I bought a warhammer, and then I thought to myself, “You know what’s better than having a warhammer…?”

If you set up a location near a native elephant population where if an elephant brought you like a banana or something and you gave that elephant a handjob… I one hundred percent believe that the elephants would figure out the arrangement and you’d have a successful elephant brothel running in short order.

Think about being a child with Professor X’s abilities. He can get anything he wants, make anyone believe anything he wants, he can know everyone’s deepest most shameful secrets. How could a person like that even form a moral framework? From his childhood, he’d have every reason to believe that he was immune to all discipline and that rules simply don’t apply to him if he decides they don’t, because for him those are true facts! By all rights Professor X ought to be a an exceptionally dangerous egoist and megalomaniac.

Oh, also, if there is any Marvel character who ought to be canonically omnisexual, it ought to be Charles. He doesn’t see bodies, he just sees minds. That undersea prawn monster that Namor was making out with ought to be just table stakes for Professor Xavier.

If you believe that laws forbidding gambling, sale of liquor, sale of contraceptives, requiring definite closing hours, enforcing the Sabbath, or any such, are necessary to the welfare of your community, that is your right and I do not ask you to surrender your beliefs or give up your efforts to put over such laws. But remember that such laws are, at most, a preliminary step in doing away with the evils they indict. Moral evils can never be solved by anything as easy as passing laws alone. If you aid in passing such laws without bothering to follow through by digging in to the involved questions of sociology, economics, and psychology which underlie the causes of the evils you are gunning for, you will not only fail to correct the evils you sought to prohibit but will create a dozen new evils as well.

Robert A. Heinlein, Take Back Your Government

I was curious about this. Since political parties run their own primaries, then they can decide to use whatever voting system they want. I suspect that RCV primaries would produce a candidate that is more competitive in the general election (though I don’t know enough about electoral math or demographics to be sure). I’m certain that RCV has a tendency to discourage scorched earth campaign tactics, so party candidates would be less prone to trying to destroy one another.

Judge Joseph P. Whyte wrote in an order Wednesday that the purpose of an expungement is to give people who have rehabilitated themselves a second chance

Sounds like people should test that theory by having a protest in front of their house and see what they do.

Also:

City prosecutors and police opposed the expungements.

Oh my God, these people are so horrible they found a way to unite cops and BLM protesters.

And has a theme song from They Might Be Giants, which is right at the intersection of a corporate behemoth making the rare right decision and a beloved weirdo niche band selling out in a fairly impressive fashion.

Also MAGA 2024: “Lock up Hunter Biden!”

Depending on who you ask, it looks like chickens currently outnumber humans by about three or four to one.

They’re already here!

What could possibly be the point of doing such a thing?

I have real love for TNG S1E16, “Too Short a Season.”

The Enterprise is dealing with a hostage crisis on a planet where the local government wants this old admiral who had negotiated a truce there decades before to come back. He shows up and it turns out he’s taking experimental de-aging drugs to grow younger. It turns out that when he had negotiated the original truce before, he had violated the prime directive and given weapons to some rebels, but he told himself that he made it even by giving the same weapons to the other side, which led to decades of bloodshed.

The writing is just okay, and the old guy / young guy makeup is pretty bad, but the scene where the admiral dies while looking into his wife’s eyes gets me. I also like to imagine that the ep might have originally been written with Kirk in mind as the old guy, because the whole “Well I made it fair by giving weapons to both sides” seems like the kind of cowboy insane shit that Kirk would pull and then never consider the consequences. The episode feels a little bit like it’s revisiting some of the times when Kirk would do his thing and then warp off into the sunset while definitely leaving some loose threads behind.

Batter and fry them! Corndog spheres!

Into the Night by Benny Mardones wouldn’t necessarily sound so bad, but then you see the video and hooooooo boy it is not okay, not okay at all.

“Go kill that Joan Wick.”

Hell, I’d watch it.

Slightly less than one boob and one testicle. Just like the average person has slightly less than two legs.

Of course politics will always disappoint you. Politics is the means by which large groups of people aggregate their desires sufficiently to achieve collective goals. It’s a massive process of millions of compromises. The goal is explicitly not to make everyone happy. The goal is to have enough people of good will and with enough information avaliable involved that the series of compromises move enough of us in the right direction.

It’s not enough to make money.

It’s not enough to make more money than last year.

You’ve got to make more money and at a faster rate of increase than last year, every single year, or else as far as the execs are concerned, you’re a fucking failure. Hence, everything getting worse, more expensive, and generally shittier all the time.

Since I Left You - Avalanches