Normally the metaphor isn’t this literal.

“Our jobs are hard! We deserve the occasional murder, as a treat!”

Olivia, my eldest daughter, caught measles when she was seven years old. As the illness took its usual course I can remember reading to her often in bed and not feeling particularly alarmed about it. Then one morning, when she was well on the road to recovery, I was sitting on her bed showing her how to fashion little animals out of coloured pipe-cleaners, and when it came to her turn to make one herself, I noticed that her fingers and her mind were not working together and she couldn’t do anything.

“Are you feeling all right?” I asked her.

“I feel all sleepy,” she said.

In an hour, she was unconscious. In twelve hours she was dead.

Roald Dahl, pleading with people to vaccinate their children against measles.

Oh my God, what if they cashed them all at once and emptied out America’s checking account.

Dipshits, ex-boyfriends, and imbeciles.

Jesus fucking Christ, Cannon again.

More despicable than running for re-election in the first place?

The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to shit in the street.

She told me that she couldn’t be bothered to think about Donald Trump.

Funny thing about that…

The former Berlin businessman I referred to earlier told me that he blamed his own group, people with the time and the money and the opportunity to know better, for what happened to Germany. “We ignored Hitler,” he said. “We considered him an unimportant fellow, not quite a gentleman, not of our own class. We considered it just a little bit vulgar to bother with him, to bother with politics at all.”

—Robert A. Heinlein, Take Back Your Government

Not blaming you or your friend for Trump, but reading the book that quote came from made me a lot more engaged in politics on a day-to-day basis.

Not a widely beloved performance, but on this episode of Prairie Home Companion, he plays Jim from Huckleberry Finn, catching up with ol’ Huck. One of my all-time favorite bits.

Relevant part starts at 9:45

I feel like I recall a story about a chip company that slowly reduced their salt content by like 50% over a number of years and literally no one noticed or complained.

I definitely saw another story about how they were researching pyramid-shaped salt crystals because they have higher surface area to volume, and with cuboid salt you wind up swallowing it before the whole thing even dissolves, so you’re not even getting a theoretical flavor experience, it’s just going straight into your gut.

We eat too much salt. It’s absurd.

We’ve got to bring back the United States Postal Savings System

New Colorado law will ban sales of dental floss, clothes, & other household products…

Me: Yo, what the fuck is going on in Colorado?

containing toxic “forever chemicals”

Me: Oh, that makes sense.

If you believe that laws forbidding gambling, sale of liquor, sale of contraceptives, requiring definite closing hours, enforcing the Sabbath, or any such, are necessary to the welfare of your community, that is your right and I do not ask you to surrender your beliefs or give up your efforts to put over such laws. But remember that such laws are, at most, a preliminary step in doing away with the evils they indict. Moral evils can never be solved by anything as easy as passing laws alone. If you aid in passing such laws without bothering to follow through by digging in to the involved questions of sociology, economics, and psychology which underlie the causes of the evils you are gunning for, you will not only fail to correct the evils you sought to prohibit but will create a dozen new evils as well.

Robert A. Heinlein, Take Back Your Government

I was curious about this. Since political parties run their own primaries, then they can decide to use whatever voting system they want. I suspect that RCV primaries would produce a candidate that is more competitive in the general election (though I don’t know enough about electoral math or demographics to be sure). I’m certain that RCV has a tendency to discourage scorched earth campaign tactics, so party candidates would be less prone to trying to destroy one another.

Judge Joseph P. Whyte wrote in an order Wednesday that the purpose of an expungement is to give people who have rehabilitated themselves a second chance

Sounds like people should test that theory by having a protest in front of their house and see what they do.

Also:

City prosecutors and police opposed the expungements.

Oh my God, these people are so horrible they found a way to unite cops and BLM protesters.

Also MAGA 2024: “Lock up Hunter Biden!”

If Clear’s entire business model is predicated on getting money from people who don’t want to deal with the standard security system, then they are 100% incentivized to keep security as unpleasant as possible. Suppose that Congressman Jones introduces the Make TSA Less Horrible Bill. That bill would be an existential threat to Clear, so they would absolutely lobby against it, even though it would objectively improve the lives of everyone who travels. By that same token, if Congressman Chudknuckle wanted a campaign donation from Clear, he might just so happen to introduce the TSA Now Can Stab You in the Ear with an Unfolded Paperclip Bill, and Clear would happily oblige.

Clear may not have created the problem for which they are selling the solution, but they have every incentive in the world to keep the problem as bad as possible, and even make it worse if they can.