We all gotta make a living. For 8 years we've had a terrible economy, lost a bunch of wars, saw a huge increase in domestic terror attacks, and laws haven't been imposed properly to the point that even the FBI is now in ethical trouble. The voters spoke and we got a major change in management. The stock market response was to rise 3000 points, up 300 today alone. The economy is improving because the Democrats aren't in charge anymore. That is really important. Democrats were hurting everyone, and most of them have to be wondering if they're voting for the wrong side. Some will switch to republican, but lots more won't. So what are their options?
Fed up voters should really think about third parties. There are several worth knowing about.
The Libertarian Party is sort of right wing, but not exactly. They're opposed to taxes, being controlled, and telling other people what to do. They are in favor of drugs, freedom, and personal responsibility. There's several famous examples of Libertarianism. Libertarians also don't wait for the police to show up with the chalk: they have guns to defend themselves. So libertarians are all NRA members and heavily armed, but not hostile. They just want to be left alone and look after themselves.
If you want dope intoxication, living in Washington state, Colorado, California and Oregon are legal for recreational dope. You don't need to vote. Just relocate. Every conceivable type of weather is available in those states. Pick the one you can live with. In 30 years the Green Party failed to get dope legal. That happened by popular state votes, not the Green Party.
The Green Party also claims to be about protecting the environment but seems to do no actual work. They complain, but they don't build or clean up rivers. They could be motivated to DO THINGS instead of just complain about them if new people took over. The Sierra Club helps a little, but not as much as they fundraise to hold more fundraisers. Their former president lives about 8 miles from here, in a wild animal preserve, which is borderline illegal and totally hypocritical.
There is also the Peace and Freedom party, which is diametrically opposed to Democrat policies of oppression and murder. This might be a good choice for those who voted for the wrong people while holding their noses. Don't hold your nose. Vote for a party that you can morally support.
Bernie is the face of communism in America today: addled, lost, unable to explain how to pay for anything, and has never held a paying job in his life. Much like modern Hippies, who at least want to look after themselves, socialism and communism are death cults. They have little to do with reality, and prior examples, and the millions who died in each, are poignant reminders of what they really become.
I was chatting with the @ultralight_backpacking group here in Google+ about food while backpacking. The OP described being the campground manager at Prosser Reservoir, which is NE of Truckee, on the other side of the Sierras from me but part of the same county I live in. Prosser is down on the plateau, one of the places where it resembles high desert, but you can see the mountains clearly. It is in the Banana Belt East of Donner Pass and the high Sierras but up the mountain from Reno.
When I ponder taking weekend breaks from being a librarian, once I start working for a living in my chosen career, I could easily see building a Teardrop trailer to camp in, and one of the above boats to fish with, using oars, and sail with after the fish stop biting, which happens around 9 AM. While I currently think a camper shell on the back of a truck is too small to live in full time, it would be fine for a couple nights of camping at the lakeside. It is possible to park these on the jacks, with them levelled, and go elsewhere for things like groceries, dumping the tanks (if you have them), and getting more water and beer. This is a viable idea, thanks to being single. I don't have to suffer the vagaries of an enraged woman in my life.
I'm taking interest in these things because TV sucks. Anime is dying out. There's too much politics and bias to even find news which isn't more than propaganda of one of the sides, who are each getting more extreme. Boating and recreation is healthier.
The above boat is fascinating for being made out of wood you cut and shape yourself, using epoxy and fiberglass to hold it together, and the result is lighter than a plastic boat or foam-core boat. The above boat is also interesting because you can add oarlocks to row it, a daggerboard and removable mast to sail it, or even a small motor to drive it around with that. You can even use an electric trollling motor if you want. I'd probably want to put in oar and the sail so I could switch my recreation based on conditions. Since I don't want to get wet while boating, that means that a kayak isn't for me. My insulin pump isn't waterproof. If I roll over and right myself I will be fine but my pump will die, and its $6000. Ergo, higher sides are needed. I might also be clever and put some ballast rocks wrapped in a towel on the bottom of the boat to keep it stable. I'm also reasonably sure I can fiddle with sails and mast setups for any type I like. I'm learning a fair bit from other building sites, and found a useful resource on ballast and "righting moment". Considering my car isn't the sort that can haul a lot of weight, a very light boat, and probably one of these teadrop trailers would work best for me.
They aren't perfect, but they're pretty cool. And warmer than a tent. I don't enjoy sleeping on hard ground and being freezing cold when I want to sleep either. The construction methods used makes it really strong for its weight, and its very light. The roofrack could probably hold one of these boats I like. And the oars. And the mast. Or I could put it on the roof of my car, using a modified hitch-mount, which is probably better. Especially if I'm clever about integrating leverage and the dolly to roll it down the ramp into the water, or across the ground there. I can do these things. It is better to use tools to help yourself than rely on others you can never count on when it matters.
The Oroville dam evacuation last week was a nightmare that stopped early. It could have been really really bad. The coffer dam was only feet of erosion away from collapse. We're talking about 30 more minutes and it wouldn't have been fixable anymore and a quarter cubic mile of water heading for Sacramento, destroying every house on the way South. 200,000 people had to run for it, but its better than 10% of them drowning and 50,000 injured.
Why did this happen? The short answer is Jerry Brown, the governor, is more interested in showy projects than maintenance of critical infrastructure. We hear about the Train To Nowhere, and his promise to launch satellites to study global warming using California tax dollars. Not protect our water supply. He's got an expensive plan to replace ObummerDontCare, since the provider companies are bailing on it.
California is ungovernable. Dividing the state into several new ones would save us, so it won't be done. Moonbeam loves power, and shitting all over everyone to keep his pals in Silicon Valley and Hollywood, billionaires who preach communism without following through, he doesn't need the rest of the state blocking his mania. He's clearly senile or evil because 200,000 people got screwed and he still won't show his face. We think he is an evil D1cK.
As I see it, having studied all this for 20 years, the USA is looking at Balkanization. The Balkans are the home of Yugoslavia, six small countries of people who hated each other passionately but ruled over by a terrifying dictator named Tito, and I don't mean Jackson. When Tito died, Yugoslavia restored their borders, armed up, and went to town on each other with mass killings. I doubt we'll come to that, exactly, but I could easily see the Left Coast becoming a Communist Country, invite in China, which then brings in its own security, which then starts killing them off with guards and drones like that one scene in Terminator. And since I know a bunch of Chinese people I know they consider EVERYONE competition for resources so its not racism that drives the genocide. Its just resource wars like always. Doped up California hippies are easy targets. Same sort of thing as happened in Bosnia would happen here, given half a chance.
Rural California, where I live, is all about the agriculture. While the Left Coast controls the ports, except San Diego and Eureka, both of which need work for proper high volume shipping, and Sacramento and Stockton, which could be blockaded by the Bay getting shut by greedy communists. Communism is a cult. It doesn't last because Pol Pot is the best example of true Communism. He killed half his country, to purify its vision. That's what would happen here if Moonbeam got his way, and his most extreme billionaire backers. The Saul Linsky Zealots like #antifa are the true face of California communism. Its all about rioting, racism, and murder. Its political.
Dealing with those killers sounds like a strong argument for guns and prepping, but that's incorrect. Moving away from them, far enough that they will face the full wrath of California's weather, which wants to kill all humans much of the time (despite what you have heard). So distance is a fantastic defense against #antifa. Rural living, done correctly and with proper perimeter defense warnings, means these urban murder-hobos are not able to reach you. The smarter answer, once you get away from the murder-hobo cities, is that the Left Coast has only a couple powerplants, no water supply except salt, and very little food (mostly south of Gilroy). They're the same idiots who think they can grow magic trees for free stuff, and voted for Bernie Sanders. The downside of rural areas is since communism is a kind of cancer, it eats its neighbors. It starts denying resources to the distant parts of the body (the state) to keep itself happy. Cancer is selfish, and breeds fast making more of itself, which is also selfish. The Left Coast is cancer, only the selfish cells are evil people. Isolating the evil by creating a new body (a state) which contains the evil with no ability to steal from its neighbor (us), could save the rest of the body. Losing Hollywood and Silicon Valley is not a tragedy. They don't pay much taxes, they don't employ many people, and they're not as important as agriculture, which makes way more money. Also, we don't need more immigrants. We have enough workers here. The naturalized citizens already know this. They don't want more competition driving down their wages. They've got a mortgage, after all, and the governor tried to drown their kids. I wonder if they'll still vote Democrat after this?
Its ironic, but more important than guns is a good wood stove so when the power goes out in the winter, you don't freeze to death. More important than guns is a mountain bike so you can ride to the market for groceries if there's no gasoline. The communists at the coast would totally tax the everloving hell out of fuel to pay for their fun. Musk is facing autoworkers union at his Tesla plant in Fremont/Milpitas, so he'll close the place and shift production elsewhere, to places like Reno which is a non-union town. He's already building a plant there. The Left Coast is the Bernie Sanders kind of Communists. Filled with doped up dreamers, no idea how to pay for it, or that it shouldn't just be given to them because they were born. That's the most common reason I hear from them. "You should give me everything because I was born!". Yeah, you can imagine what I think of that when I smirk back. It is worth remembering that this same coastline was overfished, then the sharks started eating people who started surfing in the same murky water as sea lions swim through, which look a lot like a person on a surfboard to a shark attacking from below. Surfing on the California coast is suicidal.
Having plenty of food in your pantry is key. Having a backup that can keep you safe and warm despite the lights going out sometimes is key. Not living directly below a dam that can drown you is key, even if that dam provides most of the agriculture water. Normal recommended maintenance would have prevented the problem, but Brown is either incompetent or evil. That's a question which won't matter if my state gets split off from the Left Coast. If they can't hurt us anymore, because their votes aren't in my state, we matter again, and we can save ourselves from their predations.
The Real California is agriculture. Not cities. Not high technology. Not hippies, who arrived here in the 60's and 70's and didn't go home. Hollywood and Nancy Pelosi are an unfortunate symptom of the Nerfherders that allowed Darwin Awards to be denied in my home state of California. The real California is industrial agriculture, war with nature, and a desert with a bunch of oases. The drought of the last six years is finally over for the whole state and the reservoirs are full, the snow pack is high and we're in good condition to hire back all those gang members to the farms. They in turn will have the money to rent houses so their senoritas can be senoras and have bambinas, like good Catholics should. Most of our problems get resolved that way.
In the map above you can see that only the coasts, and San Bernardino County, and Alpine and Mono County are blue, mostly due to communists retired from LA. The rest is red, because the red part of the state works for a living. The blue is mostly communists on welfare, and their billionaire slave overlords. The billionaires pretend they "really care about the poor" which is why they work so hard to keep them poor. Duh! The contrary problem is the ultra leftists in the cities want the power and they don't want those poor Black or Mexicans to work for a living. They want them poor, angry, and ready to riot and murder for them, like the blacks do.
Early this week, a gay conservative was invited to give a public speech at UC Berkeley, a state funded leftist college responsible for the invention of the Hydrogen Bomb decades ago, but shifted in the 1960's into full leftist fascism. If you aren't a vegan with a Prius or a Bicycle, you're a target for violence. That's how UC Berkeley works, and they've been allowed to get this extreme because the college is the dominant employer in the city, which is just north of Oakland, and across the bay from San Francisco. Berkeley used to be more tolerant, but that's long gone. Its now fully extremist and by the 1990's it was creating eco terrorists who actually murdered people up on the north coast of the state for the crime of working for a living after these same ecoterrorists finished building their own redwood decks. They hypocritically murdered the guys who cut down the trees to build their decks in Berkeley. This is pretty much the entire communist ecosystem. Use people as your slaves, then kill them and eat their corpses. Any fool can tell that doesn't work for long, but the Berkeley communist want to depopulate the world so their long game is actually genocide. This explains a great deal.
Milo the gay conservative immigrant had things to say, but the antifa tried to assassinate him and the Berkeley cops hid in the building rather than use the teargas they were carrying to disperse the rioters or protect free speech. The mayor of Berkeley tweeted encouragement to the rioters, which is hate speech. He wasn't charged with hate speech because the city cops work for him and they're... fascists too. Left wing fascists. This was basically #krystalnacht in #Berkeley.
This also means the mayor committed both sedition and violated the constitutional rights of those coming to hear the speech. That's a federal crime. Its 10 years in prison and $100,000 fine for each person violated. He won't be charged because the state governor is also a communist. He lived in a fancy millionaire commune nearby while he was mayor of Oakland. He was proud of this. So as bad as the riots were, and how the #antifaterrorists were allowed and encouraged to break the businesses and neighborhoods of fellow leftists, this is fantastic advertising for white flight and gun sales.
Conservatives should seriously consider the Mossberg or Remington 12 gauge pump shotgun. 00-buckshot is effective on rioters no matter how many drugs they're on. That's why the police carry them. Effective police, which Berkeley does not have, have probably used the above video as a training aid, and I will expect they'll be holding 3-gun matches with silhouettes of black-clad terrorists so they can practice shooting them. England may let hoodies run rampant but we (our law enforcement) in Rural California will just shoot them. The survivors will get charged and off to prison. The rest get buried. I do hope they're practicing, locally. Lots of practice. Even with the rain there should be lots of visitors to the gun range today. The real California is armed and conservative. Not leftists in black hoodies.
This is an electric bicycle. It has a battery and an electric motor. It costs around $3000. It has around 12 miles of range, then needs to be recharged. The batteries will work for about a year, after which you have to replace them, for around $1000. For a few people this is okay, but for most people, only 12 miles can be ridden by someone slightly fitter, on a standard bike that weighs 40 pounds less, and only costs $200 instead of $3000. In the real world, a lighter bike is a better deal. Unfortunately, I live in a place with really steep hills, unlike flatland, so the torque boost of an electric bike actually makes sense here. However, the price and range limits ruin it again.
Right now, the very best battery technology uses lithium ions with special conductors that help it charge and discharge without damage, using some semi-exotic materials. They are mostly in test phase, not in production. The best you can buy are Phospho Iron Lithium Polymer (aka LIFEPO4). The charge density of these batteries and the ability to discharge more than half the battery without damage means they're carrying more useful charge. That said, its still only enough juice in 10 pounds of battery to be equivalent of around 10 miles of pedaling. In the real world, a light weight bike and a fit rider do not need this, because the 10 pound lighter bike will go just as far as the weight of the battery, motor, etc.
In my research I learned that even a 49cc 2-stroke was a more efficient bang for my buck, since a 49cc motor is around $35-40 on ebay, plus oil and gasoline and a set of tires for a basic scooter and the parts to keep it working. For the same year that an electric bike would work before needing to replace its battery you can run a scooter for about 4 years on that money. Right now, an electric bike is stupidly expensive, and its annual costs are assinine.
Research into bicycle theft shows that people steal bikes with any perceived advantage over any other bicycle. A clean bike will be stolen before a dirty one. A bike with newer tires or brighter paint will be stolen before one with worn tires or drab paint and dull reflectors. In the real world, parking an object with wheels that can be picked up and put in the back of a truck or rolled off is asking for it. Even if you use a lock. It is still asking for it.
Scooters and motorcycles are also stolen by people with a pickup truck, which is the preferred method. But most of the ones stolen are "Japanese bikes", meaning new, fast, and generally referred to as "rice rockets". Realistically, older, slower bikes with narrower tires like an old Honda Rebel 230cc is superior to most motor scooters, but you have to repair various parts since you'll be buying this used. The Rebel was made as a starter bike, and is meant to be sold on for around what you paid for it, with no markup for parts replaced, like tires, chain, battery, etc. You ride one to learn how to ride a bike with a clutch, and then sell it, and put the money towards an upgraded bike with a bigger engine.
The Rebel was a cruiser, so its like a baby-Harley. The thing is, if you take this bike and fix the various parts and potentially give it a seat a few inches taller and an oil cooler, you might be able to improve the performance and handling. And its still more useful than a scooter because it has better brakes, a bigger engine, and is legal on the highway. It won't be fast, but its way faster than a scooter.
However, what if someday a better battery comes into existence? Enough that a bicycle gets 50 miles of range, and cheap carbon fiber equivalent frame and torque sensors means you get boosted range and speed on an electric bike, and they become so common that everybody has one so there's no point stealing one.
A battery that good would also make for fast golf carts, capable of the grocery run or taking the kids to school. Most school runs are only a couple miles each way. An electric cart allowed on the street for the school run would make sense. This battery would make better hybrid cars, and allow for hybrid electric trailers with electric suspension (like the McLaren MP4-12C) and computer controlled leaning so a trailer could go FAST on roads, including variable right height. No more blocking traffic and making Jezza furious. Efficient dense batteries that hold lots of power for their weight and bulk are exactly the sort of thing you want for a battery powered future to be anything but a Jetsons Dope Fantasy.
So imagine a really dense battery that fits inside the frame of a Canondale or equivalent bicycle frame. Enough to get you 20 miles of range, and covered in semi-transparent solar panels which just looks like paint but actually boosts the power to the batteries, so when you park it in the sun, you get a partial recharge. Imagine if recharging from stand alone chargers is a coin-op or card with a PIN pay as you go option. Never give away electric power. It is never free. Still, having it for sale would be useful. When I drive over Donner Pass, it being about 45 miles away up some pretty roads, I keep thinking about a slower alternate route so a bicycle or motor scooter could do it without worrying about swerving Walmart trucks (well, any trucks), so the core issue here is not just the technology of the vehicle, but a safe place to use it. As things are now, there are several sections of I-80 which do not have a reasonable alternate route, so attempting to bicycle it is a Darwin Award. If I ran California's govt I would have had that alternate route built, including the quiet side road along Bear River, and the additional trail through Yuba Gap, currently a campground, and connect Eagle Lake Road down to Spaulding Lake trail, which would then connect to Bear River byway, the proposed bike and scooter road.
There are unpaved dirt roads north side of 80 (orange) which could be paved for cyclists and slow scooters. I include scooter because even though they produce lots of exhaust fumes, there won't be that many and they deserve to use slow roads, same as bicycles. I would also, as leader of California, change the max speed for electric bicycles from 20 MPH max speed to 35 mph uphill, and no limit downhill. I've personally hit 55 mph downhill on a 10 speed, back when I was made of rubber like all teenagers, and I've hit 45 mph on local hills coasting down them. Very exciting, btw. And surprisingly easy to do with a properly maintained wheel bearing set. Keep in mind this area is mostly ruined by mining a century ago, then burned out a couple years ago due to pot growers igniting a fire while trying to refine Honey Oil (Hashhish oil) using a butane setup. Those explode. Dozens of homes burned, and the guilty party escaped without penalty. Its utterly destroyed now. In any case, there's no homes there now so its pretty easy to get a road built through it without much legal challenge. The best part is since this is the north side of the hill, the summer heat will be less, and water stops along the way can be supplied relatively easily.
A good electric bike is probably NOT going to have regenerative braking unless these fancy batteries can actually recharge more than 10% of the power, which is around what they do in the real world. There's a lot of loss of power to heat in the electric motors, and recharge rates for batteries are chemically limited. Limiting their speed at all surfaces is asinine, and further proof of the incompetence of Democrats. I've seen a few examples of electric scooters and electric bicycles. All of them cheat the law, and face seizure if the local cops decide to enforce them. Those motorized bicycles are only legally allowed at 33 cc 2-strokes, which are too weak to pull the local hills. The 80 cc upgraded motors are illegal, and require the bicycle to be registered, taxed, licensed and plated at DMV, with road taxes etc, yet still quite unsafe. You may as well buy a used motorcycle, which has a suspension and brake. I think that Scooters, having a simpler operation, are ideal for tiny towns like this with their very narrow roads, and a smart town council might offer a resident discount every three years, so locals could buy one cheap and use it for local shopping etc. It makes real sense most of the year. Not when there's snow on the ground, obviously, but good sense the rest of the time.
In the Top Gear Special in Botswana, the three presenters show up with very different cars. Clarkson with a Lancia, which was terrible. James May with a Mercedes, which was fine mechanically. And Hammond with an Opel Kadett, which gained hero status during the trip. It had the least power and size of the three cars, and had some mechanical problems (like brakes and electrical) but it had an important advantage: it weighed 1470 pounds, around half the other two cars. It was only 40 HP when new, but the that light weight was its saving grace. Here in America that car wouldn't be legal when new because it would fail the 0-60 time requirement, needed for getting up to freeway speed. To be fair a Beetle would fail too, because they didn't go 60. Mine would hit 55 if you floored it, but the vehicle was pretty much redlined at that point. This is important because the weight of the two bigger cars was a real problem on the terrible road and lake-mud surface of the salt pans in the special. Watch it if you want to understand. Even youtube has this.
The thing about light weight vehicles is they take less energy to get moving, less energy to stop, and feel faster because their light weight means they have less weight to accellerate. This is great fun when driving. The little Kadett is a very plain car, from 1963, but its still fantastic because when you're just tootling along at 35-40 mph it is easy to drive on most surfaces and doesn't take a lot of energy or attention. It doesn't have A/C or fancy electric toys, but its functional.
When Top Gear returns to Africa years later for a Nile and Lake Victoria trip, Hammond turns up in a little Subaru Legacy Rally wagon and its great, right up until he breaks it, and that road broke the other two cars as well. That was again the smaller and lighter car, and it had the fewest problems during the journey. IN the real world, this is also true, up until you start colliding vehicles. Then the light vehicle dies. Heavy vehicles driven badly by murderous people are a prime example of what is wrong with America today, but those same people have to buy a lot more gasoline a lot more often, so they suffer the consequences of their decisions, and moving and slowing the big heavy vehicle also uses more gasoline, meaning they have to spend more of their disposable income on fuel than people with little Subarus. This is also why there are so many little Subarus where I live. They are the eventual revision of the little Beetle with a water cooled engine and more horse power but the same origin: an Horizontally Opposed 4 cylinder engine, just like the Beetle and early Porsche.
What can we learn from this and apply to modern cars? How about buidling Subarus out of aluminum, to reduce weight, and use lots of carbon fiber for body panels, seats (still have the leather tops and padding, just replace the steel frame with carbon fiber at 1/5th the weight), and the doors and hood. You could probably reduce the weight drastically and use the smaller engine for the same speed and better fuel economy. Also, a lighter car doesn't have to deal with so much top-heavy tipping problems, so they can be taller and still go around corners fast. The terrible variety of road surfaces in Africa are unfortunately representative of the post-mining West. We are still paving main roads and arterials and highways, but the quality of pavement is lower than during the 70's and 80's. Many roads have had their paving responsibility shoved lower, to poorly funded agencies and pretend that the govt has made tax cuts, when actually what they've done is screw over the cities and counties. Its evil, not incompetent. Down at our level, on the edge of wilderness there are road that used to be paved, or graded, and aren't anymore and are going back to nature. Here in the mountains there's many roads that are no longer passable even with 4WD. If you absolutely have to cross them you either bring a bulldozer to rebuild the road in dirt, at great expense, or switch to a light motorcycle and use the deer trails. This is dangerous, but it will get you there if you are really slow and careful and wear sufficient safety gear and don't pretend you can carry lots of stuff on a light bike. But that's another topic.
In another couple days, The Grand Tour will be airing their xmas special in Namibia. Clarkson and company will be using dune buggies in Namibia's dunes. This is a fine idea, and while they can be made legal on California roads, few people bother. A buggy doesn't have a roof and can't be locked or left alone in a state where car theft is common. But given time, as roads worsen, we might end up seeing more of them on the road. The public just doesn't care that much about the poor return on our tax investment. California tax payers still pay for racist school programs and don't say a word about Social Justice being anti-white hate crimes. Maybe that will change one day, but I'm not holding my breath. We are much more likely to just buy more capable cars that can deal with worse roads.
Anime has a number of positive traits, and several odd ones, and several bad ones. The odder trait of anime is the ages are wrong. I will explain.
In anime, elementary kids talk like junior high school kids. This allows them to make funny observation jokes.
In anime, middle school kids talk like high school kids. They're still focussed on kiddy school things, but they're also throwing in romance, which is too young for their apparent age. I think this is because Japan as a whole objects to the imposed age of consent rules. As a culture, and in their constitution, Japan has age of consent rules similar to Utah and Mississippi, though they provincially adjust to older. This means that in anime, they often use the high school behavior to offer up the first innocent steps towards crushes and harmless blushing dates. But they're doing this with middle schoolers.
By they time anime depicts high school kids, these kids are talking and socially behaving like college students. They are also physically developed, and there's frequently at least one episode with partial or full nudity hidden with "steam". But they never kiss, because that is illegal pornography. In many anime, telling the girl you love her is a marriage proposal and the story ends there. In Japanese culture, marriages are starting to get arranged at 16 years old, and happen at 18, 19 or 20. Any woman unmarried over age 23 is considered an old hag and treated like a slut by the entire culture. Obviously, if she isn't married at 24, she's running around with other women's husbands and causing trouble. Japan is not in favor of welfare moms. Abortion is free, and having a kid out of wedlock is a major insult.
High school kids act like college students. Silver Spoon is a great example of this. I keep thinking they're in college but they sometimes have to tell you they're in high school.
I think this is why they treat stories about college students in anime (like Moyashimon and Honey and Clover and Golden Time) as stories about adult life, only with work replaced by college classes, which aren't often shown actually. The social side of things tends to dominate the story.
So basically, Japan is telling you their characters are 4 years younger than they behave or look. Its baffling, but its one of those cultural differences. If you find yourself feeling confused, just remember this.
We all gotta make a living. For 8 years we've had a terrible economy, lost a bunch of wars, saw a huge increase in domestic terror attacks, and laws haven't been imposed properly to the point that even the FBI is now in ethical trouble. The voters spoke and we got a major change in management. The stock market response was to rise 3000 points, up 300 today alone. The economy is improving because the Democrats aren't in charge anymore. That is really important. Democrats were hurting everyone, and most of them have to be wondering if they're voting for the wrong side. Some will switch to republican, but lots more won't. So what are their options?
There is also the Peace and Freedom party, which is diametrically opposed to Democrat policies of oppression and murder. This might be a good choice for those who voted for the wrong people while holding their noses. Don't hold your nose. Vote for a party that you can morally support.
