I got some of these that clip on to my glasses for miniature painting, and they were very nice for being able to flip on and off as needed. Looks like these come in different magnification powers, which sounds handy, depending on one’s needs.
Castle of Not
Cursed castle. Everything within it can only be defined by what it is not.
[Players meet the beautiful princess.]
“A hideous prince does not stand before you.”
[Players find a chest of gold.]
“You have not found a rotten sack full of live crabs.”
Sounds like something that would need to be secured by the Antimemetics Division.
Florida 2000 Presidential Election results:
Bush: 2,912,790 (48.847%)
Gore: 2,912,253 (48.838%)
Nader: 97,488 (1.64%)
If just 538 Nader voters had gone to Gore, representing 0.0091% of the total vote, Al Gore would have been president.
Tiny fucking margins can change the world. Ask a bunch of dead Iraqi people if they feel like there would have been no meaningful difference between Bush and Gore.
The theory I heard on the Strict Scrutiny podcast is that the 5th Circuit exists to write atrocious opinions on terrible rulings so that the Supreme Court can make rulings that are only 85% as horrible as that so the SC can seem more reasonable by comparison.
And the Carolina Squat!
I thought that was the sort of thing that the government mandated companies had to do in a controlled and transparent fashion. I wouldn’t have thought that the NTSB would allow a vehicle to be registered without a thoroughly vetted crash testing procedure.
John Stark, one of the rescuers of the Donner Party.
In Summit Valley the remaining rescuers discussed what to do and took a vote to save only two of the children in Starved Camp. That might have been all they could manage. The others would have to stay behind.
John Stark, above, could not abide that. That meant that nine people, mostly children, would die on the mountain, exposed to the elements down in a very deep hole in the snow. John Stark decided he would save all nine, “Already shouldering a backpack with provisions, blankets, and an axe, he picked up one or two of the smaller children, carried them a little ways, then went back for the others. Then he repeated the whole process again and again and again. To galvanize morale, he laughed and told the youngsters they were so light from months of mouse-sized rations that he could carry them all simultaneously, if only his back were broad enough.” Once they were out of the snow he would eat and rest he said, but not before. He saved all nine. That is extraordinary and that is heroism. It was also heroism he never got contemporary credit for.
Imagine being JD Vance, looking at all of the people smarter and more experienced than him with their shattered careers after working for Trump, and thinking “But I’m the one who will figure out how to ride this tiger to my own advantage!”
Rudy Giuliani went from being “America’s mayor” to being an absolute fucking laughingstock, a man so generally reviled that he couldn’t sustain an appearance on The Masked Singer.
Anyone, literally anyone at any level, at this point who thinks that Trump won’t throw them under the bus at his earliest convenience is just actively seeking their own destruction.
I counted at least twenty references to the “Harris administration,” or “Harris’ immigration policies,” and one full-on “the Harris/Biden administration.”
Jesus, he went to Burlington VT? Was he trying to generate so much psychic dissonance that he summoned the angry ghost of Ethan Allen?
Sweet Jesus, I wish that Democratic voters and politicians were unified enough that if we had a solid majority in this country that we could be considered a one-party state. Even if we somehow did manage to finagle things such that we won the next election 60-40 or more, it’s obvious to anyone with a brain that we would immediately celebrate by turning on each other like dogs. The neolibs can’t stand the hippies. The hippies can’t stand the tech liberals. Most of the people pushed left by identifying with one oppressed minority group or another are in a coalition approximately as stable as the Balkans in 1913.
Democrats’ favorite activity is infighting. We like it more than winning elections. The times when we actually manage to get our shit together enough to win are the exception to the rule.
When asked whether Vance believes Robinson’s denial that the comments were made by him, Vance said that the situation needed to “play out.”
“I don’t not believe him, I don’t believe him — I just think that you have to let these things sometimes play out in the court of public opinion."
Remember that for Republicans it’s not a matter of how despicable a candidate is, it’s only a matter of if they’re popular or not. Vance came right out and said that the truth doesn’t matter, just public opinion. If 50.1% of voters in North Carolina were going to vote for Robinson, the GOP wouldn’t care what he said. If that number was 49.9%, it wouldn’t matter if he was an amalgamation of Jesus Christ and Captain America, they’d throw him to the curb and claim they’d never heard of him.
They have no principles. The only thing they believe in is power; getting it, and using it against the people they hate. That is their only true ideology.
Granny Gazoot! Let’s have a toot! And when I count three!
Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.
–Jean-Paul Sartre
PLEASE ADOPT VERIFICATION CAT TO CONTINUE
“To prove that you are human, donate $$$ to Doctors Without Borders.”
“To prove that you are human, register to vote.”
“To prove that you are human, adopt a pet from the local animal shelter.”
It seems to me like there’s a lot of talk in the vein of “AI will never be able to meaningfully replace humans at [Task X],” and not enough talk about what we should do to prepare for the possibility of AI replacing humans at those tasks.
Like, right now, AI can create shitty art and write shitty code, but are we prepared for what happens if and when it can do those things well? We’ve got to acknowledge that human lives have inherent value, and not just because they can do things that machines can’t.