The d&d game summoning the devil was always my favorite. Always love a d&d episode.

Also any one where the pope is shown in league with someone unlikely - communists, jews, muslims, etc.

Are people not familiar with Chick Tracts? These comics are the product of the prodigous paranoid right wing evangelical conspiracy theorist Jack Chick (1924-2016).

I think these comics are best understood as the work of an outsider artist, like Henry Darger or a painting elephant. His work allows you to glimpse a mind outside the normal human experience.

His work focuses on who is going to hell - everyone who’s not a right wing american protestant, and many who are. It shows a strong pornographic influence - many end in a blissful face dowsed in a baptismal money-shot.

It’s meant to be used as a legitimate tool to evangelize. The worst christian lunatics leave these things in public, earnestly believing that after reading you’ll realize the divinely ordained truth that freemasons will all burn in hell along with blood-drinking rothschilds and D&D players.

Bauxite is the obvious one. Bringing bauxite to Australia. How could you forget about bauxite?

Oh, that’s great to know! I’d got the impression that 打 was being used as a verb in the sense of use/make/play with 火機 as the object. Thanks!

The way I was taught to ask for a light in chinese is literally translated as ‘Hit the fire machine?’ (打火機嗎)

Nah this was in like 2012 or 13 or so, before impossible burgers were a thing. The patty was a thin unidentified mat of some kind of substance. There was a sodden patch of greenish white and one of reddish white.

Reminds me of the one time I was desperate enough to order a veggie burger at burger king.

Part of the problem is hyperactive agency detection - the same biological bug/feature that fuels belief in the divine.

If a twig snaps, it could be nothing or someone. If it’s nothing and we react as if it was someone, no biggie. If it was someone and we react as if it was nothing, potential biggie. So our brains are bias towards assuming agency where there is none, to keep us alive.

I always thought of romney as the republican’s plan C. If White Supremacy fails, and More White Supremacy fails, then they might try Quieter White Supremacy.

Wouldn’t a Dyson swarm be much easier to construct than either? Like a dyson sphere but a swarm of smaller collectors.

But Hamas won, they completely control the ‘unity’ government and Fatah have vastly less power. If divide and conquer was the goal Netanyahu would have been funneling resources to Fatah and not Hamas. But he has consistently empowered Hamas because the international community can’t accept a Hamas-led state.

That ended over 15 years ago.

I am guessing their calculation is that losing support of Israel lobby is 100% loss?

Yeah, I’ve been presuming that’s a significant part of it. That and the importance of a dependent and dependable ally to help anchor US security architecture in a vital region. Israel needs US imperial presence in the region. Saudi just benefits from it.

US support for Israel continuing the current conflict or US support for Israel in general? If really forced into it, maybe the Democrats can withdraw their blessing for the current conflict, but I don’t see how they could end support for Israel. If Putin wins the US election who knows what could happen but short of that Israel is just too important to the US empire and they know it. I mostly believe the official line from Washington that they don’t have that much leverage against Israel - in the sense that Bibi&co have enough counter levers to make acting against them more costly than it’s worth for the Democrats.

Hence the bullshit antisemitism law, the brutalizing of campus protests, etc. Democrats are even willing to drive down turn out among their base in one of the most important elections in US history over this - I just don’t see them doing that if they had a better card to play.

I doubt it will change even if the US withdraws support, but I’m a cynical depressive type.

Our fundamentally inhuman treatment of the Palestinian people led to October 7.

There are only two ways to prevent it happening again. We could stop the unconscionable deprivations we inflict on the Palestinian people or we could speed up the genocide we’ve been engaged in.

No surprises that the government compromised of war criminals and people the Israeli courts have deemed to be terrorists are going for the later. The far right are in charge and they’re pretty open that this is the goal.

It’s not divide and conquer, that implies keeping multiple groups at parity and fighting each other. Israel intentionally kept the crazies in charge to undermine the viability of a Palestinian state.

Jealous! My sister lived in that area and we went squirrel walking a few times on visits but I was never so lucky as to have one crawl over me.

That walking up to you and standing up behavior - I’ve started to see that at a cemetery here in Portland that we walk around, but so far all the squirrels have waited a short distance away for food to be thrown to them.

Squirrels are just the best. If anyone goes to visit Taiwan - which I certainly recommend as strongly as possible - there’s a park in the capital Taipei called 2/28 Memorial Peace Park (二二八和平紀念公園).

There are these gorgeous squirrels with red bellies that will eat nuts right out of your hand. They’ll come up to you, take a nut and then run off about midway up a tree. Using their back legs to hold onto the bark, they dangle head-down against the trunk, eating with their front paws. Then you look around and all the trees have these vertical furry tree-slug looking squirrels dangling against them. Just cuting it up cutefully.

Red-bellied plumpers is what my wife and I called them. They’re just the best.

the operation is highly organised, technically savvy

Of course an operation this sophisticated targets people looking to buying luxury brands for cheap, that sounds like an ideal mark.