personally i am not really impressed when a computer is good at math — since a computer is math . i am a lot more intrigued by things like , for example , a rat being an exceptional cook — since that’s not really expected
the whole “American birth rate crisis” thing is just that we successfully stopped teen pregnancies, by the way. people aren’t not having kids because of candy crush or whatever, the sex ed programs just worked and sixteen year olds aren’t having kids anymore.
@brianchaley Seeing a lot of folks dogging Wyle’s writing/acting lately and it’s just clearly people conflating their negative feelings for the fictional character he portrays with their feelings towards him as an actor lmao
Scotland is aiming to be the world's first rewilded country. It's looking to rewild 30% of the country by 2030.
We have the solutions. Replenishing and protecting nature is one of them. #ActOnClimate#climate#biodiversity
“I don’t owe anybody anything!” Actually we are perhaps nothing but dizzyingly intricate webs of obligations to other beings and ourselves. The sheer weight of our obligations is all that keeps us from floating away into space. We can never do enough but we must try.
Conan O'Brien says he has "incredible empathy for people who have immigrated to another country" after traveling to Ireland and seeing his great-grandfather lived.
"I went back to Ireland and I [saw] a great genealogist who said, 'I found where your great-grandfather’s home was.' The home is gone, but he found the little spot where he lived, near the Galbally Mountains. He said, 'I’ll go there and show it to you,' and I said, 'We’ll do it on camera.'
"I was expecting to have these jokes loaded up; we had props and funny things we were going to do... But I got there, and I did not expect this because I'm not someone who wears my emotions on my sleeve, but I got emotional. It was very powerful.
"This was a very small plot of land. He was a tenant farmer, so it wasn't his. He didn't have money, and he needed to move on because it wasn't working; probably not enough to eat, couldn't sustain. So, he left and went to America, and here I am a couple of generations later.
"What's amazing to me is when you have that experience and you stand there, I have incredible empathy for people who have immigrated to another country. It takes an entire lifetime to go to a country where, often, people don't speak the language. They have to spend their entire lives just getting things started for the next generation; it's a whole lifetime that you're feeding into this process.
"I was just thinking about this guy, whom I'll never meet, who had to do that. I think I was overcome by the fact that there's a lot of sadness in that story, and in a lot of these stories. People leave not because they think, 'Hey, I just want to go have fun in America.' They leave because they have to."
(via Jimmy Kimmel Live)
Its an authoritarian kleptocracy shithole with some great people, cultural assets and natural wonder, but run by the most deranged, paranoid, fanatical drug junkie oligarchs and a completely broken political system.