No one becomes a billionaire by accident. People who have an insatiable urge to dominate are hugely over-represented in the Epstein class, through their own efforts.

I never see any Christians decide that the president was chosen of God – as a punishment.

That would actually plug seamlessly right in to the whole evangelical world-view and aesthetic. It’s an idea with so much explanatory power, right there for the taking. “We live in a fallen world, and the president is the proof.”

internet bluetooth wife

My new punk band name

I haven’t got the stomach to watch the whole thing, but in the bits of it I’ve watched, he seems so much more alert, so much more present, so much, dare I say, smarter, than he’s been when speaking publicly recently. He makes jokes, he’s funny, he smiles. He completes some sentences. He doesn’t seem like the tongue-tied partially-senile Fox-News-grandpa he is when he talks to the public or the press.

He quips that somehow he’s a “king” but he can’t get his ballroom approved. He’s a piece of shit, he behaves like he’s here to destroy America as we know it, but that’s a legitimate by-God joke. I’ve never seen him make an actual joke before.

Am I imagining that? I don’t know what to make of it. Is the “flailing senile dumbass” just a character he’s playing? Is it a ruse? So many people who have had face time with him say he’s genuinely a moron.

Photo for Life magazine by Alfred Eisenstaedt, gallery here.

I had a visit with a PA who pantomimed the use of an inhaler she didn’t actually have on hand. The note-taking robot decided that was a “demonstration” with a billing code, and that it should be billed as $800.

You’d never really get those ducks in a row, but it would be entertaining to watch you try.

Patents are a (relatively speaking) newfangled trick to turn ideas into legal “capital.” In the same way that a corporation “is” a person.

The backbone of capitalism? I’m not following that.

The president then proceeded to insult motherhood and apple pie

I don’t see a definition in the bill. I don’t know if there’s a standard legal definition for that or not.

Even a good-faith interpretation of “performer” could leave some gray areas, I’d think. A song-and-dance number for an audience gathered for the purpose is a performance with a performer, sure. What about an appearance on a talk show, an interview, a forum discussion, a podcast?

Unfortunately, “performance” is a bit of jargon for a specific, unrelated concept in contract law.

The reservations your question suggests are very reasonable. I don’t intend to dampen anyone’s alarm at this absurd effort to implement legal, systemic bullying over nothing. I just so happened to be reading about the Ohio bill shortly before I came across FreshParsnip’s comment.

The red ones taste like my favorite glue.

Things are bad; I’m not going to argue that things aren’t bad. I’m not a lawyer, I eat crayons.

That Ohio bill hasn’t been passed yet. I don’t know how likely it is to pass. Too likely, I guess.

It also doesn’t dictate a blanket ban on cross-dressing. What it does do is put “performers or entertainers who exhibit a gender identity that is different from the performer’s or entertainer’s biological sex” into the category of adult entertainments like stripping, meaning it’s restricted in the same ways. No kids allowed. That’s lines 153 to 165 here.

That’s very big, it’s very bad, it’s very stupid, it’s mean, it’s anti-freedom. Un-American, I’d say. It would seem to create problems with Bugs Bunny, Harpo Marx, Monty Python, etc. But the most obvious thing it’s targeting is “Drag Queen Story Hour.”

But it isn’t a ban on cross-dressing in general. Yet.

Edit: If you live in Ohio, you can find and contact your state Senator regarding House Bill 249, the “Indecent Exposure Modernization Act,” through this page.

they check for things like alcohol abuse, drug habits, sexual behavior, debt, gang affiliations, and any other dark secrets that could make you susceptible to bribery or blackmail

Yes. When I was interviewed by the FBI, because a friend of mine was seeking a clearance, this kind of thing was all they wanted to talk about. That was a couple decades ago, though.

John Bistline, whose name appears on the bottom right, posted this chart to Twitter.

There’s a pretty similar data series charted at ourworldindata.

deleted by creator

top FEMA official defends his claim that he was teleported

21st centry headlines you never saw coming, part 2,756

A wonderful series of photo-heavy blog posts about Ashgabat, Turkmenistan can go some way to answering this question.

I think more Americans need to know that Iran is big. Here’s a view from thetruesize.com. If you could move Iran to the US, it would stretch from Florida to Iowa to New Jersey.

Iran is 3.5 times larger than Iraq and roughly twice the population. That’s a handy comparison because we know what it took to invade and then hold Iraq: coalition forces peaked at half a million deployed personnel during the invasion. Iran is bigger in every way and so would demand a larger army and thus an absolutely enormous investment of troops, money and fundamentally lives in order to subdue.

– Bret Devereaux, The War in Iran

I’m probably an idiot. Tell me I’m all wrong about this.

The danger is that quantum computers could factor large products well enough to reverse public keys, finding the associated private keys. Which would indeed be very bad. But this isn’t quite a magic key that opens everything.

Public key crypto is used to set up a secure network connection, but it’s not used to encrypt the data that flows on that connection. Quantum snooping would require an eavesdropper to intercept every bit on a connection, from initiation onward. And decrypting it would probably not be a real-time affair.

Public key crypto is also not used to protect your typical encrypted zip file or file system volume. Your Bitlocker and Veracrypt secrets aren’t about to fall to quantum spies.

I’m bothered that so many popular articles about this issue draw no distinction between the classes of cryptography that are vulnerable and those that are not.

My door. Your butt. Don’t allow two objects to occupy the same space at the same time.