And I don't think that one has to have written a song in order to understand and serve the emotions of the song. What you do need, however, is some life experience to connect it with.
And I'm not talking about a CGI/animated puppet for real performers (a la Gorillaz or Dethklok). That's just human musicians cosplaying something else. What Spotify, Sony, Warner, etc. are after is on-trend content generated by trained expert systems in response to prompts or to the other content listened to by users of their services.
lj - ...and I would be surprised if this week’s is on anyone else’s.
Incorrect, sir.
The Hu - Yuve Yuve Yu (Mongolian Folk Metal)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v4xZUr0BEfE
Heilung - In Maidjan (Danish Shamanistic Neofolk)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kmWTZ3KfnXE
Both of which have, with other songs from these bands, had some heavy rotation in my playlists. Both bands are pretty awesome, and have dedicated fanbases. I find that Heilung live video astounding and powerful every damn time I watch it.
wj - you can have AI generate the name of your star and generate genre appropriate "photos" of them. You can then use Claude to generate all the lyrics for your song from a simple, one sentence prompt. You can then feed those lyrics into Suno and have it generate a genre-appropriate song based on the lyrics complete with a vocalist.
It's all just a stew of algorithmically generated near-plagiarism.
I'm prepping and making changes to my syllabus for the writing class I teach that centers around college music - writing reviews of "college radio" albums from the '80s and '90s, and then taking what they have learned from doing that to comment on the music that is a part of their college lives today.
I had been having them write an essay exploring the question "Does College Music Still Exist?," and digging into the social side of what defines the music of that moment and that community. Sadly, I've never been satisfied with the depth of their engagement with the topic and have been wanting to change it up for a few terms now in the hopes of finding something that gets them thinking more deeply and feeling like they have something that the want to say.
My current idea is to get them thinking more deeply about the ecology of their music media. If the music you listen to is chosen for you by an algorithm, what makes it yours? Should Spotify allow the uploading and monetizing of music produced by AI? Can an AI generated pop star understand your broken heart? Do you really listen to songs you don't buy and music you don't own, or is it just something to consume like fast food?
I keep making stabs at how to turn all that into a philosophical question that can provoke reflection and inspire many different responses - something like "What's Wrong With Listening To Spotify?" or the like, but I haven't found one with the right mojo and moxie. Any ideas?
Have just started to shift to teaching my students about speculative journalism (reporting of things like climate change that frame parts of the story using the tools [extrapolation, cognitive estrangement] of science fiction). I have them read a few Spec J pieces from High Country News based on the Fourth National Climate Assessment from 2018 with the stories set in 2068. In past quarters I have pulled up a copy of the Assessment to show the what and the how of the extrapolation.
All of the governmental links to the study are broken. The Ancient Orange One and his gibbering minions have taken down those sites. This despite the fact that it was his previous administration that published them in the first place.
And now I am torn as to whether the university will have my back if I simply point this out to my students. We've all been warned not to engage in anything that could be taken as political activism, and they are drawing a very risk-averse line in the sand for what counts as activism.
I think Wonkie is correct about religion as the locus for right wing charity. I remember seeing claims a decade or so ago that conservatives gave more to charity than did liberals, but the details of that showed that part of what counted as conservative charity was church offerings and tithing, which may be charity or it may be paying the pastor/priest/rabbi/imam and covering the overhead/improvement of the communal place of worship. And unlike Charity Navigator, there really isn't any way to track the efficiency with which those religious donations are turned into support for charitable causes.
My conservative family members and friends can be quite generous. I do think, however, that liberal charitable giving tends to go to causes a bit farther from home and immediate community, where conservative giving tends to have fewer degrees of separation from the giver.
russell - Grok needs to read the Second Treatise on Government. Also the preamble to the Massachusetts Constitution, which preceded and was a model for the US Constitution.
I'm sure that Grok has been fed those things, but what it "thinks" about those things is just a matter of remixing what others have said about those texts.
novakant - At least I feel on most days that I’m doing something useful, though I don’t really know what I’m doing yet.
I know a lot of teachers (myself included) with a decade or more of teaching experience that still feel like this - at least part of the time. We feel it less often, but it never quite goes away. We just get better at letting go of our expectations and more adept at flowing around the obstacles.
wj - a surprising number of evangelical fundamentalists have embraced their catholic co-religionists in the name of Christian Nationalism and being pro-forced-birth. They are also very positive where the various Orthodox denominations are concerned. They can all get along so long as there are no gays, women belong to their men, and none of the Catholics support these last couple Marxist Anti-Popes.
And they will be polite and keep their mouths shut on the whole Mormon thing for the sake of politics so long as no one presses them to affirm that Mormons are Christians.
But the JWs are still on the outs.
Gotta make concessions if you want to have your Christian Red Caesar.
Couchie would very much love to be the heir to the Charlie Kirk throne, and judging by the way that he sidesteps the questions, reframes them, gaslights, and performs entirely for the audience while refusing to engage with any of the actual questions being asked of him, I'd say that he's learned the patter needed to try to be the paterfamilias of TPUSA.
I don't think his performance is all that convincing for the people outside the room, but it's probably reassuring for those in attendance who were hoping to be a part of the moment when we all watched the triumph of Couchie's will.
Michael Cain - At one of those, one of the people who did have a doctorate made the observation that yes, Mike had done multiple projects that would easily qualify for a PhD in terms of originality and impact, but all cut across multiple disciplines so no department would ever accept them.
I was in a similar situation with my dissertation, which spanned informatics, film and media studies, and rhetoric. I had people from each of those three disciplines on my committee (two of whom had appointments in English, which is what made my project possible).
I earned the degree, but there were no journals that felt my work was in the pocket for what they covered, and no programs or departments that were looking to hire someone with an oddball set of research interests.
So I teach rhetoric and composition, and transmedial rhetoric sits and gathers dust.
I think this is a particular problem for academics specializing in East Asia because of the problem I faced: Getting fluent in one language/culture is tough, in two is exponentially tougher and three requires something on the level of cosmic coincidence.
I'm not discounting the specific language challenges that you identify here. I suspect the same can be said of linguists that are attempting to do comparative study between geographically distant and isolated branches of Indo-European - leaning too hard on the common ground of shared language and not doing enough to understand the divergent histories, local influences, and historical contexts of the moments they are comparing. These complexities are difficult to work through and require multiple bridging assumptions.
On a more general level, though, I think that the disciplinary specialization of university departments and the specialist communities that form around these disciplinary homes may also lead to another form of overestimation of individual expertise and critical perspective. Scholars submit their work to specialist journals, and the editors on those journals share methodological approaches and disciplinary identities with most of the people submitting papers for publication. And even if the paper does get submitted to an outside expert to verify parts that are outside of the author's expertise, those outside experts often find themselves in unfamiliar methodologies and contexts that limit how much they are able to interact with the wider implications of what is being asserted in the article.
If we had more cross-disciplinary appointments and more interdisciplinary collaboration, we'd probably have better structures in place for working through these sorts of blind spots and assumptions.
Alas, that is not the model on which academia currently runs.
This may sound weird, but one thing I have been doing is planting trees. Not personally. We're in an apartment in campus managed housing, so our ability to do much of anything with our surroundings is highly limited. Nope, I've been donating monthly to One Tree Planted for most of the year, and they have been doing the planting for me in areas devastated by wildfires or desertification. By the end of the year I'll have planted 240 trees around the world.
It's a small thing, but it's something I can do without having to rely on a functioning government to sustain it, and it directly contributes to slowing down the damage we are doing with our other shortsightedness.
Wonkie - my best advice would be to find a good camera store in the area around you (Seattle has to have a few) that has been around for years and has a good selection of used cameras. You are probably looking for either a "compact" camera (with a built in lens) or a "mirrorless" camera (which would mean getting at least one lens to go with it). If it were me, I'd be looking for a camera from Fujifilm, Olympus, Panasonic, or Sony with at least 16 megapixels. If you talk to the people there about what sorts of things you paint, they can probably find you the appropriate combination of camera body and lens to take some good pics with minimal fuss.
I have an Olympus OMD e-M5 with a 12-40mm pro lens. It's nice and compact for carry and the camera and lens are both waterproof. A 12-40 lens is great for landscape and street photos (equivalent of 24-75mm zoom on an old 35mm slr). If it's set to auto and auto-focus with the focus set dead center, you can quickly pick the thing you want to have in-focus, set the focus, then get the framing you want and take the pic.
I spend a lot of time with my pics on the software side to get them to look how I want, but most of these modern cameras have a few presets you can play with to give you some pics that look more like an old school film camera. Find what pleases your eye and then set it as default and you should be good to go.
Anyone heard from JanieM? She'd probably have some good advice here, too.
Good stuff. You wouldn't think it of a metalhead like me, but bembe is close to my heart as well. Opeth, the band that I got some of ObWi hooked on a while back, was notable for being a Swedish metal band with a latin rhythm section. Both the drummer, Martin Lopez, and the bassists Martin Mendez, were Uruguayan. (Well, Lopez was born in Sweden to Uruguayan parents, and lived there for a time. Mendez emigrated to Sweden when he was 17.) All of the 6/8 feel stuff that Opeth plays starting on My Arms, Your Hearse through Ghost Reveries were given pulse by Lopez and Mendez playing bembe influenced heavy rhythms to the point where even after Lopez left the group, Mikael Åkerfeldt, the main songwriter, was still writing Afro-Caribbean inflected rhythmic sections. He even had Alex Acuña play percussion on one song on the album they did right after Lopez left the band.
Bembe is what gives Opeth's brutal passages that groove that few other metal bands can find. Sepultura and Gojira get it, but Sepultura is Brazillan and Gojira are French eco-activists who do tons of work in the Amazon basin and that has bled over into Mario's drumming.
wonkie, what do you miss about the old cameras? When I bought my micro 4/3 camera before the Iceland trip, I played around with lens adapters and older lenses from the '70s. Throw the settings on manual and you barely notice that it's a modern digital camera. Doubly so when I pull up the photos in DXO photo lab and use their film stock modeling to give the pics the same light contours as a classic Fujifilm stock.
Send 'em off to an online photo processor for printing and you would barely notice the difference. The feel and the look are there.
Meanwhile, I've been converting my older mountain bike into a gravel oriented bike for when it rains and the roads are closed. I put lighter tires and some new TPU tubes on the bike and took 1.5 pounds of rotating weight and sticky rubber drag out of the equation. It's feeling fast and light. Just waiting on handlebar tape to put the new alt handlebars on to get a more drop bar like position on the ride.
russell - But the whole country is complicit in that history, and I think the whole country participates in a refusal to come to terms with it in an honest way.
Look at how the majority of the most geographically racially segregated cities in the US are Northern - Detroit, Chicago, Milwaukee, Minneapolis,...
wj - (Especially those who didn’t see it coming, and so failedto plant something else this year. Too late now to do anything but plow the crop under as fertalizer for next year.)
Right about now those farmers are also starting to realize that there is no way to plan for what to plant next year, because there is no telling what The Ancient Orange One is going to decide to add to the tariff pile as his next tantrum negotiating tactic.
You can't plan a year out when the yahoo in charge keeps blowing stuff up to keep his enemies - the farmers' customers - off-balance.
They could plow it all under and try to grow carbon, but TAOO has blown up climate subsidies as well.
We're talking about the difference between herding cats and making anxious dogs bark.
The Dems, unlike the GOP, have to bring in the dogs without upsetting the cats and making them scatter. It's a harder set of victory conditions.
First, though, they have to start talking to people in rural areas, listening to their need, and finding language that connects with those people showing that they are both hearing what was said, and responding with an approach that doesn't throw any of their urban constituencies under the bus. The Dems need to find common ground for a broad, grassroots solution.
So yeah, send the consultants to Mars and put Walz in charge of listening.
And in other news - I found this Bluesky thread (via BJ) that explains how the Marines managed to hit a CHP motorcycle with shrapnel while the CHP closed down I-5 to let Pete Dog and Couchy posture and pretend to be manly warrior men:
On “Weekend Music Thread #04 John Mackey”
russell is well on his way with this prompt.
And I don't think that one has to have written a song in order to understand and serve the emotions of the song. What you do need, however, is some life experience to connect it with.
And I'm not talking about a CGI/animated puppet for real performers (a la Gorillaz or Dethklok). That's just human musicians cosplaying something else. What Spotify, Sony, Warner, etc. are after is on-trend content generated by trained expert systems in response to prompts or to the other content listened to by users of their services.
On “Weekend music thread #05 Tuvan throat singing”
lj - ...and I would be surprised if this week’s is on anyone else’s.
Incorrect, sir.
The Hu - Yuve Yuve Yu (Mongolian Folk Metal)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v4xZUr0BEfE
Heilung - In Maidjan (Danish Shamanistic Neofolk)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kmWTZ3KfnXE
Both of which have, with other songs from these bands, had some heavy rotation in my playlists. Both bands are pretty awesome, and have dedicated fanbases. I find that Heilung live video astounding and powerful every damn time I watch it.
On “Weekend Music Thread #04 John Mackey”
If either of you want to brainstorm a thesis, I've got office hours on Zoom.
"
wj - you can have AI generate the name of your star and generate genre appropriate "photos" of them. You can then use Claude to generate all the lyrics for your song from a simple, one sentence prompt. You can then feed those lyrics into Suno and have it generate a genre-appropriate song based on the lyrics complete with a vocalist.
It's all just a stew of algorithmically generated near-plagiarism.
You can watch Rick Beato do just that here.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eKxNGFjyRv0
"
I'm prepping and making changes to my syllabus for the writing class I teach that centers around college music - writing reviews of "college radio" albums from the '80s and '90s, and then taking what they have learned from doing that to comment on the music that is a part of their college lives today.
I had been having them write an essay exploring the question "Does College Music Still Exist?," and digging into the social side of what defines the music of that moment and that community. Sadly, I've never been satisfied with the depth of their engagement with the topic and have been wanting to change it up for a few terms now in the hopes of finding something that gets them thinking more deeply and feeling like they have something that the want to say.
My current idea is to get them thinking more deeply about the ecology of their music media. If the music you listen to is chosen for you by an algorithm, what makes it yours? Should Spotify allow the uploading and monetizing of music produced by AI? Can an AI generated pop star understand your broken heart? Do you really listen to songs you don't buy and music you don't own, or is it just something to consume like fast food?
I keep making stabs at how to turn all that into a philosophical question that can provoke reflection and inspire many different responses - something like "What's Wrong With Listening To Spotify?" or the like, but I haven't found one with the right mojo and moxie. Any ideas?
On “Another variety in the diversity of greasy”
Have just started to shift to teaching my students about speculative journalism (reporting of things like climate change that frame parts of the story using the tools [extrapolation, cognitive estrangement] of science fiction). I have them read a few Spec J pieces from High Country News based on the Fourth National Climate Assessment from 2018 with the stories set in 2068. In past quarters I have pulled up a copy of the Assessment to show the what and the how of the extrapolation.
All of the governmental links to the study are broken. The Ancient Orange One and his gibbering minions have taken down those sites. This despite the fact that it was his previous administration that published them in the first place.
And now I am torn as to whether the university will have my back if I simply point this out to my students. We've all been warned not to engage in anything that could be taken as political activism, and they are drawing a very risk-averse line in the sand for what counts as activism.
This is not sustainable.
On “People and poliltics”
I think Wonkie is correct about religion as the locus for right wing charity. I remember seeing claims a decade or so ago that conservatives gave more to charity than did liberals, but the details of that showed that part of what counted as conservative charity was church offerings and tithing, which may be charity or it may be paying the pastor/priest/rabbi/imam and covering the overhead/improvement of the communal place of worship. And unlike Charity Navigator, there really isn't any way to track the efficiency with which those religious donations are turned into support for charitable causes.
My conservative family members and friends can be quite generous. I do think, however, that liberal charitable giving tends to go to causes a bit farther from home and immediate community, where conservative giving tends to have fewer degrees of separation from the giver.
I think that is a fair assessment.
On “Horrifying stuff”
russell - Grok needs to read the Second Treatise on Government. Also the preamble to the Massachusetts Constitution, which preceded and was a model for the US Constitution.
I'm sure that Grok has been fed those things, but what it "thinks" about those things is just a matter of remixing what others have said about those texts.
On “I got depressed so I bought hydrangeas”
novakant - At least I feel on most days that I’m doing something useful, though I don’t really know what I’m doing yet.
I know a lot of teachers (myself included) with a decade or more of teaching experience that still feel like this - at least part of the time. We feel it less often, but it never quite goes away. We just get better at letting go of our expectations and more adept at flowing around the obstacles.
Every new class is a learning experience.
On “Horrifying stuff”
wj - a surprising number of evangelical fundamentalists have embraced their catholic co-religionists in the name of Christian Nationalism and being pro-forced-birth. They are also very positive where the various Orthodox denominations are concerned. They can all get along so long as there are no gays, women belong to their men, and none of the Catholics support these last couple Marxist Anti-Popes.
And they will be polite and keep their mouths shut on the whole Mormon thing for the sake of politics so long as no one presses them to affirm that Mormons are Christians.
But the JWs are still on the outs.
Gotta make concessions if you want to have your Christian Red Caesar.
"
Couchie would very much love to be the heir to the Charlie Kirk throne, and judging by the way that he sidesteps the questions, reframes them, gaslights, and performs entirely for the audience while refusing to engage with any of the actual questions being asked of him, I'd say that he's learned the patter needed to try to be the paterfamilias of TPUSA.
I don't think his performance is all that convincing for the people outside the room, but it's probably reassuring for those in attendance who were hoping to be a part of the moment when we all watched the triumph of Couchie's will.
On “Ramsayer, Korea and me”
Michael Cain - At one of those, one of the people who did have a doctorate made the observation that yes, Mike had done multiple projects that would easily qualify for a PhD in terms of originality and impact, but all cut across multiple disciplines so no department would ever accept them.
I was in a similar situation with my dissertation, which spanned informatics, film and media studies, and rhetoric. I had people from each of those three disciplines on my committee (two of whom had appointments in English, which is what made my project possible).
I earned the degree, but there were no journals that felt my work was in the pocket for what they covered, and no programs or departments that were looking to hire someone with an oddball set of research interests.
So I teach rhetoric and composition, and transmedial rhetoric sits and gathers dust.
"
I'm not discounting the specific language challenges that you identify here. I suspect the same can be said of linguists that are attempting to do comparative study between geographically distant and isolated branches of Indo-European - leaning too hard on the common ground of shared language and not doing enough to understand the divergent histories, local influences, and historical contexts of the moments they are comparing. These complexities are difficult to work through and require multiple bridging assumptions.
On a more general level, though, I think that the disciplinary specialization of university departments and the specialist communities that form around these disciplinary homes may also lead to another form of overestimation of individual expertise and critical perspective. Scholars submit their work to specialist journals, and the editors on those journals share methodological approaches and disciplinary identities with most of the people submitting papers for publication. And even if the paper does get submitted to an outside expert to verify parts that are outside of the author's expertise, those outside experts often find themselves in unfamiliar methodologies and contexts that limit how much they are able to interact with the wider implications of what is being asserted in the article.
If we had more cross-disciplinary appointments and more interdisciplinary collaboration, we'd probably have better structures in place for working through these sorts of blind spots and assumptions.
Alas, that is not the model on which academia currently runs.
On “I got depressed so I bought hydrangeas”
This may sound weird, but one thing I have been doing is planting trees. Not personally. We're in an apartment in campus managed housing, so our ability to do much of anything with our surroundings is highly limited. Nope, I've been donating monthly to One Tree Planted for most of the year, and they have been doing the planting for me in areas devastated by wildfires or desertification. By the end of the year I'll have planted 240 trees around the world.
It's a small thing, but it's something I can do without having to rely on a functioning government to sustain it, and it directly contributes to slowing down the damage we are doing with our other shortsightedness.
On “Weekend music thread #03 Rhumba and the clave”
And here's Sepultura in their full Afro Caribbean mode back in 1996:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6YUJit9iNE0
"
russell - https://www.invisibleoranges.com/opeth-bembe/
On “Something Different”
Wonkie - my best advice would be to find a good camera store in the area around you (Seattle has to have a few) that has been around for years and has a good selection of used cameras. You are probably looking for either a "compact" camera (with a built in lens) or a "mirrorless" camera (which would mean getting at least one lens to go with it). If it were me, I'd be looking for a camera from Fujifilm, Olympus, Panasonic, or Sony with at least 16 megapixels. If you talk to the people there about what sorts of things you paint, they can probably find you the appropriate combination of camera body and lens to take some good pics with minimal fuss.
I have an Olympus OMD e-M5 with a 12-40mm pro lens. It's nice and compact for carry and the camera and lens are both waterproof. A 12-40 lens is great for landscape and street photos (equivalent of 24-75mm zoom on an old 35mm slr). If it's set to auto and auto-focus with the focus set dead center, you can quickly pick the thing you want to have in-focus, set the focus, then get the framing you want and take the pic.
I spend a lot of time with my pics on the software side to get them to look how I want, but most of these modern cameras have a few presets you can play with to give you some pics that look more like an old school film camera. Find what pleases your eye and then set it as default and you should be good to go.
Anyone heard from JanieM? She'd probably have some good advice here, too.
On “Weekend music thread #03 Rhumba and the clave”
Good stuff. You wouldn't think it of a metalhead like me, but bembe is close to my heart as well. Opeth, the band that I got some of ObWi hooked on a while back, was notable for being a Swedish metal band with a latin rhythm section. Both the drummer, Martin Lopez, and the bassists Martin Mendez, were Uruguayan. (Well, Lopez was born in Sweden to Uruguayan parents, and lived there for a time. Mendez emigrated to Sweden when he was 17.) All of the 6/8 feel stuff that Opeth plays starting on My Arms, Your Hearse through Ghost Reveries were given pulse by Lopez and Mendez playing bembe influenced heavy rhythms to the point where even after Lopez left the group, Mikael Åkerfeldt, the main songwriter, was still writing Afro-Caribbean inflected rhythmic sections. He even had Alex Acuña play percussion on one song on the album they did right after Lopez left the band.
Bembe is what gives Opeth's brutal passages that groove that few other metal bands can find. Sepultura and Gojira get it, but Sepultura is Brazillan and Gojira are French eco-activists who do tons of work in the Amazon basin and that has bled over into Mario's drumming.
On “Something Different”
wonkie, what do you miss about the old cameras? When I bought my micro 4/3 camera before the Iceland trip, I played around with lens adapters and older lenses from the '70s. Throw the settings on manual and you barely notice that it's a modern digital camera. Doubly so when I pull up the photos in DXO photo lab and use their film stock modeling to give the pics the same light contours as a classic Fujifilm stock.
Send 'em off to an online photo processor for printing and you would barely notice the difference. The feel and the look are there.
Meanwhile, I've been converting my older mountain bike into a gravel oriented bike for when it rains and the roads are closed. I put lighter tires and some new TPU tubes on the bike and took 1.5 pounds of rotating weight and sticky rubber drag out of the equation. It's feeling fast and light. Just waiting on handlebar tape to put the new alt handlebars on to get a more drop bar like position on the ride.
Fun times.
On “Bal des Ardents”
The problem with monarchy according to Lewis Carroll:
"Off with their heads, said the Queen."
The problem with democracy according to Walt Kelly:
"Yep son, we have met the enemy and he is us."
On “The South shall writhe again”
russell - But the whole country is complicit in that history, and I think the whole country participates in a refusal to come to terms with it in an honest way.
Look at how the majority of the most geographically racially segregated cities in the US are Northern - Detroit, Chicago, Milwaukee, Minneapolis,...
On “There have to be clowns”
They all float down here.
On “The South shall writhe again”
wj - (Especially those who didn’t see it coming, and so failedto plant something else this year. Too late now to do anything but plow the crop under as fertalizer for next year.)
Right about now those farmers are also starting to realize that there is no way to plan for what to plant next year, because there is no telling what The Ancient Orange One is going to decide to add to the tariff pile as his next
tantrumnegotiating tactic.You can't plan a year out when the yahoo in charge keeps blowing stuff up to keep his enemies - the farmers' customers - off-balance.
They could plow it all under and try to grow carbon, but TAOO has blown up climate subsidies as well.
Screwed.
On “Politics thread”
We're talking about the difference between herding cats and making anxious dogs bark.
The Dems, unlike the GOP, have to bring in the dogs without upsetting the cats and making them scatter. It's a harder set of victory conditions.
First, though, they have to start talking to people in rural areas, listening to their need, and finding language that connects with those people showing that they are both hearing what was said, and responding with an approach that doesn't throw any of their urban constituencies under the bus. The Dems need to find common ground for a broad, grassroots solution.
So yeah, send the consultants to Mars and put Walz in charge of listening.
And in other news - I found this Bluesky thread (via BJ) that explains how the Marines managed to hit a CHP motorcycle with shrapnel while the CHP closed down I-5 to let Pete Dog and Couchy posture and pretend to be manly warrior men:
https://bsky.app/profile/bafriedman.bsky.social/post/3m3lh3t342c2z
I'm sure some poor grunt is hating life right now, but whoever in the brass okayed this pointless bit of spectacle is the one who should be shunned.
Not that any of that is going to rouse the Ancient Orange One from his eldritch slumber.
MAGA - Make Abominable Gods Awaken.
On “The South shall writhe again”
Dukes of Hazard. Lynyrd Skynyrd. The latter especially after Ronnie died and Johnny replaced him.
Those two things did more to mainstream the Confederate battle flag as good ol’ boy freedom than anything else.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.