Some, although surely not all, of all the noisy violence that go with things like "Operation Midway Blitz" is to try to instigate things like this to happen.

"If you can't say 'ass,' you can't say 'Putin's face looks like an ass that's gone lumpy from neglect.'" -not quite Lenny Bruce

But the sister also performed that experiment in the worst possible way, why did she microwave the actual tea bag?!

To make the point that it didn't matter, because to her it did not. However she was as you noted hoist by her own petard in the end.

Ha. Everyone involved was American, my aunt's just cultured above the level of most of us plebs.

George Washington will come for you, if you don't.

My sister once tried to tell my aunt that there was 0 difference between tea which had been heated up in a microwave with the tea bag already in it versus tea that had been made to my aunt's specifications (boil the water, not in the microwave, and then put the tea in it and let it steep).

They had a vigorous disagreement about it, which ended with my sister making up two mugs of tea as a blind taste test and then presenting them to my aunt. My aunt instantly told her which one was the microwave tea and which was the proper tea. My sister admitted to the correction and from then on made the tea according to specifications.

Yeah, pretty much.

"Laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths discovered and manners and opinions change, with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also to keep pace with the times. We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors."

(Barbarous ancestors meaning Jefferson and his friends)

Part of what they talked about was how essential it was to have good education, good communication, and a vigorous free press. Just having people vote doesn't do shit. Even back then, they understood that. The people have to know what they're doing. Things like Trump and the poorly educated who vote for him in large numbers were a known failure mode of democratic systems, even back then. They actually tried to design in features to make sure that only "educated" "responsible" people could vote as a check against it, although, that had its own problems.

They also were somewhat terrified of political parties and the opportunities for corruption and self-interest they created. A lot of the sadness of the system they set up is that it tended to collapse into a binary system with each "team" operated by a party, because good modern voting technology was something they were not yet aware of. Sadly. Read George Washington's writing on political parties sometime, it seems incredibly prescient if you look at the rot of the late 20th century that set the stage for Trump.

The founding fathers were well aware.

People have this impression that the founding fathers wanted to put strict limits on what government was "allowed" to do, so that everyone in government would follow the rules and we wouldn't get Trump. That is adjacent to what they thought, but it's not what they thought. What they thought was, more or less, that the natural state of government is something akin to Trump, and if it gets that bad, it's your job as a citizen to get organized and fucking get rid of it. That's what they did. They just also tried to set up a balanced system for the people who came next, and explained why they were doing it in a lot of detail so people could understand and get behind it. And, they thought, if you don't do that, then you get what you get.

(And also you will deserve it, but that's not the important part. It's more about the reality than the "deserve." And the reality is, change things or they won't be changed. No one "deserves" something like Trump, but that's not the question at issue.)

(They would be surprised and saddened by Trump, I think, but I think more so about the population who let things get so bad that he came to power than about the surprise that there were very bad people doing very bad things with government. Like I said, they were completely aware of things like ICE and how those things operate. That's why they fought the war.)

Boy, you must be super pissed at Russia and critical of a lot of their people then. If support for arguably-neo-Nazi figures is the metric. I mean, lots of them speak highly of Stalin, they have statues of him for fuck's sake, and he made a deal with actual Hitler and fought alongside him to invade Poland. He wasn't just a cosplayer.

According to Vyacheslav Likhachev of the Institut français des relations internationales, members of far-right (including neo-Nazi) groups played an important role on the pro-Russian side, arguably more so than on the Ukrainian side, especially during early 2014.[240][241] Members and former members of the National Bolshevik Party, Russian National Unity (RNU), Eurasian Youth Union, and Cossack groups participated in recruitment of the separatists.[240][242][243][244] A former RNU member, Pavel Gubarev, was founder of the Donbas People's Militia and first "governor" of the Donetsk People's Republic.[240][245] RNU is particularly linked to the Russian Orthodox Army,[240] one of a number of separatist units described as "pro-Tsarist" and "extremist" Orthodox nationalists.[246][240] 'Rusich' is part of the Wagner Group, a Russian mercenary group in Ukraine which has been linked to far-right extremism.[247][248] Afterward, the pro-Russian far-right groups became less important in Donbas and the need for Russian radical nationalists started to disappear.[240]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neo-Nazism#Ukraine

Or is that side of it not a big deal?

Only the side where it makes Ukrainians look bad in some way? For some reason?

BTW, I just gave $50 more to Ukraine via https://u24.gov.ua/on the big "Donate Now" link in the top right. Hopefully they can buy some weapons with it, and keep playing Bandera songs if that's what they want to do while they are blowing up Soviet-era equipment that's trying to kill their people.