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Cake day: April 27th, 2026

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  • Irish Examiner has a few more details.

    Written statements to the coroner’s court from Mr Warnick’s friend Gareth Kirwan said he had last seen him on the afternoon before and that he was “drunk and loud but not out of control”.

    Another man, Andrew Haire who lived in a tent with Mr Scanlon, said there was “a lot of drink and drugs involved”.

    He said both he and Mr Scanlon were chronic alcoholics, and all three men had consumed a lot of alcohol and drugs around the city centre the day before their bodies were found in the water.

    Autopsy results showed Alex Warnick had evidence of five times the legal driving limit for alcohol in his system and “toxic” benzodiazepine levels, as well as evidence of cocaine and methadone use.

    Coroner Clare Keane said those levels were not fatal on their own but would make an individual unsteady on their feet.

    While Mr Scanlon had consumed alcohol just above the drink driving limit and a benzodiazepine above a therapeutic level, there was also evidence of cocaine use.

    Alcohol and benzodiazepines together is a really nasty combination that amplifies the effects of both, making you act much more drunkenly and can cause respiratory depression which can have you stop breathing. Not the best condition to combine with going for a swim.

    I had a relative who died in shallow water in a lake, he was an fisherman for decades but slipped and bumped his head. Unconsciousness and water don’t go well together.







  • Beating prisoners with plastic pipes, forcing women to undress, ripping their hair out by hand and slicing off random patches with scissors while laughing, beating people in a tire, calling the women whores and interrupting praying Sunnis to tell them they deserve to burn, demanding prisoners to shout Assadist slogans, blasting A/C in the cold and cutting it in the heat, rescinding food if they took >3 min to eat, tossing water on prisoners are leaving them soaking wet for hours, not allowing use of the bathroom so women had to relieve themselves in their cells… how could you do all that and think, hm, our regime fell, this is a good time to move to the capital. Her buddies at the beauty salon even said a dude told them all he recognized her from the prison well in advance of her being detained, so she had a flashing red button indicating her past could catch up with her.

    Can’t help but agree with her victim Hiba when she said, “How dare she not flee Damascus?” The stupidity really boggles the mind.









  • They are extremely overpopulated in much of the US, in part because most of the natural predators capable of keeping their numbers down have been killed off and there has been a huge artificial increase in field/forest interfaces where they thrive. Huge amounts of starving deer abound and descend on diminishing native vegetation with a voracious appetite while generally ignoring weird invasive foreign plants. Many native plant gardeners are vexed by their tendency to gnaw native plants, trees and shrubs to death unless those are caged in and some got a taste for venison out of revenge haha.

    Would be cool if we could re-introduce red wolves and the like to keep a lid on the deer without like half of the predators ending up shot or run over


  • People would love to live in a state with Mediterranean climate mostly year-round regardless of subsidence. You can say it would reduce agricultural jobs if charging for unsustainable water use put down farms dependent on it and that would make California less attractive economically. But even assuming the entire hulk of California agriculture was destroyed, that’s in the low single digit percentage of the state’s economic activity.

    It’s not just a matter of that the soil went down. The water was extracted from a matrix of soil and water, and the soil sinks because the matrix of soil and air no longer stands up to the weight above it and gets compacted down. Less voids in the soil means that when rain comes in, instead of seeping down and recharging aquifers it piles up on the surface in sheets that then race down to lower elevations in floods that sweep away whatever is in their path. And with enough extraction and lessened recharge eventually the wells stop working and force the issue. Everyone suffers from natural disasters for the benefit of a few who just so happened to get water rights from early settlement.


  • ~30 ft subsidence at a California farm from extraction of the groundwater. Agricultural use is immense and wipes out historic rivers, lakes, even seas and slowly replenished groundwater reserves and something like 40% of water used is wasted because the sun just evaporates it before it used by the crops.

    Everyone (agricultural or data center) would be far less wasteful if they had to at least pay for the true value of the water they’re extracting in their local area, i.e. a lot more if it’s scarcer/from slowly replenishing sources. Though that would probably result in a lot of economic relocation to wetter areas as many business models in dry areas become unviable.





  • Why do you expect it to fall? Amish and Haredi Jews intentionally stay at arms length from wider society. They maintain strict social pressures that encourage their members to focus on children and discourage the dizzying alternative uses for time socially available to Catholics and the wider US population. Certainly in Israel the Haredi growth rate is remaining stable and has taken them from a marginal groups of a few tens of thousands up to one and a half million, 14% of the population.

    Anyway say they do defy their customs and assimilate and follow suit, then other currently marginal groups that do find some way to keep birth rates propped up over time or raise them will eventually inherit the world. Not in our lifetime to be sure.