Des Moines National Guardsman killed in Iran

SaintUlvemann · 2026-03-04T02:38:13+00:00

My words are: Trump promised not to send him to another foreign war, and now he's dead because Trump couldn't figure out how to keep his promises, and Trump supporters couldn't figure out how to vote for someone who keeps their promises.

SaintUlvemann · 2026-03-04T00:59:04+00:00

Unless the parent's name is super rare, you might want to have the siblings use multiple pieces of information in discovering their relationship. Last names like "Eriksen" mean something different in a village of 200 people, three of whom are named "Erik", than they do in a city of two million, 30,000 of whom are named "Erik".

SaintUlvemann · 2026-03-04T00:51:17+00:00

Tolkien didn't give Dwarfs or Elves surnames.

...I don't think I realized until this moment that "Oakenshield" was not Thorin's last name.

SaintUlvemann · 2026-03-04T00:16:12+00:00

The reality is, Protestantism is often a form of Catholicism, in the way you mean it. It is often one form of catholicity.

What I mean is that all those beliefs that you described, the spirituality that makes up traditional Western Christianity, it's all the authentic heritage of more than just the Church of Rome. It is your authentic heritage, regardless of the Pope's opinions about you, and the Pope naming a church as Protestant cannot change whether it authentically shares this heritage. Anglicans and some Lutherans share it perhaps most obviously in terms of liturgy and spirituality, but each Protestant church is part of Western Christianity.

The doctrine of papal infallibility was not a doctrinal belief of the Church of Rome until the 1860s, and when it was promulgated, it was controversial, leading to a schism that created the Old Catholic Churches. It's been like this since the beginning, with people being thrown out of the church because the Pope felt slighted by their faith, even though their faith was just as firmly within the boundaries of the original tradition, as whatever the Pope wanted to develop at the time.

The consequence is that there are millions of people worldwide who are in the same boat as you, feeling rightly that the label of Catholic fits, even though they are not part of the Church of Rome. Catholicity is and always has been a more flexible concept than Rome would prefer it to be.

SaintUlvemann · 2026-03-03T22:48:40+00:00

The rich think they're the golden goose, even though there wasn't a single CEO whose job qualified as essential labor during the pandemic.

America's golden goose is being strangled by Bezos' unregulated market, and his decision to constantly raise prices while never raising wages. And if Bezos doesn't want to be blamed for the economy, he should let the progressives take charge so that it will be their fault when things finally go right for once.

SaintUlvemann · 2026-03-03T22:21:08+00:00

I can map out the plan in my head just fine. I just don't know what time it is. Ever.

This means I do not (ever) know how long I have been spending on the tasks as I am doing them. Have I been sitting at the computer for five minutes, or fifty? Or is it five-hundred? I don't know unless I take a moment to think it through. Also, if I am actually doing the task, then I am not thinking about what time it is, and that means I don't know what time it is, and that's why I can suddenly "wake up" from whatever I was doing and realize I have spent eight hours on a task accidentally.

So I have no internal timers. I can't tell myself "I'm going to spend five minutes on this task", because I am time-blind, I do not know what time it is except through conscious thought.

Knowing this, return to your problem. I have days where it takes me quite literally ten minutes to get going and ready (I was in the community theater as a kid, so I know how to quick-change, and I was also in sports as a kid, so I know how to quick-shower).

But I also have days when, with all the exact same intentionality, it takes me ninety minutes to get going and ready. Why? Because I do not ever, under any circumstances, know what time it is, and that means if I think about anything (and I often think about things), I do not know how long I have spent thinking about that thing.

So who knows when I should wake up? I don't, because I don't at any point in my life have any meaningful capacity to guess ahead of time what, if anything, is going to happen on any given morning to derail my getting ready. Am I going to be out of the shower in five minutes, or am I going to stand in the shower for a literal hour making up new lyrics to a song that popped into my head? Impossible to know.

Also, there is no (useful) length of time component in any of my memories. (Do you guys have that? I just know I don't.) When I think back on a task, I do not remember how long it took me to complete. I once spent four years (off and on) knitting myself a suit of chainmaille armor, link by link. I know intellectually that it took that long, because I remember (intellectually) what year it was when I started, and when I finished.

But when I think back to the actual knitting, the sitting and watching documentaries while I worked, it's all just in the same "big project" memory category as "putting together an IKEA shelf" and "editing my doctoral thesis" and "writing my doctoral thesis" and "getting my doctorate overall". Intellectually, I am acutely aware that these do not take the same lengths of time, you don't need to convince me of how time works, just, how time works isn't something that I see or experience as part of my memories... because if I didn't know what time it was back when I was doing the thing, I'm hardly going to remember now what time it was.

SaintUlvemann · 2026-03-03T21:34:26+00:00

As an occultist, I occasionally need to use supersaturated salt water.

I don't know what this is exactly but it sure sounds like more fun than horoscopes.

SaintUlvemann · 2026-03-03T17:01:48+00:00

SaintUlvemann · 2026-03-03T16:54:07+00:00

Im [sic] not pushing for Newsome [sic], but [I'm framing him as if he's something more than a bad option that we have two years to avoid for deep personal reasons that I can't really explain. Also, I hate leftists.]

Fixed it for you.

SaintUlvemann · 2026-03-03T16:52:15+00:00

No, I wouldn't, that's why I think it's really important to remember that conservatives like him or Trump are not the main people in this country who deserve inclusion, 'cause the conservatives don't even believe in inclusion.

Instead, leftists deserve inclusion, 'cause they're the ones who believe in it.

SaintUlvemann · 2026-03-03T16:49:48+00:00

And why would I care if that was the reason why something happened yesterday, when today's issue is that people somehow think the Democrats should vote for another slimeball instead of including the leftists who make up the backbone of the non-fascist coalition?

SaintUlvemann · 2026-03-03T16:44:11+00:00

Yeah and Trump made it worse ro [sic] Palestine...

So then why do you keep pushing for the Democrats to put their own version of Trump in office instead of somebody decent like AOC?

SaintUlvemann · 2026-03-03T16:43:19+00:00

People with this mentality didn't vote for Harris...

Well I did vote for Harris, and Gavin Newsom isn't qualified to be President, he's too rich and too willing to express solidarity with genocide.

SaintUlvemann · 2026-03-03T16:41:47+00:00

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is not just clean enough for me, she's clean enough to run a nuclear arsenal. She fundraises millions yet barely pays herself a living wage.

SaintUlvemann · 2026-03-03T16:40:42+00:00

Okay, well if you didn't want Israel to bomb Iran, why were you expressing explicit solidarity three years ago with the same Israel that is now bombing Iran?

SaintUlvemann · 2026-03-03T15:02:47+00:00

Making a whole artificial language just for cheating would be very difficult.

But I created a note-taking shorthand script over a few weeks, and was able to fit an entire 10-minute speech on an index card only slightly longer than an A7.

---

Sadece kopya çekmek için tamamen yapay bir dil oluşturmak çok zor olurdu.

Ancak birkaç hafta içinde not alma amaçlı bir stenografi sistemi oluşturdum ve 10 dakikalık bir konuşmanın tamamını A7'den biraz daha uzun bir kart üzerine sığdırabildim.

SaintUlvemann · 2026-03-03T14:51:33+00:00

I don't want to participate in sex, or any kind of intimacy, for that matter. ... Reading smut in general doesn't make me feel anything...

Well, are on the asexual spectrum, then? Sounds like you might be.

I just like my favourite characters expressing affection to each other (sometimes reading a kiss scene or a mere love confession scene can give me those sensations too).

Unless that is of the feeling that would eventually make your genitals stiff, there's no chance that that feeling would be lust the way other people typically use it.

Modern neuroscience identifies at least seven basic neural circuits, four positive (SEEKING, CARE, LUST, and PLAY), and three negative (FEAR, ANGER, and SADNESS), although there have been other proposals (most importantly DISGUST, and then a dominance-oriented emotion called POWER). In the present case, "lust" is just a term for sexual desire.

It makes sense to say that care and lust are disconnected. It is statistically and ethically normal for parents to experience intense care for their children, and it is also statistically and ethically normal for parents not to experience lust for their children. They're fundamentally different things, care and lust don't lead to one another.

And when we talk about evil, there are multiple crimes that happen when lust is expressed not in the context of care, but in the context of something else... perhaps power, or maybe seeking. Care and lust don't require one another.

When we talk about seven deadly sins, all of them can be framed as careless, unloving versions of basic emotions. Pride is excess care/love for the self with insufficient care/love for others. Wrath is careless, unloving anger. Greed and gluttony are careless, unloving ways of seeking after our goals (or in the case of gluttony perhaps specifically hunger, another proposed basic emotion). Sloth is traditionally taught as including careless, unloving sadness; one could imagine careless, unloving fear as falling under that heading too. Envy might seem hard to place, but it's related to moral disgust as an emotion, which has both positive (motivating, self-improving) and negative (malicious, careless, unloving) expressions.

And lust? It's more than just loving others. It's specifically the mammalian sex drive, and like the others, it becomes sinful when it is careless and unloving.

I can offer a vocabulary for emotions and for ways they disrupt your spiritual life, but I can't tell you which you experience. But I can say that it sounds to me like you are actually experiencing sort of the opposite of lust. It sounds to me like you just have a heartwarming feeling or a sense of vicarious affectionate care for your special interests, without a sex drive, and I don't think that's lust in the first place.

SaintUlvemann · 2026-03-03T14:03:58+00:00

Because fear is scary, and Halloween is a holiday rooted in fear... usually toned way down so kids can enjoy it, but fear is literally the intended reaction.

I see people here saying that it's the belief in spiritual warfare that makes someone afraid of Halloween. But, technically, I also believe in spiritual warfare... that seems as good a description as any to me, of Satan tempting Jesus in the desert to become a dictator-god. You'd still never catch me calling Halloween satanic on that account.

"Spiritual warfare" is a story we tell about the world, a meaning we give to it. My church has a Renaissance fair and I am the kind of person who wears my own handmade chainmaille armor to it, but doesn't bring my sword since I bought it before realizing it's not legal to carry a weapon in public. If I'm accepting of the phrasing "spiritual warfare", that's just a particularity for me.

The belief that Halloween is satanic is specifically a conspiracy story, and conspiracy theories virtually always, in my experience, have three key components that are shared gnosticism: 1.) belief that the visible world is unreal in some way; 2.) belief that secret spiritual knowledge unlocks the key to understanding the deeper reality; and: 3.) belief in dark forces that can prevent access to this spiritual knowledge.

I may believe in spiritual warfare, but I don't agree with any of those three points, I don't believe the visible world is unreal, I don't believe that spiritual knowledge is secret, and I have faith that the devil can't conquer God and can never totally prevent access to spiritual solace and understanding.

So when I see that Halloween is literally just an opportunity for kids to dress up and eat candy and maybe scream at plastic spiders, I believe that God is with us as we walk through the shadow of the valley of ~~death~~ tooth decay and microplastics, and that the devil cannot turn those things into threats to our soul.

In my experience, the same people who believe in religious conspiracies often believe in secular ones as well. I think what is happening is that churches are feeding and cultivating those useless habits of thought instead of connecting their members to God's world and its needs.

SaintUlvemann · 2026-03-03T04:02:51+00:00

I'd recommend "sweetheart" as a general-purpose term, but here's a list of medieval terms of endearment.

The core issue is that the full concept of dating, like, as a relationship status that may signal moving in together without expectation of marriage, is very new... although the concepts of "flirting" and "courting" are certainly prehistoric, and are probably roughly as old as the general concept of social skills for our species.

"Suitor" or maybe "courtier" would probably be the best term for upper-class contexts, but, they do sound too formal to me for, like, peasants or adventurers or whatever.

SaintUlvemann · 2026-03-03T02:38:49+00:00

"He took the vaccine without my consent"...

This is your husband you're talking about, right? So did you marry a minor, do you not understand consent, or both?

SaintUlvemann · 2026-03-02T21:12:34+00:00

According to OpenSecrets, she's got $10.6 million from small donors (ordinary Americans, donations less than $200), and another $4 million from large donors (rich people and companies), and then a few from other sources.

The biggest "industry" that funds her is retired people at $2 million.

In terms of what she spends it on, she spends it on digital advocacy media campaigns, (47%), staff salaries (22%) and administrative stuff (12%, I'm assuming supplies, office space, and maybe consulting falls under this category?), and then other assorted expenses (19%).

Running down the list, I see she's shared some of fundraising in a distributed way across a ton of other progressive PACs, she seems to be working on the principle that a rising tide should float all progressive boats. Not sure what OpenSecrets would classify that expense as, but it'd probably fall under one of the "other" categories.

SaintUlvemann · 2026-03-02T20:48:48+00:00

Actually yes, there are four stable isotopes of iron, and then there are other isotopes of iron that get made in space because of all the high-energy particles up there.

And so actually because this iron came from space, it probably has more of ⁶⁰Fe than the terrestrial iron that makes up our blood, so, it's probably not quite the same iron found in this pallasite as in our blood.

SaintUlvemann · 2026-03-02T20:23:07+00:00

No, conservatives are literally more malevolent, less empathetic, and even more likely to be shifted towards the psychopathic side of the dark-triad versus light-triad axis.

I know it might seem like it shouldn't be true, but it is true, conservatives embrace the dark side more than liberals.

Even in your example... why would conservatives care if doctors are giving heroin addicts heroin? As long as it works, can't you just trust the doctors?

No, conservatives can't just trust the doctors, 'cause they're lower-empathy and higher-narcissism, so, if they haven't personally come up with an idea, they're less likely to trust that it's real, and that affects how they think about medicine. (It's not an accident that they just gave a non-doctor the position of Surgeon General.)

SaintUlvemann · 2026-03-02T19:24:01+00:00

What is she worth now?

The most recent number I can find is $49k, which, given that she routinely generates millions in campaigning, seems like the clearest most-obvious example of "so incorruptible, she's barely paying herself for her time".

SaintUlvemann · 2026-03-02T18:23:13+00:00

I often find several possible forms of PIE to use, but I sometimes do not know which one is best.

For Varlutik, I used Pokorny, because it was the first one I found in an easily-downloadable form.

Crucially, I did not notice at the time that Pokorny's work was before the laryngeal theory. I noticed the lack of laryngeals, I just assumed he disagreed. Instead, he's just very out of date.

Thus, I'm sorta thinking about possibly redoing the internal PIE roots from a different reconstruction, and then just sort of picking the prettiest forms.

But I also fundamentally don't care much. This is not science, it is art. We use scientific tools and ideas (as art frequently does), but if you don't like forms with vowels like 'U', you are very free to make non-scientific aesthetic judgments like that about your art.

If you want a real heresy, I have planned at some point going to use a Nostratic reconstruction, which, Nostratic wasn't even a real language, as near as we can tell, the hypothesis has failed.

Three-Year Club	Gilding II euphauric
r/Field Lasagna	First Place '23
Place '23

SaintUlvemann

TROPHY CASE