Have y’all seen the pictures of chimney rock?

There have been some responses: https://news.un.org/en/story/2024/08/1153656 https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2024/07/experts-hail-icj-declaration-illegality-israels-presence-occupied

No thanks, I’ll take it without the butter.

Lime? Don’t see a lot of lime candy all by themselves.

Butter too. So many candies include butter, but it’s rarely hyped as the star flavor.

I’ve heard that Kamala needs roughly a 3.5% advantage nationwide to break even in the electoral college. It’s not a direct correlation of course, but it stands as a good indicator.

It’s insane if you think about it though, that we give the republicans 3.5% house odds. That’s more than we give casinos in blackjack. We don’t even give most one arm bandits that much.

20 of us were out canvassing in my local county today. It was super enjoyable. Even the two folks that were voting for the other party were decent and respectable.

But I guarantee, not a one of us was out there for that orange guy.

Get a Dietician and physical trainer. Use this opportunity to get yourself into healthy shape and never look back. I did something years ago and had no clue just how bad I was actually feeling before the improvement. Both physically and mentally. We are not designed to sit at desks all day.

Do your feet crack sometimes? Consider testing for athletes foot.

Blood, STD and Cancer screenings, as many as they’ll give you. Hell, depending how old you are, maybe a colonoscopy.

Sleep study. MRI, ECG, EKG. Allergy test. Dermatology/mole screening.

IQ test, find out your best skills and then learn how to use them to your advantage.

DNA testing, if you really want to know some things you may be perceptive to…though personally i don’t know if I would want to know if Huntingtons is in my future.

And I replied to you, specifically, regarding sports not being a hack on our emotions.

I suppose this begs the question, do you burn couches when a movie takes an emotional turn?

I have no contribution to why certain people do so around sports, other than to say 20% of the population also believes that the earth is flat, that is to say, they’re morons.

The difference is that movies and TV shows are often specifically made to elicit those reactions. Storytelling is essentially a hack that uses our emotions to implant lessons.

The same can’t be said for sports events.

What part of this did I miss?

Way to completely miss my point.

Hmm, gonna try and narrow this down further. Did you climb any light poles as part of your celebration festivities?

Seriously!? A Cinderella team spends a full year working their way to the sweet 16 and perhaps eventually the final four? Then loses by one point. Do you not see the struggle, the passion, the determination and the heartbreak in that?

Or a champion tennis player, significantly past her prime, coming back to championship after multiple years out and winning the title.

Or two soccer superstars at the absolute peak of their field going head to head. Can you not sense the tension, and suspense as these two juggernauts battle it out to see who comes out on top?

Or a man, born without arms, overcoming adversity at all points in his life to become the fastest swimmer and winning the gold.

Do you not see how sport can be an allegory for the human condition? The struggle, the heartbreak that comes with failure, the celebration of success, the toll of aging.

If not, I challenge you to take up a sport for a year, just a year. Try to get as good as you can with it. Celebrate your successes. Reflect on your failures. Document your milestones as you progress . Try not to give up. Make friends along the way. Become the true definition of an amateur. Living through your own experiences, you may discover that sport is full of emotion.

My local uni pulled this shit with “sustainability.” It became so inclusive of a term that it lost all meaning. And then guess what? Solar panels stopped getting put on buildings, no windmills were put up. They added more gas turbines and steam tunnels.

They did convert to LED lighting though, so that’s a plus.

It’s been 10 years and I’m still pissed about the misappropriation of the term. When you focus on everything, you focus on nothing.

I feel like we’re starting to paint fascism with too broad a brush.

The US has been and continues to be one of the most diverse countries in the world. Name another country where the majority race is 60% or less and the largest ethnicity is below 20%? The closest one I can think of is South Africa, but other examples are few and far between.

So if not by race and ethnicity, then how else could we measure how fascist the US is? Perhaps by nationalism. Well, while most Americans are patriotic, most also believe that nationalism is a serious threat to America - from Statista. Wouldn’t we need the majority to at least believe that nationalism wasn’t a threat to America in order for it to be a “fascist country?”

I’m all for looking at ways to improve things around here, but I am not for the extreme viewpoints from both sides of the aisle as of late. We don’t need to pigeonhole everyone to effect change. To the contrary, we’d get a lot more done for the American people if we teamed up against those who stand to gain from the gridlock.

Most of the dem voter base that you know. To paraphrase Nate Silver recently, the liberal very online voter thinks that their constituency is a lot larger than it is.

I guarantee you that the union steel worker in Bethlehem, PA and the school teacher mother of 4 in Georgia are and have been a sizable part of the base.

How does this square with the whole libertarian bend?

Not going to go into details due to confidentiality, but I recently was involved in an initiative to utilize AI to scan education databases and identify students who may be at risk of dropping out, with the goal of having an early safety net for these folks. And also raising the schools retention rates, thus better outcomes overall.

So yes, AI can absolutely be used for good.

Right? I get that some of middle America feels slighted, and I’m all for preventing the hollowing out of small town America, but I don’t see lying xenophobic scapegoating being the answer here. That’s how you get nationalist parties and paramilitary “cultural enforcement” groups.

Instead, I see a need to foster and fund community organizations and civil engagement. Improved infrastructure and green spaces. More affordable housing - bring people back into the towns rather than the outskirts of it. But unfortunately, oddly, for some reason, that’s not as easy of a sell as the “people be eating your pets” trope.

TIL, thanks. Makes a bit more sense now why the band chose the name.

Could have done the right thing one last time for people who actually experienced it.

Instead, it’ll remain a black mark on the state and now doubly so. We’ll have to wait for the epilogue 100 years from now.

But I suppose you couldn’t have expected much more from a folk who takes pride in stealing land, and doubling down by cheating when doing so.