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yaqdum

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Everything posted by yaqdum

  1. last one wasn't.
  2. mostly i was tongue in chic, but there may be a fleck of truth behind it. we do accept way too much crap in the service of our sports addictions. i can't think that's good for us as hominids.
  3. something else to keep in mind is the nov event. if the results are surprising, that should impact the positions of senators who hope to continue their professional representation careers. there may be some apparent growth of backbone and sense of responsibility.
  4. football. that's what is doing us in. we've learned to accept despicable behavior and outright rot in our colleges and universities and that is spilling into the rest of our lives.
  5. totally agree. i said back on the old board under my previous moniker that i have long held the opinion that trickle-down fucks should win and hold office long enough for even the stupid to gain some understanding of what that means. this situation now is awful but it has the potential to be a cure for some very sick people who aren't beyond redemption. just those people waking up would augment the more wise enough to point this nation in the right direction. piss (tape or no tape) on the incorrigible. don't need them and their numbers make them not matter.
  6. i'm not sure about four but i see your point. i''ll be quiet now.
  7. i just had a look at the location where this occurred and think maybe i have something to add. here's the streetview. the thing to note here is the absence of people who aren't white. people who have never lived up north don't have an appreciation for northern racism. it's pernicious and therefore subtle. i haven't read the detail and also realize the whole episode can turn on learning additional insight that is probably not available at this point. what i do know is my experiences living up north taught me how to read the racism there. looking at the streetview scene and using goog's wayback machine to look back in time, i couldn't see a non-white face until i got back to 2011. back then the site was a cleaners, not a bad-coffee joint. we, down here, don't realize how segregated the northern cities are. it isn't official and isn't recognized up there. it just is. simply those folks being in an all-white area is an offense, and i'm sure the offenders here knew it. it was a minor-league version of the lady who refused to go to the back of the bus. edit: adden-dumb. i looked again at the streetview i just posted and realize i made a mistake. there is one woman on the street who may be non-white but the google smear makes it not clear whether or not. if african, she is light-skinned. but well down one of the streets i just found a man who is clearly african. that doesn't change my opinion one bit, but i erred in not noticing that. what isn't wrong is my understanding of the north. i used to see a cop having pulled over a car in a all-white neighborhood and would make a guess regarding the age of the black person driving. when i say, all-white, by the way, i mean all white except the one or two black families who live there who are ordained to be the pets of the neighborhood. like sammy davis, they are there to show how not-racist the neighborhood is. any non-pets are one their own.
  8. we aren't exactly balanced as species go, you know.
  9. Trump really is driving people crazy why is he driving when most of us can walk there?
  10. can't disagree with that.
  11. memento mori was the latin reminder that we all must die. funerary architecture of old often included skulls and other such reminders. memento mori photography was a victorian practice of post-mortem photography, often with the goal to deceive that the departed was being photographed still alive. sometimes families would lose a child, say, and realize there was no photo to remind of how the child looked. they might dress up a grim brother or sister to stand with the propped and posed child and the photographer would later try to draw eyes on the departed. sometimes that didn't come out very well.
  12. that's kind of where i am. i'm certainly not going to say there is or is not an overarching principle, say, but i'm very uncomfortable with humanizing such a concept. it's perfectly reasonable to think the whole shebang is just an incident involving some stuff floating around, but what bothers me about that is explaining coincidence. i've encountered a staggering number of coincident occurrences that defy logic. at some point i have to say i just don't know and am perfectly happy to say so.
  13. that is a staggering disparity, for sure, but there's another interesting number that not immediately obvious, and that's the rate of conviction vs indictment. in other words, how likely were indictments to be true and provable. for the dems the rate was one in three while the gop tripped along at very near the rate of three convictions for every four indictments. suggestion there might be that prosecutors were trigger-happy during dem administrations compared to gop. if so, that makes the other disparities stand out even more. even under a more intense looking glass, the success rate for finding provable dem wrongdoing was close to nothing.
  14. very interesting what you say. my mother lived way too long. way. i remember her saying that everyone she knew when she was young and vibrant was gone. all family. all friends. that's an awful feeling. like you are stuck in a place with people who don't share your memories and don't understand you. she would ask me why she was still here.
  15. that's interesting. if there is any sort of get-together on the occasion of my slipping out the back door, i would want it light. nothing need be said unless somebody cared to recall something stupid that i did. no clergy except in the role of attendee, if such were to be. song? maybe this, copyright willing. there's a lot of pathos in that.
  16. some of you guys are experiencing the awe of the unknown knowing that it will likely be many years before you get to that. try it my age. something like half the people i grew up with are gone. so am i frightened? not at all. i've done what i'm going to do. i've had that moment like we all know on a long plane ride when we feel them cut the power, and we know we're starting the long descent. i'm well into my descent. there's nothing to fear and there's no way to avoid it. it's a bit like parachuting. you just let go and go.
  17. mr carlin has something to say. edit: sorry had to finish it.
  18. oh, absolutely. i see two kinds of religion today. one formal and the other informal and personal. i'm really getting the impression that only one of those is really meaningful.
  19. i don't think the presidency is relevant. i think the behavior of religious people during this crisis is what may have impact going forward. it would be hard to characterize that behavior as pro-american. anti-american at the worst and laissez faire at the best might be the ticket there. if these youngsters coming up maintain the nascent civic interest they seem to be showing, i have to think the worthless posture of the church here is going to cut pretty deep among the leaders of that group. maybe.
  20. never in my long life have i looked askance at protestant faith like i do now.
  21. i certainly agree with what you say, but my interest is in what the youth do. we've served up two basic responses here from the religious-with-a-capital-r: 1) back the creeps in attacking the republic and 2) not get involved. neither speaks well of the health of organized religion. what message will the youth take from that?
  22. one of the most interesting things to look for in the fallout of this sorry mess is what happens to organized religion.
  23. i certainly know what loyalty means but i can't see how it's meaningful in this discussion.
  24. paul ryan was a sack of shit when he was a zygote.
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