baltakatei
/ˈbɑːltəkʊteɪ/. Knows some chemistry and piping stuff. TeXmacs user.
Website: reboil.com
Mastodon: [email protected]
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It is not a contradiction to refuse your child’s desire for you to adopt a cat and to love a cat. If you force a parent to adopt a cat, they will resent you for foisting an unwanted burden on them. However, the cat has no say in the matter, so it makes no sense to resent or punish the cat. Your parent developing a loving relationship with the pet you forced on them does not absolve you of your imposition.
It’s why IQ tests are fundamentally flawed.
Since you have failed to correctly define the words “highfalutin”, “dogsbody”, “apiary”, “valise”, “collet”, “haruspex”, “threnody”, or even “copse”, we regret to inform you that you are functionally illiterate and likely mentally disabled.
My headcanon is that college started out as a way for the wealthy elite to get their children to socialize with and breed one another to produce the next generation of social elites. These aristocratic objectives were highly correlated with the ability to successfully pass entrance exams and perform scholarly tasks, until the the “college for everyone” movement of the late 20th century (e.g. the GI bill). Then, the next generation of aristocrats collectively sent their children to an elite subset of colleges (e.g. Ivy League schools) and upper class companies filled out their managerial job slots with graduates from these colleges. At some point, I believe the wealthy elite will dispense with this academic charade and simply manage their own private dynastic dossiers for managing the breeding and marriages of their children.
28·15 days agoSorry, I didn’t know there was a Nobel prize in economics. Is this one of those pseudo-Nobel prizes that has nothing to do with dynamite?
I think the cognitive reset that psychedelics can awaken come in basically two varieties: delusions of grandeur or empathy. Elon Musk has benefitted from privilege, luck, and the immunity to consequences that comes from being a figurehead leader for people who expect him to make the right noises to support their cause. This lucky run has fueled his fantasy of making humans an interplanetary species like in his Iain M. Banks science fiction novels that he uses to name his SpaceX vehicles.
In Elon Musk’s case, engineers at Tesla and SpaceX have shared his technocratic vision up until he tried to adopt Trump’s Maga base away from Trump (e.g. with his fascist Nazi salute). Engineers of solar panels, self-driving cars, and space vehicles have to have a minimum level of empathy to deal with the stresses of working in teams to overcome difficult problems; most probably genuinely want to help humanity by expanding capitalism to asteroid mining and Mars colonies; the Maga mob, though, have much more grounded ambitions of restoring their socioeconomic dominance over cultures not their own. Attempting to curry favor with both at the same time only works if your leadership inspiring improvements in solar panel, self-driving car, and space technology dominate news stories with success after success, building and maintaining momentum beyond what Trump can disrupt with his own media stunts like the tariff posturing. But Trump has succeeded in making the Maga faction feel victimized and dominated the news cycle so far in 2025.
Elon and Trump are both salesmen, but the latter only has to break things to get attention. So, I am not surprised that Elon finds solace in mind-altering drugs to comfort himself from the realization that his support base simply is smaller than Trump’s.
4·19 days agoIs it sold already wet within their packaging?
If it were water soluble, it would have already dissolved before you opened the packaging.
OP’s article is 3 months old, being dated 2025-02-11.
deleted by creator
“The F.D.A. will approve vaccines for high-risk persons and, at the same time, demand robust, gold-standard data on persons at low risk,” the officials wrote.
During a “town hall” live streamed on Tuesday afternoon, Dr. Prasad said he thought the new approach to Covid vaccination was “a reasonable compromise,” leaving the shots available to many Americans “but also generating evidence.”
Before approving Covid vaccines for wider use, the F.D.A. “anticipates the need” for new clinical trials in which participants under 65 are randomly assigned to receive the new shots or a placebo, Dr. Prasad and Dr. Makary wrote in the journal.
In other words, Vinay Prasad (appointed by Trump to the FDA for claiming the political left was using the COVID-19 pandemic to end democracy) needs to see more evidence (people dying of COVID-19) before devoting resources towards vaccine development.
I suspect Prasad is a podcast charlatan using his oncologist credentials to advance his career by stoking conservative resentment against mask mandates in order to gain popularity and name brand recognition to sell his personal philosophy books.
To me, this ADHD quirk would be considered a high capacity for curiosity if only:
- there existed a technology permitting people to speed up their minds so they could comfortably complete their rabbit hole thoughts without interrupting their daily chores or degrading their social abilities.
- the quantity of daily work required to live a comfortable life were low enough that people could comfortably explore rabbit holes to their conclusions in their free time.
FYI, their Mastodon account is here.
He wrote a book describing how, among other Unitary executive theory-friendly proposals, he would dismantle and reform the FBI into a Trump-supporting organization. See Government Gangsters (2023).
On his Trump loyalty
President Trump has proven that if you don’t bend the knee to the left’s disinformation attacks, you can win. In fact, as Devin Nunes and I learned during the Russia Gate probe, when they attack us, it’s because we are, as a friend once told me, “over the target.” Their attacks got louder and more desperate the closer we got to the truth. So we must stay the course. The more we expose of their machinations and lies, the more the American people will understand the truth and demand reform. That is how public officials keep the mission first, that is how they deliver accountability, and that is how they honor their duty to serve the American people they work for.
How the FBI can be made to stop investigating crimes of the President or Congress (e.g. the Mueller investigation, the Mar-a-Lago raid, etc.)
Congress can remove funding from the Washington, DC, headquarters and instead reassign FBI funding—and therefore FBI personnel—throughout the United States, putting field-level agents back in the field. If Congress wanted to, it could reduce the FBI behemoth in Washington, DC, to just a single field office dedicated to investigating crimes within the district and place the headquarters anywhere else in America. They could even go so far as to have senior FBI leadership run the circuit, as it were, managing the affairs of the bureau from different branches and moving after a set period of time to reduce the chances of entrenched interests and political relationships being formed. Yet even if Congress doesn’t alter funding, the president and a reform-minded FBI director can internally reassign agents outside of Washington, emptying out the DC HQ in order to put agents back in the field. A new FBI director could also change the rules dictating that FBI agents must do a tour of duty in DC before getting a promotion, instead focusing on promoting those with the most experience and success in the field.
MAGA should he shielded from committing crimes like the January 6th insurrection
January 6th gave the Deep State and the entire ruling regime afraid of the America First movement the perfect vehicle to label normal, patriotic, God-fearing Americans as not just racists or white supremacists (something they had been falsely charging for years) but as insurrectionists or even domestic terrorists. In the past, they charged us with having bad opinions. They said our policies would hurt the country or even that we were bad, mean people. Now, they have gone a giant step further to make the ridiculous claim that we want to overthrow the government. This escalation in rhetoric is intended to try and legitimize their efforts to move the political battlefield from the court of public opinion much closer to the court of law, where they can prosecute MAGA Republicans by politically weaponizing federal law enforcement. Really it moves us one step closer to a world where dissent isn’t just deemed objectionable, but it’s ruled illegal. That isn’t America—it’s Venezuela, Russia, Iran, China, the Democratic Republic of Congo, or all the other hell holes of the world that we are happy we don’t live in.
truck barreling down hillside towards river rapids
Well, at least we haven’t sunk into the river yet.
Let me channel your loved ones: Bring a walking stick with you whenever you go. They make convenient collapsible ones. But better yet, just use a stick wherever you go. They’re convenient to have when encountering rough or slippery terrain since it’s like adding another limb to your body.
Unless that cat is trained to use a toilet, that dough now has fresh cat shit and piss in on it, along with everything else the cat has walked on recently.