lee.ourand.me: Posts

🔗 Link April 25, 2025

Wisconsin Judge Arrested, Accused of Shielding Immigrant From Federal Agents

Time for centrists to migrate some goal posts yet again and insist that arresting judges isn’t fascism, and everyone saying otherwise is just being alarmist. Rinse/repeat ad infinitum.

🔗 Link April 24, 2025

Americans Believe Russian Disinformation 'To Alarming Degree'

Color me shocked!

Gullibility appears to cut across party lines, with respondents identifying as Democrats just as likely as Republicans to believe at least one of the 10 false claims.

Yea, ok. Go on… Let’s read the very next paragraph:

Republicans were, though, more likely to believe Russian disinformation claims than their Democratic counterparts, with 57.6% falling for at least one Russian disinformation claim, compared with just 17.9% of Democrats and 29.5% of people who didn’t identify with one particular party.

Oh! So Democrats are not “just as likely as Republicans” to believe at least one of the 10 false claims. Both-sidesism is just incredible.

🔗 Link April 23, 2025

Hegseth orders makeup studio installed at Pentagon

Bringing masculinity back.

📝 Post April 20, 2025

Weeknotes 29

Spent a little time playing around with the MASH stack. Still very much learning the basics of Axum (and everything else in the stack, for that matter). It’s obviously very less “batteries included” than Rails. But it’s got some neat features that suit Rust quite nicely. The with_state function pairs up with Extractors in such a simple way. I’m impressed!
Upping my running mileage somewhat. Up to ~10k distance this week. Progress is slow, but these legs are returning to form bit by bit.
Finally completed my porch renovation project with a hefty dose of help from my dad. It’s comically over-engineered, but if a tornado ever strikes, our porch is going nowhere. This is the sturdiest porch east of the Mississippi.
Speaking of my dad, he just acquired a new motorcycle, which I gave a spin. For whatever reason, it re-ignited my need to have a bike. I haven’t owned a motorcycle since ~2011. So this coming week’s projects include: fixing a DMV snafu that resulted in my class “M” motorcycle license vanishing from my license on my last renewal, and potentially acquiring a bike. Currently eyeballing the Honda NX500.

Cats—first and foremost—are machines for turning cat food into eye boogers.

April 20, 2025

🔗 Link April 17, 2025

Historians: Quibbling Over Exact Definition Of Concentration Camp Sign Of Healthy Society

Time and time again, history shows us that caveat-laden arguments about what is or isn’t a concentration camp only occur in countries with sound political systems. When people are splitting hairs over the specific methodology and intent behind mass detention and human rights abuses, that’s when you know you’re looking at a vibrant, civilized society. It’s as true today as it was a hundred years ago. Civilizations are healthier when citizens are raising trivial objections to the use of the term ‘concentration camp’ on the grounds that their neighbor’s rendition to an oversight-free mass prison still technically exists within a legal framework, at least on paper.

Thomas Chatterton Williams is the Simone Biles of mental gymnastics.

April 16, 2025

📝 Post April 13, 2025

Weeknotes 28

Did the White Lotus binge watch catchup this week. It was my least favorite season thus far. The “big twist” was very predictable. The Chekov’s gun situation with the poisonous fruit felt overly goofy. It was all just fine.
Watched Eddie Burback’s I hate my phone so I got rid of it. It’s a tale you’ve probably heard a thousand times: person stops using their cellphone so much, and is happier. But, the video’s well done, and inspired at least a temporary reduction in my phone staring behavior this week.
Stumbled upon Manet music app—a really well done iOS (and Mac) app for streaming music from a Jellyfin server. I’ve been increasingly trying to self-host as much SaaS type junk as I can. Spotify / Apple Music had been kind of hard to replace, at least on iOS. Manet seems to do the trick—it even has CarPlay support! Only thing missing now is an Apple Watch app, so I can listen to music without my phone again.
Been helping out on some spring cleaning at the little community farm down the street from me. Met some other dilettante gardeners, young and old. Nice way to get in a little exercise, learn some things, meet some folks, and if I’m lucky, do a little good for somebody.
More plant transplantations: all our lettuce is out livin’ full time in the raised beds.

📝 Post April 06, 2025

Weeknotes 27

Stove Minivan

Happy April
My daily double squirt of Flonase is completely outgunned by the rolling hills of pollen outside. This—among other current events—sucks, man.
Taxes: filed! I’d been putting this task off because of all the what have you. But turns out, I apparently way overpaid federal taxes last year. Who’da guessed overpaying income taxes would be the best investment returns goin’ right now?
Trying to get back into some semblance of running shape. Ran a few 5K’s this week at an easy party pace. It’s always surprising to rediscover how much easier runs feel when it’s 60 degrees than when it’s over 80.
I caved and paid our ridiculously over-appraised property taxes.
Biru decided to give anorexia a brief try. After a couple days of her basically eating nothing, we took her to the vet to get checked out. Got blood tests, poop tests, urine tests done. Surprise surprise, the very next day she’s back to normal, and all the tests come back fine.
Stumbled upon this excellent essay by A.R. Moxon: One About The Atmosphere. After recently ending conversations with a few “Stove Minivans” from my life, this really hit home. I wish I’d read it earlier.

Because Stove Minivan, it turns out, wasn’t some weird outlier. He was part of a growing new normal, a group of people who had been offered a chance to immigrate from observable reality and enter a dark world of constant hostility, misinformation, and self-loving grievance; a group of people who leapt at that invitation, and cling to it to this day, no matter what happens, immune to proof; a constituency who blame others for the foulness of the shallow puddle of reasoning in which they demand to sit, even though we can all see them fouling it themselves, every day.

And, crucially, when you discover that somebody isn’t open to persuasion, leave them. Leave it. Engaging with that elevates them into the sphere of people who deserve to be taken seriously, and their ideas into the sphere of things that merit debate. Even worse, it sharpens their dull knives for them. Worst of all, it wastes your precious time.

📝 Post March 30, 2025

Weeknotes 26

Mai mai

The city is apparently replacing the sewer lines on our street. It’s been a noisy week. Looks like work continues into, at least, next week as well.
I got landsharked for the first time in a long time. I joined a couple neighbors to help clean up our 90-year-old neighbor’s yard. While slingin’ grass seed, a suited gentleman approached, and started talking about how Jesus’s death day is his favorite holiday, and that 60% of the information on the internet is false, actually! Fascinating stuff. I stood there like an idiot and let him do his thing for entirely too long. Hardly the first time I’ve had such an interaction, but they happen infrequently enough that I can’t help but be dumbfounded that it’s actually happening.
Speaking of lawncare and sewer line construction: one of the construction workers—while on his lunch break—randomly walked over, picked up a rake, and started helping us clean up our neighbor’s yard. There’s some good eggs out there!
Finished binge watching Severance Season 2. Really excellent overall. It got a little Lost-like there in the middle, which worried me a bit about how it’d progress from there. But they did a solid job focusing things back up for the last few episodes. Hoping we don’t have to wait another 3 years for the next installment.
On the topic of potatoing, we also watched the classic: Being John Malkovich. What an incredibly funny premise for a movie. And John Malkovich might just be the best sport of all time for going along with a movie that just relentlessly mocks him. 10/10
Hosted my biggest pizza party to date. Cranked out 10 pizzas on my little 12” Ooni Koda. That’s probably about the limit for me. The last couple pizzas I made were entering overproof territory, and were a little cumbersome to work with.
Mandarin learning complaint: I actually learned this one a couple weeks ago, but what the hell: I’ll complain about it now. 賣(Mài) means “to sell”. 買(Mǎi) means “to buy”. So like… not only do these words sound almost exactly the same, their hanzi characters look very similar, and they mean the opposite things, and they’re used in the same contexts. Brutal!
Stumbled upon the MASH stack this week. Checks a lot of boxes for me. Will have to come up with a dumb project to build to gently kick the tires.

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