@orrickle@sfba.social

Orrock LXXXVI XLVII @orrickle@sfba.social

· 7mo ago

Replying to

@MaryAustinBooks Well kind of on topic: A small club that my late father belonged to in Baltimore when he was well-launched in his career as a lawyer regularly hosted talks by new members. One such new member gave his talk in Latin. He came up to my father and asked him how my father thought the talk had gone. My father, who had a very good deadpan, said, “Not bad.” He paused and said gently, “Too bad about your Etruscan accent.”

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Orrock LXXXVI XLVII @orrickle@sfba.social

· 2mo ago

https://www.theborderchronicle.com/floods-expose-dangers-of-trumps-3-billion-rio-grande-buoy-barrier-plan $3billion in one ton buoys running wild in Rio Grand flood.

theborderchronicle.com

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Orrock LXXXVI XLVII @orrickle@sfba.social

· 2mo ago

Replying to

@heidilifeldman@mastodon.social the stupidity and incompetence is a feature not a bug.

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Orrock LXXXVI XLVII @orrickle@sfba.social

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@colinpurrington get. yourself some mosquito fish. https://www.mosquitoes.org/biological-control

Alameda County Mosquito Abatement District

Biological Control

Biological control agents of mosquito larvae include predatory fish, predatory aquatic invertebrates, and mosquito pathogens.

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Orrock LXXXVI XLVII @orrickle@sfba.social

· 2mo ago

#luciantruscottIV Think about this: Iran can just shut down the entire machinery of western wealth by firing a couple of missiles that cost less than what Kash Patel spends to go see his girlfriend sing the National Anthem at some redneck sporting event.

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Orrock LXXXVI XLVII @orrickle@sfba.social

· 2mo ago

#heathercoxrichardson Reacting to that nomination, Senator Ted Kennedy (D-MA) recognized the importance of the Fourteenth Amendment to equality: “Robert Bork’s America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, Blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens’ doors in midnight raids, schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution, writers and artists could be censored at the whim of the Government, and the doors of the Federal courts would be shut on the fingers of millions of citizens for whom the judiciary is—and is often the only—protector of the individual rights that are the heart of our democracy….” At the time, Bork’s supporters expressed outrage at what they insisted was Kennedy’s smear campaign, for surely the right-wing attack on the protections of the Fourteenth Amendment would never so completely undermine modern society. And yet in 2026, here we are.

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Orrock LXXXVI XLVII @orrickle@sfba.social

· 2mo ago

#julisnktruscottIv Trump is humiliating us

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Orrock LXXXVI XLVII @orrickle@sfba.social

· 2mo ago

“Our general perceptions are that when your brain is disordered, you lose all function,” Parnia told me. “What we’re finding is that, paradoxically, in disordered states, sometimes that disorder actually opens up pathways to new abilities that were hidden before.” These instances of disinhibition seem to connect people, in Parnia’s view, “to parts of their consciousness that they couldn’t access before.” https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/14/magazine/terminal-lucidity.html?smid=url-share

nytimes.com

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Orrock LXXXVI XLVII @orrickle@sfba.social

· 6mo ago

Replying to

@blogdiva Quelque endroit ou on peut tourner Latin à la plaisanterie donne moi plaisir. Any place that laughs when you make a joke about Latin is the place for me. And yes I am a grandparent in a multi-gen ADU/big house family unit. @_elena

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Orrock LXXXVI XLVII @orrickle@sfba.social

· 7mo ago

Replying to

Trump’s attack on Iran scorns the will of the people and their constitutional right to decide whether they want to pay for a war with their money and their lives. That disdain for democratic government reveals that Trump’s military adventure against Iran is also fundamentally an attack on the United States of America./end

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Orrock LXXXVI XLVII @orrickle@sfba.social

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@czarbucks eggplant

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Orrock LXXXVI XLVII @orrickle@sfba.social

· 6mo ago

Meanwhile, gas prices are going up, oil prices are still ugly, the Fed kept interest rates where they are and the word is that they have no plans to lower them over the next year because of Trump’s war, and lower interest rates is one of those pesky things that keeps him up at night tossing and turning and messing up his Golden Locks.

And the “R” word is making its way into stories about Trump’s war. Yes, there is talk of recession, and that means higher inflation, and that means the Fed will be increasing interest rates, not dropping them. Trump’s poll numbers hit 36 percent disapproval again this week, and a Democrat – a traitorous, nasty, leftist commie Democrat – won the state legislative seat for the district where Mar a Lago sits and where Trump votes…by mail, of course, because mail in voting allows cheating, and Trump cheats like a mofo.

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Orrock LXXXVI XLVII @orrickle@sfba.social

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@Remke I am thinking that the same cognitive dissonance explains why so many people my age who have been driving cars all their lives but who also helped create the US environmental movement hate bicyclists. (Disclaimer: I own a car and ride my bike.)

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Orrock LXXXVI XLVII @orrickle@sfba.social

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@czarbucks eggplant

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Orrock LXXXVI XLVII @orrickle@sfba.social

· 6mo ago

Replying to

@billyjoebowers I’m going as a bike marshal for BADASH Bay Area something or other. I will be protecting the people marching, and they will know that PEOPLE LIKE THEM NOTHING SPECIAL WILLHAVE THEIR BACKS. so go. we are all behind our backs.

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Orrock LXXXVI XLVII @orrickle@sfba.social

· 6mo ago

Even if you think you have the time to wait them out, you’ve already lost, and you may as well go home, because you’re not getting a rug today – not even one of the rugs you can tell are the cheap ones just by looking at them. They just keep those on display to suck you in and give you hope. But there is no hope if you’re so stupid that you’ve burned down the rug shop and all the rugs are gone, just like the oil tankers that aren’t chugging through the Strait of Hormuz. A world without a rug in your living room can be lived, but a world without gas in your car and oil and natural gas to generate the electricity that powers the entirety of Asia and makes it possible to produce the computers that run everything in our lives – well, that’s a world that nobody wants to live in, as Donald Trump is about to find out.

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Orrock LXXXVI XLVII @orrickle@sfba.social

· 6mo ago

Replying to

To whose advantage is stringing out the war? Ah-ha! I remember that other Middle East saying about conflicts and negotiations. We’ve got the watch, but they’ve got the time. How did our 20 years in Afghanistan work out for us? The Taliban was running things in 2001 when we first attacked. They’re still running things in 2026, 25 years later. They’ve even got all the weapons and vehicles we gave to the so-called “Afghan army” to help us fight the Taliban when we were still there. You walk into the shop of the rug merchant in the market, and you spend some time looking at rugs, and maybe you decide to buy one and you haggle over a price that’s acceptable to you – and which I can assure you delights him, because he’s not going to sell you a rug for less money than he bought it for – and you walk out.

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Orrock LXXXVI XLVII @orrickle@sfba.social

· 6mo ago

Replying to

That’s like telling the rug merchant to give you all the rugs the shop you’ve set on fire and tell him that you’ll help him put the fire out, after you’ve loaded up all the rugs. It sounds bad, doesn’t it? Well, it’s worse. All those missiles and bombs we’ve dropped on Iran have cut off their communications to the extent that the leadership has a great deal of difficulty talking to one another – probably because they’re all in bunkers and all the cell towers are down and their military super-secure commo networks are destroyed. So, they can’t get together and decide how to respond to our 15-point “offer,” other than to tell us to stick it and where. The negotiations, if they can be called that, are therefore much slower than they might have been if we hadn’t bombed the shit out of everything in Iran.

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Orrock LXXXVI XLVII @orrickle@sfba.social

· 4mo ago

Replying to

@AaronDavid@beige.party Another way to utilize it is from the late Christopher Hitchens: “If there were a god, there’d be no religion."

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Orrock LXXXVI XLVII @orrickle@sfba.social

· 7mo ago

Replying to

The president is supposed to get Congress’s buy-in to go to war in part because that requirement forces an executive to convince the American people that a contemplated military action is worth their tax dollars and their lives. But Trump made little effort to explain his Iran attack to the American people, and they oppose it. Morris notes that support for attacking Iran has held fairly steady for months and remained so after the strikes, with 34% in favor of them and 44% opposed. This is “incredibly low” support for a foreign war, Morris writes, and support for military action tends to be highest at the start of a war./5

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Orrock LXXXVI XLVII @orrickle@sfba.social

· 7mo ago

Replying to

Trump launched his attack while lawmakers were not scheduled to be in Washington, D.C., for a week, but Democrats are demanding Congress return immediately to vote on whether to continue military action against Iran. Senator Andy Kim (D-NJ) said in an interview: “This is one of the most dangerous efforts that Trump is undertaking in the second term: trying to normalize war without Congress, trying to normalize the idea that a president can just do whatever they want when it comes to foreign policy.” Huge though this is, there is a larger issue behind it: Since taking office again, Trump has gone out of his way to define tariffs, deportations, and so on as part of national security policy./4

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Orrock LXXXVI XLVII @orrickle@sfba.social

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@jesper_linnet@hachyderm.io @EvelineSulman@akademienl.social how old is he? Yesterday I learned that cats can have cognitive decline. Maybe he forgets.

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Orrock LXXXVI XLVII @orrickle@sfba.social

· 5mo ago

https://www.jalopnik.com/2158607/india-striped-road-design-save-wildlife/ via #berniewagenblast

jalopnik.com

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Orrock LXXXVI XLVII @orrickle@sfba.social

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@bluetea Keep on keeping on.

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Orrock LXXXVI XLVII @orrickle@sfba.social

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@Remke Danke

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Orrock LXXXVI XLVII @orrickle@sfba.social

· 6mo ago

Replying to

@crmsnbleyd@hachyderm.io Try Upton Tea or Mark T. Wendell Tea

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Orrock LXXXVI XLVII @orrickle@sfba.social

· 6mo ago

Replying to

See, that’s what you don’t do when you walk into the rug shop in the bazaar in the Middle East, where they’ve been buying and selling things and negotiating with each other for several thousand years. You don’t tell the rug merchant what you want. You wait for him to tell you what price he’s charging.

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Orrock LXXXVI XLVII @orrickle@sfba.social

· 6mo ago

Replying to

Well, their first move was to tell the Iranians what they want, which is like telling the rug guy upfront, before he’s said a word, what you’ll pay. It’s the usual stuff that the Iranians already knew – stop working on your nukes, give us all your enriched uranium, stop producing missiles and drones, don’t give any more money or weapons to Hamas or Hezbollah, and open the Strait of Hormuz and let us manage ship traffic in and out of the Gulf. Ri-i-i-ght.

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Orrock LXXXVI XLVII @orrickle@sfba.social

· 6mo ago

Replying to

So, what’s the result, as of today? Well, Iran is still shooting missiles at Israel, and Israel appears to be running low on its Iron Dome anti-missile defenses, and more of Iran’s missiles are getting through. Iran is still sending drones across the Gulf to hit its neighbors, and its drones are getting though, because it turns out that Iranian drones are hard to shoot down. Back here in the U.S., we’re raiding the stockpiles of our missiles wherever we can find them, because we’re running low, and it turns out that our F-35 fighter is not as stealthy as we thought, because one of them has been shot down. So we’re not going to be using zillion-dollar F-35’s to drop bombs on Iran, of which we still have many.

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Orrock LXXXVI XLVII @orrickle@sfba.social

· 7mo ago

Replying to

At Talking Points Memo, Josh Marshall pointed out that as his power diminishes, Trump “is leaning heavily into the presidential prerogative powers where his power is most untrammeled, where the loss of political power doesn’t really matter. Almost no presidential power is more clearly in that character [than] the president’s control over the military.” And that is the crux of the matter. For all the vagueness of Trump’s justifications and goals in attacking Iran, he has launched a war—his word—on his own, assuming the powers of a dictator./3

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Orrock LXXXVI XLVII @orrickle@sfba.social

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@s3nnet @Boundborg Du hast recht

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Orrock LXXXVI XLVII @orrickle@sfba.social

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@bluetea @Urban_Hermit @Numerfolt @Andres4NY @paninid I am so sorry to hear that. And I apologize if it sounded as if I were taking your dilemma lightly. I know what you mean about students trying to mimic what they think of as academic writing. Perhaps in the future your department could start to take steps to support efforts to detect LLM generated material?.

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Orrock LXXXVI XLVII @orrickle@sfba.social

· 6mo ago

Replying to

@emassey0135@caneandable.social Thanks for this. I stopped at The Hobbit, but I just shared it with my DIL who just got back from a trip to NZ to Lord of the Rings world or whatever it's called.

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Orrock LXXXVI XLVII @orrickle@sfba.social

· 3mo ago

Replying to

@ShredderLivesOn@mastodon.scot The US Supreme Court would call it a legal gratuity.

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Orrock LXXXVI XLVII @orrickle@sfba.social

· 6mo ago

Replying to

The rug shop is still there. The rug merchant is still there, waiting for the next customer like you to walk in and be dazzled enough by his wares that you will fork over enough money to make the next couple of payments on his new Toyota Camry. But you don’t know that. You don’t know that he’s even got a Toyota Camry, because all you know is that there is a rug shop in the market and a guy running it whom you bought a rug from.

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Orrock LXXXVI XLVII @orrickle@sfba.social

· 4mo ago

Replying to

@linguistgoneforeign@mastodon.social What about Google docs and Google drive?

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Orrock LXXXVI XLVII @orrickle@sfba.social

· 6mo ago

Replying to

What do you think Witkoff and Kushner know about the new leader of Iran? Oh, I’m sure the CIA and Israel’s Mossad have been gathering stuff on the late Ayatollah’s son for years. They certainly knew where the Ayatollah and his top people would be on February 28. But they don’t appear to know where the son is now. The Israelis have killed a couple of Iran’s military leaders over the last weeks, but we already knew that Iran does everything in depth, as the military likes to say. They had layers of leadership, political and military, ready to go if the original guys were knocked off. So how deep did our research go on the new guys? Trump’s geniuses have at least located a couple of guys through the good offices of Pakistan whom they appear to be attempting to negotiate with. And so we must ask now what kind of negotiating are they doing?

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Orrock LXXXVI XLVII @orrickle@sfba.social

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@bluetea @Urban_Hermit @Numerfolt @Andres4NY @paninid Can. you run them through chat gpt with a rubric?

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Orrock LXXXVI XLVII @orrickle@sfba.social

· 6mo ago

Replying to

@VeroniqueB99@mastodon.social Or when dinosaur boes are all dug up.

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Orrock LXXXVI XLVII @orrickle@sfba.social

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@Natasha_Jay I do

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Orrock LXXXVI XLVII @orrickle@sfba.social

· 7mo ago

Replying to

@QasimRashid@mastodon.social They go after the people with wombs, because that’s where the next generation will come out of.

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Orrock LXXXVI XLVII @orrickle@sfba.social

· 1mo ago

Replying to

@molly0xfff@hachyderm.io @ProPublica@newsie.social @MattStollerSubstack No, but good idea

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Orrock LXXXVI XLVII @orrickle@sfba.social

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@Nibor4000@social.vivaldi.net I’ll let you know. It’s due back May 1

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Orrock LXXXVI XLVII @orrickle@sfba.social

· 6mo ago

Replying to

@emilymbender What do you know about AI LA Community non-profit?

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Orrock LXXXVI XLVII @orrickle@sfba.social

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@b9AcE Seems that Google maps is a little better?

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Orrock LXXXVI XLVII @orrickle@sfba.social

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@Nibor4000@social.vivaldi.net @DavidM_yeg@beige.party @infobeautiful@vis.social I just ordered 1-3 from my library. Any recommendations for episodes?

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Orrock LXXXVI XLVII @orrickle@sfba.social

· 6mo ago

Replying to

I once sat on a plane from Stockholm to New York with two guys from Connecticut who were returning home from making deals to buy super-high-quality steel that was made in Sweden. They told me that their buying trip had been a big success, because they had spent the previous six months looking into the life and background of every man who ran the companies they were buying from. About one man, for example, they had discovered he was into S&M and liked being on the receiving end. With another guy, they discovered he had a gambling problem and was in debt. Badly. Neither guy knew what these two men from the U.S. knew about them. I hardly need tell you how well their negotiations for super-hard steel went.

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