Re: This sucks
 

If anyone has Sidd’s contact info let him know. I didn’t PM him because he seems off FB. They were fairly close I think.

Re: This sucks
 

Dropping in to share my sadness about this news. Fucking awful and upsetting because it’s a surprise and upsetting because it isn’t.

Hope you all are doing well (and glad to hear the news about your wife, Ollie!).

TM

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I saw him comment on the FB thread. I'm so glad to have known and called friend someone who was loved by so many. He was full of love and did what he could to bring joy to others. Would that we all could leave such a legacy.

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He was often an ass, but he was our ass.

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My memory is he showed here with very little experience in having his buttons pushed, and no experience in pushing buttons. I made things hellish for him on PB (Gilligan episode recaps!) and he left for a bit. But then he came back swinging and fucking with me. He made a Hank sock that had my guy wearing a Mickey Mouse hat. One of the few people that ever got under skin. And I take credit for toughening him up, although maybe he took a class?

We became friends and the 2 times I was in Boston we spent time together. He is one of two LT people that went to the Moth with me. Less, you have at least that in common with him.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

Congratulations! I’m sorry to hear she went through this at all, but thrilled to hear it’s in rear view mirror now given those excellent odds.

Re: This sucks
 

Miserable goddamned disease. Merciless. And he had to deal with it twice. But I recall, in one exchange, he said he planted a tree and planned to see it reach full growth. Maybe he didn’t live long enough to do so, but that’s an attitude worth celebrating. Few folks could muster that finger-in-the-eye response to a terrible diagnosis. Can’t imagine he went out without a hell of a fight.

We argued a lot (although in recent years, there was probably more agreement than disagreement), but he knew his shit and one was always enlightened for having had the back and forth. Who else almost worked for Ian Bremmer? That’s some rarified air.

He was religious, I think. I hope he was right, and the food’s killer up there. That’s the least the universe could do - he certainly deserved more time.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

Some sock just asked me if GGG was also Spanky. Spanky worked in politics IIRC but he seemed really naive otherwise? But if history (Penske) has taught us anything it’s that you can make assumptions like that.

Re: This sucks
 

Fucking sucks.

Many years ago, I saw the first squirrel who came to my house dodge a red-tailed hawk who was after her. It was here that I learned about squirrel evasion techniques.

When evading an aerial predator, squirrels take a position on a big branch near the trunk of a tree. When the hawk lands on top, they go to the bottom of the branch. When the hawk swings around to the bottom, the squirrel goes on top of the branch.

They were too far from me for me to be able to do anything but scream but it went on for a few minutes until the hawk flew away frustrated and our little buddy went to live on for many more years.

I feel like life for everything is a game of dodging predators. Get Covid, hope you don't get a clot, so you're on top of the branch. Get a lipid report with bad HDL, hide under the branch, lipids get better, you're on top of the branch.

Even though I never met GGG, we interacted on here a few times. Prayers go out to all and hope there truly is a better place for wonderful people like him.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

No. Spanky is/was a friend of mine from high school. We also lived together for two years during law school.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

Ahh right.

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Nice imagery, but we had a mourning dove nest on our porch early Covid. When the chicks hatched it was a bright spot of hope. Then a fucking squirrel got in the nest and ate both chicks. Worst was it only had access because I left a chair on the porch that gave em a jumping location. Who knew they were even carnivores?

Point is I’d have let the fucker get eaten.

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You’ve told us this before. Whatevs. Unsurprisingly missed the point.

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Oh, don’t sulk. I got the point. It was a nice image as I said. And as we all go forward we all need to keep dodging the hawks. This month I started sticking a piece of plastic up my dick hole to drain retained urine, as an example. Trust me, I’m a fighter.

Re: This sucks
 

Forward.

It’s a good motto.

Life’s terminal. Enjoy every sandwich. I regret working hard, caring about the horseshit this McSociety tells us to, and being invested in thinking what I’ve done in service to commerce was real. I do not regret a single martini, line, pill, or cigarette.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=KgzQuE1pR1w

Fuck. Drink. Eat the bad stuff.

Just don’t do anything that involves a syringe. That’s the line.

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I feel a little bad about calling him creepy once apon a time, but he deserved it in the moment. Sucks that he's gone; for some reason I had the sense that things were going reasonably well.

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Remission for years then it came back hard. Been pretty ill for awhile.

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I'm in envy of the way that he and Chris (sorry, completely unable to come up with his LT sock just now) reacted to their respective illnesses. I wish I thought I had it in me, but I'm not sure I do. I am too used to living as if there'll always be another day. If and when the time comes, maybe I should wish for an unexpected and quick demise, though that would cruel too.

Re: This sucks
 

Same. I’ve had to handle a couple health issues in recent years. Cancer scares me silly. It’s the knowing and walking around in the immediate and tactile futility that seems unbearable. And the making myself a burden. In all sincerity, if it should be a long illness, as I’m watching a family member expire to now, I’m taking myself out. “Go out standing,” to borrow a Martin Sheen line I know you’ll recognize immediately.

I always take solace that to be born where we’ve been, at this time in history, is quite remarkably fortunate. We’re globally of the .0001%. If you’re in a Boeing and the engine flies off and it starts diving toward the nearest mountains, know, in a much broader and far more significant sense, you still enjoyed a very lucky ticket.

Re: This sucks
 

Pretty Little Flower- he passed from a heart attack FWIW, not cancer.

Re: This sucks
 

Yes, going out to a heart attack was one of the ways he said FU to cancer.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

Punching hippies never goes out of style. Is the speech free yet?

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

No, outside agitators drowned it out. :rolleyes:

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

Can someone under 75 be a hippy? I think it a term of its time?

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

Idk why we can’t walk and chew gum here.

Desecrate your own flag? Freedom of expression. Protected.

Desecrate someone else’s flag? Vandalism.

Camp out to protest? Protected.

Take over a building or set up blockades to keep out tuition-paying students who aren’t supporters of your protests? Trespass and assault.

It’s not complicated. The protected acts should be allowed. The unprotected ones should be prosecuted and curtailed.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

oh, and you don’t get to surround and threaten Jewish students. The disdain for the rights and lives of Jews by “educated” people is disgusting, but at this point normal.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

I'm not sure it is "protected" on private property, but certainly seems wiser to tolerate it than call the police, which will inevitably lead to escalation.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

I think one has to be careful not to lump all critiques of Israel into the antisemitic bucket.

However, one also has to be vigilant in rejecting the argument that antisemitism is but a small part of what's happening. Historically, whenever extremists get together in the hopes of overthrowing anything - or just to engage in an orgy of radical chic expositions - conspiracy theories about how the world is "fixed" in favor of certain peoples arise. And where you find conspiracy theories about powerful people behind the scenes running everything, you're going to find people eager to Blame The Jews.

It's impossible for Critical Theory and its satellite academic concepts, which together form the underpinning of every extremist view on campus today, not to attract antisemites, as they boil the world down to two populations - the oppressed and the oppressors. Israel is seen as a colonizer. And all those associated with colonization of any kind are worst kind of oppressors.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

Remember stink bombs? We used to drop those in department stores in grade school. Smelled like a hundred rotten eggs. You could clean out a whole floor of people in fifteen minutes. Seems to me all Columbia needed was a pallet of those things. Lob them by the dozens into the quad every few minutes, and for good measure, set up a PA system to play a mix of Nickelback and Yoko Ono songs on repeat at top volume while doing so. That quad would be cleared in two hours, tops.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

I’ve paid over $100,000 for my child to attend Columbia. But it will all be worth it to see her walk the stage at graduation!

Wait, what?

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

Agree completely about the schools where that appears to have been tolerated. WTF?

At my son's school, the school and the police stood by and did nothing as right-wing Jewish (and others? Proud Boys?) attacked the pro-Palestinian protestors, 25 of whom were hospitalized.

I find the schools' inaction re all of the above completely baffling.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

Wow, this article makes Columbia sound even worse than I'd thought. What a total train wreck of a school administration.

A taste:

But in November, we got a new rulebook. All of the above would be superseded by a new directive: In the case of speech about Israel-Palestine that upsets those with strong commitments to the state of Israel, all feelings would be considered facts, and all perceptions of threat would be treated as real ones. If you feel a commitment to the state of Israel and you see a keffiyeh or the flag of Palestine and don’t like it, the full force of university discipline and policy will be at your disposal.

It was this sabotaging of my educational mission, along with the advertised erasure of anti-Zionist Jewish students and faculty like myself, that first mobilized me into campus activism. And I was not alone: Faculty massed in mid-November around the statue of Athena to protest these suspensions, and a chapter was formed of Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine to support our students and carry on their mission.

I struggle to adequately state the extent of the university’s failing. It contradicts core tenets of freedom of expression enshrined in our university statutes, which affirm that “free expression would mean little if it did not include the right to express what others may reject or loathe.”

But worse, the effects on combating real prejudice were immediate and calamitous. Actual prejudice against Jews became hard to combat, because any discussion of antisemitism was tainted by the nakedly repressive project of the university. I fear that student protesters struggled to sufficiently distance themselves from real harassment of Jewish or Israeli students in part because the charges of such prejudice had been so delegitimized. Meanwhile, actual prejudice and violence against Muslim and Palestinian students went unaddressed and sometimes unreported to an institution that obviously had no capacity or interest for addressing them on the same scale.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

Judges boycotting Columbia graduates.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

Judges are, of course, free to pick whomever they want to clerk for them, and to indulge whatever preferences, biases or idiosyncrasies they wish, but publicly announcing a boycott of that sort seems more about exploiting the judge's office to make a public statement, and that doesn't sit well.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

Maybe if you send these judges links to the blogs you are getting your info from they'll change their minds?

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

I know you are trolling, but my view doesn't turn on whatever the reason for the boycott, or on anything I read, on blogs or otherwise.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

That post has nothing to do with your view. I was posting something that might give Less a smile. I don’t engage you about Jewish issues as I am deeply disturbed by your views. But I honestly like/border line love you. So I try to understand how you get your myriad confused views. #nottrolling

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

Nor does judges embracing collective punishment.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

Fifth Circuit judges have been blackballing clerks from various schools (including but not limited to Yale and Stanford) for a while now for reasons relating more to "cancel culture," whatever that means, not because of "Jewish issues," whatever that means. If you want the facts, I would assume that a fellow of your intellect and skills would know how to use the Google to find them.

I find your thinking about "Jewish issues" disturbing as well, so I guess we can share that. Kumbaya.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

This incident started with a holocaust-style massacre. I'd support anything Israel did to wipe Hamas the fuck out.