It’s not the same. Until fairly recently, TV only had a few channels, and most of the day it was showing stuff that no kid would be interested in - talk shows, game shows, soap operas, etc. Every afternoon, every station would show a three hour block of soap operas. EVERY station. So for that block, if you weren’t in school, you had NOTHING to watch.

So you went outside, found your friends, went on a bike ride, played a board game, or maybe just went “exploring,” just to see what you could find. I would do that MOST days as a kid.

Today, of course, you are right. Between cable and streaming, most kids have a LOT to distract them on TV, but it wasn’t always that way.

My son escaped the lure of video games, and anime, but he loves movies, so he spent a lot of time in front of the television, but he became a bonafide cinephile. He has actually been carefully curating his TV watching since he was a teen, searching out the best classic movies, and building a database of films.

Now he’s gone back to college for film studies, and his time in front of the TV, carefully watching high quality content, has put him miles ahead of his peers. His film classes often feature the prof and him having a discussion about a movie, as the rest of the class listens, and the faculty is starting to pay extra close attention to him. They’ve clearly pegged him as a future professional in their industry, because he is so obviously far ahead of every other student. And that’s because he didn’t waste his time as a teen on things like video games and social media, and actually used that time to learn something that would be useful to his future.

BTW, I didn’t push him away or toward anything, I let him choose his own path, and supported him. It was his personal choice to not play video games or do social media. He just wasn’t interested. From the time he discovered what a movie was, he was hooked.

Exactly. You always need a war to feed the Military-Industrial Complex, so you do what you need to do to keep it humming.

People die in war, that’s just life. So if a few Americans die in the false flag attack that allows the Military to kick off a war, and feed the Military-Industrial Complex that is important because it employs so many Americans, then they are just patriotic Americans who sacrificed for the war effort. They can be proud of their sacrifice for their Nation, even if that Nation never admits it.

/S, obviously

Excuse? “I want it! Give it to me!” is always his “excuse.” He’s a spoiled 9 year old, and for some reason, MAGAs feel they should give him everything he demands.

MAGAs are bad parents.

And video games. MANY people play video games for hours, every day. Imagine what else they could be learning, or doing, in that time. When they graduate from college, they will have played hundreds, perhaps thousands, of hours of video games, and have nothing to show for it. They could have learned to play a musical instrument, or learned a language, or learned to code, or how to repair cars, or had a job, or started an online business, or a relationship with another person, or gotten in shape, or developed interpersonal communication skills, etc.

But they spent their time alone, staring at a screen, playing a game that rewards their dopamine receptors, but provides literally nothing else of value for your life.

They spent their entire childhood doing nothing but becoming solitary Dopamine addicts, while their parents allowed it. Millions of them.

Wouldn’t be the first time.

They can target specific buildings in a group. They put that bomb exactly where they wanted to. He was targeted.

I don’t care about history. These are unprecedented times, and they require unprecedented solutions. We SCREAMED for justice for Trump and MAGA during the Biden administration, and they all but ignored us.

That will NOT happen again, or they will leave us no choice but to deal with it ourselves, and if THAT happens, stubbornly cowardly Democrats are going to find themselves standing right alongside the MAGA criminals.

They WILL do what we tell them the next time, or else. It is time for the good Citizens of this country to stop being polite, and demand justice, OR ELSE.

I actually think we may get that. The next crop of new Congressional Rep’s and Senators that will almost certainly give the Dems the majority in both Chambers, and they aren’t running for office to provide Business As Usual. They are coming in to reform the system and they will have The People behind them. The old guard is going to have to welcome them, and give them what they want, because those new elected representatives carry the people’s mandate, and they all know it, and more importantly, WE know it, and are going to insist that that new mandate leads the way.

We aren’t asking for much. We aren’t looking for political retribution like MAGA is. We are only looking for justice for their CRIMES, which are many, and notorious. They all need to be charged and prosecuted for what they have done to this country, and it’s citizens, and to outsiders who deserve the protections of our laws.

We are only looking for justice for their CRIMES. Is that too much to demand?

Why would they need facial recognition? Just look for the guy in clown makeup.

Yeah, I’m not doing that.

I’ve always been supportive of solar. After all, if the Sun goes out, we got bigger problems than charging our cell phones.

I’ve had many, many people over the years tell me it’s too expensive, not efficient enough, etc., and I always said that research will fix all that, and someday it would work great, AND be economical. I never figured it would be because Trump would fuck up the energy economics of the entire planet, and solar would suddenly be the best choice.