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
1yr ago
I just checked it to show my friends, it now shows Biden at 45 and Kamala at 37.
So it may have come around again.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1yr ago
In my mind it's The Dog That Didn't Bark situation. The backlash hasn't come. Biden hasn't done anything to flex back. People aren't defending Biden very aggressively. A week has come and gone with no organized resistance. That's probably more important than the debate itself.
Compare that time Hillary collapsed at an event and got thrown into her limo like a side of beef. Really bad, but immediately her surrogates (essentially the entire establishment media) were out there fighting it hard and within a few days she was doing appearances where she was shaking it off.
The lack of response might be more indicative than the initial crash.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
11mo ago
I've been using Whoremonger a lot in conversation to refer to someone like Deshaun Watson. I like that it cuts through the "Is it her fault?" question and gets to the point: regardless of her behavior his is still blameworthy.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
11mo ago
Botox, and also Fillers and probably other stuff that my wife could tell me all about but I'm not sure.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
11mo ago
Excellent article, thanks for flagging it.
-- It's obvious at this point that Biden does not have control over his administration. Which brings the relative normalcy of the past four years into stark relief. The Biden years, especially coming after the Trump years, have updated my priors significantly and combined with other readings I think we need to come to terms with the idea that the President personally exercising effective control over the administrative state is actually a pretty rare occurrence. Biden is clearly too out of it, at best he might make it to a few meetings between 10 and 4 with a nap in the middle. Trump was consistently thwarted and lied to by bureaucrats throughout his tenure, from the lowest levels up to Cabinet posts, and was never able to achieve any kind of effective administration between people being forced out and people openly defying him; notably top Generals lied directly to him about the US presence in Syria to prevent him from pulling troops out. Obama was effective at times, but notably clashed with "The Generals" early in his tenure before settling into a more blob-approved foreign policy. Dubya early in his admin was running on autopilot with guys from his dad's admin who had cut their teeth under Reagan or even Nixon, Cheney was widely seen as the real power. Clinton and Pappy, I'm actually not aware of any allegations that they weren't running things. Reagan was notably fading by the end of his second term. And before Reagan, after Watergate the entire federal governing apparatus was in a bit of chaos from the time the scandal broke (Nixon did almost no presidential work, often as little as half an hour a day, after the story broke in the press) through two weak presidents until Reagan reasserted control. Nixon's early years, in turn, were marked by a permissiveness that lead to Watergate, though overall he was an effective president. LBJ was probably a pretty strong president, but let's not ask too many questions about JFK ranting about getting railroaded by the CIA into launching the Bay of Pigs invasion. Scoring it on the back of a napkin, it seems like we've had a really effective executive only maybe half the time since 1960? The administrative state is truly out of control when we don't even notice having a president who can't remember what day it is.
-- Related: good leaders are actually rare. Biblical Israel had, what, two great kings and two mid ones? Rome has a steep dropoff in the rankings after the top 15 emperors, far more bad than good, and far more mediocre as well.
-- My dark joke at barbecues the past few weeks: it's deeply unfair to an aging president to have the same issues that he's seen over and over for decades. This is, what, the tenth time the Israelis and Arabs have gone to war since Biden was in some federal office? And we're still chewing over the same two or three unsatisfactory and impossible solutions: two-states but Israel will never allow a real Palestine to exist, one-state but neither side really wants to live together, some kind of UN-Lead recolonization of important parts of the holy land. We've been mooting those same ideas since the 80s! When I saw The Capitol Steps when I was 12, they did parody duets between Yassir Arafat and the Israeli PM where the punchline was something like "well your great great grandfather once planned an attack, it's been hundreds of years who could ever keep track, no one can remember anymore!" How's anyone supposed to keep all this straight, let alone a fading old man?
-- In an update to my prior post: I've continued to schadenfreude-listen to several political podcasts. The Pod Save America guys are delusional, in complete denial at this point. What Nate Silver and the other FiveThirtyEight guys brought to politics was a little bit of the rigor and logic that had colonized sports analytics years ago. Listening to PSA is pure, pre-analytics, talk-radio call in level analysis of the race as a contest. They kept asking why Biden hasn't been doing tons of events and press conferences and rallies in the past week, clearly that would benefit him to appear on top of things, why isn't his campaign making that choice? They don't even ask whether he is capable of doing those things. This is what sports analysis looked like before the modern obsession with roster construction. FiveThirtyEight meanwhile has more intelligently asked, Does Biden Have the Juice to make a comeback, or is he too old to make that kind of push? Both are starting to acknowledge that the main question isn't who wins the POTUS race, but how it impacts down-ballot races. The problem is that Dems have backed themselves into a corner: how do you acknowledge that Trump is going to win if you've said that would be a world-ending event?
-- The dam is breaking. I expect Biden to step down by the end of the month. Kamala seems most likely, for legal-fundraising reasons. That is the primary obstacle at this point: the campaign has raised ridiculous sums of money, which must be spent on a Biden-Harris campaign. It is unclear by what mechanism they could be redirected anywhere else. Unless such a method is found, Newson or Big Gretch remain pipe dreams.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
11mo ago
"BIGOT!" he argued, logically.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
11mo ago
I'm sure there are ways around it, but it seems like a potential minefield for future lawfare if Trump/Paxton can find one disgruntled donor.
Keep in mind this is probably a losing campaign regardless.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
11mo ago
Besides the straw donor possibility already raised by Mr. Nybs, and it wouldn't surprise me if both campaigns routinely arranged to have friends or relations donate to each other in order to scout info and engage in QC efforts.
Biden had well over one million donors back in March. Out of a group that big, one of them is gonna be weird. It's inevitable. People are weird. Somewhere in that million will be someone who loves Biden but hates Gretchen Whitmer for reasons so confusing as to be incomprehensible to rationality.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
11mo ago
I guess for me it's that Harris isn't a zero compared to Newsom or Whitmer. She's not, at this time, utterly unacceptable in the way Biden arguably is. So it's not, well we have to switch but there will be a legal battle but we have to. It's, well we can have Newsom who we rank a 54/100 or Harris who we rank a 48/100, but if we pick Newsom we might get shit about "passing over the woman/Negro/sitting veep" and we might get a bizarro lawsuit about the money and maybe we get an ugly/ier convention fight, so maybe we sand off those six points and stick with Harris. Especially given that they're probably going to lose, and probably going to face Ken Paxton in office with a mandate to settle scores.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
11mo ago
I've actually been to the rest of New England more than I've been to Boston. It's a town I should like more than I do, for obscure reasons. That said:
-- Go to Fenway. Even if you don't like baseball, it's a thing all Americans should do. I hate the Red Sox, but it's history. If you can get to a weeknight game against a weak opponent on vacation, it'll be like $30 or less a ticket to get in the door.
-- The freedom trail is fun, depending on weather
-- I love the museums located at all the universities. Particularly Harvard has a huge collection of anything you want to see, which gets a lot less traffic than you'd think, mostly bored Asian families pretending to care.
A bunch of things. I'm assuming you're climbing primarily inside at a gym rather than outdoor.
-- Six months to 5.10 is pretty good, but six months at any level in any activity isn't a plateau. Literally the answer is probably a cold goes away in seven days on its own or if you take antibiotics it'll go away in a week.
-- Grading in indoor rock climbing is mostly fake and gay. In all rock climbing it is purely ordinal, a 5.11 is harder than a 5.10 and easier than a 5.12, but it's not "one grade" harder in any measurable sense. For the most part, grades get broken down in frequently climbed outside areas north of 5.10, so it goes 5.10a, 5.10b, 5.10c, 5.10d then 5.11a etc. Indoors they often don't bother. So it might be that you've gone from 5.10a to 5.10d but don't see it because your measurement tool isn't fine grained enough, or it might be that they set all the 5.10s at a 5.10a and all the 5.11s at a 5.11c. Nobody ever really critiques gym grading hard enough to change them, and when they do there's a social pressure grade things down rather than up. Every guy wants to say "Oh man that wasn't a 12, for me that felt like an easy 11;" no guy wants to say "Hey, uhhhh, that one is really hard, I barely got it, I don't think that's an 11 I think that's a 12." Most grades are decided by the setter, or one manager, looking at it and making a rough guess.
-- What you're seeing might be oddness in your local grading, which frequently is set up in a funny way by staff who have weird social reasons for doing it that way. A lot of times the low grades at gyms are super easy, and set kinda lazy because the setters don't care about them and the higher grades are set to prove a point to each other and the other good climbers at the gym. Grades in gyms are fake, they often reflect more from the marketing angle than they do from the sporting angle. They want people starting out to feel like they are making progress fast, but once they get into the 11s and 12s they're often moving between gyms on occasion, or going outside, and you don't want your grades to be known as too soft or you'll lose the regulars. They might have different people do all of the 10s vs all of the 11s. 11 might just be their jumping off point where they figure the climbers are serious so the climbs can get serious.
-- Try to find a gym that's doing a youth comp, that's going to be the best way to grade yourself. We would set our wall with 60-100 new problems for the comp, all graded ordinally 1-X in terms of difficulty by committee of setters and regulars. That might help you see exactly where you land. Or find a dense outdoor crag, that's the most "peer reviewed" grading, but honestly: I dislike grade chasing in outdoor climbing. I mostly climb as a workout indoors, but on the rare occasions I get outside, I'm just in it for the lulz, grades only matter inasmuch as I pick areas and climbs with stuff I can do.
-- Style. Even when I was really climbing a lot, I basically never did pockets. I'd flash a 12 that was all crimps, and just flat out refuse and jump off if I had to do a 10 that had a lot of pockets. They always make me feel like my fingers are going to fly right off. Insert jokes about disappointed girlfriends here. Can you do ALL the tens? And you can't ANY 11s? Try to do different ones, you might be surprised at the difference. I was always good at dynamic strength based climbs, but not at actual dynos; crimps good pinches good slopers ok pockets absolutely not. If you're climbing outdoor, it's probably this, differences between rock types and crags can be HUGE.
-- If you need more to work on, consider bechtel's strength standards and work on your flexibility. I never got much out of hangboarding, but I'd get on the campus board to show off if I felt like it.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
11mo ago
A core part of the priors that lead me to settle on Harris as the pick: I am pessimistic about the Dems chances in this situation. Any hot swap other than an assassination of Joe Biden, which would clearly result in a Harris pick anyway, likely leads to a doomed Quixotic post-Biden campaign, designed more to put up a good show and avoid embarrassment than it is to win the electoral college. Given that, there is value for Dems in avoiding other issues.
Imagine a group of three coworkers, who travel together for work and take turns picking the place for lunch. One of them has horrendously bad taste, picking Subway or Checkers or Cracker Barrel some other bottom tier chain. It's his turn today, and everyone is dreading it, but they stopped for lunch at a turnpike rest stop anyway and he's picking among those options. It's not worth fighting him on his turn, even though his pick will suck, because lunch is going to be mediocre at best anyway.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
11mo ago
I think we have a misunderstanding in terms here. I don't think I was very clear.
I don't really care if Ezra or the PSA guys or any particular Dem personally did or advocated for this or that. In their work, they refer to Democrats/Liberals/#Resistance/People of Good Will/Etc. types under the rubric of "We." What will we do? What should we make of this?
In the same way that a Cowboys fan speaks of we. We beat the Eagles, what a thrill. We lost to the Bears, this is embarrassing for us.
It's not particularly important which person did what. It's important to take a look at the process and how Democrats got here. If one is a Democrat, that's a we issue. That's something you have to figure out how you avoid next time.
Not to mention you assume that a handful of news organizations could coordinate to tank Biden's candidacy after he won nearly a dozen primaries on Super Tuesday to Bernie's four.
I don't want to get into the weeds here, but you're doing the same thing I'm accusing them of here: you're starting the clock very late in the day. The endorsements poured into Biden well before Super Tuesday, the election might have gone very differently if they hadn't done so. We might have gotten to a different outcome. We can argue about coordination versus a sort of stochastic chance and follow the leader, but what we can't do is start with a fait accompli, start the story in medias res and say "Ok what should we do right now?" without ever discussing all the past prologue that got us here. That's a recipe for repeating one's mistakes.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
11mo ago
Exactly. That's the point I've been trying to make here. Realistic assessment is that the Dems are deep underdogs for the presidency after that debate. Biden was already behind, which is bad, and he lost ground, which is worse, but worst of all by far he clearly lacks the juice to make up that kind of ground. Any chance the Dems have of winning is relying on Trump to self immolate. They're picking among bad options to cauterize the wound.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
11mo ago
Doesn't one need to keep in mind that he's legitimately a crazy person? He might fear getting too much attention from the wrong people when he looks at the results.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
11mo ago
What purchases have you been extremely satisfied with lately? Can be large, small, regular or extraordinary, for yourself or as a gift, whatever.
For me:
-- I love my 97lb kettlebell. I'm having so much fun.
-- I bought a NEBO cap light at the hardware store, although upon googling to find it for this I'm realizing I overpaid. It's really convenient, in the heat lately I've been trying to walk my dog for a long walk before the sun comes up and again after it comes down, I bought it to keep the red light on when I walk her to avoid getting hit by a car. I've never had a good clip light before, it's so far superior to a strap on headlamp.
-- I like cool mint Zyns on long drives. I don't use them daily, but I find them very nice when I'm tired and bored, the nicotine perks me up, and the flavor is sort of nice with a diet coke without eating anything.
-- Lately I've been living off of frozen fruit blended with cottage cheese in the vitamix. It hits my frozen treat desire in the summer while being fairly high protein.
What about you?
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
11mo ago
I'm still on And the Band Played On. It is such an engaging, well written book, that among other things it is making me think of how much I hate writers who make everything depressing and grimdark all the god damn time. Shilts wrote ATBPO, about AIDS, while dying of AIDS, after most of his friends died of AIDS, and it is filled with humor, irony, wry observations and satires. It's hardly ligthhearted, but it maintains a lighthearted degree of readability.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
11mo ago
Huh. That's pretty neat.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
11mo ago
I'm just going to note that for actually existing Catholicism and Catholics, the answer is mostly the same stuff anyone else would do: ask people you trust, read philosophers' books or essays on the topic. With whatever additional weight given to Catholic priests and theologians makes you comfortable.
I realize that endeavouring to be more Catholic than the Pope is a less obvious joke than it once was, but nonetheless: don't make the philosophically and theologically perfect the enemy of the good.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
11mo ago
For the most part, what you do with a kettlebell is repetitive explosives. You can also do more static exercises with them, like squats and presses and rows, and that's fine, but not really any better than a barbell or a dumbbell for that. In my mind the snatch is the king of all kettlebell exercises, the swing is the starting point (I've done the 10k swings in 30 days thing a couple times), but the ultimate expression of the kettlebell as an exercise tool is the 5-10 minute snatch test. The rounded motion, bringing it between your legs for the swing snapping the hips and pulling it through then swinging back down, provides a much more natural motion than the stiffness of a barbell or a dumbbell for reps. I can do 50 reps of KB snatch much easier than 50 reps of barbell snatch, much more graceful and with less chance of injury.
Sometimes I'm a kettlebell focused guy, sometimes I'm a barbell focused guy, sometimes I'm really into rock climbing. I'm mid at any of them. For me it's just one more thing I do when I'm in the mood for it, but in all honesty I think with one 24kg kettlebell you could get into better shape than most people do with a full gym. I'm just not that kind of minimalist.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
11mo ago
No, but I did name it Erica, after a girl I dated who weighed 97lbs.
This has long been a tradition with warmup weights on the barbell for me, each weight between a pair of 25s and a pair of 45s+5s is a former lover. But this is the first kettlebell I've ever had that is person sized.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
11mo ago
I (by which I mean my wife) got one like that for my niece, it plays lullabys and projects stars on the ceiling. Her and her little brother have both gone through phases of refusing to go to bed without it. It was really a neat item.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
11mo ago
I always just make cold brew in a half gallon mason jar, but for $10 that isn't bad.
Whenever I make cold brew, I don't get why other forms of coffee exist. It's so easy, requires no expensive equipment, comes out perfect every time.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
11mo ago
Home gym master race. It's so far superior.
I do go back to my old climbing gym weight room about twice a year to try to hit a max on the jerk or snatch, because I don't have a proper safe drop space or enough bumper plates at home.
Nobody is dragging you into anything, Chris.
An open Democratic convention strategy was always doomed. The people who say that an open convention would never work, that as Klein put it on his podcast it was Aaron Sorkin fanfiction, are correct. The D candidate chosen to replace Biden is probably doomed by the weird relationship they'd hold to Biden, both in the tension between running on the last four years of Democratic policy while not being an actual incumbent, and in the "they tried to foist a senile man on us as president" argument.
Part of the argument for Biden from the beginning, in the NYT opinion section et al, was that he could always be a one term president replaced by someone younger near the 2024 election. That turned out to be impossible, for all the reasons we're seeing now, chief among them Biden's choice in the matter.
And Klein remains optimistic! He acts as though the start date for all thought is today, we just found ourself here. There's no examination of the decision making process that got us here.
Bernie is old too, but they didn't have to pick Biden to rally behind. Klobuchar or even Liz Warren would have been fine choices. Even Kamala, for all her flaws, would still be upright at this point. It was their choice in putting Biden on the ticket that I'm criticizing, not endorsing Bernie as an alternative. And the fact that no one is grappling with this decision making process, and how we wound up here, is maddening to me.
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