Reminds me of my dad’s “penguins” story.
As a kid, he got a book about penguins from his aunt for Christmas. My father had never expressed, nor did he have a keen interest in penguins, but being a well mannered southern boy he wrote a thank you note…”Dear Aunt Mildred, Thank you for the book about penguins. It taught me more about penguins than I ever wanted to know.”
Still today, 70 years later, whenever someone in my family gives TMI, we just say “penguins”.

"The car-maker’s share price has cratered since Musk announced his buyout plan, shedding more than 30 percent of its value over the course of a month."

https://www.theverge.com/2022/5/25/23141940/elon-musk-tesla-twitter-margin-loan-buyout-deal

You're right about it being a relatively good time to buy the stock (always buy on bad news) but last I checked, you seemed keen around here https://videosift.com/video/Why-I-8482-m-ALL-IN-On-Tesla-Stock


At the very least, unless you bought stock in Tesla before Dec 2020 - OR - very specifically the month of June 2021, you're in the Red. At worst, you're down 30%.

But you're right, it IS a great time to buy that stock...because it's doing so amazingly fucking incredibly poorly. However, what's the stock gonna do when the S.E.C. comes ah-huntin for them shady deals that Musk seems to be runnin by acting like a lunatic in thinly veiled price manipulation schemes???

One maxim i've found true, rich people get mad when you mess with their money. They even get mad when other rich people do it.

About your brain damage, how exactly is it joe biden's fault? EXACTLY?

in general, hindu eschatology resembles the big bang/crunch. the cycle of expansion from a single point only to collapse to another single point and another expansion. these cycles are billions of years apart. (also some idea - that's too fuzzy to recall in detail - about matter changing and slipping into an alternative dimension might be a model of the great beyond)

will use Russell Bertrand - although not a poet, have read poetry that echos this thought (not gonna search) almost verbatim - when he said, “The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts.” this was pretty much summed up the Dunning-Kruger Effect. (https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/355363-one-of-the-painful-things-about-our-time-is-that)

the other you noted. meditation is healthy. of note, Sufism tends to focus on intense focusing, in music and song...and some of the musicians are peachy keen https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-QRivHR0c28

and the poetry is beautiful (EX: Rumi). so religion has spawned some good things, too.

in short, religion is no more destructive than the person implementing it. do believe in ideas. whether it comes from a white cassock or lab coat. such is the freedom to keep a mind free.

or take it up w/René Descartes*. he seemed to be better at it than I.

*Descartes died when he was run over by a horse-drawn coach. This is where the saying "Don't put Descartes in front of the horse."

BTW: Earle song?

Keen to hear your answers.

Commander Keen rocked. I am surprised id Software didn't make an official crossover!

Looks like Commander Keen dressed up like Doom.

Same guy.

Guy also mentions the Keene Police force... The Free Keene Squad was him... yeah.

https://youtu.be/-vQ5h8iWa0Q

But everybody finding this funny, or revelling in the karma isn't watching the same video I am. If you've watched him in the Vice segment, this video is one of the most disturbing things you can watch. These aren't the tears of a defeated man. This looks to me like the a guy overcome with emotion, not just sadness or fear. I can easily imagine this same gut wrenched display as an apology to the guy(s) he just shot at a future protest and distraught at how he was forced to do it and doesn't like it but will do it again if he has to.

I don't have privileges to promote this but man, you made me think back to the olden days. For years, I had only a PC speaker, and all my friends had an AdLib or Sound Blaster. The day I got a ProAudio Spectrum 16 was the day I discovered just how much I'd been missing out on all those years. King's Quest and Commander Keen never sounded so good.

The deeply conservative (!) "Die Welt" in Germany has two pieces by Sy Hersh, completely debunking the supposed chemical attack by the Syrians at Khan Sheikhoun. It also paints a highly disturbing picture of the decision-making process in both the White House and the Pentagon.

The first one is a rather short conversation that includes all the goodies: the chemical attack in Syria was, once again, not a chemical attack by Syrian forces -- they hit a stash, just like both the Syrians and the Russians claimed at the time.

The piece also details that US forces are keenly aware that it was not a chemical attack, that the response (Tomahawk strike on Syrian airfield) was equally ridiculous and dangerous, and that the bellicose stance of the US vis-a-vis Russia is complete lunacy.

The longer piece by Hersh himself and displays in great details the disconnect between Trump and his military advisers, as well as between the upper echelons of the military and the troops in the region.

Just a snippet about the strike itself:

A Bomb Damage Assessment (BDA) by the U.S. military later determined that the heat and force of the 500-pound Syrian bomb triggered a series of secondary explosions that could have generated a huge toxic cloud that began to spread over the town, formed by the release of the fertilizers, disinfectants and other goods stored in the basement, its effect magnified by the dense morning air, which trapped the fumes close to the ground.

And the media went along for the ride, for the umpteenth time. Remember Brian Williams fawning about the beauty of the weapons?

At some point, this volatile mixture of warmongering and McCarthyism is going to start WW3, and they'll blame it on the Russians.

I think this quote illustrates the issue quite nicely:
“Did the Syrians plan the attack on Khan Sheikhoun? Absolutely. Do we have intercepts to prove it? Absolutely. Did they plan to use sarin? No. But the president did not say: ‘We have a problem and let’s look into it.’ He wanted to bomb the shit out of Syria.”

Well, if you pay Taika Waititi to direct your movie what do you expect?

Personally, I wasn't that keen on the first two Thor movies but I think this looks Fucking Awesome.

Also... Immigrant Song FTMFW.... *rocknroll

I've done everything you have @PlayhousePals and I'm dead in the water also. I'll keep trying for a while, not really keen on using Firefox.

@newtboy,

No, it's about law. Warren Jeffries people did all that, on a smaller scale. They weren't their own country, even though they got away with it for decades. Law.

Forgive my lack of familiarity with him, but your telling me he (on a smaller scale than Texas), stopped paying taxes, and instead collecting them. Started up his own legal and justice system. He created his own borders within which the police would not dare set foot because it would be a death sentence for them. And after he'd done all this the US military itself failed to remove him as well?

Or are you meaning not just scale, but severity and all the other rather meaningful extremes of sovereignty that the Taliban and Al Qaida achieved? It's the same then in the sense that me punching you is violent just me killing ten people is violent, but in another sense they are nothing alike...

No, but they couldn't indiscriminately bomb Houston and any large gatherings either....not even if Spencer might be there. The first American civilian they kill will start a war...a real, legitimate war.

Your not embracing the analogy. Spencer's terrorists are still killing American civilians every week, outside of Texas borders. The American military is just corrupt enough that as long as its democrats/republicans dying,(whomever we choose to not be in power) they let it slide because it shows the need for the military to 'protect' the country.

You need to take a harder look at Pakistani politics to see just how powerful Al Qaida and the Taliban's control over the tribal areas has been.

More over, all of the above definitions of state within a state violence and jihad doesn't require war as the response to acts of war. To invade Afghanistan to prevent another 9/11 is dubious at best. Even the Kissinger's of the world wouldn't count the value of that trade off, losing a couple thousand Americans to an attack each decade or so is 'acceptable' loses.
Call it the price of freedom and carry on. The real trick was that if the Taliban and Al Qaida were so tight with Pakistan's military and intelligence services, how concerned should America be that the Pakistani proxies in their tribal regions and Afghanistan are so keen to target Americans. That lead directly to Pakistan's nuclear arsenal being a big enough concern with that pairing that maybe it was time to tell Pakistan they had to end their little dance with terrorists hitting Americans and they had better make a choice who they are going to side with in the Jihad that was already being waged for 2 decades.

Yeah, Ireland was neutral in both World Wars. "Neither King not Kaiser" was the slogan. Basically, it was felt that while the Axis weren't the nicest guys, we weren't super keen to join in with the guys who'd occupied our country for the previous 800 years either.

Technically, Ireland is still a neutral country. It doesn't belong to NATO.
In practice, as a member of the EU, it would almost certainly have to help defend the Eu if it were attacked from the outside and in recent years, (in a fantastically Irish way) we have been "neutral on the side of the US/U.K."; allowing US warplanes to refuel for example.

I'm basically done with defending WikiLeaks as well, after the shit they pulled with the leaks of Turkish data. Completely irresponsible, that one.

However, WikiLeaks doesn't need credibility -- the data does. And the data they published vis-á-vis Clinton/Podesta/DNC is, as of now, solid. There was one fake document, but that was shown to have been injected by someone other than WL.

"Strong bias" -- oh, I do have a strong bias. Plural, as in biases, actually. For instance, I'm disinclined to take anything the US intelligence agencies say at face value, given how they manufactured more than one casus belli. I don't put much weight into (un-)official statements in general, but especially since all the misinformation they spread about issues like the coup in Honduras or the actions of Nazi militias in Ukraine.

In this particular case, however, my argument is much simpler: Occam's razor seems much more likely than malicious intent. Propaganda outlets on both sides are run by people. Maybe the propaganda outlet Sputnik intentionally twisted the content of email, or maybe they just fucked up, like people are wont to do. Maybe someone intentionally fed Trump this bad info, maybe his people are just as incompetent as he is.

There are too many parts in this that include people who have more than once proven themselves to be utterly incompetent, or in complete ignorance of even the concept of truth. I don't think Trump gives a shit about truth or facts, he strikes me as the typical blowhard who spouts whatever shit comes to mind, and spins stories on the fly like a 4-year-old when caught red-handing.

No need for a conspiracy there, with all this incompetence, naiveté and plain disregard for facts.

So when they keep on pushing the Russian angle in this, it just seems like a desperate attempt to conjure up the old unifying enemy. Why worry about Russian propaganda when there's plenty on FOX and MSNBC/CNN? Why worry about Russian hackers when you accept the unbelievably insecure method of eletronic votes, partly without paper trails, and completely controlled by private companies?

It's just very strange to an outsider like me to see them focus on perceived external influences when the internals are a complete clusterfuck. And this presidential election is the biggest clusterfuck I've seen in 30 years, which doesn't mean much, admittedly.

That said, we can't just be looking at it from the outside with binoculars, not when people are back to full-blown Cold War rhetoric. When the ruling class in the US and/or the ruling class in Russia start their pissing contests and other forms of grandstanding, it's usually brown people who pay the price, like they have been in Syria for the last couple of years. And Libya. And Yemen. And Somalia. And Afghanistan, And Iraq. And Pakistan.

Personally, all the rhetoric about "standing up to Russian aggression" and similar nonsense makes me keenly aware that the bridge just outside my hometown was constructed with a shaft to place explosives in, to slow down advancing Soviet troops... so yes, I would very much like to bitch-slap all these warmongerers on both sides, but particularly the ones in the US since they are currently the ones racking up the highest death toll.

Edit: I should have made it clearer. Yes, WL is absolutely biased against Clinton and they do seem to act in support of Trump. Assange in particular. Which bums me out to no end, since I actually met the guy in person when they presented WL at the 26C3.