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Cake day: January 9th, 2024

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  • Yeah and he could also have been a clone, so both rather than either-or:-). I don’t think they’d hesitate to lie to him, or conversely to tell the truth about his abduction, so if he has memories that they allowed him to keep I presume they would be real - the Vorlons just couldn’t care less otherwise so why not? (Occam’s Razor)

    You bring up a very interesting point about Kosh: yes the Vorlons were assholes, but he (it? they?) was not - and oddly enough, it wasn’t that he “wasn’t a (real) Vorlon”, but rather like he was a true one and all the others were the fakes?

    I don’t quite have the words but like, he was what he was because he knew about the ancient task that they had set out for themselves hundreds of thousands or even millions of years hence, and decided to actually do it rather than as the others all seemed to, do the exact opposite of “guide” the younger races (to self-discovery).

    John Sheridan was ofc the same type, as too was G’Kar: both men ready for war, while in the service of peace (a different purpose than the Vorlons… or is it?).

    We see this all over now: people showing up on January 6 at the USA capital to “defend” democracy by… overthrowing it? And religion that somehow becomes warped into diddling kids, yet side by side with others in the “exact same” religion who take care of widows and orphans and do so much good in the world. The cheaters are never going to be honest about who they are, preferring instead to hide out within the existing substance living as parasites rather than do the work of making their own structures, borrowing its reputation and forms of earned authority - e.g. President Clark did not declare himself an emperor but retained the title of a democratic “President”, despite the literal coup that gave him that position.

    Kosh, John, and G’Kar were those who refused to blindly follow their culture to “just do the thing”, and instead questioned everything according to the logical principles of self-consistency: “is what I’m doing right according to the goal that I want to eventually reach?”, and by doing such they not only served their peoples (hehe, but not necessarily the ones in charge at the time) but also lead them, as in they went out ahead and did that next right thing, thus setting an example for others to follow, if they wanted.

    So I said that I lacked the words but a stab at it could be: Kosh was who he was not despite being a Vorlon, but rather because of it. However, if true, that has massive implications for the nature of Truth, i.e. it must not be defined by a majority-rules consensus (even for something like a race of people or a democracy) and rather some other standard that if not purely external then at least is not entirely internally defined, in the sense that it is a combination of whatever was internal but also subject to the (external?) constraints imposed by the need to remain logically consistent.

    As in, there was a “correct” way to be, and Kosh chose it in defiance of his people, which we as consumers of the media recognize and respect.

    That show is so deep. Or perhaps it is better to say that I feel deeper as a result of thinking about the material presented in the show.:-)




  • To anyone wondering, that is 69.3 degrees Fahrenheit (°F). So if it started from freezing it would make it “very hot”, while if it were to start from lets say a perfect 70°F it would rise to ~140°F. And if it happened in the summertime when it was already 100, it would rise to 170°F - and how many people would even survive that? Maybe, if we had advanced warning and it were to only last a few hours - but what about things like crops & wildlife?

    According to a recent poll, the number of Americans who outright deny climate change is down to just 15% of the population, but whether they “believe” in it or not may be indistinguishable from not believing - e.g. as this article discusses - since just like how they are “Pro-Life”, the walk does not quite seem to match the talk.

    To anyone feeling overwhelmed by all this: please don’t be - there’s only so much that any one person can do. Do what you can, and try to remain “aware”, but this is bigger than all of us, and we will need to face it together, so you are not alone.:-)





  • I meant that people like Matt Gaetz and MJT are promising to make the 4th turning happen, by escalation of the existing obstructionism and even outright bringing about a second civil war. I do not think it will happen so quickly, but they will try again, and again, and maybe one day it will. So this is a time of “replacement”. But I did not read the book, just a wikipedia article about it, so probably I am not matching up the terms well.


  • Keep in mind that people will PROMISE that, but then not deliver. Worse, they will promise it and then WILL deliver their distorted view of it - an example is Trump “draining the swamp”, which he did, sort of, so long as you define “draining” as “installing” and “swamp/corruption” as “efficient and capable leadership, using fact-based policymaking decisions rather than whoever donates the most gets to wear the shiny hat”.

    If you can just remember that “good=bad” and vice versa, “up=down”, “forward=reverse” and so on, then the fact that conservatives want to “innovate” the nation to “remove corruption” is a “good” thing!:-)

    Sadly, whether we vote on it or not, powerful people are going to implement the 4th Turning regardless. Possibly they will use corporations to become powerful lobbying groups and then after taking over the government from the inside turn around and use the facade of it to take over, or maybe they’ll just do an end-run around it altogether and let us have whatever silly little government we want, while they ignore it and do whatever they please free of interference from it. Most likely they will do both at the same time. Source: they have already been doing both of these for decades, and while corruption goes back beyond the dawn of humankind lately the swing does seem to have turned more towards rather than away from it.


  • I am no historian personally, but from what I am hearing, even if a former President had only had to deal with a tenth of the issues that Biden has - heck, just pick COVID alone out of that ginormous list - that he already has dealt average to above average with it. But when you put them all together - like you had a whole list and still didn’t get to huge concerns that people have like the border issue - then it becomes supremely admirable, in relation to what he has had to deal with.

    I wonder if some of that may be due to the Afghanistan withdrawal debacle early on in his Presidency, but even there he owned up to that, despite how it was Trump who caused >95% of it, and anyway that was years ago now. Another part is that the process he chooses to use to get things done is slow and boring, and then he doesn’t grandstand to the extent that past Presidents have done.

    The media has consistently been instantaneous to blame Biden whenever there is the tiniest thread of a future thought that he might be to blame, but then when he does things like help out the train workers, or lower gas prices, those achievements barely register. This is “biased reporting”, arguably so much so that we are not “informed” by what they say and thus it seems not “reporting” so much as showing “advertisements” for things that bleed & lead.

    Fox News is correct - hurk 🤮 - when it says that our “lamestream media has failed us”. Ofc it is also corrupt and it does even worse, but if that much at least were not a true statement then it would not have half the viewership that it does.

    Like Brexit, we have allowed our government to fall into such disarray that we will never been seen the same way again on the global stage. Nor should we.


  • I mean, we do hold leadership to a different, higher standard, that much is true. But is this man not the foremost world-class expert authority aka leader of his own life at least? And if not him, irt to that super narrow niche, then who else would be considered the leader of his own life?

    Imagine if you will a scenario of a Doctor on television, let us call him Oz, who gives patently false advice that literally gets people actually killed. It is not okay for the TV station to air whatever film was handed to them, but how does that absolve the responsibility of this Doctor Oz from his own measure of responsibility, one may even say culpability (or perhaps criminal liability?) in this whole affair?

    Again, there is more than one way to be incorrect, and by extension they both were partners in this crime against journalistic integrity.


  • Your own wording softens the blow too much, imho. How is it “fairness” to point out that he may or may not have been lying (you seem to think not but… how can you tell, really? after all: his answers were prepared in advance, thus the fact that they were not inconsistent is not a surprise?)

    Also, even if like you say he is massive unintelligent, he still collects a paycheck to do the job - how then is he not a liar, either way? When people get into a plane, it is with the expectation that the “pilot” knows how to fly the plane. Then, if someone passes themselves off as one, how is that not a lie?

    There are so many more ways than one to be incorrect. For example, just b/c they don’t slant the coverage as much overtly towards Trump does not mean that it is unbiased for it to have been slanted away from Biden.

    The job of a newspaper is to tell the unvarnished Truth. Whether it fails to do so for reasons of profit, or b/c of Russian interference, or they are merely unintelligent, or whatever - does it matter? Whether it is a “lie” (and that fact demonstrable in a court of law) or not, it is not the Truth, and thus fails the criteria of being “news”, and remains mere opinion instead.