656 Comments
Feb 21Edited

The shit in our food is evidence of what I've been banging on about in comments here since the start: We only think that the name at the top of the ticket makes a difference when in reality most of the decisions that impact our lives, our health, and our fortunes are being made by unaccountable government actors in league with malevolent multi-national corporate interests to whom they regularly go for big paychecks when not "serving" in government.

This must stop, and it will only stop by application of deliberate and overwhelming force. That force is available to us through the ballot box and the jury box...for now. And if we don't make use of it real fucking quick we'll be stuck resorting to the cartridge box and friend you do not want to live in that world because there is no coming back from it. It will involve acts of violence that will absolutely destroy the soul of anyone involved. Imagine someone going to a private elementary school where the scions of our self styled elites are being educated to continue the evil empire their parents have profited from and utterly destroying every living soul there and the person who did that being hailed as a hero by 1/4 of the country and another 1/4 saying "Well, what did you expect to happen?" in response.

That's only the beginning of the future if we don't get a handle on this shit and get everybody to remember that the constitution was an agreement between a bunch of people who didn't trust anybody else to keep behind some lines so we don't devolve into violent bedlam.

And unfortunately what I'm talking about ain't the future, as anyone who bothered to look at the hot takes on Twitter in the aftermath of the shootings at the Nashville School or Osteen's church or the cheering for Hamas happening at Harvard could tell you. *It's the present.* But it takes putting it as something happening in an elite NY prep school before somebody will recognize it's happening right now and that our fate as humans is that there is an equal and horrible reaction for every such action.

People who fantasize about government troops jackbooting the shit out of people who refuse to give up their AR15...door to door confiscation by the national guard was actually proposed in the Virginia legislature...don't understand what happens next.

And I'm on bended knee begging with tears in my eyes, put the fucking pin back in or you WILL kill us all. Civilization is a gossamer thin construct that will evaporate right in front of your eyes. Slowly at first, and then all at once. And when that happens you and your children will never again see a peaceful day.

That kind of devolution is a choice, and one we don't have to make.

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and im begging you to get a paid subscription so i can get takes like this more often

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From an email I sent to a group of like minded friends: "Call me a coward, but as something of an amateur historian of 20th century conflicts and having a glimpse of what was going on when my cousin was in Iraq in 2007 I would do almost anything to avoid an open conflict on US soil. "Loss of life" does not even begin to describe what happens in a modern civil war."

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NYC will have bodies five feet deep in the streets.

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At least that'll match the bags of trash stacked five feet high.

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I've not always had time to wade through the mass of comments on here these days, but snark like this is one of the reasons I do

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ice does snark pretty damn well

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q9rl_J9kdnM&t=294s Slowest motion possible. Start at 4:52. You'll know when to freeze frame. It's only 1, but it's a start. I think it's a chick.

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So THAT'S what Heaven looks like!

Wow...

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It's too late. We've already passed the tipping point. The only question is when it will start, and where.

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I don't agree. I think a great deal of the public has been misled by false narratives and that they are waking up to reality. I see a potential reckoning of epic proportions on the horizon...and I'm not alone in seeing it. I think there are people inside the giant unaccountable machine who recognize the beginnings of a popular revolt against their rule that will wipe them out completely and that they're trying to get ahead of it.

The deep state is at a crisis point on what to do. Doubling down on authoritarianism in an ever more nakedly open ways is what a chunk of them are most definitely doing by reflex, and in so doing only making it more and more evident what's happening. The deep state nakedly subverting the Constitutional order makes it impossible for the deep state to continue existing. The more sophisticated actors with in it realize that their power exists only so long as it is not clearly seen by the man in the street.

What I think is most likely is a realignment. I think the smarter people within the deep state/shadow state recognize that some sort of reckoning will be necessary. And I think they'll offer up the dumber ones responsible for some of the more excessive acts as an acceptable sacrifice as they look to make a deal with an emerging political reality that makes even business as usual 25 years ago impossible.

To survive, I think they'll make a deal that has the appearance of reform without having nearly as much function as I would like. Give the "intelligence community" and other assorted would-be masters of our universe the choice between quiet survival or an all-out war of annihilation that they know they cannot win and I think they pick survival all day. It will mean a purge of their ranks but I think they'll happily offer up the foaming-at-the-mouth fanatics in their number with glee...because, after all, who the fuck wants those people around anyway?

That, too, is not new. The Church Committee came to be due to overreaching during the 60's, producing accountability that they had to work hard to manage. And they did it successfully, finding new casus belli in fighting the Cold War. And viola, in a few short years the institutions that had murdered JFK, MLK, RFK, and Malcom, that had plotted terrorist acts across the nation to justify starting a war for Cuba, that had planted cells in Europe to destabilize even NATO partners, that had partnered with organized crime to run drugs guns and people across the world filling cities with poison that would enslave entire generations...POOF...suddenly wrapped themselves in the flag of patriotism and fighting the communists to protect FREEDOM AND LIBERTY AND MOM AND APPLE PIE.

So successfully, I might add, that Benji Shapiro and Sean Hannity practically trip over themselves to defend those actors to this day.

"Dude, that's hardly a rosy picture." Yeah, it's not intended to be. But the optimistic part is that not all utterly corrupt power brokers are simultaneously catastrophically stupid on top of it. And thus survival and even some level of recovery is entirely possible even if purging their corruption from our body politic entirely isn't.

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If you look at the Trump verdict, you can understand what the Left is dealing with.

They hate Trump so badly, and are so afraid of his return to the presidency that they've completely thrown the mask away. They stand revealed as totalitarians who'll go to any length to get their man...

...but everything they do digs them deeper into this public-relations pit they've made for themselves. They really can't win peacefully at this point.

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I want to be clear: I do not see the vitriol against Trump to be a phenomenon of right or left, but of top and bottom. The unaccountable machine loathes Trump because of what Trump represents. He is the lighting rod of populist revolt that has been brewing for generations.

He's not the source or sustainment of it...he's just found himself on its back riding it. The high profile lawfare screwjobs have been a giant red suppository shoved up the rectum of normies. The things that have been done against Trump and Kyle Rittenhouse and various other targets of the "mainstream" press in service to the machine have shown what the machine has always done to dissidents and the downtrodden.

There's a credible argument to be made that the same sorts of people who brought us the Tuskegee experiments ran a great big one on the entire nation. The psychological experiments the "intelligence community" ran on prisoners and political dissidents in the 50's and 60's has been commoditized, digitized, and run on LITERALLY EVERYONE'S CHILDREN with the advent of social media. The abuses inside the federal prison system which used to be confined to accused drug dealers are now brought against non-violent January 6th protesters.

The end result of all that is that normies have increasingly begun seeing themselves in the crosshairs of stuff that used to only happen to the fringes of society and it's causing a wide array of people to rethink everything they assumed about the motivations of people in government. I can't tell you how many times I've seen "If they're doing this to Trump, what makes you think they aren't going to do it to you?"

...and this is not just fluff. Policing in America was dealt a severe blow during COVID when departments announced that they wouldn't be coming for any but the most severe calls for service while simultaneously enforcing legally dubious lockdown policies at gunpoint. A shitload of thin blue line stickers got scraped off of trucks and SUVs because people who had believed that the police were the good guys suddenly got a very rude reminder that armed agents of the state are *always* a potential menace to even the most basic civil rights. A good many people who believed the 9/11 NYPD police are heroes concept suddenly got a good look at just how many people in uniform pledge allegiance to their dental plan.

Bye bye traditional "conservative" support for "backing the blue!"

The institutions are discrediting themselves at a rapid pace. The extent of the problem could be witnessed in the US Supreme Court's hearing on the Colorado case to keep Trump off the ballot where EVERY JUSTICE expressed doubts on Colorado's arguments so severe that a good many analysts expect the USSC to unanimously reject the effort. And they kind of have to if the judiciary is to retain any credibility. And at least some members of the court seem to be actually thinking about the "and what happens next?" question by pointing out that under these novel theories nothing is stopping the other side from fully embracing the exact same theories and doing the very same thing.

And increasingly in populist circles there is a growing number of voices saying that the appropriate response to the weaponization of government is to weaponize in the other direction until the people doing it now cry uncle. And maybe even not stop when that happens.

...and, really, who can blame them? What's good for the goose is good for the gander, right?

And that's how we end up in an argument over who controls the guest list for the camps. None of that happens if the institutions themselves shed this nonsense and at least go back to pretending not to be picking a side. Some sacrifice of the more extreme agitators and claiming that they're all good now is something the normies can accept.

That's why I think it's the most likely outcome. It's the easiest fix for everybody. Purge the most extreme actors and put all the blame for everything that went wrong on them. Some of them go to jail and the people behind get to play patriotic reformer. Big tech and big corporations get chastened, but never face full accountability for the death and havoc they have wrought.

DC keeps getting paid. Corporations keep making money. Mr. and Mrs. America have a more normal quality of life and soon enough they'll stop being angry about what happened.

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Nicely done!

You know, I'm sorry I won't live to read the books 26th Century historians write about America.

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QotD: [we all] got a good look at just how many people in uniform pledge allegiance to their dental plan.

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"The unaccountable machine loathes Trump because of what Trump represents"

While I agree with this, this doesn't reconcile the fact that even in 2016, after he defeated Clinton, people that I'd consider moderates or moderate left seemed to just seemed to hate him. Even after I pointed out that his policies were that far different than Clinton's husband's. They bought into the Russia narrative. They bought into the "both sides" hoax, they bought into the election interference narratives. These same "moderates" then refuse to consider any wrongdoing by the otherside?

Are there right wing/deep staters that have the same vitriol against Trump? Absolutely. They pale in comparison. The left still thinks he's Hitler.

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I disagree. They're not that smart and they're not that charitable.

There's going to be a war.

Look at history.

Nothing can stop it. The only question is: when?

We're already in the opening stages of it.

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I am sanguine as well. The purging of any better angels has already happened. The stage where they toned down the assassinations and coups and instead wrapped themselves in the flag and apple pie was when they directed their gaze on US citizens and now the gloves are off. Snowden might have triggered a chance at reversal. That was a decade ago.

Throwing the borders wide open is perhaps a last act of desperation, both to have a new domestic army to draw from and to keep the rabble on their heels and off the ruling class' collective throats.

As for the deal-cutters Tim described, snakes like that are not to be trusted.

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oh boy

fifth column time

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Pinned.

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You do know that what he's talking about in regards to the school thing did actually happen in a european country (I won't say which) and the man who did it is regarded as a saint now?

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He's regarded by CERTAIN people as a saint, anyway. Not sure the man on the street there agrees. Of course, the media of the state had their say on it.

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Indeed. But his elevation from homicidal monster to what some twisted minds would laud as some sort of freedom fighter has been a more recent phenomenon, and that in light of how things have...evolved or degraded...since. With the Nashville shooting the blood hadn't even stopped flowing before radicals who still have a place in polite society were on twitter lamenting there weren't more dead Christian kids or insisting "what did you expect" when Tennessee's legislature has expressed doubts about chemically and physically castrating teenagers.

The lack of a gap there is the disturbing part. I was pretty online in various discussion forums when Brevik did his evil deed and I don't remember a single contemporaneous statement about it being an act of spiritual or social hygiene. With Nashville the bile and vitriol was instant.

The steps between the people doing that and the people who gleefully filmed themselves raping and murdering innocent people at a music festival for peace in Israel are short and few...and that genie can't be stuffed back in the bottle.

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Oh no, there were a lot of people who made some 'back handed' comments about just who the people were he killed. The 'freedom fighter' bit isn't recent. I heard about it form folks over in Europe after the initial fuss has settled down.

Everyone knew over there that he'd targeted the children of the ruling class. Everyone quickly saw that he gutted the ruling class that most people despised (or at least most of the ones I heard from). The effect on the nation's politics has been profound too.

And no, I would not say the 'steps are few'. I would not say that at all. There are zero similarities between the two events.

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I don’t? Norway?

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Sweden

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“will have a single guiding ethos that I hope comes through every single time you open a link: that powersports are inherently cool.”

Given that the single guiding ethos coming through every time I open a link in the automotive “enthusiast” press is “cars are bad and you’re a Neanderthal for liking them” I’ll take J-Klo’s, thanks very much.

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Note, however, the emphasis on "powersports", rather than "motorcycles".

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Maybe there’s some signal here I’m too dense to pick up, but I like other power sports too, assuming they mean ATVs, SxS, jet skis, snowmobiles, etc.

Or is this some veiled power bottom reference or something I’m not getting?

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The veiled reference is, basically, "SxS manufacturers have PR budget now, because sales are on the rise, while motorcycle manufacturers are moving their budget to influencers like the adorable Aya Dijkwel, so it's gonna be a whole lot of SxS from now on."

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Fair enough. I get how that’s annoying. But still seems better than “this hobby is terrible and we should all hate ourselves for our involvement in it.”

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That's never been the position of the motorcycling press, thankfully. It wasn't even the position at RideApart prior to Jonasponcon's arrival. I'll be curious to see if RideApart's enthusiasm carries over to things like ElectraGlides, or if THOSE are bad for the planet.

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I mean in general the motorcycle community is so small, and the miles done per motorcycle outside of a few diehards/heroes/ironbutts so low, and the mpg efficiency of bikes so high, that no one should care about the environmental impact of motorcycles.

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Plodders gotta plod Jack .

Hence the Electroglide, it's actually a much better bike than my (first generation) 1965 PanHead ever was .

-Nate

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Well it does have “Electra” in the name

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They said they were interested in cool powersports.

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That this professional conman even thinks he has to tell enthusiasts that vehicles are awesome says more about HIM than the audience.

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I, for one, am glad he told me that it's ok to think powersports are cool. I've thought that for a long time. I'm so happy he verified I wasn't engaging in wrong-think.

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I mean yeah, that’s the cynical way to look at it. But if you read it sincerely, as I did, the message is “hey every other platform tells you you should feel bad for liking this stuff. We won’t.” But I could be naive.

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You have a point. It's really sad he thinks he has to say that.

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2024 path to differentiate yourself for an enthusiast audience: “We are enthused!”

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My first thought after reading this: This clown is going to Jalopnik my redneck hobbies, isn't he?

With any luck, he'll be back to writing "Deal of the Day" posts covering cheap impact guns and no-name lithium jump starters by next year.

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Sounds like "The Drive."

I don't know why I visit that site. I don't even like it. Force of habit, more than anything else.

The one on that site that really annoys me is Andrew Collins' "Will It Dog?" where he writes about how well a car can handle several of the filthy beasts.

Dude, aren't you married? Why aren't you writing a column called "Will It Child?"

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It took me years to break my TTAC habit. Ok, probably months, but it was a lot of months.

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Once Jack and Derek were gone I found I didn't like any of the other writers so much.

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Tim Healey was hired to kill it. Which he did.

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Your articles about the behind-the-scenes stuff going on there in those days were really interesting.

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One more to go!

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Finally happened for me in the last week or two! What other sites are there just for brief bits of car news, e.g., changes to existing models, etc.?

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Automotive News plus Archive.is?

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That's exactly where I was going. Prior to Rideapart, Klein was a typist at The Drive. He's commented here before. IIRC, it was an article where Jack called out another "journalist".

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I’ve driven around with two golden retrievers tethered to the roll bar of my Miata...anything “dogs”.

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If anyone wants the "Will it child?" question answered in regards to supercars, just get me one for a week or two and I'll let you know.

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Marty and Jennifer both fit in the passenger seat of a DeLorean.

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They could probably both fit in the passenger seat of a McLaren 650S, too.

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People weren't as zaftig in the 80s.

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Takes on a whole new meaning on drive.co.uk 😬

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Which is a blatant rip-off of Torch's original 'Will it baby?" articles on Jalopnik.

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I at least got Torch's permission to do a "Will it Zayde?" as I've been babysitting and picking up grandsons since I still had access to press cars.

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I would knock on a thousand freaking doors if one of them was Tulsi’s bedroom door!

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I photographed her in 2020 when she was running for the Democratic nomination. She is a handsome woman, lots of charisma. But she said Hillary is a warmonger and you can't have that.

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Tulsi is the most moderate of the political class, and what she says about kilery is accurate.

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I was all for bombing the shit out of the mideast back in 2001 and 2002, but watching how they fucked it up over the ensuing decades(!) has made me a peace-loving hippie. 2002 MD would not be able to recognize me, but I would hope he would be able to understand.

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Same camp!

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Same here as well. We should have left Saddam alone.

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All the state department did was unleash Hell.

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If we stayed in Afghanistan and focused just on OBL he would have never made it out of the Tora Bora caves. Instead we killed Saddam and Ghaddafi, made a run at Assad and in the process helped nurture the creation of ISIS. We also propped up the Pakistanis, let the Chinese catch up to us economically and weakened ourselves militarily to the point where Putin is emboldened enough to consolidate power (he will swallow what he wants of Ukraine by the end of the year). The worst thing we did is diminish our resolve to go after our enemies by staying in the middle east for so long for no good reason. If another 9/11 type attack happened, I dont know what our response would be now.

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Feb 21Edited

Saddam had taken Iraq from a poor backwater to a relatively advanced secularized state in the course of a few decades at the helm, putting nationalized BP oil money to work for his people. Things went sideways when he went at it with Iran (with our backing, funny enough). Gaddafi’s Libya was a similar story. Now they’re back to open air slave markets thanks to the forces of democracy at work in the form of Hillary.

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Which is what made Hillary great. No pussyfooting round Assad or shaking hands with Kim Jong UN.

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Hillary was ready at any time to put a million white kids in the meatgrinder.

Scratch that. I think she was EAGER for it.

But the minute Trump vague-threatened her with jail, we had to change the whole world to keep it from ever happening again.

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Why are/were we at *all* interested in Assad?

We've got 100k+ overdose/fentanyl poisoning deaths a year, a decade long slide in life expectancy, and people like you are eager to fly across an ocean and then some to look for problems. Get a grip man.

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Because the poor kids from Aleppo or something. Remember them harping on and on about that during the debates?

American kids clearly don't matter.

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Lest we forget the whole "Arab spring" thing in 2011 was kicked off by the CIA/ State Department. Once Libya was destroyed the CIA started to funnel Libyan guns to Syrian "peaceful protestors." Can't we just leave the poor bastards alone? (rhetorical question, the answer is no, because muh Israel and oil traded in dollars).

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I can't decide if middle-aged women are hotter than they've ever been, or if it's just that I'm middle-aged now and appreciate them more.

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I am in agreement, but I tend to like softer lines.

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It's both and neither. Diet and exercise have come a long way so the fitter woman typically looks better than ever but the average woman is chubbier than ever.

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I'm so glad I'm not married to the average woman.

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Aren't you married to the average Japanese woman? (Not really)

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She's definitely not average as a Japanese woman for being married to me!

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That's kinda profound.

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Profoundly depressing.

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It's your hindbrain trying to maximize opportunities.

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...before the dying of the embers and the guttering of the candles.

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I realized with sadness a little while ago MILF now means 'attractive woman my own age'.

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I had to look her up, but with that silver streak in her hair, she's certainly not without her charms. Crikey.

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