What could have possibly prompted this?

He still managed to come out two years ahead of nearly everyone else.

The US Senate is a shit place full of shit people. But you’re fooling yourself if you think Bernie Sanders is the reason we’re still sending billions a month through back channels to re-arm the Zionists in their crusade for a Greater Israel. There’s about 98 Senators ahead of him in line. 97 if Platner pulls it out in Maine.

Americans are routinely terrorized by the very thought of moving to a foreign country. Every other place on Earth is wracked with crime, plagued with poverty, ruined by pollution, and obliterated by war. Fortress America is the only Safe Space for white people. And even within Fortress America, you need to be holed up in some exurban Walled Garden that’s surrounded by battalions of the most heavily armed police imaginable.

My father-in-law traveled to Zhuhai, China (just outside Macau) a few years ago. He was flabbergasted at how clean and safe and easy to get around a foreign country could be. He’d been prepared to hike ten miles a day between shitty bus stops. He’d left everything personally valuable to him behind, because he was convinced it would all get confiscated or stolen. He dressed almost entirely in flannel, because he was afraid looking to affluent would get him mugged. He even packed a bunch of dried food, for fear he wouldn’t find anything to eat for days at a time. Ended up in a city that could have doubled as San Francisco. The worst experience he had was people insisting they let him take a picture together (he’s a tall round guy with a white beard and people kept calling him “Santa”).

I’ve had this experience so frequently with folks who have traveled. We go to Mexico City. We go to Seoul, South Korea. We go to Turkiye and Greece. We go to Moracco. We go to Buenos Aires. Even London and Paris. Everyone thinks we’re going to die. We send them pictures. We tell stories. Nobody in the states believes it, until they get dragged out of their hidey holes to see it for themselves.

The American Brain is absolutely cooked.

November 2023

:-/

It’s why you’ll see some Chinese guy with dogshit taste paying an $80k premium to bring in a Cadillac SUV or Mercedes. Literally just conspicuous consumption on steroids for some folks.

But you have to balance this out with the realization that half the population of China doesn’t even own a car, much less some gawdy Americanized abomination. These sales figures are still just a drop in the bucket compared to 4.8B rail trips taken in the country last year. If you’ve got the spare coin and the extra real estate and you live out far enough that owning a car makes sense, then why not own a Tesla Y over a BYD? But 28k units sold in a year represent a rounding error on a rounding error compared to the total transportation budget of the country at large.

Just 40M more triangles, dawg. I just need an extra 40M more triangles and then the game will look good.

Please, bro. I’m begging you. This is the last time. Then the game will look SO SMOOTH. I just need those 40M extra triangles and then it’ll look absolutely fantastic, I promise. Games are literally unplayable without the extra 40M triangles. I won’t have any fun unless I get them. I will pay literally any price. Please, this is the last time. I swear.

It falls victim to the old SciFi trope “The only way to beat a Good Protagonist is with an Evil Protagonist”. And like all the Picard-Era movies, it has a habit of forgetting what made the television series gripping. Perhaps because it’s always afraid of doing something with a character that they can’t undo with a handwave by the time the credits roll.

Bible be like “You’re going to experience hunger, illness, war, and death.”

2000 years later, every single fucking generation in history thinks they’re living in the End Times.

There’s a world in which someone takes the Section 31 plotline and spins it out into a compelling Star Trek storyline. But it’s where Section 31 is basically Specter to the Starfleet Rebel Captain’s James Bond. They could have even done it with NuTrek, if they’d left Into Darkness on a cliffhanger (Khan Noonien Singh remains commander of the Enterprise, while Kirk and Spock have to do spook shit to stop him before he takes down Star Fleet from the inside).

If you’re feeling squirrelly, you can do a Hitman style story arc, where you introduce a fresh new character/team doing Le Epic Spycraft Shit in the first Act, realizing the moral hazard of the agency in the second Act, and going through a redemption arc in the third Act. Presumably with some handful of Star Fleet cameos operating as the protagonist’s Jiminy Cricket.

Instead, we get some kind of Space Charlie’s Angels, where the Gene Roddenbery story beats are all tossed in the trash and it’s just generic cowboy sci-fi with Starfleet badges.

“God is angry because we elected the wrong dude” is just a mantra the losing party repeats following every defeat.

On the flip side, “God’s light shines on our candidate!” is the mantra the winning party repeats following every victory.

Almost as though it’s just hollow partisan superstition used to distract the gullible types from policy.

Isn’t the primary like, today?

Yeah, but Janet Mills dropped out in April. She was the only significant contender against Platner for the nomination.

A lot of people have seemed hellbent on absolutely not supporting anyone but Platner

Mills is currently the most unpopular Governor in the country, with a 29% approval rating (worse than Trump). I don’t think it’s quite so much hellbent on Platner as it is hellbent on not electing another Schumercrat. The only other candidate on the ballot - David Costello - has no budget or constituency. He spent the bulk of his career in Maryland, doing work as a mid-level staffer for the governor.

and who eats sea weed daily?

Honestly, it’s one of my favorite snacks

The congressman they voted for was actively fighting screwworm

You don’t really know who you are until those last five seconds before the anesthesia takes you down.

Flamingo Revolution

Metal Gear Guard Alert Noise

Caveat Emptor, sure.

But so much of this is based on maliciously propagated misinformation. It’s the same shit asbestos, lead paint, and cigarette companies were doing in bygone days. Going into national media, lying their asses off, and then kicking the blame down to their customers when they get caught.

That’s the beauty of the Mexican project. They’re going to accommodate the refugees in a way Americans refused to do. And they’re going to become a better country for it

I’ve just been reading this article over and over again since the 1980s. We’re way past whimsy and on to scammy pseudo science

Do you understand how Federation even works?

Christ. Go back to Reddit with this shit

On a minor plus side, if you dope the walls with mercury, it transmutes to gold, in commercially viable amounts!

There’s literally a startup promising to exploit this. Although, how they’re going to get a commercially visible fusion reactor started remains to be seen