RFK is a true believer; he actually thinks, against all evidence and logic, that vaccines are bad for your health. Trump does not give a shit about vaccines, but he offered RFK the CDC position because A) RFK was running a third-party candidacy in 2024 that could have cost him several swing states and B) anti-vaxers are a large part of the Trump coalition, but he was losing their trust after promoting the covid vaccine. Most congressional Republicans are just going along with this out if cowardice.

So, tl:dr: ending vaccines is what RFK (stupidly) believes in, Trump put him in power to return a favor/appease a portion of his base, and every other Republican is too chicken-shit to do anything about it.

Sees someone articulating the problem of streaming platforms elevating low quality or toxic media in children’s feeds.

You (a genius): “This is bad parenting.”

Yeah, I was a teen in the early 2000s too. Most people still consumed most of their media through live TV. Anyway, you’re right, I should build a home server and start burning my own torrented DVDs. That’s the only reasonable solution to, “apps suggest crappy shows to my kid,” and it’s definitely the thing a parent of a toddler has the time to do.

Yeah, thanks, I’m not looking for notes.

Except they didn’t. They mostly watched live TV.

Paw Patrol is empty calories. It doesn’t teach emotional regulation like Daniel Tiger, or shapes and colors like Mickey Mouse Clubhouse, or numbers, letters, and problem solving like Sesame Street. It’s not harmful like Cocomelon, and I’ve accepted that my son loves it, but that doesn’t mean it’s good.

Curating what your child consumes, both dietary and cultural, is the basic requirement raising a child.

Yeah, I curate what my child consumes, thanks, I just don’t have the time or energy to create a bespoke tablet of torrented kids shows to present him, or track down a circa-2002 portable DVD player and start a new physical media collection. If you’ve got that kind of free time, great, but I’ve just got to use the apps I’ve got, accept that he’s going to want to watch some shows that I find worthless, and make sure he doesn’t consume anything actively harmful.

I don’t give him a tablet, he only watches at home on TV (or a phone on very long car trips). I don’t know a toddler parent that has the time to download a curated media library for their kids, and even if you do have the time, things like that fall apart eventually. My wife and I managed to avoid most crap TV until we wound up in a hotel room with two dead phones and a fussy toddler, and that’s when we finally caved and put on Nick Jr. For a while, we managed to convince him that Paw Patrol was only available in hotels, but eventually he saw the thumbnail for it when we were trying to show him Dora the Explorer, and that beautiful lie finally died.

Holy shit, I did not know you could do that. That is going to be life changing.

App suggestions make it so hard to keep kids away from slop. I started out only letting my toddler watch PBS Kids programs and a few other educational programs, but then your kids start seeing suggestions for all sorts of shlock, and they want to see the show with the superhero kitties is (it’s called Super Kitties and it is garbage). God help you if you try to watch something on YouTube; every suggested video is either low-quality home movies of people playing with toys (which is like crack to toddlers or weird shit like this that absolutely shouldn’t be on YouTube Kids but often is anyway.

I would have labeled you guys, “Frasier.”

Yeah, seriously. At least call us, “Revolutionary War Reenactors,” or, “Cold NYC.” I’d even take, “Southern Quebec.” But lumping us in with Montana and the Dakotas? That’s some bullshit.

By the numbers, probably Mississippi. Lowest life expectancy, highest infant mortality rate, second highest poverty rate…being ranked 39th in education actually seems to be a bright spot for them.

That’s certainly how I feel about Parachutes. Solid little album, even if it’s not reinventing the wheel. I feel more mixed about A Rush of Blood to the Head. Some of their best tracks are on that album (The Scientist may be their best song), but a lot of it is forgettable, and Clocks just sucks, don’t know how that became a big single. I thought X&Y was pretty meh, and then I stopped listening.

I don’t know, maybe? When I was in high school the girls were all listening to emo. Once pop-punk went out of style (pretty much the minute Sk8ter Boi was released), most of the girls I knew pivoted towards Death Cab for Cutie or Dashboard Confessional. I was having a sad-boy period and other sad-boys I knew got me into Radiohead, Interpol, Coldplay (again, those first two albums), the Shins, and the Strokes.

I got the impression they were more of what bro-dudes listened to when they were sad rather than what sad-boys were listening to, but only exposure to them was Chasing Cars. They seemed closer to The All-American Rejects than, say, The Shins or Interpol or any of the other shit I was listening to when I was my most insufferable teenage self.

20 years ago they were what teenage sad-boys were listening to when they got bored of Radiohead and The Postal Service (and I mean that in the nicest way possible). Then after X&Y they kinda became electronic/synthpop for the clinically depressed.

Cut Coldplay some slack, this was the funniest thing that’s happened in a while. Plus, Parachutes is…fine…A Rush of Blood to the Head has a couple of good tracks. Everything after that is pretty trash, but those first two albums were good to mid.

First, Bill Clinton is almost certainly all over them, and older Democrats still think of the Clintons as the epitome of Democratic success. Some of the old guard is still trying to push focus away from the Epstien files. Just two days ago, Nancy Pelosi was calling the Epstien files a distraction, which is a bat-shit crazy thing to say about evidence that could prove that your opponent was involved in a pedophile ring.

Second, Epstien probably has some sort of ties to the intelligence community. I don’t know that I believe all these stories about him being a secret Mossad asset, but I think its very possible that the someone in the CIA was using him. Alex Acosta, who prosecuted Epstien in 2008, claimed that he was told to back off because he, “belonged to intelligence,” and they’re clearly withholding a lot of information, there’s definitely something they don’t want people to know. Anyway, since 9/11, the Democrats and Republicans have had basically the same position on the intelligence community (essentially, abject deference), so if the CIA says that it would be a national security risk to release the files, the Democrats aren’t going to release the files.

If you want to be this simplistic, you could also apply this to the Matrix, Die Hard, at least 3 Star Wars films, most od the James Bond series, and basically every action movie made between 1991 and 1999.

Then again, have you seen reality?