Of what use, then, are the American Communists?

They serve one function extremely useful to you and to the country, so useful that, if there were no Communists, we would almost be forced to create some. They are a reliable litmus paper for detecting real sources of danger to the Republic.

Communism is so repugnant to almost all Americans, when they are getting along even tolerably well, that one may predict with certainty that any social field or group in which the Communists make real strides in gaining members or acceptance of their doctrines, any such spot is in such bad shape from real and not imaginary social ills that the rest of us should take emergency, drastic action to investigate and correct the trouble.

Unfortunately we are more prone to ignore the sick spot thus disclosed and content ourselves with calling out more cops.

–Robert A. Heinlein, Take Back Your Government

Because government does things that large populaces can’t or won’t do for themselves. Sometimes that’s things like Social Security, regulating companies so they don’t enslave us or dump DDT all over the place, or organizing enough coordinated violence to prevent other, more aggressive governments from coming in and taking over. Sometimes, usually when the people aren’t paying enough attention, it’s horrible things like building Gitmo or supporting Israel.

Ideally, everyone would be well-informed and engaged enough to immediately hold government accountable when it does horrible things in our names, but for a lot of people life is hard, and they’ve been actively discouraged from having that education and engagement, usually by one flavor or another of psychopath who wants to get away with their atrocities and not be answerable to a decently informed and engaged electorate.

Democrats do, on balance, care more about their leaders committing atrocities than Republicans do, but the phenomenon of “I just can’t think about that right now, I’ve got other things going on” is a universal experience.

It’s right to be outraged by this complacency, and I don’t even think anyone is wrong for wanting to disengage from any political party or even politics as a whole in response, but wanting to remain morally pure and wanting to achieve anything of merit within the system we currently have are mutually exclusive goals.

If someone finds politics as a whole, and all of the moral compromises involved, so abhorrent that they don’t want to engage at all, I get it, but they’d really better start looking up how to engage in violent resistance, because change either comes through politics and all of its attendant compromises or through violence, there’s no third alternative.

Contribution: Go check out other countries’ translations of Disney songs. Disney puts in a lot of work to make sure that their foreign language singers sound as much as possible like the original and that the translated lyrics have about the same rhythm as the original. It’s deeply uncanny sometimes, a bit like having a brain malfunction where the song sounds exactly the same but you can’t understand the words.

Corollary: Can anyone recommend some good German rap? I downloaded one German rap song back in my Napster days and I loved how it sounded, but then I realized that I didn’t speak a word of German and for all I knew they were rapping some truly heinous lyrics without my knowledge, so I took it out of rotation. I’d love to have some good German rap that I wouldn’t be horrified to learn is about right wing politics or something

I’m not sure if it’s himself but John Spencer had an oddly specific career type cast as “guy who is smarter than the people around him and is totally exasperated with having to deal with their nonsense.”

From WarGames to The Rock to The West Wing, he’s that guy. So consistent.

Fatberg

There’s like… one percent of one percent of advertising that has ever been created that actually had some kind of artistic or entertainment merit. Those insane Spongmonkies ads for Quiznos. The H&M ad Wes Anderson did. It’s so vanishingly rare as to not meaningfully count, but it does happen once in a blue moon.

Yes, they confirmed the objective existence of the soul within the context of their fictional universe, alongside faster than light travel, time travel, accessible parallel universes, stable wormholes, hand-held weapons that can vaporize a human being, and artificial general intelligence.

On the scale of science fiction hardness, Star Trek is somewhere between warm jello and cotton candy.

1: Closing Time, by Semisonic, but that’s because I put it on when I’m trying to hustle people out of the store at the end of a day

2: Batman Theme, by Neal Hefti

3: Evil Plot to Blow Up Batman, by Neal Hefti, but those are because my daughter kept insisting she wanted to listen to the 1960s Batman soundtrack on the way to school.

Numbers 4-6 are from the Frozen Soundtrack for the same reason, then back to 1960s Batman for 7-9.

10: The Batman Theme, by the Ventures. Kid loves Batman.

Then there’s more Batman, more Frozen, and a song from The Little Mermaid.The first song that I consistently choose to listen to for myself and that hasn’t been artificially inflated is #15.

Victim of Love, by Erasure.

It’s been at least twenty years since Spielberg made a movie that anyone gave two shits about.

In the TNG episode Lonely Among Us, while under the influence of an alien entity, Picard disintegrates himself into a nebula. The crew spend hours trying to get him back and are about to give up, when Troi senses Picard’s disembodied presence nearby, and they are able to reconstitute his body from the transporter buffer, reuniting it with his mental energy.

So Star Trek has effectively confirmed the scientific existence of the soul, and the fact that it exists independently of the body, and that the soul can continue to exist without the body, and that the transporter can transport the soul without destroying it. So, no, the transporter is not a suicide machine.

The first time I ever paid for access to cheat codes was in 1990.

We got our rescue dog sequenced.

She came back 75% Staffordshire Terrier, 12.5% German Shepherd, and 12.5% “Miscellaneous Asian,” and if I had to hazard a guess, I’d say Shar Pei is a strong possibility, because she had a ton of extra skin around her neck and shoulders, giving her a mighty wattle.

I’d like to imagine that, between those three components, some unethical breeder was trying to create some super fighting dog, and instead what they got was my dog: profoundly lazy, couch-motivated, totally lacking in hunting instincts, neither a sight nor scent hound (you could drop a piece of cheese on the ground and you’d have to point and say “Here! Here” as she obliviously sniffed in every direction), and so lacking in killer instinct that one time she found a baby rabbit in a bush and we said “Ah ah ah!” and she instantly dropped it unharmed and walked away without a glance back.

She died just a few days ago, and I’m nowhere near over it

She was the perfect dog.

…it must be a lightsaber handle!

Although black nail polish does still exist.

I’d say that’s the point of having a functional democracy: you respond to the needs of the people with a series of bloodless revolutions in the form of elections so as to make bloody revolutions unnecessary. Why should there be cities in flames and blood in the streets when one can have a series of votes instead?

This is predicated on the the concept of a functional democracy, of course, whereas ours has become less and less functionally representative every year since 1929, and then got a bullet to the brain from Citizens United.

Hell yeah, electric horses!

I taught myself a few knots! Took a few tries, but now I can tie a monkey’s fist without screwing it up too badly. Gives me something to do with my hands for a while, and I can give them away as gifts.

It’s actually an example where 100% soulless corporatism can result in better moral outcomes than a particular ideology. Disney corporate doesn’t give a fuck about queer folk as human beings, but because there was money to be made, they were more likely to side with them than with the DeSantis administration. This is only so long as it’s profitable, but it’s still actually preferable to actively seeking to persecute theys and thems purely out of ideological hatred, even at the expense of tearing down a chunk of the economy.

I think it’s a zombie book called Feed where the zombie apocalypse is brought about by two generically engineered cures, one for the common cold and the other for cancer. The upshot is that there’s no more common cold and there’s no more cancer, but there is a zombie apocalypse so that’s a bit of a downside.