• We Have Ways of Making You Talk
• Battleground
• The Rest is Classified
• The History of English
• Ehrman Podcast (Christianity from an atheist expert in the New Testament)

I look at Trump having meetings with Putin where none of Trump’s advisors were allowed to attend, no transcripts were published, and I think they even used only Russian translators.

So either Trump is controlling Putin, or Putin is controlling Trump. I know which way to bet.

Just don’t tell anyone about The Judgment of Paris and similar events that showed the wine world, and French wines in particular, in a very poor light.

Sadly, France doesn’t have a very well developed wine industry yet!

They won’t learn a goddamn thing. They’ll vote for him again.

You are assuming that he wasn’t serious when he said people would not need to ever vote again.

The only promises that he has kept, or has any intention of keeping, are the ones that lead to an authoritarian, fascist government.

I suspect that it was a defense mechanism due to her experience of many older men trying to hit on her. Better not to even open the door.

Even if he works twice as much as one of his employees, which I do not concede, he is being paid 500 or 1,000 times as much. For that much money, I would expect nothing less than 24/7.

Have you paid any attention to the political scene in the United States? There is no way that a billionaire could be convicted of any crime. In the rare event that they are charged, they can delay and obfuscate so that they die before any repercussions must be suffered.

I don’t think that the truth of the two-tiered American justice system has ever been so clearly delineated.

I see that the last update was more than 2 years ago. Is it just complete? Or is it being neglected?

I was talking to someone recently and he mentioned that he has used AI for programming. It worked out fine, but the one thing he mentioned that really stuck with me was that when it was all done, he still didn’t know how to do the task.

You can get things done, but you don’t learn how to do them.

Starbucks may deserve all the stick that they get for their labor practices, but here in Canada on holidays they pay double time and a half (or about CAD $50/hour).

Given that large areas of the world do not see breasts as sexual, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that breasts are erogenous because our society has said that they are, rather than any innate characteristic.

When I lived in Africa, women and girls had no problem exposing their breasts, but would go to great length to keep their thighs covered.

My parents were happily using Mint for about 5 years, until my brother took over the it support role, and was uncomfortable trying to troubleshoot issues in Linux.

YouTube has just notified me that my family subscription, which cost under USD $3/month because I used a VPN to buy it in Argentina, is about to be canceled, and I have to pay the local amount, about USD $17.

It was good for the 2 years or so while it lasted, but I’m done with YouTube. In any case, I was finding the videos being shoveled in my face were irritatingly uniform and clearly chosen to reinforce my prejudices rather than challenge them or even give me an even-handed selection.

And fuck, I am just tired of all the reaction videos and clickbait “content” by talentless hacks who are just trying to profit off of other people’s creativity.

I got a Wii with the Wii Fit balance board for my dad to work on his balance and coordination as he aged. He never really got into it, but I think that could be an absolutely killer “game” for elderly people.

Back when the X-Files was ruling the airwaves, in the 90s, there was a companion show called Millennium. The first season was a bit weak, focusing on serial killers and gore. Second season went completely off the rails in the best way possible. The third season was a lackluster attempt to regain a wider audience.

I would recommend watching the second season for sure. It has religious satire (you will know exactly who they are skewering when you see it), the occult, end of days, mixed in with humor and solid human drama. The season finale, when they thought that they weren’t going to be renewed, is extraordinary.

Even as a 13-year-old, I could see gaping holes in the plot and inconsistencies. The aliens were hardly alien.

Even more so, I could see that the writing was clumsy and the dialogue was stilted. I could see how the writer was developing the story, and so I was not pulled into it at all. I was actually thinking to myself that I could write something like this. And I was 13!

I haven’t seen the movie, but from the sounds of it many of the problems with the book are also on screen.

I don’t know if this counts, but when I was about 13I was very excited to find an enormous book in my favorite genre at the time, Battlefield Earth by L. Ron Hubbard.

It was the first book I ever put down in disgust without finishing. In the almost half-century since then, there are under a dozen that I haven’t finished. Shows you just how bad it is.

I haven’t done it, bit I believe that with a pressure cooker you don’t need to soak the chickpeas.

All but one of my grandparents had died before I was born, and the remaining one died when I was about 10. She was a stickler for social rules, so I found her kind of intimidating.