Sebastian Tombs 🥧 @pieist@qoto.org

#NATO now has legitimate cause to defend all ports at the mouth of the #Danube. This is a vital corridor essential to trade, livelihoods, the safety and economic well-being of #Europe. #Russia attacking it is NOT just #Ukraine's problem: it is manifestly a direct attack on Europe.

To put it another way, it's absurd to try to re-terraform the Earth while still continuing to venusform it with all our might.

What are all these complaints I keep hearing about a culture of imp unity? I think imps should have united a long time ago. Strength in numbers and all that.

Like Rupert Murdoch, I'm a great believer that journalism should be "#FairAndBalanced". Which is why I think when someone interviews Donald Trump, they should then walk around to his backside and interview that end of him as well. Then readers/viewers can decide for themselves which is more sane, rational, articulate and in touch with the facts.

I really need to work on my irony. I've just had two people I thought fairly well of unfollow me because they thought I was serious.

Look, it may be technically renewable but that doesn't mean you should run your 4WD pickup on refined beef tallow, mmmmkay?

So the CW of the usual cohort of maniacs is that "Russell Brand was speaking truth to power so they have to tear him down." Now I'm scratching my head trying to work out what truths Jimmy Savile was speaking to power.

But did you see what Hungary was wearing in 1956? And those scandalous outfits on Poland in 1939! Honestly they were asking for it

Oh yeah? Well I'll see your hard data and raise you this vague impression that I'm under!

#Ukraine isn't just defending itself. It's defending everyone else.

https://www.gov.uk/government/news/new-intelligence-shows-russias-targeting-of-a-cargo-ship

I wonder if telemarketers ever call in sick. I mean, you know the management response has got to be be, "look, if you can make this call you can make any call. Get to work."

This morning we noticed the cat's water bowl on the back deck was full of dirt. This usually means that a raccoon has been by.

We have cams on the front and back door. Checked the footage. At 11.40 pm Stanley the neighborhood cat was asleep on our front porch. Suddenly he woke, sat up on high alert and began peering at something. Then he got up and left.

He walked up onto the back deck a few moments later and took up a position by the back door. Within a minute a big raccoon, easily three times Stanley's size, came up the steps. Found Stanley's water bowl, washed his li'l raccoon hands in it as they always do. Then he started accross the deck toward the back door. Stanley rose up and hissed. Raccoon backed away, went back down the steps.

Stanley waited a minute, then walked back up the driveway and round to the front porch and went back to sleep on the chair we leave out for him.

Stanley's a remarkable cat in many ways. He's not even ours, we just accommodate him because, like everyone on our block, we think the world of him.

In the middle of a download, it's going at a leisurely 40MB/s, and I just flashed on the fact that the first hard drive I ever owned, a 5.25" Seagate 20MB in a 4.77MHz IBM PC clone, would have completely filled up in 1/2 sec*. It's right up there with the fact that you can get a cheap storage device smaller than your little fingernail that holds 50,000 times as much.

(*If of course, it had been capable of writing that quickly, which of course it wouldn't.)

When you land on the MIT Technology Review page, you get not less than 3 simultaneous popups overlaid on the page, each implemented in a different way by a different subsystem for a different purpose. For some reason I find this very amusing.