Nope! The Reichstag fire was set by a crazy Dutchman. Read William Shirer, he walks through the still smoking building with Goering and Goebbels and watches them talk to Hitler about it.

Now, both kinds of socialists (national and communist) definitely took full advantage of the incident afterwards. But the Reichstag fire was not a fabrication.

What a narrow perspective. I prefer a more left-wing view of life:

"You must all know half a dozen people at least who are no use in this world, who are more trouble than they are worth. Just put them there and say Sir, or Madam, now will you be kind enough to justify your existence? If you can't justify your existence, if you're not pulling your weight, and since you won't, if you're not producing as much as you consume or perhaps a little more, then, clearly, we can not use the organizations of our society for the purpose of keeping you alive, because your life does not benefit us and it can't be of very much use to yourself."

-- George Bernard Shaw, communist

Calling for suppression of discussion on an important issue that not enough people are talking about...do you realize what you are? Do you know what a "heel realization" is?

"You must all know half a dozen people at least who are no use in this world, who are more trouble than they are worth. Just put them there and say Sir, or Madam, now will you be kind enough to justify your existence? If you can't justify your existence, if you're not pulling your weight, and since you won't, if you're not producing as much as you consume or perhaps a little more, then, clearly, we can not use the organizations of our society for the purpose of keeping you alive, because your life does not benefit us and it can't be of very much use to yourself."

-- George Bernard Shaw, communist

It seems you're implying that that is the default method of doing things, which it is not. If it were, it would not be exceptional and would not be worthy of attention. Look at places like Brazil or Venezuela where there are constant videos of police doing what they do in those countries, and nobody cares. And yet, in America, whenever it happens it is front-page news and the footage is endlessly replayed on the 24-hour media.

Here's a project: ask actual African people what they think about African-Americans. Then, ask them how they would behave if the situations were reversed.

Because it's not? Seriously, this sort of "it's ruined already, let's go ahead and implement THE REVOLUTION" thinking is wrongheaded. Your life will be worse off, on every measurable metric, after the revolution. Unless you're one of the elite, and you're not. It is better to live under robber barons than oppressive moral busybodies. Especially moral busybodies who are so far to the left that anything to the right of Mao Zedong looks like fascism.

I have long been aware of the fact that Microsoft quietly sank a lot of resources into rewriting Windows and improving performance so I'm not exactly thunderstruck by news that they succeeded.

You should be. That is entirely out of character for Microsoft. In fact, devoting more resources to a problem just makes it worse, see the book "The Mythical Man-Month" where this is discussed at length. This book was written in the 1960s! So this has been with us for a long time.

Funny how socialism always devolves into that, isn't it? It's because it concentrates power in the government, and then the government does the obvious thing and abuses that power. And then socialists have to invoke the No True Scotsman fallacy in order to even make any kind of point on discussion boards. "Nay, tha's na REAL communism, laddie! A real communist would never have murdered millions of people!" Meanwhile people with actual doctorates in Marxism don't get what all the fuss is about. You can't make an omelet without breaking a few eggs, after all.

I have a bottom-of-the-line ordinary rice cooker. It makes rice just as good as yours. If I want to specify the time I want the rice to be ready, I just start it 20 minutes before that time. I do this by pressing a single button.

Are you trying to justify the counter space spent for a specialty device, or are you retroactively trying to justify spending way too much on import tax for a tchotchke? Because those are two different things.

Since that is their response to everything, how can one know when they are telling the truth and when they are simply reciting the narrative? Even when the facts are wrong, the narrative can still be right. According to leftists.

The reason we had pixel art in the first place is that's what screens could display. Then, we got super-high resolution displays and the need for pixels went away. I can't even see the pixels on my LCD screen even though it's a foot away from my face right now. So why are they clinging to this outdated concept?

Because something in the artsy fartsy mind takes great delight in "we can do it much better now, but we're going to deliberately use the outdated method instead!" People don't understand why the graphics are blocky and give low ratings. Cue the anguished whining that people just don't understand great artists, smelly unwashed commoners don't deserve the kind of great art that we offer, etc., I think all of us know the rest of it from here by heart because we've heard it so many times.

It's not their fault for making crappy-looking graphics, it's everyone else's fault for failing to recognize artistic brilliance when we see it. If it IS popular, then it's bad art by definition (Leland D Howard, Norman Rockwell, etc.)

This is why Drew will never win a political contest. He says what he really thinks instead of what he is expected to say, and that absolutely infuriates certain people that he does not toe their party line.

You think rape jokes can't be funny? Imagine Porky Pig raping Elmer Fudd.

I notice how the naming of hurricanes and great advancements in weather forecasting happened at the same time, and question your assumption that that's what led to greater evacuations. If you don't even know the storm is coming, how can you be expected to evacuate? And if you look at the sky and it looks like the other three times this year it's rained heavily, how can you really justify leaving your house where it will be smashed and robbed for social justice?

We don't have to cut our energy usage to the bone, we just have to invest in carbon-neutral energy generation - then we can easily support our lavish lifestyles with zero carbon cost, and save money in the process.

Where do you GET crazy ideas like this? Have you even seen what global warming alarmists are saying? The whole climate change thing is just a tool to destroy Western civilization. And no, that's not a typo or a joke, it's what they've said themselves. They're quite proud of it, too.

But that utopia can never exist. It's a pipe dream, it's already been tried. At the largest scales, and by people who were much smarter and more committed than you. They were willing to murder millions of people to achieve utopia and they still didn't get it. In fact, they created a dystopia (for everyone but themselves, of course).

It doesn't work and it can never work. Now we're going to corrupt science, our only hope, so that it fits this utopian false thinking? That leads...to dystopia. For everyone except you, of course.