Letter from Charles Darwin to Asa Gray (22nd May 1860)

With respect to the theological view of the question; this is always painful to me.— I am bewildered.— I had no intention to write atheistically. But I own that I cannot see, as plainly as others do, & as I shd wish to do, evidence of design & beneficence on all sides of us. There seems to me too much misery in the world. I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent & omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidæ with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars, or that a cat should play with mice.

Source

Lasagne - I got layers.

Oh boy…

Back in the day you would have asked for a flattop.

You could always save a picture to your phone and then ask them to do that. They’ll probably still ask if the length is alright but it’s up to you to instruct them from there.

A site-blocking law would let copyright owners “request, in court, that Internet service providers block access to websites dedicated to sharing illegal, stolen content,” he said. Rivkin claimed that in the US, piracy “steals hundreds of thousands of jobs from workers and tens of billions of dollars from our economy rich people’s yacht money, including more than one billion in theatrical ticket sales.”

Probably not, but they’d definitely patent the method.

Dell are shit. It was a good day when the last Dell in the family was switched out for Macs.*

*I don’t like Macs either but I could plausibly refuse to support them on the basis that I didn’t know how they worked and the hardware is all locked down.

I read the translation of Stefan Aust’s book on the Baader-Meinhof and he covers the Rudy Dutschke shooting and also the bit where a Springer editorial praised Savak for beating up students protesting the Shah’s visit to Germany. Called them something like ‘Jubilant Iranians’ if I recall correctly.

Like we do any better without Springer in the Anglosphere. If it’s not Murdoch metastasising everywhere it’s one of the Bannon/Koch Foundation appendages.

Yes, I suppose what I ought to have said is that for people with an already elevated risk of developing schizophrenia cannabis could be the trigger. Thank you for this well written summary though.

No, but here he is trotting out the line about Schizophrenia, which is a real risk, but is dwarfed in its societal impact by the downsides of alcohol. I don’t expect he’s said anything at all publicly about the impacts of that though, which would suggest that he’s the talking head that the German press always contact for a negative comment about cannabis every time it hits the news. Especially as this is reported by Die Welt which is an Axel Springer publication.

Probably not as selectively stupid as Thomas Fischbach.

“Chronic cannabis use makes you stupid, to put it bluntly, and can also cause psychosis,” Thomas Fischbach, president of a German federation of doctors for children and adolescents (BVKJ), told the Die Welt newspaper.

Meanwhile, at Oktoberfest…

The drunken debauchery often leads to fights, aggressive behavior, and bierleichen — so-called “beer corpses,” which is what locals call the many passed out drunks lying on the hill behind the tents.

Source

This is just monetising incels, isn’t it?

Cheetara.

Nah I think he meant to say ‘total victory’ as in:

Do you believe with the Führer and us in the final total victory of the German people?

Apparently he’s referencing Goebbels’s Sportpalast speech.

Mozilla throwing the following error:

Secure Connection Failed

An error occurred during a connection to pointieststick.com. The OCSP response does not include a status for the certificate being verified.

Error code: MOZILLA_PKIX_ERROR_OCSP_RESPONSE_FOR_CERT_MISSING

The page you are trying to view cannot be shown because the authenticity of the received data could not be verified. Please contact the web site owners to inform them of this problem.

Edit: this is now a working link for me.

I started of on Linux Mint, had a couple of niggles with it so I thought ‘let’s be a spoony and get Ubuntu.’ Got on pretty well with Ubuntu but there were a few minor things about Gnome I didn’t like. I’m now on Kubuntu and it’s the Goldilocks zone for me. It’s been about 18 months now since I abandoned Windows 7.

Are they slowing down to let the moose lick the car or so as not to run into the damn thing?

I’m a pasty, old, white man and even I’ve got a half-full can of ghee in the fridge. I know you don’t have to keep it in the fridge but I’m short of cupboard space.