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10 Apr, 7 tweets, 2 min read
This morning, our oldest cat slipped out of the house and was hit by a car. She was gone instantly.

She was six years old. Our very first baby.
Kiara was a beautiful Calico Siamese we adopted from @austinpetsalive.

We had actually gone in to look at another cat, but she came up to me and cuddled me and purred like a little motorboat. She knew she wanted to go home with us.
We don't really know what her life was like before we adopted her. But she was one of the clingiest cats I've ever met.

Whenever I was working in my home office, she had to be on my lap. Whenever I was in bed, she had to be on my chest.
The one thing we were able to guess about her first year of life was she was probably an outdoor cat. We kept her indoors but she'd try to sneak out and whine at the front door.

She never tried to run away though... if she got outside she'd just stay put in the flower bed.
It was a horrible shock when we lost little Kion to heart disease last year, at the age of one.

This one is an even worse shock. Because I was just a week away from coming home to see her, after not having seen her since September.
I know she missed me. Because she kept sleeping on my side of the bed.

Even after @fawfulfanswife got a new bed that obviously didn't have my scent, she kept sleeping there because she knew that's where I SHOULD be.
I love you, Kiara. You will always be my sweet little baby.

I'm so sorry that I had to be away in Reno working. I'm sorry that your daddy wasn't around and you didn't know why. You'll always be a part of me.

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More from @fawfulfan

Matthew Chapman Profile picture
9 Apr
We probably aren't going to have any more true "wave" elections until the next big political realignment that scrambles both parties' coalitions.

Neither party holds enough seats in demographically unaligned areas anymore for a huge sea change like we saw in 2010 or 2018.
Nearly all rural seats are held by Republicans. Nearly all urban and suburban seats are held by Democrats.

There are still exceptions of course, but not enough that if they all flipped in a favorable environment for one party, it'd be a wave.
Of course, this doesn't mean we'll settle into a stable equilibrium forever. Political alignments come and go. There will eventually be some big event in American politics that forces one or both parties to dramatically change their ideology or the demographics they're targeting.
Read 5 tweets
Matthew Chapman Profile picture
4 Apr
One factor that really needs to be discussed is Facebook.

As post-junta Myanmar got broadband, cell plans often gave people free Facebook access. It became the country's primary news source. And we've seen how ineffective Facebook is at keeping hate and extremism off its site.
If anything it would be even harder to keep that content off Facebook in Myanmar than the United States, because while Facebook at least has a number of English language content moderators, it has almost none who speak Burmese.
Basically, hate and fake news eroded all the functions of civil society in that country, and Suu Kyi was either unable to stop it or got caught up in it herself.
Read 4 tweets
Matthew Chapman Profile picture
2 Apr
Here's a very underrated infrastructure idea: what if we invested in creating seamless transportation between airports and train stations?
Intercity rail is never going to be as cost effective in America as in Europe because everything is so much more spread out. BUT, the hub-and-spoke airline model often has you take one long flight and one short one. What if we could replace *just the short flight* with a train?
Imagine if we had a system that encouraged multi-modal trips.

Airlines would fly you to a big city relatively near your destination, then transfer your luggage on to Amtrak, shuttle you to the station, and you ride the rest of the way. The ticket lets you book this all in one.
Read 4 tweets
Matthew Chapman Profile picture
25 Mar
I will say this for DeSantis: he at least seems to have a better intuitive grasp of what "marginal" Trump voters liked about Trump than, say, Hawley or Cruz.
DeSantis understands that the biggest thing isn't the far-right policy. It isn't even really the racism — that's the entire party at this point.

It's the way that Trump would take their every slightest frustration, and declare war on it. He would name the enemy, and go after it.
It's just such a simple, compelling kind of politics for people who don't want to think.

Identify who's the problem. Talk smack and get into a fight with them. Declare victory over them. Find the next person who's the problem. Repeat until America is great again.
Read 5 tweets
Matthew Chapman Profile picture
25 Mar
I'm already seeing some on the right once again claiming that "the CDC" has proven that guns "save 2.5 million lives" per year.

So before we jump on that merry-go-round of bullshit, I'm going to debunk it again.
First, this 2.5 million number *doesn't* come from the CDC.

It comes from a 1992 survey by FSU criminologist Gary Kleck, who random-dialed a bunch of ppl, asked if they used a gun to defend themselves or their property in the last 4 years and extrapolated to the U.S. population.
There are a million problems with trying to measure defensive gun use this way.

First, there is no way to verify the respondents. Any of them could have fabricated an incident, named a real one that fell outside the 4 years, or even cast an aggressive gun use as a defensive one.
Read 9 tweets
Matthew Chapman Profile picture
21 Mar
It's not really an endorsement of communism, though, to say that zero leaders who have ever sought to create a communist society have ever actually created one.
If I were to tell you that being able to fly is a great idea and everyone who jumped off a building and splatted on the pavement just never achieved it, that's not an endorsement of jumping off buildings.
Similarly, no matter how good a concept it is for humanity to transcend the need for states and classes, if communism the political theory never actually gets us there, at some point that is on the theory, not just on every individual political leader who "messed it up."
Read 4 tweets

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