Justice of the Supreme Court is a sweet gig!

You have the prestige of being scholarly in the matters of history and Constitutional law. You are tasked with weighing the merits of competing arguments in messy legal cases that couldn't be resolved elsewhere.

Any yet, these days the average layperson can predict with a high degree of accuracy what your "decisions" will be.

Contrast this with the work product from a medical diagnostician or a mathematician or an inventor.

Also, add in lifetime tenure and you get to wear those badass robes. I want that gig!

When did you re-enter a restaurant post-pandemic and where?

I haven't been inside a Waffle House in a few years. I love Waffle House. The synchronization between the cook and the waitresses is a wonder to behold. I went inside this week and had two eggs over light with bacon and hash browns scattered covered and smothered. It was glorious.

Yellowstone Season 4 was a bit uneven (spoilers)

I finished watching Season 4 and was surprised by all the plot holes, illogical character behaviors, and disappointments.

- We're 6 months or so after the coordinated attack on the Dutton's and we're not sure if everybody is alive. We are teased with the prospect of bad news and fear that Kaycee might be dead. Nope, just a cabin is burned down. Everybody survives the bullets and bombs due to some remarkable plot armor. Beth was severely burned but not remotely phased by it, snapping back very quickly.

- Thomas Rainwater serves an important role in IDing the attacker but is mostly Native American window dressing for the remainder of the season. Kayce gets mired in this with his mountaintop arc which is also mostly filler.

- Market Equities makes a job offer to Beth who negotiates a controlling stake in Schwartz & Meyer. There is a clear conflict of interest as the daughter of John Dutton, and she demonstrates a misguided focus on crushing the Schwartz & Meyer CEO. She takes the job and starts pulling the pin on proverbial hand grenades shortly after. Caroline Warner is surprised by this outcome?

- The Jimmy 6666 arc is decent, but odd. He "broke his word" with John Dutton and has to go away. Well, this wasn't much of a betrayal. John just didn't want him to get hurt again and made him promise not to rodeo again, a promise he breaks. Big deal. Regardless, off he goes to Texas to perform grueling labor as part of his SECOND spinal cord injury rehabilitation (!)

- Jimmy's coming-of-age arc seems rushed. He learns to say "yes sir" a lot and is quickly upgraded from loser to cowboy. He makes the brisk 22-hour drive back to Montana, shakes hands, and immediately drives back. This seems odd until you realize they are setting up a sequel show "6666". Ok, now it makes sense. Well, except for the fact that branded cowboys aren't allowed to leave the ranch.

- Beth is a great character, but was really dislikable this season. She takes a young boy Carter under her wing. Her initial kind behavior is soon replaced by mind games and enslavement of him in total squalor working long hours for zero pay. She even mocks him for the futility of crying right after enjoying a cry herself at Cowboy's song.

- There's trouble in the bunkhouse! There's an interesting protocol at Yellowstone for dealing with fights. Rip will break up the fight, randomly pick one offender, and severely beat him. Then, the two offenders must battle like gladiators nearly to death. This must be done even if one of the offenders is recovering from a severe stabbing injury. Then, the winner of the fight is severely beaten by Rip one last time for good measure. I'm not making this up, folks. Oh, then they have to do the usual ranch work the next day.

- Jaime's father Garrett is revealed as the ringleader of the coordinated attacks. This is odd because he had limited interaction with Jamie prior to this, and it seems implausible that Garrett could conclude this is a reasonable action. I guess this lack of dots was necessary to keep the Reddit sleuths off the case??

- Beth is angry at John for engaging in yet another gunfight at a local restaurant. The writers realized that this could be a watershed moment in John's gubernatorial campaign, but this is somehow lost on slash-and-burn Beth??

- I like Beth, but any honest writer has her going over the cliff at the end. She didn't even bring a gun. Come on!

Benny Mardones Into The Night 1980

I've found the right amount of CNN to watch per day

I'm slowly weaning myself off of cable/satellite TV and am watching more streaming content. I've downgraded my Dish Network plan and have subscribed to Peacock.

I'm more or less hooked on the 24-hour news cycle and enjoy CNN (and to a lesser degree MSNBC). Now, I flip on CNN and watch it until I am presented with one of the following:

1) A prescription drug commercial
2) A commercial for that goddamn mesothelioma book

Then I watch something else, or just flip off the TV entirely. I must say, I'm watching far less news these days. Some days I flip the TV on right into #1 or #2 and don't watch any. As a bonus, I don't have to listen to those shitty repetitive drug commercial jingles.

Is Zaporizhzhia the first active nuclear power plant to be seized by a hostile military force?

I believe so. These are dangerous times.

I wonder how Russia will keep it operational. You can force captives do manual labor indefinitely, but nuclear engineers running a complex facility? Not so much. They're going to need some freedom and autonomy.

It will be interesting to see how Russia manages this. They could bring in their own people. It was built by the USSR, and they will have knowledge of the reactor design. But time marches on and by now there are surely a lot of custom systems in place requiring tribal knowledge to operate. I'm guessing they will have to make it worth their while. There are seriously bad optics if that plant shuts down.

This is Ukraine's fight

You don't enact a no-fly zone unless you are prepared to enforce it. And you will likely have to enforce it deep in the Eastern Bloc. And if you enforce it, it's WWIII. This isn't advanced chess strategy, it's basic checkers.

We are glorified cheerleaders on this one.

Germany is #1!

Germany's 28-day COVID case count of 4,964,658 just surpassed the US count of 4,793,905 according to JHU. I don't recall a time since the start of the pandemic where the US wasn't #1.

https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/map.html

John Wayne Gacy: Devil in Disguise

I watched this docuseries on Peacock. There's a lot of detail, too much really. There is this previously unaired prison interview with Gacy throughout. There's really only one question to be answered during such an interview: WHY? You aren't going to get that here. Gacy basically flip-flopped from originally confessing to claiming he was largely innocent. He comes out with this huge scrapbook of notes and goes into these pedantic details that the media and the legal system got wrong about him. It's really frustrating to watch as he took zero responsibility. At the end of the day, he wasn't that interesting of a character. What's interesting is how he escaped justice for as long as he did. There were so many clues, and he was very sloppy, but the Chicago police dropped the ball. He's just a despicable figure best forgotten in my opinion.

The MSM may be gaslighting us with the NFL head coaching discrimination story

Hear me out. I don't know what the "right wing talking points" may be on this subject and generally steer clear of those on DU. I'm approaching this from a statistical perspective and not a partisan one, so I'm asking for some leeway.

The headline is basically that 70% of NFL players are African American, but only one coach is. This sounds alarming at first, until you peel the onion a bit. First, I separate these into two statistics starting with the one African American coach. African Americans comprise 14% of the total US population. If this ratio were perfectly reflected in the population of NFL coaches, that would equal 4.5 coaches. Last year, there were 3 coaches. This was very close. Then Flores and Culler were fired, and we're down to 1. These two firings (which have not been demonstrated to be racially motivated) threw off the ratio substantially. However, the pool of 32 coaches is pretty small, so this is not statistically significant.

Then there's the statistic that 70% of players are African American. This is statistically significant considering the population of over 1600 players, and I don't claim to be able to explain it. Regardless, it really isn't the case that most coaches are ex-players who are promoted. There are some examples of that, but that is not the norm. Therefore, I don't see how the 70% statistic bolsters the position that African American coaches are underrepresented. If anything, the strongest case that can be made here is that white players are being underrepresented in the NFL.