Okay, well I definitely wondered what the hell the star of Gremlins and Drop Dead Fred was getting up to.

If you drive from the east coast to the midwest and back, as I have, you’ll get a sense of how weirdly huge the United States is. There comes a point where your primitive monkey brain is confused that people still speak the same language.

I’m familiar with all of the technology involved, but I’m not sure about the applications you’re describing.

With a Have-A-Heart, the specific goal is live capture and release. There is no killing involved. The animal might be properly freaked out at the experience of being trapped, but that is specifically so as to permit an animal’s live relocation.

With a bolt gun, it’s meant to be used in a slaughterhouse scenario, which is a whole moral discussion of its own, but at bare minimum one wants the animals to be kept as calm as possible until the bolt gun is applied, because stressed out meat tastes worse than calm and placid up until the moment of death.

With hunting, the goal is to kill the target as cleanly as possible, preferably with a single bullet. That’s the Scenario A I’m describing above.

If one were hunting an animal with the intent of killing it, then a trap, followed by a knife or bolt gun, would maximize the terror felt by the animal to be killed. Sure, one may be putting less lead out in the environment, but at the cost of putting the animal through… almost the most appalling experience of death possible, with the admitted exception of a poorly-aimed bullet or arrow, followed by a wounded flight through the woods and slowly bleeding out.

So… if one’s absolute maximum goal is to reduce environmental lead, yes, that is one way to do it, but the moral implications of that method seem pretty rough.

Scenario A: You’re minding your own business, when a bullet passes through your heart/lungs and you’re dead in seconds.

Scenario B: You get caught in a trap and wait for hours for an ape with a knife or a bolt gun to come along and finish the job.

Honestly, if I were an animal, I’d prefer Scenario A.

Holy shit, I had no idea Raymond Cocteau was this before he was Raymond Cocteau. That’s total genius casting.

Comrade, I rented that movie from a locally-owned VHS rental shop that used physical membership cards.

Sure it’s a dystopia, but it’s a dystopia where they solved too many problems. John Spartan gets into a high speed car crash and his car instantly fills up with safety foam and he’s completely unharmed. The police force is ethnically and gender diverse. Guns are museum pieces. The cops don’t know HOW to assault somebody.

Sure they’ve killed a large amount of choice, and the guy in charge of it all seems to be determined to secure even more power for himself because of course he’s a sociopath with Mr. Rogers’ speech patterns, but all told I’d much rather live in the Demolition Man future than Judge Dredd or Death Race 2000.

If the three sea shells discourse isn’t a stand-in for 90s Americans’ anxiety about bidets then I don’t know what is.

See also: A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder

If an angry mob had closed a loophole around Richard Nixon’s neck after he received his pardon, we probably wouldn’t be in the mess we’re in today.

This was why I was fucking bummed when Biden got into the Democratic primary in '19. Name recognition >>> Younger, better options.

“Gambling and crypto” reminds me of when I was in DARE and they would refer to “drugs, alcohol, and tobacco,” and I thought “aren’t those all drugs?”

When the righteous prosper, the city rejoices; when the wicked perish, there are shouts of joy.

Proverbs 11:10

“Do you have money?”

“Yeah.”

“Right this way, you exploitable rube!”

Consent and Tea

There’s like a Zach Braff, Joel Osteen, Ray Romano continuum of vaguely odd-looking dudes.