I think you’re severely overestimating the average intelligence of the population.

True, the weather was really bad in that area, but he was traveling in a 3-helicopter convoy, and only his helicopter crashed. Now, I’m not saying that it’s impossible, or even improbable that it was an accident, but we can’t really rule out sabotage at this point, especially considering how big of a target he had on his head from both the US and Israel. Personally, I really hope it was an accident. I mean, I shed no tears for that son of a bitch, but the ramifications if this was an assassination are unsettling.

I think you’ve got some very mistaken ideas about who Democrats are if you think that a supermajority of them would be totally up for implementing a slew of progressive policies. They’re way more progressive than the Republican party is, for sure. But that’s such an incredibly low bar that it’s laughable. Democrats will do things like make Cesar Chavez day a holiday, or fly BLM and LGBTQI flags, but expecting them to actually pass legislation that addresses the root inequities in a meaningful way is an uphill battle.

I occasionally forget mine, too, but I was fortunate in that I was born in 1970, so it’s really easy to calculate it on the fly.

Except, they’re not really leftist; most of them support authoritarian regimes, like Russia and China. I’ve engaged with them about the war in Ukraine, for example, and their opinions on the matter ranged from “Ukraine should just let Russia win, because war is bad” to “Ukraine is full of Nazis, so go Russia”. If I had to make an historical comparison for them, I’d say that they’re basically like Mao’s red guards - kids with a little schooling under their belt who were nevertheless dumb enough to join a cult of personality for a bloodthirsty maniac.

Oh hey - catturd2; isn’t that that sycophantic piece of shit who fawns all over Elon Musk every chance he gets? Maybe it’s a different catturd2 on bluesky.

Edit: Actually, yeah; it does look like it’s a different person entirely:

Unfortunately, it’s often not easy to do. Women have a notoriously difficult time convincing fertility doctors to sterilize them because “well what if you change your mind some time in the future?” or “well what if you eventually meet a man who wants kids?”. Yeah. Basically, your wants and desires take back-seat to some hypothetical future you, or some hypothetical future man’s wants and desires. Unfortunately, even some of my blue state friends have faced major road blocks in this quest. It’s a disease that’s only going to get worse if the Republicans take over the executive. :(

Well, the first thing I’m going to do is drink myself into a coma. After that, I don’t know. I keep hoping to wake up rich so I can have a lot more options, but that hasn’t happened yet.

Harsh, but fair.

Can’t jump, can’t dance, but I’m ok at swimming.

I recently read Neil Stephenson’s book called “Fall”, in which a significant chunk of the novel is set about 30 years in the future. At that point in time, large swathes of America are referred to as “Ameristan”, because they are break-away territories ruled by evangelical warlords. It feels surprisingly prescient.

Ah, a fellow “Cracking the Cryptic” lover, I see.

Guess that assassin moonlights as a police officer.

Yay! I love copaganda! Show me some pictures of cops playing basketball with a group of “urban”-looking youths!

I think if I hadn’t dropped Netflix when they did a 180 on their stance on password sharing, I would drop them now.

And nothing of value was lost.

“X” isn’t publicly traded. When he bought it, he took it private, so you can’t short it. The ticker symbol X is for the United States Steel Corporation. You could definitely short that, though; it’s entirely possible that it’ll tank just the same because people confuse it with Xitter. Like when that Chinese company that had the ticker symbol ZOOM shot to the moon at the start of the pandemic because people thought it was the video conferencing app (whose symbol was ZM).

Well, as dumb as this was (and it was very, very dumb), I found myself distracted by just how… weird he looked. Not just his face, which reminded me of Lady Cassandra from Dr Who (“Moisturize me, moisturize me!”), but his weird, jerky movements, and just his general vibe. He’s like the personification of the uncanny valley. Eggar-from-MiB “get me sugar water” lookin’ ass. If someone were to come out with a tell-all saying that Musk had been secretly replaced by aliens, I wouldn’t even be terribly surprised at this point.

Ooh - very cool. A. baumanii is a really nasty little fucker. It’s the A in ESKAPE, a list comprised of the 6 most virulent and antibiotic resistant pathogens out there. A. baumanii is also sometimes referred to as Iraqibacter because of its prevalence in US military personnel returning from Iraq. It’s a soil-borne bacteria that was local to the middle east, but has now been spread around the world by hitchhiking in people. One of the main reasons why it’s so difficult to kill is that it is gram negative, which means that it has both an outer and inner membrane, which makes it difficult for existing classes of antibiotics to penetrate into the cell. Some of the other notable gram negative bacteria are E. coli, Y. pestis (the bacteria responsible for the black plague), and C. trachomatis, the bacteria responsible for chlamydia.

This study is pretty significant because, in addition to targeting a nasty little fucker, it’s possible that the approach used could be repurposed to target a number of that nasty little fucker’s nasty little family, too.