I don't know… a show about heroin dealers in a mid-Atlantic city? Not sure that would ever work.

Man, nobody cares about your damn '90s X-Men.

Because… I don't know. I'd like to believe that NBC is somehow different, that it's not overwhelmed by the wave of bad-faith camp and people who like corny stuff that seems to be the Done Thing these days. Realistically speaking, that is the way it is, and probably the guy who is imagining a TV era where that is not…

Except that stuff like this has no replay value. It's like sports… great, you got ratings, but you can't re-air that football game in March. You have to pay for more programming.

Much as I'd like to believe that, there's a reason so little of that viewership was in the 18-49 range. There are a lot of families out there, and a lot of old people, and other things. Whiskers on strudel, raindrops on kittens, etc.

"Beautiful like a mannequin"? I guess SOMEBODY's into mannequins…

"People innately, naturally enjoy holding secrets and we derive a deep sense of purpose and self worth from participating in a clandestine mission." Ah, the sweet smell of essentialism.

I have no reason to believe that the owners of small comedy venues had any way of knowing the contents of the acts of every comedian who passed through there. I don't think that's a reasonable assumption even now, even with the Internet. The booking agent calls, the club answers, the guy has appeared on…

Which is overheated rhetoric. A more accurate rendition would be "Corporations are treated similarly to people, and not similarly to overtly political organizations, in determining the rules that apply to political campaign contributions and advertising." Accurate, but not snappy. Mind you, I disagreed with the ruling…

Epiphanies are also not based on tangible evidence, right? Because again, I have no time for anything that's not based on tangible evidence. ESPECIALLY when it consists mostly of accusations flung wildly at massive groups of people.

If by "complete cratering" you mean "zero or slight growth, which isn't that bad in and of itself given how badly things were messed up." And if by "whistleblowers" you mean "reckless criminals", and "unabashed expansion of the surveillance state" you mean "I worry about the remote possibility of things that haven't…

The impression I have always gotten is that he was doing quite well for himself as early as 1988-89… perhaps that he would have been doing okay financially before then if he hadn't been spending a lot of his money on drugs.

Yeah… and this is assuming he KEPT doing it, when he knew for certain he wasn't going to win people over, and when he had opportunities to do shows elsewhere. I can understand blowing up, but putting yourself into a situation to blow up because you think you're making a point is pretty juvenile.

"The point" being that when Republicans decided to go hard right, either they won and they got all the reactionary stuff they wanted, or the Democrats won, but they were diluted by the influx of moderate Republicans to the point that whatever policies they proposed probably wouldn't be massively objectionable to the…

I feel like you're avoiding the real point. Yes, I was being flippant in combining two of Hicks' fact-unsupported beliefs. I mentioned them above in pretty much the state that he claimed them. Are you saying that Bill Hicks didn't believe in Kennedy assassination conspiracy theories? Are you saying that he didn't…

Yeah, and here's another thing — he brought a lot of that on himself. I have nothing but support for a comedian (or anyone, really) who wants to express his or her opinion as fully as possible. If I think that opinion's nonsensical or unethical, I'll say it, but go ahead and express it first.

I'd consider that a given, yes. If by "spiritual or religious experience," you mean something containing information that is not already in your own head.

What if you or me owned a corporation? It's the same system.

I'm half convinced that's the point. The Republicans are self-destructing, sure, but they're leaving in its wake a Democratic party that contains an AWFUL lot of people who 40 years ago would have been moderate Republicans. And because of the nature of the two-party system, those are the people who have won a lot of…

Here's the thing, though. Take drugs, experience what you want to experience. When you start insisting that those experiences reflect objective truth, or anything other than your own brain circling around itself? Well, that's when you're off the deep end.