I’m trying to imagine how were going to get lions and bees to compete. I think all the lions want all the bees because they polinate the vert that their snacks eat.
And the lions regulate the animals that eat the plants the bees depend on.
It’s all good between lions and bees.
Deep Rock Galactic Galaxy’s Finest!
I’m a greybeard with a crack crew but they get wreckless sometimes, and mining on Hoxxes is intrinsically dangerous. We don’t always make it back.
It took decades before Hasbro Easy Bake Ovens were marketed in the US in Yellow and Black rather than Mattel Barbie™️ Fuchsia Pink (💕) which is still the standard in US department stores. Curiously gender neutral colors started from demand in Sweden and expanded outward.
In the nineties, Barbie was built like only a select few Playboy Bunnies (Jessica Rabbit’s dimensions are physiologically impossible. A robot, maybe) and Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader action figures were ripped like He-Man (or soon-to-be Governor of California Arnold Schwarzenegger).
Gender roles are (to me) extremely weird.
The problem is dominance hierarchy, which expresses itself as patriarchy most of the time.
But not always, and places on this earth exist where a matriarchic hierarchy is similarly asserted.
Obligatorily, no war but class war.
…and a forgone conclusion (a Shakespearean phrase) used to mean a conclusion that could be ruled out as implausible.
It raises the question. The reason begs the question has become acceptable is specifically because English speakers used the term in error often enough to make it common.
Which is to say, when the President of the United States uses the phrase …which begs the question… in a speech, or a PHD academic uses it in a thesis in 2024, it’s fine. But nineth-grade grammar teachers all across the nation cringe when they hear it.
I meant similar to Joan of Arc, in that she chased the English out, but I’d be much happier for someone who wasn’t a religious saint.
For now, it’s Mad Sweeneys’ day, more or less.
A fact is an observation made in nature. At 8:40 PM PDT I read from my kitchen thermometer 73°F. One datum.
So often people use the term fact to suggest something is true, e.g. Gravity is a scientific fact. It’s an easily demonstqble phenomenon. There’s a mathematical law that predicts the interval of falling bodies. You can make and present facts that demonstrate the consistency of gravity, but it isn’t a single fact in itself.
Recommended highly by Marie Antoinette. Allegedly.
Similarly, the Shamrock, (☘️) an important symbol for Saint Patrick’s Day has three leaves where most SPD kitch sold in the US features four-leaf clovers (🍀) an unrelated good luck symbol. I dont object because I feel Ireland needs a better iconic saint (and a better holiday) than the guy who brought the imperialist religion under which the native Irish would be subjugated.
They need someone like Joan of Arc who ran the English out (of settlements in France).
A proper Reuben features pickles, sauerkraut, corned beef, Swiss cheese and Russian dressing. Most restaurants will replace the pickles and Russian dressing with Thousand Island dressing. Blasphemers.
Don we now our gay apparel
And we’ll all feel gay when Johhny comes marching home
Deutchland is happy and gaaaaaaay!
we’ll have a gay old time
Gay refers to party happiness. Places where Celebrate by Kool and the Gang would be played as a reference. Places where people dance to disco. Places where the Grinch would look on and feel embittered.
Literally can mean literally ( My girlfriend literally stabbed me in the back. I’m bleeding out and need an ambulance. )
It can also mean emphatically ( My girlfriend stabbed me in the back. She emptied my bank account, shot my dog and left town with my best friend. )
I won’t use it in the latter way, and will sometimes use the adjective proverbial ( proverbially ) if my metaphor could be plausibly read as literal. ( I could drive to Maryland and assassinate Supreme Court Associate Justice Brett Kavanaugh for a fresh cruller right now. )
I have a different issue.
A hot dog is a Frankfurt sausage or frankfurter in the United States. Frankfurters were notorious in the sausage scene for having the Frankfurt bend. You’ve probably seen this bend on fancier sausages like Louisiana Hot Links, or Chicken Pineapple. But US hot dogs, whether Ball Park or Oscar Meyer or whatever are these straight things.
Hot dogs are no longer hot dogs.
For the first six months, I’d be very very sad, and that is not accounting for the additional shopping time. Maybe if I had a vegen chef to help me transition.
That said, my meat intake is probably below average, but I am a cheese junkie.
Begging the Question is a logical fallacy, a circular argument. So when a position brings a question to mind that is other than a challenge to its validity, it raises the question.
When I was six and in first grade, the teachers directed me to the school psychologist. But it was the early 1970s and people had just seen The Exorcist and believed it was based on a true story, so when it came to me, I was just a bit odd.
It would turn into a diagnosis Major Depression in my early twenties, severe enough to get disability benefits. It would become Anaclitic Depression in my late twenties. Around fifty, I was the subject of my psychotherapist’s PHD thesis and got an ASD diagnosis out of it. I’m now enby, though through most of my life I was [M] because that’s what it said on my state ID. Whatever.
When I was in a partial hospital program, the fine doctors who answered questions explained some models regarding sanity, that almost everyone has to contend at very least with neuroses, which are characterized by internal conflicts. Those are like:
This was in the nineties, in which the US was undergoing an epidemic of mental illness, featuring a lot of major depression. There are reservations in the academic sector as to opine why – I expect – for the same reason climatologists who are willing to discuss the expected outcome of the current climate path are rare: It leads to come uncomfortable truths that our society is not ready to address. In the case of everybody crazy, the hypothesis is that it’s intergenerational. We’re not meant to exist in a society where every adult is required to work forty-plus hours a week (plus breaks, plus commute). We’re also meant to have parents who are not exhausted all the time. The madness is intergenerational, with cumulative family dysfunction getting passed down, as people not only neglect their kids, but self medicate to cope, so they’re even less available.
So, no, the possibility that everyone is crazy is not crazy at all. It’s a product of the industrial age. What’s worse is the psychiatric community is expected to treat it as a medical issue. Toxic work life and toxic home life making you depressed? Here, take some pills. If you can afford to sob at a therapist one hour a week, do so. In any other situation we’d remove the patients from the hazardous area but that would cause the economy to collapse, because that’s the entire workforce.
There are some capitalists who are aware they get better productivity out of their workforce by acknowleding they are human beings, not machines, but those are the rare exceptions. The rest of them believe J. D. Vance has a point. So we’re not going to move towards any rational solutions for a while.
I don’t have any solutions to this.
For my own case, I’ve reframed my own life as a renegade in a society that has, itself, gone entirely rogue. We are the punk in the cyberpunk dystopia we live in. This is your YAF coming of age story where the ministries try to mold you into a solder or laborer for some billionaire’s vanity project, to be used and discarded like a disposable part. Find a way to escape and run!
Or if you’re my age, find the places where Big Brother is blind to your thoughts and actions, and subvert the system from within.
I’m not mad, but disappointed. Remember how history is all about the proletariat being a sucker for the bourgoisie. We were promised heaven in the afterlife for the whole middle ages.
In the new world an honest day’s work for an honest day’s pay was the American dream.
Then the California gold rush promised us we could get rich quick with luck and pluck.
By the great depression (about a century ago) what we noticed was this is how the industrialists like it and they resented FDR’s New Deal. (A lot of us were thinking that whatever Lenin was doing in USSR was better than the cardboard + paint can shelters we were living in and eating flour paste.) It was a stopgap to let capitalism have another chance. One it didn’t deserve.
So when they’d see our homeless crisis and fast food swamps, they’d nod, knowingly. We should have socialized then.
The GOP thought it had the upper hand when it pushed Reagan in and started killing unions and rolling back regulations. Reagan won with a landslide due to the Moral Majority, hopped up on anti-abortion rhetoric. It taught campaign managers the public could be manipulated.
Then George W. Bush took the White House with a procedural couo d’etat. Then Trump showed us the only way the GOP can win is by shennanigans.
It’s harder for the masses to organize. But there are more of us than them by orders of magnitude. When we see the police killing the public, more people move from bystander to sympathist, from sympathist to activist. From activist to rebel.
This isn’t our first rodeo. And our ancestors would recognize the same dirty tricks used to keep them from a new revolution have gotten better. But then insurgency tricks are better as well.
Harris is at that precipice moment when she has to get more radical than FDR to hold society together. Because we know Trump and company are the baddies. We know we can justly resort to violence against a Trump administration because they’ve already declared the public illegal.
I remember the Velcro legal campaign insisting generics or other brands refer to it as hook and loop and I thought it was a missed opportunity. Velcro brand Velcro or simply Velcro™ with the trademark would be adequate differentiation between the brand and the technology. It would also remind everyone who invented it, much like Kodak and Xerox.
The opening scene to Apollo 13 (1995) features a party in Houston with NASA dudes as they gather around the television and Walter Cronkite announces as Neil Armstrong takes his first step on the moon. ( On YouTube )
I was not at that party, but I was at a party in Houston with NASA dudes as we watched the very first moon landing. My dad was a mission control guy with the black horn-rimmed glasses, white shirt and black tie, but Apollo 12, not 11 (Neil Armstrong) or 13 (the one that blew up and barely made it home).
I couldn’t walk yet, and I got that the space man on the screen was super important, but at the time I was missing a whole lot of context. The blanks would fill in with time, since the US was super proud of that moment. It’s my very first memory.