What is it with right-wing populists and being undone by lettuces? Liz Truss in Britain is now synonymous with the lettuce, and she had a simillarly laxative effect on the economy.

The doom of all ADHD blokes who can’t stand being behind people walking slower than him.

‘I’m not following you, I just have places to be faster than your leisurely dawdle down the pavement will allow’ is a phrase I wish we had a polite word for.

Which makes a lot of sense when you remember a lot of the North American population hailed from families who had a specific beef with a specific church and state; the role of bishops was one of these many axis of opposition during the conflict in Britain and Ireland.

The English Civil War and its aftermath is barely taught on either side of the Atlantic, yet it’s so important to understanding both countries’ history. The per capita casualty rate was worse than WW1, no wonder people felt rather strongly about religion and in some cases still do

In the UK you can even make an affirmation if you are not religious or your religion forbids you from taking an oath. This as brought in originally for the Quakers but anyone who objects to Christian oaths has this option.

When I did jury service I took the secular route, though I wouldn’t have strongly objected to swearing the traditional oath either. I quite like the idea God is personally nosing into the daily business of HM Courts and Tribunals, although judging by the backlog he abandoned the justice system long ago.

Personally I think the group of people it is most essential to prevent the reproduction of is eugenicists.

Scotland has an absolutely god-tier PR game, passing themselves off as a victim of the nasty old English when they were a prolific colonising country too.

Golden age pirates were generally fairly rational economic actors, they wanted to terrorise you into a quick surrender and potentially recruit from the defeated merchant crew. Once you’d surrendered they usually had little need for theatrics like walking the plank, while there absolutely were brutes who’d dish out violence for the fun of it this wasn’t the favoured outcome generally because it’s expensive to the pirates. It’s why the pirate flag is so important, just possessing one is enough to hang you so it’s a reliable way of saying ‘we’re outside the ordinary rules of engagement, do you really want this fight?’

Of course, if you fight they might quite instrumentally make an example of you to enhance their reputation, and increase the chance of future surrenders. If every pirate captain did that to every ship though, he wouldn’t be in business long.

I thought I was being paranoid dropping Google like a hot dog turd around 2018, but everything they’ve done since then has made me glad I’m no customer of theirs for the most part.

While the chances are much lower in the modern era, there’s still a non-zero chance of Mr Blobby appearing anywhere in the UK at any time.

Probably doesn’t help there’s also the existing fault line of ‘an init system shouldn’t be doing x’, systemd was always a magnet for partisanship.

Yeah the David vs Goliath fight is a lot less one-sided when you remember David was a shepherd and a dab hand with a slingshot, he’d have been using it to defend his flock from predators from childhood and ancient armies fielded them as weapons of war. The man basically took a gun to a sword fight.

The lesson I think is less ‘the weak can defeat the strong’ in general and ‘don’t engage your enemy on his terms, engage him where you are strongest’.

Its roots were even older too I think.

Yeah the British and French efforts to colonise the Falklands were probably the least morally questionable act of colonisation ever, since there was no indigenous people there to repress. They genuinely were terra nullius, in the actual original sense not the inhumane imperialist meaning of ‘we don’t consider the inhabitants human’.

The Penguin’s Republic of the Falkland Islands will rise again!

+1 for Escapology being a cracking album.

I’ve binned off both but personally it’s the cigarettes I miss, especially straights. Vaping just tastes cloying as fuck to me now, it’s so strongly flavoured if you’re vaping a lot you become totally nose-blind to it.

From what I’ve seen in the UK, it’s not that the youth particularly see temperance as a virtue it’s more than unless you’re going to a Spoons pints are £6 if not more these days. Ket is big in Britain too, on account of it being cheap especially compared to pints. They don’t want to be filmed while hammered and immortalised on tiktok either.

I feel it’s a common problem that economic factors are often attributed to moral ones.

I was sad to see Reaction Engines go, they were local-ish to where I grew up.

The Falkland Islands, population about 3000 or so, would suddenly find itself one of the few territories in the world capable of deploying an aircraft carrier.

From what I understand it’s only WMDs that are internationally banned from space, while obviously a rather distasteful thing to do it’s not unlawful to put conventional weapons in space. The Soviets armed some of their space stations with autocannon for example, which isn’t even the best example of their space programme making Bond villains everywhere look like complete scrubs.