eVille Times

May 17, 2026

Erika On Certainty

They sell us on Pie In The Sky

And while we sit here waiting for the pie, they take everything else.

On Being Human

What if the most human thing any of us can do is simple not to give up?

May 16, 2026

Lucas Bean Explains

Olbermann tells the story from a friend of his who explained it with a scoreboard analogy.

If there's something about you that you've been trained to think of as wrong and immoral and evil, you can deny yourself that thing for only so long - eventually, it will manifest in your behavior.

So what often happens is you begin to condemn that behavior very loudly and very publicly in order to score points against it. But in the meantime, you're scoring points in favor of it because that's just something you really can't deny always and forever.

So you trick your brain by keeping score. You may have 90 points for it because of what you do, but as long as you make a show of scoring 110 points against it, you're ahead of the game.

Today I Learned

... about my appendix

Rich

Bending their "values" to fit a conclusion works perfectly for MAGA because their leaders have modeled the whole political thing after their favorite brand of religion - "The Supreme One has handed down the answer, and there will be no questioning."

"Cognitive Vacancy"

Belle

The "Thucydides Trap" is a political theory popularized by Graham Allison describing the high risk of war when a rising power (eg: China) threatens to displace an established ruling power (eg: US).

Named after the ancient Greek historian who observed that the rise of Athens and the fear it instilled in Sparta made the Peloponnesian War inevitable, this dynamic suggests that structural tension - rather than sheer accident - makes conflict likely, as the established power takes defensive actions and the rising power demands recognition.