Worse, it validates the precedent that non-U.S.-citizens can be prosecuted for breaking U.S. law over things they did outside of the U.S.

Really happy that Assange gets to go home, since he’s suffered enough personally, but I really don’t like the precedent that I can be prosecuted in, say, Israel under Israeli law for things that I did in Wisconsin (e.g. boycotting).

Honesty, I don’t think that there is a Great Filter. The Fermi Paradox strikes me as not very well-reasoned. A whole hell of a lot of things would have to go exactly right for civilizations to make contact, rather than it being the default assumption. There are lots of filters, not just one Great one.

But the closest to a Great Filter is that space is really, really. stupendously big. The chances of even detecting each other across such distances is vanishingly small, much less traversing them. Add in the difficulty of jumping the metabolic energy gap to become complex life, and that could reduce the density of civilizations down to a level that they’re just not close enough to each other in spacetime to admit even the possibility of contact. And we’re hanging our hat on some highly-speculative concepts like alien mega-structures harnessing whole solar systems to allow detection.

I think a lot of persnickety, smaller filters combine to make interstellar contact between civilizations against long odds. Perhaps the best we’ll get is spectral signatures from distant planets that are almost-conclusive proof of some sort of life.

It could be a word, like everybody or everything, perhaps a synonym for “24/7”.

When times is the diner open? Everytime!

Thank you for this moment of Zen.

I don’t have much to contribute, except that I recently got to a see a friend’s backyard. The whole street is built in an old quarry, so the yard abuts a weathered rock wall, which makes it a quiet, secluded enclave. You’d never know that you were in the city if you woke up there, and you’d almost expect to see gnomes and fairies among the maze of trees.

I’m no expert, either, I just read about death grip in Savage Love, and it always made me cringe and wonder, how in the hell? Then I learned more and figured it must have something to do with the skin being able to glide back and forth.

From what I understand, the penis is supposed to have a mobile skin system, so it can glide up and down. The “death grip” is when guys get a tight grip and crank it up and down to get maximum stimulation. Circumcision can (often?) remove the entire mobile skin system, leaving the penis skin as tight as the skin on, say, your thumb.

Get a tight grip on that, and start cranking, and it’s basically trying to rip your dick off.

An attempted handjob by a woman from a country where circumcision is rare, so she went for the death grip.

British newspapers were only able to subsidize the use of the letter ‘u’ through taxes levied on the colonies, which led to the revolution. So who’s so smart after all?

Nah, seriously, the Normans added the ‘u’ to French-derived words after they invaded. English orthography wasn’t standardized, though. Johnson kept the ‘u’ out of a sense of tradition when compiling his British dictionary, and Webster elided it in his American dictionary because we don’t pronounce it. Neither spelling, -or or -our, derives from the other.

The dollar is metric, so we already have such a system. People often use kilodollars already, e.g. writing $2k instead of $2,000, but we could start using decadollars ($10) hectodollars ($100), too.

So what do you make of my experience? For background, I used to live in an apartment in an otherwise-wealthy and desirable neighborhood, and worked at a grocery store. Within several blocks of me, there were three different well-to-do families that adopted daughters as infants from troubled backgrounds, probably with drug-abusing birth mothers.

One daughter worked at the same store I did. She regularly called in, or otherwise didn’t show up for work. Her diet was atrocious, she was always fighting with certain other employees, and eventually got fired for swiping her employee badge to get the discount for any cute guy who’d talk to her. Not the sharpest tool in the shed, or the most ambitious. Her sisters, though, were star students, and went on to attend Ivy League schools, and got high-powered jobs.

The 19-year-old daughter of another family moved into the apartment across the hall from me. Her parents paid the rent, because she would fight with her mother constantly at home. She couldn’t keep a job, even at the co-op across the street (absenteeism, again). She kept a string of pets that she couldn’t take care of, eventually a rabbit that she tortured by leaving alone for several days at a time while she was staying with her 50-something boyfriend. One time, she met a homeless man, and let him move into the apartment she wasn’t using (without informing our landlord). While she lived there, I had a chronic problem with small flies in my apartment, no matter how much I cleaned. When my landlord finally evicted her, he threw out the refrigerator, because it was caked and crawling with maggots. (The flies went away.)

The daughter of a third family, a friend of my landlord, got involved with a troubled young man, another student at her school. They hatched a scheme whereby he’d rob her parents, but the robbery went wrong. He shot them and left their bodies by the side of the road in a nearby wooded area. Same deal as the first family, though, her siblings were well-behaved, and good students.

These particular kids were problem children, although raised in exactly the same environment as their siblings, by the same parents. They had love, wealth, good schools, close involvement in their lives, lots of activities, medical needs attended to, et cetera, et cetera. What more could any of these couples possibly have done? In contrast, most people who have abusive, neglectful parents turn out to be responsible citizens, despite their emotional turmoil. Bottom line, I don’t buy the “bad parenting” explanation. There are way too many holes in it. What would better parenting look like, exactly?

The story earlier knocked loose a memory:

I worked at a small law firm years ago, and we used to have a could of community-support workers, a man’s and a woman both with Downs, come in to do janitorial tasks. The woman was an Elvis Presley fanatic. She would listen to Elvis on headphones while she worked. She’d talk about Elvis all the time. She’d mark his birthday, and the anniversary of his death. She was sad that she never got to see him sing.

One day, a potential client came in for a consultation, and this guy was an Elvis impersonator by vocation. And who happened to be there, by chance, even though she came for only about an hour a week? Yep, our Elvis fan.

The guy was really sweet, and put on an impromptu performance for her, and she was Over. The. Moon. It was a good day in the office.

I’ll note here that we Americans have no influence whatsoever on what Hamas does, but allegedly, the President represents us. It makes sense to criticize Biden, whereas criticism of Hamas is just farting into the wind.

Oof, this feels unintentionally personal. The stories those quotes come from are about doing bad things while thinking of yourself as actually a good person “deep down.” For me, though, it was realizing that people can like you for who you are only if you communicate to them who you are.

The first one is from Kurt Vonnegut’s Mother Night, which is the story of the American Nazi propagandist, Howard Campbell, who briefly appears in the more well-known book, Slaughterhouse Five. The second is from the show BoJack Horseman, specifically episode 12 of the first season.

Kudos to Obama for actually following through, but the withdrawal from Iraq had a deadline set by the U.S. Status of Forces Agreement signed by Bush, per the request of the Iraqi government.

“We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”

ETA, same thing a different way: “That’s the thing. I don’t think I believe in ‘deep down’. I kind of think all you are is just the things that you do.”

Okay, you do the high-speed rail. I was gonna say 15-minute cities, so I’ll do that. We’ll attack the same major problems from complementary angles.

I have no direct evidence, but it’s not at all far-fetched. The Obama administration set up a coordinated effort to share intelligence and plan tactics for the crackdown on Occupy Wall Street across the FBI, state and local police forces, and the banks themselves. The uniformity and brutality of the response to the university anti-genocide protests is… curious, at least.

I’ve heard of Project 2025. It seems like the Democrats in office have not. Heck, just this morning, I read Jennifer Rubin’s op-ed about how Sen. Durbin (chair of the Judiciary Committee) is so peeved he’s almost on the verge of sending a Very Sternly Worded Letter about one of our Supreme Court justices being an insurrectionist.

Indeed. I keep asking what is the plan to stop a fascist MAGA candidate from winning the Presidency in 2028, when the Democrats don’t have incumbent advantage, and the historical pattern is a party flip, and have received only one (joke) answer. I have heard no talk whatsoever about how to handle a Biden win this year, although the MAGA politicians are signaling another attempt to overturn the election. (My state AG is still “investigating” the fake elector scheme from 2020; no way a prosecution will happen before the election, and likely never.) “Vote harder” is not going to be effective.