France revolted violently for less… and again after Charlie X started stripping away the Napoleonic rights.

Is that her face?

Is that the sound of fast-approaching leopards?

Is it face-eating season?

Isn’t this like every guy at the Unite The Right rally of 2017? Maybe crossbred with Michael Douglas in Falling Down

So it means we all get to be Spartacus.

Too quick, though a classic.

Falling into a deep canyon (or from the top of Notre-Dame) would give him a moment to think about what he’s done. More so, being stuck in a lamp in the Cave of Wonders.

I am especially particular to the horror of being torn apart and eaten by hyenas (that you’ve just betrayed), but I’ve reserved that for people higher up on the Trump hierarchy.

I may be thinking of the July Revolution of 1830, in which case you’re right. They’re not the same, just related.

The French Revolution took about a century to fully process through. There were several instances of guillotines and piles of heads. We usually know about the first one (and the second one for those who’ve seen Les Misérables. ) During the post 1789 process there was also a weird cult thing that looked a bit like MAGA, until even the cultists got tired of Robespierre’s bullshit.

Marie Antoinette was a perfectly serviceable princess / queen and fielded charities and smiled at the commoners and all the things ambitious feudal ladies are supposed to do. She never said Qu’ils mangent de la brioche but the rumor of it was current, and sped her way to the guillotine. She was also accused of sexual perversities, including The German Vice (lesbianism) most of which had to be explained to her so she could deny having ever done them.

I think falling from a great height is too kind a Disney fate for Charlie Kirk. Perhaps he should be permanently turned into a kitten to suffer the effervescent (grabby, drooling) adulations of small children for all of eternity.

When I played The Sims 2, the first thing I’d do is create a small public lot where everyone could get all their needs met and buy food and a cell phone (since starting characters didn’t have one). There were some oddities, since Sims get dirty quickly, I’d replace sinks with showers, and would make sure coffee was available everywhere.

Eventually, sims could walk from their home, rather than investing in a garage and a car or taking a cab.

Note that Disney and Universal pirate other people’s stuff whenever they want.

Note also that all the Generative AI services are very protective of their big cistern of web-crawled data, say when China borrows it for DeepSeek.

Content, content everywhere and not a drop of principle.

Looney Tunes did it first.

I posted a post-deep-dive take on what gave Trump the presidency here, but I will say that misogyny did did no small amount of heavy lifting.

What we need to figure out before the GOP finds its next cult leader is how to neutralize the massive far-right propaganda machine that is churning out false information and disinforming the public.

We’ve decided before that ethically we can’t trust human beings to make sound decisions in some conditions. Gambling, for example. Sometimes humans get addicted to just giving the house their money when it’s coached in a probability game. But then we’ve just invented loopholes (and lootboxes) to circumvent regulation. So I don’t know how we’re going to deprogram massive viewerships of media that promotes hate, including misogyny.

If we fail then the ice zombie army climate crisis (and running out of water for agriculture) is going to drive us to extinction.

These days, the best thing to be armed with when drama happens is a camera. Preferably with a tripod, a good zoom and a shotgun mic, but that is typically a big ask.

To be fair, its not Jesus or Muhammed, but the massive ministries that propped them up as icons for rallying power.

And classical history features plenty of other divine images and massacres in their name.

Humans are suckers for it, especially in hard times and mass precarity. And that’s the problem we have to fix if we want to be a serious contender civilization.

The Soviet Union is long gone. Communist should no longer be a derisive and should sound like a 20th century cliché in 2025.

I wonder (can’t confirm) if the evergreen state of communist or socialist as derision is due to the far right propaganda industrial complex still pushing (hard) that anything that isn’t capitalism is a moral wrong.

As I understand it, Christianity got lucky. Jesus’ incident led to a movement in a time when it suited the purposes of disregarded demographics, of ambitious warlords and academic philosophers. It was the grain of sand that started a landslide, the planet suitable for intelligent life to evolve.

Jesus (again, according to academic consensus) was the lucky quantum to start a massive chain reaction.

It’s all a part of Azathoth’s dream anyway, long may they slumber.

Those kids were just figments, but then so are we.

In Julius Caesar a clock strikes three, and while they had hours (a fraction of the daytime, not a standard unit) they didn’t have mechanical clocks.

But then while we know what happened to Julius Caesar based on historical accounts, even chronicles were politicized, which is why we don’t know of Julia the Elder boffed half of Rome or was just the victim of slander. (Dramatists prefer she did while academics assume she was virtuous). So we know some of the details of the mass assassination of Julius Caesar but we only know some of the general details, which allows a lot of latitude in period recreations.

Jesus existed according to academics (based on third party accounts) but he might have just been an anti-establishment activist or a failed apocalyptic prophet. Not only did Jerusalem have those by the dozen but so did most satellites from which Rome demanded tribute. The miracles and matching Jesus up to fit the prophesies came later. Also Pontius Pilate loved crucifixion and had execution teams on standby where it was considered elsewhere in Rome a dire sentence for the worst of offenders. Pilate was the Roman equivalent of a hanging judge, so it was super-easy for a malcontent in Jerusalem to end up on the cross.

It’s a day and a half the way we Americans drive which is to run on coffee and fast food and burn above the speed limit for fourteen hours a day.

I am (or was, now I’m having doubts) of the belief that European motorists were more inclined to take their time, see some sights and not exhaust themselves in the transit. That may have been a late-20th century thing.

One of the factors is that the US is surprisingly huge. It takes EU tourists by surprise that a quick jaunt from NYC to visit their friend in Chicago is several days by road (unless you drive like an American roadtripper for fourteen hours a day) moreover, there’s just huge tracks of land featuring not-too-exciting vistas (unless you plan your road trip to feature pretty routes, in which case multiply the distance by 1.3), so for the short while that airlines were regulated and we weren’t worried (yet) about the air-travel carbon footprint (Huge. Enormous. Colossal.) it made sense to fly everywhere in the US.

Now that it’s insanely expensive and inconvenient to fly, and we shouldn’t be doing it, it’s time for the US to build HSR for realsies, if the automotive / fossil fuel industrial complex will let us.