Is....that... a candy bar, stick of RAM, or a bookmark?

???

Also what ever happened to Metal Storm?

Soldier of Fortune 2 had a pretty devastating OICW.

Throwing on some more extremely rough math:

Assume the average person lives 80 years.

Assume they start working at 20, and retire at 65.

Average out $4.4 mil over 45 years for an average yearly income their entire working life of...

$97,777.77

Ok, now check that against this:

https://www.omnicalculator.com/finance/us-income-percentile

And you get 83rd percentile, alternately stated as you have to be in the top 17% of Americans, by income.

Now again this is quite rough and the most obvious challenge to this math is that these estimated costs seem more to be for households, not individuals.

Well, ok, then if you go by household total income if $97k, this is the 65th percentile of households, ie, top 35% of households.

But to that one can counter that divorce rates are still climbing, and according to BLS, only about half of married households have both partners working.

https://www.bls.gov/news.release/famee.nr0.htm

... So basically the American Dream(TM) only exists for something around a quarter-ish of Americans, and of course half of that quarter would basically be considered quite wealthy.

I have had the misfortune of seeing some recent Fox News coverage of the FEMA response to places like Asheville so far.

It is entirely, 100% absent of any mention that the reason FEMA is underfunded and isn't doing more faster... is because congressional Republicans recently voted down a bill that would have given them more funding.

Its also full of ... I mean, legitimate disaster victims, but they are incredibly sanctimonious and whiney about how they aren't getting any help, and how somehow this us all Biden and the Democrats fault.

... I've spent a year homeless, seriously injured to the point of being crippled, and spent the last year living in a roach motel trying to figure out how to get any permanent housing or aid from any existing resources.

I have less than 0 sympathy for someone whining that they are just deserving of help, that it should literally fly out to them on a helicopter, that the government should pay to rebuild their house or rehome them, pay for all their lost property.

... Especially when said sanctimonious people almost certainly voted for people who they should have known would cut aid and resources to themselves, and would almost certainly be completely fine with someone like me just dying in agony.

The most insane thing I remember from Katrina was Blackwater authorizing themselves to respond to New Orleans, (they received official approval after they were already on site) where they didn't provide any aide or assistance, but set up sniper teams on roofs and above water overpasses and sniped people they deemed to be looters, as well as confiscating any guns they found.

https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2009/08/secret-history-hurricane-katrina/

So I guess that kind of makes the 'black helicopters' conspiracy sort of true, lol.

Don't let the QAnon crowd know.

It features heavily in the DX franchise because ... well DX was written in Texas in the mid to late 90s, around the same time Alex Jones had a public access TV channel.

They quite literally could have just worked in half the conspiracies he mentioned, and that would have been about 80% of the more fantastical stuff.

I'd say they did a compelling job of weaving in batshit conspiracy stuff (it does make for dramatic storytelling, wild enemy types and locations) with ... fairly prescient actual stuff around the unchecked progression of capitalism and technology.

I can't believe I am saying this, but compared to a whole lot of modern media franchises, they actually did a lot of continuity work to make the FEMA thing make sense in HR as a plausible precursor to how much more widespread it was in the original.

I don't think it really features in IW at all, as by that point the US government doesn't... really exist, almost every where that still has a functional technological society is managed by a mixture of UN/WTO authorities and gigantic megacorporations.

Also I guess worth mentioning: DX accidentally contributed to conspiracy culture even further by 'predicting' 9/11.

When playtesting Liberty Island, enough people noticed that they'd cheaped out on the background worldbox/skybox by mirroring it, not including the Twin Towers, that they wrote it in a minor lore blurb that they'd been destroyed by terrorists in the early 21st century.

Game is set in 2052... but came out basically a few months to a year (depending on your region) before ... 9/11 actually happened.

Please, please let it be Hideo Kojima.

Koyaanisqatsi.

... the 'yo quiero taco bellllll' commercials?

=P

So, she isn't saying not to ask for disaster assistance per se, she's saying not to comply with FEMA.

Given Loomer's other quite conspiratorial beliefs, my guess is that she believes FEMA will round them up into internment camps and then either use them as slave labor or forcibly reeducate them.

FEMA is one of the conspiratorial right's long existing bogey men. Based off of I think some executive orders signed under both JFK and Reagan, if a extraordinary national disaster or state of emergency is declared, the President has the power to relocate people to FEMA camps.

What this actually is, is basically in the event of the Soviets nuking the entire country to shit, basically martial law is exercised and the President gains a whole bunch of direct control over and exceptional powers to direct many federal agencies toward the aim of keeping as many people alive as possible.

What conspiracy theorists think it is, is that basically arbitrarily at any point the President can use FEMA to round up and 'deal with' any kind of political dissidents. It was most often invoked as the way that gun owners would all be rounded up during some kind of total gun ban.

Senile old man is too stupid to realize (admit?) his ally is very obviously totally intent on politically ratfucking his party.

Trump is the vector, not the disease itself.

The disease is the curdling rage of the (mostly) working class that's massively failed to achieve the American Dream(TM) that was promised to them, which has been perfectly heightened misdirected and cultivated by decades of right wing radio talk show hosts, psuedo 'philosophers', outright racist and religious extremists, conservative 'think tanks' lending credibility to failed economic doctrines, 30+ years of conservative influence on our public education systems essentially ruining it to the point that now only around 10% of Americans are capable of comparing and contrasting news coverage critically... etc etc.

Trump was just the first presidential candidate to completely drop the pretense and show the country that its fine to go totally mask off with your inane bullshit falsehoods, that there is no real need for anything other than appeal via signifiers and cliches and dogwhistle.

Actual policy means nothing, only spin.

Actual hypocrisy means nothing, just sling more baseless shit at others.

Reality means nothing, everyone else is wrong, you know in your heart what I am telling you, no matter how contradictory or incomprehensible it is, is true...

... because it allows you to feel rightfully indignant.

This has always been the strong undercurrent amongst conservatives.

Trump was just the vector that metastisized it into basically mass psychosis.

I feel we are both technically correct here.

Were incels common? Almost certainly not.

Were incels impossible? No. Rare, but not impossible.

Possible, but that would imply he simply had no sexual desires/attraction whatsoever.

Of course, when debating the supposed sexuality of people who lived and died roughly 400 years ago there's always going to room for argument, differing interpretations, and of course rumors.

To which I submit this, part of a 'Fragment on the History of Apostasy', written by Newton himself:

The way to chastity is not to struggle directly with incontinent thoughts but to avert the thoughts by some imployment, or by reading, or meditating on other things, or by convers. By immoderate fasting the body is also put out of its due temper & for want of sleep the fansy is invigorated about whatever it sets it self upon & by degrees inclines towards a delirium in so much that those Monks who fasted most arrived to a state of seing apparitions of weomen & their shapes & of hearing their voices in such a lively manner as made them often think the visions true apparitions of the Devil tempting them to lust.

https://www.newtonproject.ox.ac.uk/view/texts/normalized/THEM00061

Attempting to summarize and translate this into more modern parlance:

Newton thinks the best way to maintain chastity is not to entertain your sexual fantasies/desires in your mind, but to constantly busy yourself with work, reading, meditating or conversation, and also that fasting as monks do actually makes sexual desires so inflamed that it has resulted in many monks having dreams or visions or hallucinations of tempting, lustful women which are so vivid that monks believe them to be from the Devil.

To me, this reads as Newton himself telling us his own preferred strategy of maintaining chastity, implying it is something he struggles with, must put effort into, thus implying he is not asexual, and that his method of quenching his sexual urges is actually superior to that of what many monks do.

Thus, volcel, not asexual.

Again though, this is far from definitive proof!

I'd be interested if anyone could source some actually real evidence either way on this, as a whole lot of Newton's speculated sexuality is pop history or pseudo history based on hearsay.

Hah, well thanks for the idea endorsement, I guess!

Turns out Antarctica actually has some very interesting geography if you take the ice away.

That and the winter being totally devoid of daylight, the summer being totally devoid of night... the aurora australis being visible basically all the night time...

Sets up an interesting world, if you crank the temperature up enough.

... you... don't think there were people too poor, or ugly, or unhygenic, or rude, or abrasive, or poor of health, ... to have ever had a sexual encounter, to ever be married ... and to become misogynistic as a result?

Obligatory reminder that Cheney literally does not have a heart, nor a pulse.

His heart was replaced by a continuous flow pump after something like 4 heart operations/transplants/surgeries.

It isn't at all, but apparently any form of price/cost distribution is indistinguishable from any democratically 'owned'/managed/controlled productive enterprise.

Using this logic, a giant conglomocorp that uses 10% of the profits from one line of business to internally subsidize an expanding line of business hoping to gain a monopoly there, is socialist.

Just throw on a subscription model where some users barely use the service and others use it maximally, if you need the analogy to be more accurate.

What would actually make an insurance company socialist is if it were a worker owned co-op, where all workers voted on large company policy changes, hell maybe even include the policy holders in those votes too!... or if the entire thing were a government agency in a faaaar more direct, transparent and accountable democracy than what exists in the US currently.