My hypothesis: Youth pastors are supposed to counsel teens in order to woo them into the fold. They're there to help, but not for sake of the teen but for selling the teen Jesus. It's dishonest work for an allegedly good cause.

But someone who can sustain that kind of dissonant duality in their relationships can do so for other causes. If they can be equivocal for Jesus, they can be equivocal for their own libido as well.

Hence the nickname given to YPs by the kids The freak of the week.

We're pretty sure it's the Monsanto pesticide and anyone who suggests it is hit with a litigation threat. Curiously, as we're speed-breeding domesticated bees the wild bees are dying out faster, so as the bee population dwindles it also becomes more domesticated and less wild. I know that's a bad thing, but I am fuzzy on the why details.

I'm a brown thumb, and plants wilt as my shadow falls on them, but if you're a green-thumb, plant pollinators, which will help the bees.

Also plant milkweed for the monarchs.

I'm telling ya, this is the beginning of A Christmas Carol. The ghost of Thompson needs to visit his colleagues and warn them you too, shall die, and no-one will mourn you and the people will celebrate in the streets. And all your friends will tear into your assets like vultures into carrion.

Heck, replace the ghosts with mobsters and use a trick of time rather than supernatural spirits, and you have a 21st century version of the story.

In the aughts, once the US torture programs started getting public attention around 2003, I did my obsessive thing on the German Reich and the Holocaust.

During Operation Barbarossa, the SS was experimenting with eradication methods. The most common was the pogrom, endorsing the locals to massacre the undesirables. When they weren't undesirable enough or it was the whole village, the einsatzgruppen (death squads) had to come do it, usually forcing them to dig a mass grave and then executing them along the side.

It was messy and brutal and gross, and there was high turnover among the death squads (the US has a similar problem with its combat drone operators). And this was a major problem.

The SS experimented with other ideas, including deathwagons that would pipe the vehicle's exhaust into an enclosed chamber to kill dozens at a time, but even that was too harsh and too slow.

This is how the prototype genocide machine was made at Auschwitz. The program was contrived so no one who interacted with the live prisoners also interacted with the dead corpses. The guy who pushed the execute button was two persons removed in the chain of command from the guy who signed off on the execution order, and none of those people had to face the prisoners or the outcome. The point specifically was to make the process of massacre less stressful for the people involved.

She and her husband attempted to fight the demand, attempting to buy the implant outright...

It was compulsory brain surgery for a repo.

In other words the company interests superceded the patient's

This is the sort of inciting incident that triggers cyberpunk dystopian adventures that conclude in a blaze of electrical grid collapses, warehouse explosions and mass spiritual awakening. Then the protagonist moves to Amsterdam.

I like it that Wikipedia is now an authority on trustworthy citation sources.

I have [a] conservative family.

To be conservative in 2024, you have to dismiss that some people in our community are miserable and every day we leave them to their fate is heinous.

In the US, a failure to vote [against] any given Republican (by voting [for] an opposing democrat) is another step towards autocracy and genocide. Every Republican in office is a force towards the Heritage Foundation's 2025 project, by which they will unmake the meager democratic features and civil rights that remain in the US.

Conservatives believe, by the natural extrapolation of their positions and behavior, I have no right to exist. (Curiously, this includes my own father, who simultaneously facilitates political efforts seeking out my extinction while expressing a dissonant interest in my well-being. He doesn't dare connect the two in his mind.)

The problem with a vehicle kill switch is the same problem as an encryption backdoor for law enforcement. It will leak, quickly (inside a year) and so not only will law enforcement misuse this power (history shows they've misused all powers they've been given) but nefarious interests will use it to cause havoc.

I opine this is the advantage of growing up on social media and being used to deliberating. When I was a young clerk in the late eighties, we were pressured not to ask questions about cruel treatment, (which factored into my suicidality.)

When zoomers see something weird or harsh, they go on social media and ask their homies my boss keeps hanging around looking down my blouse. Does anyone else think it's super creepy? So they get a lot of rapid feedback.

Maybe they'll lead the revolution toppling capitalism.

Once the Miserables found themselves outvoted in the Estates General of 1789 by about 3% of the population (the ones with money), it became very uncomfortable in France for aristocrats.

Just saying,

Isn't this action (removal of the git repo) essentially an admission that:

• Unity is doing something shady;
• Unity knows it's doing something shady;
• Unity knows when the public sees what they're doing what they're doing, it'll be recognized as totally something shady?

My (unpopular?) solution is to make sure the rest of society isn't so desperate for food that they're willing to rob a robot.

In an unrelated suggestion, if youre in a grocery store and see someone stealing food, no you didn't.