I can't believe nobody has brought up Bojack's critique of the French yet, starting with his critique of Sartre and how his philosophy aided Stalin's and Mao's tyranny and ending with "and they smell".

That's a cliched formula? Where else has it been used?

Yes, the whole angle of him being a racist wasn't really the focus until recently — certainly when I got into Lovecraft in the 1980s by way of the "Call of Cthulhu" RPG it wasn't brought up much. Makes me wonder if in the future when vegetarianism or something becomes standard we'll say things like "Yes, Einstein was…

Are you talking about the Spanish movie "Dagon" (which was really a version of "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" rather than "Dagon", which was a different story). I liked how the village was called Imboca. Made me wonder if nearby there was a town called Arcajamón.

Indeed, he was not much for those who couldn't trace their ancestry back to Cotton Mather's Puritans.

No. MR James wrote traditional ghost stories, not Lovecraftian horror. If you really want to find a British forerunner of Lovecraft, try Arthur Machen. "The Novel of the White Powder" and "The Great God Pan" were basically Lovecraft before Lovecraft. Horrible sanity-blasting ancient gods and degeneration and body…

I'm completely the wrong generation for it (I was in grad school when Pokemon first came out), but I've gotten into it because all the twenty-somethings in my group at work are into it and it's nice to talk about something other than work at lunch.

It's very weird. Even DOE nuclear weapons labs like Los Alamos employ townies, and even weirder, commercial contractors. People don't live "on base" — DOE is not the Army (Yes, I know that Hawkins lab might not really be DOE despite their claims).

We know El has the power to transmit whatever she hears transdimensionally over radios/intercoms. That's how she broadcasted Will's words over the ham radio. And it's stated again and again by various characters that the purpose of the lab is to defend against the Russians, so spying on their military seems to be…

"Was Mr. Gandhi okay?"
"He was fine, porkcfish. Go home. "

Better than 100 years ago? Sure. Better than 30-40 years ago? For a lot of people, no. It used to be totally possible for somebody like my grandfather (with only a high school education) to be middle class, own a house, go on vacations. Now the modern equivalent of such people work for minimum wage at Wal-Mart and…

The constantly updating population sign in Bunnyton and the fact that Judy had 275 siblings weren't enough?

Or anywhere, really. Like calling the official days off for Christmas "Winter Holiday and Day after Winter Holiday". At one level it's annoying, but having Jewish relatives, I get that the default assumption that everyone must be Christian is kind of annoying as well.

I don't know. I kind of liked it because it reminded me a bit of travellng in Eastern Europe in the 1990s where you were in a crowd of people who didn't know your language and couldn't communicate with them other than pointing, etc. Which is pretty weird and unusual setting for a native English speaker — I went back…

Go read Obama's wonderful editorial in the WSJ where he prides himself for developing a "21st century regulatory system" (i.e. a *deregulatory* system) that helps business by reigning in the EPA (the damn hippies there still have a thing against saccharine!). To be fair, I know it was before his reelection and was…

Because as we all know from recent history, removing a Ba'ath dictator from power leads to wonderful things, and the people would welcome their Western liberators with open arms!

Presumably she saved all the kids lives by screwing with their compasses so they wouldn't find the gate.

For starters, he's gutted the EPA's power to define what is and what isn't a "dangerous chemical" on the grounds that the FDA also has rules for that and that having two agencies with overlapping jurisdictions is redundant. Except for the fact that the EPA's rules were more stringent, and industry, which has more pull…

Go read Piketty. Increased economic inequality over the past thirty years or so is a real thing. Traditionally in the US we blame Reagan and other Republicans for their deregulation efforts, but that deregulation continued into the Clinton years and even Obama's.

People *say* that, largely because he lost against Reagan while trying to get reelected, but really, what did he do that was so bad? His time in office was viewed as a dark time largely to things outside his control. OPEC engineered the gas shortages (to which he rightly responded by increasing efforts towards…