Saying "Bernie would have won" upsets Dems because a) it's true & b) it means they handed the election to Trump on a platter. Keep saying it

— maple cocaine (@historyinflicks) June 9, 2017

What’s weird is that up until my 30s I had a gap between my two front teeth. It wasn’t huge, but it was not small either.

Now I don’t. No gap, no cleft, no discontinuity. No dentist repaired it. It’s just not there any longer.

Also my jaw has gotten more prominent and changed shape, which I’m guessing is why my teeth moved.

Nope, not taking HGH or anything else. Never taken steroids, either.

I think I am mutating.

Where’s my superpowers?

The 2016 election in the US and the recent UK election both show one thing: that older people are bound and completely determined that the younger generations will be denied any of the benefits or advantages they themselves enjoyed.

Why? I don’t know. At this point, given that almost all of the initiatives championed by Corbyn and Sanders et al. would also benefit older people, it seems mainly like spite.

When you're not doing so well, vote for a better life for yourself. If you are doing quite nicely, vote for a better life for others.

— Irvine Welsh (@IrvineWelsh) May 7, 2015

People lately have been fond of saying about funding government programs that there is “no magic money tree.”

But the thing is, for a sovereign nation with a fiat currency…there kinda is.

Like all magic, it can go wrong — but we are so very far away from that in the UK and the US.

Or rather, it already has gone wrong, by way of the magic money tree’s bounties only being distributed to banks and to the rich.

See the graph in the post below for reference.

Why asset prices (in part) have gone stratospheric.

Major Central Banks Boldly Going Where Major Central Banks Have Never Gone Before pic.twitter.com/bqw1E8zIGM

— Not Jim Cramer (@Not_Jim_Cramer) June 7, 2017

When — if — that unwinds….dang.

I think one of the reasons that I am terrible at operational math is that I either know the answer or I do not.

No amount of reasoning will get me from the problem to the answer as I don’t really reason about anything in math, or with words, or even with any sort of related problems in general.

I just look at something and it’s just obvious or I’ll never know it. In areas with muscle memory — like playing music — that is not true, luckily. I do learn there, especially if it’s to do with my hands.

So that’s why I sometimes look like a mega-genius and other times like a complete dunce. That problem you were working on for six hours? Yeah, I’ll just walk over to your desk and tell you how to solve it in 15 seconds. The answer’s just obvious to me. I don’t know where the solution came from. It’s just there. No thought required.

But ask me to solve a math problem, and even if you explain to me a thousand times the steps it takes to do it, it never makes any impression and similar problems never look equivalent enough to me to guess that I should use the same methods. And I never know why I should use those methods and not others, or what the differences are between dissimilar problems, or why I shouldn’t just use some ligatures to make the numbers look prettier, nor why I just can’t abandon the whole futile enterpise and instead endeavor to ascertain why I’m even attempting to solve such boring garbage in the first place.

That’s when I look like an utter oaf.

What makes The Handmaid’s Tale so correspondent to reality is that the right and the left both often base their political imperatives on withdrawing and trading away the rights of women.

The men and the authoritarian theocracy in THT have a mixture of (mostly) right-wing ideas with some left-wing pragmatism and language tossed in. Reminds me very much of many of Donald Trump’s supporters, and that is not accidental.

Many of the left’s “compromises” betray women every opportunity they get, by the way.

It’s not just the right. Nope.

I think about 80% of right-wing men and 60% of left-wing men would be perfectly happy to live in a society similar to Gilead.

So, yes, the right is worse. But it’s not alone. “Not worse” doesn’t mean at all great.

Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) Stock Soars Again: Should You Buy?

Naw, all ya’ll should’ve bought two weeks ago when I did.

When you read articles like this, it’s usually too late. Don’t fall for them.

I suspect Noam Chomsky was substantially wrong about his idea of “universal grammar,” but correct to argue that language acquisition and use is innate.

“Universal grammar” as such appears to me to be just the concordance certain sensory and causal-seeming experiences must have with the world and with our sensory apparatuses.

Where I’m guessing Chomsky went wrong is that the idea of universal grammar doesn’t dictate that some innate, hidden grammar corresponding to features universal to all languages, but rather a more-accurate account is that language tendencies are partially genetic (Would humans invent language again? Of course.), and that due to the structure of the world both as we perceive it at and at a remove as it actually is, language was constrained to and by certain parameters — not to mention the usefulness tradeoffs such as time, processing, and semantic complexity.

I wonder if all our societal problems can’t just be reduced down to that people and society in general just no longer care to deal with nuance?

And is this post itself an example that illustrates that larger leitmotif?

Otterly cute.

If that doesn’t cheer you up at least a little — well, I got nothin’ for ya.

The left is doomed to lose on immigration and related if it continues to pretend — and it shows no sings of stopping — that there aren’t valid concerns with communities rapidly changing, and the related worries of long-time residents distressed by being displaced or just finding themselves navigating unfamiliar territory and then being told they are racist for wondering why they can’t live in their own neighborhood any longer.

Call it xenophobia, call it racism, call it what you like — I call it human nature.

I’m for fairly high levels of immigration, by the way.

The left is absolutely excellent at shooting itself in the foot (both feet, really) and on this issue is no different.

People would be far more accepting of immigration and immigrants if:

1) The left didn’t insist that everyone who expressed any doubts about anything any less than full open borders is a fiendish, crazed cackling racist.

2) The left didn’t insist on siding with neoliberalism on this, where the desire for immigration has nothing to do with compassion or self-determination, but rather with the aim of preventing wage gains and for busting labor.

Sure, the left is marginally better than the right. But with their current ideological and functional-level dimwittedness, they are bound to lose.

Just as they usually do.

What makes The Handmaid’s Tale so unnerving is its plausibility.

A lot of dystopian fiction is escapist, because it feels incredible in the older sense of that word. By contrast, The Handmaid’s Tale for the US is something that could happen in a few years, or sooner.

It’s probably easier to grasp the show deeply if you grew up among the Religious Right as I did — it’s clear that many liberals have no idea just how many of them there are and even less understanding of their true beliefs and how well the show in particular reflects them.

What makes the book work, and what makes the show even more affecting, is that it’d only take a few crises for America to look exactly like that — and most liberals would be just as complacent and unaware as even the protagonists are on the show. That is, until it is far too late.

I could never be a talk show host or anything like that because I tend to say whatever comes to mind. It’s just built in. Or more accurately, it doesn’t ever impinge on my mind consciously, rather it egresses from my mouth seemingly ex nihilo.

One of the reasons I tend to be quiet is that if I speak, I am never sure what is going to emerge. Better to say nothing.

A friend of mine used to ask me, “Do you have to just say whatever pops into your head?”

But here’s the thing. It didn’t pop into my head. I only knew it was going to come out of my mouth when I heard it, just as you did.

Oftentimes, I am just as surprised as anyone else by what I hear emanating from my own face.