There are times when we need to be stoic in the face of unexpected setbacks. This would be one.
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Ron, I hope everything’s okay with you.
From the morning links comments.
Wound up drinking with my step dad last night and we are tearing apart his rotting deck today.
That sounds like something will need lots of alcohol. Good luck Ron.
Awwww! Rage therapy!
Ron is okay, just quite busy today.
Ron has a good step dad.
Everything a widowed mother could want!
The word stoic comes from stoa, the Greek word for a covered walkway supported by columns.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stoa
The stoics got their name because they liked to hang out in such places and their strong, quiet, helpful, upright nature reminded people of stone columns.
In Chinese philosophy, Confucius spoke often of junzi, meaning a superior person.
***
In Confucianism, the ideal personality is the 聖 shèng, translated as saint or sage. However, as sagehood is impractical for most people, Confucius defined an archetype for a less demanding but still cultured and moral way of life and used the term junzi, originally used to refer to members of the nobility, to refer to anyone upholding that way of life, regardless of social status. Junzi act according to proper conduct (禮, lǐ or li) to bring about harmony (和, hé or he), which Confucianism maintains should rule the home, society, and the state.
***
Confucius and his disciples once went for a walk in a distant village. By the side of the road, there was a woman weeping bitterly. Confucius asked her what was wrong. The woman said her husband and then shortly after her son had been killed by a wild tiger. Confucius then asked her why did she not move away? She answered that she was afraid of being a subject under an even more cruel warlord.
At this, Confucius turned to his disciples and said that an oppressive ruler is even more fearsome than a killer tiger.
hey d00d. In case you didn’t see it from a few days ago, I passed the German test (took a year) and wanted to thank you for your advice.
I saw. You are most welcome. Good luck to you in all your future linguistic endeavors. A famous Romanian writer taught himself English by copying sentences.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eug%C3%A8ne_Ionesco
***
Ionesco began his theatre career later in life; he did not write his first play until 1948 (La Cantatrice chauve, first performed in 1950 with the English title The Bald Soprano). At the age of 40, he decided to learn English using the Assimil method, conscientiously copying whole sentences in order to memorize them. Re-reading them, he began to feel that he was not learning English, rather he was discovering some astonishing truths such as the fact that there are seven days in a week, that the ceiling is up and the floor is down; things which he already knew, but which suddenly struck him as being as stupefying as they were indisputably true.[11]
***
Always remember that however bizarre a language might seem, there is a method to its madness, because it was made by people not much different from you.
Just in time for the rise of the American Reich (not to be confused with Robert Reich).
Not from “stoat?”
We don’t get to run around like weasels?
***
This is of obscure origin, said in Watkins to be probably related to Proto-Germanic *wisand- “bison” (see bison), with a base sense of “stinking animal,” because both animals have a foul, musky smell (compare Latin vissio “stench”).
***
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k76IGLi6jWI
Tiger repelling rocks hadn’t been invented yet.
Remain calm. All is well.
I don’t believe you.
+6°
So, Mom is home in her pretty bedroom. Home health nurse, PT, and OT were here. The OT was the only one who’d been here before and she was astounded at the difference. Mom’s up and about, getting her own bfast (with a tidge of help), sorting her stuff, and generally almost back to baseline where she was before we took her to the hospital on Jan 4 (with the exception of showering, as we have a small walk-in shower and the one at the SNF was ginormous).
Today, we are going to work on stairs.
Swiss is good at stares.
SWISS!!!!!!!
Some positive news is always welcome. Good for your Mom and good for you. Hopefully this will help as an antidote for the ‘other’ difficulty.
Are Swiss Stairs like pocket doors?
Hopefully the stairs are up to code and not too narrow.
House built in 1996, so probably. Three stairs from garage to house, with railing and shelving supports to hold onto.
Amazing recovery.
<===
Maybe CAS will have difficulty with stairs? As in “falling down.”
I somehow doubt she’ll threaten a fast food worker with a gun.
I do not allow CAS and CAM in my house. (This makes me a monster in their congregation’s eyes.)
This is good news.
Buddhism is sort of like an extreme stoicism in that it teaches that the self is an illusion.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lc5H0gtl0h4
We are not our thoughts or feelings, though sometimes it seems so.
There are a lot of similarities, which I find interesting.
We are not our thoughts or feelings
Then what are we?
A fair question…
We are the thing that experiences thoughts and feelings. When you are hungry or tired, you are not those sensations, just whatever it is that experiences them.
Just got back from the range. Got a training session with handguns. Shot a Sig 1911, worked on my technique.
Brief review of the Sig 1911 versus the Sigp320 – no comparison, the 1911 wins. It’s more comfortable in the hand, the mechanism is smoother, the slide easier to operate, and I could operate the controls. If you don’t know how to take it down, it’s a puzzle, but simple once you know. There was one problem, which I am unsure of the cause.
More than once on the second to last round in the magazine, it would start to pick up the last round while feeding and jam. We were not able to determine if this was a problem with how I was loading the magazines, or an issue with the magazines. I’m going to need some alternative magazines to compare with.
Based on the pic you posted, you shoot handguns very well already.
Your time might be spent training with other weapons.
Pulling out a knife works well even against multiple armed attackers, at least in my experience. You can buy a tire thumper at many convenience stores.
Pros use sodium cyanide in a spray bottle or otherwise dissolved.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Kuklinski
That is all terrible advice.
Oh?
Many people have tried to kill me and I’m still here.
How many grenades have you thrown?
I invoke my 5th amendment right against self-incrimination.
Interesting.
Ever been through something like this?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mUPJckUSdzo
I can say definitively that I have never killed three people on the subway.
What?! Not even with your strangling gloves?
Sheesh, guy. Live a little.
https://youtu.be/V355OG77SQM?si=DQvSqUbq58yTBCil&t=6298
As a proponant of the personal automobile, I do not spend a great deal of time on subways.
Are you being honest or just trying to trick me into revealing fucked up shit about my own life?
Neither, I am trying to be funny by using oddly specific denials.
Understood.
I think well of you and hope you find lasting happiness.
There are too many miserable troublemakers in the world as it is.
There’s a good reason why a century-old pistol design still remains relevant today. Nothing shoots like a good 1911.
That said, I wouldn’t buy a SIG 1911. (Actually I wouldn’t buy anything from SIG, ever.) That magazine issue (?) is an example of why.
Third party magazines exist.
This. I can hit with my Kimber 1911 single stack almost like a rifle. For some reason my hands like the round rather than the straight spring housing. Also, I put tritium sights on it. I cannot miss with that thing.
I have a Sig P226 .40 S&W that shoots really well, nice and accurate, never had a problem with it. That being said my EDC is a Glock 43X.
My p938 is a nice little pistol.
But, I do love my Springfield 1911s.
Older/european SIGs are sometimes very nice. I wouldn’t buy a modern one, as their QC has demonstrably gone to dogshit.
Sure, but a gun should ship with magazines that work in it. It’s not the gun I don’t trust, so much as the processes that made it.
Yes but the company that makes the good thrid party magazines is Mec-Gar, who also makes the OEM ones.
Having said that, I will need to buy a SIG this year. No idea which one. The 1911 would be the only one that would open up a new division for me.
Thorny question
While no one has been injured or killed by these attacks, three professors and researchers of domestic terrorism and extremism tell NPR that they consider these cases to be acts of domestic terrorism.
“It’s absolutely domestic terrorism. I know that may discomfort many people. But vandalism is a crime that if it’s committed with a political motive, can certainly be defined as terrorism,” says Bruce Hoffman, senior fellow for counterterrorism and homeland security at the Council on Foreign Relations. He is the co-author of the forthcoming book, God, Guns, and Sedition: Far-Right Terrorism in America.
One man’s domestic terror is another man’s patriotism. If only we could pin this on right wing anti government kooks.
This far right terrorism business….examples? The only thing that comes to my mind is violence against abortion clinics. We haven’t had any of that lately that I am aware of and in the past it was scattered lone wolves.
I think the “experts” would put Dylan Roof and the guy who shot up a synagogue in that bucket.
If. you put the left wing and right wing violent nuts next to each other you wont see any sunlight between them. The left/right designation is meaningless. What we are talking about are uncivilized people who use violence and coercion to solve their problems, get their way etc. Like guns, the politics is not the problem.
It’s not just vandalism, it’s arson in some cases. Arson committed for political motives is absolutely terrorism.
Fun fact, Arson is among the very short list of crimes New York allows you to use lethal force to stop.
I recently had been considering upgrading from my Expedition to a Navigator. So when this one came on the market recently, I was quite interested.
I’d done my search on CarGurus, so I didn’t notice at first that the beast was being offered on AutoNation. Eventually, I contacted the dealership, detailed my car for trade, and exchanged texts with them.
The saleschick that I was dealing with was cagey about sending me the Monroney (window) sticker and the Carfax, and lowballed me (in my opinion) on the trade, considering the aggressive maintenance and care for the appearance that I take on the Expedition. They also wouldn’t budge on price — this is an AutoNation thing: no haggle pricing, take it or leave it.
Eventually, I looked up the vehicle on the AutoNation website just to see if the price had dropped some more. It was there that I found the original window sticker. Goddamn, but the MSRP was $120K, while the asking price for it now was $81K. The car was under a year old and only has 9000 miles on the odometer. Great deal, but why was the price that low.
Ahh, but the AutoNation site also has a link to the CarFax, and the vehicle’s service history.
Yep, between July 31 and December 27 of last year, the owner had brought the vehicle to the Lincoln dealership six times for one issue or another, before the car went up for sale on January 5. That kind of off-the-line lemon is vanishingly rare these days, but it does happen. Bullet dodged.
I’m really glad that I was slow and meticulous in searching for a new car. If I’d just shown up with my checkbook, I’d be giving myself a serious ass-kicking right about now.
o.O
I will make a list of the things I hate. In the top five you will see ‘buying a car’.
“Buying a car”
I hope that is something I never have to do again, especially considering the current price of new.
But at my age, and the age and mileage of my current ride, the outlook is poor.
My wife’s car on the other hand only just now topped 25K mileage and is ten years older. We obviously use my car for most driving.
I really can’t think of a bad car-buying experience. When I traded in my FJ a couple years ago, they gave me some crap about needing to put new tires on it (the ones it had were fine), but they were paying so much for it they really didn’t dent my warm glow.
The whole thing (other than the handover and the dinking about the tires) was done online with one, maybe two, phone calls. I had more trouble getting all the “safety” shit turned off on the new car than I did buying it.
I was waiting for the punch line.
Is it too subtle for my small brain? Is “ass-kicking” or “shown up” or “checkbook” somehow pun-tatively related to the word navigator or expedition? Or “saleschick” to “feed back”? I give up and will take it face value; I’m not Judge Napolitano here after all.
Extremism experts have long warned that domestic terrorism, mainly coming from far-right and white supremacy groups, posed a far greater threat than foreign terrorism. Still, despite sporadic efforts to do so, no federal domestic terrorism law has been created due to a lack of consensus.
Because of this, people involved in acts determined to be domestic terrorism are still just charged with offenses such as arson, murder, kidnapping and assault.
The perpetrators of the most famous incident of U.S. domestic terrorism, the Oklahoma City Bombing that killed 168 people, were never actually charged with domestic terrorism. Rather, Timothy McVeigh and his co-conspirator Terry L. Nichols were found guilty of several counts of murder and the use of a weapon of mass destruction or conspiracy to use a weapon of mass destruction.
That seems like a missed opportunity for prosecutorial grandstanding.
If you’re wondering why no one takes you seriously, I’d start there.
I dont think the OK bombing bunch was ‘far-right’ or white supremacy. It was revenge for the murders the FBI committed at Ruby Ridge and Waco. How is that ‘right wing’?
Just wait for BLM to be called far-right.
‘Anti-government’ is ‘right wing’ by default. Ya gotta keep up with the lingo, daddy-o!
Don’t question them. They are experts.
I was waiting for a Navy press release to brag about my son-in-law on Facebook, and here it is. Officially they are being deployed to Third Fleet, which is Northern Pacific. Hopefully he’s not manning the rails, I heard that’s terrible. It takes a whole day to get to the open ocean.
https://www.kitsapsun.com/story/news/2025/03/21/uss-nimitz-departs-bremerton-for-global-deployment/75311855007/
Beware of unusual storm activity out there in the Pacific.
Better to be barfing in heavy seas than confined to a narrow blood-hot channel lined with people who want to poke holes in your ride.
That’s a quote from Seneca, right?
Close, I think it’s North Syracuse
Your talking about Seattle, right?
I saw that ship in Puget Sound when I was there last summer. Got a couple of nice pics of it.
A guy with a Datsun 240z blows up the gearbox. He goes to the parts store and they want $1500 for a replacement gear. He does some research and finds out, if he orders a crate of the gears from the manufacturer, he can get a good deal, sell the surplus, make a profit and fix his car for free. So he does.
His crate of parts is on a plane, but the plane develops engine trouble. The pilot decides to ditch the freight the plane is carrying.
Meanwhile, two farmers are having a chat on their boundary fence when these gears the plane has dumped start landing in the paddock around them.
One farmer says to the other, “Will you look at that! It’s raining Datsun cogs.”
You truly are the master of puns and especially shaggy dog puns.
Next-to-last semester of college. Creative writing/journalism major. Next-to-last creative writing class I need to graduate. All short stories, all the time. I’m a novelist. This is not appreciated by anyone. Stressed, working 50 hours a week graves, dad just died. Class is at 8a.
BUT! As soon as I turned in my first assignment, my prof (faculty editor-in-chief for uni’s lit rag) pulled me aside and said, “I can’t teach you anything, and you have an A in this class. But I would love it if you’d come and do the assignments so I can see what you come up with.” Oh, I am THERE with bells on every class, sleep or no sleep.
I wrote a story he loved and held up as an example of the perfect “shaggy dog story,” but I had never heard of that. I went along like I knew what I was doing.
FF to last semester and last creative writing class I needed to graduate. Prof is a dot-Indian with a thick accent whose focus was in English-language poetry. He a) told us explicitly not to turn in anything we had written for any other class and b) did not like me the second he clapped eyes on me and made sure everyone knew it.
By this time, I was over the whole college thing. I just wanted to get done, so I didn’t much care. Had a time crunch. Turned in shaggy dog story. He HATED it. “What is the point of this?” he demanded. I explained it’s a shaggy dog story. “What does this mean? What is this ‘shaggy dog story’?” I ALMOST said, “If you don’t know, you shouldn’t be teaching this class,” but I refrained because it wasn’t that deep for me. I made my disdain clear because the face don’t lie (sorry, Shakira).
That is my “shaggy dog” story.
As a tech major, I didn’t have to take as many English language classes, but the one I was required to under the General education requirement taught me a very valuable lesson – it eliminated any lingering aura of respectability from professors. The highest I was able to get in that class on an assignment was a B for a paper that catered to the biases of the professor. Once I no longer cared what they thought beyond “how do I get a passing grade?” My stress level over them disliking me dropped substantially.
I still wonder why an English professor who didn’t like men was at a technical institute whose student body was skewed heavily male.
Sadism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_120_Days_of_Sodom
Back in my professorin’ days, I actually had a herpetology grad student capture an alligator from the on campus lake at Big College and take it back to his apartment for “research.”
He actually came to me requesting an extension on his project because his homework ate his dog.
I never dawned on me to ask if the dog was shaggy.
In my professorin’ days, I had a student ask if they could go over the maximum amount of allowed absences so he could do some frat thing.
He was not very happy when I said no, and even less happy when I followed through and failed him when he missed anyways.
That took awhile because my brain reads in Southern and the pronunciations that make it work aren’t there…
MSRP was $120K, while the asking price for it now was $81K. The car was under a year old and only has 9000 miles on the odometer.
*outright prolonged laughter*
It’s raining Datsun cogs.
*Boos, throws popcorn*
Panic!
Is it Widespread?
No. Manic.
Nah, just a Massive Attack.
I was familiar with the band, but I only found out a little while ago (while playing Art of Rally) that Massive Attack is rallycross lingo.
Heading for the Disco?
probably not
Rabid totalitarian
“If you read the news, it feels like Armageddon. I can’t walk past a TV without seeing a Tesla on fire,” Musk said, referencing protesters setting Tesla vehicles on fire at dealerships and vandalism at Supercharger locations. “I understand if you don’t want to buy our product, but you don’t have to burn it down. That’s a bit unreasonable.”
Trying to rally the troops and reassure the investors.
I have a feeling this story was AI generated. It hits too many buttons in a stereotypical way.
https://freebeacon.com/campus/disqualifying-member-of-top-doe-physics-panel-said-white-empiricism-undermines-theory-of-relativity-accused-israel-of-genocide/
The Bee can’t beat reality.
Mental illness does not discriminate. It does not care about race, gender, age, money or level of education.
Last hour on the TeeVee: endless coverage of Tesla violence, Swatting of conservatives….one on now is a lefty who found out after Helene what FEMA is all about, radically changed their position after actually meeting conservative people (conservatives, some wearing MAGA hats helped them through the storm damage while FEMA did jack shit and their left wing ‘friends’ did nothing)
They vocally criticized both FEMA and their left wing former associates….they got swatted.
The one before was a woman claiming she has been regularly threatened and had objects thrown at her while she drives her Tesla in some town near L.A.
Let me scroll back up and re-read those expert’s claims of rampant white supremacy and right wing violence.
They don’t count vandalism and arson as violence.
it’s righteous violence
They don’t count vandalism and arson as violence.
Property is theft, man.
A loving obituary, Florida Man style.
Bonus points for using his mug shot in the obit.
lulz
Florida man, meet Reno woman:
https://www.rgj.com/story/news/2014/06/25/full-text-of-marianne-theresa-johnson-reddicks-obituary/11321891/
Tour of the Swiss Shooting Museum
Is it full of holes?
Neat!
The process is not over.
Just got a call making an appointment to talk to a judge regarding my permit application. Now I have a new conversation to develop social anxiety over. It’s still a month away.
The clerk who called me (I assume she was a clerk) said it should take fifteen minutes, so I’m not sure how many questions will actually be asked or what’s actually going to happen.
Appropriate attire.
I don’t like wearing T-Shirts.
But more pragmatically, I’d rather not antagonize the Judge when I benefit from being unremarkable.
You might invest in a few of these, just in case…