Flashing to pass ‘might’ have been a thing long ago. When I was taught driver’s ed in the 1980s, we were told not to do it, so perhaps it was done in previous decades.

1967: Six Day War. Israel invades a variety of areas that it borders

You’ve made a pretty good summary, but I have one quibble: Egypt, Syria and Jordan were planning to attack Israel. Israel launched pre-emptive strikes.

Removed by mod

He doesn’t have $270 billion dollars. He has $270 billion dollars worth of assets.

Very common. Almost every home built in the past 50 years would have one. Not sure about apartments.

Agreed. The “Pepper munitions” might be paint-ball style rounds shot from paint-ball style guns. I’m not sure in this case, but other police departments have had them. The grenade launchers are for tear gas grenades. Perhaps also flash-bang or stun grenades.

“But from the perspective of a coherent story in a coherent world, ignoring the success in terms of sales, it was cobbled together without a plan, and it shows. It wasn’t until maybe order of the phoenix that she had a plan for how the story would end, and she had to do a lot of hand waving to make it happen.”

“But she wasn’t a good writer. She was mid tier at best. So the eventual success of the series got beyond her abilities. While the last book was much better overall than the first few, it still relied on shoddy world building”

Excellent explanation. The first HP book is excellent. It really sucks you in. After book 4, the quality declines and they become slogs to get through.

This simplest explanation is that JKR isn’t a very good writer. She came up with an idea “I’ll give hard working and ambitious Hermione a time travel device so that she can take more classes in the same amount of time” without thinking deeply about the implications of allowing time travel to exist in the universe of Harry Potter.

House Elves were one of the things that made me realize that JK Rowling was something of a hack. I found it odd that Hermione was the first person in the wizarding world to ever point out that House Elves were slaves and were being treated very badly. In the thousands of years that wizards and wizard schools had existed, no one ever protested the treatment of House Elves? Not even the ‘Good Guys’? Everyone just accepted this over the centuries??

And then she does almost nothing with this potential plot point…

Does he “claw” the towel? By this I mean he reaches up to the towel and stretches, resting his front paws on the towel, then flexes his claws so that the catch into the fabric of the towel. Then, when he is done stretching, because his claws are embedded into the towel, pulls the towel down?

My father-in-law got a Master’s Degree in Computer Science 30 years ago. IIRC, it was heavy in C programming and involved typical CS fare like algorithms, pointers, sorting, data structures, etc. He was a high school math teacher at the time (he’s now retired). He took the classes mostly because he enjoyed learning.

I did ok during the Dos/Windows 95 era, but as time went on, he seemed less and less able to solve his own computer problems. He can’t even Google a problem effectively (or even remember to try to Google his problem).

Most recently, I had to hold his hand while he bought a new computer at Best Buy and then further hold his hand as he went through, step by step, the Windows 11 installation/first time start up process.

<sigh>

I’ve got Win 10 and it works fine. I have no reason to upgrade to Win 11. If any new ‘feature’ gets added to Win 10, I will disable it.

It does in my house.

What political opponents have been killed? Of any political stripe??

Could it be that not as many potential serial killers are being born? I believe there is a link between criminality and childhood abuse. Less unwanted kids are being born. Less abuse. Less criminals of all kinds, including serial killers.