CayceG

Yeah... I don't know if I'm going to attend my family's big Christmas. We wound up doing one for Thanksgiving having missed both last year. But Omicron is in West Tennessee now and I'm not sure I want to risk exposure--especially with my Q-uncle.

That's true. But I'm mainly pushing back on the line about "they aren't even parts of society!" What does that mean to the people making the criticism? And at the end of the day, my point about the dominant culture making it hard for people outside of it to join in is really the main barrier. And that's not on any sort of external group to fix. That has to come from within the dominant culture.

That guy pays sales tax and other service fees and literally remodels things as part of your business. How is that not an integral part of society? He doesn't need to go join the Rotary Club to be a part of society. Besides, like you said, do we (the majority white, English speaking portion of society) really make it worthwhile (to say nothing of welcoming) for people like him to integrate into the rest of culture?

So, I watched the race. I'm a Hamilton fan so far as I love seeing the best racing driver on the grid do what he does best with the best team behind him. I also truly love the competition between him and another very good driver in a very good team. Them being tied in the points going into this race was just icing on the cake. The last little bit of the race was purely perfect from an entertainment standpoint. I was kinda confused about the calls for the lapped cars not to pass the safety car at first, but then the lapped cars between Max and Lewis to go ahead and pass. But that allowed us one lap of green flag racing in a sprint to the finish between two very good drivers. Two things: part of the gamble was that Hamilton didn't get new soft tires--like you said. The other thing is that the race director CAN kinda do whatever the hell he wants (making rules up on the fly) with regards to the safety car procedures: So the way I see it, the issue of 'they should have red flagged it' isn't all that important. That gained steam on twitter because it's just more intuitive. But it isn't unfathomable to have ended it the way it did--it's in the rules that Masi can just do whatever he wants.

Isn't France's 'colour-blindness' just a way to describe assimilation to a French Republican ideal that generally involves being "Socially French" which is rooted in typical white western European culture? If so, maybe they could use some CRT.

@SaysWho? can confirm, but yeah, the landscape doesn't mean shit for tornado prevention. It's all about warm air, instability in the atmosphere, and atmospheric shear. All of that can happen in a lot of places--most notably from the Great Plains all the way to the Appalachian Mountains.

Don't deaths lag behind cases like a month? Omicron hasn't spread for that long, so we wouldn't see the spike yet.

I prefer to call vaccines "protection injections." It's better than "Fauci Ouchies."

This thing just straight up carved a path visible from space.

The Night of the Hunter (1955) - 10/10 This one has been on my list for some time and I finally got around to it today. It is an expressionist film noir that follows a boy and girl whose father stole and stashed $10,000 before being sent to prison. In prison, the father's cellmate is a psychopathic con man posing as a preacher that tries to uncover where the money was stashed. Upon getting out of jail after the father's execution, the preacher ingratiates himself to the widow and the boy and girl. The widow is smitten and the boy is skeptical and untrusting. It turns into a thriller, but one of just absolutely fantastic cinematography and music. When I said it's expressionist, I mean the lighting is ethereal and unrealistic, but stylistically perfect. Robert Mitchum plays the preacher and is terrifyingly good at it and the switches between a charming and down to earth man of God, and a bloodthirsty greedy killer. The best part of the movie for me, though, was the heavy use of protestant Christian stuff--namely, the hymn "Leaning on the Everlasting Arms." I used to sing it all the time in church when I was younger. But now, after hearing Robert Mitchum's murderous preacher sing it, it's taken on an altogether different tone for me. Fun fact: this was actor Charles Laughton's only film he ever directed. It didn't do well when it came out, so Laughton decided not to do any more. Which is a tragedy because of how damn good it is. I put it right up there with Citizen Kane and Dr. Strangelove for one of my top 3 movies of all time.

It depends. Where I grew up, west Tennessee/Kentucky, they aren't very common unless your house was built on a slope and you have a half-underground lower floor. It's not like in Texas where there aren't any basements. But they aren't common. In the neighborhood I live in now in Nashville, there are more because it was an older development in a hilly area. Newer developments are just homes built on concrete slabs.

It'll be an EF-5 that took out Mayfield.

I had to shelter around 330 am as they rolled through Nashville. We had wind gusts up to 80 mph near my home. But my mom off to the west lives near Mayfield KY and dealt with her own tornado around 1130 last night. She texted me and said she could hear it going by. She didn't have any damage though, so that's good. This one is the quintessential hook echo on the radar. I've circled where my mom's house is: But Mayfield KY got blown off the map. It's only an hour away from my hometown. This is what they had to deal with:

I've seen this and I agree this is 100% a wonderful use for these things. It also reminds me of a Metal Gear Solid level.

Thanks for redoing the thread title. Because I was going to ask what the legalese meant in real human terms of abortion being legal or illegal. It's times like these (legal rulings and dumbass lawyer speak) that I well and truly rely on Twitter reactions to tell me what to think.

For those that want to read the piece in question: https://web.archive.org/web/20211207035647/https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/05/opinion/gentrification-los-angeles-little-library.html

Think of how many liberal suburban white women will be able to watch it happen and will then use that anger at the voting booth 2 years later!

Well, they obviously won't pick the Gripen. Congrats to the F-35. My choice was the F/A-18, but I suppose that Canada's internal requirements for this acquisition was more geared towards supporting international combat efforts--which the F-35 would perform better at among these 3.

Bob Dole was a mean old man. The mean old man of the GOP is dead WWW.EDITORIALBOARD.COM Bob Dole 1923-2021

Also, I don't like to use the term "stab in the back" when talking about international geopolitics because it's yet one more thing the Nazis ruined... But the Budapest Memorandum was ABSOLUTELY a stab in the back when Russia carved out Crimea for themselves in 2014. In return for giving up the position as the nation with the 3rd largest arsenal of nuclear weapons, Ukraine essentially got 1/5th of their land and something like 1/4 of their industrial capacity (and population) hacked off by Russia. Being real, we were never going to be held to that anyway. But fewer nukes out there was an objectively good thing. Ukraine paid with its borders being shifted yet again.

I don't believe it. I don't believe that the Kremlin has the intention of invading. What I do believe is that they have a contingency plan in place if they decide they need to launch an invasion. That does not mean they will do it, want to do it, or intend on doing it.

I've been seeing and hearing so many stories in the western (US, UK, German) press about how Russia is absolutely ready to invade and could at any moment. I mean, look at this: The former prime minister of Sweden and part of the current international NatSec Blob is retweeting what might well be a fucking war plan from German tabloid Bild. I have always been wary of Russia involving itself in its neighbors. From Georgia in 2008 to Crimea/Donbas in 2014, to now... I understand where the fear comes from. But at this point, it seems as if the western press is inflating this so much so beyond the actual threat. It seems like most of these stories of warning are coming out of WW3 fantasies rather than interpretations of Russian motives and past actions. My leftist swing in the last several years has indeed made me more critical of the western liberal order, so I'm finally looking at these stories with a skeptical eye. I don't want to forgive Russia for anything they've done because of that. But this whole war scare seems manufactured. And I don't know what for. Keeping a near-peer (lol) threat in the sights of the nation? It's all so exhausting. I don't think Russia is going to sweep across the Ukrainian steppe and encircle Kyiv. I think all they want to do is prevent more NATO moves in Ukraine and they really have only one way to do that--massing troops.

"Why was the bomb squad called to the ER?" "Cause of this BOMB boipussy!"

Alec Baldwin was part of a gun-involved incident where a bullet was inadvertently discharged.

This was a great article. It really underscores the classic films I've been watching lately and just how GOOD they are all around. In every facet, the directors of those films (Kurosawa, Orson Welles, Hitchcock) just knew every aspect of filmmaking.