German efficiency at its best.

MacArthur was a bit crazy in that regard…

Ocarina of Time

CAT5 was right there…

I can sing the Blazing Saddles theme song pretty decent. Final offer.

I was thinking about Khashoggi, but fair point.

I mean, the Saudis did it a few years ago and we really didn’t raise much of a stink.

Tangentially related. I watched a pretty interesting documentary many years ago about avant-garde art in Weimar Germany. Back in the days of the kaiser and before, if you painted a horse it damn well better look like a horse. During the third reich, if you painted a horse it damn well better have hitler on it. But during the interwar years there was quite an explosion of weird shit from the German art community.

Then, of course, the war happened and all that shit ended, just like it’s happening in Russia now. Not that America did much better back then. Frank Capra was directing WWII propaganda films and Bugs Bunny was flying a B-29.

This is what I keep trying to tell people about this war. There are no good guys. There is no right side of history to be on.

There are sides. And people are perfectly welcome and justified to take a side. But you have to understand that whichever side you take, they have done terrible things to innocent people for terrible reasons.

Argument is correct.

Tone is asshole.

Upvote or downvote? I’m not sure on this one.

That might be more than wishful thinking. Gantz has personally overseen the invasion of Gaza twice, and he joined the war cabinet right after 10/7. He is definitely no friend to Gaza.

Calling him a centrist is only true in that he’s slightly left of Bibi, which is saying nothing.

Ah, the Sam Vimes boots theory again.

That’s actually what I tried to do. But I live in Seattle. 9ish months of cold wet days means I’m in terrible shape when the beautiful summer comes around, then by the time I’m back in shape, it’s time to hibernate again.

Basically comes down to the fact that I don’t enjoy it. Every time I’m on a bike I just think “I could be in a car. I could be sitting in a comfy seat listening to music, going way faster than this, using zero effort.” I like diving, I don’t like biking.

Plus, the last thing I want to do after a 12-hour shift at a physical job is to bike several miles uphill to get home.

I did the same math when I bought my bike. How many times do I have to ride it to work to break even on this purchase? And as soon as I hit that threshold I never touched the thing again. Turns out I hate riding a bike.

Bottom trawling is one of the most hideously destructive things we do to this planet. Imagine if you wanted to catch rabbits, so you hooked a giant nylon net to the back of two humvees. Put them 100 yards apart and drive through a forest, knocking down trees, shredding the underbrush, catching anything and everything in its path. At the other end of the forest you carefully step over all of the dying deer, moose, mice etc and pick out the 30-40 rabbits that you want. Then you leave the net and everything else you just happily killed lying at the edge of the forest so nothing can grow under it. That’s what bottom trawling is. People would be horrified by it, except that it literally happens under the surface.

This is a huge part of the reason that we’re missing a billion crab. This is a huge part of why the king salmon are dying, which is a huge part of why the orcas are starving.

Commercial fishing in general has massive, glaring environmental problems, from bycatch to emissions to illegal overfishing to everything else under the sun. But if I had to pick one issue to focus on it would be bottom trawling.