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Ghost of LL

Certifiably Surly
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Posts posted by Ghost of LL

  1. 16 hours ago, Brisketexan said:


    What you’ll do is buy some sweet property at rock-bottom prices because the MAGAts who live there will all be in deep financial holes because they are relentlessly voting for self-destruction. Once the leopards have eaten enough of their faces, you can offer them pennies an d they’ll take it out of desperation. Fuck em.

    So fun story on that: nearly a century ago, we had a Great Depression.  Many are saying it was the best Depression.  It came at the end of a half-century of nearly uninterupted Republican government.  Many people don't know that.

    Anyway--I digress.

    My family has had a few tracts in Bell County for a very long time.  I didn't really know how long.  I knew it was family land and that was it.  Cotton farming, mostly.  But Cotton is hard on the land; for the last 20 years it's been corn.  And corn doesn't make very much money.  So we leased the upper tract to a solar outfit to build a solar farm.

    A few months ago, Oncor came asking for an easement to run transmission lines across the lower tract.  There was some family discussion, but at the end of it we decided to go ahead.  There was some discussion about the fact that my grandparents had kind of envisioned that as the bug-out property.  Papa worked for the DOD and figured it might be good to have a place of last resort if the end of the world came about.  And these days, . . . .

    But in that discussion, I asked how it came about that the family owned this random property (or really set of properties) in Bell County.  And it turns out that my great-great grandfather was a soon-to-be-retired teacher in the very early 1930s, and as local farmers went bankrupt he would buy their tracts for virtually nothing from the local bank (which itself was about to (and ultimately did) go bust).  

    So yeah--we leased out that tract to Oncor.  It paid for my son's first car: a new BMW.  There's plenty left over for his sister's car in a couple years.  And along with it comes a lesson in family history.  And why the family's crest ought to feature a vulture.

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  2. 1 hour ago, WhatTheBuck said:

    I would like to sit on a cloud. That sounds fun. I don’t think it’s possible.

    Did he really spell it that way?

    Yes—he really fucking spelled it that way. Because he’s a goddamned moron.

    But sadly, the reality of it is that he’s completely average.

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  3. Well, Kerrville is about to get wiped out by this flood.  And a lot of people won't be able to rebuild with FEMA now functionally out of business.  So any of y'all looking for some cheap Hill Country real estate and willing to take advantage of some human misery . . . this may be your shot real close to home.

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  4. 22 minutes ago, Gatorubet said:

    Not a criticism GOLL, but I disagree with the bolded statement.  “Protestant” includes everything from the Anglican church to evangelical snake handlers and the abomination that is the politics-centric cowboy church.  The term protestant is perhaps the least theologically exclusive term you could find…they cover the theological map from Catholic-light to bat shit crazy.

    And if you are approaching this from the Catholic perspective, that church has a list of rules and requirements for salvation that appear nowhere in the Bible - yet make up some of the core tenets of the mother church (the list of sins requiring confession to a priest, last rights, Papal infallibility, etc.)

    I'm not talking about Protestants broadly.  I commented on "Protestants who fetishize the Ten Commandments."  And that's a lot of them.  But it's certainly not all.

    I'm fairly atheistic these days, but I grew up Catholic.  And at least when I went through CCD, the Church was pretty fucking supersessionist.  I assume it still is, based on my occasional readings of what the Pope has to say.  So I tend to think of this weird love of the Ten Commandments among purported "Christians" as a purely Protestant phenomenon. 

  5. On 6/24/2025 at 6:25 AM, HornOnTheBayou said:

    Right there with you. I also thought about putting it next to the board where I write announcements, like "Test on Wednesday", because I know students never look at that.

    But in all seriousness, I cannot in good conscience put this in my classroom. Off the top of my head, in my classes last year I know I had Christians, Muslims, Jews, Buddhists, Hindus, agnostics, and athiests in my classes last year. I am not going to hang up an official sign from the government that says "I am the Lord, your god. You shall have no other gods before me."

     

    On 6/24/2025 at 7:15 AM, Goofyboy said:

    Sure you can. Put it up with some stuff said by Zeus, Ra, and others and label it Mythology. Have fun with malicious compliance.

    I don't think it's even a matter of squaring that circle.  It's just a fucking circle.

    If you look back at the original text--and any Biblical scholar worth a damn will agree with this--Yahweh isn't saying "I am the only god out there."  He's saying that "you shall have no other gods before me."

    That necessarily implies the existence of "other gods."  Now, Yahweh is a jealous fucker.  He doesn't want you putting Baal or Zeus ahead of him.  But he's not saying that they can't be co-equal.  And he's sure as shit not saying that Baal and Zeus don't exist.

    So fire away and hang your Vedas and Sutras and whatever else.  Just don't hang them above the Ten Commandments, I suppose.

    Or maybe do.  Jesus told y'all fuckers that the Ten Commandments don't really matter.  There are really just Two Commandments: “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’  This is the first and greatest commandment.  And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’  All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.”  

    I'll just never understand Protestants who absolutely fetishize the Ten Commandments in the face of Jesus's actual fucking words.

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  6. 34 minutes ago, Brian Fantana said:

    "God Bless Israel" in a POTUS address to the nation

    Cracking Up Lol GIF by GIPHY IRL

    AMERICA FIRST!

    4 minutes ago, Vegas64 said:

    We aren't going to war. We are bombing Iran from afar and letting Israel put boots on the ground and die in that manner.

    If this is truly contained, and we did truly obliterate (taking both statements with a bath tub of salt), then this was an amazing and awesome military exercise and America, the region (specifically Israel) and the world is better for it.

    This is every client I've ever had who said "we're just filing a quick suit for declaratory judgment."  Yeah--those counterclaims are a real bitch, though.

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  7. 23 hours ago, Judge Roybeanbag said:

    Generally speaking, we have our shit in buildings, not out on a tarmac day to day.  

    I think that's wrong.  Just put into Google Maps "Minot AFB," "Barksdale AFB," and "Dyess AFB" and count the number of B-52 are out on the flight line of the first two and how many B-1s are on the flight line at Dyess.

    And to be real honest, I don't see just a whole lot in the way of hardened shelters for the aircraft at those bases.  I see the hardened shelters for the weapons.  But it looks like those would be driven to the flight line and loaded on to the aircraft.

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  8. 2 hours ago, Brisketexan said:

    You can still have cold water oysters in the summer.  Some tasty PNW oysters in June is a good, good thing.

    Yep.  I'm going to be at Eventide Labor Day weekend.  I plan to eat all the oysters.

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  9. 1 hour ago, Mo Horn said:

    I had the best oyster I've ever had in my life a month ago at the Tsukiji market in Tokyo. I didn't get the largest one and it still took me 3 bites to eat it. 

    20250422_112907.thumb.jpg.bbb845ad6f43e97319b11e35f0a5e375.jpg

    The two I had at Tsukiji were unreal.  It's like they were the gozira of oysters.  They were every bit as good as a Wellfleet (which is generally my go-to).  But they took three or four bites to get through.  It was just unbelievable.

    My general preference is PNW.  But they're hard to get here in Austin.

    About ten years ago, I was up in Seattle with a group of guys going to a Rangers-Mariners game.  That's a great park, and we were just bar-hopping from our hotel to the stadium.  Along the way, we happened into a place that had Happy Hour $1 Puget Sound oysters.  The first dozen went down quick.  We're snacking on the second dozen when a couple of the guys said "we need to go or we're going to miss first pitch."  Fuck that--I'm missing first pitch.  I think I finally made it for the third inning after downing a couple dozen more.

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  10. With the contract situation with the core of this team, you've got probably five years to win a Cup.  That's plenty of time if you're thinking DeBoer isn't the guy.  Even if it takes a year or two for the new coach to implement his system, you've got the players locked down for that.  

    But if you think DeBoer might not be the guy, then you've got to pull that trigger now.  And I have no problem with that decision.

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  11. 22 hours ago, 956 Worldwide said:

    The result of this ambiguity and the completely overheated rhetoric deployed against “Zionists”  means that among people who are most inclined to take dramatic and potentially illegal action, the difference between “Zionists” and “Jews” is nearly eliminated, especially since the vast majority of Jews, even those who oppose Netanyahu and the conduct of the war, believe that Israel has the right to exist as a uniquely Jewish entity.

    I think Israel has a right to exist as a uniquely Jewish entity.

    But the right to exist is different from a supposed right to expansion.  And that's particularly true where it want to retain its Jewish character.  

    If Israel is going to be both an expansionist entity, then it either needs to be a multi-ethnic country or a practitioner of ethnic clensing.  I don't support the latter option.  But that's the option that this Israeli government is undertaking.  

    I don't think opposing that renders one either anti-Semitic, anti-Zionist, or anti-Israel.

    27 minutes ago, burnt beanz said:

    What's their exact status?

    Were they granted asylum?

    No lawyer, but I'm guessing if you're here under asylum and a family member carries out a terrorist attack then there is legal justification to remove you from our country. Seems pretty straightforward.

    Is there a legal justificiation for removing someone from the country based on the actions of a family member?  Can you please cite the legal authority for that proposition?

    Punishing family members for actions in which they did not participate is pretty anathema to our system of justice.  And I'm not familiar with any circumstance in which we have done that before.

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