I just look at the port and the USB connector and see which side the plastic bit inside is blocking and which side is open, can get them right every time if you take 2 seconds to look at them
They exist, but are only really relevant at the local level, or rarely as a spoiler effect if one gets vaguely popular. This isn’t so much that people don’t want other options, but mostly because the US system is badly designed. The US has a first past the post, winner take all type system, ie, if you win the most votes in a given election, you win that spot and it’s all yours. That makes some intuitive sense, but is actually not the most democratic option, as it means that parties that have, say, 20% of the population supporting them don’t get 20% of the seats, they get none of them, because for each individual seat, they won’t win the most votes. Worse, such a party will cause the major party it is less similar to to win, because it’s voters voted for them rather than the major party it was most similar to, so even if the voters on that side of the political spectrum are in the majority, their votes are split among multiple parties where their rivals that stay as one party can then be the single largest one. The US system accidentally makes it mathematically inevitable for two and only two parties to dominate.
Historically they have switched up once or twice, when one party became so unpopular that it basically became nonviable, and a different party rose to replace it, and once the current major parties have swapped ideology more or less, but this kind of thing is very rare.
I mean, that does happen with a lot of traditionally scary monsters to be fair. Look at how cutesy Halloween monsters sometimes get portrayed as, or dragons, which at least in the European sense would traditionally have been dangerous and scary monsters but nowadays are just as often friendly or protective as they are hostile.
This cannot reasonably be how mentally healthy people react though, because this would seem to suggest that the healthy thing to do is to never worry about anything at all, in which case, what utility would have led to that emotion evolving in the first place?
I mean, he might have liked it, it’s not a bad movie and it’s not a terrible adaptation of the story either. Probably would have to first explain the context of what the muppets are and a bit about the various characters to really get some of it though
I mean, isnt this a thing in comedy, where you can make the jokes of the one being funny have more impact by contrasting them with a super serious character? Scrooge is already a normally quite serious character, and the muppets are known for their antics, so leaving the comedy to them and acting serious makes a lot of sense.
But, what if that person was a time-traveller, and was actually tying future mass-murders, serial killers, and dictators to the tracks before they ever got a chance to start their crimes?
(Sarcasm aside, what’s so worrying about lizards? Only a couple types are venomous, only a few more are big enough to seriously hurt you (and most of those live in tropical forest sort of places), and anything smaller is probably just going to run away and hide it you get close to it. Lizards are pretty non-threatening.)
So far as I understand, there is a common idea that Texas has the legal ability to leave it it wants, but it’s just a popular myth as far as I’m aware. Whatever their state constitution says doesn’t matter anyway, because federal law trumps state laws and as far as I’m know there’s not a legal mechanism for states to leave again, it’d have to either get the government as a whole to make legal or possibly even constitutional changes to allow it, or leave illegally, either by force or by having a sympathetic government just not press the matter and just ignore the laws in question. I can’t really see them getting enough support for the former two, they’re too weak compared to the federal government for an actual war, and the current administration is not likely to just let them go, so I don’t expect them to go anywhere unless one of those things drastically changes.