A policeman’s job is only easy in a police state

You know, if the husband does a good job clearing up the garage or whatever household man’s-job needs doing, he just might get some oofty-magoofty tonight.

There are apparently T-shirts which read “don’t shoot, I’m Canadian” in a number of languages (Arabic, Russian and Spanish, I think)

A rare sighting of the legendary dildo of consequences, which is said to never arrive lubricated

And so is the SIM card in it. And your credit card, and car key. And each of them has more computer power than the entire world during the moon landing.

Various Australian Aboriginal cultures had message sticks which were inscribed with marks that served as a mnemonic device to the carrier, who would recite their meaning, but didn’t go as far as encoding language independently.

They tended to be so committed to knowledge as a living system, a sort of society-scale memory palace continually rehearsed in songs, stories and rituals, that if anyone had come up with the idea of converting language into writing, it’d probably have been shot down at the suggestion phase as being unnecessary and/or something that could damage the systems they had for maintaining their culture if adopted.

Sino-Russo-American, actually

You’ve got a bit of Edward Gorey in your Gary Larson

They just rename the Communist Party to the Trumpist Party, use their totalitarian system (now reinforced by Palantir technology) to guarantee cheap labour to US firms that kiss the ring, and cede some prime Havana real estate to the House of Trump-Kushner, as “compensation” for property seized in 1957. In return, the newly liberated Cubans get Netflix and Chick-Fil-A.

I was referring more to the art style and use of light. The setting in the game doesn’t quite get this twee.

From what I remember, e/n sites were like personal blogs only with more of an incel vibe. They seemed to be by guys who referred to women with misogynistic slurs, while lamenting their lack of a girlfriend.

“Our god has balls”

With one honourable exception: Leitz, who made Leica cameras. A privately held company, they hired German Jews and immediately posted them abroad as “sales representatives”, delivering them to safety. This was explicitly on the orders of the Leitz family, who also insisted on keeping the programme secret even after the war rather than claiming credit.

I do wonder how much of the difference between the levels of concern for Palestinians and, say, Uyghurs/Sudanese/Rohingya comes from almost 2,000 years of pervasive antisemitism in European Christian culture, in particular a deeply ingrained, entirely subconscious assumption that The Jews Are Up To No Good that somehow survives the 80-year-old awareness that the belief in Jewish malevolence leads to Auschwitz-tier atrocities.

(And there is a lot of background antisemitism in European cultural heritage if you know what it looks like. For example, the tendency of outsider subcultures from beatniks to emos to wear black comes from fictional villains being depicted in black, which comes from the figures of the Christ-denying, well-poisoning Jews in medieval mystery plays. A particularly obvious living fossil of this trope is Gargamel in the Smurfs cartoon.)

None of this is to say that Israel isn’t committing a genocide or that we shouldn’t condemn this, but being oblivious to other atrocities, whilst coming from a culture steeped in blood libels and pogroms, does seem sketchy.

Warhammer 40K meets Weekend At Bernie’s.

To run them over Australia-scale distances, you’d need to keep recharging them throughout the journey, otherwise most of the load will be the battery. Recharging takes time, so to be time-efficient, you’d want to do so in motion, by running catenary over the roads and equipping the trucks with pantographs like electric trains (there’s a highway in Germany with such an arrangement). At that stage, you may as well electrify the nation’s railways and rely on rail freight (rail can both go faster and run more efficiently, at the cost of needing to offload goods for the last mile), though much of Australia’s railways are still diesel (the electrified ones are mostly suburban).

The oil price shock (and the reality of climate change) should be motivating countries like Australia to electrify their railways. On any line with more than a handful of trains a day it’ll pay for itself. Though Australians seem to not be into long-term thinking, and can’t get past the immediate cost of thousands of kilometres of copper wire. I can imagine them short-terming themselves into shelling out for fleets of heavy Tesla trucks that will spend most of their time charging, because in the immediate term, it feels like the path of least resistance.

that looks like one of the more pleasant corners of Revachol

The ship’s cat on the Amethyst, Able Seacat Simon, was also the only cat to ever be awarded the Dickin Medal, the animal equivalent of the Victoria Cross, for keeping the crew’s morale up despite being badly injured in the attack on the ship that killed the captain.

He’s the guy who would hide his zombie bite

same reason Australia let Vietnamese boat people in because they were escaping the evil of Godless Communism: it fits a grand narrative