BranBucket

The ship was built as simply as possible and fueled with the precise amount needed for it's weight, there was nothing else to jettison besides the young woman. The plot was intentionally structured around an impossible scenario because the editor of the magazine the story originally appeared in wanted to subvert the "engineer action hero saves the day with a clever idea" trope that was common when it was written. The heavily contrived scenario is the weak point by most people's estimation, but overall the writing is well done and characterizations are very good.

The story bugs a lot of people due to the total lack of any safety margin for such an important mission as delivering emergency medical supplies. A guy named Don Sakers even wrote a rebuttal called The Cold Solution that was meant to point out a few things the original story overlooked without the idea of a bare minimum ship being changed.

"Cherokee" is a common family legend in the South East, much like having Wyatt Earp's illegitimate child in the family tree in Texas, Oklahoma and Kansas.

I was always taught that the claim of having a Cherokee princess in the family tree was often used to give nativism and white supremacy more credibility through self-Indigenization, which is what helped it spread and survive to the current day. And as others have pointed out, it was also used as a way to hide race mixing. It's likely that a lot of people aren't aware of this, and just think they're sharing a fun but if family trivia.

And, as I pointed out in another comment, the Cherokee Nation has no requirement for any percentage of native ancestry, so there are a lot of people in Oklahoma and the surrounding area who are more or less white, but are legit members of the Nation under it's bylaws. Which can add some confusion to the issue.

In Oklahoma, if you can trace your ancestry back to someone who was on the Dawes Rolls, you can apply to be a member of the Cherokee Nation regardless of your percentage of native ancestry. So there are a lot of people who are effectively white, but are part of the Nation and consider themselves part Cherokee.

This is distinct from the "part Cherokee" or "descended form a Cherokee princess" claims that were used to try and legitimize white supremacy in the south.

"The person in front of me looks innocent..."

Most of them do.

In the documentaries there's always a neighbor saying "He was the nicest guy, we never suspected he could do something like this."

I'm no psychologist or sociologist, but it seems that most of the people who treat their kids this way had kids because of external expectations or for status. They treat their kids like property or as an extension of themselves. Raising them to be cis no matter what is not about their child's well-being, it's about how having a trans child makes them look in the eyes of their bigoted, greedy, status-seeking, peers. When their kids come out as trans, they see this as a personal attack on their place in the pecking order.

In general, they treat even their cis children like shit, because they don't think of their children as people, children are just assets in what they think is some kind of cosmic dick measuring contest.

It's incomprehensible because it's pathological and generally sick.

He knows. He knows it's bullshit. He doesn't care that it's bullshit. It gives him and people like him more power, and that's all he cares about.

Good lord, they absolutely would have gone with her.

I live in deep red country, and work in a deep red career field, a lot of today's Trumpers have never forgiven Obama for being black, popular, and competent. They took it personally. Harris is going to mobilize the fuck out of them.

I think she's the right pick, I think she can govern well, I'm voting for her 100%. But the Dems need to be prepared. This was a dammed if you do, dammed if you don't situation for them. But replacing Biden isn't even a fraction of the work they're gonna have to do, and AOC is on point for speaking up about it.

Aside from the occasional hit show, the real product is the illusion of choice.

The problem is that the more you fight change, the more you change things. Your movement becomes more and more focused on resisting change, and less focused on preserving any good qualities it once had. It's an inescapable bit of futility, hard coded into the human condition.

And they've even got one that leaves his shirt untucked! Definitely a wide range of experience and viewpoints in this squad.