how:

"I’m NOT voting for an entire apparatus of executive government with thousands of employees, I’m ONLY voting for a charismatic messiah godking, because I’m still little more than a medieval peasant looking to be mesmerized.

Then if fascists take over the nation (again) and the most vulnerable among me suffer from it (again and again and again), that’s not MY problem. While (somehow) fancying myself as enlightened and special and pure. I’m at the center of my goddamned Universe!"

The Supreme Court, and how republicans effectively staged a coup of it in 2016 by turning their back on Merrick Garland, then packed it with corrupt right-wing zealots? “Not MY problem!”… until it is, but by then it’s way too late.

Dude trying to get it from first principles!
Which is what I also lean towards. Give it to me step by step and I need to clearly map out each one… then the mind wanders and when I snap back to attention, I’ve lost the plot already, my mathematical surroundings are unclear, disorienting.

Add to this an erratic series of math teachers - some of them good, some of them blah - and this day trigonometry to me is a jumbled mess, but I loved calculus and was pretty good at probability and statistics.

Among so many other wonderful things, Roger Penrose contained in a single image the mathematics of infinity in our universe, which then can be folded open mathematically further, to reveal a chain of universes in a multiverse.

An adaptation or upgrade of the Minkowski 4D space diagram (extremely useful in Einstein Relativity, integrating movement through space and time), it’s now called a Penrose Diagram, no less.

Look at it for a minute. It is deceptively simple. It took generations of great minds to slowly distill to maximum visual simplicity a mathematical expression that encompasses something as wildly vast as an infinite universe with finite speed of causality/information.

Starring… a de-aged Brad Douriff, in the role of a lifetime!

Ok, I just gotta pause, take a breath, and say - the selection of art in this instance has consistently been beyond outstanding. So many surprises such as this. A Penrose doing abstract art with mathematical underpinings… so delightfully fitting.

I’ve loved the history of art for decades now, yet in every regular wave of images posted here by you, I discover so many things I never knew existed.

Meanwhile, Ignacio over there, aka Nacho:
What am I to you, chopped liver, güey? Cabrón…

Also the owner of the cheese shop, the finest in this manor, squire. So clean… certainly uncontaminated by cheese.

Can any mere man wield such ferocious, blinding power?
A terrifyingly, beautiful thing to behold. But only just a glance.
I’m scared, feel like… like an Upper Neolithic man witnessing Nikolai Tesla inside his Faraday cage, as the bright blue electric current crackles and arches all around him.

Go home, evolution, you’re drunk… or tripping balls on a heroic dose, sounds more like it.

The red chair of death… to the lumbar region.

Hold it right there, buddy, what’s the matter, didn’t you read the sign at the entrance of this instance? It clearly says CAT, not CATSssss…

also bOtH pArTiEs ArE tHe SaMe I hAvE aN iNfOrMeD oPiNiOn!

A chronic compulsive content-stealer creature like gallowboob might have encompassed that 15% all by himself.

The thought of Quark Stars have fascinated me ever since I first read about them, about maybe fifteen years ago, a supernova remnant that is dense enough to overcome neutron degeneracy pressure, not dense enough to become a singularity.

The Cosmic Microwave Background was emitted when the Universe was around 370,000 years old, the oldest light in the Universe but the way space expands and accelerates, the distance at which the photons we detect now were emitted and when they reach us, is all distorted and crazily stretched. If you want to visualize how light moves as slow as a snail in the grand scheme of things, look no further.

Neutrinos, as far as we know the closest a particle with mass approaches zero, to the infinitesimal point that it’s thought it doesn’t derive its’ mass from the Higgs Field. Then there’s the as-yet elusive Cosmic Neutrino Background, emitted when the Universe was less than a second old.

Alright alright there, Nietzche.

When I was a kid, our family’s portable stereo had a bunch of weird radio bands on it, by which I mean anything other than AM and FM, the edges of some shortwave bands picked up the radio chatter of local fishermen here and there.

One time a friend and I stumbled into one of these conversations, the engine of some boat had stalled, my friend plugged in the headphones into the microphone jack and started to talk with the guy on the other end.
Of course he wasn’t, but his improv and timing was impeccable, it really did seem like the setup was working as a transmitter also.

Decades later, I still clearly remember the way my friend mimicked an adult and technical conversation to a tee, promising to the stranded fishermen that backup was on the way… into the right earcup of a set of headphones.

The legacy is irreparably tainted. He abused a position of influence to push a personal vendetta and in the process, helped the kremlin inject a political cancer into western society.

Assange turned out to be just as much a megalomaniacal, petty little tyrant as those he pointed a sanctimonious finger at, to the cheers of those who saw him as a “friend”, when he was only just “the enemy of my enemy”.

It could be broken down into a couple of further categories somewhere in the middle:

1. Where probes have landed - Venus, Moon, Mars, Titan, a couple of asteroids/comets.
2. Where probes have only flown past - Mercury, a few asteroids/comets, Jupiter and its’ main moons, Saturn and its’ moons (except Titan, see above), Uranus, Neptune, Pluto, Ultima Thule (now officially named 486958 Arrokoth).

EDIT: on further thought, there’s another one in between those two.
Where probes have orbited - Mercury, Venus, Moon, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn.