I normally find Trump impressions very unfunny, but this one is solid.

Yeah, a common them I come back to is cycles of mistreatment: people who were push from their homes pushed people from their homes.

Chill, man. I’m not here to fight.

I’m also not going trying to white-wash anything. War and tribalism are indeed ancient, and historical echos can certainly be found. But my point is this: the regional conflict between Jews and Muslims is most certainly not a persistent, perpetual, irrational animosity that has stubbornly raged on for millennia. It is true that it is informed by a long cultural relationship. But the violence is modern. It’s caused by political forces, and it can be ended by changing those political forces.

Prior to the Zionist movement and the Arab nationalist movement of the twentieth century, Jews and Muslims (and many other groups) cohabitated Israel-Palestine (or Trans-Jordan or whatever you want to call it). They did in fact share the land peacefully in the nineteenth century.

https://www.972mag.com/before-zionism-the-shared-life-of-jews-and-palestinians/

True. It definitely has a long history. My point though – as you said – is that it’s really a persistent myth that these people are just oil and water. Their conflict is far more material than that.

It certainly isn’t intractable.

I must politely reject this assessment. There have been decades and centuries of peaceful coexistence. It isn’t as though this is a persistent condition.

Prior to 1948, there were a lot of Christians and Jews living in Palestine without major conflict.

The modern ethno-religious tensions are the product of modern political events, not some mystic curse.

I think the most important takeaway here is that for those of us in the imperial core, the urgency has never been greater to understand the architecture of power and find the weaknesses in its ediface.

The opportunity (and associated responsibility) to pursue shared liberation is greatest for each of us on in America and Europe.

Divest everything. City governments, schools, business, whatever. My city – Oakland – has had great success at this. And each institution that joins the efforts is another crack that will eventually bring end the occupation. We can do it this decade!

We have to have hope enough for ourselves and those with far fewer options.

Alright, I just wasted a bunch of time I should’ve been working looking into this, and here is the HSRA’s most recent report on the subject: https://hsr.ca.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/Sustainability-Report-2024-FINAL-A11Y-20240916.pdf

From the relevant section, pg 58:

With high-speed rail, the annual GHG emissions reductions are projected to be 0.6 to 3 million MTCO2e. based on 2024 Business Plan ridership models. This reduction is equivalent to the annual carbon emissions associated with the energy use of between 77,000 and 372,000 homes – more than the housing stock of San Jose. The cumulative reductions in well-to-wheels emissions over the first 50 years of operations are projected to be between 29 million and 142 million MTCO2e.

I wish they’d provided a percent reduction in vehicle emissions, but according to another source (https://ww2.arb.ca.gov/ghg-inventory-data), in 2023, transportation emissions in California were 137 million metric tons of CO2. The average of the range comes out to around 1.3% of that range.

That’s interesting. I wonder what fraction of transit emissions are from passenger travel across the state, vs commercial hauling and inner city traffic. I still think this is an obviously necessary step, but I’m curious what other actions are needed to take care of the other 99% of transit emissions. Perhaps urban public transit and bike infrastructure.

First: fuck this bullshit. This is such a common problem with market-based solutions. I’m a big proponent of them, but you really need to keep politicians from doing this. The goal is phasing out fossil fuels. The money absolutely should be going to projects that fulfill that goal. This is not a piggy bank.

Second:

“While supporters ballyhoo the bullet train as something that would have a major impact on emissions by reducing auto traffic, the High Speed Rail Authority’s own projections indicate that, were it to be fully completed, it would reduce automobile emissions by scarcely 1%. Meanwhile construction actually increases emissions.”

This doesn’t quite pass the sniff test. You’re telling me that if you built a zero-emissions mode of high speed transit along one of the most trafficked routes in the state that there would be no change in emissions? Are the ridership projections zero? Did the model say that for every driver who choses to take the train instead of driving, a new driver will take their place? Is this factoring in the effect on airline emissions from people who train instead of fly? This just sounds like that monologue from Landman where Billy Bob Thorton’s character confidently declares a bunch of facts about climate reduction that the writer thought sounded good.

That was a great ep and this is a great meme

Holy shit, really?

That is Sony levels of stupid.

View from the Top.

I saw it when I was in my twenties with a friend because we (two mostly straight guys) thought we were going to see the latest silly Mike Myers movie. And then it turned out that he was barely in it! They just took all his scenes and put them in the trailer! The actual movie was a very dull romcom staring Gwyneth Paltrow and some guy who I don’t remember being in the trailer at all.

When it ended, we walked out of the theater and just said to each other ‘What the hell was that?’.

Also, I think Shallow Hal kind of falls in this too. I don’t recall the trailer being great, but it had to be good enough that it got me to see that terrible movie.

Also, I don’t know if this qualifies, but I remember that The Cable Guy staring Jim Carrey and Matthew Broderick was the first time I saw a movie and realized that a trailer can be misleading. They deliberately promoted it like The Mask and Ace Ventura. I think I was like 12 when I saw it, and it creeped me way the fuck out.

It wouldn’t surprise me if it’s actually a better movie than people remember, but the misleading promotion was a great way to ensure the movie didn’t find its audience.

Wanna join my D&D group?

My timezone is west coast.

Please desist

Ulgh.

Blocked

I feel like a lot of people are missing the obvious conclusion that everyone involved here is awful.

Maduro? Brutal dictator. His domestic opposition? Violent fascists. His international opposition? Absolute war criminals.

It’s really sad. My primary opinion is that the US needs to leave Venezuela the fuck alone. If you want democracy in Venezuela, you can’t get it through sanctioning the population into starvation if they don’t vote the way Chevron tells them to. Did Maduro steal an election? Yes! But his opposition at home and abroad isn’t mad that it wasn’t fair: they’re mad because they think it’s bullshit for him to steal it after they stole it first!

Get the fuck out and let them actually decide what they want. The US is the clearly the greatest villain in a story with no obvious good guys.

I don’t know what your legal remedies are, but my first question is if your neighbor has any family that you could speak to.

I live in the US, but I had a somewhat similar problem with a neighbor. We saw his daughter come by from time to time, so one time we got her attention and shared our phone numbers and explained that we all wanted the same thing: peace and quiet. She was then able to speak to her father and possibly get him to take medication. In any case, things got much better, and when we had issues after that, we didn’t go talk to him, we texted her politely to ask that she might do a wellness check and help keep him regulated.

That’s fine, but I want my shy players doing more accents, so no one teases anyone about all our awful accents.

I think it’d be very cool if they approached challenges like a hacker.

Instead of just tricking a target with a direct approach, use illusions to trick targets into helping them trick secondary targets.

Surveil a target to find out what a family member’s voice sounds like in order to imitate it.

Use an illusory object to feign that you’ve taken something to bait someone into an over reaction that gets them in trouble.

That kind of manipulation.

It would explain a lot

Last night one player said of another, “wow, that cowboy accent drifted to southern real fast.”

I was like, “we got a house rule: we don’t talk about accent drift at this table, buddy”