“What’s worse than lies but not as bad as statistics?”

“DAMNED LIES, MOTHERFUCKER.”

Fair enough, LOL. Just love that it’s “oh I pay TONS of taxes, but asking me to pay more in taxes won’t help anything.”

Just make sure your beard feels empowered to live their truth, and it’s all good. You do what you have to.

Or did you mean facial hair?

Anyway, I can’t grow a proper beard at all, and my plaid button-downs are generally cotton because I’ve always lived places where it’s hot AF most of the year, but I do very much like my Subaru. Had a '13 Outback for 9 years, and finally replaced it with a '22 Outback Wilderness, as possibly the dullest mid-life-crisis automobile purchase ever… it’s a little bit taller and looks a little cooler and has the turbo! I still have the ethereal butterflies center-console protector because I had to make a deal with my daughter to let me trade in the only car she’d ever seen daddy drive.

TIL. Bad for cholesterol, but maybe good for cancer and nerve issues. Coffee is fuckin’ weird.

I do basically the same thing. I just try to make sure it’s light or medium roast, use brown sugar and a bit of milk, and the second half goes in the fridge to become iced rocket fuel for the next day. Also means I get to alternate making and cleaning.

“The top 1% of taxpayers pay about 40% of all the tax revenue, and the bottom half pay 3%,” Bezos said. “I don’t think it should be 3%. I think it should be zero.”

“People sometimes say that, you know, I don’t pay taxes. Not true. I pay billions of dollars in taxes,”

“You could double the taxes I pay, and it’s not going to help that teacher in Queens. I promise you.”

WT-absolute-F? I think he got oxygen-deprived in space.

Not the main issue of course, but I found this fun:

Both YouTubers said the exposed database records indicated significantly lower customer interest than previously reported. According to Coffeezilla, internal order identifiers suggested roughly 30,000 total orders associated with around 10,000 unique customers, far below earlier public estimates claiming nearly 600,000 reservations.

So this grift will only net them ~$3M, not sixty. My heart weeps for them.

At this point, I think its most lasting cultural impact is everyone’s opinion on how little cultural impact it had.

Modi has not held a traditional solo press conference since taking office in 2014, and has rarely answered questions from journalists on his trips abroad.

If not then, when?

That’s a fair take, but for me it just went past the point of willing suspension of disbelief, and I don’t find that meta-narrative compelling. It may well be a reason for me to re-evaluate it though, to decide if I think it’s poorly done versus something where what they wanted to do simply didn’t connect with me.

I recently finished Blue-Eyed Samurai, and Mizu’s increasingly powerful plot armor comes very close to ruining the whole show.

Anyways, I saw TPM 9 times in the first 48 hours.

My friends thought I was nuts for seeing it six times during its first and dollar-theater runs. There was so much interesting stuff to unpack…

…except the plot or acting (barring Ian McDiarmid and Liam Neeson).

part of a deal to resolve President Donald Trump’s lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service over the leak of his tax returns.

Yup. The sitting president was suing an agency of his own executive branch, folks. A lawsuit he filed – checks notes – four months ago. They’re barely even trying at this point.

I tried so hard, but poor Jake Lloyd was never given anything to work with, and Natalie Portman and Samuel L Jackson and any other actors who were hoping for some competent direction were hung out to dry too. Some of the worst line readings I’ve ever heard from professional actors.

Then there was JarJar… and watto… and the neimoidians… oh, and the utter lack of a compelling story…

Like you, though, I convinced myself that the bones were good, and then also that they were just getting warmed up and episode two would be a banger. Spoiler alert: it was not, though it had a few isolated moments as well.

It was so much worse than that. People had been waiting 16 years to see a proper cinematic continuation of Star Wars. There were some pulp novels, a couple of very weak kids cartoons, a pretty decent tabletop RPG with source materials, a few video games, and that was about it. For a franchise that was still iconic and incredibly popular despite lying fallow like that.

We got a more distilled version of George’s vision, and hoo-boy it just simply wasn’t very good. I still saw that movie six fuckin’ times (the last three at the dollar theater), but while there was plenty to digest and feed my nerdery, the story and acting just never got better.

Surely they were just getting warmed up though, and episode two would be better…

JJ Abrams, but yes. I will give TPM credit for production design and world building and for a few of the veteran actors’ performances.

TFA gave us a cast of characters you could do something with, and apart from sounding a bit too much like a Joss Whedon movie, performances that were at least not delivered by cardboard cutouts. I didn’t completely mind the plot being a rehash, but the contortions they went through to make the state of the galaxy exactly fit a rehash doomed the entire trilogy.

Waited in a three-hour-ish line for The Phantom Menace. 100 minutes of “I’m sure it will get better” followed by the Naboo duel tricking my fanboy brain into thinking it was a good movie.

Not to mention state and local governments. One of the dirty little secrets of our economy is that undocumented workers have a significant direct and indirect tax burden, but other than schools (which are for literal children, lest we forget) they’re excluded from almost all benefits that require any sort of, well, documents.

So you’ve got a permanent underclass who are paying into the system but literally aren’t allowed to reap all the benefits. Now, on the one hand, I kind of get how that’s a devil’s bargain they were willing to make to get to the US from countries with more immediate issues, but to argue that they’re a drain on the country and need to be hunted down post-haste, and not treated as the human beings they are, that’s just evil on so many levels, but one of them is that it upends the economic deal America tacitly made with them by accepting their labor. They literally pay a huge tax to be in the country at all. Even the business owners used to understand that. I assume most of them still do, but none of them will pick this hill to die on.

This is definitely the right community, LOL. I am absolutely a dogs>cats person, but this junior-high school-paper article has me questioning 20 years of a catless house.

It doesn’t help that immediately after the gospels are Paul’s angry, regressive, and authoritarian letters to all the congregations he was trying to dominate, followed by the late-first century anti-Roman millenarian fever dream of Revelations.