Joel

80s singer Thomas Dolby on raising queer kids: "the eldest is trans, the middle is a lesbian, and the youngest is a drummer"

The 3 genders

Glad we're going into summer. Glad we've got a wood-burning stove. Decidedly not glad our regular stove/boiler runs exclusively on oil

"Simply be Dumas, skill issue" is perhaps not useful writing advice however

Han Solo saying "It's the ship that made the Straits of Hormuz in 12 parsecs"

It was becoming so by the Third Century, post- Edict of Caracalla. Anthony Kaldellis has done a fair bit of work on this.

Of course, the identity of a 3rd-century Anatolian who was in the Roman army probably really does resolve to simply "Roman"

And if the issue is he wasn't from modern England (and never visited)... well, that's true of most national patron saints. France, Wales and Ireland are broadly outliers here!

St. George being 'Turkish' is a fascinating bit of historical illiteracy you encounter all the time on the lib-left. St. George likely never met a Turk! They were hundreds of years and several steppe migration waves away from Anatolia!

Once again, the British electorate finds itself woefully out of touch with the Conservative Party and must apologise.

When I said 'Kemi Badenoch is so partisan, under her the Tories would oppose puppies and kittens if Labour said something nice about them', I didn't mean it literally.

Hehe fluffy

“how about we send the kurds to cuba” - the greatest thread in the history of CIA, locked by the national security advisor after 12,239 pages of heated debate

The publishing industry's lack of confidence in authors and its own ability to create careers for them is pathetic and, in the end, self-defeating.

You've seen me liveblogging The Expanse S1, but it's striking just how much padding that has without ever *feeling* slow.

But that's a deeper world and an entirely adult cast; they can *afford* to stretch what's there because the material can bear it

Arguably *possible* in like the 1810s or so. But strikes me as unlikely

To be clear I love a tricorne. But it's mostly an 18th-century look

Big tricorne or cocked hats, too

Always interesting that modern artists so comm9nly render Grainne Ní Mhaille in 1710s clothing, brandishing a flintlock and a cutlass. We have one image of "pirate" and will shove anyone into that box

I've already got a "cloud missile" as a kind of smokescreen so that couod fit

Spray a mass of dense fluid? Enough to get a bit of a shadow, not enough to actually damage a ship going through it?

Okay, *now* I'm thinking about how you'd make a decoy project a radar shadow

Oh good, I get to use this one again

You could probably do a short stopgap of a local occupation but a) extrmely hard, guaranteed losses, very risky, b) no political will, c) still relies on Iran tapoing out at some point because d) only helps thin strikes out, doesn't hard-stop them

The United States, had it the will, could absolutely, over the course of years, conquer Iran. It has a population several times that of Iran's, and could build production capacity to outfit millions of conscript troops.

It does not have the political will for that kind of war (nor should it)

Well yes, that's what I meant by 'political constraint'

grok how do you open the strait of hormuz

grok how do you clear mines

no grok I don’t mean the game

In this case you're entirely right

(And again the problem is "what precisely is the political aim of the war, and can the US Military achieve it in the political constraints of Trump 2", too which the answers are "??????" and "lmao", respectively)

Reopening Hormuz not an insoluble problem in military terms - simply very difficult and requiring a willingness to take sharp losses and out boots on the ground. Which is exactly what the US has no political will for.