Yeah, LOL, "Director of Special Projects". That happened to a manager where I used to work. He asked me if I wanted to come work with him in his new department, and I said, "OH HELL NO." Two months later he was out of the company.

Do you even know the people who were elected? WTF? Communist, Marxist, etc. Did you know that up until a few years ago, Greece had an active left-wing group that was trying to overthrow the government by force?

And I love how the far left are somehow heroes, while on the other side of the coin, the far right are somehow crazies. From the middle, you both look the same. Something to think about.

Cooking is subject to trends, if you haven't noticed. Clunky 70s housewife equipment is out of fashion, to say the least.

The last time I tried criticizing the US government, I got called a racist and told to shut up. Has anything changed since then? If not, then what gives you the idea that you're qualified to complain?

Way to not tell the whole story. The Chinese were arrogant and insisted that they didn't need anything the British could trade with. This is the same arrogance that started China down the road to 150 years of tragedy. They insisted on cash payment for everything, and the foreigners could go fuck themselves because they weren't racially equal to the Chinese. The product the British ended up with was opium, but could have been anything that they had a surplus of. To pretend that the Chinese gave a single shit about their commoners - LOL. They didn't, any more than today's rulers give a shit about their people. The Chinese didn't make it illegal because they were caring and sharing, they made it illegal because they thought they didn't need anything from the outside world and thought Chinese products were inherently superior because they were Chinese.

And then the war started, and China discovered real fast that it wasn't up to modern standards. Fun fact: the British didn't even want Hong Kong, they wanted Zhoushan (at the time, an important port south of Shanghai). The negotiator screwed up and got a barren island instead of a busy city, and today Zhoushan is a small town that never went anywhere.

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.