It’s a good colour for boats as well, sailing boats especially. A sailing ship painted black with gleaming white sails is a beautiful sight, but it works well for stinkies too.
I really love black cats but I’m unfortunately allergic to them. Looking forward to the day you can be routinely vaccinated against cat allergies, apparently that’s a thing.
Twitter’s effect on politics at least in the UK has been pretty negative in my opinion, it drives journalists towards short-form hot takes rather than journalism.
I think the scariest thing about a world government isn’t some daft prophecy about the antichrist but that if it turned tyrannical there’d be very little anyone could do about it. Power inevitably corrupts and to say otherwise is wishful thinking; we’d have created the ultimate power and therefore the ultimate source of corruption, imagine the world government underwent a palace coup and we ended up with a regime like Stalin’s or Mussolini’s but you couldn’t even flee it as a refugee or hope for foreign intervention.
Balances of power rather than monopolies on it are probably best in my opinion.
Yeah even when I was chronically broke and a smoker I was usually able to scrimp enough together for a pouch of Amber Leaf. Rolling your own means you can roll skinnier ones too if necessary.
Ireland has used this system since independence a century ago which suggests it would work pretty well in countries like the UK and Canada too which share a fairly similar machinery of government.
I'm British and I'd genuinely vote for this on a single-issue basis! Unfortunately FPTP means we have a duopoly of two Frankenstein's monster UK-wide parties that in a reasonable electoral system would really be two or three each and will never abolish FPTP on their own as a result, the only chance would be as part of a coalition agreement with a regional party and thanks to FPTP coalitions are rare in the UK system. In 2015 the SNP (Scottish independence party, long-term incumbents there) got 56 seats off 1.4 million votes while UKIP (right wing populist party, very Brexity and went the way of the dodo soon after) got one seat off 8.3 million votes. UKIP were awful in my opinion but that was downright undemocratic.
Your skin actually has quite a lot of resistance especially compared to a copper wire, while it's definitely bad news for a current to be flowing through your nerves it would need to get there first. Current doesn't really 'choose' a particular path either; if you have a potential difference V between two points the current will take all paths available between them and Ohm's law I = V/R tells us that the current will be greatest through the path with the least resistance. The reason you don't get a shock when you touch a properly insulated wire is that the path that includes your finger also includes the resistance R of the insulation which is very high so correspondingly I is very low.
I grew up in a Calvinistic worldview where every week you were reminded you were utterly disgusting in the eyes of God and simply by being born you deserved to be tortured more brutally than the English language can adequately express because you had by virtue of being human inherited original sin, and the only way you could get rid of it is if you had been predestined to be saved by Jesus (who did not come to save everyone, only a select few). Anyone can imagine the horrible effect this polar opposite of therapy has on rates of mental illness in that community. This kind of worldview was popular with the English Dissenters (those famous 'persecuted pilgrims' belong to this category) who later crossed the Atlantic in large numbers and I think I can see its unpleasant legacy in American political thought both left and right.
If there is one idea I could delete out of existence it's this notion of original sin in both its religious and secular forms. I would make it unlawful to tell a child that they were born guilty of anything simply for existing or that guilt can be inherited from anyone because of how psychologically harmful this is. While it's usually not the intention there exists a trend that de facto results in telling boys they're guilty of various things simply for existing, and then in the same breath we act surprised when scumbags like Tate are hoovering up their attention instead of everyone telling them what a piece of crap they are for being born. Manly qualities in my mind are qualities like physical and mental strength in the face of adversity, having the moral courage to make difficult decisions for the good of a group, a deep sense of good sportsmanship, being willing and able to take risks when required, that sort of thing. The left should be all over that as its history is littered with such examples!
As someone raised in an authoritarian Calvinist belief system (albeit not in the US) it’s simpler than you think in my opinion. People in general believe whatever fits the random things they absorb into their psyches growing up as kids because being kids they have no yardstick to differentiate between fantasy and reality other than what the authority figures in their life tell them and the evidence of their own eyes. This is true whether you’re raising someone on a diet of intellectual curiosity, a diet of pernicious cult-adjacent nonsense, or anything in between. There’s a reason so many people who’ve left similar authoritarian beliefs love “The Truman Show” in my experience but it’s true for everyone.
Part of being human is that our perceptions unconsciously bend around our beliefs and that the stronger the belief the stronger the amount of bending. We all have this built-in bias towards existing beliefs to a greater level than we instinctively assume, although it’s usually a lot more obvious among authoritarian religious groups because their beliefs are so markedly different from consensus reality.
Yeah I feel we had a less extreme example of this phenomenon in the UK with Boris Johnson. Lots of people took his bumbling blonde persona at face value but the reality is he’s a cunning political operator without any basic moral instincts.
Yeah unfortunately for MI5 the reintroduction of red kites across much of the UK has rendered them less effective with attacks being common. They also mostly use the BBC Radio 4 longwave transmitter to navigate and that’s being shut down next year along with the rest of the BBC’s AM output so they’re developing an alternative called SEAGULL: Self-Extracting Audio Guided by Ultra-Light Links where residential and commercial WiFi networks are hijacked to guide the mechanical avians instead of the centralised transmitter system. This system has its detractors however and occasionally they’ve locked onto train WiFi and immediately failed.
They were originally going to use mechanical geese for this task but political interference meant that seagulls were used instead so that the rapid decline of the fish and chip industry isn’t blamed on Tory economic policy. Unfortunately people are rightly suspicious of seagulls and this has thus far limited the success of operation SEAGULL. The authorities are hoping that operation ‘drop several hundred kilograms of LSD into a reservoir on the basis it’s not even the worst pollution Thames Water are up to that day’ will improve matters.
It’s a good colour for boats as well, sailing boats especially. A sailing ship painted black with gleaming white sails is a beautiful sight, but it works well for stinkies too.