Rot in prison, bitches.

You talk like ships just routinely traverse our land bound political boundaries! /s

The Americans you meet in Germany are not a random selection.

America is simultaneously the best country ever and one of the worst in its class. If you’re affluent, it’s the best. I make double what I could in Germany and have no complaints about my healthcare or kids schools. America only sucks for people with less money, and for them it is a shithole country in a first world suit.

Now: which kind of Americans do you think a young guy in Germany gets to meet? The poor Americans who can’t afford to go to the dentist? Or the affluent ones who can afford to travel, move abroad, or who work some fancy international job?

Interesting. I found the opposite. I was never very good at moderating.

Smoking was my addiction. Complete cold turkey removes the question from the table. It might suck, but at least you aren’t in a constant battle with yourself over whether you can have a cigarette now, or should wait. Is one more too many? Am I no longer smoking moderately but addictively? I found it was way too easy to slide down the slope on all that. Getting through the day without smoking meant holding fast 1000 times, and relapsing just meant giving in once. I could always talk myself into why a cigarette was okay this time, why I deserved it, how I’d been doing so well…

Cold turkey just shut all that off and I could move forward. Eventually, when I was truly and finally free of the addiction, and was capable of choosing if I wanted to smoke or not, of course I didn’t want to. It has no benefits other than serving an addiction. I never smoke anymore.

Do what works for you. Just make sure it is actually working and not just giving you the illusion of that.

The reason complete cold turkey doesn’t work for some people is that it’s too overwhelming. You get scared by the idea of never having your fix again ever for the rest of your life. That’s so scary and overwhelming that you run back and have a total relapse.

This is why AA has the motto “one day at a time.” If you’ve ever seen that bumper sticker, that’s what it is. They say to just focus on getting through today. Don’t think of it as forever. At the same time, they don’t like moderate, continuing use. So AA basically is cold turkey, but they have an answer to the issue of it being overwhelming. After all they are right. All you ever have to face is today. Tomorrow is a tomorrow problem.

I would venture to guess that the disciplinary action generated more attention than the haka itself. So a good thing in the end.

AND the stock market ROARS BACK to… 80% of previous baseline. O the winning!

This points to a flaw in your question.

You probably should have said “foolproof countermeasure” if you really just wanted to remove nukes as a factor to see what happens.

But you said “foolproof deterrent” and now you’re quibbling at people over whether a psychological deterrent can actually be foolproof.

Maybe not, but then your question is nonsensical. The fact is that we are already using guaranteed total destruction of the world as a deterrent and it has so far worked. What more deterrence are you even suggesting we might add to that???

I mean… for now. How long until drones with thrusters on their backs can land on a missle and redirect it wherever they want?

Sometimes we ask questions to gain knowledge we simply haven’t found yet.

Other times we ask questions because some knowledge just won’t stick in our brains even when it’s given to us, and then we spend the thread fighting the answer for that same reason: it just won’t stick.

Anti-ballistic missile defense systems are a technology.

You asked what would happen. A treaty is a thing that can happen.

Why don’t you tell us what you think would happen and be done, if that’s what this is really about.

Spoken like someone who has never attended university. Please don’t come back and say you did - that would be even worse, because it will mean you didn’t learn a fucking thing by being there.

I sob like a kid every time. They are purely innocent and loving. The grief is correspondingly pure.

I guess we can reasonably disagree on this. Posthumous damnation of Limbaugh sounds less likely to me than letting him fade into obscurity. He was already damned to anyone who would care now.

That’s a lot of what the first two world wars were, under the sheet. Germany and Japan had few aligned interests, but they agreed to help one another to each pursue their own local imperial ambitions.

I actually think I’m agreeing with you. I’m just saying that large wars have always been an excuse for regional pissing contests.

It scares me. Think about Putin and Ukraine. The conflict in Gaza helps Putin, because it distracts the world from what he’s doing. Imagine if there were 5 or 6 Ukraine sized conflicts in the developed world. He’d have a much easier time and there would be less available aid for Ukraine.

How many Putin-style assholes need to figure this out and launch their little wars before the world is overwhelmed and descends into a chaos where all bets are off?

Somehow Palpatine Rush Limbaugh returned.

Oh, someone quoted him? Don’t even do that, y’all!

Pete Buttigieg is doing pretty fucking well, politically. It helps that he’s a medal-wearing veteran. I think that’s actually an important credential for most politicians but in the case of a gay man, perhaps moreso because it helps silence any slurs against his manhood. Your husband is lacking that. I don’t think success as a patent attorney is worth much in terms of image. The rest is someone who loves him listing his many virtues.

To be honest I think gay people are doing pretty fucking well these days versus when I grew up. There are still plenty of firsts left to happen, like President. But my whole childhood and young adulthood, gays were public enemies and the focus of conservative ire at every turn. They seem to have switched targets to trans people now, which is awful. But it has left gay people in an unusually quiet space. The marriage question is settled in all 50 states. With that, we seem to have moved on.

No one gives their time to a company for free. That’s volunteering. Getting paid doesn’t mean you’re quiet quitting.

Quiet quitting means doing the absolute minimum not to get fired, showing no initiative or ambition. Employers often expect you to work extra hard and do a bunch of bonus work to try to get promoted or a raise. They believe all this extra work is part of what they’re paying for. But an employee who has quiet quit will do none of that, accept that the job is a dead end job, and just do the minimum to keep from getting fired.

I always used to get from bosses, “Hicks! How come you’re not working?”

I go, “There’s nothing to do!”

And they go, “Well, you pretend like you’re working.”

Yeah, why don’t you pretend I’m working? You get paid more than me, you fantasize, buddy! Hell, pretend I’m mopping! Knock yourself out! I’ll pretend they’re buying stuff, we can close up! Hey, I’m the boss, now you’re fired! How’s that for a fantasy, buddy?

• Bill Hicks

The existing currency pool is not the reason. Paper money has a pretty short durable life, and coins don’t have enough value to operate society on. It’s actually a fairly big task for a government to maintain the currency supply.

“We didn’t bomb these people out of their homes only to have them return.”

—Israel

Catnip is easy to grow. Where I live it grows like a weed, eventually goes to seed and then plants come back the following year all on their own.

If you have ever enjoyed sprinkling a little bit of dried catnip on your scratching board and watching your cat go wild, you’ll love cutting down a big live plant, chopping it up on a cutting board, and stuffing an old gym sock with it.