Ideally your car will always be Lawful Good; it will drive better and cause less wear and tear on itself over time. But shoddy roads, rage-inducing drivers and lengthy traffic stops can tend to cause the car to slide slowly but inexorably through neutral to chaos and evil. Regular maintenance and the occasional exorcism can keep this tendency in check, however.

Go to church every Sunday, listen to the pastor tell you who you should hate. Then catch a beer and the game, watch some kid wreck his life with a concussion. The bloodier and more brutal the sport, the better.

Your evil overlords thank you for your contribution to their bottom line. And remember, ads are wholesome, players are young gods, and viewing is a family-friendly event!

Not giving your kids brain damage is probably a good long-term strategy for their success.

And America worships them for it!

It's not unwitting. Tens of millions of Americans are fully cognizant of the fact that their politics will put them in an early grave, harm their kids, their parents and their spouse - and these Americans don't care so long as the politicians hurt the people those voters want them to hurt.

It is still a problem. I had a major surgery in 2020 and coming out of it my options for painkillers were opiods or nothing. I chose nothing and am not an addict today because of it.

If we decriminalized possession we'd have to fuel our prison industry with some other widespread crime. Maybe make driving 5 over the speed limit into a felony with a three strikes rule; third time you're 20 to life.

I mean, those corporations gotta profit right? They employ like literally a million prison guards, and if we stopped feeding people into the machine all those guards would be out a job.

Luckily between the cartels, the pharmacies and the for-profit prison corps there is plenty of money to bribe congress with and a majority of corrupt congress critters right now. We won't have to worry about winning the drug war any time in the near future.

It does take months, but during peacetime modern militaries burn a lot of money on "being ready" for a quick response when it's needed. Russia spent their "Ready to get dropped out an airplane whenever" guys at the start of the war, they failed to do anything noteworthy, now they have nobody with the training and resources to be able to do that. Not to mention Ukraine is now a lot more ready to blow a transport plane out of the air if they -did- want to drop over Kyiv.

Welp, the horses are all gone, time to see about closing that barn door.

No, China restrains itself to tiny fish: Taiwan, tibet, racial minorities who are not permitted to protest their genocide, mothers and children who can't fight back.

China shows great restraint in this way.

Ein-comment-schadenfreude? Autoschadenfreude!

Hasn't stopped them yet.

Yeah, fuck China. Tiananmen square massacre was their last chance at democracy, now they've got fascist Winnie the Pooh in charge.

Only a fool fights a war on two fronts and only a madman fights one on three. Putin could absolutely pull a Hitler here.

Our civilization is founded on steam, built with steam, run by steam, could not survive long without a robust steam economy and many of our greatest advancements in energy and propulsion have either been, "This makes a more efficient steam," or, "This makes a more efficient use of steam."

Yeah, we'll be lucky if we don't have a Bronze Age Collapse within a century or so. Eight billion people in an environment of widespread climate change, resource wars leading to the collapse of the global food supply and a return to waves of famine refugees in the hundreds of millions...the war in Ukraine is just the start. Things are going to get ugly.

And hey, maybe when things get really bad we can rely on fortified outposts of insane religious zealots to preserve our most important art, literature and scientific advancements. Maybe even a couple copies of wikipedia.

It's more about paying a $350,000 consulting fee to the company for them to hand over a $500,000 ransom, I think.

Peasant kids losing their virginity to those in power at a young age is neither novel nor alarming...to those in power.

On the other hand, fraud and extortion by the Vatican against the wealthy and politically connected would absolutely provoke a policy change.

Having read the article, the recorded phonecall basically amounts to the ex-VP of finance asking the CEO, "Do you remember that I asked you to approve a budget," and the CEO going, "I recall something about a budget, please submit any requests for approval in writing."

Hardly damning of the pope, and a very very thin defense when the VP is arguing that "The CEO approved all of the illegal things I did because he approved of the budget for them."

As long as it can deliver precision kills with an intuitive point-and-click interface I"m sure the resultant massacres will be very humane.

smuggling a bit of white powder through the airport in a dildo, your first thought is -not- going to be, "oh those are her boyfriend's ashes, duh."

He's still a dangerous traitor with a large following, I may get sick of hearing about him but at least I know where the backstabbing piece of dirt is.

The fifth amendment, once upon a time, prevented one from being compelled to incriminate oneself via testimony. However, that hasn't stopped courts from attempting to compel people to incriminate themselves anyhow, and the last-ditch line of defense against that is to simply be unable to remember any of the incriminating evidence you are being compelled to testify about.

If you aren't a big-wig politician with the pull to buy off a judge it generally results in contempt of court.

https://www.techdirt.com/2016/04/28/so-much-fifth-amendment-man-jailed-seven-months-not-turning-over-password/

If the jury gets sufficiently pissed that he 'cannot recall,' they are permitted to jail him indefinitely without trial for contempt of court in order to jog his memory. https://www.techdirt.com/2016/04/28/so-much-fifth-amendment-man-jailed-seven-months-not-turning-over-password/

No, if it said something like, "Iranian police beat, murder 17-year-old student" I could understand translation issues. But either the translator got creative with the title, or there is no mention of the active, participating killer in the actual title - just the murder weapon.