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This strikes me as a particularly ahistoric take. I’d like to make two points in that regard.

News Radio was the biggest gig yet for both Joe Rogan and Andy Dick, who played main characters on the show from the start. Jon Lovitz was already well known from his time on Saturday Night Live – arguably a higher-profile position than the one he took on News Radio.

Jon Lovitz wasn’t spawned by News Radio, is my first point. To the contrary: Lovitz was brought onto the show as an established big-name talent after (his friend and fellow SNL alum) Phil Hartman died.

And how did Phil Hartman die? Phil Hartman was shot and killed by his wife, Brynn Omdahl, who struggled with substance abuse. According to Lovitz, Andy Dick was said to have shared cocaine with her at a Christmas party at Hartman’s house.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/lovitz-speaks-out-on-dustup-with-andy-dick/

“[Andy] was just complaining and really giving me a hard time for no reason. Phil told me that they had a Christmas party and Andy was doing cocaine and he gave it to Phil’s wife Brynn, who had been sober for 10 years. So Andy said to me, ‘Well, you shouldn’t be here,’ and I said, ‘Well, I wouldn’t be here if you hadn’t given Brynn coke in the first place.’”

After this on-set exchange, Lovitz and Dick were said to have made up and were able to work professionally together on News Radio. Later, however, when Lovitz was out at a restaurant, Dick came over to his table and invoked his ostensible involvement with Hartman’s murder:

“He’s standing there with liqueur dripping down his chin and he says, ‘I put the Phil Hartman hex on you, you’re the next one to die,’” said Lovitz. “And he’s smiling, and my blood just went to my head. I wanted to smash him, but if I hit him he would have gone flying into the table behind him. He was really drunk.”

My second point is that, while Jon Lovitz maybe be a “character,” he’s an entirely different class of character than Andy Dick. (Or Joe Rogan, for that matter, just to pretend this whole long reply still has something to do with the actual OP topic.)

A pastor usually leads a Protestant church. Catholic churches are led by priests.

Confession of sins to (God though) a priest is a rite in the Catholic church, but not in Protestant churches. Protestant churches often encourage members to ask forgiveness for their sins directly to God through prayer.

There are more Catholics than protestants in the world, but there are more protestants than Catholics in the U.S. The type of Christianity most often associated with socially conservative Republican/MAGA primary voters is Protestant “evangelical” Christianity.

Evangelicals are a hardcore subset of Protestants who take the Bible literally. They’re sometimes called “Born-again Christians” because of their belief in the importance of personal conversion. That is, you’re not really a real Christian until, as an autonomous adult, you willingly choose to surrender yourself, mind body and soul, and devote your life to (your pastor’s teachings about) the teachings of Jesus.

Anyway, now I’ve done an eight-hours-later four-paragraph TED-talk riff on what is otherwise quite a fine and clever comment. I mean no offense and hope none is taken. I mostly just wanted to note that when Nikki Haley talks about “pastors,” she isn’t talking to Catholics; she’s talking directly to the GOP evangelical voter base.

Again, I acknowledge your point about accessibility.

When you say something like “I wouldn’t count Windsor,” however, it suggests to me that you’ve never been to Detroit and that you still don’t understand what I’m talking about.

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EDIT to add:

I don’t think you’ve been to Detroit, but I’m not sure that you’ve been to New York City, either?

It seems as if you are thinking of Manhattan as all of NYC, or at least as the center of NYC. Geographically, it is not.

I’d agree Manhattan is “central” to NYC, in terms of culture and politics and money. But it could not be – it would not even exist as it does today – were it not for the other four boroughs. It takes all five boroughs to make New York City. The shape of the whole city is as irregular as any other city built on the water, and the center of it is nowhere near Central Park or Manhattan.

In fact, the only way that Central Park is close to being geographically “central” to the whole city is if you include Newark NJ as part of the city. But New Jersey is a totally different state from the State of New York. (I mean sure, you don’t need a passport to go across bridges or through tunnels, but still: You see where I’m going with this, don’t you?)

Detroit is laid out differently from NYC, more like the spokes of a wheel or a spiderweb, instead of a grid like Manhattan. Downtown Detroit (the most “urban” area of the city) and Belle Isle are both at the center of the wheel.

Not sure you’d get a sense of that by “looking at it” on a map, but Belle Isle at least as close to downtown Detroit as Central park is to lower Manhattan.

You do have to take a bridge to get there though, since it’s an island, so you may have a point about accessibility in that regard.

Nevertheless, Belle Isle is a large park in the middle of an urban area. Especially if you bring Windsor into the mix.

Giant food stores in Mid-Atlantic US

What does that mean though, “anti-war party,” “anti-war politician”?

Did your “anti-war party” stop being so because they’d ended the war we were in? And if so, wasn’t that a good thing, for those with an “anti-war” outlook?

Back in the late 1930s, I’m pretty sure America’s “anti-war party” was mostly isolationists and some Nazi sympathizers. It was FDR, one of the most progressive Democrats ever elected to the office, who led the country to war back then.

If your entire political belief system is based on avoiding war at all costs, you deny yourself any real-world context in exchange for that purist ideology.

Those who are anti-war above all else lose everything they have and everything they stand for, the first time someone (anyone!) else decides to threaten them with war. The first time that someone sneak-attacks their Pearl Harbor, or crashes planes into their Twin Towers, or whatever else.

Maybe war is like abortion (in this singularly metaphorical political sense). Nobody ever really wants it to happen, and most people do their best to try to avoid it for themselves and others. Yet sometimes, despite everyone’s best efforts, it ends up being the safest and healthiest way, sometimes the only way, out of an untenable situation not completely of our own making.

I’m not arguing that World War II was a “good” war and that W. Bush’s Iraq was a “bad” war. That may comport with my personal beliefs, but my real point is that everyone has their own personal beliefs. Everyone has something that is most important to them.

If you say that war is never justified for any reason, then you are also saying that your call for pacifism is more important than whatever the reason for the war may be. Not just more important for you, but for everyone else too.

There is a phone app, that pretty much allows you phone to work like the scanner gun. I’ve used it before and it works fine, but my phone’s camera is not as good as the guns at scanning barcodes.

Also, as much as I realize I am trading privacy for control, I figure there’s no need to have the grocery store’s app living on my phone, when it is just as easy for me to use the dedicated device they provide in-store.

In the produce section, they have scales that print out barcoded price stickers. I look up the item I’m weighing (or enter the PLU) and it gives me a sticker I can scan.

In the bakery section, where you can pick out individual muffins or donuts, they have barcodes printed on the self-service case above each item. I can just scan the barcode for whatever I take.

(I do also have the option of checking things out at the end, if I didn’t scan them with the gun.)

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EDIT to Add:

Ironically, the only time I remember taking something from that store without paying for it was a time that my self-scanned order had been flagged for an audit. I was trying to buy a watermelon on sale, but the sale price didn’t come up when I scanned it, so I set it aside to figure out at checkout.

When I got to checkout, my order was flagged for an audit. (Maybe even precisely because I had scanned the watermelon but then removed it from my cart when it came up at the wrong price.)

The guy running the self-checkout saw the flashing light at my register. Without comment, he came over to perform the ritual of scanning the certain number of items in my cart to reset the transaction and allow me to pay and be on my way. He and I had both been through this procedure many times. He probably performed it several times each shift he worked there.

I was distracted by the audit, however, and I forgot about the watermelon. When he scanned enough items and punched in his code, the register came up with my total and asked me how I was going to pay. I stuck in my credit card, clicked “yes” to the transaction amount, and made my way out of the store with a pilfered watermelon.

The grocery store I shop at has handheld scanner guns for customer use. I check out a gun by scanning my loyalty card, then make my way around the store, scanning each item as I put it in my cart. When I’m done, the handheld scanner displays a barcode that I scan at the self-checkout scanner. My entire order shows up on the screen there, along with the total cost. I pay, take my receipt, and head out to the parking lot.

I like scanner-gun shopping a lot. I like it because it’s efficient, but also because it puts me in control. I can see the real price of everything I take off the shelf, in real-time. If something doesn’t ring up at the price it’s marked, I know instantly. The device keeps a running total as I shop.

Most days, my entire grocery experience involves no direct interaction with any store employee whatsoever, except maybe to exchange pleasantries with a stockperson. I do 100% of the work of checking myself out. I imagine the money the store saves on me in labor might make up for a lot of the money it loses in shrink.

But the store gets something else from my use of its scan-as-you-shop service. It gets to collect a huge amount of data on the way I shop. Not only does it record everything I buy, but it knows when and where I buy it. It knows the patterns of how I move through the store. It can compare my patterns to the patterns of all the other shoppers who use store scanner guns. It can analyze these patterns for useful information about everything from store layout to shoplifting mitigation.

One of the ways the store mitigates shrink from scanner gun shoppers who might accidentally “forget” to scan an item they put in their cart is point-of-sale audits. Not usually, but every so often and on a regular basis, my order will be flagged for an audit when I go to check out. When this happens, the cashier running the self-checkout area has to come over and scan a certain number of items in my cart, to make sure they were all included in my bill.

My main point in all of this was to offer a narrative that runs counter to the narrative I picked up from the article. I prefer to have more control over my checkout experience, and I will willingly choose to surrender personal information about my shopping habits and check-out procedures in order to gain that control, every chance I get.

Yes, that sounds right, except that I think it really is relevant that one party was a U.S. citizen.

There are strict laws against the U.S. government surveilling U.S. citizens without a warrant. By using FISA information gathered through warrantless foreign surveillance, the FBI appeared to be taking a backdoor around those laws.

FISA stands for “Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.” By definition, it’s only supposed to be used in the surveillance of people foreign to the U.S.A. The FBI’s job is domestic law enforcement. It’s the FBI’s job to investigate crime involving U.S. citizens.

Officially, the NSA does not spy on U.S. citizens. You can believe whatever you want about whether it actually “unofficially” does, but unless you do a lot of business overseas, chances are high that Google and Amazon and Facebook all have collected way more personal information about you than the NSA has.

Even if the NSA does surveil U.S. citizens, it can’t use any information it obtains in any legal or political way, or in any otherwise public manner.

If a U.S. citizen has communications with a foreigner, however, it is possible that those communications will be surveilled. The NSA does spy on foreign citizens, just like foreign intelligence agencies spy on U.S. citizens. If you’re a U.S. citizen communicating with a foreigner who’s being surveilled, then your communications with that person are going to be surveilled as well.

But again, it’s not the FBI’s job to police international crime – that’s the job of the CIA. As the article describes, this is why it is a bad idea for the FBI to be using FISA intelligence. This is why “it’s a problem when they do it to Americans.”

Yes, yes, and yes. Seeing a movie in a theater offers a distinct experience in two main ways:

The first concerns the experience of losing some self-awareness as you “get into” a movie and devote your focus to what’s happening on the screen. This experience different when it happens in unfamiliar surroundings than when it happens on your living room couch. Losing yourself to a film’s narrative in a public place feels different than doing so at home.

Second, the experience of watching a movie together with strangers is different from watching it alone. You’ll hear people who you don’t know laugh when you laugh, and sometimes when you don’t. You’ll also hear people who you don’t know cough, slurp sodas and crunch popcorn, and sometimes even comment or heckle. A full theater adds a communal aspect, as the mood of the audience as-a-whole affects the experience for each individual audience member.

I’m so old I remember when going to the movie theater was literally the only way to see the movie. I’ve been in all circumstances: alone, on a date, with a group; in empty theaters and in packed ones. Going to see a movie by yourself and ending up the only person in the theater can also be a good experience, and is still very different from watching alone at home.

After you’ve tried going to the cinema a few times, you might look for a (now rare) opportunity to see a movie at a drive-in. It’s a weird juxtaposition of the theater experience with the private home experience that also becomes something more all its own.

Good point!

For the sake of accuracy, Hulu is owned by Disney which also owns ABC, as well as ESPN, Marvel, and Fox Entertainment (but not Fox “News”).

Meanwhile, a couple years ago, CBS and Viacom merged to become “Paramount Global” which owns both CBS and the Paramount (streaming) Network (obviously) as well as a slew of cable channels including Showtime, MTV, Nickelodeon, BET, Comedy Central….

And as noted, Comcast owns Universal which owns NBC. Their streaming service is “Peacock,” which has yet to demonstrate that it can compete against Disney’s Hulu (or CBS’s Paramount).

This may soon change, however, as licensing agreements expire and corporations begin to run their own content exclusively on their own networks. Disney-owned content will stream on Hulu, Universal-owned content will stream on Peacock, and Paramount-owned content will stream on Paramount. Same goes for all their respective cable TV channel subsidiaries.

This consolidation in media ownership gives more power to the corporations to compete against one another in the emerging streaming-service market, but it also takes power away from the people who create the content. This is a big reason why the screenwriters and SAG are on strike.

I’ve been trying to do my part by watching reruns of The Nanny in demonstration of my support.