causes you to mistreat the people who love you

I’ve told my wife that she doesn’t have to spend time with me if I end up with dementia and I start behaving that way. Both of my parents were more or less all there well into their 90s, but you never know.

I wouldn’t go that far. I don’t miss having to scroll past endless chains of puns, recitations of song lyrics and film dialogue, or references to popular comments from years ago.

I was thinking the same thing, that recently the tone around here has gotten more disagreeable. It might be something bigger going on, though. There is an old-style forum I visit that was quite pleasant for years, but lately I’ve been seeing surprisingly nasty comments there.

Why do you say that?

Its been okay, if a bit stale, but this was one was disheartening.

Yeah, I feel the same way. The other episodes were all right, although a bit heavy on the memberberries, but this was just awful.

I haven't seen every episode of Futurama, but I've seen the vast majority, and while more than a few haven't been my kind of humor, this is the first one I've seen that I thought actually sucked.

I guess Wenner is such a fan of these guys that he’s lost all perspective. I mean, I’m a big Stones fan myself, and I think Mick Jagger is pretty clearly a smart guy, but a philosopher?

I think “asshole” is a pretty common type.

That’s a really good one.

I like the idea that a lot of series are repeating Act II over and over. I had never thought of it that way, but it makes a lot of sense.

Its complicated, because he did stop it. He also immediately took notes and immediately told others about the conversations, actions which clearly paint him as somebody fully versed in the processes of establishing cooperation with law enforcement on an informer basis.

Yeah, I hate to admit it, but I might not be giving him enough credit. When I read about his conversation with Dan Quayle I thought he was trying to find a legal basis for doing what the mob wanted, but it may have been the other way around. He may have been attempting to establish unambiguously that he intended to comply with the law, and he consulted with someone who is not only another attorney, but a former vice president, in order to leave no doubt about what the law mandated.

I was a somewhat credulous teenager back in the 1970s, and I have maintained a sort of hobbyist’s interest in fringe literature and conspiracy theories ever since.

One thing the article mentions that I noticed pretty early on was an undercurrent of antisemitism found almost as soon as you left the mainstream stuff for sale in regular bookstores.

It was kind of surprising how few steps it took some people to get from unusual lights in the sky to The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

I also ran across a lot of ranting about the Federal Reserve, a topic that you wouldn’t expect channeled extraterrestrial entities to care much about.

Just the same, there was nothing like the current level of vicious hatred that you see routinely expressed nowadays. I guess the internet has allowed these people to connect more easily and to encourage each other to go farther, but there must be something else at work. Even well into the current century the tone of the conspiracy literature you would find online was much the same as it was in the print era.

I never thought I would say this, but thank God for Dan Quayle. Pence was looking for any excuse not to certify the election results, and Quayle told him flat out that the Vice President didn't have that authority.