Unexplained Ferrous Objects

I mean, I grant that there’s a pretty steep degradation from the first to the fourth, but are you annoyed by the implication that Superman could crush coal into diamond?

Go squish some coal into diamonds.

😳😬

I DID tell the guide what he was wearing because I didn’t want us to end up in a military detention cell but the guide was like “Eh, it’s fine,” so I guess it was, but boy it didn’t feel like it should have been!

I got a tour of a military base with a guy who was wearing smart glasses and I couldn’t fucking believe that someone didn’t grab them off his face and break them in half. I was being VERY careful to ask if I was permitted to take pictures in some places (in at least one of which where the answer was No), and this dude was cruising around like Boris Badunov trying to gather secrets.

I don’t think anyone will like what happens if even the illusion of a functional system of laws is well and truly swept away. When enough people believe that a system is working, even if it isn’t working but they believe that it is, then life can more or less continue in a vaguely tolerable fashion. When that belief is taken away, things tend to get weird.

Edit: For the record, I think that most lower class and an ever-increasing number of middle class people already live in that reality. I think it’s the people with the most to lose who will find out just how bad it can get if the imaginary glue holding society together evaporates away in a puff of searing populist anger.

Not that I really expect Disney to ever do the right thing as such, but I can dream about Disney lawyers going all…

…in court for ICE fucking around with their “WOW” customer service ethos and therefore their bottom line.

I love that a show about a hat-wearing pig looking at plants is long enough to have an intermission.

passive income

growing cash crops

🤔

I was going to say that eating someone who died of a bacterial infection doesn’t seem like a very good idea.

In Intro to Political Science, I read King of the Mountain.

In it, the author explores the behavior of primates when they take over social groups. They secure access to food, mates, and social prestige. This happens in gorillas, chimpanzees, and in human beings, too. In humans, it tends to take the form of powerful leaders securing themselves wealth through corruption, having mistresses, and forming cults of personality, and that all of these behaviors are more pronounced under more authoritarian governments than under functional democracies.

I don’t think that humans are inherently bad, in fact I think that we achieved our level of success on the planet through our communal and altruistic tendencies. But I also think that there are human traits that we still have in common with our ape cousins, and that we’ve got to keep a close eye on them and think about what we can do to account for them and prevent them from overriding our healthier and more beneficial impulses.

[Checks]

Oh, thank God, I was worried it was going to be something heartbreaking, like the painting was commissioned after the little girl had tragically died from scarlet fever or some such. Everything’s fine.

The “doppelganger problem” is really why this is not an easy issue to answer. If someone gets exclusive rights to a specific face, who is to say another person naturally having a similar face isn’t being wronged? How close is too close?

At what point is Natalie Portman allowed to sue Keira Knightley?

Or even just getting hit in the head by a well-meaning person who reasonably thinks they’re trying to prevent a maniac from killing someone in the building.

You’d be amazed what a determined meth addict with a crowbar can do.

But it comes with a free frogurt!

The artist here is Brom, and he’s so fucking good. Gives Goth Boris Vallejo vibes.