SwingingTheLamp @ SwingingTheLamp @midwest.social

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2 yr. ago

It's explained on his Wikipedia page. He was an Army captain in the Kosovo War, when a NATO commander (Wesley Clark, who later ran for President) ordered his unit to secure Pristina Airport, which Russian troops had already occupied. Blunt refused to engage them, long enough for the British general get involved to countermand the order, on the grounds that he didn't want his men to start WW3.

For some reason that reminds me of how the first member of the Wampanoag tribe to greet the Pilgrims at Plymouth Colony, named Samoset, spoke to them in English. Then he came back later with another tribe member, Squanto, who also spoke English.

James Blunt possibly prevented the start of World War 3. (But became best known for the song You're Beautiful. Reality is weird.)

That sounds like the story in the Oliver Sacks book, The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat. There was also a story in there about a man who taught himself to see just fine, even though his eyes didn't work at all. His brain just made educated guesses.

Along those same lines, we're all blind literally around half the time we're awake. Our optic processing system can't keep up with the input as our eyes flit from thing to thing, so we don't see anything while they move. And they're moving constantly, even if we're not aware of it, because only the fovea in the center of the retina has a high enough density of receptors to see details, and also because of sensory fatigue from prolonged static stimulus. In short, we have a tiny field of detailed vision that's not even working much of the time. That field of vision that feels like a 4K video feed into the mind is a complete lie.

Like the way our subjective experience feels like a continuous, integrated mind fully in control of itself, but in reality, consciousness dips out a couple of times every minute while the brain attends to sensory input.

Even weirder, the conscious mind might not even exist, except as an illusory, emergent phenomenon of sensory experience and memory. There isn't a place in the brain where it 'lives', no part that's only ever active when we're conscious.

A couple of factors: Back in olden times, before Douglas Coupland applied the Generation X moniker in 1991, they used to talk about the Baby Bust generation. The Baby Boom was when all of the GIs got back from the war and all started getting jiggy at the same time. Then, the birth rate dropped significantly. In my elementary school, we had combined grades 2/3, and grades 4/5, because there weren't enough kids enrolled for full classrooms otherwise.

Also, the Baby Boom generation is defined as 1946 to 1964, which is 19 years, compared to the 16 years of what we call Generation X now, from 1965 to 1980.

Granted, is not a huge difference—71 million Boomers and 73 million Millennials vs. 64 million Gen X—but there's fewer of us. But also, the name and the generational categories are pretty recent developments. When Coupland's book came out, I was too young to be Gen X, the people he was writing about were adults out into world. I wasn't part of the classic Gen X disaffected-slacker culture, and its touchstones don't really resonate with me. It wasn't until years later that the definition of Generation X definitively included me. That's why you'll often see a lot of younger Gen X identify with the Xennial label, because we have a lot more in common with "elder Millennials," which makes the whole cohort less cohesive.

It's almost like the generational cutoff years are arbitrary, and that society changes continuously, and not in discrete jumps. It's almost like, too, that something unspeakably neo-liberal happened in 1980, and the real division is between the people who came of age before they pulled up the ladders to prosperity behind themselves (Boomers and older Gen X) and the people who came of age after (Xennials, Millennials, and so on). Nevermind, sorry, that's just some anti-capitalist hogwash. /s

That's why I'm thankful somebody did it before I moved in! The chimney, on the other hand, didn't have a cap, so it leaked when the rain fell vertically. The re-lining and new cap was pretty expensive, too.

Somebody installed a sump pump fairly recently. There's plenty of evidence that the basement used to be partially finished, but it was probably all ripped out due to water damage. It's dry now, thanks to the pump.

I'm waging a tiny, ineffectual protest whereby I almost never say his name, and avoid mentioning him at all whenever possible. It's never a good idea to give a raging narcissist the attention they crave. It's an interesting writing challenge, and makes me feel a little better, at least.

We need an AI agent that filters out all news articles that are just people flapping their pie-holes, whether that be the President-elect, or Twitter randos.

JFC you don't even live in the U.S. and you want to tell me that the type of people who would be happy to have American women in the same situation as Afghan women don't exist here?

Something about a full-court press?

Who compared the situation? This is about comparable view of women.

That feeling of dread when the anecdote begins with a specific date...

I live in the United States. I don't have to imagine, I can see it up close.

Speaking of real, the USA is not a law of nature. It's only been around for a short time, historically, and it took a bloody civil war to keep it going this long. The warning that we have to vote for the correct color every time, or the country falls apart, is wrong. Voting for the correct color and the country still falls apart is possible if that color can't make the fundamental changes needed.

Not just obesity, but also the loneliness epidemic, since mental health is boosted as much by the weak relationships of the people that one sees regularly, day-to-day, whose name one might not even know, as it is by close, intimate relationships. (And even the latter are suffering the loss of social contact.)

Disable the ad block, wait for all of the ads to load so the text stops jumping around like a crack-addled wallaby, accept the cookie notice, try to hit the tiny X to close the inevitable video overlay with shaking fingers, try to hit the tiny X to close the ad overlay, too, decline signing up for email alerts, decide whether to accept notifications, and then read the article one sentence at a time while scrolling past ads.

Maybe your local news sites aren't as insane as mine?

The Cannibal Sandwich, which doesn't actually use human flesh, but is also not a sandwich. Anyway, you take a slice of rye cocktail bread, spread on some raw, ground beef, then top it with some sliced onion, salt, and pepper. You can't get it ready-made, because nobody likes e. coli or salmonella poisoning. In fact, you have to make special arrangements to get the beef ground by a butcher in a clean grinder, and pretty much eat it the same day.

Indeed, it's fun to talk things over even if we don't disagree. My username is an old, nautical version of shooting the breeze, chewing the fat, etc. The tendency to see every interaction as verbal combat was slowly driving me off the red site even before the API fiasco, and Lemmy has been refreshing that way.