I hate this headline. You can’t correctly pronounce or understand the first word in the sentence without the context that comes later in the sentence.

Defending Russia is the most restrictive definition of Tankie.

Liquidators go through everything. Five toilet rolls in what was an 8-pack? Liquidate it.

IIRC, bankruptcy puts creditors in order, with employees getting whatever pay they’re owed first in line, then debtors, and whatever might be left goes to investors. When you paid 5 or 10 cents on the dollar, you don’t have to get much back for the deal to be profitable.

They’re talking getting 5 or 10 cents for every dollar of debt. Which roughly means the buyers need a 5 to 10 percent chance of getting their money back for the deal to make sense (interest rates complicate the EV calculation, and it’s not clear what those are).

This is the banks writing it all off and getting whatever they can out of a bad deal. The buyers will probably make money on the deal, even if Xhitter goes into liquidation.

No. The 12th Amendment specifies that “… no person constitutionally ineligible to the office of President shall be eligible to that of Vice-President of the United States.” If you already served two terms as President, you aren’t eligible to be Vice President.

Now that Hegseth is in, the Joint Chiefs will be key. You can assume that anybody with a high enough rank to be a Joint Chief will have tended to vote Republican, but the current bunch would be dead set against using the military to fire on American civilians on American soil. They’ll be kicked out, but the Senate needs to confirm the new batch. That’s the fight that needs to have the monkey wrench thrown in.

Not really. There’s no way this passes. The constitutional amendment process is too complicated even for broadly popular ideas to get through. Anything blatantly partisan like this is DOA.

There’s some other novel legal theories (read: dumb as shit, but our Supreme Court might let it through, anyway) on how Trump could bypass the constitutional term limits, but I doubt even those will work.

The first/second/third world designation is a cold war relic. America is first world by definition, but we probably should have ditched the whole framework after the Berlin Wall fell.

Hearing “Highway to the Danger Zone” at a piano bar. It was request night for tips, where the requests were ordered by how much the tip was.

Most of the tips were $1 to $3. I laid down Highway with $5, mostly as a joke.

What I got was a panio cover made up on the spot, and it was the best version of the song I ever heard. Will likely never hear it like that again.

Sorta, not really.

The book is notable for its almost complete lack of sex on any level. The protagonist goes on a date with a woman at one point. That’s about it. A shower scene where everyone is naked but nobody is horny would fit right in.

Stranger in a Strange Land, OTOH, goes completely the other way. I was reading that book on vacation, and a friend picked it up and peeked at a page about halfway through and started reading it out loud. The last half of that book is basically pornography, so . . .

“I love maps,” the president continued. “And I always said, ‘Look at the size of this. It’s massive. That should be part of the United States.’ ”

Let me guess, Trump is looking at a Mercator projection, right?

I tend to think Lauder planted the idea as a joke to see if his idiot golfing buddy would actually do it.

It comes down to framing. You put Animal Farm (unapologetically anti-Soviet Union) and 1984 (more broadly anti-authoritarian) on the required reading list for high schools. You haven’t provided any education around Marxist theory anywhere in the curriculum besides “communism bad”. That lets you transfer the idea that the USSR is representative of all leftist thought, and these books are about the USSR. Breeze over all the stuff in 1984 that points to any kind of leftist theory–which Orwell helps with because he expects people to get bored and skip that whole bit–and boom, Orwell becomes an anti-leftist icon.

If Homage to Catalonia were also added to the curriculum, this whole farce would be torn down.

I don’t think it’s currently on any ban lists in the US; if it is, it’s just in a few odd corners. It has been on ban lists around the world in the past for various reasons.

Plus, at the other end of the spectrum, I’m quite sure anyone making $28.6k a year would be very happy to pocket an extra $790.

Even more: an interest rate of <3% is basically blown away by annual inflation.

That assumes your salary goes up with inflation, though.

There are whole sections of the story that show American suburbia as it would have been known in the 1960s, except with Nazis. Churches are repurposed to worship the state rather than a god, but are otherwise unchanged in their layout or services. When the Nazis took over, they found plenty of people willing, even eager, to collaborate.

The whole point is that America was never that far from fascism to begin with.

Hitler didn’t take power democratically. Neither did Mussolini or Franco. They each found cracks in how liberal democracy worked in their respective countries. Those cracks were usually the places where the system was decidedly undemocratic, which in those three cases, was generally something where the old nobles still had some power and they lined up behind fascists to save them from leftists.

America never had nobles, but it does have plenty of cracks in its liberal democracy to be exploited by fascists.

So to answer your question simply, no, there are no instruments to fix this. Congress can potentially either reign Trump in with legislation, or even impeach him, but I don’t expect either one to happen. If the GOP can be swept out of Congress in 2026, then we can maybe start to fix some things without resorting to extralegal methods. Even that is only a starting point.

I do know for sure that we can’t go back to the old trajectory as if Trump was just an outlier.

Don’t worry about it.

In Chrono Cross, when entering Time Fortress Chronopolis, you immediately encounter the PolisPolice. This isn’t framed by the game as a boss encounter, but it is.

There is a design problem with this boss that you probably wouldn’t see in a more modern RPG. To survive its big attack, you need the White Plate to absorb white-based magic attacks. You get the White Plate by stealing it from the Sky Dragon. If you already fought the Sky Dragon and forgot to steal at the time, you are hosed. The game doesn’t let you go back and redo that, and the PolisPolice encounter is about 2/3rds of the way through the game–very late to be starting over again.

I replayed that encounter 20 times before I finally lucked out on the attack cycle to keep the party alive. Then I encountered the actual hardest boss: a disc scratch that prevented the game from continuing towards the very end.

Context. I know kinky dom men who keep a Hitachi along with their floggers and clamps, and they might bring it out on a first time partner. They also tend to clean it and may even wrap a condom around it.