All of these therapies crashed and burned in clinic and most of the companies behind them have laid off 90-95% of workforce. You know, if you're curious.
— Schnorkles O'Bork (@schnorkles.bsky.social) September 3, 2025 at 11:07 AM
Old men, especially old men with money and/or power, have always fantasized about living forever. But this is America, where there are lots of people with money & power, and if *they* can’t force the scientists to build them IMMORTALITY NOW…
(Of course, if you want to be a doomer, these particular old men have the power to make When I die, the world ends a nuclear reality, which is a different argument.)
Putin and Xi are both men who are not especially intelligent and wise and they are growing old, and they live in countries where people will say what they want to hear out of fear of being shot or exiled if they don't. *Of course* they both believe they will live forever.
— How Beautiful the Stars Are (@seed-corn-thoughts.bsky.social) September 3, 2025 at 11:47 AM
===
Oh don't worry there is no way you're going to live forever. None of the technology is even close and there's still the whole "we don't understand the brain at all" bit.
— Schnorkles O'Bork (@schnorkles.bsky.social) September 3, 2025 at 11:19 AM
===
People have misunderstood how successful we are at increasing quality of life up to a certain point (i.e. late 70's and early 80's) and the fact that ultimate life expectancy, while up, is not nearly as transformative as the increase in just general quality.
— Schnorkles O'Bork (@schnorkles.bsky.social) September 3, 2025 at 11:20 AM
===
You have a much better life for a whole hell of a lot longer, which is absolutely a very good thing, but it's not "we're gonna live forever!!!!!11"
— Schnorkles O'Bork (@schnorkles.bsky.social) September 3, 2025 at 11:21 AM
Interesting argument from Rosencrantz & Guildenstern, here:
That’s 100% some bait to get Trump to come begging
— Breddy Tidgewater (@intelsebastian.bsky.social) September 3, 2025 at 12:20 PM
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Yeah he totally looks like he could handle multiple surgeries….I wonder if that's the real bait.
— Flopsytop (@flopsytop.bsky.social) September 3, 2025 at 12:47 PM
===
Bloomberg reporter:
Guess who's laughing and trolling now?
— Edward Harrison (@edwardnh.bsky.social) September 3, 2025 at 12:42 PM
Gin & Tonic
Boy, I didn’t know Modi had game this good.
NotMax
AI will fix it.
//
Rusty
Unfortunately there are a good number that have enough money, that when left to promote right-wing causes, will make life miserable for the rest of us long after they die.
catclub
I have asked before. Can the EU impose sanctions/tariffs on India for buying Russian oil?
Why have they not done so yet?
Old Dan and Little Ann
Get busy living or get busy dying.
Baud
Chetan Murthy
@catclub: I don’t have to like it, but I think that the reasoning is something like: “try to keep them connected to us, so we can exert a gentle influence, bit-by-bit”. Truthfully, given that the EU can’t even stop Slovakia and Hungary (from buying RU gas), it’s a little ….. hypocritical for them to try to stop India.
And I write the above, -incensed- that India is buying RU fossil fuel.
mrmoshpotato
@Old Dan and Little Ann: Dump looks like he’s dead. Looking forward to him joining Kissinger.
dmsilev
@Baud: LetThemFight.png
Shalimar
Florida just banned all vaccine mandates, including for children to attend school. I’m glad I rarely leave the house. This place will be contagion hell within a year.
oldster
Putin and Xi also just said, on hot mics,
“We have no viable plans for a transition of power. We don’t have successors, or plans for successors. Our regimes are as fragile as our own failing health is, and when we die it’s all going to go to shit.”
Quite the confessions to make.
Ishiyama
Hey, the Pharaohs had the best solution. youtube.com/watch?v=LetN_usw-w8&list=RDLetN_usw-w8&start_radio=1
Jeffg166
I remember seeing an author on the Mike Douglas show 45 years ago who wrote a book about the rich and how they were upset they couldn’t buy their way out of dying. Neither Putin nor Xi will live as long as they think they deserve to.
Captain C
@oldster: I’m not an expert on this by any means, but I suspect that China will have an easier time going back to something like they had post-Deng and pre-Xi, given that they seem to have reasonably strong institutions (although it’s possible Xi has weakened them more than it appears to a casual outside observer). Russia, on the other hand, could easily turn into a repeat of the Yeltsin years but without an amusingly destructive drunk to hold it all together. I could see it becoming a country in name only, with most of the peripheral provinces quietly going their own way and striking their own deals with each other and with neighboring nations to survive.
eta: and places like Chechnya turning into self-immolating bloodbaths as their puppets no longer have Putin to back them up.
Deputinize America
Goddamn, I hate Modi, but that’s some top-level trolling.
SiubhanDuinne
@Shalimar:
I just saw a clip of the FL Surgeon General announcing the new no-vaccine-mandate policy, apparently to a crowd of adoring MAGAts, not to the press. He kept saying, with big dramatic inflection, “Who am I to tell you what you can put in your body?” and I just yelled at the TV “Who are YOU?! You’re the fucking Surgeon Fucking General of fucking Florida, you fucking right-wing idiot!!”
JFC, these poor excuses for humanoids.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@Shalimar: Even parents who are fine with vaccines sometimes need a mandate from the school to get them. My DIL teaches kindergarten and it’s not uncommon for a kid to miss the first week of school because s/he turned unvaccinated and was sent home.
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
@Jeffg166: I’d argue they have already lived longer than they deserve to. Worse, they will likely live much longer than they deserve. For example, Rupert Murdoch is still alive at 94 and I’ve been assuming he would drop dead to the delight of us all any day now. I’ve been disappointed for going on 20 years.
me
@oldster: China has dealt with that before when Mao died so Deng Xiaoping, Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao didn’t stick around until they died. They should have kicked Xi before he decided to become a dictator but he wouldn’t go.
Melancholy Jaques
@Jeffg166:
Whenever the subject of living forever comes up, I always think of Durk Pearson, a regular on Merv Griffin when I was in college. He was an advocate for supplements, mega doses of vitamins and other alternative medicine to extend life. I always thought he was crazy, but I note that he managed to live to 81, which beat his cohort’s life expectancy by 10 years.
Baud
@oldster:
Trump has them beat, turned everything to shit before dying.
Dave
Been saying for some time while not the problem that at least some of the malignant fuckery from our billionaires and their fellow travelers is that while we sorta understand what the outline of significantly extending human life would look like we are also nowhere near it and it’s driving them bananas.
They can’t have it and nothing they do will make it so and when you can have whatever you want that is maddening.
Baud
@SiubhanDuinne:
A good question, except in situations where everyone has the capability of putting a virus into someone else’s body without their consent.
Shalimar
@SiubhanDuinne: The last place I lived there was a 200-year-old cemetery 2 blocks away. Anytime someone wanted to talk shit about vaccines, I told them to go count the percentage of child graves pre-1960 compared to post-1960 and get back to me.
Trollhattan
@Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony:
Kissinger set a bar, of sorts.
Chief Oshkosh
@Baud: Well, that’s what all the guns are for.
Trollhattan
@Shalimar:
It always catches me short. We have cemeteries back to circa the Gold Rush and the number of children and infants is always a gutpunch.
Deputinize America
@Baud:
Florida is gong to be America’s great incubator.
chemiclord
The obsession with the rich and powerful wanting to live forever was the initial premise of my latest book, funny enough, and what would happen to the world if they succeeded.
Spoiler alert: Not very good things happened.
Trivia Man
@oldster: More people should read up on the Roman Empire and see the range of turmoil possible in a transition. Over 1200 years they had examples of just about every type of plan.
Trivia Man
@Captain C: I’ve heard the description “a gas station with nuclear weapons” to describe Russia.
gene108
As someone who received an organ transplant, I’m trying to figure out how anyone thinks it will make them live forever, given the immunosuppression required to maintain the transplant.
Transplants aren’t a permanent fix. They will fail depending on a number of factors. Getting 20 years out of a transplant is well above the average for how long a transplant will last.
Matt McIrvin
@NotMax: AI won’t, of course, fix it, but what it COULD do is create a simulacrum of the dictator who can “rule” in his stead, or at least continue to create the hot social-media takes and insane public statements.
I’m actually kind of afraid they’ll do that with Trump. Just continue Trumping along when he’s dead, with an LLM stupidity generator that can precisely mimic his style. A decade or two down the line, they get Disney or somebody to build it a new body. Trump 2.0 forever.
You know who the current President of North Korea is? It’s not Kim Jong Un. It’s his dead grandfather, Kim Il Sung. Eternal President. Now imagine that your dead Eternal President can still talk.
Trivia Man
@gene108: Easy peasy – cultivate individual harvest clones and you are guaranteed a match!
/s
rikyrah
It’s the 3rd of September![]()
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youtu.be/pJV2pWFyfn4?si=Iqm3C9Rn51OxSIZh
Jackie
@SiubhanDuinne:
Change two words…
Oh, yeah, he’s not talking about pro choice or gender identity…
mrmoshpotato
OT – WeRateDogs – This is Delta. (after a bath)
Trollhattan
This seems suboptimal.
Certainly explains today’s odd sky.
gene108
@Trivia Man:
I’m pretty sure some rich assholes are funding “research” into cloning themselves.
matt
@Baud: Weird thing to say in the endless War on Drugs era.
Scout211
@Trollhattan: Tell me about it. I live in Calaveras County.
I’ve been posted updates in comments. At one point yesterday there were more than 20 fires burning in three counties on the eastern edge of the Valley and the western slope of the foothills. There are still many really large ones with zero containment. It’s been really scary out here.
prostratedragon
Meanwhile, we ordinary folks can just try stuff like this:
MagdaInBlack
@rikyrah: ..the day I’ll always remember…
Suzanne
Disagree. Putin is a smart man. Really want to separate intelligence from megalomania.
mrmoshpotato
@prostratedragon: The Jewel’s!
Also, Papa Charlie’s Italian beef on sale, and buy 1, get 2 free on pork ribs.
Matt McIrvin
@gene108: And I’ve got a cyborg part, a mechanical knee.
Guess what: it’s not as good as a healthy normal knee, though vastly better than a busted knee. It works pretty well for the most part, but there are some things I can’t do, or can’t do very well (I can run and walk just fine, but kneeling and crawling can be kind of problematic). They’ve made great strides in making these artificial body parts work with your body, but it’s not a panacea.
I figure if I can have a good long time as a reasonably healthy person and a rapid decline at the end, that’s pretty good. Dreams of immortality are for the young, when they haven’t assimilated the idea of their mortality completely. Or for the very rich and dumb, I guess.
Trollhattan
@Scout211:
Will avoid the no-duh stay safe bromides and just wish it gets under control and you have no need for the go bag and exit plan.
We had a good couple of summers and it was only a matter of when, not if wildfires would return. One positive: little wind today in the Valley.
Melancholy Jaques
@rikyrah:
That day I’ll always remember, yes I will.
I have never stopped loving that song.
frosty
Hmmm. Didn’t the west coast states just do something like this to source vaccines for their residents?
catclub
@Suzanne:
To get where he got, he had to be smart. Nonetheless, his delusion that he will win in Ukraine, and that it belongs to Russia, is completely bonkers.
More delusional than Trump’s love of Putin.
Suzanne
@catclub: One can, of course, be both intelligent and delusional. We underestimate our foes when we pretend they’re dumb.
Mr. Bemused Senior
@Suzanne: the delusional smart ones are the most dangerous.
Geo Wilcox
@gene108: I’m sort of shocked someone like Musk or Theil hasn’t decided to start some sort of “Never Let Me Go” program creating clones and growing them up to harvest organs from them.
Fair Economist
@Melancholy Jaques:
Hunh, so the people most responsible for the life extension and supplements craze, Pearson and Shaw , are now both dead, at 81 and 78 respectively. Given their advanced education, that’s pretty average. So much for life extension by popping supplements.
I was really excited by their book back in the 80’s and was really into antioxidant supplements. Then the research on humans came in in the late 80’s and early 90’s showing the various vitamin megadoses didn’t help, and sometime hurt. So I ditched them. Unfortunately the general public still hasn’t gotten the memo, 30 years later, and pharmacies and grocery stores are still overrun with antioxidant and megadose vitamin supplements.
I don’t think Pearson and Shaw ever got the memo either.
Suzanne
Open thread, so…. just saw on socials that Chelsea Clinton is considering running for Jerry Nadler’s Congressional seat.
Sigh. I am sure she would always vote the right way. But I have to confess that I am exhausted by this society in which privilege and access to power is so clearly circumscribed by who one chooses as parents.
ETA: AND WEALTH! Do not forget wealth! Arrrrrrgggggh.
Trollhattan
Is Rooshins writing headlines at BBC?
And what if does agree deal, only deal includes Putin put head in bucket pigshit? Vlad?
Baud
@Suzanne:
You know how right wing media feeds outrage to their viewers to manipulate them. Social media does the same for libs.
Suzanne
@Baud: Oh God, and now they’re throwing Jack Schlossberg under the bus. My comments apply to him, too!
Point taken, tho.
kindness
@Trollhattan: I was up before sunrise yesterday morning. Drinking coffee looking out my east facing kitchen window. The amount of lightning was incredible. I figured some would touch ground but not as many as did. I texted my BIL in Oregon telling him it was raining in early September and that is not normal. I’m in Modesto looking at the foothills going up to Sonora.
Doc H
WotD: struldbrug
Swift, Gulliver’s Travels
Scout211
Pfizer responds to Trump:
LOL!
All Trump will read is that he deserves a NOBEL PEACE PRIZE!!!!
Well played Pfizer, well played.
me
@Scout211: Don’t typically see trolling in corporate press releases.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@Scout211:
OTOH, now he’ll simply see this as another extortion/transaction scheme: get me a Nobel Peace Prize and I’ll make sure the CDC grants you what you want…this one time.
Jackie
@Suzanne:
I’ve seen multiple sources that Chelsea has no interest in running for Nadler’s seat (or any other seat,) BUT I did see this:
I can’t link, but I’m sure a quick google will bring up links.
eta: Baud once again beats me by a country mile.
lowtechcyclist
@Baud:
Or bacterial infection, or bullet, or….
Jackie
@Scout211: Well played indeed, Pfizer!
Should Pfizer’s flattery help save Covid vaccines for the U.S., I would nominate PFIZER for a Nobel Prize!
lowtechcyclist
@rikyrah:
So it is! If my parents were both still alive and, even more unlikely, still married to each other, they’d be celebrating their 75th wedding anniversary today. As it turned out, their marriage didn’t quite make it to #25, let alone #75. Both of them had second marriages that lasted longer.
patrick II
Do you know what helps you live forever? Construct an underground fortress featuring hundreds of life-like terra cotta statues, creating an army in the afterlife. You would hate to make it to the afterlife and get killed there (then it is really forever), so the army helps protect you from your enemies. The next best things are to eat right and exercise.
TONYG
In a logical world, this will lead to a mass exodus of educated people out of Florida, and a big reduction in educated people moving to Florida. We’re not in a logical world though.
Trollhattan
@Scout211:
Is Big Pharma trolling best trolling? Let’s find out!
Damn, that was equal parts shameless/awesome.
They better not have hired away Newsom’s social hit squad. We need them.
Trollhattan
@kindness: If anybody is left at NOAA I’d like to know if this year’s monsoons are stronger than usual. Most years they don’t seem to push this far over the Sierra.
patrick II
@Rusty:
That is a real problem. Trusts from wealthy individuals who died a hundred years ago continue to support causes from the Gilded Age. Their time should be gone.
patrick II
Not even Ruth Bader Ginsburg did.
Trollhattan
This fuckin’ guy.
NotMax
Speaking of immortality, 5 Animals That Broke the Rules of Death (30 minute watch).
;)
Peke Daddy
@Melancholy Jaques: Clint Eastwood bought into their pitch. Make of that what you will.
Shalimar
@Scout211: I assume Pfizer’s hope is that Trump will internalize this as RFK Jr costing him the Nobel Peace Prize and fire him. Trump’s natural reaction was to brag about vaccines, but the anti-vax people took over the Republican party and now he can’t.
patrick II
@Trollhattan:
His hate of, particularly ocean-based, windmills supposedly comes from Scotland’s plan to build some off the coast of his golf course there. He is afraid it will diminish the value of his property there.
He is such a precise thinker.
1. Because he hates those windmills, he hates every windmill everywhere.
2. Scotland does intend to build the windmills, but they will not be in sight of his golf course.
3. Because he imagines a non-existent problem in Scotland, a real problem in the U.S. is the result — renewable energy will be diminished.
Shalimar
@TONYG: I just exodused back to Florida, but it was from Alabama (okay, Mobile, so it could have been worse), so that was still a step up. I like where I am now, but admittedly i don’t speak to any of the people.
Pennsylvanian
Our sweet Juliet crossed the rainbow bridge today at nearly 17. We are crushed.
Baud
@Pennsylvanian:
My condolences.
Anonymous At Work
EIGHTY-ONE Comments and no one thought to repost the recipe to the Chinese Elixir of Immortality??? Trump might be reading…
1 part liquid Mercury
1 part gold
1 part elemental sulfer
Place ingredients in brass urn and heat gently over a fire, chanting in an ancient dialect or dead language. Set aside to cool.
Next, have the ruler/leader renounce any succession planning. Light executions might be desired.
Finally, have ruler/leader drink elixir rapidly.
Citizen Alan
@SiubhanDuinne: Before I got my current job, I interviewed with a judge in Tallahassee and think I finished in the top 2. Every day, I thank God I didn’t get an offer. Because I am so terrified of unemployment that I’d have taken it and become trapped in Florida for the rest of my life. (No offense to the decent Floridians.)
Snarki, child of Loki
If Putin and Xi (and Trump) want to cheat death and preserve themselves forever, they need to inject lots and lots of formaldehyde. No complaints from previous users!
Look for it under “embalming fluid” in your local mortuary supply store.
Eyeroller
People seem to have no concept of what “immortality” means. It doesn’t matter how much we learn about life extension. Immortality is not physically possible. The Earth will not support life for more than another billion years or so. “Oh we’ll go to space and find other planets.” OK and something similar will probably happen within a few billion years regardless of where you end up. Immortality means billions, trillions, and on beyond that years.
Sustaining a life requires a large input of energy. It requires that chemistry be possible, which means that the mean energy per particle in the universe has to be above some threshold. The universe is expanding and cooling and eventually the “Age of Chemistry” will end. Life will not be possible anywhere. Even if we’re wrong and the universe will recollapse (and I’m skeptical about recent press releases about that), it will still probably not support life before it starts contracting, and of course anything would be destroyed in the collapse anyway.
And even if you don’t buy that, since life requires energy, immortality would require infinite energy and that is not possible regardless.
We could talk about very extended lifespans, but literal physical immortality is not possible.
Trollhattan
@Anonymous At Work:
Can we skip the “set aside to cool” part?
Certain GOT scene comes to mind.
Anonymous At Work
@Trollhattan: If you can get them to drink it hot, sure. But historically, disdaining succession planning has played an important role.
Betty
@Trivia Man: My theory on why Biden went slow on arming Ukraine is because of the chaos and loose nukes if Putin lost the war.
Betty
@Suzanne: I read that Nadler is backing one of his aides.
Old School
@Pennsylvanian: My sympathies.
satby
@Pennsylvanian: Condolences. You gave Juliet the best life, as a deeply loved family member. That’s their heaven.
YY_Sima Qian
@frosty: Such devolution will only happen if the central authorities in Beijing utterly collapses, a la the fall of the Qing Empire. Otherwise, people up & down the society in China remember what happened following the fall of the Qing Empire, where warlords seized autonomy in their provinces & struck deals w/ different imperial powers to preserve their autonomy, all the while battling each other to try to seize (reunify) the country. That left ruins & corpses in the wake of their wars, left the semi-dismembered China highly vulnerable to exploitation by the Western powers & outright invasion by Imperial Japan. Not an experience anyone in China wants to repeat.
But somehow this very scenario has remained a fantasy of far right ultra-nationalists in Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and Russia (Dugin, for example) for decades (hoping for a deus ex machina to deliver them from their own geopolitical vulnerability). Now, this fantasy is gaining adherents among the far right in the US, too.
Incidentally, after Dugin fell out of favor w/ Putin, Zhang Weiwei (a hawkish/nationalist Chinese international relations scholar) invited Dugin for a series of lectures in the PRC, & gave the latter a fellowship at Fudan University (one of the elite universities in the PRC & where Zhang teaches). Since then, Dugin has pulled a 180 & became “China-pilled”. Either Dugin is weak willed, or he has always been a charlatan, or both.
Pennsylvanian
@Baud: thank you. We are so sad and need to grieve with her brother Romeo. (They were named at the shelter w shameless heartstrings and were there for 4+ months) He is a younger sibling from the same mother. We don’t have any experience w pet loss among more than one pet. New territory and any input welcome.
Pennsylvanian
@Old School: Thank you. I can’t say more right now, so thank you.
YY_Sima Qian
Xi may wish he could live to 150, but he is not behaving like he can rule forever. The more astute China Watchers have seen a pronounced shift in Xi’s governing style in the past 2 years, where Xi has increasingly delegated to key lieutenants to exercise power on his behalf, internally & externally. There is no successor in sight, yet, but that might come in his 4th term. He is “only” 72 (so 7 years younger than Trump), probably not going senile, just yet. However, even if he does try to struggle to hold on until death, the inevitable decline of mental capacity in old age (if not outright senility) will leave him vulnerable to usurpation by once loyal lieutenants vying for advantage. We’ve seen that in the last few years of Mao’s life.
Or, perhaps Xi is trying to set himself up to pull a Deng. Deng resigned from all official posts in 1989, but continued to wield at least veto power behind the scenes until his death in 1997, even as Jiang was nominally the leader of the PRC & the CPC. Jiang himself also held on to the powerful post (& thus the real power behind the scenes) of the Chairman of the Central Military Commission, for 2 years after Hu had assumed the roles of the President of the PRC & the General Secretary of the CPC. Even after Jiang stepped down as the Chairman of the CMC in 2004, he continued to wield influence & constrained the Hu-Wen Administration throughout the latter’s terms, via his allies on the CPC Politburo & the Central Committee. This was the “precedent” for the collective style leadership that most western China Watchers became convinced of in the late ’00s as being established as the status quo.
TL:DR There is in fact far greater continuity between the CPC regime under Xi & that under his predecessors than break, in terms of policies, political outlook, even philosophical inclination. What is different is Xi’s ability to re-centralize authority in the person of the leader of the Party, to a greater degree than even Deng (because Deng still had to contend w/ other still living revolutionary “founding fathers” of his generation, each w/ their own patronage networks & power centers). However, Xi was able to consolidate power to such a degree precisely because a significant majority of the CPC leadership gave him a mandate to do so in 2012, having saw the severe draw back of collective leadership, & the resultant corruption, wealth gap, interregional development gap, policy paralysis/sclerosis, penetration by foreign intelligence agencies (the CIA 1st & foremost), all of which posed long term threats to the CPC regime’s legitimacy & governance capacity. (This is all relative, of course.)
What Xi wants is not all that different from what Deng, Jiang & Hu wanted: the CPC regime as the unquestioned & unrivaled authority, deeply interwoven w/ the governance & development of the PRC, a strong state retaining control over the “commanding heights” of the economy, capable of executing coherent & consistent industrial policy, markets & capital utilized to serve development goals but not allowed to dictate, a more egalitarian society, ecologically sound environment, & ultimately a wealthy, powerful & technologically advanced China that resumes its leadership position in the world & invulnerable to foreign pressure. Jiang & Hu were simply hemmed in by factional politics (which also provided space for Neo-Leftists, western style liberals, libertarians, right wing pseudo-Fascists, etc., to enter the Party power structure) & the PRC’s relative weakness.
I am fairly certain Jiang wished he could live forever, too. Hu was perhaps the most grounded of post-Mao CPC leadership, but also the weakest, unable to push through much of his agenda (that has been more successfully pushed through & greatly expanded upon by Xi).
If you read Joseph Torigian, at his heart Xi is a man deeply loyal to the institution of the CPC & its self-professed place in the PRC & in Chinese history, much like his father Xi Zhongxun. He is not a revolutionary harboring utopian fever dreams like Mao.
Pennsylvanian
@satby: Thank you. We are so lucky to entertain these magnificent beasts. We will grieve.
Kayla Rudbek
@Geo Wilcox: Lois McMaster Bujold has that in her Vorkosigan series (with the evil people doing brain transplants into their clones as being from a planet where capitalism truly went on a runaway path)
Paul in KY
@Jeffg166: Putin should be dead by now, by that logic.
Paul in KY
@Melancholy Jaques: Even Jack Lalanne finally died…
Paul in KY
@catclub: That’s just his ‘rationale’ for fucking up Ukraine. The real reason is that Ukraine is a functioning democracy and a jarring contrast to his dictatorship/kleptocracy and he hates that and feels it can weaken his hold over Russian people.
Paul in KY
@Anonymous At Work: Maybe add some castor beans for flavour…
Paul in KY
@YY_Sima Qian: Thank you for that commentary.