Because government does things that large populaces can’t or won’t do for themselves. Sometimes that’s things like Social Security, regulating companies so they don’t enslave us or dump DDT all over the place, or organizing enough coordinated violence to prevent other, more aggressive governments from coming in and taking over. Sometimes, usually when the people aren’t paying enough attention, it’s horrible things like building Gitmo or supporting Israel.

Ideally, everyone would be well-informed and engaged enough to immediately hold government accountable when it does horrible things in our names, but for a lot of people life is hard, and they’ve been actively discouraged from having that education and engagement, usually by one flavor or another of psychopath who wants to get away with their atrocities and not be answerable to a decently informed and engaged electorate.

Democrats do, on balance, care more about their leaders committing atrocities than Republicans do, but the phenomenon of “I just can’t think about that right now, I’ve got other things going on” is a universal experience.

It’s right to be outraged by this complacency, and I don’t even think anyone is wrong for wanting to disengage from any political party or even politics as a whole in response, but wanting to remain morally pure and wanting to achieve anything of merit within the system we currently have are mutually exclusive goals.

If someone finds politics as a whole, and all of the moral compromises involved, so abhorrent that they don’t want to engage at all, I get it, but they’d really better start looking up how to engage in violent resistance, because change either comes through politics and all of its attendant compromises or through violence, there’s no third alternative.

The first “Peanuts” comic strip from Oct. 2, 1950:

Absolutely fucking brutal.

“It was one time!”

Contribution: Go check out other countries’ translations of Disney songs. Disney puts in a lot of work to make sure that their foreign language singers sound as much as possible like the original and that the translated lyrics have about the same rhythm as the original. It’s deeply uncanny sometimes, a bit like having a brain malfunction where the song sounds exactly the same but you can’t understand the words.

Corollary: Can anyone recommend some good German rap? I downloaded one German rap song back in my Napster days and I loved how it sounded, but then I realized that I didn’t speak a word of German and for all I knew they were rapping some truly heinous lyrics without my knowledge, so I took it out of rotation. I’d love to have some good German rap that I wouldn’t be horrified to learn is about right wing politics or something

I’m not sure if it’s himself but John Spencer had an oddly specific career type cast as “guy who is smarter than the people around him and is totally exasperated with having to deal with their nonsense.”

From WarGames to The Rock to The West Wing, he’s that guy. So consistent.

He’s trying to build his own monuments while he’s alive because no one will build monuments to him after he’s dead.

Yeah, but you’re answering someone who asked a question about the show who may not have watched it yet, and has an interest in watching it.

When my kid would fall, I wouldn’t say “Are you okay?!” and make a big deal over her, because this was a good way to make her start crying.

Instead, I’d start with “Did you fall?” and she’d usually say “Yeah,” and then I’d say “Where did you fall on?” and she’d point to her knee or hand or whatever, and then I’d check in on that.

If she was going to cry anyway, she’d start crying all on her own. Otherwise, I was inviting her to self-examine and self-manage, and it worked great.

Fatberg

Might want to put a spoiler tag on there.

I once saw someone post online “No one ever advanced the cause while in the closet” and I had a real hard time not making a whole thing about it

Hartman Hips

Free OC! Free OC!

There’s like… one percent of one percent of advertising that has ever been created that actually had some kind of artistic or entertainment merit. Those insane Spongmonkies ads for Quiznos. The H&M ad Wes Anderson did. It’s so vanishingly rare as to not meaningfully count, but it does happen once in a blue moon.

Yes, they confirmed the objective existence of the soul within the context of their fictional universe, alongside faster than light travel, time travel, accessible parallel universes, stable wormholes, hand-held weapons that can vaporize a human being, and artificial general intelligence.

On the scale of science fiction hardness, Star Trek is somewhere between warm jello and cotton candy.

1: Closing Time, by Semisonic, but that’s because I put it on when I’m trying to hustle people out of the store at the end of a day

2: Batman Theme, by Neal Hefti

3: Evil Plot to Blow Up Batman, by Neal Hefti, but those are because my daughter kept insisting she wanted to listen to the 1960s Batman soundtrack on the way to school.

Numbers 4-6 are from the Frozen Soundtrack for the same reason, then back to 1960s Batman for 7-9.

10: The Batman Theme, by the Ventures. Kid loves Batman.

Then there’s more Batman, more Frozen, and a song from The Little Mermaid.The first song that I consistently choose to listen to for myself and that hasn’t been artificially inflated is #15.

Victim of Love, by Erasure.

It’s been at least twenty years since Spielberg made a movie that anyone gave two shits about.

I’d almost give him a “Stopped Clock” award for discontinuing the penny, but actually that’s also an example of him overstepping his powers because the law as written by Congress says that the Treasury shall produce appropriate numbers of each denomination of coin, and Trump has just interpreted that appropriate number as “zero” for pennies. By all rights, it’s a decision that should have been made by Congress, but yet again Trump is governing using “No Homers” level logic.

But fuck pennies. And nickels. And one dollar bills.