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Mole

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  1. This activity is reserved exclusively for Russian spies.
  2. My experience in higher ed tells me that the ratio of crazy or clueless to reasonable and grounded pretty much mirrors the general population. It seems more acute because 1.) we foolishly think education inoculates against crazy; 2.) people with more education are given many more chances to demonstrate their tenuous grip on reality; 3.) smart people can reason themselves into really crazy things at a very high level. That’s not to say that their aren’t a ton of nutcases in higher ed, just that most here are underestimating just how many nutcases are prowling around them while they wander around the Piggly-Wiggly.
  3. Someone needs to read more Tuttle Twins to understand the wonders of the invisible hand.
  4. Staying in the pop genre and adding a UT connection, Ray Crisara played piccolo trumpet on this track, he comes in around 2:00: And here he is playing Hindemith with Glenn Gould: And here he is playing Bugler’s Holiday: I don’t think there’s a UT connection here, but the Mnozil Brass put on a good show:
  5. Another UT grad, Billy Hunter, has been in the Met for quite some time as well. Also, Tom Siders is in the Boston Symphony. There are probably others, but those are two that also came to mind.
  6. I like presidents who don’t rape children, but that’s just me and I’m surely out of step with mainstream America these days.
  7. Not to mention that from my reading of the Bible, God redirecting that bullet seems more likely to be a judgement against our country rather than an endorsement of TFG.
  8. I may be misunderstanding what’s being said here, or it may be a case of people from different backgrounds using the same word with subtly (or wildly) different meanings. The idea that prayer can have tangible results in changing the outcome of events (what I would call intercessory prayer from my background), surely must be a position held by the majority of Christians. This is distinct from the signs and wonders stuff you’ll see in more charismatic churches, which is probably a minority view. It’s also distinct from the performative whitewashed tomb on your TV. I’ve been in many different churches of many different denominations, and I’m struggling to think of an example of prayer being treated as solely a form of meditation or a spiritual exercise. People ask God to help others in need. Sometimes that community has the resources to be that answer to prayer, sometimes they don’t, but they ask God to act. There’s a pretty strong case that at least most of the writers of the Bible believed that prayers can tangibly change things, not just in a spiritual way. Reading the teachings of Jesus on prayer, while He’s more often focused on our inner lives, asking God to affect specific change to specific situations is certainly present. You certainly can spiritualize “you have not because you ask not,” or the parable of the persistent widow, or Abraham negotiating with God, or the book of James talking about the effective prayer of a righteous person, but I suspect the folks who wrote those things were talking about more than good vibes and finding inner peace. Writings about the early church noted that they worshipped Jesus as God. That’s not a metaphor. I guess you can overlay a theology or philosophy related to an all-knowing God that can muddy the waters, but that doesn’t really change what all those praying people are trying to do.
  9. Psalm 10 begins: Why, Lord, do you stand far off? Why do you hide yourself in times of trouble? The rest of the Psalm bears closer resemblance to our current social order than a disaster such as this, but it seems like a pretty fair question in this case too. I don’t know how a compassionate person can look at this situation and not ask, where is God? The situation seems too cruel. The already mentioned book of Job is the go-to biblical book on human suffering, but to my reading, it’s throughout the entire text. The writers of the Bible seemed to accept that suffering, often unjust, was a part of life, and it can be terrible and unfathomably cruel. Unjust suffering is certainly depicted in the Gospels and Jesus does not respond with the trite responses that some of us try to self-sooth with. He responds with compassion for those who are suffering. I can’t speak to what any particular blowhard with a microphone says about prayer — whether he’s just trying to comfort himself in the face of such suffering or if his words come from genuine compassion or just putting on a show. Often times the desire to stand in front of a microphone put on a show indicates the lack of qualification to do so. I will say that for me personally, prayer does work. Meditating on the suffering of others and seeking to see them with the level of selfless compassion show by Jesus in the Gospels is a good first step to finding ways to help others in their suffering. I think this is probably the case for most believers, despite the compassionless performative show we all run across so often. Jesus didn’t like the show all that much either. If prayer is communicating with the creator of the universe and God of the Bible, and if some of those prayers are raging against the cruelty of this event, I think a just God would agree with such a sentiment. If such a prayer doesn’t spur the person to ease human suffering, then it was nothing more than a vain repetition. Townes Van Zandt sang, “If you needed me I would come to you; I’d swim the sea just to ease your pain.”
  10. During times of mourning, I like to turn to great works of our shared culture.
  11. The Jerry Lee Lewis talk made me realize that I only really knew him as the crying face on my TV, so I checked his Wikipedia article and found this gem of a sentence:
  12. He was definitely a harbinger of the our present day cultural rot. Someone so obviously dishonest, disingenuous, and sleazy feels so warm and familiar these days. Some of us sure do love our cartoon characters. Of course him admitting to “sin,” even so disingenuously, would put him in the top 1% of his type in terms of character and personal responsibility today. It’s almost quaint that someone would lie to us in such a way.
  13. A little more context in the IU situation: https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaeltnietzel/2025/07/01/indiana-university-to-discontinue-more-than-100-academic-programs/ Reading between the lines (maybe too much), these are probably smaller, less popular degrees that are probably mostly being shuffled into other programs to boost and consolidate numbers. I know that’s what I’d do in this situation.
  14. AI is pretty good at some things (loosely walking through technical problems, writing grammatically correct yet asinine prose, cooking advice) and terrible at other things (namely accuracy and truthfulness). My uniformed guess is that this is a result of its training, largely internet writing. ChatGPT’s default tone is the same as Reddit posters. With that in mind, and considering the history of the internet, AI will no doubt make access to more and weirder porn even more ubiquitous. Considering AI’s disinterest in factual accuracy and its ability to confidently argue against reality (again, consider its training), I see us going one of two ways: 1.) learning to value factual learning and actually knowing stuff in your head again or 2.) losing our grip on reality. It’ll probably be some of both.
  15. It’s turned me into a pretty good pastry chef. On the downside, my family will all end up with diabetes.
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