squarely rooted

"look he hasn't memorized anything, he's not embellished anything, it is just a machine which reproduces an single original text presumably stolen from a real bard without compensation! My students just use wax tablets for everything, some of them can hardly memorize even 700 stanzas"

(as I mentioned the other day, the dad of a friend of mine went on a path that started with him owning a small chain of these and ended up with arms dealing to Libya and being murdered in flight on a toilet)

69) Sex. Popular game believed to have been developed in premodern India, which received a somewhat controversial new edition in 1963. More than two players can get overly complicated and lead to hurt feelings, but the solo mode remains perhaps the most popular.

Imagine being a soldier taken off the battlefields of ‘Nam. A guy claiming to be Santa Claus tells you his genius plan is to give some midgets he found in the English countryside a H-bomb which they must take to Hanoi in order to dismantle it. Man was a saint for putting up with as much as he did.

The manosphere is a conspiracy to prevent men from doing the things that actually are attractive to women (locking in and spending 18 hours a day posting on Bluesky)

Need to cheer myself up so here's the best Twitter post ever. It spawned one billion bad ripoffs but it's a beautiful magic trick. You don't just read it in his voice: he said it now. This quote is real.

And for those of you who like it the other way

lost track of the cite (goddamnit) but recently came across a fascinating look at the economics of monasteries in medieval europe

they're a great source not least because we have relatively good data on income and expenses

so let's talk watermills, investment, and economic growth

cold

Ahh *crossing out the error term and writing "institutions"* that makes sense

"we will encourage more youth to go to engineering school by offering a crisp new FIVE DOLLAR BILL for each of the first two quarters of your three year program."

“thomas you dumb slut” is definitely a thought the real john adams had 100000 times

aka history

overheard in the discord

One like = one obscure C++ fact

So it cannot generate a change in political attitude to them for them to be seen behaving unreasonably, it simply changes what sort of mitigation strategies one has to adopt when dealing with the natural disaster that is rightwing political opinion. They're never written off as the unreasonable lot.

This is a point where the media and many centrist types not treating rightists as agential works in their favour. They're *never* unreasonable, or at least never dismissed on that basis. Doing so would be be a category error, right wingers aren't the kind of beings that may fail to be reasonable.

Prague, 23 November 1911 Highly esteemed Mrs. Curie, Do not laugh at me for writing you without having anything sensible to say. But I am so enraged by the base manner in which the public is presently daring to concern itself with you!? that I absolutely must give vent to this feeling. However, I am convinced that you consistently despise this rabble, whether it obsequiously lavishes respect on you or whether it attempts to satiate its lust for sensationalism! I am impelled to tell you how much I have come to admire your intellect, your drive, and your honesty, and that I consider myself lucky to have made your personal acquaintance in Brussels. Anyone who does not number among these reptiles is certainly happy, now as before, that we have such personages among us as you, and Langevin(3) too, real people with whom one feels privileged to be in contact. If the rabble continues to occupy itself with you, then simply don't read that hogwash, but rather leave it to the reptile for whom i

einstein sent this to curie in 1911 when she was being harassed by tabloids. it contains everything you’d want in such a letter:

(1) your haters are trash
(2) you’re a baller, a true queen
(3) i have determined the statistical law of motion of the diatomic molecule in planck’s radiation field 🧪⚛️

A few more words than this, as a couple of people have posed questions. One of the most common drivers of change in an extremist movement's ideology is a legitimacy challenge, and that's what's happening in Trumpland right now. 1/x

Sonic the Hedgemage

1 like = 1 wizard who has betrayed me

I think we should replace the friend/enemy distinction with Luigi/Waluigi so as to deflate its mystifying properties with the needle of ridicule

truly insane that while the NY times was trying to beat chris rufo the the scoop on mamdani's SAT scores, the murdoch owned wall street journal was uncovering evidence of trump's close ties to the leader of an elite pedo ring

The backstory here is that the Squamish people of what is now Vancouver were illegally dispossessed of this land a century ago. They sued, got their land back, and are using their sovereignty to ignore local zoning rules and build 6,000 new homes over the objections of nearby wealthy NIMBYs.

my own take on civ-mil relations is it's a more general issue of the overall problem with bureaucracies identified by heath in THE MACHINERY OF GOVERNMENT. there's this weberian ideal, the sovereign decides what to do and the professional bureaucracy executes...

but, surprisingly, that's bullshit

Well, I'd like to see ol Jackie Chan karate his way out of THIS jam!
*Chan creatively and acrobatically karates his way out of the jam with his signature mix of goofiness and aplomb*
Ah! Well. Nevertheless,

I was worried at first, but I think we got this fight in hand; it's pretty clear Jackie Chan is just trying to run away from us through this Everyday Household Items warehouse, so he must know he's about to lose.

[long, exhausted sigh] sohrab amari, welcome to the #resistance

the issue is not the technology itself but that entryism and Omnicause-ing is not solely a leftwing risk