Das Doak

If we fully caveated everything to account for every nuance, we'd be blogging, not posting.

Talarico and Crockett are both very impressive.Texas Republicans desperately hoping for bad feelings between the two (and their supporters) will be disappointed by Crockett putting country and party over self. The seismic effects of a Democratic winning in Texas will rock the nation.

Friendly arguments with Seminarians can be a lot of fun.

But, yeah, doing that publicly and antagonistically is going to end *very* poorly.

As usual, Republicans wreck things and Democrats get to spend the first half of their administration putting them back together.

It's "legal" for the same reasons that most of the "move fast and break things" culture's actions were "legal":

Because no one has sued them yet.

Watching TV explains so much about the mind state of the median American voter.

That's the fundamental problem I have with this tech; if it actually works as advertised then, congratulations, you have made every digital record useless and your legacy will be a return to hard copies, couriers, and physical seals.

I feel increasingly like we should've thrown every silicon valley billionaire down a well years ago. People love to make arguments about inevitability, but we could've kept this shit from being reality for at least a decade if we'd clipped their wings very early.

The F-104 really is one of the most amusing aircraft the Germans could have picked for air defense; it's fast enough to cross the entire country in its longest direction in less than twenty minutes, but it doesn't carry enough fuel to actually be able to do that.

Which just means they'll be less effective and commit even more war crimes.

Ah, the bottom bracket thread chaser. It can make your day go very poorly but, when it hits the threads perfectly, it is *so* satisfying.

Ain't procurement corruption grand?

"Hallo, ve vould like an interceptor to defend against ze Soviets."
"Well, we got this absurdly fast jet that can carry a maximum of four missiles and can't turn for shit... and it comes with this briefcase full of cash!"
"Zis vill be acceptable to us, danke."

Damn that's a crazy picture; were it not for the scorching and smoke, you'd think there was supposed to be a well deck amidships.

Shock and Uh.

Finland during the 30s and 40s really is one of the best analogies for Ukraine; a state that faced existential threats to its independence, and wound up having some very strange and questionable bedfellows as a direct result of doing what they had to in order to deal with those threats.

yeah the damage a single bad billionaire can do wildly outstrips any positive impact even a theoretically ideal billionaire can have

more, I think that the kind of person you need to be to become a billionaire tends to select for the worst outcomes in all but the rarest of cases

Post DOGE I think of redistributive taxation far less in terms of redistribution itself than in terms of taking away social-political nuclear launch codes from people who can’t be trusted with them.

It doesn't feel like white wealthy racist sexist men are a minority right now because they're in power, but they still are, and a big part of why they're desperately going anti-democratic is because they realize they are in the minority and their beliefs are broadly hated by the rest of the country.

Except it's really not; that is the motivating ethos primarily of white wealthy men, but that group is, itself, a minority of the country; *maybe* a quarter of the population on a good day.

It's a minority with a lot of political power and - obviously - wealth, but still a minority.

And this is bourn out by the polling showing that "acquiring Canada" is unpopular, the fact that multiple Native Americans have been elected to Congress, and by the fact that we have to explain what Manifest Destiny is in schools to children; if it was still a motivating ethos that'd be unnecessary.

Manifest Destiny has been spent as a political force in the US for basically the last century; the last time more than a tiny minority of the US believed it was destiny the country would control all of North America was probably the 1880s.

This stands in stark contrast with Israel, which really doesn't have anything *other* than "the Jewish state" as its central identity, and that identity is fundamentally exclusionary.

It's obviously imperfect and there are definitely people who disagree with that inclusionary identity *very* strongly, but we know that it works as an organizational principle that people are *still* willing to fight and die for, because that's what we had after the civil rights movement.

The US has found ways to form an inclusive identity as "Americans" that push past those exclusionary parts of our past identity; "The Land of the Free" is something that unites people who fled authoritarianism, whose ancestors were in bondage, or who were once persecuted by the government.

Primarily that fucker but *still* vote blue.

You can have a winery without a vineyard, but it's generally somewhat gauche, just because the big differentiator for wine is the grapes you're growing and how they're treated on the vine.

Nah, winemaking was covered too.

Home distilling for beverages is still *very* illegal though, but it's not like the ATF is gonna hunt you down because of your backyard still, particularly because you can claim that you're just making alcohol for fuel, which *is* legal.

But, for both distilleries and wineries, aging is very important to make a quality product that's worth a lot, so you aren't going to see big returns for a couple years at least.

Distilleries have a much harder time turning a profit, though there have been a handful that've figured it out.

Wineries are generally dependent on having an accessible vineyard, which is way more capital-intensive to set up and takes a couple years.