FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
And every gimmick hungry yob
Digging gold from rock n roll
Grabs the mic to tell us
he'll die before he's sold
But I believe in this
And it's been tested by research
He who fucks nuns
Will later join the church
User ID: 195
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
21hr ago
Runoff from the vast area of lawn that drains into the reflecting pool.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
21hr ago
"He didn't have the choke on me. I could still breathe in little gasps! I just tapped out because of the choke."
Trump himself has said, when justifying the peace deal:
“We run out of reserves at about four weeks,” Trump said in France while at the Group of Seven summit, discussing the recent memorandum of understanding with Iran. “You know, there are reserves all over the world, and we would really run out, and there’ll be a time when you wouldn’t be able to get it.” He said it would be “bedlam” if the oil ran out. “What this does is it allows the ships to go,” he said of the Iran deal. “If we keep bombing, those ships won’t be going.”
And again:
"I didn't want to see economic catastrophe. If you kept this going, that could have happened," Trump told reporters in the lakeside resort of Evian-les-Bains. The Republican president said he did not want to be like Herbert Hoover, who was U.S. president in October 1929 when the stock market crashed, triggering what became known as the Great Depression. "All I know is every time we talked about the possibility of peace, the stock market shot up like a rocket ship," Trump said. "Every time we said something negative, like, guess what, we're not going to be able to settle, it would go down very big."
Trump himself has made one of the clearest statements he's made about the war, saying that the strait of Hormuz was insufficiently open. We can get pedantic about what exactly "closed" means or whether we just needed gutsier ship captains if you want, but I don't think that really matters in assessing the success of "America" or "Trump & Hegseth" as strategic actors. Trump stated directly: the restrictions placed on the strait of Hormuz worked to force Trump to make a deal.
A general or an admiral can claim a "stabbed in the back theory" that "we didn't lose we left" that "we won the war on the battlefield and the politicians lost it at the negotiating table" or that "the civilians followed the traitors at home and didn't support the war enough."
A politician, a POTUS, can't claim that, because rallying public support is kind of his whole job. Coordinating with international insurance companies is within his purview. The home front is his war. Trump can't whine that we were winning the war if it wasn't for public opinion and the markets, public opinion and the markets is his job. The buck stops here. He needs to go to war with the public he has, not the public he wishes he had.
Trump and Hegseth made the specific decision not to attempt to build a public case for going to war with Iran, not to coordinate with international partners, not to plan ahead for the business consequences of the war. They chose speed and surprise over those things. That turned out to be a bad decision.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
23hr ago
That's the beauty of Pro/Rel, everyone has a peer to look up to and a peer to look down on. The clubs that are in danger of relegation have near-peer clubs around them that are a league below them, so just by scoring enough draws to stay in the top flight (or 2nd etc) you've achieved superiority to someone. Where in America a last place team is just a last place team. This is helped in Europe by density, the biggest distance in the EPL is less than the distance between Philly and Pittsburgh, which are in-state rivals in the USA, so no one is ever really bereft of top flight football (which is why pro/rel wouldn't work in the USA). This is also why I support instituting a modified version of the Gold System for draft picks.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1d ago
Balogun was benched.
Bosnia would be an embarrassment:
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1d ago
Trump called for Unconditional Surrender and made regime change a clear goal of the war from the get-go. That objective was clearly unachieved. Replacing Khamenei with Khamenei is a joke.
On 1, 2, 3 we don't have any data that shows a significant decline in capability. The ability for Iran to project power has not been meaningfully reduced in any way that is testable, as they still possess the naval/missile capability to shut the Strait of Hormuz, threaten their neighbors, and force a deal that benefits their proxy Hezbollah.
The problem here is that some people think this is Team Deathmatch rules and some people think it's Capture the Flag. The objective isn't to kill a lot of Iranians, it's to achieve some kind of strategic goal. The K:D doesn't matter, the objectives do.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1d ago
I don't think you're rejecting the premise, that conflict is the premise. Why does all the structure of the sport lean toward variability, but the result toward predictability?
While I hear you on the financial aspects in regular season league play, it doesn't explain the world cup. We see very few upsets in the world cup knockout stages or UCL knockout stages, relative to the NFL playoffs or NBA playoffs, which are just single games. The draw creates an illusion of regular season parity, but disappears in elimination rounds.
And the finances don't explain all of it, expensive MLB or NBA or NFL don't dominate cheap ones in the same way game-to-game, though they show similar advantages over time.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1d ago
I think what we're seeing here is modern woke secularism is a religion that has adapted to American law around the separation of church and state, such that it is able to infest the perquisites of religion without being expunged by the court's religious protection pesticides. Wokeness is a religion in the sense of acknowledging an ultimate reality and seeking to answer metaphysical questions about life, the universe, and everything; but it avoids the legal American definition of religion and thus can seek to be enforced by laws and taught in schools and discussed directly in the workplace. It satisfies the need for religion without being a religion.
The separation of church and state fundamentally, but silently, assumed that we all had a church we were leaving behind when interacting with the state. The Founders assumed that each man had religious beliefs, likely a formal denomination, which answered questions about life, the universe, and everything and that we would all lay those disputes aside when interacting within government structures. The assumption was that our public schools would be secular, but that was ok because nobody in the room fully believed in what was being taught in that school, we were all setting aside and sacrificing some separate religious belief and finding common ground in the secular.
Wokies have in essence hacked the system, where Hindus and Jews and Christians and Buddhists and Muslims and prots and Catholics and Jehovah's Witnesses and Mormons* all need to set aside their identity at the door and learn to accept secular stuff they don't actually believe, Wokies seek to impose their metaphysical understandings within the classroom and the office as orthodoxy. "Just being a decent person." Yeah, we're all trying to do that, and we all have different definitions.
This will ultimately require reworking the concept of freedom of religion.
*the Overton window of religious acceptability varied with the Founder in question and the era of the American Republic, Jefferson certainly in his writings at least fantasized about including hindoos and Mohamedans in the range of religions accepted in the land, but Missouri only rescinded the Mormon Extermination Order 50 years ago.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1d ago
Soccer fans, something that has bugged me for years: how does soccer manage to combine low scoring with highly predictable outcomes?
In most similar sports, low scoring and low margin of victory correlate with unpredictability. But soccer is the most predictable sport in terms of finishes, very rarely have we seen real surprises at the top of the table or at the end of a major cup. It's the same few teams winning the big 5 leagues, the UCL, the world cup.
Across every other sport, one score games are so close to a coinflip in luck that much of analystics consists in softening or removing one score games from the data. In soccer a one score margin is completely normal, two scores is high, three a murder.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1d ago
Then I agree with you completely. It is 100% normal and social for a couple guys to say "Hey let's get away from our families and watch the game and grab a beer." I frequently do that with brother in law at holidays at my in laws, hey let's go to a bar and hang out and watch the finals. With the subtext being, let's get away from the family for a bit and be guys. A guy who doesn't want to do that is kinda subnormal in masculinity in my mind.
Though I offer the Pence Rule exception because I can think of a couple of guys off the top of my head who are on the kind of marital probation where they would say no to going to a bar without their wife.
And Lord, I hope the people in this thread saying "you have kids why are you watching a soccer game in your free time" don't come for me next year.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1d ago
To be clear this is "going to a sports bar or whatever" not "dropping $$$ on tickets" correct?
I'd agree with you broadly and I think the guy hating sports ball or crowd anxiety is a weirdo showing his ass here. High stakes soccer is maybe the easiest sport to watch and enjoy.
That said, the one thing I'd point out is Pence Rule related stuff around foreign travel and going out to bars could come into play.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
2d ago
Most things we consider vices are mostly fine if the upper class does it but can be disastrous when everyone has access to it. Prostitution, drugs, alcohol, gambling, homosexuality, infidelity, etc all fit in these categories.
I'd annotate this that it's typically a high-low vs middle phenomenon.
Very rich people have access to high end escorts where the whole experience is carefully guarded and vetted. Very poor ghetto dwellers have access to street walkers. Your middle class suburbanite is too sweaty and nervous to find the right part of downtown, and too poor to get the concierge service.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
2d ago
Any actual evidence has been thoroughly covered up or not reported, there is virtually no one with any interest in looking into it outside of muckraking, and there's just not many of those in sports journalism these days (Russini-Vrabel aside).
But conspiracy or not, if it were Nathan Eovaldi, he would have faced some consequences regarding the whole affair.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
2d ago
The problem is that like most gamblers, they will lose. There's less issue with getting into debt with shady bookies today than there used to be, but a common risk path to fixed games historically has been that a player bets on unrelated games or on himself to win, loses, gets into debt, gets approached with an "offer" to make the money back.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
2d ago
a court ruling that the NCAA had no power to declare a player ineligible for one of the two cardinal sins of athletics (the other being PED use) is tantamount to saying that they have no power at all.
Do you think PED usage is that bad in this day and age?
Gambling you historically don't come back from, unless you're the best pitches since Tungsten Arm O'Doyle and your best friend is willing to take the rap.
Tons of players get PED suspensions at different times and come back from them.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
2d ago
It's not designed to give them the ideas inception style, it's designed to make them talk about them today.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
3d ago
Actually what I was thinking of.
The play isn't to go for the brunette, it's to start an obscure math argument among your dork friends.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
3d ago
Imagine you and our learned friend in argument SecureSignals are at a party in college. You both spot the same blonde, and you're both hitting on her. She seems to like you, you're hitting it off, but then SecureSignals starts telling her about his interest in chemical engineering and ground penetrating radar and she might like him better. You want the girl, what do you do?
You bring up the Jews. You mention how much you loved the movie Schindler's List. Because you know that SecureSignals, however interesting and attractive he might be otherwise, will be unable to resist talking about how the design of the gas chamber makes no sense and the bodies were never found and it would be mathematically impossible to burn that many bodies and it's likely most of the Jews died in Soviet captivity. And that's going to scare the hoes.
I understand your point, these guys were all ALIENS guys before any disclosures. But when they're a threat, you want to bring the ALIENS stuff to the front to scare the hoes and discredit the "Dark Money From AIPAC might influence US foreign policy" stuff. It's a foolproof trigger. JFK assassination stuff works pretty well too.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
3d ago
Yes, and aliens and UFOs and Atlantis put conspiracy theorists firmly in the "harmless crank" box. Maybe fun and interesting, maybe you even think they might have a point, but you're not going to do anything about it.
When they get more into the ZOG, Epstein, Bilderberg, Pizzagate, fixing the NBA draft lottery stuff, and especially when events seem to be confirming what they're saying, such that normies start listening to their schizo rants and saying "Gee, sure seems like they might be right..." that can be threatening to the establishment.
So the government chums the water with some UFO stuff. And the guys that were putting together the Epstein information, or talking about AIPAC, suddenly they're talking about ALIEN ABDUCTIONS.
And the normies who were maybe starting to listen on the AIPAC stuff, now they're reminded oh no this guy is a crank, I can ignore him. I'm sure Israel is the good guy.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
3d ago
I don't think you should assume that the two victim sets aren't at least partially coinciding, though that's kind of irrelevant here.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
4d ago
Regulatory capture, historically a robust used car market which makes it difficult to sell a $5k penalty box when $5k can get you a much larger car used, the obesity and stupidity of the American consumer.
That said, if you're ok with a gas engine, the 25 year rule on importing non-American compliant cars has now reached the point where 25 year old cars don't suck. So get yourself a kei car for like $5k, and you're golden.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
4d ago
Why does the bulk of the evidence of extraterrestrial life that people focus on recently seem to come from the government rather than from scientists?
It's a strategy for countering the influence of conspiracy theorists. Throw a little alien chum in the water and watch them a) get distracted from ranting about Israel; b) make themselves look insane to an audience that might otherwise be receptive to their anti-government conspiracy theories.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
4d ago
I'd also add that there's an element of identity. There's a big difference in street pimps taking advantage of lost poor juvenile delinquents, often with absent or bad parents, vs "Good Kids" whose parents are pious enough to get them to church and make them altar boys. The horror of the latter is significantly larger publicly, even if people won't acknowledge it.
Similar to how school shootings are significantly more horrifying than gang related shootings, even if the gang related shootings kill more kids.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
5d ago
I still remember one of my TAs in law school (a step below HYS) almost taking a swing at me at a cocktail party when he solemnly told the group his life goal was to argue in front of SCOTUS, and I gave him the piss-take that given he was Kenyan, his easiest route wasn't through a big-law litigation firm, but to move to some former Confederate state capital and join the AGs office, where he would be a novelty both for the quality of his law degree and intellect and for the color of his skin. Become Mike Huckabee's token black friend and they'll put you up for promotion right away, and those states are always getting into some cockamamie case around wanting to execute a black man that they would love to have a Black Attorney to argue for them.
He said he wanted to do it with integrity, I said that there are only a little over 100 lawyers who argue in front of the SCOTUS any given year, and there are about 1,000 students graduating from HYS every year. There's not a lot of room at the top.
Don't become a lawyer to argue about the constitution, unless you are either very rich and connected or want to be a PD and argue about very particular types of constitutional law. Or I suppose if you're a true outlier genius, where getting a 180 LSAT is trivial for you without practice, and you figure to be top of class at HYS given your resume.
It's not the worst thing in the world to do with your time, law school is actually quite pleasant in my opinion, but the industry is about to go through major shifts related to (a new variety of) LLM in the workplace. So it may not be the source of major job security in the immediate future, regardless of how things ultimately turn out.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
5d ago
A second hand Womb Chair.
It does a show a rather concerning inability to exercise control over strategically important bodies of water.
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