"…Enemies foreign and domestic."

We wouldn’t exist as the US.

The job of President throughout the 20th century has involved committing crimes. If they gave that away, then all of these ghouls could potentially be prosecuted.

In the future, the former President could go to jail for the next version of Iran-Contra… and we couldn’t possibly allow that to happen.

I’ll believe it when I see it. Batteries are so heavy right now that 80-90% of the available cargo and passenger capacity would be batteries.

For the moment, batteries are better for cars, and something like hydrogen would be better for planes and semi trucks

Yeah I have the world’s smallest astigmatism in my left eye and even that was annoying for me as a kid using it.

I set up Alpine to read my Gmail last summer, and while the nostalgia hit was nice, the browser version was more responsive and useful, cap I went back to that.

Those Vaios had a monumental amount of bloatware slowing them down too.

It wasn’t really fun, and I could never see properly in it.

I think there’s an Arthur Miller quote along the lines of man cannot appreciate sky without earth, nor heaven without hell.

Smart astrophysics people I’ve talked to are excited when we see gamma bursters further out in the universe than before, because that means that the universe is bigger than previously known.

That also does not matter. Spinozan Determinism can be summed up as:

“If it could have happened any other way, it would have.”

Tri-omni God problem. The God that we are told is worthy of worship is

1. Omniscient, and
2. Omnipresent, and
3. Omni-benevolent.

The presence of evil in the world demonstrates that no more than two out of those 3 can possibly be true at the same time. Thus if God does exist, he’s not all that and a bag of gummy bears.

That’s actually my favorite parasite! Toxo really wants to live inside a cat’s digestive tract, so much so that, when a rodent gets it in their blood, the baby toxos produce cysts in the brain (and liver and muscles) that hypnotize the rat into being attracted to cat poop. This leads to the rat hanging around where cats poop, and therefore getting eaten by the cat, and ending up happily back inside the cat’s GI tract.

In the old Star Wars Expanded Universe, there was mention of a Shawken Device which, if operable, could destroy the universe.

This has led me to conclude that the universe probably isn’t infinite.

In an infinite universe, all possible things should be happening at the same time. This would necessarily mean that someone invented a device/mechanism/reaction that could destroy the universe, and successfully activated it, thus ending the universe.

There are only two possible conclusions that I can draw from this thought experiment, which are not mutually exclusive:

1. The universe is not infinite, and/or
2. It is not possible to destroy the universe.

Presidential debates are just TV for people to get mad at, especially with this election. We all already know how we’re going to vote.

Also, the incumbent President always does terribly in the first debate. This has been true in 2004, 2012, and 2020 (2020 for other reasons, though), because they haven’t debated anyone in years.

I’m expecting Biden to shit the bed.

Mozart’s full baptismal name was

Johannes Chrystostomus Wolfgangus Theophilus Mozart

But he went by a few different names, partially because there were so many different languages spoken by the aristocracy in 18th century Central Europe that he adapted his name to suit whatever language he was using at the moment. “Theophilus” is the Greek form of “Amadeus.” Sometimes you’ll see the German translation of “Gottlieb.” Day-to-day, he is reported to have gone by “Wolfgang Amadè.”

It wasn’t uncommon for people to translate their names freely like this. Beethoven went by “Luigi” in Italian texts, and “Louis” in French.

“Giuseppe Verdi” would today be translated to English as “Joe Green.”