If a book claims something that’s fundamentally impossible by the laws of physics, I don’t need to read it to dismiss it.

With all due respect, you’ve latched onto 1. my introductory literary device for framing the argument, and 2. where I dismiss the book based on my argument, but missed my argument, which I would succinctly state as: By definition, we don’t know anything about the supernatural, but we know the natural world extremely well, and we can explain the way that it behaves fully and completely without supernatural influence. Not only do we lack evidence of the supernatural, the evidence that we do have rules it out.

That’s essentially a “god of the gaps” argument, i.e. if we cannot demonstrate it scientifically, therefore it must be God, or ghosts, or the Great Bacterial Collective Intelligence. But, in any case, turn that question around: do we have good reason to scientifically exclude the possibility of ghosts? And the answer there is a very strong ‘yes’.

Ryan North has a lot of Dinosaur Comics exploring concepts around ghosts, but the one that sticks in my mind is the one in which T-Rex muses about finding out what makes a poltergeist angry, triggering its ire constantly, and connecting the object(s) it manipulates to a generator in order to get infinite free energy.

Because, the physical world that we know and inhabit works on energy. For a ghost to interact with our world, it would simply have to inject energy into it. Sound, light, heat, et cetera, it’s energy. There’s no way around it. And we have laws of physics, like conservation of energy, which we very, very, very thoroughly tested at the scale, energy level, and relativistic velocities (that is, our human environment) at which ghosts would interact. In our natural world, we’d have to see macroscopic effects without causes, and energy entering or leaving the system. We’d be able to measure it, but we have not. E = mv², and the two sides of the equation balance, always.

More prosaically, another Dinosaur Comics strip posits that ghosts must be blind because they’re invisible. Invisibility means that all light passes through them, but if it doesn’t strike whatever ghosts use for photoreceptors, they’d by needs be blind. If their eyes did intercept light so that they were able to see, then if a ghost was watching you in a bright room, you’d at least see the faint shadows of its retinas. (Creepy!) In short, we don’t have to make any claims about the supernatural to say that if ghosts, or other supernatural phenomenon, interact with our natural world, we’d have to be able to see and measure the effect beyond subjective reports. However, we don’t, and there really just aren’t any gaps in the physics for ghosts to reside in.

As for the book, well, we all live inside these meat-based processors that are not exactly reliable in interpreting sensory input, or making narrative sense of it, and are well-known to just fabricate experiences and memories out of the ether when the sensory input is absent, scrambled, or just not interesting enough. It seems to me that the strongest likelihood is that brains did what brains habitually do (i.e. come up with fantastical stories), and that our theory of physics is pretty decent, since it has enabled us to create all sorts of technology.

The meme is fine, it’s the comments. If a business is following the law, the business must pass along the full amount of donated money, and does not get a tax deduction. I tried to look up some numbers, and found that many companies do not even report the amounts they collect, so they’re not doing it for media coverage. Agree with me or not, those are the facts.

Oh, for Pete’s sake! If you don’t want to donate, don’t donate, but at least get the facts, please. There’s plenty of stuff in the world to get angry about right now that’s real. In reality:

• The store has to book your donation as “unearned revenue,” that is, money it collected, but is not theirs. Charitable donations collected through the registers do not count as the store’s income. Giving the lump sum to the charity does not count as a store expense. The store is merely a custodian of the money until transferring it to the charity.
• YOU get the tax deduction, not the store. If you itemize your tax deductions (and do not take the standard deduction), you can submit the register receipt as proof of a donation, and get the tax benefit.
• The media coverage of these donations for PR benefit is basically nil. Off the top of your head, name the last 3 feel-good stories about grocery store charity donations that you saw in the news. (Can you name even one? I can’t.)
• Stores often do add some of their own money to the donation, but charitable donations are an “above the line” adjustment to income, not a “below the line” refundable credit. That is, the value of the write-off is the amount of tax the store avoided, which is always less then the amount of money it gave.

Last time I was at a grocery, and the payment terminal asked my to round up, I did. I see it as a win-win-win. I win because I can feel good about donating, even if it was only 14 cents. The store wins by some of my good feelings transferring to it; as well, the people who run the store are human, and also want to feel good about themselves by helping a charity. The charity itself wins by getting a couple thousand dollars that it wouldn’t have received otherwise. Despite my best intentions, I wouldn’t have gone out of my way to donate to that organization, and absolutely would not have bothered to give a tiny amount like 14 cents. But every little bit helps, and a few cents each from hundreds people adds up. I see this as a frictionless way to do some good.

Source: Used to work at a family-owned grocery store.

No, for pushing the COVID-19 vaccine. As I keep telling people, it was the “plandemic” that made him get the jab which is what made his neck just do that. The liberals pinned it on a nice boy from a MAGA family to protect Big Pharma.

Was this a regional thing? In my memory, they were all dyed green.

This sounds like kayfabe, a term which has escaped professional wrestling for politics in recent years.

Oh, wow, good for you! I guess I’m lucky that I was born before anti-vax was even a thing. In fact, my mother was one of the “polio pioneers,” the school children who served as the nationwide randomized, controlled trial for Salk’s vaccine, and her father had nearly died from polio, so I certainly got all my vaccines as a kid.

If you have read it yet, you may find The Case Against Travel interesting.

Honestly, I don’t have such a movie to suggest, I don’t think such a movie can exist, due to the Backfire Effect. Changing people’s minds takes time, and the impetus to change has to come from within. The handful of times that I’ve managed to do it involved sharing an idea or observation that doesn’t immediately trigger their defenses, but metaphorically is like dropping a grain of sand in the gears of their mind, and then letting it do the work of grinding away at the teeth, until one day their old thought process breaks down. It can take months.

Favorite is relative, usually the one I’m listening to at the moment. But I keep coming back to the Okkervil River album, The Stand-Ins. It’s a companion album to The Stage Names, about the losers and also-rans, so it’s full of sad songs.

My favorites, though, are the last two:

Calling and Not Calling My Ex, about a man who stagnated after breaking up with his girlfriend while she pursued her career. (Rumored to be inspired by Will Sheff’s relationship with Scarlett Johansen.)

Bruce Wayne Campbell Interviewed on the Roof of the Chelsea Hotel, 1979. Campbell was the first openly-gay rock star under the name Jobriath, and now mostly forgotten. He was manipulated and exploited by his manager/agent, and retired from music in 1975 to an apartment on the roof of the Chelsea Hotel. He died there of AIDS in 1983.

Life pro tip: While humans are indeed vulnerable to gamma rays from uranium, it’s usually all around more expedient to just hit 'em with it. And for that, many rocks will do, even just plain old feldspar.

Indeed. I stopped going to general admission live music shows years and years ago, because no matter where I’d stand in the crowd, that’s the spot that people would choose to force their way through to the bathroom, or bar, or to smoke, or wherever drunk people at a show go. (And go they do, the shifting around never lets up.) There’s really only so much being elbowed in the side or shoved in the back constantly that one can take before it starts to feel personal.

Then I realized that when other people would scan the crowd for an opening, it’d seem like the spot where I stood was a good choice, because there was visually a gap. Above my head. Because I was usually the shortest man there. (Which is somewhat unusual for me, but the fact that it was always the case at shows should’ve been a hint.)

I did try to stand my ground a few times, but then just risked getting into fights with drunk people, and/or getting slapped with the bullshit Angry Short Man label. Best just not to go. Especially since I couldn’t see the band anyway, what with the 6’6" guys who’d decide to stand up front.

So yeah, really tall people do see things differently, and if you see others as figuratively beneath you, or as invisible, well, I hope you have to sit in a coach seat for a flight to New Zealand.

Oy vey, I’ve experienced this for the past 30 years, in which time no Democrat has ever been able to give me a positive reason to vote for their candidate. Rather, only browbeating about how I’m to blame for Republicans winning, like I owed them my vote.

Even though I’d never voted for a Democrat for President. Well, until Biden, and then as a sort of Hail Mary last attempt to forestall the fascist takeover that’d been openly brewing for at least those 30 years. And what’d I get for voting for the Democrat? Sweet fuck-all, that’s what! The signs were there that Biden was not the man to meet the moment, and several op-eds I read even before the 2020 election warned that his win might be a Pyrric victory. (Nor to diss the man; he’d have made a great Republican President in the 1950’s.) And then he did nothing about the COUP ATTEMPT for 2 1/2 years. I voted in-person absentee, and [REDACTED] filed a lawsuit to throw out my vote, not absentee ballots in all of Wisconsin, mind, but my county specifically, and Biden did nothing.

Then, after I voted for Harris, and she lost, it came out in a few quiet news articles that her campaign knew that her support of the Gaza genocide would cost her some votes. To re-state that: Killing civilians in Palestine was more important to the Harris campaign than allegedly saving the U.S. Ho-lee fuck!

So that’s it, I’m done. If the United States can’t come up with even one major political party that opposes literal genocide, is it worth saving? (And no, I don’t buy that line about protecting other marginalized groups. Once a party has decided that it’s okay to throw people under the bus, it’s only a matter of whom, which they proved almost immediately by speculating that maybe they should’ve ditched trans people.)

Hmm, yeah, I’m triggered. Nice to have a rant now and again.

Not a very useful heuristic to identify bots and paid shills, given that there’s always an election in the future, eh?

This line is extra hilarious after the election is over, and they’re still here.

An incomplete image, since all of those other groups are just slightly further down the track on the D side.

Pfft! It’s 2026 now… the stereo in my car holds 6 CDs.

This is a shitpost? Seems like a LPT as a useful, quick approximation, since the real formula is “subtract 32, divide by 9/5”. 30≈32, and 2≈9/5, as long as you’re figuring out what to wear for the day, not working in a chemistry lab. (Don’t burn your meth, fer gawdsakes!)

For 32°F, the approximation is 1°C, and even where the scales align at -40°, it works out to -35°C.