I also think that American national identity was shaped pretty profoundly by manifest destiny, and so even after the frontier was closed we’ve kept trying to recreate those conditions.  That explains all the imperialism (and its frequent association with cowboy imagery, George W. Bush style).  And I think that same…

“Vunce ze rockets go up, who cares vere zey come down? Zat’s not my department,” says Claire Foy.

This is a very bad take. For starters, Nevada only gets 1.8% of the allocated Colorado River water (and we actually take less than we’re legally allocated). Another issue is, something like 70% of the Colorado water (in all the states that get it) goes to agriculture, the overwhelming amount of which is for export to…

While the “right and wrong” functionality was originally scheduled for this version, conflicting priorities meant that the development team had to push it back to a future release.  Rest assured, however, that the company places a high priority on it and is totally committed to listening to customer feedback.

Closest analogue I can think of is the subplot in Love Actually where the guy who’s a complete goober in Britain thinks that if he moves to America, gorgeous women will start throwing themselves at him based on his accent alone... and then as soon as he arrives, that EXACT thing happens. It’s a riot.

I mean, were they REALLY trying to find new blood? I feel like they were actually trying to automate their hiring process so they wouldn’t have to pay humans to do it anymore. But “we want to cut jobs” doesn’t sound as good as “we want to find overlooked job applicants and help them out,” so they’re using the latter…

This is a very good and true point about asset forfeiture laws more generally, but the problem with those is that they’re used as improper leverage over criminal defendants. This specific shark-fin case wasn’t criminal - the dispute was over civil penalties that the government assessed on the shipowners. That’s the…

I think Shawn is going after the humans so hard because they’re a huge threat to him.  If they’re successfully able to become better people, then it proves that the whole Good Place/Bad Place system is based on a false premise, and that it’s actually super immoral to send billions of basically mediocre people to…

I feel like the benefit of bugs (and bioweapons generally) is that they reproduce on their own, so it’s possible to start with a very small attack that rapidly multiplies. That kind of small attack could be launched covertly, so nobody knows that we did it (or we can plausibly pretend we didn’t do it). Whereas with…

All those potential good things could come from plants that have been infected with beneficial transgenic viruses, sure. The issue here is the delivery mechanism. Almost all food plants are annuals - they die off at the end of every growing season, and new seeds are planted next year. So if you come up with a new…

I did not realize this until I went on IMDB afterwards, but the orderly is Titus’ rival from Kimmy Schmidt.

Jed killed the hawk, not Owen. 

“When I was a kid, I found this hawk in the park, and I just had this feeling that I had to protect it because it was so strong. But it was, like, hurt also, and I brought it home and I helped it get better. And then it ate my brother’s gerbil, and he killed it with a hammer, and I’ve…

I always think this is a really good article about “what does atonement actually look like.” To summarize, the person needs to satisfy four conditions. (1) Loss or punishment - they need to be smacked on the nose for purposes of deterrence and encouraging rehabilitation. (2) Restitution - they need to do something to…

But here’s the question we haven’t answered: does Louis CK owe us? Not the women he hurt, he undeniably owes them something (I don’t really know what that is, nor is it my place to say - kind of up to the women he hurt on a case by case basis)

I always think this article is a good exploration of “what people have to do in order to stop being shunned for their sexual misconduct” - this is the kind of thing that C.K. has been badly failing to do.

https://www.currentaffairs.org/2017/11/can-penitent-sexual-predators-ever-be-granted-redemption

Jeez, Mr. Kavanaugh, I really think you should be keeping a low profile right now instead of commenting on message boards

Scott and his colleagues then analyzed the ionosphere response records that corresponded to the timing of 152 large Allied raids in Europe, in which 100 to 900 tons (220,000 to 1.8 million pounds) of explosives were dropped onto cities, factories, and other military targets.

In the comics, Thanos is actually from Titan, so yeah, pretty much.

And if they don’t make this session, even if they rammed him through, he’d have to sit out the whole session & wait for the next one.

A lot of publications also embed tweets nowadays instead of copy/pasting them.  If a tweet is deleted off Twitter, the article embed no longer works.