That is quite a headline. I just got on but that’s already enough internet for today.

The Republicans need pedophile votes, so they legally protect pedophilic behavior.

The classic method of murdering random innocent people and claiming they deserved to die for whatever reason after they’re dead. Conservatives fall for it every single time.

International politics are pretty complicated.

I have finally rediscovered my love for cooking. Here’s what I do:

1. Don’t follow the recipe. The chef can’t write and the writer can’t cook. A lot of it is nonsense. If you think you know better, you do.

2. Do whatever you want. Don’t oversalt it or burn it and everything else can be fixed with more cookery.

3. Don’t cook for 2 hours unless you are having fun goofing around in the kitchen for 2 hours or are making a holiday dish everyone’s been wanting all year.

4. Learn all the shortcuts and try your own.

5. Eat while you’re cooking to see if it’s the way you want it and use all those spices and sauces to see what they do.

6. Easy mode: To make anything delicious, add salt, oil/fat, and acid. That will make everything but burned or oversalted stuff into edible. Also, pepper is somehow underrated despite being everywhere and in everything.

7. Don’t eat it in 10 minutes. You won’t digest it properly and it will add to your stress rather than relieving it. Take your time eating; the people making you rush are the problem not the food.

Agreed. It evokes a whole story. Either the Paladin is so overcommitted to their work to such a degree that they are willing to go on dangerous adventures or the society is so legalistic it’s the Paladin’s duty to accompany their cases wherever they go without exceptions. Alternatively, maybe the Paladin wanted to be an adventurer anyway to escape their boring life as a parole officer and found just such a situation that they can fufill their desires and duties at the same time.

If this is her motivation it’s extremely encouraging. So many elected Democrats have demonstrated their cowardice consistently for many years. If the cowardly move is now to yield to voter pressure rather than to donor pressure it can only be a good thing.

The Financial Times. It’s the newspaper used by capitalists the world over for reliable business news which they can use to inform their business decisions. It can’t be bullshit or very powerful people would lose a lot of money. I look over a few news sites every day and pretty consistently the first several contain what capitalists want you to know and the FT is what the capitalists themselves want to know. They assume their audience is capitalists so there isn’t any need for bullshit propaganda, just the real business news. It’s probably the most objective look into the events which will end up driving the rest of the news. The opinion columns are predictable though, being a capitalist circle-jerk.

Edit: The site is paywalled and subscriptions are deliberately more expensive than the average person can afford. I like archive.ph .

Too often this option is presented by people who are deliberately manipulating you and causing you to think that you only have the two choices which each benefit them and neither you. Always consider who is offering this choice and why. The true lesser evil here is whatever you have to do to get out of the situation where this choice is being presented to you.

Kirk had a pretty animated speaking style, which is what I meant by moving. He could have leaned forward, backward, or turned which may not have affected him being hit at all but would definitely affect whether his vitals were hit. It looks like the shooter waited until it seemed he would not move this way. You’re right though. The more I learn about it the more it seems like the shot placement wasn’t exactly intentional and the deadliness of the shot wasn’t assured. I have heard that it was windy that day, but not more than an experienced Utah deer hunter would be able to account for. My argument was only intended to support that the shooter was skilled whether their skill was from hunting or otherwise.

The shooter’s setup and escape seem to me to be more professional, but this sense of mine is more from contrasting other assassinations and attempts I’m aware of. This one is appears far more informed and effective than average. The escape into a field itself wasn’t special, but planning and knowing a good spot to shoot from and be likely to escape from is what I’m looking at. They could have gotten lucky of course.

The two captured suspects are also suspicious. The first one arrested was shouting that he was the shooter and to arrest him, while the other suspect was walking around with a pellet gun. These could also be coincidences but they definitely helped distract the searchers.

Good point. I edited it for clarity.

A 200 yard shot on a moving target, accounting for windage and bullet drop for a single-shot kill and immediate successful egress? I have to emphasize this.

Personal grievance is definitely believable as a potential motive, epspecially considering Kirk’s career was exclusively to cause grievance.

The factor that would be atypical with this as the motive is the calculation, planning, and skill which was utilized in this shooting. Asassins who kill people only tangentially involved in the cause of their grievance tend to act rashly in all areas of their plan. In any terrible position that Kirk has supported I can’t think of any instance where he wasn’t a secondary or tertiary instigator. I would think someone with the clarity of mind to coordinate a successful assassination and ostensibly baffle the FBI with their escape may also have spent some time determing who is most culpable in their grievance. That being said Kirk could have found himself at the intersection of percieved culpability and accessibility.

At this point all most of us have is speculation and reasoned guesses. I can’t claim to be totally certain about any of this. However, seeing that this shooting has several times the coverage of the factually terroristic murder of a Democratic State Senator which did have an immediately tangible political effect, it seems clear to me which political movement is most supported and protected in these assassinations.

Charlie Kirk was losing relevance rapidly, especially after advising his audience to trust the government regarding the Epstein files. Now he’s far more useful to Trump than he has been in many years. I don’t know how likely it is for the Trump administration to be involved in what appears to be a highly professional assassination, but martyring public figures is precedented by Hitler’s administration. Regardless of who shot Kirk, you can be certain the Trump admin won’t miss an opportunity like this to galvanize the base and pin it on the enemy of the week.

The actual bubble that needs to be popped is financialization. The US economy is now completely detached from productivity and is now running on speculation only through financial valuation. At the same time, people are starving, infrastructure is falling apart, the birth rate is plummeting, and suicide is on the rise. It’s time to stop taking “job creators” seriously and use all this fallow professional experience and skill to restart the material economy and forget this pretend crap that keeps plutocrats busy doing nothing of any value to anyone.

It’s not just that reading is high effort, it’s that the effort is often unrewarded. If a piece of narrative art takes several times the energy to consume, if it’s not several times the quality of a more accessible form it’s a waste of time and energy. Everyone understands this intuitively.

Nah, I can think of a worse feeling. To me it feels worse that people without executive dysfunction have never had to deal with this even one time and many of these individuals have no patience for people who do. At the same time they are fully capable of not procrastinating and do it anyway for fun and can at any time come back around to whatever it is they intended to do effortlessly. Because this is their experience and they constantly benefit by going along with societal prejudices without having to think about them because their default is non-thought at all times, there are no consequences for them to believe the brain is magic and brain disabilities can’t exist.

I think that’s the right approach. Once it starts getting old it won’t get better. That being said, the writing of the DLCs does not have the problem of the main story and are often pretty good. If getting access to all your character’s abilities wasn’t attached to playing the main story I would advise skipping the main game and only playing the DLCs.

I, like you, heard the story was bad but figured I could just focus on the gameplay and ignore the writing. Unfortunately, the reason the bad writing is so notorious is that the game is setup to jam it in your face consantly. It’s unrelenting.

Imagine playing a pretty decent game while a dead-eyed 50 year old comedian is making the worst jokes you’ve ever heard in your life while doing a very poor impression of gen-z internet slang they barely understand. The comedian thinks you the player are actually stupid so the jokes are as condescending as they are awful. Now imagine they won’t shut up. Every time you do anything in the game, you get a few minutes of these whacky jokes. Accepting a mission, every bullet of the mission, skits that you have to watch before progressing, etc. You have no choice but to engage with the lazy, insulting, horrendous writing that wears thin after minutes and goes on for the entire hours-long game.

There are mods that disable the endless chatter which I can’t recommend more highly. I made the misake of playing the game raw. The game is actually pretty fun, but the aggressive garbage of the writing is not something easily ignored.

This is really interesting. Faking an endorsement by someone who is accused of preventing thousands of needless deaths to sell shirts is on one level nefarious but on another level incorporating Luigi into mainstream pop culture. The plutocracy wants people to think this kid is the worst monster who ever lived, but the average American is so pleased with what he is accused of doing his likeness can be used to sell clothing. I am not totally opposed to the mainstreaming of this kind of folk hero. Optimally he should at least get some royalties to pay for his legal fees, though.