Levitating. Ballistic. Catastrophe. Incandescent. Shivering. Sultry. Sauté.

Congratulations … you’ve trained a generation of junior product managers.

First step: Find a country with a navy competent to defend your undersea cables.

If you don’t want to be treated the way Stalinists treat dissenters, don’t voluntarily put yourself in places where Stalinists set the rules.

Stone two birds with one hit.

Tankies are against good things, because good things make the world more pleasant, and if the world becomes more pleasant then the people are less likely to want to destroy it.

What’s Greek for “persona non grata”?

So does voir dire.

Jury nullification is a real thing, but it is often misunderstood … mostly because right-wing libertarians and sovereign-citizen kooks have spent decades pushing conspiracy theory about it.

It isn’t an affirmative right of citizens to get onto juries and block the enforcement of the law. Rather, it’s a logical consequence of two important rules in our legal system:

1. Double jeopardy: if a defendant gets a “not-guilty” verdict from a jury, that defendant cannot be retried for that same crime.
2. Juror independence: the judge cannot order the jury to return a particular verdict, nor punish them for returning a verdict that seems contrary to the facts and the law.

Double jeopardy is in the US Constitution. Juror independence comes from English common law, where it was established in 1670 in an infamous case where a judge imprisoned and tortured jurors for not returning the verdict the judge wanted.

Because of these two principles, if a jury returns a “not-guilty” verdict, the defendant goes free; even if the verdict seems blatantly contrary to the facts and the law. Even if the jury is blatantly wrong, nobody in the system has any authority to do anything about it — not the judge, not the prosecutor, not the cops.

If you are summoned to be on a jury and you make it clear that you do not intend to judge the case on the facts and the law, you will be dismissed from the jury in voir dire. If you preach nullification to your fellow jurors, you might cause a mistrial: the defendant will not be freed; the court will just get a new jury, and the defendant will go back to jail in the meantime.

A mistrial does not free the defendant. A hung jury (refusing to come to a consensus) does not free the defendant. Only a not-guilty verdict frees the defendant.

There are 10,000-year-old arrowheads sold for that much or less. They’re not scarce or sacred or anything; they’re literally weapons that were made in mass quantities for warfare or hunting.

Doctors can tell you how to save children’s lives. But they can’t make you want to.

I think it’s pretty neat when people get to do stuff they like with other people who want to join them.

“… and he was aiming for John Connally.”

Here’s my peace proposal: Putin goes out a window, and Zelenskyy gets to be Tsar of the traditional territory of the Kyivan state.

The unofficial sequel to Untitled Goose Game is Little Kitty, Big City.

Ideologically, Leninism supported vanguardism, a variation on Marxism that said that the Communist party was supposed to drag the early-20th-century proletariat into the revolution, instead of waiting for late capitalism where the proletariat would (according to Marx) naturally become revolutionary. This, and the notion of “false consciousness”, authorized Communist parties to go against the expressed (democratic) will of the proletariat, on the theory that the proletariat’s judgment was clouded by false consciousness, while still claiming to act in the interests of the proletariat.

Basically, “we (the party) know better than you (the people)” was ingrained into Leninism from the beginning, and the major communist revolutions either were or became Leninist. Maoism was a branch off of Leninism as well.

Are you saying he’s a Keir Blair?

“Buffy” was originally a nickname for “Elizabeth”, but then the TV show happened, and Buffy Summers is not an Elizabeth.

Utah Mormons often give their kids odd names. That’s where “Nevaeh” was invented, too.

Yep. I was thinking of Heinlein’s 1952 The Rolling Stones, where the person doing the timing calls out commands to the person controlling the engines, like an old-timey sea captain. (And in German, despite being an English-speaking family, because rocketry is German, donchaknow: Brennschluss!)

In some mid-20th-century science-fiction novels, people in the 21st century are piloting rockets by manual control, using slide rules to calculate trajectories.