Oil and gas which need to be extracted from deep underground so we can burn them: a gift from God.

Wind and sunlight which come to us for free and never run out: somehow not a gift from God.

Back when I worked in an office I would put up badass president pics Fourth of July. Too lazy to find them, but stuff like Kennedy riding a robot unicorn on the moon, FDR in wheelchair themed power armor, Roosevelt gunning down big foot in a forest fire, etc.

At home, the only significant decorating I do is for Christmas. There’s enough misery out there, and I choose to embrace the joy and the appeal to the better side of our nature. So we have lights, fake candles, and so on, and we put up a tree that gets a new ornament or two every year which fills it with memories. And as a finishing touch we hang a banner declaring “All creatures will make merry under pain of death”

Needs more Clancy Brown.

He’s not relying on Ukraine’s allies running out of money, he’s betting that they’ll lose interest and/or vote for pro-Russian stooges before he loses the ability to win the war.

IIRC, Troi mentions how the replicator makes the food healthier and at one point she specifically instructs it to not do that because she wants a real ice cream sundae even if it isn’t healthy.

And Scotty can taste the difference between alcohol and synthehol.

Rockets are literally on fire.

Hawaii

And for something similar in its insanity, there’s also Santa Claus, a product of Mexico that I can only assume was fueled by product from Columbia.

“I wonder if there’s beer on the sun”

The Canada Song lives rent free in my head.

“We put our faith in BLAST HARDCHEESE.”

Final Sacrifice.

And even if these cruise missiles were completely undetectable, it would still fail unless the strike takes out 100% of the enemy nukes. If even one is able to survive, you risk a nuclear holocaust.

Being able to theoretically wipe our all the enemy nukes without using any of your own is strategically nice to have, but on its own it isn’t enough to negate the threat of a nuclear exchange. At best, it should make your enemy more reluctant to retaliate with a nuclear launch, assuming they realize that they aren’t getting nuked and that a launch would potentially change that.

He talks about it in one of the interviews from the remastered VHS collection. During the fight on the second death star, the script just said “Luke gets angry” and he couldn’t figure out how to flesh that out until he came up with threatening Leia.

Redoing the election only takes pressure off Maduro. It’s an empty gesture to appease the opposition for a time, which just gives Maduro room to plan for stealing the next election. And it drags things out for longer, which can easily cause some of the energy to be drained from his opposition, because movements like this tend to fade out after a while.

And what could possibly be the point? If he won’t concede this time, next time won’t be any different.

Better to keep putting as much pressure as possible on Maduro and his regime. No reason to make hanging on to power any easier for him, and even if he can’t be convinced to bow out gracefully, if things get bad enough for him, the decision might not be his to make.

Just logically speaking, a do over makes no sense because it was never the voting process that was in doubt. Both sides agree that the votes were all valid, they just disagree on the count… by a lot.

Well, they disagree about that and the need for any kind of transparency at all. Apparently Maduro thinks that elections should be run on the honor system.

It will block youtube ads if the video is embedded in another website. When I want to find a youtube video on my tv I just search it on DuckDucGo, since watching it there blocks ads and seems to bypass any restrictions they’ve placed on watching videos outside of youtube.

I need to set up a cheap computer and just run the TV as a monitor so I can have all the features I want, including a real browser with ublock. But in the meantime, this fixes the one issue I have with DNS level blocking.

Insert “Why is it always you three” meme here.

That same logic applies to everyone else too. If Batman has some obligation to play judge, jury and executioner, so does anyone else who gets the opportunity. By that reasoning, cops who see criminals getting back on the street again and again should take matters into their own hands and just kill suspects who they believe are too dangerous to entrust to a broken system.

Batman isn’t just trying to beat up every criminal in Gotham, night after night, one by one. He’s trying to clean up the city, take down organized crime, fight corruption, and help fix the system so that it can deal with crime. Killing people prevents him from being able to work with people like Jim Gordon. And it forces the authorities to redirect resources away from fighting other criminals and instead use them to hunt down Batman because he isn’t just a vigilante trying to help, he’s a mass murderer.

And while that may prevent his victims from coming back to commit new crimes, it won’t prevent new criminals from taking their place, something that’s going to happen when he creates a power vacuum by killing a major crime boss. Plus, the calculus changes for any criminal he faces, because they have far less to lose by doing something stupid or desperate when their lives are already on the line. It destabilizes every situation, and makes dangerous people even more desperate.

Any lasting solution for Gotham has to involve fixing its failed institutions. That’s a long term goal, and one which Batman can’t do by himself. He can make a difference, he can protect people on a daily basis, and fight corruption wherever he’s able to find it. And he can inspire others to act, coordinate with them, and support those who try to create a real change.

Now, will he ever actually clean up Gotham? No, because then we wouldn’t have a story. Of course, that would be just as true if he killed people. I mean, Frank Castle has been gunning down criminals for decades, and yet, that doesn’t seem to have eliminated violent crime either.

• enough money, highly qualified personnel, and connections (both legitimate and clandestine) to bring real change to a blighted city
• does none of the sort

He does use those resources to make change through charity and programs designed to improve the community. But that doesn’t instantly solve existing crime, particularly organized crime and corruption.

Plus, it will never actually fix Gotham because Gotham being shitty is part of the premise.

• brutalizes mentally ill people (but it’s okay because he doesn’t kill)

He beats up violent criminals, generally when they are in the middle of either attacking him, or attacking someone else, or otherwise doing something that would harm or endanger innocent people. That some of these people have varying degrees of mental illness is unfortunate, but they doesn’t mean they don’t have to be stopped.

• crime lords and terrorists walk free because of notoriously terrible corrections system and no-kill policy

Everyone of those criminals who walks free could have just as easily been murdered by any number of people during their time in custody. Why is it Batman’s responsibility to decide who lives and dies, and not any given cop or prison guard? And even if the system is broken, is it really better to have a masked vigilante killing people without trials (and appeals, and evidence, and oversight by some kind of authority)?

Also, let’s be real here, the reason they get out so predictably is not because of in-universe reasons, it’s because they want to keep bringing back villains. He could kill every supervillain in Gotham and most of them would be back in six months.

• main appeal is cool gadgets made by other, more qualified people

He’s the world’s greatest detective, a ninja, a world class martial artist, a scientist, an inventor, and one of the greatest strategists who ever lived. If he’s not qualified, who the fuck is?