DanteGabriel

How old is the Acura? If it's 8-10-ish years old, check its infotainment system. I'm driving a 2016 and its infotainment system is pretty ass for a car in its price range. It feels years behind the system in my 2011 Infiniti. Slow to boot up, clunky interface, navigation is primitive -- the map does not rotate around a fixed car, but rather the red arrow turns on a static map, so if my car is heading south, the arrow is pointing down. Mrs Gabriel hates it for that reason, it screws up her sense of direction. Even little things, like the odometer doesn't show 10ths of a mile and the audio system doesn't show the time elapsed in a music track. Then again, the system in a Honda may be just as bad, but if it's newer maybe it won't suck as bad.

You should see him covering himself in glory in the international events thread. He has an equally incisive grasp of international relations and the geopolitics of the Middle East.

Gosh, that sounds like more than one phone call, and all of it would be about as effective as a wet fart. "It's the gesture that counts" when trying to untangle the Israel-Palestine blood feud is either hopelessly naive or thunderously dumb.

Hawaii gave us Spam musubi: a slice of Spam on a bed of sushi rice, wrapped in seaweed. I am craving one now. Spam is popular in the Philippines as well. Fancy hotels will include Spam as a breakfast meat. I think it probably has something to do with US military presence around the Pacific. I enjoy Spam unironically. I think it is the ideal protein for fried rice.

Syphilis isn't a worm...

Who would they call, and what would they say?

They were synonymous with incompetence and division long before Sunak, weren't they?

So trespassing is not, in fact, violent? Just make your fucking point, counselor.

Was Rosa Parks violent for refusing to move seats? Were the men and women occupying segregated lunch counters violent?

You're lecturing the wrong people, Scot.

Yeah, the "attacks" by Biden as cited so far are... stretching and hand-wavy.

Jello. I used to make it a lot as a kid. It was a cheap and easy sweet. I think probably the last time I had it was in the form of shots, at parties we threw in my 20s. The purple ones, we mixed in everclear instead of vodka. Relatedly, Cool Whip was the standard accompaniment for Jello, and now just the thought of it makes me queasy.

Which citizens has Biden attacked now?

As maarsen alluded, "pork 'n beans" is quite the misnomer, as you would be lucky to find a small cube of wobbly pork fat in a can, which led to some of my disappointment. Rice and beans is another classic combination, and one I enjoy and have cooked before. Just never with canned pork 'n beans.

Money was pretty tight for the first few years my family was in the US, and sometimes dinner would be a can of pork 'n beans and a pot of rice. I am not a fan of pork 'n beans to this day.

Politics doesn't attract the best grown-ups, though, does it? Your current government couldn't get one soul into heaven if they pooled all their good deeds together (not that those abysmal shitheels could actually pool something together). So why not put some faith in young, energetic people who might actually believe in public service?

By vindicated I just mean "were proven right that the thing they were against was bad" -- so those protesters against the invasion of Iraq were absolutely correct, about the phony justifications for war, the intentions of Bush's government, and their incompetence in managing everything after. That said, the rest of your examples don't really apply, because I am not making an argument about how effective their protests were. The righteousness of a cause doesn't really seem to have much impact on its success. If you are doing something bad enough to inspire widespread student protests, you are probably going to be known as an asshole in fifty years.

I fear this is inevitable. Plutocrats are busily chipping away at the New Deal, instituted through quasi-legal strong-arming by Frankin Roosevelt -- himself a plutocrat who didn't want to end up like the Romanovs. A while ago in the writers' strike thread, I suggested beating a few billionaires to death in public as a lesson to greedheads, then said I was 80% joking. The percentage keeps dropping...

That's what I hear about every protest movement. Black Lives Matter perhaps most recently. If CNN is showing a visceral disgust for them, while still trying to keep a straight face about Trump and the Republican Party's descent into the cult of Fascist McJesus, that's probably solid justification to nuke CNN from orbit. Can anyone cite of a student protest movement that was NOT vindicated by history?

Fair. Let's cut to the chase - I wish more Americans were as just and kind as our PR says.

I'd also argue that the '72 election shaped a couple generations of Democratic electoral strategists, as they've never run anyone anywhere near as liberal as McGovern since. Not saying they made the right choice, especially over time, as I've also been frustrated by their predilection to "centrists" and it's contributed to the party's rightward, corporate drift. I wish there was a way to destroy the "liberal is a dirty word" paradigm that has gripped this country for over 50 years.

This will be tough for HoI to parse since he thinks "Racism is part of the negative reaction to Meghan Markle" is equivalent to "Racism is the only reason for the negative reaction to Meghan Markle."

Ye gods it's so fucking ugly. So funnily enough I drove a Tesla for a few days last week. My car was in the shop and we went for a rental. EVs were actually the cheapest rentals available. Later on the rental dude (Hertz) told us that they were abandoning EVs because the replacement parts were so delayed. Anyway, I actually rented a Bolt but they only had a Tesla Model 3 available. I didn't like it. Interior felt cheap and rickety. There was persistent noise leakage behind my ear like a hissing 8-track (hi, I'm old). I hated the fucking touchscreen being in charge of pretty much every car function except lights and shifting. I hated the stupid fucking flush door handles. Acceleration was nice, I'll give them that, and acceleration is important to me (I've rejected prospective cars I otherwise liked in the past because they were so anemic). At times I really wanted to rip into some curves, but I had groceries sliding around in the back. It took some adjustment to the fact that the car would pretty much brake if I let off the gas. The brake pedal was almost superfluous. So I continue to feel confident in our "not a Tesla" policy for Mrs Gabriel's next car. We're thinking a Hyundai or Kia at this point. Probably can't wait until the VW electric bus comes out (maybe I'll get one after I've driven my current car into the ground).

Come now. Ideology taking over science in medicine is nothing new. You're just alarmed because you feel it's "woke" ideology. Just like the age-old practice of social ostracism and "cancellation" suddenly became a major problem because it started to affect people with views you sympathized with.

Amazing, her reign wasn't even long enough to trace the second lightning bolt in the SS symbol.