I think you should vote for someone you believe in, rather than voting for someone who is not someone else

This would be the ideal situation, but for so long as we have first-past-the-post it's a fundamentally ineffective way to vote. Thanks to Duverger's law, unless one of the two big parties just so happens to coincide with your views then the best you can do is to vote against whichever of the big two you dislike most. "Big two" here depends on your constituency - it may not be Labour and the Conservatives locally, but it is true that virtually every constituency has at most two realistic options. Labour may not be very good, but if they're in power it's probably at minimum going to make this a better place for asylum seekers and trans people (or whoever the Tories would go after next), and Labour's voting record on the environment really is far better than the Conservatives' too.

They remastered the 2004/2005 Pandemic ones and apparently did a fucking terrible job of it

This can't be the whole story, otherwise we'd see places like Chile, Peru, and India competing too

a small sliver of Ukraine

"Oh poor little Putin only wants to steal the entire land area of Greece and the homes of eleven million people"

which voted to secede from Ukraine,

Ahh yes I too take referenda run by occupying militaries very seriously

Whether a Hitler comparison is valid or not, your take here fucking sucks

To be honest I'd be surprised if this was Russia. It's certainly not outside of Russia's capabilities, but at the end of the day they're just cables. Plenty of the Red Sea is right next to Houthi-controlled territory and not all that deep. Something like this is commercially available and easily capable of reaching the floor of the area near the Bab el-Mandeb that any cables from Europe to East Asia have to go through

I think part of the problem is the swinging temperatures as much as the actual cold. There are several different classifications of dzud, and the "iron dzud" in which heavy snowfall melts and then refreezes into a solid layer of ice seems to be what the article is describing. Obviously temperatures anywhere near -50 C are brutally cold regardless, but if everything is covered in a layer of ice then it doesn't even matter if the animals can keep warm because there's nothing they can get at to eat.

If this war was about having NATO on their doorstep, why is it an invasion of a non-NATO country twenty years after the first neighbours of Russia joined NATO? It's never seriously discussed because it's either a lie or unfathomably stupid, and whichever of those two it is doesn't much matter.

Just for a second, imagine you're a neutral country in eastern Europe. Russia has been fucking with Georgia and Moldova since the fall of the Soviet Union, and now it invades Ukraine for the second time within a decade. Russia has never touched a NATO country despite bordering several of them for literally decades. And then Russia acts all shocked when you say you want into NATO

Artist Prof. Sam Van Aken took this to the logical extreme with the Trees of 40 Fruit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree_of_40_Fruit

"A calzone could also be called a pizzussy"

This is pretty close to Petrov's account of his reasoning, plus that the early warning system only showed four or five missiles inbound and he expected a hypothetical American first strike to be way bigger

The Taiping Rebellion. Basically a Chinese guy claims to be the brother of Jesus and leads a pro-Christian rebellion against the Qing government that results in more deaths than the first world war

They're from a delightful blog (and now book) called the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows. It's a collection of neologisms with etymologies included, so yes they are made up but that's the point