David Pakman, is that you?

I think it’s probably more newsworthy when he tells the truth.

She fucked around and found out. I’m exhausted by people talking about their ethical failings “as a Christian.” If she were successful in her attempts, along with others, to overthrow the election, she wouldn’t be apologizing. She would be saying that God helped her. The issue is that she just doesn’t have an ethical spine, and she has to borrow a misguided one from a religion.

Yeah, this really resonates with me. I have family and friends who I would describe as good people in general but for whom the maga era has completely unhinged their rational faculties. It’s really sad to see. It also makes it such that there’s really not much to discuss with them, because so much has been impacted by the MAGA lies. Politics, religion, current events, weather (it’s cool in the fall, so global warming isn’t real), local matters, what my kids are doing in school, the list of things that the MAGA infection has affected is stunning. I guess technically the MAGA movement has just exposed some of the brain rot that was already there in my family, but I also think it has actively made them less rational. Fucking populism.

Fucking great time to figure that out, Joe. I’m all for ranked choice voting and options like it, but he’s just talking about a third party option, which means we’ll just feel the negative effects of the party system more quickly, and possibly spoil the election to shoo in Trump for another term. We don’t need him running for a third party as though that’s the fix, we need to overhaul the voting system as a whole. Things like ranked choice, automatic registration of voters, voting at any location, etc (not to mention getting rid of the EC) would all significantly improve the voting system, and access to it.

It’s the high speed that lets you know he is right, and that the full-speed gish-gallop that runs over you is legitimately discourse…

Yeah, I thought it was a metaphor. That’s a beautiful photo though.

Earlier in this fever-dream hell-scape timeline, I didn’t imagine that kids would literally need a VPN as they tried to just exist. Yet here we are, and I’m right with you, I’ve been setting my kids up with VPN as well, and talking to them about what sort of things they need to be careful about looking up without the VPN connection. Fucking dystopian.

My locally owned bookstore has a display featuring banned books. It’s not an entire store of banned books, but I think that’s good. I don’t think a store with only banned books would be viable in the long term.

Number one, that’s some seriously good craftsmanship. I love this. It looks so cool and detailed. Number two, I have zero knowledge about the historical way these were done, so apologies for a very ignorant question. Did metal suits of armor have padding like this? It occurs to me that it makes total sense to have padding, but I don’t recall ever seeing “historical” preserved pieces with padding like this. Was that the norm? Either way, that’s the type of helmet I’d want. Looks beautiful.

I feel like Galaxy Quest with Tim Allen, Susan Sarandon, Alan Rickman, Rainn Wilson and Tony Shalhoub is a criminally underrated movie.

This one is one of my all-time favorites. “Spencer knows how to deal with floaters!”

This is really cool!

This made me laugh. I’m in my early 40s and in the past six months I’ve been using the Merlin app to identify birds by their song. It’s really fun to see what’s going on around me in terms of birds. I had no interest before.

To be fair, Plex/home theater stuff is so stinking fun tho.

Last year my youngest was in kindergarten around the time of St. Patrick’s Day here in the U.S. At some point they went out to recess and came back in to find little chocolate coins wrapped in gold foil on their desks. I picked him up after school and as we were driving away I asked how school was. He told me that he thinks leprechauns might be real. I asked what made him think they might be and he gave me the “we left class and when we came back there was chocolate on our desks” answer. I asked him if something else could have happened, like a teacher leaving them, and he said no, because the door is locked when they leave. I told him “maybe it was a rainbow unicorn who left the chocolate.” His response was very dismissive. He said “no Dad, that’s impossible because rainbow unicorns don’t exist.” He’s a sharp kid but he’s not quite at the logic stage. :)

Just to be safe, yes.

YES. Yes yes yes.

I’m sure this will go well and will never be abused. I mean, good that doctors, attorneys and MPs are exempt, because fuck the everyman Joe worker. /s

It’s global average temps, not every area will be as hot as it’s ever been recently.