Asteroids are nature’s way of asking “How’s that space program coming along?”

When unrolled it might say “KICK OUT THE JAMS!”

Never listened to OA, but Strict Scrutiny is one I listen to for Supreme Court news and analysis.

Opossums are one of those creatures that remind you just how much of evolution is driven by the rule of “good enough.” Sure, they could have evolved to have more wrinkles on their brains, or the ability to cross the road without getting crushed, or to not look like an old scrub brush that’s way past its replacement date, but they didn’t need to, because the way they are is good enough!

Look at the last handful of democratic presidential losses to see this in action:

Gore gets nominated due to familiarity. He has the charisma of a warm sponge. He loses (barely, and not the popular vote; by the way, FUCK the electoral college) to George W. “I’d have a beer with him and hey wasn’t his dad president?” Bush.

Kerry somehow rises to the top of the next democratic primary, a fact that I will never understand, because he also has the charisma of a warm sponge. Bush is familiar and a wartime president. He is re-elected in defiance of God and nature.

Obama comes along and is a once in a generation political talent. Things are pretty good for a while.

Hillary enters the primary and wins mainly based on name recognition. She presents herself as having the charisma of a warm sponge, when we all know full well that she has the charisma of a wood chipper, and since we’re pretty good at detecting artifice she loses.

In 2019 we’ve got a pretty good set of primary choices, but Biden gets into the ring and that’s pretty much fucking it, because, again, he has name recognition, so he blows past some better, younger choices and manages to leverage his name and Trump’s fuck-ups enough to win.

The pattern is that name recognition will get you a real long way, especially with low information voters, and that is a real goddamn problem when there are objectively better options who aren’t as famous.

So anyway, I think we need a constitutional amendment forbidding members of one’s immediate family from running for president after one has been president. No sons, daughters, husbands, wives, etc. Fuck dynasties. Fucking fundamentally un-American.

This is the way.

Conservatives heard Stephen Colbert say “Reality has a liberal bias” and concluded that the only solution was to declare war on reality.

New Colorado law will ban sales of dental floss, clothes, & other household products…

Me: Yo, what the fuck is going on in Colorado?

containing toxic “forever chemicals”

Me: Oh, that makes sense.

It’s a re-imagining and not a film of the play, but Scotland, PA is a very good dark comedy about Joe “Mac” McBeth taking over a fast food restaurant through less than ethical means. Christopher Walken appears as McDuff, an investigator looking into the goings on.

I was trying to watch the original Nosferatu but the version I was watching had dogshit Casio keyboard accompaniment. I muted it and had Spotify put on a playlist based on “Danse Macabre.” Much better. That said, a proper silent movie with live accompaniment is fucking fantastic. I saw Dorothy Vernon of Haddon Hall that way and loved it.

Virtually anything with a Newberry Medal is highly likely to have a traumatizing beloved character death somewhere in it. Maniac Magee and Bridge to Terabithia were good examples from my childhood.

It’s been a process.

💰💸💵💲

💸💵💲💰

💵💲💰💸

💲💰💸💵

What’s amazing to me about the people who are facilitating the downfall of democracy on behalf of their oligarch and demagogue buddies is that they’ve deluded themselves into believing that they will still be of use, once democracy is good and dead.

If you’re looking to murder democracy, you need accomplices, people in positions of power within the existing government to help get the job done. But once it’s done, what do you need those accomplices for anymore? If anything, they’re just loose ends for you to tidy up within your full-on fascistic government.

The Teds Cruz and Clarences Thomas of the world serve a purpose in helping achieve a hateful goal, but once they’ve outlived their usefulness, they will absolutely be made to disappear, if for no other reason than because they know too much.

They’re basically setting up a scenario whereby they will either be facing an angry mob for their role in attempting to kill democracy, or else they will be facing a purification squad once they successfully replace democracy.

Not great on long-term planning, if you ask me.

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.

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

I wonder if he was trying to mate with the toilet.

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.

And no air conditioning! Even in the summer!

“'This is the excellent foppery of the world, that,

when we are sick in fortune, often the surfeit

of our own behaviour, we make guilty of our

disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars; as

if we were villains on necessity; fools by

heavenly compulsion; knaves, thieves, and

treachers by spherical pre-dominance; drunkards,

liars, and adulterers by an enforc’d obedience of

planetary influence; and all that we are evil in,

by a divine thrusting on. An admirable evasion

of whore-master man, to lay his goatish

disposition to the charge of a star! My

father compounded with my mother under the

Dragon’s Tail, and my nativity was under Ursa

Major, so that it follows I am rough and

lecherous. Fut! I should have been that I am,

had the maidenliest star in the firmament

twinkled on my bastardizing.”

—EDMUND, KING LEAR, ACT I SCENE 2