Thrashy

He should really aim higher.

Personally, I'd like to suspend the 8th Amendment for law enforcement and senior executive branch personnel. Fuckers need to feel the Sword of Damocles actively tickling their scalp at all times.

That's comedian Jack Whitehall, and I struggle to think of a presenter who'd be more in on the joke.

Look, I'm in no position to talk seeing as I once wrote a cron job in PHP, but the profusion of JavaScript in the late aughts and early teens for things that weren't "make my website prettier!" feels very much like a bunch of "webmasters" dealing with the fact that the job market had shifted out from under them while they weren't looking and rebranding as "developers" whose only tool was Hammer.js, and thinking all their problems could be recontextualized as Nail.js.

Mona Lisa's eyebrows may have faded with time, but his appear to have migrated down onto his eyelids, somehow.

Important to note that it appears that the drone struck the north side of the New Safe Confinement structure. Russian claims that this was a false flag attack can be safely ignored, but there was always the possibility that a Ukrainian drone went off course, or simply hit a tall structure on its flight path. That's not likely with a drone headed south only a few kilometers from the Belarusian border. Sure seems like a deliberate strike on the NSC by Russian forces, on that basis.

UHC denied coverage after the fact for my wife's gall bladder removal surgery because they claimed she was insured with a other carrier through her previous employer. That got straightened out with a couple phone calls, but it was still ridiculous.

Even more ridiculous, though, was the time that they convinced a former insurer of mine to retroactively deny already-paid claims, on the (false) basis that they had been my primary insurer in that time period, only to then deny those same claims when the doctor resubmitted them on the (correct) basis that I had no active policy with them at the time! I suspect that it was a case of a faulty automated system rather than active malice, but the net result was a massive headache for three unrelated parties and a mind boggling amount of paperwork on my part, because they couldn't be bothered to write software that could properly handle the same person having two different policies with a gap between them.

Point me towards systems that don't have a human in the loop, particularly any that utilize fully-autonomous swarms, and I'll agree. Scary as the former are, there's a world of difference between a handful of FPV suicide drones, and a cloud of HL2-Manhack-esque things operating on face-recogniton-guided autopilot.

I've low-key started to think the only reason we haven't seen autonomous hunter-killer drones yet is that nobody's willing to break the seal, and I'm scared for what happens when somebody finally does.

That's a lot of mental gymnastics, given that Jesus' selection of a Samaritan was specifically made because Jews and Samaritans loathed one another as a rule. The point was to treat everyone as your neighbor, not just those who were part of your in-group. It takes some incredible brain damage to argue "actually, it means the exact polar opposite of its plain meaning."

It's always fascinating to go back and re-read the Bible without the blinders of dogma on. For instance, Paul was held out as a divinely-appointed guide to the early church, but if you don't take his conversion story at face value it's quite clear that he's a conservative trying to take control of a nascent religion and steer it away from the more radical ideas that some of the other early followers took away from the teachings of Jesus. That fun children's story about Joshua and the walls of Jericho (remember the French Peas from VeggieTales)? That was the opening act of a years-long campaign of genocide and ethnic cleansing that God commanded the Israelites undertake to claim the Promised Land!

My favorite, though, is Song of Solomon. It's straight-up erotic poetry, right in the middle of a book handed out to children! I know they claim it's metaphorical, but come the fuck on... the author spends whole chapters describing his lover's naked body, that ain't a metaphor for anything other than "I want to bone you."

I'm not going to go as far as to say it's good erotic poetry, though. I've tried "your breasts are like fawns, twins of a gazelle" on my wife and was immediately ejected from the bedroom. YMMV, though.