My pupper has currently gone to great effort to start the day by lying in between me and my wife in the bed so that she can be touching us both as she sleeps.

15/10, she couldn’t be doing a better job.

Public opinion always matters. Even kings needed their people on their side; why do you think they made up all that divine right bullshit and had the churches preach it so much?

Every country has the government that a sufficient number of people are willing to tolerate. Tyranny can only tip the scales, it cannot change the game. If a populace doesn’t want to be ruled, it cannot be ruled. That’s why fascism relies so heavily on the imposition of a hierarchy; because the people who aren’t at the bottom will support the system that gives them someone else to tread on, while the rich and the powerful live it up at the top. But you always need to keep a significant sector of the population on your side. There always has to be an in group who benefit enough from the government to want to keep it.

Governments end when enough people want them to end. Democracy is just a way of doing it politely.

Hmm… I’m not actually seeing anything here that indicates an immediate plan to recognize Palestine as a state. Canada has been a supporter of a two state solution for a long time, but that’s only a commitment to working towards Palestine becoming a state, it doesn’t immediately imply that they’ll follow in France’s steps and immediately recognize Palestine as a state. The article offers no further evidence for the claim.

The problem, as always, is that parents don’t want to put the work into educating their children, they want the government to wave a magic wand and make the problem go away. And that’s what gets you half assed solutions like this.

I have to support a remote client that uses Starlink. It’s a nightmare. We can deal with slow connections, we can deal with bad ping, but with Starlink what we get is the entire connection dropping every minute or so, and coming back up a short while later. It’s unbelievably bad.

Pardoning Maxwell would be an insanely bad idea. The MAGA world love two things more than anything else; conspiracy theories, and imagining themselves in an endless war against a cabal of powerful pedophiles.

Maxwell directly aided and abetted one of those powerful pedophiles. To MAGA, there is no possible justification for pardoning her. It would be tantamount to a full admission from Trump, and it would send their conspiracy addled minds into overdrive. At best (for him), they’d wonder what kind of leverage she has over Trump in order to buy herself a pardon. If not evidence of pedophilia, then surely something else, right?

Is Maxwell angling for a pardon? Almost certainly. But giving her one would be a suicidal move for the administration right now.