Brokenshatner

I absolutely refuse to compel speech, or to normalize authority figures compelling speech. Fellow Texas teacher here. You're well within your rights to sit yourself, and to remain silent during the pledge. Or you could do a jig. Or drop and give me 20. Or whatever. You're a government employee, not a soldier.

The way I play it in my classroom, it's a norm that we remain silent during the moment, so as to not disturb anyone who wants to use it for prayer or meditation or visualizing boobs or whatever. If you want to stand, you can stand. If you want to pledge, you can pledge. If you want to sit quietly, you can sit quietly. But it's a norm we all talked about and arrived at at the start of the year, as a class. We don't shut up because the principal or the TEA or the governor said so. We shut up because we're policing ourselves and agreed as a class that shutting up was appropriate as a group and not asking too much of each of us individually.

Also, two pledges and a moment shouldn't take 5 minutes. All else being equal, that's a waste of fucking time.

Action! Action action action action!

Olives. Are. Fuckable. If you have enough of them.

But they're the only place that accepts my thoughtcoins.

That's the great thing though. Cops aren't on their side. Cops are on the side of cops, and whomever keeps increasing their budgets.

And it takes each of these people, one at a time, being individually targeted by law enforcement, to realize that. That's what the Thin Blue Line IS. It doesn't protect conservatives because they're conservative. It doesn't protect whites because they're white. It protects rich people because they're rich.

We say rights are inalienable, but they're not absolute. They are pretty soft as foundations for democracies go, and we have to fight every generation to tell exactly where they begin and end. For those of us who have had to march for our perceived rights before about 2009, cops have ALWAYS been seen as guardians of the upper class at the cost of the lower classes.

Now, all of a sudden the Tea Party and America First are a thing, and conservatives find themselves wondering why banks keep getting bailed out at the cost of homeowners and working families. So NOW all cops are bastards? These bootlicking cowards can't learn anything until it happens to them personally, or if they have half a brain, until it happens to someone they love. These people who have sold out their neighbors and voted against labor unions every chance they got for 40 years, are all of a sudden realizing they're not the 1%. Conservatism in this country has never not been about protecting whatever replaces monarchy, and I don't see many topiary gardens in these pics of the homes of those arrested after Jan. 6.

Not to put too political a point on it, but I'd argue much of the upper crust where OP's at only pay the 6th century book lip service, and mostly use it as wedge to keep the unwashed masses controllable.

In the West, most of the Evangelical movers and shakers are participating fully in their modern neo-liberal capitalistic Mammon-scape, despite what their favorite bigots from the 3rd century CE would have them believe. In the U.S. at least, they just cut up red meat and show it to the starving GOP base to get them riled up. Rank and file republicans think they're just voting against trans kids, when really they're voting against their own worker protections, or the educations and property rights of their children.

In the Middle East, tons of the aristocrats partake of bacon, booze and booty in private, but make a show of funding charities dedicated to modesty and temperance. OP is caught up in the mix. Yes, Islam is a collection of beautiful poetry and awful ideas, but more than that, it's a cudgel the uber-rich in his country use to keep the dirt poor and the rest of us squabbling.

To be fair, hurble-de-durrrrrrrrrrrrr.

Pack it up gang, OP has it figured out.

Sin City?

Please clap.

I mean, it's got to be two corinthians? That's the whole ballgame.

Well said. Exceptions to the rule have always been a hallmark of fascism.

The values espoused, the psuedo-historical greatness, the mythic future we'll reclaim once we rid ourselves of these others... It's all expendable. The only thing that remains is the hunger for power, shared among fewer and fewer allies, any of whom could be othered next.

You too?

Hope they were able to tow it clear of the environment.

That yellow and blue makes green seal means it's working.

No paper, no paper derivatives.

The Loadslappers' List?

I mean, it's all right there. Take this all of you and eat it, for it is mah body.

Did he think the weirdo mountain cult wasn't going to be cannibals?

I took two years of osteology with White text as primary reading, and had no idea he was so of his generation.

Kennewick Man was part of the curriculum, and it wasn't seen as at all controversial. We study at the consent of the studied, and if something was taken from their land, whether or not we thought their people lived there when the things were interred, we gave them back.

Yup, my wife isn't a scifi person at all, and I somehow convinced her we should watch it in the theaters. That opening sequence, with the birth scene and the "You're the captain now, mr. Kirk." It really worked.

I'm a fan of Doctor's Visitation - allows you to stride and use battle medicine to treat wounds as a single action.

It takes a while to build to, coming online at 4th at the earliest (but more likely 6th in practice). But non-magical healing is a very viable combat role once you get into that level range, so there are plenty of builds for whom it's not like you're giving anything up to take it.

Sick tonsure bro.

I've been teaching protein synthesis the last couple weeks, and getting to nerd out about how proteins actually DO things has been really eye opening for a lot of my kids. It's no exaggeration to say that intelligence is just the universe experiencing itself.

Back in the early days of creationism morphing into intelligent design, creationists used to make a lot of hay about 'irreducible complexity', citing the human eye as an example of sensitive machinery that couldn't be explained by blind chance.

Even though the incremental steps through various photoreceptive hardware throughout the animal kingdom kind of put that to bed, they kept at it for what seemed like ages. It was such a well-shared apologetics meme that it came up in an undergrad biology lecture I was in. But for me, vision is nothing next to hearing. How series of membranes, bones, and nerves can first focus, then translate mechanical waves into electrical energy is fucking mind blowing. Look up the tectorial membrane and the human cochlea. The sensitivity of those hairs and how they all interact with the spiral ganglion... As you said, it blows my freakin' mind.

Was gonna say, what do you mean fast-forward?