Maturin

Yeah, subsurface helium would probably have been a better example for this

What do you think the first several hundreds of millions of years were like before they had Doritos?

To be fair, some of them do have a huge supply of lignite (/s except those who are already feverishly mining it)

...and those 2 or 3 years were 35 years ago

Fair. Your way is certainly more epic.

Haven’t you basically done everything needed to escape the solar system by the time you do the burn to turn back again?

don’t even bother counting.

Wish I had know this tip earlier. Got to five thousand something, lost count and had to start over.

Topology nightmare snake #2

Biden has actually been this openly ghoulish for a half a century at this point. Look for that quote from him on the senate floor in the 80s talking about the massacres in Lebanon.

Not saying Vonnegut couldn't have done better historical research, but Slaughterhouse 5 was not intended as historical analysis and is much more a psychological novel about PTSD and the effects of war on the mind of someone who lived through the brutality taken from his personal experience of being a POW during the Dresden bombing. He picks up what amounts to an early pop-history American source and doesn't really critically analyze it - just takes at face value its account of the event that he mostly focuses on from his personal, micro-perspective. I don't know if later in life he was confronted with more accurate accounts of the Dresden bombing and whether he commented on the inaccuracy of his books, but you can understand the literary appeal to a surviver of the Dresden bombing being presented with an official history that confirms what he emotionally felt while in the middle of it. He even presents it that way in the first chapter - describing himself and his army buddy as basically ignorant to the macro history of the event until they crack open a book decades later that describes it that way. When the "author" of the referenced book appears in the story itself, he is presented as one of the most deplorable characters confronted in the book. Essentially a bloodthirsty maniac that is both unapologetic while being aware that his conclusions are unsupportable (feeling the need to get confirmation of his statements of belief from a person that he does not even acknowledge to be conscious or cognizant). All that is to say, if the only thing one takes from Slaughterhouse 5 was that it is "bad history" and somehow nazi-aplogia for exaggerating the extent of death in Dresden, or worse, if someone avoids the book altogether because of the accusation, they are really missing out.

🌎🧑‍🚀🔫👨‍🚀

I see what you mean. Most of my exposure to the hypothesis (other than the aforementioned Zionist tropes) is from Cold War era non-Zionist Jewish sources, and they really didn't deal too much with the Yiddish thing. I believe the idea of the constant movement of peoples, in those tellings, explained why they ended up north and west of Khazar land for the same reason the Magyars and others ended ups in similar places. The main up-shot of those sources, at least in my reading, kind of goes to your final point, but in a different way. The idea being that the peoples in the Steppe were always a fluid amalgam of people and there were home-grown Jewish influences there that became a cultural seed that developed in groups in the area that sought to neither ally with the Christian world to the west and what was developing into the Persian/other empires and Muslim world to the east. So that reading of it goes that essentially no one has mythic ancestors in any one place because the version of history during any time period where one would posit a homogenous genetic group stayed "pure" from others is, at least with respect to Eurasian and African history, false. As those writers point out from the genetic (albeit, genetics as they existed a few decades ago) perspective, Jews generally are more genetically similar to the populations they live with than Jews from disparate places have genetic commonality with each other. I definitely agree none of this matters with respect to the current genocide of the Palestinians, but the modern politics overshadow the almost mundane aspect that I am more curious about regarding the movement and interactions of peoples from Eastern Europe to Central Asia prior to and after the Rus came into the picture.