“I don’t hide from that. I was certainly skeptical of Donald Trump in 2016, but President Trump was a great president and he changed my mind. I think he changed the minds of a lot of Americans,” Vance told Fox’s Sean Hannity in a friendly interview

Translation: I was against him before I was for him, now that I’ll be the number 2!

Oopsies! My bad! Tihi.

Also, she should get over it.

Isn’t that what he said about the shooting in Perry, Iowa?

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/trump-tells-supporters-get-iowa-school-shooting-move-forward-rcna132610

OK fine, we are mid-neocolonial. Accepted.

Do we have any reason to believe there’s giant blocks of pure, rare metals on the moon or asteroids?

So far there’s no evidence to the contrary. Speculative interest says “keep digging, there’s bound to be one out there” among the rocky asteroids. Heck, even “comet water might” bring a price, given trends.

There’s no brown people on the moon you can give a dictator weapons to in exchange for keeping the people selling their labor and resources for peanuts.

If you think the next wave of neocolonialism wouldn’t consider indentured servitude and/or conscription, well… I guess we shall see. You don’t need indigenous people, just poors.

Edit: …when you can just turn off their air.

Lemma: Earth lodes are assumed to be limited supply.

Find a Smaug-scale lode of d-block transition metal like gold or palladium on the Moon or a near-Earth asteroid. Crash the market. Buy other metals at fire sale prices.

Also, own the silicon semiconductor market.

Profit.

We did neocolonialism. It was profitable. Nobody forgot that.

More, shelter.

There’s no atmosphere to attenuate hard radiation, so rock overhead is the next best thing.

There’s no gravity to contain an atmosphere, and domes are expensive and time consuming to build. Meanwhile the crews are exposed to radiation.

There’s nothing but regolith on the surface of the moon-- finely powdered rock of unknown (and likely poor) assay for vital ores and minerals useful to bootstrap a colony.

A cave provides shelter, more assay-ably dense ore resources, potentially water in the form of subsurface ice, and potentially a vitrable (melted, glassified rock) cavity to contain a viable, pressurized atmosphere on the quick.

A cave on the moon is a find. Given the potential for neocolonialism in the next decade or three, it’s a boon for whatever program discovers one.

edit: typos

Oh you… 🤣

I don’t think the episode changed either of our votes, do you?

The universe might have imploded from the sudden imbalance between mass and un-mass (the opposing axis of the “dark matter” posit). We might count ourselves lucky ¹.

1. For values of lucky exceeding 10^-20

Maybe, Texas, don’t elect these kinds of assholes, yeah?

I’ve never known Texas to back down from a fight it couldn’t win.

His Russian husband is certainly toxic.

The moderate pivot is early this year. 🤔

Isn’t this like the second Iranian warship to be mysteriously disabled this week?

Abbott rolls out as Beryl rolls in.

Someone, please think of the comedy!

Totally a collaborator with P2025.

What a cock-goblin.

Oh, they wrote it. They damned well wrote it. Now they deny it, and those are the lies I’m accusing them for.

Lies. All lies.

Haven’t we seen this film once already?

Oh! I thought “daylight savings” was another US-only thing like our Freedom units and our slobbering worship of guns.

It’s 18 minutes to Monday in London, as I write this