The prequel to the original gritty, morally ambiguous First Blood, or to the Reagan-era commercial blockbusters which made a messed-up veteran into an anticommunist superhero?

* or being aware that their privileged place in the social order is built on the legacy of slavery, and desperate to preempt the bill coming due

But can it make a damn fine cup of coffee?

Or a low-end version of ortolan

There was a guy who was jailed at Dubai Airport because he had eaten a poppy-seed bagel at Heathrow some 8 hours earlier.

Go to mullvad.net and make an account. It’s a 16-digit number, and you’re never asked for personal information. There’s no credit on it, but you can pay with a card, crypto if you do that sort of thing, or by sending some banknotes in the post to the company along with the account number to top up.

Australia may be a better bet. It preserves the culturally ingrained assumption that each electorate has one MP (at least in the main chamber of parliament), though these are elected using STV preferential voting. (There is an upper house which is proportionally elected per state, though it acts as a house of review, much like the Lords.) You also have compulsory voting (or at least showing up at a polling place or having a good excuse), which makes it harder for parties to win by riling up highly motivated fringe groups.

The “pepe” being green is the tell

Possibly a case of a stopped clock being right twice a day.

On the face of it, this falls foul of numerous anti-bribery laws and regulations of the sort employees of companies such as Apple are required to do tests on annually. (If you ever so much as worked as a mail clerk at a large company, you will have clicked through multiple-choice tests driving home that, should you somehow find yourself in a position of trading a bottle of champagne or some Superbowl tickets for a multi-million-dollar contract in some exotic foreign land, that sort of thing is absolutely not on, and will cost you your job if not federal prison time.)

On the other hand, those rules were drafted back when America saw itself as qualitatively above the sordid corruption that less fortunate nations were mired in. Those days are as far gone as the drag clubs of Weimar Berlin.

Much in the way that conservatism is the real punk rock and there’s nothing more rebellious than saying no to drugs, obeying your parents and following Jesus, the unjust, tyrannical law the outlaws justifiably defy is that laid down by the blue-haired urban elites, things like pronouns, prohibitions on slurs, empathy and so on. As for “the law”, well, the constitutional sheriff’s part of the resistance, as are the ICE goons.

LOL

Every dictatorship gets its Horst Wessel.

In a few years’ time there’ll probably be a military base or warship or something named after Big Balls.

Weird fetish for a non-mammal to have, but to each their own

Mastodon is the German nudist beach of social media. There’s a strong sense of camaraderie, but the average age is somewhere north of 50, and people under 40 instinctively cringe when they hear about it.

Also, onomatopoeic.

A generation earlier and the RSL would have been pig-biting mad at this. (Which is probably why Japan wasn’t considered as a supplier of submarines.)

Technically, if there are no more elections, he won’t be running.

Dessau has been on my bucket list for a while, because of the Bauhaus site. Though, having read this, maybe that window has closed.

Client Liaison, if you extend your definition of funk to 80s Minneapolis boogie groove.