Mediterranean literally translates to “middle of the earth”

Medi = middle Terran = earth Ean = of the

The complete sea name in a native romance language, not English, is Mar de Mediterranean. The word is obviously Latin in origin and the sea has been known as such since antiquity, probably predating Rome (who at the height of their control called the Mediterranean a Roman lake, since they encircled it on all sides. How quaint of them, yea?). This would have been known to Tolkien as the educated, well everybody really, back in the day, had more exposure to Latin, which had spread out widely due to the Church. Martin Luther and Guggenheim started that unraveling, tho Latin is still spoken in many many Catholic churches today.

Midgard does translate to middle earth as well. Tolkien was prob aware of this as well, tho i think that this is lesser well known than Mediterranean, just by the global reach of Spanish.

I mean Mediterranean is literally middle earth.

I think I was 27 when that gem hit me upside the head

In Tacoma, Wa.

I witnessed 5 police officers all hit a man on the ground with their tasers. Broad daylight.

Died on the scene of a heart attack. Apparently natural causes. The polices internal investigations found the police did no wrong, imagine that.

Unless you make enough money that you can regularly “donate” to the force, I suggest that you assume they are not there to help you and you protect yourself accordingly

The most common place to find .1" is on micrometers. And that’s just fine until you need to switch it back to imperial or metric for the next processing…which the rest of your tooling is in.

.1" is roughly 2.54mm

.1", fractionally is ~7/64

7/64 is roughly 2.77mm

See how this is recipe for disaster?

You do you boo but Metrics fucking awesome. It’s simple, conversions are super easy, etc. it’s just basic numbers. You can thoughtlessly multiply or divide (assuming you could thoughtlessly do that before).

You want a real shite headache? Try translating tenths of inches. I’d just burn the blueprints and tell them to try again.

Except that’s not what’s written.

It’s 0.25/0.5

Raising it exponentially would be

2.5/5, or

25/50=50

1/2≠50. Does not compute.

Removed by mod

I mean, yes and no. Pearl harbor wasn’t the only place hit 12/7. Philipines, Guam and Wake were all hit as well

Hong Kong and Singapore were also attacked and the empire invaded Malaysia.

America took a sharp hit square in the face, but Britain got sent home in a body bag at the end of 1941. By Feb 1942 the UK had lost all of Malaysia, lost Hong Kong and lost Singapore. They lost 12,000 troops, the rest surrendering. Zero soldiers made it home. Out of 120,000. Australia and New Zealand were in extreme danger and the Raj was expecting assault at any moment. I’m the spam of a few months Japan had sunsetted the largest empire the world had ever seen.

America had never been pit against such an enemy. You have to take all of WW2 into that context. Fuck in WW1 they played soccer across no-man’s-land on Christmas. The next year the Canadians had arrived and…well…I’m not saying shit about canuckistani military just that over half of the geneva convention exists because of Canada.

Lindsey Graham will say whatever his sponsors want him to say. He shares like 2 of his opinions a year, and you can tell which ones they are because a week after saying it he’s already backtracking acting like he never said otherwise. He’ll dance any dance to suppress video of him and his prostitutes dick in his mouth. It’s a corner he’s painted himself in by courting the homegrown hate vote.

My gut tells me that he’s a decent guy and I bet he’s quite capable at the state level, but he’s been in over his head in DC ever since he got there.

I’m waiting for an “Ohio” moment like CSN&Y sang, it’s coming. That shit happened to boomers, who have now become the oppressor, continuing the cycle of needless pain, loss and suffering. That’s the kind of shit that keeps the aliens from showing their face. I would’ve want to be known about around that kind of normalized psychopathy either.

History doesn’t repeat but it rhymes. Cops today are too indoctrinated that they are at war with the citizenry - of which they clearly hold themselves above. They’re gonna spill students blood. Students who are protesting supplying Israel with weapons for what’s become an unjustifiable offensive war. Hell half of these cops fetishize throwing the Zionists back in the old ovens but they just can’t pass up any chance to spill 18yr old girls blood for having an opinion. And at this point the girl is the only moral one in the group. I don’t think I’d even stand in the way of the cops if they were going for the Zionists.

Fascists all around. Kleptocracy staring down the barrel of loaded gun.

Above all, we need to collectively realize that the story of our lives in our head is a fiction. Every second we are alive we are deciding what kind of world this is, with our actions. There is no one coming to save us. You are the adult in the room. If you see a wrong, justice demands you act. All of us. Together that adds up to community, a zeitgeist of home.

I have a metaphysical theory that we all unconsciously carry the weight of our ancestors with us, and some part of our subconscious, or our reflexive self (the part of you that blinks the millisecond before something hits your eye), or maybe our supra conscious/soul/spirit, (the part of us not bound to time/Morty playing Roy) is constantly tabulating a score and multiples of maladies manifest from this ennui.

If you’re bored, you aren’t trying hard enough. If you’re depressed, you need to insert yourself in the solution, whatever you see that as. Your depression will magically resolve itself. No ones depressed in a war zone. Science has quantifiably proven that.

It’s better to die on your feet, in defense of the truth, and as an agent of justice than live on your knees having sold the essence of your soul, sacrificing dynamism for mediocrity. 5 years that run the gamut of highs and lows or 50 years of office work. It’s not even optional to me, it’s just fact.

Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison -Henry David Thoreau

Those little fuckers will destroy yr garden if you let them.

You can leave beer out in a cooking pot and they’ll climb the walls then drown in it - but I don’t drink and don’t want to buy beer

Sooooo you can capture 4 or 5 of them, cut them in half and impale them on skewers and line your garden Vlad-like and that will, I shit you not, scare the rest from coming in.

Unfortunately, slug eggs are super fucking tiny and are just left random-where in the soil, so there’s nothing short of nuking the ground that we can do to get rid of them…so the staking continues.

Waking Life.

If you wrap your head around it after the 2nd viewing, you’re doing better than most people.

It took me a few watchings of Akira to really have it all sink in.

Koyaanisqatsi

Visual poetry. Literally. It’s conveying a message, it’s just you have to come up with the dialogue. Beautiful work. The sequels are fantastic as well.

The right is responsible for almost all domestic terrorism in the states, and that’s according to the FBI/NSA, who are far from objective. Police (and the FBI and NSA are just federal police, obviously) are overwhelming conservative. There is no liberal cop to speak of. This is proven, undeniable, by the reluctance to prosecute the right. I guarantee you if anyone made death threats to Mitch McConnell the NSA would know exactly who that is. But every democratic lawmaker, even sympathizer, and it’s crickets. Death threats continue. You know, you don’t see a leftist version of libs of tictok with its owner bragging about inciting stochastic terroirism. It’s proven again with the heavy hand society uses on peaceful protestors. I’ve been in the protests. I’ve seen the police strike first. I’ve been in the tear gas. The polices us vs them mentality, that they are “at war” with civilians is sickening and entirely one sided. A leftist will say ACAB and if you’re a leftist, every cop will be happy to prove that correct for you, but no one thinks they’re at war with the police. Not acknowledging this is willful ignorance. That’s the kind of ignorance thats unforgivable, even by legal standards. That’s where you go down by association alone.

Blood is almost entirely on conservative hands. Not the other way around.

But suuuuure buddy. It’s the left that’s the problem. I’m envious of your ability to see reality as you choose it, no bullshit, truly I am. I’m unable to mold facts to fit my narrative, I simply have to make a narrative around objective fact. if that is how you describe yourself as well, I suggest you relook at the facts.

And as long as we’re holding facts high, since 2016 the majority of guns in America, which have never sold better, have been sold to those that identify center or left, so don’t think you’re a wolf amongst sheep. Trump winning and his entire presidency of eroding our rights and institutions while stoking division amongst us - truly unique amongst presidents, in a baaad way - woke millions and millions of people up…and America acquired about 20million new first time gun owners.

Oh I’m with you, believe me. Theres some great building tech now, things like aircrete and the hundred variations and uses of lime. And if course just caluz it’s old doesn’t mean better, there was definitely a gradient to build quality back then, same as today.

We can look at churches in Uppsala that were built with pine and have stood for 1000 years…in Sweden…and it’s clear we’re missing something in our knowledge today that they had (it was their harvesting practices, btw, fucking germ theory levels of brilliance). Or how the Japanese have relied on coppacing for lumber for 500 years and that’s why Japan still HAS trees and didn’t go all Rapanui/Easter Island. The Amish and green wood timber framing is another example - practices that take the future into account. It’s the planting of trees who’s shade you’ll never sit in.

It’s easy, and incorrect, to point at history and say it was ALL better then, because only the cream of the crip has survived. Survivorship bias, clear as day. Of course we can build with the same mindset today - we just DON’T.

For a substantial group of people building their own home, to their own standards, towards sustainability or fingerprint reduction is their main driving goal. Earthships are an attempt. Buckminster Fuller made his entire career building off such ideas. Fuck I want to live in a geodesic dome SOOO BAD. Only have to deal with rain when I have to brave society. (I figure where the segments meet I can channel the rain to irrigation channels for the foliage and trees in the inner biodome…and then I’m raising free range sugar gliders.)

I’m in the middle of building my redoubt now. Everything by hand, it’s tedious, requires a ton of knowledge and physically taxing, but it also screams of character, uniqueness and craftiness. I take a lot of fun making things intuitively crafty if you know, but invisable if you dont know. Microprocessors can be a part of that (Im a huge electromagnetism fanboy, I’ve spun up my own generators from magnet wire for custom windmills, and I’m debating doing it again for some microhydro but currently leaning stepper moters), hidden magnetic locks are fun. shit my firearm safe is a Rube-Goldman-machines worth of steps to open, and that’s if you even noticed it was there.

I love the new tech. Don’t get me wrong. Maybe it’s that I’m a xennial, and that I had an analog youth, idk. I own all the power tools - I also own the hand tool analog version and know how to use them. I’ve always maintained the position that I had to level up into power tools. Electric planers save a SHITTON of time but if I can’t plane by hand…then it’s just a crutch. I don’t even want to get into metal working by hand, I’ve done it, i prefer metal to wood so that entire attitude applied to metal before wood.

Anyway. I think we have more in common here than not, lol.

Timber framing, and all Amish framing, is actually done with green wood. Attention is paid to grain of the beams and they are put up so as the wood dries and ages it’ll twist into itself making a more cohesive unit.

Sure it makes remodeling a bitch, but plum straight and true were never part of a remodelers lexicon to begin with.

Oh man, the quest for plum straight and true. Rick was well within his right to wipe Morty’s brain of it. It was probably the single greatest act of compassion we’ve seen him do. I wish he’d wipe mine.

New houses are fucking garbage, what are you talking about? You aren’t from the trades, clearly.

The only thing new houses have on old - speaking in generalizations - is a warranty - which is really what’s at issue here. And as it plays out, it’s super fucked up

The main number one metric for housing is livability. New houses are all glue and wood shavings. Literally what’s swept up after tree delamination for plywood. I’ve seen it. I’ve swept it up. I don’t even want to know the VOC release from OSB over time. If there’s ANY traceable amount (and of course there is) then the fact that I have to spend thousands putting in a RADON bypass cuz the ground wants to kill me for standing on it now yet swimming pools of profits from industry remain untouched and not held responsible. Yea…no. Old walls are best walls. Gypsum is nice but plaster isn’t out of reach. Old framing is best framing. Old wood floors can be found inches thick, no nailing. Carpet? Vinyl? Linoleum is only the best…NOFX song…arguably…Gen Z is suuuuper good. And Eat the Meek, New Boobs, Kill all the White Men, Creeping Out Sara, Idiots are Taking Over. Fuck. NOFX is just best, everything, really. Fat Mike seems like a cool ass dude to hang out with.

Um. Back on it…

PEX cannot be good for you, and even if not bad - yet - it’s not going to kill microbes like copper piping will - “upgrade” your pipes back to copper people, as a matter.of health). +1 old home

Hmm…Hardy board, that’s a modern win. Except it dulls your carbide immediately. That shits awesome for siding and water containment. +1 new homes

Modern windows are better. Without question.

Modern wiring wins over obvs.

Whatever. The WARRENTY. Don’t be the second owner of a new house. Do. Not. Do. It. Motherfucking chosen class gets zero percent interest rates and carried into new development, just to move 7 years later right before the “25yr” roof mysteriously needs to be replaced at 10years, just outside it’s warranty. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen this. 1st owners have no costs going into house. 2nd owners, night shift, if you will, gets caught out, besides paying more for the house than the original owners did almost a decade ago, are going to have to absorb that extra 50k in repairs, essentially insuring 2nd owners NEVER rise above their position. Modern red-lining. Fuck bankers. Usury guarantees you’re going to hell. Fuck old money. Fuck everything -lord. Put feudalism back down, THAT SHIT IS BAD. The media only serves to persuade you of an opinion the owning class wants you to have without informing you of opposing opinions.

Did you know there are more houses in the UK and USA to the population than ever before? We’ve never had MORE housing…and yet…crisis…? That doesn’t make NeoLiberal sense…I was told…

Lies. You were told lies.

The amount of housing, that’s true. Thatcher and Reagen really changed the game tho. If you were born past 1980, your future was already sacrificed before the better part of you hit your parents sheets.

Before Thatcher less than 10% of housing in the UK was rented. It was considered one of the most successful postwar decisions, to promote security and autonomy in the citizenry…and now? The housing crisis is literally at the heart of every single crisis the western world is having, the entire world over. It’s vampiric. Cannabalizing the economy and lowering GDP for NO FUCKING REASON.

I am not against rentals - AFTER everyone has been housed. Let people have vacation homes, sure. Shit. My grandfather put 3 kids thru school, golfed thrice a week, stay at home wife, two car garage, bought his kids cars, my father raced motocross semi pro (thousands of trophies - that probably cost a house in itself) and was still able to buy a vacation home off his sole income (just so you don’t lose sight in how much economic freedom neoliberalism has stolen from the working class). I’m also not against private insurance - as Cadillac insurance. Capitalists have proven, beyond a rational doubt, that if they’re allowed monopoly to provide a neccesity (by that I mean, only private sector agents) than the rest of us are steadily more and more fucked. This is exemplified in the Simpsons. Homer went from bumbling idiot to upper middle class. Nothing about them changed, it’s just every year it gets harder. 2020 was the easiest year of the decade - bank on that - and that’s pretty fucking harrowing if you ask me.

Private farming…who has an issue against the farmer? No one. People have issues with being fleeced. See Netflix 10 years ago to the streaming shit cacophony today. Yar me matey, seems like some things are back in fashion. If farmers decide to fleece on a starving population, I won’t be sympathetic when the farmers are served up with their wheat. Treat people with respect. It’s fundamental to social cohesion. Exploitation is not.

My point, ultimately, is that people are people and people are entirely predictable. Our problems are manufactured by greedy people in power who’ve been using mass media to propagandized obedience while they return wealth to preplague levels of serfdom. And they e overplayed their hand, and they know it, everyone knows it - that’s why everyone’s just waiting for when the violence to start. Not if, when. People, again, are entirely predictable. Frankly, imo, we’ll be much better off when notions of social engineering and social darwinism go the same way route as phrenology.

Man everything you wrote here sucks and I’m sorry you’ve had to experience all that. Riding isn’t a “if” you crash, its a “when” you crash thing.

Even still, I find it preferable to being in a box isolated from the environment. Then it’s just more detached television. Being a part of the environment helps me feel alive.

It’s just trading one set of obnoxious noises for another and we’d be in a thread about that instead, y’know.

Clearly ppl don’t like motorcycles here. Maybe they name should change to fuckcars+motorbikes.