Oh ho ho. You thought they were just racist against Muslims?

Well, buckle up, buckaroos.

You can just get another re-keyable lock for any added later locks or replacement lock sets.

All things that are a pain in the ass.

I saw someone being interviewed who didn’t know who hilter was. Apparently genuine.

There was a bit that Conan O’Brian used to do back when he had a late-night show. He’d go out and do Man-On-The-Street interviews in… Times Square, I think? Can’t remember if he was LA or NY. But he’d ask some absurdly complex question and get this excellently reasoned and well-thought out answer from randos. And then he’d ask what they did for a living. It was inevitably some NASA engineer or finance professional or other well-educated individual. And they were all just… in the crowd. Because in a city as big as that, of course you’re going to get this extremely mixed bag.

On the flip side, there’s Sailor Socialism, a podcaster and aspiring actress who baited an interview with an InfoWars reporter, in which she was dressed in a sailor fuku, then went viral talking about how she wanted universal health care and liked Bernie Sanders.

Interview twenty people and edit the content down to the one or two who make for good entertainment. It’s a tried-and-true strategy.

No way the general populace is that stupid.

It isn’t an issue of stupidity. Not like “Edward Snowden” is a name you can conjure up from first principles.

He was headline news back in 2008 and now he’s not. Anyone who wasn’t following national news nearly twenty years ago likely won’t be familiar with him. No more than a Millennial is going to know who Daniel Ellsberg or Robert W. Jackson are.

The entire Wikileaks project has been more or less obliterated.

Did you notice your electronic locks all have keys for when they fail?

No, because I don’t have them. I have a fake rock with a key in it and generally don’t bother locking my front door anyway. But I’m lazy and cheap, not terribly interested in changing out all my locks myself or paying someone else to do it for a marginal quality of life improvement.

Still, if you have a need for locked gates, a set of combination locks all set to the same combination or keyed locks with all setup for a single key once again minimizes the need for a bunch of bulky keys.

Sure. And if you’re setting up a security perimeter from first principles, that’s fine. But then you add an interior gate or you need to replace a lock that’s rusted through or yadda yadda life happens, and you can lose the single key design.

Case in point, my front door lock did foul a few years ago. My wife changed out the front door but didn’t bother to sync it with the back door. She didn’t want to bother with an electronic lock because she thought they were too expensive. So now we’ve got a front door that doesn’t match the side door or the garage door. And we only have two keys to the new lock, one of which has been lost almost immediately.

A digital system that I can just sync from my phone would be far more appealing than juggling keys. Or staring at a key dish and trying to remember which ones actually link to which doors.

You still need an interface. Bunch of ways to do it.

I just don’t understand the desire to control everything in your house with an app.

Shrinking the size of my wallet and getting rid of all my keys has an instant appeal. I’d much rather just carry around a single phone-sized multipass than a janitor’s worth of hardware for accessing a dozen different gates and appliances.

I work in IT and I’ve got most of those things.

But it is largely due to the inconvenience of installation relative to just coasting on existing home infrastructure. I also don’t bother with roof solar and home battery backups, a household wide firewall, or anything connected to a raspberry pi. Just implemented Jellyfin over Christmas and my wife regularly throws up her hands at it, preferring Amazon Prime or HBO Max at every opportunity.

For the most part, the cost of an individualized IT component isn’t worth the pain of support. If I was looking for an apartment or a condo, I would absolutely be interested in their building wide IT setup. But the whole point of IT is to deliver at scale. Homelabing can be a fun hobby but it’s a shit-pay second job.

Reagan had really done us dirty

He definitely kicked the county while it was down. But a big part of the US Golden Age was being the last economy standing after WW2.

The end of America’s economic dominance was inevitable, as old colonial powers re-industrialized and newly liberated post-colonial states gained control of their natural resources for domestic use.

By Nixon, American global dominance was sunsetting regardless of our domestic policies. That’s why we gave up the gold standard and adopted the Petrodollar as a globalized economic strategy. We couldn’t just import everyone else’s gold and sell it back to them at a premium anymore.

Panama makes some sense, because of the loch system.

It helps to know the history of Panama. Namely, how it exists because an independence group was sponsored by the US to break away from Honduras, because that group would then give the US better terms for using the soon-to-be-constructed canal.

Each ship that passes takes a lot of their drinking water, and they don’t need to bomb ships to stop them passing.

Ask Noriega about that.

It’s crazy how Iran deciding to start taking fees for shipping is a blockade, when the entire national business models of Singapore and Panama hinge on their ability to do exactly this.

They’ll get him eventually

harder to believe the CIA failed to assassinate him

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_assassination_attempts_on_Fidel_Castro

The 1975 Church Committee claimed eight proven CIA assassination attempts between 1960 and 1965. In 1976, President Gerald Ford issued Executive Order 11905 banning political assassinations. In 2006, Fabián Escalante, former chief of Cuba’s intelligence, stated that there had been 634 assassination schemes or attempts.

They eventually got him at age 92 with the oldest CIA trick in the book - waiting until he dies of natural causes.

It’s no more illogical than any school shooter who ends up killing themselves halfway through a spree

This guy is no less logical than the Columbine or Sandy Hook shooters

All written accounts of God are produced by humans for an audience of other humans.

In the same way that we might describe a storm cloud as “angry” or a sunny day as “cheerful”, one might apply emotional descriptors to an omnipotent divine force in order to personify an impersonal and abstract entity.

Past that, assuming you believe that a divine being is above humanity, why wouldn’t they have emotions? Emotions are a feature of sentience and God is supposed to be a super-sentient creature. If anything, it would experience these emotions more intensely and intricately than its creations. The human rage of a shout or the despair of a cry becomes the earth-splitting eruption of a volcano or the suffocating deluge of a flood.

At the same time, it is the overwhelming longing for companionship that drives a God to form life from the void of space. The intense joy in the creative act leads this fundamental superhuman force to tirelessly build an entire universe. The deep and profound pride and love which brings them among their creations clothed in their own form, willing to endure the humiliation of this avatar form in order to enlighten and elevate their divine progeny to their own level.

Absent these primal emotional urges, why would a God choose to be a God at all, and not simply languish within the darkness for eternity, content to the echoing silence of dead space?

There’s no hard evidence. But some anonymous White House staff have reported the existence of an Erika Kirk body pillow at the Naval Observatory.

The kid was told to shoot into the crowd

At the crowd behind Trump, but not at Trump? And then he got near enough to the mark that he shattered the teleprompter which was right in front of Trump? And kill a guy just off his shoulder?

Come on, dude. Is it really so hard to believe someone sincerely wanted this guy dead?

I’m more inclined to believe this was a deliberate hit job (by, say, the FBI or CIA… or OUN-B) that failed than a fake hit job that succeeded.

Well DUH.

I don’t think a school shooter trying to clip the President so his sempais at Demolition Ranch will notice him is as crazy a theory as “Trump paid a teenager to wing him in the ear so he could…” I’m not sure what exactly? Beat a punching bag like Kamala Harris by an extra point when he was already favored to win?

Like, the guy standing behind Trump did die. This “fake” assassination was using real ammo.

2024: “Trump good. Protected by God. Evil assassin must be Woke Transgender Communist.”

2026: “Trump bad. Nefarious and sinister. Assassin must have been evil trick to make us think Trump Good. But we too smart. See through trick.”