1. Tater tots are basically an entire potential meal of their own. Not a French fry, but I may actually prefer them as a possible main dish.

2. The best French fries. They are the perfect side.

3. If you want to fancy it up a bit. Suitable for formal occasions.

4. Taking the one-dimensional line of the French fry and extrapolating it out to two dimensions. Still a good ketchup conveyance, but starting to get into the issue I’m going to bring up with…

5, 6, 7. Not a good enough ratio of crispy outer fried surface to gooey potato inner. I prefer crisp, but when I bite one of these, I have a good chance of just getting a mouthful of scalding hot potato napalm, or what’s worse, cold potato cement. Not ideal.

'8. Yeccch.

You’re correct. I’m sorry, I had my numbers screwed up in my head.

These are the numbers from Wikipedia. It still fucks me up that Trump increased his vote margins, even to the point of winning the popular vote. It’s probably going to haunt me to my grave and be a thing that I deeply wish wasn’t true, but there it is.

What I ought to have said was that comparing 2024 to 2016, it’s not that Democratic support fell off precipitously, but rather that a lot of people showed up in 2020 to vote for Biden, and then a lot of them stayed home in 2024.

Trump gained some, and that fucking sucks, but apathy and disengagement is a big factor in what got him back in the White House.

Accurate.

Trump got about the same number of votes in 2024 as he did when he lost back in 2020, whereas Harris got fewer votes than Biden did, so strictly speaking we are getting exactly what all too many of us didn’t vote for.

Wanting TWO MIDGETS SHITTING INTO A BUCKET to have A BIGGER, BLACKER DICK is woke.

Don’t forget to make the working conditions inhumane and unsafe for the workers building the place! That could probably shave off a few hours, too!

13 year old: “I’ll just take the death penalty, thanks."

Well, thankfully we made NASCAR stop using leaded fuel way back in [checks notes] fucking 2007?! Holeee shiiit.

You Made It Weird, with Pete Holmes. Really fucking funny comedian Pete has had lots of interesting guests. Usually starts with relatively normal stuff, but usually by the end of any given episode he gets into “Do you believe in God?”, “What do you think happens when we die?”, and “You ever do ayahuasca?” territory. Pete is SMART and has been going on his own spiritual and philosophical journey for a while, and it feels like every guest is another step on that journey. Look up the episode list and find someone you like and listen to their conversation.

unless we have a major nuclear exchange

I was going to say, it really depends on just how hard we go on the “let’s kill everyone” vibe.

Under a blanket. In any weather. I have cold urticaria, where if my skin feels even the slight chill of cool sheets, it assumes I must be under attack and deploys just enough histamines to make me feel itchy and keep me from sleeping. It fucking sucks. I’ve just barely learned to cope with it.

Catra would never try to use the power of friendship to pay off gambling debt.

She’d either cheat at gambling so as to win big, or she’d run up a bunch of debt and then leave Scorpia holding the bag, with the possible long-term consequence of having to burn down the casino.

an abandoned farm in the middle of nowhere

So, either you see the rare bird you’re looking for, or you get carved up and turned into lampshades.

Those who make peaceful revolution impossible make violent revolution inevitable.

Why is dark humor like food?

Because not everyone gets it.

It’s fucking rich Thiel trying to coopt Robert A. Heinlein. The man believed in people being free to do as they wish, but he was no fucking kleptocrat. I’m not convinced that his philosophy would comport particularly well with modern libertarians, who amount to sock puppets for the GOP.

He believed fiercely in being politically knowledgeable and involved:

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.

He believed in rationally-considered governance:

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.

And while he sure seemed to hate Communism, something I don’t find all that surprising for a man of his generation, he arguably hated corruption and capitalist decay even more:

Of what use, then, are the American Communists?

They serve one function extremely useful to you and to the country, so useful that, if there were no Communists, we would almost be forced to create some. They are a reliable litmus paper for detecting real sources of danger to the Republic.

Communism is so repugnant to almost all Americans, when they are getting along even tolerably well, that one may predict with certainty that any social field or group in which the Communists make real strides in gaining members or acceptance of their doctrines, any such spot is in such bad shape from real and not imaginary social ills that the rest of us should take emergency, drastic action to investigate and correct the trouble.

Unfortunately we are more prone to ignore the sick spot thus disclosed and content ourselves with calling out more cops.

All of those quotes are from Take Back Your Government, a nonfiction book about how and why to get involved in politics, and one that I wish more people would read and take seriously. All of his fiction… you have got to take with at least a grain of salt. He loved to put political philosophy rants into his writing, but he also loved exploring weirdo scenarios that he may or may not have totally believed in, himself. Just because someone took a given interpretation from one of Heinlein’s fictions does not mean that he would be chill with a bunch of vampires bleeding the planet dry.

Red Cross

The cholla cactus: