Depends on which map you look at.

And if you eat that, and then eat the right kind of flower… Holy crap, my dude, shit gets wild.

There’s really only one choice .

As noted biblical historian Andrew Zaltzman has often pointed out, Pontius Pilate was a law-and-order administrator and Jesus was absolutely guilty under the law at the time.

There was a story going around yesterday about Wendy’s supposedly trying it. It sounds like the kind of headline that’s going to turn out to be BS, but I also didn’t really look into it so I don’t know any of the details. Seems like the kind of thing you’d have to be an idiot to actually attempt. Hard to imagine a universe where that goes over well.

Bosnia: “Ooh, can we go to the beach?”

Croatia: “Haha, fuck no!”

I’m talking about how it’s literally impossible for your eyes to focus at more than one distance at a time. This has nothing to do with speed, training, or how good you imagine the marksmanship of your average soldier to be. It’s about how your eyes work.

Correctly lining up a shot with iron sights doesn’t mean everything in your sight picture is perfectly in focus. Unless you’re shooting a handgun with a very short sight radius you usually can’t even keep both the front and rear sights in focus at the same time, forget about doing it with both your sights and the target. Your eyes can’t focus at three distances at once. Or even two. You have to pick one.

Most people when they learn to shoot learn “front sight focus.” And front sight focus is exactly what it sounds like: the front sight post is what you focus on. You line your sights up with each other (equal height/equal light), and line that up with your target, with your focus on your front sight. With this sight picture your target will be blurry and your rear sights will be blurry, but you can still see the mass of your target well enough, and your rear sights well enough to keep everything lined up.

There’s also “target focus,” which is basically the same except the target is in focus and both your sights are blurry. The people who prefer target focus tend to be more experienced shooters who have already developed good enough muscle memory, and are comfortable enough with their weapon, that they don’t need to spend much of their attention maintaining EH/EL.

You can shoot target focused, or you can shoot front sight focused, but you can’t do both. The appeal of red dot sights is that they kind of flatten all of that out. They make it easy to look at your target normally with both eyes open. You put the optic up in front of your dominant eye, and now there’s a dot in your regular field of vision showing you where the bullet will go. You don’t need to direct your focus to the dot, you don’t need to be tempted to close an eye for a clearer sight picture, you don’t need to line up a bunch of posts. The dot is just there. It really is like having a cheat code for aiming.

Well, regardless of how good your sights are, it’s really hard to shoot straight while you’re rolling around on the ground like a doofus.

They’re becoming a lot more common. A lot of police departments didn’t or don’t allow them. Attitudes are changing fairly quickly, but there are a lot of old-timer gun people (including some who write policy for police departments) who see red dot sights as a gimmick, the same way weapon mounted lasers were in the 80s and 90s, or as a crutch to compensate for poor training.

They do have a couple of legit drawbacks like the possibility of the battery dying or the slim chance some part of the electronics might eventually break under force of the action cycling. And that’s why you’ll usually see guns with red dot optics having backup iron sights that co-witness with their dot. Also, a lot of pistol optics are open emitter designs which means, for people like cops who open carry, the optic is exposed to the weather and can collect rain, snow, or debris on the glass or between the glass and the emitter.

More and more departments are beginning to allow them though. Despite their drawbacks it’s like having a cheat code for aiming. With traditional iron sights your eyes can either focus on your target or on your front sight, but not both. With red dot sights, you put the window on the target and put the dot where you want the bullet to go. You get to see your sight and your target in focus at the same time, and it’s easier to keep both eyes open while you’re shooting. So as these optics become more proven and “battle tested,” more departments are starting to feel like the benefits outweigh the drawbacks.

It’s a cartoon about a boy who is very stretchy because he ate a magic fruit who is determined to become the king of all pirates. To do that he has to have fistfights with other people who ate magic fruits which gave them different powers. Everyone shouts out the name of their special moves during the fights. There is a lot of shouting in general.

I don’t know who hurt this guy, but it sounds like we’re only a couple more low-effort math jokes away from hearing a rant about the Jews, and how the woke mindvirus is destroying America.

Student: “Hey, a shortcut! Let me first just walk around the long way so I can measure the length of the other two sides, multiply those lengths by themselves, add them together, and find out how much extra walking I’ve saved myself by taking the shortcut. Boy, this shortcut sure is saving me a lot of effort. Hooray Pythagoras!”

And all cake is comprised of at least three toast layers.

At the time? Practically everybody. She got absolutely slaughtered in the media, and it went on for years.

Nah, I hired an electrician to handle all that for me. Now if I want electricity all I have to do is stick a plug in a socket, or flip a switch. It’s way more convenient.

Sure, let’s all hustle like crackheads:

“Oh, your job isn’t paying enough? Well, have you tried stealing from your family? Your grandma has a social security check coming, right? Oh, your family doesn’t talk to you anymore, huh? Well have you tried selling your neighbor’s car stereo? What about his propane grill? How about stealing tube socks from Walmart and trying to sell those on the street to anyone who walks by? Still not cutting it, huh? I don’t know man, maybe it’s time to try sucking some dicks.”

These memes seem a lot less clever if you’ve ever been close to someone whose life got snowed under by addiction, or lived in a neighborhood that has a crack problem. Seeing real crackheads really hustling is pretty fucking bleak. They’re not getting ahead. They’re not winning. They’re burning everything with even a shred of value to service their addiction, including family and personal relationships.

I don’t know, maybe it’s a very apt metaphor for capitalism, and what our capitalist system expects of us, but I have no desire to trade the people and things that make my life bearable just so I can brag about having a couple extra dollars in the bank.

The guy to the right of Saddam is Eric Harris, the other Columbine shooter, and Adam Lanza, the Sandy Hook shooter.

Now I’m imagining Scruffy as Zorg.

I used to have this idea of shady lobbyists skulking around Washington with big bags of money, trying to entice wayward congresspeople and lure them to the dark side. Then a friend of mine did a short internship in the office of a congressman, and I found out it’s actually very much the other way around.

You’d think a congressperson spends most of their time reading, writing, debating, and voting on the laws on which the country is run. That’s their job description. That’s what we’re taught in school that they do. But what they actually spend most of their time doing is cold-calling people and soliciting donations. So if you define their job by what they spend the largest amount of time doing, your congressperson and your senators’ job to beg for money so they can keep their job. There’s a big call center just off the Capitol grounds, and as soon as the session at the Capitol ends they all walk over to the call center, plop down in their cubicle, and spend the rest of the day calling past and potential donors.

But a principled politician could just choose not to participate, right? Maybe, but even if you could self-fund your own campaigns, you still have to get out and earn for your party. Having the support of your party is contingent on hitting predetermined fundraising metrics based on the population, demographics, and economics of your constituency. If you don’t hit those metrics you might suddenly find that it’s tough to find support for your legislation. It’s the same in either party.

It was one of the most disappointing things I ever learned about how our country works. The corruption isn’t just baked into the system, it’s all but mandatory. And this was like 25 years ago, before Citizens United. I can’t imagine it has gotten any better since then.

I don’t think it’s from anything, but it has kind of a similar look to Robby the Robot from Forbidden Planet, so maybe that’s why it looks familiar.