TIL

That’s why electroconvulsive therapy uses pulses of about a millisecond. But, then, it’s not actually turning the power off, ECT is more of a warm reset of consciousness.

Huh. If traffic is more likely to kill me than violent crime, it’s a dishonest emotional reaction to fear traffic more than violent crime?

Yes, if your city has more homicides than traffic deaths, the bigger problem is—drum roll please—homicides.

But if your city has more traffic deaths than homicides, then traffic is a bigger problem than homicides. Which is the whole point of this post.

I mean… good? Why would we want a politician that’s acceptable to him?

Yes, mathematicians first encountered equations which could only be solved with complex numbers in the 16th century.

(17M)

There it is. That’s the issue. One’s teenage years are a time of figuring out one’s identity, and a huge helping of insecurity about it. He’s giving away the game by claiming to be so mature.

Spoiler: He desperately wants to be seen by others as mature, but he doesn’t feel it inside yet.That’s why he makes a big show of rejecting “kid stuff.” Nobody needs to point out what’s obvious about themselves, so if he felt mature, he wouldn’t need to say it.

He’ll get there eventually. In the mean time, he’s hurting your feelings. Tell him that, in plain words, like, “Badmouthing the things that I like makes me feel bad. It makes me wonder why you’re with me. You don’t have to like them, but please accept the fact that I do like these things, and keep any criticism to yourself.”

TL;DR: We can’t hold them accountable for their crimes, because they might try to hold us accountable for the same crimes.

The Red Green Show

Easy-going comedy with minimal plot, mostly there to tie together an episode of shorter skits. Some Boomer humor, but not too cringe, I think.

One of the Big Lies that they repeated over and over throughout the election season was the one about the “border crisis,” where allegedly criminals and rapists were flooding into the country across the southern border by the millions. They promised to round up and deport all of them, literally millions of people. You can see where the problem arose: Lies collided head-on with reality. There simply are not millions of migrants for ICE to round up. They don’t exist. They never existed. It was all a lie.

Now, the regime has to appear like it’s Doing Something™ by actually deporting people. Stephen Miller has even given ICE a quota of 3,000 deportations a day, and it’s struggling. They have to make the numbers somehow, and the low-hanging fruit are the immigrants that they already have records on, and know about. ICE can just comb the immigration records, and go pick up people whom they know exactly where to find. Morality and logic have nothing to do with it, it’s all about throwing the red meat of performative cruelty to their base, and intimidation to their political enemies.

It feels like 5 years ago, but it was only back in January that a man used a truck to kill 14 people in a ramming attack on Bourbon Street in New Orleans, LA. The city had been warned, and knew of the need to have bollards installed, but cheaped out on temporary bollards, which were apparently malfunctioning at the time of the attack. There had been a vehicle-ramming attack at the Christmas market in Magdeburg in December, and an attack in Munich following in February.

I’d say that the title is right on. Car terrorism is a thing.

Best that I can think of would be to create an endowed institute of political scientists, psychologists, neuroscientists, linguists, et cetera, dedicated to studying and developing ways to counter right-wing populism, and de-program people who fall under its sway.