Slartibartfast

Sounds exactly like the antebellum South to me!

That sounds like total bullshit to me! I plug mine in every time, at both ends of my commute.

Whatever it takes to make him stop digging!

The animation was laughably bad, but if anything the stories were better than TOS. They had some decent writers involved.

I have gone back and forth on the question of whether or not King Charles is a reprehensible wanker, but his little footsie exercise with Trump has removed all doubt in my mind.

...Looking the term up online I see that it sometimes means just a big awful mess, but in the Austria of my childhood it definitely meant some kind of deliberate, conspiratorial chicanery.

Upstate NY is like the Central Valley and the Sierra Nevada in California, a very mixed culture. Plenty of assholes, but plenty of totally decent and interesting people too. And of course even the worst hellholes in our US cultural landscape harbor decent people, who actually deserve special praise.

Seriously, WTF are you even talking about? Perhaps you should go back to the top of this thread and take an overdue look. I was talking about how not to be seen as a Trump-worshipping asshole in casual conversations while traveling abroad as an American in this fucked-up time, which was on-topic.

No, it doesn't mean you're a separatist, but it does mean they've got a little splainin' to do in my book, just like somebody who says they're from Idaho might have! If OTOH you say you're from CA rather than the US while in Europe, that sends a pretty effin clear message. Stop being so dense!

The point of this thread, which you obviously seem to have missed, is that in the very act of choosing to say "California" (etc.) instead of "America", you are tacitly telling the questioner exactly what they need to know about where you stand wrt to all this Trump mishugas.

I believe that whatever rationalization he uses to declare victory and stop this abject insanity is OK with me!

I mean IF you are from those places. Myself, I'm from the DC area originally, which hates Trump as much as anybody here in the Bay Area does, so they should get a pass too.

...Or "tri-state area" is you're from any of the decent places between Philly and Yonkers.

I think the magic phrase is "New York City".

How long is the GOP congressional caucus going to let this abject insanity go on? If the plug is not pulled soon, America is fucking toast!

That scarcely even qualifies as such by the standards of our ~80 megapixel retinas. So what if they can see in the UV and infrared? Moreover, the # of neurons I cited was not for thinking about images, but just for their primary processing, and I didn't even count the optic chiasm or LGN neurons!

LOL. Humans have WAY MORE input than the shrimp does. I mean, what part of the images we see having 1,000 times the spatial resolution of what the shrimp sees don't you understand? The shrimp can only point maybe 1000-2000 ommatidia in the same direction at once, creating an "image"...

You overlook our biggest success at regime change in the region -- replacing Saddam with an Iranian puppet!

There is no easy way to make the theocratic regime in Iran relinquish power. Bombing stuff will surely not achieve that, and anybody who thinks the IRGC will just melt away like Saddam's army in the face of a US invasion is sorely mistaken. The Neocons of post-9/11 left Iran alone for a good reason!

OK, I'll number you among the 10% of real live idiots. Still nobody should give a shit what you think, because you are an enemy agent whether you believe that's what you are or not. Now fuck off, the grownups are talking!

Nothing he can do will stop the transition in California. More than half of the houses in my neighborhood already have solar panels, and electric/PIH/hybrid vehicles will soon outnumber conventional ones on the highways in the Bay Area.

One of the biggest differences between Germany and the United States today is that in Germany nearly all the Nazis got killed off in a giant war and the survivors were shamed afterwards, while in America all they had to do was lay low for a few years and then it was back to business as usual.

I think "Schweinerei!" might be an appropriate expletive and descriptor for such things, but my German vocabulary is limited.

I own a plug-in hybrid and have a 9kW solar installation on my house, so surging prices for power and gas have very little direct effect on me. Makes me chortle to think about all the chiding from the Right about how that was an uneconomical, elitist solution as I pay next to nothing for all that.

It's hard to overstate the impact that $10/gal gas is going to have on all these monster-truck-driving MAGA yahoos. I wish I could magically put "I did that!" stickers with Trump instead of Biden on all the red state gas pumps.

Hard not to respond to that with "If it's working your last nerve, then why do you keep reading it?" A categorical boycott is the only defense we have against Bezos' multi-billion dollar firehose of shit. The Washington Post that I took such pride in as my hometown paper growing up is long dead.

If you want to end up like John Brown did I won't stand in your way, but for my part I'd like to actually live to see better times.

Pretty sure everybody who was dancing in the streets in Tehran is not so jazzed anymore.

Pretty stunning they hauled off and did this without a word to the neighboring countries that would be most affected by it.

...as well as the vastly larger numbers of neurons we have behind those photoreceptors to process the image. Just the primary visual cortex of a human has about 400 times as many neurons as the entire brain of a mantis shrimp does. That means we can extract hugely more information from what we see.