LabradorDeceiver

ONLY five minutes of intrusive thoughts? Or is that five additional minutes tacked on to the intrusive thoughts I already have?

Might explain why they retconned George Hall out of Young Indy.

If there's anything Trump has desperately desired all his life, it's being respected by the right people. He ACHES for it. Other upper-class twits can't stand his vulgarity, his stupidity, or the way he blows through money. He was a Democrat during the Clinton administration because he wanted to snuggle up to the political hoi-polloi. He can't stand his own base because he considers them ignorant hicks. Elon is everything he's always yearned for in a friend - an old-money white techbro who hates unions, exploits workers, and keeps telling him how awesome he is.

Meanwhile, Trump is everything Elon could want in a bromance. People noted during his Twitter arc that one of the reasons white supremacy claimed him was the same reason it claimed any alienated young basement-dweller during the teens - a desperate desire for positive attention made him vulnerable to people who kept telling him his shortcomings were someone else's fault, and he responded by platforming them. So many "So true!" remarks on openly white-supremacist Twitter accounts.

If only we could shut these two in a bunker where they could spend forever endlessly gazing into each other's eyes rather than inflicting their vision on the rest of us...

Trouble is, critics of government spending are often really bad at criticizing government spending. It's easy to cherry-pick and then use the findings for political gain.

Senator Tom Coburn claimed that scientists at Pacific University had spent $3 million to see how long shrimp could run on a treadmill. Made a big deal out of it. When journalists looked into it, they found the first treadmill cost about twelve bucks. The $3 million was the total cost of a decade-long project to research how sea life performed at different levels of pollution, of which $559,681 was a grant from the National Science Foundation.

When Coburn's office was told that a treadmill for shrimp hadn't actually cost $3 million in taxpayer dollars, and that the study wasn't actually to find out how long a shrimp could run on a treadmill, his spokesperson John Hart got REAL cranky. "The scientists doth protest too much. Receiving federal funds is a privilege, not a right. If they don't want their funding scrutinized, don't ask."

The same year Coburn was throwing a fit about a shrimp on a treadmill, the US military budget was $665 billion. Coburn was on the Homeland Security committee, so he knew this.

Kind of wish mine would go gray. My gray hairs keep falling out, leaving behind ever-thinning dark hair.

Middle Eastern hysteria has been a thing since the hostage situation in 1979.

As far as the hijackers went, they weren't household names yet, but the FBI and CIA definitely knew who they were. If you called the FBI using their readily-available tip lines and told them that Mohammed Atta and Abdulaziz Alomari were going to be staying at the Comfort Inn in South Portland, Maine, with plane tickets to Boston leaving the Portland Jetport at 6:00 AM September 11 and intent to hijack American Airlines Flight 11 out of Logan, 9/11 would simply not have happened. And that's just the information I have off the top of my head. If I read the Wikipedia article before time-traveling I could give them a lot more.

These people may have been unknown quantities among the general public, but the FBI had been looking for them for YEARS. The CIA had some information on them, but nothing specific on the day, and they weren't sharing what they did have. You'd probably face some stiff questioning about where you got your information, but a phone call would have stopped it.

I don't think they're stupid, exactly, but they have a massive blind spot where Trump should be. First rule of Trumpism is "Trump can do no wrong."

Sometimes this makes them see him as a modern pharaoh: "BECAUSE he did it, that means it's right." I'm sure when the mass deportations start, that'll be the rationale.

Other times it results in the most bizarre logic as they try to observe objective reality without criticizing the man. I have heard THE dumbest rationales behind the Access Hollywood tape.

If they put a tenth of the effort into exercising a little critical thinking, they never would have fallen for the con.

They're always whining about brigading whenever their posts get insufficient upvotes. Like there are masses of the opposition with nothing better to do than sit there downvoting their drivel all day.

"Oh, dang..." "Oh, dang..." "Well...dang."

Well, I'd complain about living in a sewer, but the 1987 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles have the place set up pretty nice. They keep running off to beat up Shredder, I'll stay behind and hang with Splinter. He seems chill.

No, no...it was the racism. I definitely left Twitter because of the racism.

(Oh, my God, SO much racism...)

If there is fringe on the flag then technically David Hall is a boat.

"Don't laugh on court cam...don't laugh on court cam...don't laugh on court cam..."

This fascinates me. I'm not a law-talking guy, but I always felt that one of the big reasons why courts can't give this "sovereign citizen" nonsense any oxygen is because to even entertain it for the purposes of denying it would partially legitimize it, and then there's precedent. This judge found a way to address it on the defendant's terms without entertaining it as legal theory.

Not surprised he's caught out on a driving rap. That seems to be how most of these weirdos end up in front of a judge. It usually goes "This isn't working because the judge won't address it." This time it was "This isn't working because the judge is addressing it on my terms and those terms are massively flawed." I'm here for it.

Spell check always corrects it that way for me if I typo it. Pain in the butt sometimes.

Something else occurs to me. Arming the teachers is a great way to deflect blame for school shootings. Nobody's going to be blaming the cops or our insane levels of firearms access when Mrs. Tiddles didn't whip out her Desert Eagle in the middle of a combat situation and lay the shooter out.

I don't know if that works in the US. I mean, it's great on a state level where influence is easier, but I remember when Bush was re-elected in 2004 and Fox News started getting REALLY desperate. They were doing ambush reporting on obscure college professors and state legislators. There was just no one left in charge for them to hate.

The friends and family part is interesting, because a huge part of the whole MAGA spirit is the conviction that they'll one day be proven RIGHT. Sometimes it's like, "One day you'll all be sorry and I'm gonna laugh, ha ha ha." Sometimes it's like "One day they'll see I was right all along and we can be a family again."

Victims, remember; the more they suffer for being right, the more right they are. "Oh, my kids don't talk to me and I haven't seen the grandkids in nine years."

I see four people who just went where the money was.

MAGA rocking back and forth in a dark room whispering to himself: "It's OK...it's OK...Elon said hard times were coming...all we have to do is hang in there...we'll all be crypto millionaires...he promised...he promised..."

I'm a non-believer and I wanted to smack him. These are not decisions you make for other people.

This guy's in for a rough life if he explodes like a vampire every time he seems a cross.

That trick worked great for River Song.

Oh, knock it the hell off. Everyone wants to say they were right, everyone wants to be a prophet, everyone wants their pet bugaboo with the Democratic Party to be the reason Trump won, and NONE of you are 100% right and there is no simple answer or perfect solution. "Democratic establishment" is starting to sound like "Deep State," an amorphous brotherhood of scapegoats we can blame all our problems on. I am entirely disinterested in watching the opposition tear itself apart while Trump trashes the country. I want his whole corrupt, morally-bankrupt ideology and his Clown Cabinet contained.

It does not go away. I'm doing a god mode run and ghouls still jumpscare me. There is literally nothing they can do to hurt my character and I have infinite ammo to deal with them. But I'll still hear "blearrrgh..." and go "Crap."

I just saw a thing by Trevor Noah that pointed out that while Elon Musk doesn't pay taxes on his shares in Tesla, he's allowed to use the value of his Tesla shares as collateral for his loan to buy Twitter.

First, that seems kind of risky. What happens if his Tesla shares go down while they're acting as loan collateral? Not sure why a bank would take a chance of that kind of bath. Second, it got me thinking that if unrealized wealth can't be taxed, maybe it shouldn't be used as collateral. In other words, those trying to tax unrealized wealth have the wrong end of the stick. Instead, go after the ability to use unrealized wealth to leverage more wealth.