I don’t think it’s individual evidence, really. I suspect it’s probably more the bot farms and pressure campaign. Those carry a lot of water for the illusion of continued group consensus.

You can disable the Outlook addon that nags you about Adobe cloud, btw. Small part of the puzzle, but it helps.

His detractors don’t get it. The doctors just called him back for his second once a year exam to admire him. Trump is in unbelievably good health.

It’s Trump’s business acumen showing again. He gets his yearly checkups each calendar and each fiscal year.

Saying this is a check up is a cover story. The doctors obviously called him in to consult on a particularly tough case.

Yes, these are jokes. I hope president pudding brain remains cognizant enough to see all he built crumble, see his reputation ruined, his criminal enterprise dismantled, see his children jailed, to realize that he’s going to die before his political and criminal enemies, and that it all unfolds exceedingly quickly. Not all hopes are rational or possible, but I’ll accept any part of the above.

Online retailers, too. Item goes from ordered to processing to shipping in a half hour. Takes a week or more to go from shipping to shipped.
Item can’t be cancelled without a restock fee if it’s in shipping — which is fine (I guess) if the item takes the provided time estimate to arrive.

To be fair, I also suggested he might be stupid.

So the person who is lying is Ted Cruz. Or he’s too stupid not to conflate the statements. But it’s likely the former.

I promise if they enlist me, I will be utterly incompetent.

I mean. Choose your own conspiracy.

Coup against democracy. Coup for democracy (unlikely, but hey, who knows when you get that many people with that much power together to talk). Mass firings. Loyalty tests. War against Venezuela. War against Russia? Going to withdraw from the international stage entirely and let China have Taiwan/Russia go full tilt at Ukraine. Gonna invade Greenland. Maybe the U.S. just is planning to fire off all the nukes on October 14th to mark the biggest and only Charlie Kirk Day.

I always tell people the very last thought I had before they ask the question, even if it’s completely random. However, I try to walk the thought process back to get to a point where it’s clear I am listening to them. It’s a bit like a Pinky and the Brain bit, except we’re all smart, just not on the same wavelength.

I just had this funny thought— so boomers adopted and settled into Facebook after millennials made it popular. And then everyone except for boomers stopped actively using it. It’s kind of their “retirement social media platform.”
Now you have TikTok, which the millennials flocked to after GenZ popularized it. Does this mean after Gen Z flees the platform that it’s just going to be the Facebook equivalent for millennials?

It’s like people forgot about that.

He can’t even unite both sides of his face.

After reading that, some wild and ungrounded part of my brain: Putin used the Russian version on him of whatever Vance used on the Pope!

I play it when I’m really depressed.

I would say that I enjoy the game and feel that the developers have invested a lot of effort into building a panacea of a game that is sort of low stress and maybe a little repetitive, but it gives me something to do, and I can set goals for myself that are… well, absolutely batshit.
My current goal(s) are to get my settlements to S tier (pretty close on this one), swap all my frigates over to supply ships (If you repeatedly assign the same ship to the same sorts of missions, it will level up just that stat, so you can have a supply ship that has a high combat stat, etc), and build resource bases so that I can automatically collect every kind of automatically collectible resource in the game. I’ve also visited about 20 universes, and think it might be fun to put a resource collection base in each universe (that I have the patience to visit) and then just go hang out at the anomaly so folks can use the teleporter to fling themselves to universes unknown.

The what?

Edit: What the fuck?

In this case, it’s just me having a ‘Spider-Man meme’ moment with your comment and being excessively cavalier/silly in my response.
Medical diagnosis’ should not come from anonymous people on the internet. I could be a dog, for crying out loud.

You have Hyperactive-type ADHD and Anxiety. (Possibly)

So mote it be. (Maybe)

Awkwardly gestures prophetically.

I agree with you, and your point is valid, but the larger context is that it probably doesn’t matter.

The U.S. has been fucked since… well, probably when it didn’t prosecute Nixon, but definitely since 2011.

Apologies for the WP link - I’m sure better people than I could have provided an archive link. It doesn’t present a paywall to me (or even an Adblock warning, which is interesting…)

Several nations have tried to restore democracy after populist strongmen. It was never the same.

Short of pushing all the way through and becoming something else entirely, I don’t see how the current system can be fixed. And I don’t have much faith that ‘something else entirely’ would wind up being better for the people of the U.S., given that its media and all of the leading political figures are in the pocket of the oligarchy, some of whom have already prepared to rewrite the U.S. constitution (the Koch’s) and are salivating at the opportunity to implement a government that is even less useful to the populous (read: even more friendly to their interests).

My point with sharing this is basically… well… despair. I guess my horrible, mediocre comment can be summed up as “The U.S. is fucked, so it might as well keep choosing the lesser of two evils. Sorry. 😕”

Within the last day or so -

Burning the flag, renaming DOD to Dept. of War, trying again to deport Kilmar Abrego, signaling they’re going to ban the COVID-19 vaccine, and attempting to sue California to prevent their redistricting while allowing Texas’ to proceed.

Is this more of the gish-gallop that Bannon described that they’re pulling to overwhelm the news cycle so that a few of the bullshit things they’re pulling don’t get overturned, or are they specifically looking to push out some stories, like Trump’s obvious failing health, Epstein-related stories (inclusive of the latest on Gislaine), or possibly the redistricting one above.

Ugh. They’re up to more bullshit than usual, but the signal to noise ratio makes it hard to discern what.

Increasingly, I’m reminded of this: Paul Bunyan vs. the spam bot (or how Paul Bunyan triggered the singularity to win a bet). It’s a medium-length read from the old internet, but fun.