In my opinion, the lyrics tell a pretty straightforward story, no real need for metaphor

Someone releases a bunch of balloons into the sky, they get mistaken for enemy aircraft/missiles, and set off a war.

If you get more out of it with your interpretation, more power to you, but it feels like a bit of an unnecessary stretch though.

It sounds like you’re actually conflating The Iranian Hostage Crisis and The Iran Contra Affair

Which is a very common mistake, you’re not the only one, both involve hostages and Iran, and they’re not totally unrelated.

This is all greatly simplified of course.

The Hostage Crisis was was basically part of the Iranian Revolution when Ayatollah Khomeini seized power, where a bunch of supporters of the revolution took hostages at the US embassy. This happened under Carter. Carter placed an arms embargo against Iran in response. And like you said they held off on releasing the hostages until Reagan was elected. The Algiers Accord that formally ended the crisis did not involve any arms sales.

Iran Contra happened under Reagan. Reagan wanted to fund anti-communist rebels in Nicaragua (the Contras) but was blocked from doing so by Congress.

Meanwhile, the Iran-Iraq war is going on, Iran is still under that arms embargo, and really needs some weapons for that war.

At the same time, over in Lebanon, Hezbollah (who Iran has some influence over) takes some US hostages.

So Reagan and his cronies, like Ollie North, come up with an idea.

To raise money off-the-books to send to the Contras, they secretly sell weapons to Iran, and in exchange Iran will use its connections to Hezbollah to get those hostages released (and the hostages were in fact released, but Hezbollah pretty much immediately took more hostages, this was in the middle of a whole decade-long hostage Crisis in Lebanon with hostages from several countries taken, this was really just a small part of that)

US

It varies from district to district of course

My school offered Spanish, French, and Latin

They used to offer German, but ended that a few years before I got there.

In 7th grade, unless you’re in remedial English, they have you do ¼ of the year taking each as an “exploratory” language (the last quarter they had something else, I want to say they called it “study skills” or something, just a very general class on how to do school stuff)

Then in 8th grade you took that class, it’s been a long time but I think you had it for half the year, but it possibly might have been for just a quarter or maybe for the whole year.

Then in 9th-12th grade you had each class for half the year. If you really wanted to you might have been able to arrange your schedule to have, for example, French 2 1st semester and 3 2nd, but again, it’s been a while, I don’t remember exactly how the scheduling worked.

Little tangential story about my own language learning

I went with French

Initially I kind of wanted to do Latin, but the Latin teacher was a little bit insane. Not actually a bad teacher, but I just didn’t jive with her energy, she was a former gymnast from Russia, and also kind of a germophobe, and just really intense and hyper, one of those rare human beings that if you saw a character like her in a work of fiction it might break your immersion for being unrealistic, but there she was, in the flesh.

There were two Spanish teachers, one was fine, the other was arrested a few years later for being a child molester (I heard somewhere that it eventually turned out that the kids who accused him made it up, but I really can’t find anything from after his arrest to confirm that one way or another) and I didn’t get particularly good vibes from him regardless.

So I went with French. The French teacher was actually pretty great. Also, I decided that I’d rather go to France for a school trip if I stick with it over Spain or Italy (for Latin class)

Unfortunately, she also had a baby that year and was out for most of the year.

We had a long term substitute who was also pretty great, and a pretty competent French teacher.

However, that substitute had some kind of health thing come up and was also out most of the time.

So we had a string of short-term substitutes who mostly didn’t speak a word of French.

And so we all pretty much just got passed along to French 2 knowing barely any more French than we did after our one quarter of exploratory French the year before.

That year, the high school got a new French teacher. He wasn’t so much a French teacher as much as he was a teacher who happened to be from France. He didn’t seem to me to be particularly good at teaching a language. He was also kind of a sad, lonely man who was too soft to deal with American teenagers, and some of the most unruly and problematic our school had to offer were in his first semester class, and they absolutely broke this poor man’s soul, he was an empty husk of a man by the time we got him 2nd semester, and although my class was decent in comparison, teenagers can smell weakness in a teacher and he was totally unable to control the class, he ended up having to take a lot of time off, I’m pretty sure because of depression, and actually got canned a couple weeks before the end of the school year.

So again, we all kind of get shuffled along to French 3 despite having only the most basic understanding of French possible.

The higher-level French teacher had been there for a long time. She is good at her job. She’s intense, but not unlikeable. Unfortunately from French 3 onwards, the class is supposed to be mostly taught in French and most of us could barely manage to ask to go to the bathroom. So she was frustrated with us, we were confused by her, it wasn’t a great experience.

So after barely scraping by in that class I decided no more French class for me.

Which was kind of a bummer, because I was kind of looking forward to going on the class trip to France in French 4 or 5 (they did the trip every other year) but I was way out of my depth and didn’t want to put in the effort to catch up on my own.

A sound question.

Ok, where do you get those 50 people?

Do you have 50 people sitting around on-call 24/7/365 just in case they need to go knock on everyone’s door?

Are you taking them off of other jobs to go do this? If this happens at 3AM on a holiday weekend, there’s probably a pretty good reason those other people are already on the clock, like maybe fixing whatever issue is causing the advisory.

Are we relying on volunteers? How are we going to get ahold of them to let them know, let alone guarantee that they’re actually going to show up.

We gonna mobilize the national guard to do it? How long is that gonna take to get going?

Maybe we’ll just press-gang the first 50 people we can get our hands on to do it. What could possibly go wrong?

But let’s say getting the people is a solved problem. How are they getting around? Not every area is easily walkable. Do we have 50 municipal cars on standby for them to use? Are we going to have additional people driving them around to the needed areas in vans? Are they using their personal vehicles and will need to be compensated for gas and mileage (not to mention probably an insurance nightmare for those people using personal vehicles for non-personal use)

3d printing is not the default fabrication method now that we’re getting good at it. It just shines in certain applications.

Getting a little theoretical here

With the current state of the technology, 3d printing lags behind some traditional manufacturing techniques like machining and in terms of speed, cost, quality, available materials, etc. except for some relatively niche cases.

However, that gap is closing a bit every day, it may or may not ever catch up completely or surpass the old technique in those aspects

But if it does ever get close, I could very much see 3d printing being a preferred method

Subtractive manufacturing like machining, by design, creates a lot of waste, all of the chips and off cuts that are removed from the stock are either discarded or require additional energy and/or materials to recycle.

And things like injection molding require custom molds that wear out over time, and can be expensive to design and manufacture

And in either case, you’re largely locked into making one thing on an assembly line at a time, and to switch over to a different product you’re probably going to need to switch out a lot of the molds and tooling, recalibrate everything, etc. which can be time consuming.

With 3d printing, you could theoretically use only the amount of material that’s actually in the finished product (if you design it that it doesn’t require any external supports ) you don’t need any custom tooling or mold, just generic, interchangeable nozzles (for FDM, LCD screens or lasers or whatever the equivalent is for other printing technologies) and you could switch production from one item to another by just hitting print on a different file.

Again, we’re not there, may never be there, but it’s a cool thing to think about

I’m also a cart-straightener

Blows my mind how some people actually manage to walk their cart to the corral, and then decide they’re going to abandon any semblance of order in putting the carts away, you’ve already done the hard part by walking over, it takes less than a second to just not be an idiot when you push your cart in there.

Big carts in one line, small carts in the other, seems easy but they all put the square peg in the round hole.

And at least try to line them up. I don’t care if you push them all the way in, just try to line them up so that they can be pushed together.

Cracker barrel decided they were going to change the logo

And to be fair, in most respects, the new logo was pretty bland and corporate, I don’t think anyone particular liked it.

But if you don’t tend to eat at cracker barrel, you didn’t really care.

But cracker barrel’s target demographic is somewhat older, conservative, white, and obsessed with old-timey Americana bullshit, so they took this logo change as a direct insult to that southern-fried all-American fantasy they hold so dear and had a hissy fit about it.

And with the backlash, cracker barrel rolled back the logo change.

Those same cracker barrel aficionados then started trumpeting about this being some sort of conservative victory in the culture wars.

Which is kind of baffling to liberals, because we didn’t particularly care to begin with. If we had to have an opinion, most of us would probably have agreed that the new logo sucked, but we weren’t going to be major cracker barrel customers either way so it wasn’t worth getting worked up over.

And then in the midst of all of this, cracker barrel decides to roll back some of their DEI initiatives. Some think that they manufactured this logo controversy to act as a smokescreen so they could do that without it being noticed

I am very bad at remembering to clean my water bottles regularly, I have about 4 nalgene bottles and a CamelBak in fairly regular rotation, they get left in the car, sometimes with water in them, sometimes empty but rarely totally dry, often for days, weeks, or even moths at a time. I don’t drink water that’s been sitting in my bottles for that long, but I’ve never noticed any weird smells, scum, cloudiness, mold, etc when I go to empty them.

And I can’t say I’ve ever had an issue with mold or any other funkiness in any of my bottles.

And I think a lot of it is that I only put water in my bottles, no flavorings or anything else (except maybe occasionally iodine or other water purification products when I’m camping, which of course is just going to kill anything that would start growing in there otherwise)

I also usually (but not always) fill them with purified water to begin with.

Regardless of if they’re a major factor or not, or what species they’re targeting, it’s still a shitty thing to do to allow your pet to fuck with the local wildlife.

If you wouldn’t go out killing birds, don’t let your cat do it either.

You don’t need an FFL, it’s a 200 dollar tax stamp, some lengthy background checks, and you have to find one made before 1986 owned by someone who’s willing to sell it to you.

You can kind of get around that by getting an FFL to acquire post-1986 machine guns, but that comes with its own red tape, and you can basically only get them for your business as a gun shop. If you close up shop, you gotta get rid of the new machine guns.

It has been a pretty common thing for the national guard to be deployed domestically with weapons but no ammo, or with ammo on their person but not loaded into their weapons, so it’s a valid question.

nonessential items such as clothing, appliances and furniture

There might be some weird wording in the law or how the article is reporting on it, but those things feel pretty damn essential to me.

Good thing it’s legal to walk around naked since clothing isn’t essential.

Oh, you need a new fridge so that you can store food or medication? Sorry, appliances are nonessential.

Beds, chairs, tables, etc, who needs those?

To be fair, at the time, there was no ISS for the shuttle to dock to, the shuttle pretty much was all they had. It was designed for missions of about 10 days, and could be expanded to about 17 days if needed. If they needed to stretch it up to a month to go beyond that for her to have a second period, I suspect that would rather have used that cargo capacity for some extra food and such and dealt with her free-bleeding, and much beyond that they’d need to come down one way or another or just die in space.

Care to elaborate a little on the racism angle a bit?

Not that I doubt it, but with the amount of research I’m willing to put into it (basically skimming the character barrel Wikipedia article, and a couple quick Google searches) I couldn’t turn up a whole lot of details.

I did find one class action lawsuit accusing them of racial discrimination, but without diving too deep into the court records, a lot of it kind of looked like more of a “some restaurants had shitty, racist managers” than a top-down “this whole company is racist” kind of thing. Not that it excuses the company for that, they’re responsible for hiring decent managers, but unless you’re going to have someone from corporate monitoring operations at every restaurant all day every day looking out for that, I could definitely see a lot of it flying under the radar.

If we want to talk LBGTQ discrimination though, yeah, there’s some outright shitty stuff at the corporate level in their past. Although (again, from just some very brief and not-at-all in-depth research) it does look like they’ve straightened that out pretty well over the last decade or two (and also, let’s not take for granted how fast a lot of people have come around on a lot of LGBTQ issues, at the time that stuff was happening, a lot of the country still hadn’t come around to the idea of accepting gay marriage, for example. It doesn’t make those policies right, but it was more in-line with the country as a whole at the time)

I work in 911 dispatch, so my job kind of falls into some weird exceptions as an essential public safety thing.

Technically I’m considered salaried somehow, but in practice my pay is hourly.

I work 12 hour shifts, and my paycheck reflects how many hours I worked (and however much PTO I used) during that pay period.

Technically, if shit really hits the fan my supervisor could come running into the lunch room and say they need all hands on deck, no more breaks today, and they’ve eased up on it a bit but for a long time we weren’t even supposed to leave campus at all on our breaks so that we’d be available if we were needed, so I guess that’s at least part of the reason my breaks are paid.

The roads get better, the drivers get worse, there’s jughandles everywhere, they won’t let me pump my own gas, and there’s liquor stores that aren’t owned by the state.

Also I have to cross a river, and pretty much everything gets flatter.

For the other borders, mostly the same. One direction you start seeing more places serving crab, another has no sales tax, one is just boring and depressing, and the other unless you cross at some very specific places is mostly just woods and farms and shit that kind of blend into our own but with better roads.

Some people out there are really reluctant to branch out and try anything different. There’s a million places around me selling the same food but better, but some people just want to go to cracker barrel.

Old people especially, but also some people with, for example, autism, ARFID, etc. can be really picky about where they’ll eat, and sometimes it’s just not worth the aggravation of trying to get them to try something new.

Hell, I have some friends who aren’t even particularly picky who can be reluctant to try out new places. Restaurants aren’t cheap, I can understand being reluctant to spend money on food you’re not sure you’re going to like.

Generally I agree, but I do carve out a narrow exemption for that particular hourly job, it was in a warehouse so pretty physical, I was on my feet all day, carrying around heavy boxes and such, and with the specific job I had I was often the first one there in the morning and basically always the last to leave, so I really wanted that nap in the middle of the day

I’m not a doctor who fan at all, so as far as I’m concerned the show is dogshit regardless of who the doctor is, but that’s my personal taste, to each their own.

However, from a couple minutes of googling, I’m pretty sure that the most recent doctor was a dude, and the next season with a new (“gender swapped”) doctor hasn’t even aired, or even been given an official release date, so not sure how you can really judge it already. Maybe you don’t like the actress, but I know I’ve been surprised by actors I generally don’t like knocking it out of the park before.

There was another female doctor prior to this most recent one, but again, you’ve had a whole 'nother doctor since then.

So I’m really not too sure what you’re on about their “current attempt.”