I'm not sure why I made this connection, but the joke about Obote implicating Amin using a picture which implicates himself as well brings to mind L. Ron Hubbard's later insistence that he'd been spying on the Agape Lodge, and stealing Parsons' money (and wife) was on orders from J. Edgar Hoover.

The quote about fluorine-based rocket fuels is from "Ignition!" by John Drury Clark. Several years ago Scott Manley did a hilarious video about the most dangerous fuels NASA had considered in the 1960s and 1970s, by way of reviewing that book.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=_wLk...

Vis a vis 'Israel is fine, really', I can't help but wonder how many Israeli leaders have wondered *why* so many avowedly anti-semitic Evangelical Christians are eager to support a country which they believe had to be first re-established, then destroyed again, in order for the Apocalypse to come...

Would that last set of symptoms indicate that the medicine was... tainted?

<conspiracy-theory>Are you including the ex-KGB agent who is currently living in the White House under the assumed name of the man he killed in 1977?</conspiracy-theory>

OK, fair enough. I was just wondering if that was considered before. Thank you.

Romans sacrificed war captives at the end of a triumph, Americans sacrifice an effigy of Bart Simpson in much the same way.

I've been looking for it for some time now, and while I have found the lyrics on a mirror of an old Geocities page, I can't find a recording of the song itself.

It's a ridiculous idea, far too absurd a thing to do even for Trump. I don't believe it for a moment, but once I thought of it, the idea has kept gnawing at me. Please tell me that I am crazy for coming up with this nonsense.

And before you ask, Venice and Genoa were republics, but they didn't have popular sovereignty; they were explicitly oligarchies. In both cases the republic was less a ruling body than a polite agreement between the noble families to fight with words rather than daggers. The Doge was just the umpire.

They knew very well, not never. Blame it on a dumbass attack, I guess.

The entire ethic of leadership inherent in Xtianity (and Judaism and Islam) is that leaders are, at best, regents appointed by God. The Divine Right of Kings is baked into the religions. You can't be a Xtian if you believe in republics, and you can't believe in democracy as a Xtian.

Far from being a Xtian nation, most of the Founding Fathers were Deists - they saw 'miracles' as being bad reporting of facts, and that faith-based religion would fade away, replaced by their expected Age of Reason. No one can read Jefferson, Franklin, or even Washington without see this.