Two quick thoughts: one, my 11th grade AP History teacher, Mr. Carey, used to beg us to do some clever prank, the cleverer the better. Move the whole classroom to the gym. Stuff like that. But not fundamentally destructive stuff. Channel the desire for adolescent mischief.
Two: when I first started at MIT, I took the midnight "Orange Tour," which involved several hours of guided explorations of sub-basement tunnels & the roofs of the dome & stuff. MIT has a long tradition of pranks ("hacks") & this tour was a way to teach new students the rules.
At one point on the tour, we were brought to a kind of underground "commandments" for hacking. All I remember was prioritizing being clever and not permanently damaging property or risking injury.
Rebuild a police car on the roof of the dome? Sure. Set your dorm on fire? Not cool.
And while the administration official denied any knowledge of the Orange Tour or the diffuse hacker community, of course they knew and tacitly encouraged it. Because it was more likely to safely channel the normal energy to break rules while causing the least damage or risk.
Which is all to say, there can be rules for deviancy! There always have been in societies that practiced occasional social inversions.
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I've been off the internet most of the day but there's still a bit of time to recount my incredibly banal where-I-was-on-9/11 story.
I had just started grad school. Between the time I'd left home to walk across campus to my office, the first plane had struck the North Tower. A large group of students, mostly management students, were already clustered around a lobby tv watching the news.
I truthfully cannot remember if I saw the second tower get struck or if it had also just happened. I've seen so many videos everything blurs together. Eventually I pulled myself away to get to my actual office, where I found fellow shocked students packing up to head home.
Because this is making the rounds, it’s important to understand the broader context, and also how Texas Republicans did something foolish then tried to clean it up by doing something that also looks foolish.
When Texas Republicans passed their H.B. 3979, they tried to balance it’s misguided awfulness—and assuage critics—with a list of *positive* civil rights topics for teachers to continue to teach. It’s a good list! legiscan.com/TX/text/HB3979…
It’s also a ridiculously detailed and lengthy list in an already-confusing bill. Is every social studies class in Texas supposed to include every name, document, & event—in this bill? Does it supplement existing state standards? What gets cut to make room? Why these & not others?
My best understanding of the confusing nature of multiple universes within a single "Sacred Timeline" in the MCU: because of the efforts of the TVA, time is a circle (flat or otherwise). It repeats endlessly.
There are always tendencies to create branches–presumably every time something different could have happened, branch timelines form. For an unknown number of cycles, these have been pruned by the TVA.
But each loop–each arbitrarily chosen Sacred Timeline (well, arbitrary in that it's not uniquely good but the one He Who Remains/Immortus chose to privledge, perhaps because it led to him)–can be different so long as key things happen.
If you're not in Ohio, the legislature passed a bill at the 11th hour of its session to ban most public K-12 & colleges from requiring any vaccine only on an emergency authorization by the FDA (the covid vaccines). The governor said he's veto but at *his* 11th hour, signed it.
No definitive explanation publicly as to why, but presumably if he had, he believed the legislature would come back with something even worse. He's also hoping the EUAs become permanent FDA approval soon enough that the issue is moot.
If Graham ends up leading the charge to tank the bipartisan infrastructure bill, there’s a strong chance the inevitable partisan reconciliation bill will just suck it up and amp it up along with all the things Dems could do alone anyway.
Sure Republicans could argue for a political win (?) but it doesn’t actually decrease the chances of passing the reconciliation bill *and* they’ll be able to take no credit for the things they actually want. Oops.
I haven’t tweeted much about the origins of covid question because what do I know?
But it seems that short of some unlikely definitive proof it came from a lab (an admission by someone who was there, the announcement of stored samples there matching the SARS-CoV-2 genome), we’re never going to know for sure and this will always keep the lab theory alive.