I have a bookmark bar and good intentions at first. But in the end most of them are under the >> on the far right side of the bookmark bar in no particular order…

Speed Walking Workshop at 10:30pm? This is blasphemy!

It’s about time someone makes Clooney pay for his role in Batman and Robin.

Probably because all food prices has outpaced inflation. If you’ve done any grocery shopping in the past two years between shrinkflation and price increases many food items have doubled in price.

The right wing always assumes everything is a government conspiracy and the left wing assumes everything is a corporate conspiracy and neither group bothers to think about any other reason for things like this.

But before blaming the government for “printing money” (when the central banks have done the opposite by raising interest rates) or assuming every grocery store in the world got together to raise prices all at once, maybe we should consider other factors.

There could be food supply issues. Given this is a global phenomena, we should consider global food supply problems.

One thing that could cause global food supply is if there was a war in a part of the war that normally exports a large percentage of a staple food to the rest of the world. Where is wheat and grain normally produced? Is there a war happening there?

The fun thing about economics is the idea of substitutes. Bread is more expensive now? Just have more rice. Grain is too expensive for cattle feed? Mix in some more corn. If you’re the only one doing these tricks to reduce your food costs, it works really well. But unfortunately everyone is substituting which results on food prices across the board going up.

Also Climate Change does have an effect on agriculture. Droughts and floods mean less food is produced. So places which were reliable fields for farming aren’t so reliable anymore. So while the war in Ukraine will eventually be resolved which will put some downward pressure on food prices, climate change will continuously be putting an upward pressure on the price of food.

Atheism is bad for science because atheists tend tend to present science as a belief system that’s in completion with religion.

Science is about discovering how things work, while religion is about thinking about why. These are different questions.

There is of course some intersection between science and religion, but atheist seek to artificially widen that intersection to create conflict. To prove religion wrong “because science.”

This has an effect of pushing religious people away from science. But atheists don’t care that they’re hurting science, because the goal is to win petty internet arguments (many of which are imaginary) rather than promote scientific understanding.

My reaction to a post like the above would be to explain that science is not about disproving God, it’s simply about gaining a better understanding of the universe. Since it’s a religious person, we could also explain that understanding the universe is a way of appreciating God’s creation. That person could walk away thinking more positively about science and willing to learn more about it.

But an atheist will just mock the person to gain imaginary internet points and that person would go on being distrustful of science.

Atheism is bad for science.

Probably a bit of both. Having that mechanism is just another point of failure, and seems like it would a pain in the ass to install and test on an assembly line.

And here in Canada it’s required that new vehicles have daytime running lights, ie. lights are on (but at a dimmer setting) whenever the vehicle is running. Because it’s easier to see vehicles with lights on them than a vehicle with no lights in poor weather conditions. So pop-up lights would only make the vehicle look nice when it’s parked, but it wouldn’t look good whenever you’re driving, even in the daytime.

Burying the lead…

That investigation, launched in 2021, culminated last week when Bensouda’s successor, Karim Khan, announced that he was seeking an arrest warrant for the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, over the country’s conduct in its war in Gaza.

The investigation the lead up to Karim Khan seeking an arrest warrant started in 2021? Do they have psychics working there? Probably more likely they’ve wanted to do this for a long time, they were just looking for a reason.

The ICC is burning a lot of credibility here. So how much can we believe these “alleged” unsourced statements, especially considering it’s from The Guardian which has had an anti-Israel bias for decades?

Ukraine fires rockets at military targets. Hamas fires rockets at civilian population centers. Most people get the distinction.

There’s IDF all around them, but instead they fire the few rockets they have left at a civilian population center.

Terrorists to the bitter end.

Network effect. People can’t leave because the people they like to talk with are they and those people can’t leave for the same reason.

Unfortunately there’s these kinds of assholes in every country.

They were asked to help distribute food and refused. Just something you’re not you seeing in your information silo.

This guy is playing politics. If he wasn’t he’d just put in the paperwork instead of sitting down for an interview with CNN.

See how Jack Smith, a serious prosecutor rolls. There are very few press conferences and they are concise and to the point.

This guy is playing games to get publicity, he’s probably working on a book deal or whatever right now to monetize the publicity.

it is a good way to try to prevent governments from using that currency issuance power in ways their citizens would prefer they did not.

And instead it should be hedgefunds that have that power?

There is a need for currency and someone is going to have control over the value of that currency. At least with the government you can vote the bastards out.

Israel asked for help from Arab countries in providing support in dealing with the humanitarian crisis. They laughed in the Israelis faces.

The problem is too many people are willing to let the Palestinians die in order to win some propaganda war against Israel. I don’t feel like anyone really cares about Palestinians. They’d rather Palestinians die so they can have proof Israel is evil.

Joe Biden has built a pier to provide aid. This is more than anyone else has done to prevent famine. But the propaganda says he’s “Genocide Joe”.

FFS so Netanyahu was extremely close to being pushed out of power and this dumbass pulls this stunt (just to get publicity) which only makes it easy for Netanyahu to make the case that “it’s us against the world”. He’s also seeking to prosecute Gallant, the guy that would most likely make the push to remove Netanyahu. So he’s pushing Gallant back towards falling back in line with Natanyahu.

Does this idiot want Netanyahu to stay in power? He’s basically throwing a lifeline to Bibi while throwing away the credibility of the ICC. Never attribute to malice and all that, so likely just a moron.

Fuck, I was starting to have some hope the Netanyahu could be gone in the next few weeks and this guy is pulling out all the stops to keep him in power. All to get his face on TV.

Really the regulation should be about requiring social media companies to interoperate similar to regulation on the phone companies. You should be able to switch to another social media platform without losing your ability to communicate with your friends on the old platform similar to how you can still call your friends after you change phone companies.

Then is if the social media companies want to charge money people could change to another platform without losing their contacts.

Basically the only reason I still have facebook is to talk to chat with people on there that I can’t contact through other means.

Seems like a red line that would activate more direct action from lots of other countries against Russia.

Yeah they don’t want direct action from lots of other countries because that would be an existential threat to them. But if Ukraine is an existential threat, why would a few more stop them from using everything they have in a desperate attempt to save themselves?

A cornered rat is going to fight with everything it’s got when it’s about to be stomped on. The fear of a couple more people coming over to also stomp on it doesn’t change anything for the rat when it knows it’s already going to be stomped dead.

I think it’s more down to the fact that regime change initiated from the outside doesn’t go well. And if the west tries to take out Putin directly there’s a very high likelihood of it resulting in a nuclear war.

The sanctions the west has in place are designed to nudge some powerful people within Russia to take out Putin. Problem is Putin has been around long enough that he’s been able to make it extremely difficult for someone to make a coup happen.

Meanwhile the upside is that the collective West gets to try tactics and weapons for modern warfare (drones, ai, analysis) and get ready for the next fight.

Russia also gets this experience. And we can get this kind of information from more traditional sources (ie. Israel) without Russia getting it.

It would be better for the West if Putin was gone, but that needs to be done by Russian, and that’s easier said than done.

I wouldn’t look for too much nefarious intent for things that can be explained by regime change being hard to pull off (and very risky when it’s a nuclear power) and war is not a simple thing.

The goal is to provide enough aid to Ukraine to defeat the invading army without providing so much aid that Ukraine becomes an existential threat to Russia. There being an existential threat to a nuclear power can have some bad outcomes. So it’s a balancing act for the West. This is what Zelensky is alluding to with “to win in such a way that Russia does not lose.”

And of course there’s a lot of shenanigans involving Russian assets in the west doing everything they can to sabotage aid efforts. That’s a significant factor in all of this that shouldn’t be ignored. Providing military aid to Urkaine is a no-brainer for geopolitical interests, but no-brain Russian shills are doing their best to block it.

A long drawn out war of attrition isn’t actually in the best interests for the West. Russia gains experience, improves their weaponry and has ample opportunities to test that technology in the battlefield. They’ve been updating the battlefield doctrine to include ways to effectively use new technologies like drones. This isn’t something the West wants.

Best outcome for the West is Ukraine drives out the Russian Military, and there’s a peace agreement that resolves all disputed territory which would pave the way for Ukraine to join NATO. The longer the war drags on, the longer it will be before Ukraine is part of NATO.