Macrophage

Human beings as a species define their reality through misery and suffering.

@zweiwalker89607 "He ceased to be Anakin Skywalker and became Darth Vader." It's a pretty important part of retconning him as Luke's dad.

Now that I think about it. What was the accepted reason for why Anakin Skywalker changed his name to Darth Vader before we got confirmation that it's a Sith thing?

@JoshDaws GoT

Heroes

@shanaka86 Why haven't we sunk this already? Wednesday night was the ceasefire deadline.

JUST IN: Iran just pulled a thirty-year-old empty supertanker out of retirement and began towing it toward Kharg Island. She is moving so slowly that a voyage that should take a day and a half is taking four days. Her name is NASHA. IMO 9079107. Built 1996. A two-million-barrel very large crude carrier that has been anchored empty off Kharg for years. TankerTrackers confirmed her reactivation yesterday. Gulf News, Iran International, and Fox News all picked it up within hours. The reason she is moving at all is that Iran is running out of places to put the oil. Kharg Island handles roughly ninety percent of Iran’s crude exports. Its onshore tanks had about thirteen million barrels of spare capacity when the US blockade began on April 13. Net inflow since has been running at one million to one point one million barrels per day because exports have collapsed to single digits of vessels while upstream production continues. The math is mechanical. Roughly twelve days of spare capacity. The calendar says that window closes this week. NASHA is not a strategy. NASHA is what you do when you have run out of strategy. A two-million-barrel floating storage vessel buys Iran approximately forty-eight hours of continued upstream production. After that, either the wells get shut in or the crude goes somewhere else. The parallel options being pursued, ship-to-ship transfers in the Riau Archipelago, AIS-dark transits, sanctioned VLCCs returning home through the blockade line, are not enough. Lloyd’s List Intelligence has tracked roughly twenty-six Iran-linked vessels evading since April 13. That cannot absorb a million barrels a day. The wells will shut in. The question is which wells, for how long, and whether they come back. The Asmari and Bangestan carbonate formations that sit under most of Iran’s giant southern fields are high-permeability, strong-water-drive systems. The Society of Petroleum Engineers literature on this specific reservoir class is unambiguous. Remove continuous pressure support for a prolonged shut-in and four damage mechanisms activate simultaneously: water coning upward through the fracture network, fines migration into pore throats, formation compaction under increased effective stress, and clay swelling under altered salinity and pH. The damage is not theoretical. It is documented. And it is measured in months to years of recoverable production capacity, not days. Maleki and Gordon estimate three hundred to five hundred thousand barrels per day of permanent capacity loss if the current shut-in trajectory completes. That is a directional estimate, not a lab measurement, but the direction is not in dispute. NASHA is the archaeological signature of the clock. When a country with the world’s third-largest oil reserves reactivates a thirty-year-old retired tanker to float on top of its main export terminal and buy forty-eight hours of time, the institutional systems designed to absorb shocks have already failed. The insurance market, the shadow fleet, the diplomatic channels, and the reservoir physics are all converging on the same conclusion at different speeds, and NASHA is the one that shows up on satellite. The market is pricing a ceasefire. The Pentagon is pricing six months of mine clearance. Iran just pulled a corpse out of the Persian Gulf and asked it to buy two days. That is not how a reversible crisis looks. That is how a regime tells you, operationally, that it has run out of options between the blockade and the shut-in. The reservoir does not negotiate. open.substack.com/pub/shanakaans…

@PageauJonathan Only because we've asked for one many times before and God said no, lol.

A mature Christian wouldn't ask God for a Ferrari Watch the full version: youtu.be/7WqrbWNHJBs?si…

@JonahDispatch I mean, do people know how much PhDs in academics are paid? Lol, totally realistic imho.

I thought it was very weird. Also weird: the idea that a top flight engineer who made all sorts of important stuff for NASA lived with his mom and thought he was too poor to have a kid, even though his wife was a high ranking pharmaceutical executive. Also, Leonard’s marriage to Penny made no sense. He totally should have hooked up with Alex or the hot comic book artist.

@bryan_caplan Why would I want to improve my personality? More people would like me then.

If you live in the First World and are habitually angry, sad, or anxious, you are either (a) very unlucky, or (b) need to improve your personality. Yes, you CAN improve your personality.

@petergklein Conservatism is not a humanities movement.

This is a complete misrepresentation of Elizabeth’s position. Her argument (echoing Scruton) is that conservatives are tasked with preserving and sharing a cultural tradition that includes philosophy, art, literature, etc., not “owning the libs” with short-term political wins.

@JustinWStapley Trump needs to stop, declare hostilities over, except for the bockade, and tell the Iranians it's now or never. Take back your country. They may fail. They may not even try, but it was worth a shot imho.

It's wrenching my gut that Iran is starting to look like another TACO. Trading an aged theocrat for a younger and more bloodthirsty military dictatorship is a terrible, terrible outcome for all this.

@christopherrufo The reason Asians were more effective here is because they were not white, Chris. You know that.

This is correct and white conservatives need to reckon with this fact. Here in Washington State, at the celebration dinner for our winning referendum to stop affirmative action, I was one of three or four white men—the real movement-builders were almost all Asian-Americans.

@Rainmaker1973 I never once in my life listened to the Top 40 or whatever the fuck we're told is good musoc.

Age 33 is often called the “point of no return” for discovering new music, the age when many listeners enter what’s known as “taste freeze.” A detailed analysis of Spotify streaming data revealed that the average person gradually stops keeping up with mainstream pop and Top 40 hits around age 33. While people continue to enjoy music, their listening habits shift away from current chart-toppers toward the familiar songs of their youth or more niche genres such as jazz and classical. The study, conducted by Ajay Kalia (then Product Owner for Taste Profiles at Spotify), showed that teenagers’ playlists are dominated by the most popular tracks, but this proportion steadily declines through the 20s. By the early 30s, most listeners’ musical tastes have largely “matured” and stabilize. Several life factors accelerate this shift. Becoming a parent, for example, tends to advance “taste freeze” by roughly four years, partly because parents spend more time listening to children’s music. The rise of digital streaming has also reinforced the trend: people build personalized playlists and share them within their own age group, creating comfortable echo chambers that reduce exposure to newer artists. In short, around age 33, many of us quietly trade the thrill of the charts for the comfort of what we already know and love. [Kalia, A. (2015). Music Was Better Back Then: When Do We Stop Keeping Up With Popular Music? Skynet & Ebert]

@FeserEdward Admitting what I said about just war theory in your other thread. If a war begins "just" it can end "unjustly," which means you cannot know whether a war is just when you make the decision to go to war, which is why nobody consults just war theory when making decisions.

Eminent Catholic natural law theorist Heinrich Rommen: “A war that is one of revenge, that is malicious destruction or has as its object conquest beyond restoration, war in which the just cause and the right intention are superseded by militarist, immoral pleasure in military adventure, such a war becomes unjust, however just it may have been in the beginning” (The State in Catholic Thought, 1945, at p. 665)

@BenSasse The conflict thesis has been debunked by serious historians. Go get educated, you dolt.

“Religion withdrew to its own arena, lost the relationship in which it stood with the other sciences, and appointed itself as the great master whose task it was to impede the unwelcome progress that the other sciences were making. All too often it forgot that our beautiful confession says that we know God from two books: the book of Scripture, as well as the book of Nature in which the majesty of the Lord of lords is revealed to us in golden letters.” — A. Kuyper

This is a lie perpetrated by hucksters attacking religion. It's called the conflict thesis and has been debunked by historians for years now. Look up Andrew Dickson White. Religion never stood opposed to science. Just because you are dying does not entitle you to spew nonsense.

@JonahDispatch I think we need a clinical trial to understand this better. I think I had the sniffles this morning, so probably eligible.

Pretty sure humans exposed to cocaine in the water swim farther too

@FeitCanWrite @JeffreyTheGreek Except win 9 games every year.

@JeffreyTheGreek For a guy who played at Ohio State and was an assistant at Iowa, Bo had no clue what to do when Nebraska joined the Big Ten.

With each passing year…Bo Pelini looks more and more like a Nebraska Head Coach demigod

@zweiwalker89607 Lol.

Great Man Theory has been proven by George Lucas, who single handedly shaped the world as we know it today

@JonahDispatch @daveweigel @DavidMDrucker Payable on Death @POD

@daveweigel @DavidMDrucker Unrelated observation: Death Caused Vacancy would be a great band name.

Dems had been trying to reason with Scott for years — he was old, fading and unable to do the job like he used to. But he filed to run again and now Dems have their fourth death-caused vacancy of this Congress. politico.com/news/2022/01/1…

@DrEliDavid What does checkmate look like?

White 🇺🇸 is up a Queen and clearly winning. Black 🇮🇷 should resign, but refuses. Instead of simply playing out the game and delivering the inevitable checkmate, White gets angry, declares victory, and asks Pakistan 🇵🇰 to invite Black to the negotiating table for a "fair deal"…

Whoever dubbed this is great