Should have stuck with the British Monarchy, powerless as it comes. A woman as head of state for 70 years and even better, no elections for any president during any of time.

Here I go trying to explain my joke: The joke is that Stargates can only exist in or around Vancouver, because near enough the entirety of all Stargate TV series was filmed there.

But are we sure that’s a Einstein–Rosen bridge portal device that allows for near-instantaneous teleportation across both interstellar and extragalactic distances?

Its location doesn’t look instantaneously like a place in or even around Vancouver, BC.

And then try DISM.exe /Online /Cleanup-image /Scanhealth and DISM.exe /Online /Cleanup-image /Restorehealth that’ll get rid of the 9GB file for sure. If not, reinstall everything again and again and again.

Banning the party isn’t going to help.

Yes it will. It’ll mean it won’t be standing in elections, and that’s only fair because it’s an anti-democratic party… and it will deprive its members of broad protections afforded to parties and remove a unifying banner for them.

Banning anti-democratic institutions in a democracy is not only justified, it is conducive to the democracy’s survival. It lifts the bar for getting rid of democracy to be equivalent to not winning in an election but by establishing a second monopoly on violence, a far greater threshold and attempts at which are more straightforward to deter, prosecute and stamp out than being within every TikTok user’s first few swipes.

There’s nothing that prevents AfD voters from going to other parties, there’s plenty, or to voice their concerns in a new party that can be a legitimate part of the democratic system. Changing parties isn’t like banning a religion or a creed or a race, a party is hardly more than just a banner, the power of which can change between and during elections, at any time, through a simple act of the mind. Banning the party will absolutely help.

It sends a good message. It doesn’t send a message of wanting the silence the concerns of those who voted for the AfD in anything but the short term, it sends the message of ‘we hear you, but try again… a bit less fascist-y please’.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pzGimN2H2oQ as written by Howard Goodall, 1:06 in particular is a moment I live for.

I’m thinking he might be happier with Noridian, ZephyrOS, Sylvanix, or AetherForge.

I myself have been trying neoNova, specTRAos, and VortexLinux and they’re all pretty good.

…

All of these are made up, I think, I just can’t cope with everybody and their dog still rolling their own distros (and alternatives to GNOME 3, thank goodness for KDE), even after 25 years of observing it happen over and over again.

Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can.

Zawinski’s Law.

Not quite the same, but you’ll be prying my imported 2004 Estima from my cold dead hands.

That’s console.trace() for all you JS devs out there.

Germany is being interpreted as a disaster, but the only hard right party is the AfD and they’re up around 5% it looks like… and there are 13 other parties about to represent Germany in the EU parliament. France is looking terrible though, at least the RN has at least pretended to cut off ties to the AfD. And the equivalent of the CDU/CSU in France is near death, so it’s not like voters in the middle had anywhere to go other than Macron or RN.

Austria could have gone worse, despite the FPÖ up. In Germany you have this kind of cordon sanitaire, the other parties have an agreement of sorts to never cooperate with the AfD, the CDU/CSU has been a bit flimsy on that though.

Meanwhile in Austria, the FPÖ has been around forever and used to represent some liberal politics way back when so they didn’t have that cordon sanitaire, including coalition governments between the ÖVP (the equivalent of the CDU/CSU but imbroiled somehow in more political turmoil in recent years) and FPÖ on numerous occasions. And what happened in this election is that basically three seats went from the ÖVP straight to the FPÖ.

Basically Austrian representation in the EU probably got marginally worse for all it matters, but in turn the CDU/CSU saw that any cooperation with the AfD would just lead to voters of theirs just going to the AfD in the long run, strengthening the case for a cordon sanitaire.

At least I hope that’s how they’ll interpret it. The other Austrian shift was one from the Greens to the heavily pro-EU NEOS, as much as I’ll disagree on some of their domestic policies when it comes to their EU politics they’re a bit more palatable.

I see. I should have my lawyers argue buying a $1,000,000 house for $0 is reasonable, that way a deal for $500,000 is perfectly reasonable. In the same way that threatening to illegally detain is a halfway compromise between nothing and threatening murder.

And it seems that imprisoning political opponents goes beyond carting down a hill in a shopping trolley which is what we here overseas associate with “jackass”, but what do I know.

Non-American just double-checking I’ve got his right…

Private citizen makes actionable credible threat to unlawfully detain legislators, legislators choose to do nothing for about half a year before slowly murmuring without specifics other than “yeah he said it” and “I think he means us”.

You OK USA? Just checking in.

The New York Times is fighting off Wordle look-alikes with copyright takedown notices

I cancelled my NY Times puzzle subscription as soon as that happened.