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Mole

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Everything posted by Mole

  1. It seems like a pharmacy might have an inventory that commands a good price per volume and mass, although selling it may be riskier than selling some wet Playstations on Craigslist.
  2. Look who just got the gig running Taliban fundraising. Put some Benny Hill music over that and it would sell.
  3. The trivializing of death by evangelicals drives me nuts. The faith is built on a sacrificial death of a person who preached on laying down life for others. If death means nothing, then the foundations of the faith mean nothing. The self-sacrificial core beliefs in the teaching of Jesus and his sacrificial death mean nothing if there was no cost to that death. It’s one thing to take grieving comfort in “oh death, where is your sting;” it’s another thing to turn indifference to suffering and death — even happily spreading it — into an article of faith. Identity as a Christian has superseded identifying with the suffering of Christ. There’s a problem of education and a terrible culture here, but it’s also a spiritual sickness in the evangelical church.
  4. Back when the local one wasn't just drive though only, it was a good place to take a small kid -- decent enough food, good service, and a reasonably clean and air-conditioned playground.
  5. Last week I received an email that one of my students tested positive and would be in isolation. Usually they isolate for 10 days, but their isolation was only for 4 days. The reasoning was that the student had been experiencing symptoms for a week and a half so isolation could end early. My attendance policy is don’t come if you feel sick; just email me telling me you’re sick. I don’t want a doctor’s note or anything, just an email and no disease vector sitting in front of me. This isn’t even a hard class. It can be hard to get students to come to class, but give them COVID and they’re Mr. and Miss perfect attendance.
  6. Since the Clinton comparison was brought up, it wasn’t simply an affair. The President becoming involved with one of his interns is on some level coercive and not consensual. It’s not as egregious as the Trump stuff, but it wasn’t just stepping outside of his marriage.
  7. There’s a bit of grumbling whenever a thread gets moved to the cloak room, but as someone who would never otherwise click on a Cole Beasley thread or any Bills thread at all, I appreciate the mods for putting up the lunatic bat signal. I would have put it in help, lulz, or maybe even gambling, but politics works too.
  8. 1. You won’t find many sources more credible than Reuters. They can be wrong, but their reporting is likely pretty accurate. 2. Maybe a little pedantic, but “worst casualty of the US military in over a decade” and “deadliest day for American troops there in a decade” don’t really mean the same thing. Either statement could be worse depending. Reuters called it the deadliest day and limited it by geography (“there”). Casualty is a broader term beyond just death and of course that would also include anything from Iraq or elsewhere. Yes, it’s pedantic and it doesn’t change the overarching point of the statement that this terrible thing happened on his watch, but they’re still different things.
  9. When my family joined team COVID breakthrough last month, it was unnerving. The same part of my lizard brain that told me I’d grow an extra arm when I got my shots in March told me that we’d all waste away on ventilators in July. The rational part of my brain told me that thanks to the vaccine, it would be mild and would pass shortly. It did. We all felt run down for a few days and then we quickly got better. Take this seriously and protect yourself and others, but breakthroughs will happen. Try not to listen to your lizard brain if/when they do.
  10. That Reddit thread. Buy airtime on any and every media and just have some frank talk like that. That’s sobering stuff. I don’t know how healthcare workers can face that day after day with no end in sight.
  11. If we weren’t so completely culturally broken, this would be a moment of great national pride. It doesn’t have to negate the justified criticisms of leadership, but these past two weeks have been heroic. Reuters says 100,100 evacuated since August 14.
  12. I have no idea if he believes it. I just think it’s dumb.
  13. There’s a passage in Jim Bouton’s Ball Four, a great book about an aging and marginal baseball player hanging on in the big leagues. In the passage, he talks about having to act really mad after every loss even though it was just an act. He liked winning, but he didn’t see the point in throwing a tantrum after a loss. I feel the same way every time a president gives the tough talk to the bad guys. It feels so pointless to me, but I guess it’s part of the job to act angry. If you need to blow up some bad guys, then blow them up. I don’t see the need for the act. I guess some people take solace in tough talk, but it seems dumb to me. If a president initiates military action, putting American troops in danger, simply out of some righteous sense of vengeance, he’s a maniac. If there’s a valid strategic reason for it, that’s a sobering decision that carries the weight of life and death. If you have a strategic justification for killing the bad guys and the risks are acceptable, cool, but that’s not a choice made in anger. Put more directly, no service members should be put at risk just because some fat redneck in College Station wants to act tough and angry. Some things are worth dying for, but not a demented identity and hurt national pride.
  14. To the extent that retaliation serves actual purposes and protects our people, it’s good and sort of patriotic, but retaliating because we’re angry isn’t patriotism. Making American service members pay the price of our anger is the opposite of patriotism. I don’t care if the bad guys get the last lick as long as it’s the last lick.
  15. There are times when killing your enemies is justified, but any ideology that unilaterally seeks to simply wipe out the bad guys includes self-annihilation if it’s to be consistent. If we start destroying all the “bad guys” then we’re the bad guys. I don’t like the minimizing of today’s suffering. It sucks and we can discuss it without pretending otherwise because it might be our guy taking the heat. And the pretend patriotic rage is the worst. Vengeance only leads to more American tragedy. Making loud noises and talking tough doesn’t make you a patriot. Legitimate grieving anger is fine for the short term, but sending someone else’s children to die for your anger isn’t patriotism.
  16. I think it’s officially an adjective. According to the Lego company it’s Lego bricks, but the Lego nerds seem to use it as a plural noun. I’m a descriptivist at heart, so I go with the people over the official version. Of course my depth of knowledge on this subject rivals my depth of knowledge on Afghanistan and infectious diseases.
  17. I always said Legos, but since my son has gotten really into them, I’ve noticed that all the Lego nerds we watch seem to use Lego as plural. I’ll take any chance I can get to use the awkward, unintuitive, and pompous sounding phrasing. Life’s more fun that way. Just like someone using data as plural communicates that they’re more likely to understand the data they’re using, plural Lego seems to be a Lego nerd shibboleth.
  18. Henry Kissinger how I’ve been missing you.
  19. CNN sucks, especially in the Trump and post-Trump era, but not for the reasons conservatives claim.
  20. If you can include swimmers, Phelps/Brady probably beats MJ/LT for top spot, maybe.
  21. There absolutely could have been a better plan and this whole thing really sucks. There’s a bit of a difference between discussing the shortcomings — some avoidable and some unavoidable — and their possible solutions vs. the breathless magical thinking hot takes that have become the political side of this discussion. I’ll listen all day to informed thoughts and plans, but even those pretty words don’t really convey the uncertainty and problems they introduce. I never served in Afghanistan so I don’t understand the region at all, but I spent enough time in the military to understand that any kind of operation is mostly sausage making that often looks pretty disastrous in the moment. The closer you look, the uglier it seems. Everyone always seems to have a brilliant plan for how it should be done better. I don’t know anything about how Afghanistan works, but I know how we work, and it’s messier than we like to pretend. Add in all the competing interests of everyone involved and the sudden power vacuum, it’s guaranteed chaos. If you or someone else who understands what’s going wants to tell me their proposed solution, great, but that’s a bit different than the political hackery/brilliant plans this version of the thread keeps cyclically slipping into. In the alternate universe where the “right” plan happened, we’d by having a similar thread for whatever crisis that plan caused and the same hacks would be complaining about those problems and proposing their obvious magical solution. I’ll definitely admit to too much nihilism about this issue. I should work on that. I think Biden might share my nihilism. He should work on that too.
  22. The audio is far worse than the caption. The worst part is that it’ll probably eventually work.
  23. Political Twitter is just competing propagandas. I guess it’s fun to hear the Republican war monger hits again. It harkens back to better days and better football, but man it’s a beating to follow those Twitter links. Also, anyone who has some simple or complex plan to leave without starting a crisis isn’t being honest. Talking about the problems or missteps is fine and great, but your plan sucks too. Your way would have started a slightly different crisis — maybe a little better or maybe a little worse, but still terrible. Stop pretending. My reading between the Biden lines is that their analysis was that there’s no good way to leave, so let’s just get out. Leaving is bad, staying is worse, so pick any terrible plan because none of them will work well and they still beat the alternative. The Clash taught us that 40 years ago.
  24. I didn’t know Grendel was back.
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