Don’t sell the Internet short. It also brings a lot of pointless suffering to others as well

The Internet is a big place. There are lots of cat memes that don’t depict any suffering at all.

If the disaster is bad enough you only have to survive off of your hoard until enough other people die off that one can scavenge. COVID showed us how brittle JIT supply chains are. How many people die in 3 months without access to daily medication? How many broken arms or ankles go septic or heal badly? How many staph infections, bad teeth, tetanus, botulism or whatever that used to kill and now we can get ready treatment for? Just got to stay in the bunker until all the more dependent and unlucky die then you can come out and spend the rest of your short life fighting over the remains of technological civilization with the other preppers.

Together for 16, married for 11 or 12

I think it was a military action not a law enforcement action so jurisdiction is irrelevant in that sense. Just the world’s largest military killing random “terrorists” in international waters. Good practice for getting the terrorists at home next. People who cheer this need to understand that authoritarians always need an enemy and will invent that enemy out of the citizenry as needed.

If he had diplomatic immunity, he didn’t claim it as far as I’ve seen. He was given a date for appearance before the judge so they could have held him until then with no problem. I agree they didn’t want to make an incident of it but it wouldn’t have involved the ICC.

Thank you for making the second point. It does suck that I am forever searchable on an arrest database but I’ll take that over the cops being able to disappear me as a matter of course, as opposed to having to do extra work to disappear me. This is why the suspension of due process for ANY crime is bad. I know I’m preaching to the choir here.

They have a rule against United States news here maybe they should make one against comments that derail the topic to be United States focused. Unless that would be too broad to be applied fairly? Always room for improvement though.

I think the charitable explanation is that the US exports so much pop culture and also several of the main social media companies are US based that US Americans see “their culture” constantly reflected back to them causing a reflexive assumption that is often wrong. The less charitable explanation would be willful, myopic ignorance I guess.

Houston is a big place. The vast majority of it is safe and some of it is pleasant.

I think impoverished would be the common thread in my experience

Yeah, they are still complaining about it over there.

Babies, famously, make very few decisions of consequence.

Mostly the United States South but long stretches out west and up north too.

To be clear I’ve never seen anyone shoot a gun at a wedding (and I’ve been to some trashy weddings) I just meant celebratory gunfire in general

Houston, New Orleans, SWLA. I never heard it in the other 5 states I’ve stayed in but I try to live rurally when my situation permits so I can’t speak to the large cities of those other states.

I used to live in both too and I heard it a lot in Houston during the holidays and when the Astros won the world series. I heard random gunfire so much in New Orleans I stopped calling the cops. One time I saw a guy shoot at a group outside a bar I was working at and the cops didn’t come for like 40 minutes. No one was hit but if they would have stopped and talked to us we could have told them who it was. Things were wild there for a few years after Katrina compared to before.

I associate it with any holiday that also has fireworks and professional sports victories. I guess there is more that joins us than separates us when it comes to irresponsible firearm usage.

I didn’t realize this was a thing outside of North America. What a sad waste.