Nintendo once again treats its fans with contempt and hostility. It’s not a good look.

Hey, Israel just needs a little living space.

This is pleasing to the USA because the machine needs more money too.

It’s just that the NYT isn’t the progressive institution people wish it was. Its thing is old-fashioned liberalism that will say progressive-sounding things when nothing much is at stake, but will go quiet, or distract with “lifestyle” articles or vapid opinion pieces, when it matters.

His poll numbers aren’t looking great,

They’re not looking anywhere near as bad as they should. 44% for Trump and 48% for Harris doesn’t mean much when the states’ election infrastructure has been systematically compromised by Republicans and the election all depends on a few swing states. There’s still a good chance of Trump being the next President.

The problem is, he has no idea about policy and really no interest in it, except when the decision obviously benefits himself, or benefits those who pretty directly benefit him. So whatever he’s saying at this point is just stuff he thinks sounds good. It bears no relation to what he’ll do, except where there’s obviously something in it for him and his associates. That’s why “I’ll take vengeance on my opponents” or “I’ll increase fossil fuel use and suppress green technologies” are the kinds of statements to take seriously from him, but “I’ll sort out your water problems” is not, unless we can find a benefit for him in it. The question to ask is, “Is he saying this because he thinks it benefits him to say it, or because he thinks it benefits him to do it?” (And for him, making people he dislikes suffer counts as a benefit.)

In any country with public healthcare, there is a problem with how to afford to care for the elderly when the population contains more elderly people needing expensive healthcare than working people paying the taxes that fund it. This seems like a problem that extends beyond capitalism’s growth-seeking. It’s an issue of how to achieve stability.

This is why employers are ageist. They want naive employees.

Qobuz is good: reasonably priced, you get the best quality audio (actual high resolution, not the MQA nonsense Tides was doing), a good catalogue and a decent UI, and it pays the artists a bit more than Spotify and others. Spotify is still a bit better for recommendations and automatic playlists.

Right-wingers reach for these religious or moralistic justifications and laws, but Putin is probably just noticing, like many other countries, that their economy is screwed if their birth rates continue to decline. And yet the planet is screwed if we continue to increase. As climate change eats away at the habitable areas of the planet, the obvious thing is for habitable countries with declining birth rates to accept many immigrants from places climate causes people to flee from. This will help those people and help the receiving country’s economy. Unfortunately the right wing is also too wrapped up in xenophobia to accept this solution. They’d rather double down on controlling women.

Aside from being “literally demonic,” Wallnau has claimed that Harris only beat Trump in the debate earlier this month because of “witchcraft.”

“When I say ‘witchcraft’,” he tweeted, “I am talking about what happened tonight. Occult empowered deception, manipulation and domination. That’s what ABC pulled off as moderators, and Kamala’s script handlers set up the kill box. One sided questions and fact checking sealed the box. Witchcraft. It’s not over yet, but something supernatural needs to disrupt this counterfeit momentum because the same public that voted in Obama is voting again and her deception is advancing.”

He has also repeatedly called Harris a Jezebel and accused her of having a “Jezebel spirit” — which, in addition to being a feminist website, a mediocre Bette Davis movie, and a lady from the Bible who is supposed to be especially evil but does not appear to have done anything more disturbing than the “good guys” of the Bible did (including God) apart from the fact that she did them while being a woman and having a different religion, has also long been used as a slur against Black women.

This is who the Republicans align with. In 2024, as humanity faces its greatest crisis ever in climate change, these people drag us back into arguments over whether Black women are witches or demons.

Notice how he calls fact checking “occult empowered deception, manipulation and domination.” That’s what he sees when someone checks facts. And his godly answer to that is… Donald Trump. That’s just as nuts as anything he can say about demons.

And who’s the one on the side of the occult when he says, “something supernatural needs to disrupt this counterfeit momentum because the same public that voted in Obama is voting again”? He admits that the public support Harris, so calls for supernatural intervention against democracy. This is the value system of modern Republicans, dressed up as religion. In the end it’s just “men like me get to control everyone else.” No surprise that these people say man was created in God’s image, when their God just happens to agree in every way with their nasty men.

In separate remarks made during his speech, Trump again dialed up his rhetoric against Harris, calling her “mentally disabled” and “mentally impaired.”

Well by the law of Republican projection there’s our proof that Trump is not playing with a full deck.

Biden didn’t seem to mention that Israel has conducted more than a thousand air strikes on Lebanon in two days, killing many hundreds, possibly thousands by now:

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cjd5x1mnj2yo

Are all of those thousand air strikes “justice”?

That’ll give Netanyahu the perfect excuse to continue slaughtering thousands of civilians.

This article is from 2018.

That sounds like Trump accepts Putin’s line that this war was the fault of Ukraine and NATO.

And I specifically mentioned the USA because that’s the country where OpenAI operates and where the events in the article take place, so if someone asks why it’s so easy for OpenAI to go from being a nonprofit to a for-profit company (this was the issue I was responding to, not some general question about whether money has influence around the world), it’s the laws of the USA that are relevant, not the laws of other countries.

It all gets publicity, and he won in 2016 on the back of months of free outrage publicity. All the time our attention is on him, it’s not on his opponent.

I don’t see where I said that.

USA tho