There are no smart people. Everybody is stupid (where “stupid” is defined as “prone to maladaptive behaviour and/or belief”), no exceptions. There are just some fields society values more when less stupid than others.

This isn’t a spelling error. This is a grammatical error. “Your” is correctly spelled. It’s just the wrong word.

The ability to use the correct words

“The capacious aptitude for the judicious deployment of linguistically felicitous and semantically apropos verbiage,” I think you mean.

Not even slightly surprising to me. Mention China, directly or indirectly, and the fee fees of American neocon thugs get hurt and the downvote brigade comes out to fight as only they know best to fight.

Empathy. It shocks me how many “adults” have a toddler-level understanding of their relationship to the world (as in it doesn’t revolve around them) and society (as in we have responsibility for each other). So many “adults” sound like screeching toddlers whenever there’s a hint of someone else getting something they don’t get. It even reaches the level of “I don’t like this movie so it shouldn’t have been made” as if the very existence of entertainment or education or whatever in a field they themselves don’t prefer is a personal affront.

And this isn’t even a right-wing thing. The feminist National Action Committee in Canada was turned from a potent and feared political force to a laughingstock by ostensible left-wing women deciding that their concerns over daycare trumped native women’s active murders among other intersectional issues.

snort

The downvoting brigade is out in force I see.

Terrified, are we, about an alternative to the current broken system?

That’s twice now.

And for a non-American, there’s a whole lot of American-focused political shit in your feed. Perhaps there would be less confusion if you, you know, stopped talking like an American with an American’s viewpoint on everything.

My gal.

Yes. “Guy.” Even the American “left” can’t help but use the masculine-as-default.

In today’s lesson, an always-seeking-something-to-be-offended-about ideologue learns about “linguistic drift”.

Or, more likely, doesn’t. But that’s par for the course for America’s so-called “left”. (You know, the “left” that the rest of the world considers “centre right”.)

Oh, I love divination systems myself. I don’t think they have any predictive validity, but I think they have value in “de-rutting” your thoughts. I find they foster creativity and unjam blocks and such by putting a new way of looking at issues.

Currently I’m playing around with the 易经 (Yijing/I-Ching). (I literally just put up a photo-essay yesterday of some of my tools, and a photo-essay with two forms of divination, including the Yijing a couple of weeks before.)

And black fungus and a whole host of other environmental plagues, yes.

In a “possible world” ghosts could exist. In the world we happen to inhabit, I firmly believe they don’t.

People’s “experiences” with ghosts are everything ranging from misinterpretations of things they’ve seen to hysteria to hallucinations to outright fraud. (All the “ghost hunter” types, no exceptions, fall into the last camp.)

I’m open to evidence to the contrary, of course, but this is a very large claim so it’s going to need a mountain of solid evidence.

Yeah, you have to be really careful who you choose as a travel partner. Bad partners destroy any trip.

The dealership in our case was fine. They even apologized profusely for that Albertan service centre’s behaviour. But if the core company is vile, I don’t buy their products. Neither my parents nor I bought a Chrysler ever since. My father bought two Toyotas and a Nissan. I bought a Pontiac and an Acura. My stepfather buys Nissan only. To his dying day my father refused to even look at a Chrysler as an option. They made literal life-long enemies with that.

Oh, we had emergency supplies. And plenty of warm clothing. But yeah, it was something that could easily have gone totally pear-shaped.

In the '80s my family piled into our brand new (maybe two months old) Plymouth Caravelle for the long trek from central Saskatchewan (Regina) to northern B.C. (Prince George) to get to a family Christmas gathering.

In the middle of nowhere, during a mild snowstorm, the transmission just stopped. The engine worked fine. Everything in the car worked fine. Except the transmission. So in the middle of nowhere, and in the middle of the Christmas season (this becomes important) we were stuck in the middle of nowhere.

Now thankfully the engine worked, so we could keep the car heated. And the gas tank was full so it would be a long time before we’d face actual cold. My mother and I, thus, were left in the car while my dad bundled up and started walking to the nearest town (according to the map) to get help. His idea was to hitch-hike, actually, but … Christmas. There was no traffic. So for hours my mother and I sat in the car getting increasingly worried as the sky darkened before, finally, we saw headlights off in the distance in the direction my dad had disappeared in.

It was a tow truck. My father had reached the town, found out that no tow truck operators were even in town and had to get someone to drive him to the NEXT town to find a place that had a tow truck in operation. We got hooked up and pulled onto the flatbed and driven to where the nearest Chrysler service centre was.

Now it’s indisputable that we were under warranty. The car was two months old. If we’d driven non-stop for the entire time we’d not be anywhere near out of warranty yet, but this didn’t stop the Chrysler guys from trying to deny us warranty service. (There were complicated reasons for this caused by Chrysler’s bizarre incentive structures for service.) It got to the point of my father calling a lawyer and just as that conversation started the service centre collapsed and decided to do the service as required. AND supply the loaner vehicle (which was a New Yorker because that’s all they had on the lot at the time).

It took a while for it to sink in that had the engine failed we’d likely have been either dead or seriously hurt by the cold.

I’ve never even looked at a Chrysler product after that. Not just because a brand new car failed so utterly (shit happens) but because the company’s shenanigans around service are simply unacceptable … and I do not forget, nor forgive, such behaviour.

I still have two slide rules from my youth.

They were anachronisms even then, but I thought it was funny watching my fellow classmates’ and teachers’ faces as I solved my math problems with these aluminum things stained a bright yellow.

Working at a 7-11 while going through college.

And it wasn’t the bosses, bad as they were. It was the customers.

Blue hair is cool. Especially if you add subtle plum streaks.

I went full punkette in the very late '70s and early '80s, so shaved, spiked, and in whatever colours I could find (whether it was meant for hair or not).