Ahhhh, insects. I spent more than thirty years collecting and studying them. My love was mantids. Before selling it, my collection had well over six hundred species from all over the world and I fielded identification correspondence with people from same. Good times.
Another wonderful feature of them is their eyes. I have a photo I took of a Stagmomantis carolina posing on an upright twig. It’s a closeup and you can see not only my reflection on her eyes but a complete and detailed panorama of everything behind me.
Oligonicella:
I’d like to see that photo!
Could you put it up on Google Drive or something and share the link?
The FBI and Justice are evil. Not misguided. Not just bad. Not just morally defective. Evil.
Each time I type the word “evil” I ask myself if I might be overstating the case. Is that overboard? But the facts are the facts. This is vile stuff. This is the deliberate, intentional use of violence/force to abuse and inflict all manner of horribles on people simply because they disagree on politics. This is driven by hate. A mindless, irrational hate and a desire to abuse others. This is about ‘othering’. This is about dehumanizing other people. This is playing god. This is evil.
And not an isolated case. Just one of many. This is part of a deliberate, calculated, orchestrated, malevolent campaign of abuse. A campaign that is celebrated and cheered by its partisans. This is chilling, frightening, un-American.
Evil.
Free association and nothing more: Neo’s moth video made me think of the Mothman, the 1960s West Virginia version of Bigfoot. According to the following video clip (which incidentally is proof of the decline of the once-genuinely educational History Channel), the Mothman is associated with UFOs and Men in Black:
Shucks, we now know that the Men in Black are nothing more than dressed-up FBI agents.
In other news about evildoers: a graduate student in psychology at Washington State University, just across the state line from Idaho, was arrested in Pennsylvania a few hours ago for the November murders of the four college students at the University of Idaho. “According to the WSU website, [Bryan] Kohberger is pursuing his Ph.D in criminal justice and criminology. In college, he was a student investigator for a survey that explored people’s actions, thoughts, and feelings when they committed crimes. One question in the study, ‘Why did you choose that victim or target over others?’ Another reads, ‘After committing the crime, what were you thinking and feeling?'”
Sounds like he was doing some highly questionable dissertation research across the border in Idaho.
huxley,
Re yesterday’s thread, I’ve been sporadically using Duolingo to improve my Spanish. (They offer French and other languages too.) It seems to be at least partially aimed at children, with funny animations that you may be able to switch off. It’s free.
PA Cat, according to the Daily Mail, when arrested, the suspect asked if anyone else had been arrested. Very strange. I hope he is the one. Otherwise, surely more atrocities would occur. I also wonder if there were any warning signs. I suppose we may find out.
Jordan Rivers:
How do you like Duolingo? I’ve noticed it in roundups of language learning courses.
I’ve been trying different programs since I did a vinyl Living Language course as a teen. However, Spanish, Russian, French…nothing much has stuck so far.
I don’t know that French will this time. However, I am emboldened by my recent successes with math, exercise and diet.
Plus it’s the Bucket List years.
I’m 70. I’d given up on putting a foreign language in my quiver. Now I discover part of myself has risen up to say, “No, I can still do this and I want to.”
PA Cat, according to the Daily Mail, when arrested, the suspect asked if anyone else had been arrested. Very strange.
Kate:
He is a strange one. Looks kinda like Christopher Walken.
Walken once told an interviewer that he is most often approached by people in the streets, not because he is a movie star, but because he was mistaken for someone they had been in prison with!
Neo is indifferent to mid-1970s British domestic comedy.
Some thoughts from Sasha Stone who used to be a Democrat:
“I’m not now, nor have I ever been a “Trump supporter,” meaning, I didn’t vote for him. I didn’t support him. Like all of my former Democrat friends, I spent the years from 2016 onward angry and hopeless that he had won. But over the next four years, while he was in office, I would watch my former side, the people I always thought were the good guys, turn into monsters.
They dipped a toe into the forbidden land of mocking and ridicule that tasted good. It tasted so good they couldn’t give it up. They kept tearing into the flesh like hungry lions, begging for more. They had spent the last eight years under Obama being Good Liberals. Now, it was time to unleash hell. Now, they wanted to release all of that pent-up terribleness.
It never sat well with me, the mocking, the dehumanization, the need to attack Trump, his family, his staff, and his supporters. On and on it went. They slut-shamed Melania by cascading her modeling photos on Twitter. They said Kellyanne Conway looked old. They made fun of Sarah Huckabee Sanders’ makeup. They said Trump slept with his daughter.”
JJ, I feel about these people the way I did about my stepmother, who turned out to be a sociopath and liar. I didn’t want to be like her, and it kept me from a nasty catfight when my dad died. These people deserve a lot of horrible things, but aside from ridicule and reasonable legal penalties, I don’t want to descend to their level. Possibly they know that. My wicked stepmother did.
Neo’s moth video made me think of the Mothman, the 1960s West Virginia version of Bigfoot.
PA_Cat:
The first book on Mothman was John Keel’s “The Mothman Prophecies” (1975). Keel personally went to West Virginia to investigate the stories.
When I was a high school kid in Florida in the late 60s, a couple of classmates went into the Tomoka swamp late at night with shotguns in search of the Mud Wamp, an ape-like creature with glowing red eyes said to live there, and they came back with the shit scared out of them. They said they saw something coming at them, fired their guns and ran like hell.
It was a good story and that swamp was ~spooky~ at night, I can tell you. They probably just scared themselves.
Still I was surprised to read about a similar creature in Keel’s book.
Whether Keel’s Mothman was real or not or something in between, I figure the stories had migrated down to Florida and become the Mud Wamp.
Oh yeah, according to local lore the Mud Wamp had a companion — the Moth Lady!
huxley,
re Duolingo, I like it well enough. I’m not crazy about the animations, though I find them cute. The program is in very short lessons, maybe 7 minutes, and they say if you do 1 every day it is better. I only do about 1 a week. I already know some Spanish from 4th grade and working with a lot of Mexicans and living in an area with a lot of them. If you are motivated, give it a try! If you put in the time you might do well.
In Spanish they also have podcasts to give you some more realistic training. I don’t know if they have that for French.
I first tried Duolingo for Mandarin. Between the characters and the sounds I wasn’t getting anywhere, so I dropped it.
Jordan Rivers:
Thanks!
I took a look at Duolingo. I get impatient with web point/click educational software, so it’s probably not for me. (I’ve really hated that stuff since I returned to college.)
The search continues. I can tell I’m going to end up cobbling together a program of my own out of various pieces. I will check into taking a French course this spring.
You can now download all the Foreign Service Institute language courses free. That was pretty hot stuff in the 60s for teaching US government folks new languages. Here’s the French link.
It’s a dry, rote method based on audiotapes and manuals photocopied from typewritten pages. Spartan. But people learned from them back then and I’m sure one can, with sufficient motivation, do so now.
Huxley:
I restored and improved very rusty French, and learned Spanish from ground zero, at FSI. The tapes are terribly boring, and are really meant only for taking home after class and drilling grammatical rules into automatic reflex. The real learning takes place in the classroom: six hours a day with a native speaker and only 3-4 other students, and no English spoken at all. It’s a grind, but it works.
F:
That sounds about right.
I had a friend who was self-learning Spanish by working with some primers and watching a lot of telenovelas. He concluded that if he really wanted to learn, he would have to go full-immersion with Spanish speakers.
I’m looking into Alliance Francaise, which is a global network teaching the French language and French culture. It’s supposed to good, though pricey, for learning from native speakers.
I had another friend whose son attended the San Francisco AF for a few years. When the mother moved to France, the son attended school and amazed the teachers with his perfect Parisian accent.
There is an AF here in Abq, but according to its website, it is still stuck in Zoomsville. Blech.
@ huxley > “He concluded that if he really wanted to learn, he would have to go full-immersion with Spanish speakers.”
The quickest way to get usefully fluent in a foreign language is to spend 3-12 weeks at an LDS Missionary Training Center.
Of course, there are a few preliminaries to get through first…. 😉
Ahhhh, insects. I spent more than thirty years collecting and studying them. My love was mantids. Before selling it, my collection had well over six hundred species from all over the world and I fielded identification correspondence with people from same. Good times.
Another wonderful feature of them is their eyes. I have a photo I took of a Stagmomantis carolina posing on an upright twig. It’s a closeup and you can see not only my reflection on her eyes but a complete and detailed panorama of everything behind me.
Oligonicella:
I’d like to see that photo!
Could you put it up on Google Drive or something and share the link?
https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2022-12-28-more-on-the-partisan-administration-of-justice-in-the-us-the-case-of-tom-barrack
The FBI and Justice are evil. Not misguided. Not just bad. Not just morally defective. Evil.
Each time I type the word “evil” I ask myself if I might be overstating the case. Is that overboard? But the facts are the facts. This is vile stuff. This is the deliberate, intentional use of violence/force to abuse and inflict all manner of horribles on people simply because they disagree on politics. This is driven by hate. A mindless, irrational hate and a desire to abuse others. This is about ‘othering’. This is about dehumanizing other people. This is playing god. This is evil.
And not an isolated case. Just one of many. This is part of a deliberate, calculated, orchestrated, malevolent campaign of abuse. A campaign that is celebrated and cheered by its partisans. This is chilling, frightening, un-American.
Evil.
Free association and nothing more: Neo’s moth video made me think of the Mothman, the 1960s West Virginia version of Bigfoot. According to the following video clip (which incidentally is proof of the decline of the once-genuinely educational History Channel), the Mothman is associated with UFOs and Men in Black:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8bknt7M9kJ8&ab_channel=HISTORY
Shucks, we now know that the Men in Black are nothing more than dressed-up FBI agents.
In other news about evildoers: a graduate student in psychology at Washington State University, just across the state line from Idaho, was arrested in Pennsylvania a few hours ago for the November murders of the four college students at the University of Idaho. “According to the WSU website, [Bryan] Kohberger is pursuing his Ph.D in criminal justice and criminology. In college, he was a student investigator for a survey that explored people’s actions, thoughts, and feelings when they committed crimes. One question in the study, ‘Why did you choose that victim or target over others?’ Another reads, ‘After committing the crime, what were you thinking and feeling?'”
Sounds like he was doing some highly questionable dissertation research across the border in Idaho.
https://heavy.com/news/bryan-kohberger/
huxley,
Re yesterday’s thread, I’ve been sporadically using Duolingo to improve my Spanish. (They offer French and other languages too.) It seems to be at least partially aimed at children, with funny animations that you may be able to switch off. It’s free.
PA Cat, according to the Daily Mail, when arrested, the suspect asked if anyone else had been arrested. Very strange. I hope he is the one. Otherwise, surely more atrocities would occur. I also wonder if there were any warning signs. I suppose we may find out.
Jordan Rivers:
How do you like Duolingo? I’ve noticed it in roundups of language learning courses.
I’ve been trying different programs since I did a vinyl Living Language course as a teen. However, Spanish, Russian, French…nothing much has stuck so far.
I don’t know that French will this time. However, I am emboldened by my recent successes with math, exercise and diet.
Plus it’s the Bucket List years.
I’m 70. I’d given up on putting a foreign language in my quiver. Now I discover part of myself has risen up to say, “No, I can still do this and I want to.”
PA Cat, according to the Daily Mail, when arrested, the suspect asked if anyone else had been arrested. Very strange.
Kate:
He is a strange one. Looks kinda like Christopher Walken.
Walken once told an interviewer that he is most often approached by people in the streets, not because he is a movie star, but because he was mistaken for someone they had been in prison with!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eSVWEm_wvC4
Neo is indifferent to mid-1970s British domestic comedy.
Some thoughts from Sasha Stone who used to be a Democrat:
“I’m not now, nor have I ever been a “Trump supporter,” meaning, I didn’t vote for him. I didn’t support him. Like all of my former Democrat friends, I spent the years from 2016 onward angry and hopeless that he had won. But over the next four years, while he was in office, I would watch my former side, the people I always thought were the good guys, turn into monsters.
They dipped a toe into the forbidden land of mocking and ridicule that tasted good. It tasted so good they couldn’t give it up. They kept tearing into the flesh like hungry lions, begging for more. They had spent the last eight years under Obama being Good Liberals. Now, it was time to unleash hell. Now, they wanted to release all of that pent-up terribleness.
It never sat well with me, the mocking, the dehumanization, the need to attack Trump, his family, his staff, and his supporters. On and on it went. They slut-shamed Melania by cascading her modeling photos on Twitter. They said Kellyanne Conway looked old. They made fun of Sarah Huckabee Sanders’ makeup. They said Trump slept with his daughter.”
She nails the left’s monstrous tactics. Well worth reading it all for a roundup of the viciousness and inhumanity we have been witness to for the last seven years.
https://sashastone.substack.com/p/no-i-wont-be-celebrating-jill-bidens?utm_source=substack&publication_id=66221&post_id=92844184&utm_medium=email&utm_content=share&triggerShare=true&isFreemail=true
JJ, I feel about these people the way I did about my stepmother, who turned out to be a sociopath and liar. I didn’t want to be like her, and it kept me from a nasty catfight when my dad died. These people deserve a lot of horrible things, but aside from ridicule and reasonable legal penalties, I don’t want to descend to their level. Possibly they know that. My wicked stepmother did.
Neo’s moth video made me think of the Mothman, the 1960s West Virginia version of Bigfoot.
PA_Cat:
The first book on Mothman was John Keel’s “The Mothman Prophecies” (1975). Keel personally went to West Virginia to investigate the stories.
When I was a high school kid in Florida in the late 60s, a couple of classmates went into the Tomoka swamp late at night with shotguns in search of the Mud Wamp, an ape-like creature with glowing red eyes said to live there, and they came back with the shit scared out of them. They said they saw something coming at them, fired their guns and ran like hell.
It was a good story and that swamp was ~spooky~ at night, I can tell you. They probably just scared themselves.
Still I was surprised to read about a similar creature in Keel’s book.
Whether Keel’s Mothman was real or not or something in between, I figure the stories had migrated down to Florida and become the Mud Wamp.
Oh yeah, according to local lore the Mud Wamp had a companion — the Moth Lady!
huxley,
re Duolingo, I like it well enough. I’m not crazy about the animations, though I find them cute. The program is in very short lessons, maybe 7 minutes, and they say if you do 1 every day it is better. I only do about 1 a week. I already know some Spanish from 4th grade and working with a lot of Mexicans and living in an area with a lot of them. If you are motivated, give it a try! If you put in the time you might do well.
In Spanish they also have podcasts to give you some more realistic training. I don’t know if they have that for French.
I first tried Duolingo for Mandarin. Between the characters and the sounds I wasn’t getting anywhere, so I dropped it.
Jordan Rivers:
Thanks!
I took a look at Duolingo. I get impatient with web point/click educational software, so it’s probably not for me. (I’ve really hated that stuff since I returned to college.)
The search continues. I can tell I’m going to end up cobbling together a program of my own out of various pieces. I will check into taking a French course this spring.
You can now download all the Foreign Service Institute language courses free. That was pretty hot stuff in the 60s for teaching US government folks new languages. Here’s the French link.
https://fsi-languages.yojik.eu/languages/FSI/fsi-french.html
It’s a dry, rote method based on audiotapes and manuals photocopied from typewritten pages. Spartan. But people learned from them back then and I’m sure one can, with sufficient motivation, do so now.
Huxley:
I restored and improved very rusty French, and learned Spanish from ground zero, at FSI. The tapes are terribly boring, and are really meant only for taking home after class and drilling grammatical rules into automatic reflex. The real learning takes place in the classroom: six hours a day with a native speaker and only 3-4 other students, and no English spoken at all. It’s a grind, but it works.
F:
That sounds about right.
I had a friend who was self-learning Spanish by working with some primers and watching a lot of telenovelas. He concluded that if he really wanted to learn, he would have to go full-immersion with Spanish speakers.
I’m looking into Alliance Francaise, which is a global network teaching the French language and French culture. It’s supposed to good, though pricey, for learning from native speakers.
I had another friend whose son attended the San Francisco AF for a few years. When the mother moved to France, the son attended school and amazed the teachers with his perfect Parisian accent.
There is an AF here in Abq, but according to its website, it is still stuck in Zoomsville. Blech.
@ huxley > “He concluded that if he really wanted to learn, he would have to go full-immersion with Spanish speakers.”
The quickest way to get usefully fluent in a foreign language is to spend 3-12 weeks at an LDS Missionary Training Center.
Of course, there are a few preliminaries to get through first…. 😉
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missionary_Training_Center