I was trying to watch the original Nosferatu but the version I was watching had dogshit Casio keyboard accompaniment. I muted it and had Spotify put on a playlist based on “Danse Macabre.” Much better. That said, a proper silent movie with live accompaniment is fucking fantastic. I saw Dorothy Vernon of Haddon Hall that way and loved it.

Wasn’t there a super simple experiment where they threw rocks at a tub full of dust and no matter what shape rock they threw or what angle or how fast, it always left a circular impact crater?

Bone conduction headphones solve this problem.

It’s true, that wasn’t an entirely fair comparison, but I was thinking about disastrous adaptations, and that one sprang to mind.

Say, for example, Kubrick and The Shining or Ridley Scott and Blade Runner or Jackson and The Lord of the Rings, as opposed to Shyamalan and The Last Airbender or Jackson and The Hobbit.

Honestly, if Jesse Eisenberg had just been doing a version of his Zuckerberg from The Social Network, it would have been fine. His whole twitchy routine was weird as fuck.

Proverbs 28:27

Those who give to the poor will lack nothing, but those who close their eyes to them receive many curses.

versus

Matthew 6:6

But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.

But they can’t be expected to actually pay attention to their own scripture.

“We can’t turn off the orphan-crushing machine! Think of all the unemployed orphan crushers!”

The way of expressing this that really put it together for me was “The United States only ever has one total healthcare bill.”

People not getting the healthcare they need already has costs; costs in hours they can’t work because they’re sick, costs in retraining people for jobs they can no longer do due to health issues, costs in people declaring bankruptcy because they were devastated by medical bills, and costs in lost human lives because of untreated sickness. All of those costs ripple through the economy, and we all wind up paying for them, one way or another.

Even if you assume that universal healthcare wouldn’t actually improve the total base amount spent on medicine (it fucking would, in several ways, but assume that it doesn’t just for the sake of argument), we would still be coming out ahead because we’d be sweeping the legs out from under the private healthcare industry, which only exists to siphon profits off of expenses that people have to pay or else they die.

Fuck everyone who ever voted against universal healthcare.

Virtually anything with a Newberry Medal is highly likely to have a traumatizing beloved character death somewhere in it. Maniac Magee and Bridge to Terabithia were good examples from my childhood.

If you set up a location near a native elephant population where if an elephant brought you like a banana or something and you gave that elephant a handjob… I one hundred percent believe that the elephants would figure out the arrangement and you’d have a successful elephant brothel running in short order.

Sculptor Moses Ezekiel included the weeping figure of the loyal black mammy as a correction to what he and the UDC saw as lies about history perpetrated by the North.

It’s been a process.

Hitler’s government was a popular government; the vast majority of Germans preferred the rule of gangsters to the effort of thinking and doing for themselves. They abdicated their franchise.

[…]

The former Berlin businessman I referred to earlier told me that he blamed his own group, people with the time and the money and the opportunity to know better, for what happened to Germany. “We ignored Hitler,” he said. “We considered him an unimportant fellow, not quite a gentleman, not of our own class. We considered it just a little bit vulgar to bother with him, to bother with politics at all.”

They thought of the government as “They.” The only possible route to a clear conscience in politics is to accept political responsibility, either as an active member of the party in power or as an equally active member of the loyal opposition.

—Robert A. Heinlein, Take Back Your Government

💰💸💵💲

💸💵💲💰

💵💲💰💸

💲💰💸💵

Think about being a child with Professor X’s abilities. He can get anything he wants, make anyone believe anything he wants, he can know everyone’s deepest most shameful secrets. How could a person like that even form a moral framework? From his childhood, he’d have every reason to believe that he was immune to all discipline and that rules simply don’t apply to him if he decides they don’t, because for him those are true facts! By all rights Professor X ought to be a an exceptionally dangerous egoist and megalomaniac.

Oh, also, if there is any Marvel character who ought to be canonically omnisexual, it ought to be Charles. He doesn’t see bodies, he just sees minds. That undersea prawn monster that Namor was making out with ought to be just table stakes for Professor Xavier.

“We changed it after the war!”

If you believe that laws forbidding gambling, sale of liquor, sale of contraceptives, requiring definite closing hours, enforcing the Sabbath, or any such, are necessary to the welfare of your community, that is your right and I do not ask you to surrender your beliefs or give up your efforts to put over such laws. But remember that such laws are, at most, a preliminary step in doing away with the evils they indict. Moral evils can never be solved by anything as easy as passing laws alone. If you aid in passing such laws without bothering to follow through by digging in to the involved questions of sociology, economics, and psychology which underlie the causes of the evils you are gunning for, you will not only fail to correct the evils you sought to prohibit but will create a dozen new evils as well.

Robert A. Heinlein, Take Back Your Government