← Feed

Posts

• Post #1419682

  About a year ago, a fellow tennis player who had been in the US army and I were talking about how he had joined up (he's retired now and in his 60s.) He is black and came from an Eastern city not known for being wealthy. He said to me the one thing that really worried him about joining the military was that he might have to kill someone and that would make him a murderer. Just thinking about that boggles my mind. How have things gotten to the point where a young man trying to make a futu...

• Post #1419681

  Now and then, I come across the claim that humans evolved dark skin in tropical regions to protect from UV rays. When humans moved to more northern climes, this story goes, they became more light-skinned so as to get more sunlight and thus Vitamin D. I wonder if the reason humans became lighter-skinned as they began to live in northern areas had little to do with sunlight and a great deal to do with camouflage when they hunted. Skin color evolved as camouflage in humans just as patterns in fur e...

• Post #1107912

  @climatologist49.bsky.social Although the evidence for climate heating has been clear for decades, the first time I was really scared was September 2023. Here, near the Chesapeake Bay, we had four days in a row of low to mid 90F degree temps. I've lived here more than forty years, that never, ever happened before. You might get one day of 90F in September but that was it.

• Post #920359

  @DrALJONES@mastodon.social It is from reading history that I saw this is the case. "Religion" is political ideology. Leor Zmigrod says ideology is "a narrative about how the world works and how it should work. This... could be the natural world or the social world. But it's not just a story: It has really rigid prescriptions for how we should think, how we should act, how we should interact with other people. An ideology condemns any deviation from its prescribed rules."

• Post #913808

  @Ashedryden@xoxo.zone It's just one damn thing after another with you, isn't it?

• Post #913483

  @rpmik@avgeek.social We once flew a jet VFR from Baltimore to Newark. It's legal but ATC does not like it at all. One controller asked me what we would do when we got to Newark. I replied, "Beg." He got mad! He said how they were working hard to get us up there. I told him I knew that and appreciated it. That calmed him down.

• Post #901710

  @History_of_Geology@mstdn.social This is great! I have forebears from New Hampshire, Massachusetts, and Connecticut, so it's quite enjoyable to read about Marsh and his discoveries.

• Post #901215

  @lilithsaintcrow@raggedfeathers.com @mwl@io.mwl.io "Lead" instead of "led."

• Post #899674

  @xankarn@mastodon.online We have this "election" system whereby we vote for certain people to take power to make decisions and solve problems for us instead of us doing that for ourselves. This system says whoever gets a majority of votes for a position "wins." The whole system leads to division among people because it says one ideology is better than another. So, instead of people working together to solve problems, the system works to set people one against another. This wa...

• Post #895198

  @Ashedryden@xoxo.zone It's surprised me how much what I read before bed can affect me the next day. No crime novels! But Charles Portis is good as is PG Wodehouse. Best is a book of essays by John Haines, "The Stars, The Snow, The Fire." When I read his essays before bed, the next day I am quite calm and settled!

• Post #882025

  @tompearce49@mastodon.scot It's very good you told us about him. I look forward to reading his ideas, he seems to be worth looking into. (I never heard of him before.)

• Post #751363

  @autonomysolidarity@todon.eu Fair point, but then what happened? Is it also not true that other people who used violence have been killed by their own explosives? So, let us say that it is never a good idea to use violence to get what you want.

• Post #751191

  @autonomysolidarity@todon.eu I am greatly in favor of anarchy or consensus-based decision-making. But it is not going to come about through violence. I'm sorry they died, but this was a bad mistake all around. Not only is it dangerous to the activists who use violence, it gives authoritarians another excuse to imprison and kill anarcho-activists who are peaceful and working to change in a non-violent way.

• Post #741005

  @Ashedryden@xoxo.zone This was very sad but there was a lot going on when it happened. As a professional pilot, I'd wait until a thorough investigation is finished and then see what led up to this. From a personal point of view, I can't watch or listen to the tapes, it just hurts too much. Those pilots were doing their job and did nothing wrong. This could have happened to anyone, me included.

• Post #734962

  The time-change still infuriated me this year, but I kind of got away from it by ignoring the clock (except for appointments, but those were in the PM, not AM, so not bad.)

• Post #590744

  @deb829@dmv.community Wow, beautiful photos. I saw some of this over by BWI, but you sure got a great sunset.

• Post #572820

  @rpmik@avgeek.social No. Are there any? What the community group telling us all this does is go into the abandoned vehicle because it's unlocked, find out via registration who owned it. Then they have someone who can find through the registration who the company or family is that is connected with the driver/owner. They get in touch with that company or family and many times this is the only way the family of the kidnapped person knows it even happened. But here in the Baltimore area, ICE is...

• Post #572679

  @Ashedryden@xoxo.zone I was surprised it was this soon. It's only been four months since the last change?

• Post #571148

  @UncleDuke1969@universeodon.com "Hey, where did the piano go?"

• Post #529244

  @TheEddieShow@beige.party Cats love trampolines.

• Post #529222

  @SnowyCA@social.vivaldi.net There won't be any borders to be on one side or the other of.

• Post #528649

  250 years is long enough to have a country. Let's call it quits, abolish "America" and just all be North Americans. No more "presidents" or government.

• Post #526846

  I very much dislike the way the NYT keeps saying "the US" is doing things when there really is no "US," it's just 47 and his pack of goons running amok here. This is a group of astonishingly incompetent and irresponsible people who are killing other people without anyone stopping them. 47 seems to have started this thing with a mind to getting people not to think about the Epstein files. But he started a war and he had no business doing this at all.

• Post #523897

  @SecureOwl@infosec.exchange @acarsdrama@live.acarsdrama.com LIZZI, that's out over the Atlantic. Down by Cape May, I recall? When we flew from KACK to KBWI, we always got that intersection.

• Post #519550

  @emptywheel.bsky.social Nobody knows what "Christianity" is. Also, what is this "reverend" crap? Nobody is "reverend."

• Post #519346

  @quietmarc@kolektiva.social On non-violence, we agree. What is "religion?" It is political ideology. That's all it is. With anarchy aka consensus-based decision-making, all ideology goes away, it just fades into the twilight. As far as "ministering," whatever that is, there is no evidence that "humans do it since before we might have been human." There's just no evidence of that at all. People, humans, have in the form we see now, been around for more than 3...

• Post #488228

  It was strange to find that sociopathic people have empathy. What they don't have is the ability to feel pain that most humans have. If you don't feel pain that others feel, you cannot be expected to "empathize" with them. This lack of sensitivity to pain leads sociopathic people to believe they are "superior" to others. The mix of intelligence and lack of empathy, however, is dangerous and needs to be understood so we don't do something stupid like let sociopathi...

• Post #487891

  About thirty years ago, some words were painted in large letters on the side of a railroad bridge crossing a highway into Baltimore: "STOP THE WAR MACHINE." They're gone now but I can still see them and still feel how right those words are.

• Post #487822

  @Ashedryden@xoxo.zone My favorite tool is a sledgehammer because, when you threaten a machine or appliance with one, they start working pretty quick.

• Post #477300

  @artemis@dice.camp I'm reading "America, America" by Greg Grandin right now. Maybe you've read it. It is chilling to read the sheer violence Europeans visited on indigenous people. Many indigenous were killed by disease but the ones who weren't faced violence on an awful scale. Grandin deals with both Americas, hence the title, and one thing that has surprised me a bit is how much the two Americas had to do with each other's destinies. Grandin is a superb writer. One th...