A final thought from yesterday. I had my youngest read my post on prediction markets. We discussed it afterwards. He understood the post, and thought it made sense. He didn't get the Brendan Schlichter joke, so I explained it to him. He assumed the markets were just people like him, but I explained once a market gets profitable, professionals enter in order to make money off of him.
We talked about sports betting, and he shared he has stepped back from it. It's fun, but he recognizes he's mostly betting on what he likes, not what he knows. Some of his friends due it not just regularly but at higher stakes. We commented on two sons of a family friend who are in that category--I mentioned my concern they were talking so much about gambling strategies at a recent holiday gathering.
We talked about addictions, and how those can be cruel. He seemed to appreciate it. It was a good talk.
But what about that other much more common and widespread malady that was also mentioned but not discussed: PhD?
It's also known to cause changes in the brain that are not always healthy, though seldom are those actually fatal to anything other than the notion that the victim is in possession of a normal amount of common sense, or in extreme cases perhaps their sanity.
Similarly to the aforementioned irreversible brain pathologies, by the time this is observed it is likewise way too late to do anything about it.
So, given that it's rate of incidence is a quantum leap in magnitude beyond that of those other brain wasting maladies, I'm going to immediately contact a top government expert on brain wasting phenomena and demand that a massive clinical research program into the malign effects from PhDs and the prevention of same be undertaken at once.
But I could use a little help here... Any of y'all got RFK Jr's phone number?
One reason I never went for a master's degree is that in my chosen field, too many of the MBAs I encountered had apparently had a lobotomy, and I didn't want that if it was a requirement.
P.S. My father and sister had MBAs, but they were from the University of Chicago, and there you get the common-sense module added. Or at least they did that when Milton Friedman was around, and I think his influence is still strong.
In organizational behavior, we call it the "availability bias". We remember vivid memories, and assume they occur much more often than how they actually occur.
When Jaws came out, it was done well enough it scared people. I recall swimming in the Missouri river that summer. There were some waves and I remember wondering if sharks could swim in fresh water that far north! 😬 My youngest older sister wouldn't swim as a result. My older brother, OTOH, did the jaws theme song as we waded in.
I remember in the late 1990s the joke was Americans were at greater risk of being bitten by NBC sports announcers than by sharks.
This post title reminds me that I have a running gag with my friends on Facebook, making fun of the people who spell my name Brain. It has happened all my life. Starbucks does it constantly, with other misspelled variations too, and I take a photo and post it on FB with a caption I try to make witty. It gets lots of laughs. I’m amazed at how many people get my simple name wrong.
When I first heard it, I thought they were singing to a different god, so I substituted Yahweh when they sang Yah Mo. Then I read their first title WAS going to be Yahweh but they changed it to Yah Mo in order to appeal to a broader base, but have the same meaning.
I shoulda realized something was up when ex started putting the wrong last letters of my first name that were the last letters of, uh, her first name...
When I moved to TX I dropped all the last letters of my first name so just go by 3 letters. It's kinda funny how many people want to call me by the name using the ending. Most people quickly use the correct one. One neighbor who has now moved away, never quit using the other, after repeated times to correct her; I finally quit responding.
I'm used to my last name often being misspelled (why, I don't know - it's pronounced exactly as it's spelled) and even getting mail adverts in Spanish occasionally because somebody somewhere apparently doesn't know the difference between Spanish and Italian names.
But Kurt = Greg? C'mon! I wouldn't think even *artificial* intelligence could be that big of a numbskull. 🤔🤷♂️
This post clarified a memory for me. As you explained, the internet, specifically Google Gemini, made me a PhD candidate in about two minutes. I was in London in 2001 and there was an outbreak of Foot in Mouth disease while I was there. I have memories of TV news coverage showing mountains of cows and sheep being burned. Gemini said it was 6 million. Those bizarre images have stuck with me. Until now I remembered it was Mad Cow disease. I stand corrected.
Having read about your experience regarding misspellings, I’m not sure whether toregret to point this out, or to relish it: The disease is “foot-and-mouth disease“, foot in mouth being an entirely different affliction. :-D
Oh, we also cannot forget the toll it took on the cows. Poor babies. “During the mad cow crisis, over 4.4 million cows were slaughtered in the UK alone to halt the spread of Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE). Around 184,000 cows actually contracted the fatal disease.”
My friend could not give blood for years because her husband was stationed in Germany in the 90’s. “For many years, individuals who spent time in the UK between 1980 and 1996 were deferred due to concerns about variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD), commonly known as "mad cow" disease.” The FDA lifted the restriction in 2022. Why so long? Because the incubation period for vCJD is quite long, up to 30 years.
I couldn't for about ten years. I was exposed to tuberculous while teaching at the Indiana Women's Prison. I tested positive for it, so they did more in-depth testing, and cleared me. I never developed it. Apparently a small portion of the population fails the basic skin test, and I am one of them.
Whenever I had a new doctor and they asked about it, I'd cough and tell them I was alright. One asked about it and I explained how I got exposed and he told me "serves you right", while laughing.
My wife had the same restriction. She lived in London for about 6 months in 1986. The incubation period up to 30 years? Not 31 or 36 or 40? I suppose there are other things we should worry about.
A social media trend has twisted the idea of a presidential assassination into a morbid joke — and researchers are alarmed by how mainstream it’s become
Peyton Vanest was fuming about President Donald Trump when he grabbed his phone and hit record. “Somebody should,” he declared, pausing for dramatic effect. “Somebody should, you know?”
“If somebody knew what needed to be done, that person should probably just do it …” the 27-year-old progressive influencer continued, conspicuously not defining “it.”
Then he uploaded the 62-second video to TikTok, where it accumulated more than 700,000 likes and 3.2 million views. His version on Instagram garnered another 1.4 million views.
Vanest’s vague plea — posted 18 days before the third apparent attempt on Trump’s life in less than two years — is part of a social media trend that has twisted the idea of a presidential assassination into a morbid joke.
Once an unseemly feature of the web’s fringes, deliberately ambiguous chatter about political violence has spread on mainstream platforms over the past year — most often in reference to Trump and Elon Musk, according to a new report from Know Your Meme, which tracks the rise of viral posts. “Somebody should do it” and its online variants, the authors wrote, is wink-nudge shorthand for suggesting that somebody kill a powerful person.
I'm posting this, well, because it's sick - imo - , but also, because during the elections AXIOS was publishing 'surveys' saying how Republicans, not specifying MAGA, etc., thought it would be ok to have physical violence if the elections didn't go the way they wanted. Someone posted a link to AXIOS, & in the summary to the link, said that almost half of 'Republicans' believed that. Following the link to the AXIOS 'survey' it did not, in fact, come close to 'almost half'. In fact, the wording could very well have said "Less than half". And again, there was no distinction between conservatives, Republicans or MAGA voters. Just clumping all together.
And now the liberals - the commenters at the WaPo are primarily left to far left. The comments aren't saying anything negative about assassination "jokes". They all place blame on Trump, etc., etc. As is very typical, w/ the liberals, it's pointing fingers, never taking any blame, never accepting anything could be wrong w/ anything a liberal could be doing or saying
There was a recent Remnant with Jonah Goldberg interviewing Noah Rothman. Noah has a new book on the rise of Left Wing violence. Jonah was more vigorous than usual with push back.
My biased observation is that it's true, as Noah claims, that left wing violence is too often dismissed or semi-condoned / "understood" by prominent left leaning thinkers, like NYT, WaPo, Atlantic, prominent universitie professors, etc. The right has plenty of wackos doing the same, but it's not the WSJ or NR. I don't know about Fox - having never watched or read.
Jonah pushed back, but Noah "had the receipts," as Jonah likes to say, regarding left-wing violence not being identified as such either contemporaneously or in historical analysis.
ETA: Also, I was annoyed with Jonah for refusing to remember Brian Thompson's name. Remembering the murderer's name while calling the victim "the health care guy" is a demonstration of why the media IS the problem.
I sometimes feel like busting Jonah's chops over "receipts," but then I remember he's taken my side about "members" amd "junto," both of which I really appreciate.
Not a good look on his part. I normally forget the names of the murderers, since if they get convicted they'll be out of society awhile, and are no longer important.
The problem is labeling people is very subjective, and one can shift numbers by what is included/excluded, and how you classify someone as left or right. Many members of my monthly meeting believe the murderer of Charlie Kirk was right wing, since his family were Republicans. Subsequent evidence suggests he was very liberal/left wing. Our pastor stated he was right wing in a sermon right after the shooting🙄, but tbf he refuses to give messages about mothers on Mothers day. 🙄🙄
But even in the current context of our politics and times, why in the world should it mater even one iota as to the "politics" of a cold-blooded murderer? Other than to the people who see politics merely as a way to divide and conquer rather than to unite with dissimilar people to overcome differences in an effort to promote the common good of all.
Dead is dead. And I doubt the victim, whoever they may be, really gives a damn about any ideology or the politics of the person who pulled the trigger or sank in the blade or whatever.
Violence of any stripe, but especially political violence - along with any supposedly clever memes or any too-clever-by-half camouflaged comments alluding to the appropriateness of it for the sake of political ends - should be equally and loudly called out and vigorously condemned by partisans, non-partisans and all Americans with a conscience of any stripe, without regard to politics.
Politics may have been a motive in a killing such as Charlie Kirk's. But it is never, ever a bona fide justification, no matter the "side" involved.
Not in this country. Not ever. A fact that's dangerously diluted by the self-serving whataboutism of laying such acts off on the right or the left.
I did not like Charlie Kirk, and for a number of reasons, some of them based on my own politics.
I did not know Brian Thompson.
Nor do I know Tyler Robinson or Luigi Mangione.
But I condemn these two men equally as cold-blooded murderers and don't care one whit about their personal politics one way or the other.
If convicted, I strongly believe they should both spend the rest of their lives locked up in prison. And not just locked up but locked up and doing the hardest time there is to do. (I'm against the death penalty, but not for the reasons one might suspect, and that's a subject for a whole different conversation.)
And it's no secret here and elsewhere that I absolutely loathe Donald Trump. But if someone managed to assassinate him, I'd loathe them even more, and I absolutely wouldn't care whether their motivation was rooted in one side of the political divide or another.
Because political violence of *any type* against *anyone* is only good for dividing our country even *more* than it's already divided by the people like Donald Trump and those among us who wish to profit from us all disliking and mistrusting one another for reasons insufficient to produce such animosity and distrust if not for their efforts to engender such feelings through their lies, damned lies and ultimately meaningless performative politics.
Not talking about things when you don't know is better choice for pastors. Our pastor just said Charlie Kirk's murder was very sad, which you can't argue with unless you're an awful person.
Each May, as the third Friday comes along, we celebrate National Endangered Species Day. We use this day as an opportunity to learn about the importance of protecting endangered species. The Act is administered by two federal agencies, the United States Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). The FWS maintains a list of all the endangered species, which includes birds, insects, fish, reptiles, mammals, crustaceans, flowers, grasses, and trees. In late 2019, President Trump announced a major overhaul to the law that would reduce regulations. Because of this, it’s more important than ever to support the ESA.
Also INTERNATIONAL DAY OF FAMILIES. “A happy family is but an earlier heaven.” —George Bernard Shaw “Family is a life jacket in the stormy sea of life.” – J.K. Rowling
This day in history:
1928 - Mickey Mouse makes his first appearance in the film Plane Crazy.
1940 - The first McDonald's restaurant is opened.
1942 - Gas is rationed in the U.S.
1944 - Dwight D. Eisenhower, Bernard Montgomery, Winston Churchill and King George VI discuss plans for D-Day in Europe.
before I read the comments already here, this morning, the email I receive daily from the Methodist was coincidentally all about worry. However, what I really want is to c/p something from that; perhaps Jay might enjoy:
"comic strip from 1976 that my Mom clipped out of the newspaper to put in my scrapbook. Benjamin Franklin & George Washington are looking at Betsy Ross as she stitches the U.S. flag. George asks Ben, “What do you think?” Ben replies, “It’s sew-sew, George.” The final panel shows Ben locked in a stockade saying, “I guess George isn’t a fan of puns.”
My wife’s uncle died from what was described to me as CJD, after a corneal transplant. In the space of a few months he went from normal cognition, to dementia, to death.
On the other end of the scale, I was barred from donating blood for years due to my service in the 1980s in Germany with the US military.
I read something I didn't know anything about. Pope Leo XIII, on this day in 1891 issued the encyclical addressing 19th century labor issues, essentially telling employers to be nice guys and pay their employees and for governments to not do bad stuff like start wars.
Now, it doesn't seem like folks were paying attention.
I teach an update on it called "Vocation of a Business leader", written about 2016. It asks managers and executives to consider the downsides to their actions. Not that the actions are bad, but that they are not costless.
The basic argument of "Rerum Novarum" was that economic progress is (a) happening and (b) positive in many ways. However, the incentives and constraints of markets are, like gravity, impersonal.
The Christian Faith, in contrast, is personal, concerned about individual humans as individuals, as family members, as community members; as both "subjects" with personal agency and the "objects" of other individuals and of systems.
Therefore, it is the obligation of Christian people in every aspect of economic and social life - in markets, in business, in government - to embody the principles of Christianity and not simply, like dead fish, float along with the economic currents.
Pope John Paul II restated much of this in "Centesimus Annus" in 1991, the 100th anniversary of Pope Leo XIII's encyclical. Pope Leo XIV has been teaching on how the same principles need to be applied in the newly digital/virtual environment today.
Good morning. 44 degrees now, with a high probably reaching 70.
The mothership has an article on short selling and particularly aggressive short sellers who publish unfavorable information about a company, then short its stocks. Is that market manipulation? The answer seems to be — the courts haven’t weighed in yet.
In the past that has been viewed as market manipulation, and has for over 100 years. The question from yesterday is who is supposed to regulate prediction markets, where this type of behavior has occurred.
https://www.commentary.org/seth-mandel/the-laughing-monsters/
Commentary mentions only a few graphic details - overwhelmingly documented - from the Civil Commission report.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1jbil8feEMw-TGi-X7xxbZGCJAkotvTM0/view?usp=drive_link
Yes!
Imagine there's no mispronunciations
It isn't hard to do
ia sounds different from ai
and n vs nn too,
Imagine all the people,
saying things correctly (eeeeeee eah)
You may say I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope someday you'll say my name right
And the world will be as one.
Love it! Good handwriting, too.
The guy looks like John Lennon.
how in the world you found that is someone else's guess
Too much time on my hands. I think I got it from one of my friends commenting on my FB posts.
A final thought from yesterday. I had my youngest read my post on prediction markets. We discussed it afterwards. He understood the post, and thought it made sense. He didn't get the Brendan Schlichter joke, so I explained it to him. He assumed the markets were just people like him, but I explained once a market gets profitable, professionals enter in order to make money off of him.
We talked about sports betting, and he shared he has stepped back from it. It's fun, but he recognizes he's mostly betting on what he likes, not what he knows. Some of his friends due it not just regularly but at higher stakes. We commented on two sons of a family friend who are in that category--I mentioned my concern they were talking so much about gambling strategies at a recent holiday gathering.
We talked about addictions, and how those can be cruel. He seemed to appreciate it. It was a good talk.
RE: The Scariest Afflictions
CJD, CWD... Okay...
But what about that other much more common and widespread malady that was also mentioned but not discussed: PhD?
It's also known to cause changes in the brain that are not always healthy, though seldom are those actually fatal to anything other than the notion that the victim is in possession of a normal amount of common sense, or in extreme cases perhaps their sanity.
Similarly to the aforementioned irreversible brain pathologies, by the time this is observed it is likewise way too late to do anything about it.
So, given that it's rate of incidence is a quantum leap in magnitude beyond that of those other brain wasting maladies, I'm going to immediately contact a top government expert on brain wasting phenomena and demand that a massive clinical research program into the malign effects from PhDs and the prevention of same be undertaken at once.
But I could use a little help here... Any of y'all got RFK Jr's phone number?
One reason I never went for a master's degree is that in my chosen field, too many of the MBAs I encountered had apparently had a lobotomy, and I didn't want that if it was a requirement.
P.S. My father and sister had MBAs, but they were from the University of Chicago, and there you get the common-sense module added. Or at least they did that when Milton Friedman was around, and I think his influence is still strong.
Ha!
& everyone in my field I thought needed help - psychologists, psychiatrists, social workers - I thought, gosh, what's wrong w/ me?????
In organizational behavior, we call it the "availability bias". We remember vivid memories, and assume they occur much more often than how they actually occur.
When Jaws came out, it was done well enough it scared people. I recall swimming in the Missouri river that summer. There were some waves and I remember wondering if sharks could swim in fresh water that far north! 😬 My youngest older sister wouldn't swim as a result. My older brother, OTOH, did the jaws theme song as we waded in.
I remember in the late 1990s the joke was Americans were at greater risk of being bitten by NBC sports announcers than by sharks.
That is availability bias.
This post title reminds me that I have a running gag with my friends on Facebook, making fun of the people who spell my name Brain. It has happened all my life. Starbucks does it constantly, with other misspelled variations too, and I take a photo and post it on FB with a caption I try to make witty. It gets lots of laughs. I’m amazed at how many people get my simple name wrong.
and now you've reminded me of a song I love
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8SPYSrcxhzY
When I first heard it, I thought they were singing to a different god, so I substituted Yahweh when they sang Yah Mo. Then I read their first title WAS going to be Yahweh but they changed it to Yah Mo in order to appeal to a broader base, but have the same meaning.
Well, I think it's good that you don't seem to (coughs, clears throat) mind being Brain instead of Brian too awfully much. 🙄
On multiple occasions, mine gets misspelled as Greg. I don't know how one gets Greg from Kurt.
I shoulda realized something was up when ex started putting the wrong last letters of my first name that were the last letters of, uh, her first name...
When I moved to TX I dropped all the last letters of my first name so just go by 3 letters. It's kinda funny how many people want to call me by the name using the ending. Most people quickly use the correct one. One neighbor who has now moved away, never quit using the other, after repeated times to correct her; I finally quit responding.
I can see Curt or Kirk, but Greg?? They must be brian dead.
What?! That's bizarre!
I'm used to my last name often being misspelled (why, I don't know - it's pronounced exactly as it's spelled) and even getting mail adverts in Spanish occasionally because somebody somewhere apparently doesn't know the difference between Spanish and Italian names.
But Kurt = Greg? C'mon! I wouldn't think even *artificial* intelligence could be that big of a numbskull. 🤔🤷♂️
that's hilarious!
The USPS made a passport appointment for me yesterday. I spelled my name and they pronounced it "yanni". 🙄
BTW, my last name is pronounced Jan knee (the k is silent).
That's really something. "Brian/Bryan/Bryon" is an easy mix-up, and there are even some Byrons out there ... but Brain?
I write them off as being brian dead.
Well played. You obviously have a working brian in your head.
This post clarified a memory for me. As you explained, the internet, specifically Google Gemini, made me a PhD candidate in about two minutes. I was in London in 2001 and there was an outbreak of Foot in Mouth disease while I was there. I have memories of TV news coverage showing mountains of cows and sheep being burned. Gemini said it was 6 million. Those bizarre images have stuck with me. Until now I remembered it was Mad Cow disease. I stand corrected.
Having read about your experience regarding misspellings, I’m not sure whether toregret to point this out, or to relish it: The disease is “foot-and-mouth disease“, foot in mouth being an entirely different affliction. :-D
No ragrets. Good catch. There’s a pattern: when I point out a mistake I often make one myself while doing so.
You must have meant to say no rugrats, correct?
No regrets is the of a good tattoo artist as well.
Oh, we also cannot forget the toll it took on the cows. Poor babies. “During the mad cow crisis, over 4.4 million cows were slaughtered in the UK alone to halt the spread of Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE). Around 184,000 cows actually contracted the fatal disease.”
It was a serious scare!
My friend could not give blood for years because her husband was stationed in Germany in the 90’s. “For many years, individuals who spent time in the UK between 1980 and 1996 were deferred due to concerns about variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD), commonly known as "mad cow" disease.” The FDA lifted the restriction in 2022. Why so long? Because the incubation period for vCJD is quite long, up to 30 years.
I couldn't for about ten years. I was exposed to tuberculous while teaching at the Indiana Women's Prison. I tested positive for it, so they did more in-depth testing, and cleared me. I never developed it. Apparently a small portion of the population fails the basic skin test, and I am one of them.
Whenever I had a new doctor and they asked about it, I'd cough and tell them I was alright. One asked about it and I explained how I got exposed and he told me "serves you right", while laughing.
I also couldn’t donate for a long time.
My wife had the same restriction. She lived in London for about 6 months in 1986. The incubation period up to 30 years? Not 31 or 36 or 40? I suppose there are other things we should worry about.
A social media trend has twisted the idea of a presidential assassination into a morbid joke — and researchers are alarmed by how mainstream it’s become
Peyton Vanest was fuming about President Donald Trump when he grabbed his phone and hit record. “Somebody should,” he declared, pausing for dramatic effect. “Somebody should, you know?”
“If somebody knew what needed to be done, that person should probably just do it …” the 27-year-old progressive influencer continued, conspicuously not defining “it.”
Then he uploaded the 62-second video to TikTok, where it accumulated more than 700,000 likes and 3.2 million views. His version on Instagram garnered another 1.4 million views.
Vanest’s vague plea — posted 18 days before the third apparent attempt on Trump’s life in less than two years — is part of a social media trend that has twisted the idea of a presidential assassination into a morbid joke.
Once an unseemly feature of the web’s fringes, deliberately ambiguous chatter about political violence has spread on mainstream platforms over the past year — most often in reference to Trump and Elon Musk, according to a new report from Know Your Meme, which tracks the rise of viral posts. “Somebody should do it” and its online variants, the authors wrote, is wink-nudge shorthand for suggesting that somebody kill a powerful person.
Link: Washington Post (John Woodrow Cox): https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2026/05/09/trump-assassination-jokes-internet/?pwapi_token=eyJ0eXAiOiJKV1QiLCJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiJ9.eyJyZWFzb24iOiJnaWZ0IiwibmJmIjoxNzc4Mjk5MjAwLCJpc3MiOiJzdWJzY3JpcHRpb25zIiwiZXhwIjoxNzc5NjgxNTk5LCJpYXQiOjE3NzgyOTkyMDAsImp0aSI6IjM3NWMzYzUyLTA4ZmYtNDA2My1hZmE2LTg5NTZlOWY1NWYwMyIsInVybCI6Imh0dHBzOi8vd3d3Lndhc2hpbmd0b25wb3N0LmNvbS9uYXRpb24vMjAyNi8wNS8wOS90cnVtcC1hc3Nhc3NpbmF0aW9uLWpva2VzLWludGVybmV0LyJ9.S7TJROtByAdWDGqan4ZTdqjxPR54qMTdSGeBX1cw
I'm posting this, well, because it's sick - imo - , but also, because during the elections AXIOS was publishing 'surveys' saying how Republicans, not specifying MAGA, etc., thought it would be ok to have physical violence if the elections didn't go the way they wanted. Someone posted a link to AXIOS, & in the summary to the link, said that almost half of 'Republicans' believed that. Following the link to the AXIOS 'survey' it did not, in fact, come close to 'almost half'. In fact, the wording could very well have said "Less than half". And again, there was no distinction between conservatives, Republicans or MAGA voters. Just clumping all together.
And now the liberals - the commenters at the WaPo are primarily left to far left. The comments aren't saying anything negative about assassination "jokes". They all place blame on Trump, etc., etc. As is very typical, w/ the liberals, it's pointing fingers, never taking any blame, never accepting anything could be wrong w/ anything a liberal could be doing or saying
There was a recent Remnant with Jonah Goldberg interviewing Noah Rothman. Noah has a new book on the rise of Left Wing violence. Jonah was more vigorous than usual with push back.
My biased observation is that it's true, as Noah claims, that left wing violence is too often dismissed or semi-condoned / "understood" by prominent left leaning thinkers, like NYT, WaPo, Atlantic, prominent universitie professors, etc. The right has plenty of wackos doing the same, but it's not the WSJ or NR. I don't know about Fox - having never watched or read.
Jonah pushed back, but Noah "had the receipts," as Jonah likes to say, regarding left-wing violence not being identified as such either contemporaneously or in historical analysis.
ETA: Also, I was annoyed with Jonah for refusing to remember Brian Thompson's name. Remembering the murderer's name while calling the victim "the health care guy" is a demonstration of why the media IS the problem.
I sometimes feel like busting Jonah's chops over "receipts," but then I remember he's taken my side about "members" amd "junto," both of which I really appreciate.
He forgot because he was thinking about how to pay for his next vacation.
He does travel a lot while pleading poverty. Reminds me of Brenda.
Not a good look on his part. I normally forget the names of the murderers, since if they get convicted they'll be out of society awhile, and are no longer important.
The problem is labeling people is very subjective, and one can shift numbers by what is included/excluded, and how you classify someone as left or right. Many members of my monthly meeting believe the murderer of Charlie Kirk was right wing, since his family were Republicans. Subsequent evidence suggests he was very liberal/left wing. Our pastor stated he was right wing in a sermon right after the shooting🙄, but tbf he refuses to give messages about mothers on Mothers day. 🙄🙄
"The problem is labeling people..."
Ding! Ding!! DING!! DING!!! DING!!!!
And in a lot more ways than one.
But even in the current context of our politics and times, why in the world should it mater even one iota as to the "politics" of a cold-blooded murderer? Other than to the people who see politics merely as a way to divide and conquer rather than to unite with dissimilar people to overcome differences in an effort to promote the common good of all.
Dead is dead. And I doubt the victim, whoever they may be, really gives a damn about any ideology or the politics of the person who pulled the trigger or sank in the blade or whatever.
Violence of any stripe, but especially political violence - along with any supposedly clever memes or any too-clever-by-half camouflaged comments alluding to the appropriateness of it for the sake of political ends - should be equally and loudly called out and vigorously condemned by partisans, non-partisans and all Americans with a conscience of any stripe, without regard to politics.
Politics may have been a motive in a killing such as Charlie Kirk's. But it is never, ever a bona fide justification, no matter the "side" involved.
Not in this country. Not ever. A fact that's dangerously diluted by the self-serving whataboutism of laying such acts off on the right or the left.
I did not like Charlie Kirk, and for a number of reasons, some of them based on my own politics.
I did not know Brian Thompson.
Nor do I know Tyler Robinson or Luigi Mangione.
But I condemn these two men equally as cold-blooded murderers and don't care one whit about their personal politics one way or the other.
If convicted, I strongly believe they should both spend the rest of their lives locked up in prison. And not just locked up but locked up and doing the hardest time there is to do. (I'm against the death penalty, but not for the reasons one might suspect, and that's a subject for a whole different conversation.)
And it's no secret here and elsewhere that I absolutely loathe Donald Trump. But if someone managed to assassinate him, I'd loathe them even more, and I absolutely wouldn't care whether their motivation was rooted in one side of the political divide or another.
Because political violence of *any type* against *anyone* is only good for dividing our country even *more* than it's already divided by the people like Donald Trump and those among us who wish to profit from us all disliking and mistrusting one another for reasons insufficient to produce such animosity and distrust if not for their efforts to engender such feelings through their lies, damned lies and ultimately meaningless performative politics.
can I c/p this?
Not talking about things when you don't know is better choice for pastors. Our pastor just said Charlie Kirk's murder was very sad, which you can't argue with unless you're an awful person.
hmmmm, maybe not a good look for your pastor?
I'll miss his non-Mother's day sermon next year (our youngest will be graduated that day), but it has been observed that he is tone deaf about it.
He went to seminary to be a chaplain, not a pastor...it shows.
Hey Cynthia -
Each May, as the third Friday comes along, we celebrate National Endangered Species Day. We use this day as an opportunity to learn about the importance of protecting endangered species. The Act is administered by two federal agencies, the United States Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). The FWS maintains a list of all the endangered species, which includes birds, insects, fish, reptiles, mammals, crustaceans, flowers, grasses, and trees. In late 2019, President Trump announced a major overhaul to the law that would reduce regulations. Because of this, it’s more important than ever to support the ESA.
Also INTERNATIONAL DAY OF FAMILIES. “A happy family is but an earlier heaven.” —George Bernard Shaw “Family is a life jacket in the stormy sea of life.” – J.K. Rowling
This day in history:
1928 - Mickey Mouse makes his first appearance in the film Plane Crazy.
1940 - The first McDonald's restaurant is opened.
1942 - Gas is rationed in the U.S.
1944 - Dwight D. Eisenhower, Bernard Montgomery, Winston Churchill and King George VI discuss plans for D-Day in Europe.
before I read the comments already here, this morning, the email I receive daily from the Methodist was coincidentally all about worry. However, what I really want is to c/p something from that; perhaps Jay might enjoy:
"comic strip from 1976 that my Mom clipped out of the newspaper to put in my scrapbook. Benjamin Franklin & George Washington are looking at Betsy Ross as she stitches the U.S. flag. George asks Ben, “What do you think?” Ben replies, “It’s sew-sew, George.” The final panel shows Ben locked in a stockade saying, “I guess George isn’t a fan of puns.”
reminder to self: DO NOT USE THAT PUN WITH A KATIE QUILT! 😬
My wife’s uncle died from what was described to me as CJD, after a corneal transplant. In the space of a few months he went from normal cognition, to dementia, to death.
On the other end of the scale, I was barred from donating blood for years due to my service in the 1980s in Germany with the US military.
I’m a regular donor and that’s the only time I ever hear “CJD.” It’s asked about every time.
That’s called iatrogenic vCJD. That’s very sad.
I read something I didn't know anything about. Pope Leo XIII, on this day in 1891 issued the encyclical addressing 19th century labor issues, essentially telling employers to be nice guys and pay their employees and for governments to not do bad stuff like start wars.
Now, it doesn't seem like folks were paying attention.
I teach an update on it called "Vocation of a Business leader", written about 2016. It asks managers and executives to consider the downsides to their actions. Not that the actions are bad, but that they are not costless.
I assume they nodded in agreement in class, then went out and teed folks up just like before....cynicisms's been given a bad name...
The basic argument of "Rerum Novarum" was that economic progress is (a) happening and (b) positive in many ways. However, the incentives and constraints of markets are, like gravity, impersonal.
The Christian Faith, in contrast, is personal, concerned about individual humans as individuals, as family members, as community members; as both "subjects" with personal agency and the "objects" of other individuals and of systems.
Therefore, it is the obligation of Christian people in every aspect of economic and social life - in markets, in business, in government - to embody the principles of Christianity and not simply, like dead fish, float along with the economic currents.
Pope John Paul II restated much of this in "Centesimus Annus" in 1991, the 100th anniversary of Pope Leo XIII's encyclical. Pope Leo XIV has been teaching on how the same principles need to be applied in the newly digital/virtual environment today.
Thanks for the explainer.
Good morning. 44 degrees now, with a high probably reaching 70.
The mothership has an article on short selling and particularly aggressive short sellers who publish unfavorable information about a company, then short its stocks. Is that market manipulation? The answer seems to be — the courts haven’t weighed in yet.
In the past that has been viewed as market manipulation, and has for over 100 years. The question from yesterday is who is supposed to regulate prediction markets, where this type of behavior has occurred.
Pope Leo XIII said folks oughtn't be doing that.
I'm pretty sure Rerum Novarum didn't have anything to say about short selling. 🙂
An official good morning, all. 44Fs with a high of 76. Vlad was complaining about the cold yesterday.
"I can't go to Walmart until my sweatshirt is out of the dryer."
"You can borrow my sweatshirt."
We had a hard frost…