Pete Ehlke

I was on fucking *PLATO*

I have usernames older than your mom.

Before I retired last year I had co-workers who drew sincere, utterly *blank* stares when I used 867-5309 as an example phone number. That's the moment I really knew that I'd overstayed my welcome in the workforce.

He’d have won 2020 in a *landslide* if he’d branded the Trump Covid Vaccine, bragged about how fast it got done and how many lives it saved, and taken credit for a great medical miracle. It wouldn’t even have been too far from the truth.

Heaven or Las Vegas, Hunkpapa, Star, Goo, All of This and Nothing, Document, Nothing's Shocking, and for God's sake why is The Mind is a Terrible Thing to Taste not here?

When my company was bought by a large Indian firm, I expressed concern to a US-based EVP about the CEO's chummy relations with Modi. He said: if you're friends, your business is left alone. If you're hostile to Modi, the full weight of the Indian bureaucracy will crash down on you every day.

The continued shallowness of the Democratic bench is a source of never ending dismay.

Seconded. With a vengeance

…

None Oatmeal

I’m not going to make a single dollar, am I?

The data I've seen- and keep in mind I'm 65 and watch _zero_ cable news- is that the median audience age for Fox, CNN, and MSNOW is 71.

The problem is that those people vote a lot more than the younger people who don't watch.

My most deeply held religious belief is that if you’re really, really good in this life you get to come back in the next as a house cat.

Imagine walking through a park in a blizzard, coming across the pure joy of an ad-hoc snowball fight, and not only failing to throw your own snowball but actively approaching it as the scene of a crime.

Policing creates mental illness in the police. Full stop.

"Friends" is a beloved American sitcom that aired from 1994 to 2004, following six young adults—Rachel, Ross, Monica, Chandler, Joey, and Phoebe—living in New York City. The show explores their friendships, romances, careers, and personal growth over ten seasons.

Religion is, indeed, the self-consciousness and self-esteem of man who has either not yet won through to himself, or has already lost himself again. But, man is no abstract being squatting outside the world. Man is the world of man — state, society. This state and this society produce religion, which is an inverted consciousness of the world, because they are an inverted world. Religion is the general theory of this world, its encyclopaedic compendium, its logic in popular form, its spiritual point d'honneur, its enthusiasm, its moral sanction, its solemn complement, and its universal basis of consolation and justification. It is the fantastic realization of the human essence since the human essence has not acquired any true reality. The struggle against religion is, therefore, indirectly the struggle against that world whose spiritual aroma is religion. Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.

In grad school, my classical sociology theory professor took the time read aloud Marx's famous passage about religion. Bob was a brilliant orator who spoke in a perfectly timed cadence; he paused at the end and said, sadly:

You don't get this kind of writing in the American Journal of Sociology.

In Sociology grad school in the 80s, I worked with a full professor who wrote a well cited paper arguing that sociology always lagged economics & that litcrit / cultural studies usurping soc’s territory was because Econ had stagnated.

There’s zero chance he can stand for over two hours

A picture of my legs while I lay on the couch watching Olympic bobsledding. The TV and a grandfather clock are in the background; there's part of a red cable-knit blanket on my shins and my cat is adorably peeking out from under the rest of it.

Kodos helped me watch the final round of four man bobsled.

The key thing the regime is selling is impunity. Nobody's getting fired for anything other than disloyalty to il Capo di tutti capi.

Old enough to remember when Jerry Falwell, challenged with the Inquisition after his claim that Christians have never been antisemitic, responded that those were Roman Catholics, not Christians.

Seriously, 12 step rooms are filled with bio-hackers. We just used to call it “self-medicating.”

DO YOU BELIEVE IN MIXED FEELINGS?

Current status:

Phil.

I think Bjarke Ingels owes his whole schtick just as much to Mark Zuckerberg as he does to Rem Koolhaas

If we rebrand mRNA to mRNAI we’ll have vaccines again by Monday

A few days ago someone said that these public servants seem to think their job is to yell at subordinates, make short form videos, and fly private. Hard to argue with that.

I love a physical kanban board

Do you still use the system you blogged about years ago?

Remember when people thought Benioff was one of the good billionaires?

Class solidarity is a hell of a drug, man.

Especially for the less popular events where you can’t make a living.

It’s always something like “Lucas has seven Olympic medals and four World Champion Cups. Back home in Des Moines, he’s a tax analyst at a soybean processing plant.”

Who decided to call it Epstein Island instead of Kid Rock?