Doesn’t matter!
What a glorious day! I got to sleep in my own bed with my own pillow. And I believe the traveling is done for a couple of weeks. Which might have become the case anyway, what with states going lockdown crazy. But it’s happening on my terms, so it feels a little better.
Liverpool lost to Arsenal, but it doesn’t matter. They’re really mailing it in, but I can’t say I blame them. Next season is so close, there’s no reason in risking injury or burnout with these late-in-the-year games. Not when you won the league with seven matches still on the calendar, anyway. But I wish it had been anybody but Arsenal. I like seeing their cocky fans taken down a peg. Anyway, I’m droning on now and very few of you care. So I’ll move on from what are very sad sports updates.
Hey Glibs. You know how cute I always thought you were.
Christian Scientist founder Mary Baker Eddy was born on this day. She shares it with journalist and civil rights activist Ida B Wells, polar explorer Roald Amundsen, baseball great “Shoeless” Joe Jackson, popcorn magnate Orville Redenbacher, dancing actress Ginger Rogers, tennis great (who is being cancelled) Margaret Court, football coach Jimmy Johnson, dance choreographer Michael Flatley, the ever-lovely Phoebe Cates, hockey great Claude Lemieux, actor Will Ferrell, one of the greatest running backs ever Barry Sanders, actor and abused child Corey Feldman, and enigmatic soccer player Gareth Bale (boy, I fucked that last one up good before the edit).
That was a decent list. Now on to…the links!
An EO isn’t a law, asshole.
Atlanta mayor accuses Trump of breaking mask law. There’s only one problem…it’s not a fucking law. In fact, none of these “laws” we keep hearing about are laws. Sure, they’ve been given the criminal penalties associated with laws, but they aren’t, in fact, laws. And by the constitution of every single state they’re written in and the US constitution which guarantees each state a republican form of government, they can’t be given the weight of laws. So I sure as shit hope she tries to have a fine levied on him. Because that would be an extraordinary test case for the constitutionality of these infringements on our liberty being handed down by executive branches of many states without any legislation being passed.
Sorry for the rant. I’m fired up.
This seems excessive. Like, really excessive. Shouldn’t this be a civil matter?
How in the holy fucking fuck is this even possible? Oh I know, because they’re union cops in the biggest cop union in the country. And because they have a DA who drops charges even though the case appeared pretty strong on its face.
This might be a bit hyperbolic. Maybe more than a bit, even. Sorry, but if wars break out because of tweets, then humanity is done for. Because hacks happen all the time. Also, try not making something like twitter so influential, people. And if you’re gonna hack Biden, don’t make the tweets so obviously coherent that they are easily spotted as being fake.
“We’re gonna cook the books until we get the results we want”. Here’s a newsflash: if you’re counting “presumptive positives” when people don’t actually get the test, you should probably count three negative tests as negative if the same person gets tested three times in the course of a month. But since one serves the narrative and one doesn’t, guess which one will remain in the counts? Not to mention, many places weren’t even reporting the negative numbers. This is all game of made-up bullshit at this point.
Just a normal bat delivery ahead of a “protest”. Nothing to see here.
How many times do we have to tell you these aren’t coordinated attacks? It’s a coincidence. One of the protesters had a softball game coming up and was responsible for the team’s equipment. And he had to get the delivery of equipment en route so he could both protest and meet his softball obligations. And if you say that sounds crazy, you’re just a racist.
Of course they said this. You wouldn’t expect them to actually try and figure out a way to get into the classrooms, would you? That would require them to do their actual fucking jobs. And we all know that’s not the CPS teachers union’s priority. At least it never has been, based on student progress reports or test scores.
Good! Now let’s get those hate birds (the birds that hate) back where they belong: having food shoved down their throats instead of at parks terrorizing people.
I don’t want to sound hyperbolic. But somebody needs to take this teacher and judge to visit a woodchipper factory. In fact’ I think she should participate in a demonstration.
Enjoy this great song. I certainly will.
Now have a great day, dear friends! I hope today’s links made up some for the shitty job I did yesterday.
Hey Glibs. You know how cute I always thought you were.
*blushes*
The next line is “I was wrong”.
Don’t go looking for Qtips. It never ends well no matter how many times I’ve watched that scene.
Just looked Phoebe Cates up on Wikipedia to see whatever happened to her. “Cates retired from acting in 1994 to raise her children, ”
Somehow, knowing she was sane and family-oriented makes her even hotter to me (as if that’s possible) in retrospect.
And makes Kevin Kline “Shitlord Supreme”.
I’m pretty sure his starring in A Fish Called Wanda and Fierce Creatures did that.
Of course but the fact that he married her and got her to retire to raise kids is Sloopy-level Shitlordin’.
Of course but the fact that he married her and got her to retire to raise kids is Sloopy-level Shitlordin’.
Fuck me. Left the bathroom door unlocked again.
I’d prefer not to.
Now you know why Kevin Kline is always in a good mood.
*goes to bathroom to gain a little self-knowledge, doesn’t lock door*
You assholes make sure you fucking knock this time.
Wait? Socrates was commanding us to flog our philosopher? Ohhhhh. That is much easier than introspection.
“Atlanta mayor accuses Trump of breaking mask law. There’s only one ”
Impeach the mother fucker
A woman in NJ was cited a while back for organizing an anti-lockdown protest. She was about to go to court and the prosecutor offered to drop charges if she would stipulate to probable cause. She refused and they dropped charges anyway, because none of the restrictions are actual laws and will not hold up in court.
Trump was spotted not wearing a mask during his visit to Atlanta on Wednesday, and Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer on “The Situation Room” that Trump broke the law.
Atlanta mayor is asshole.
Great way to get TeeVee time on a channel rabid morons that might vote for her watch…
VP material right there
She can’t possibly be worse than Pence.
“I don’t want to sound hyperbolic. But somebody needs to take this teacher to visit a woodchipper factory. In fact’ I think she should participate in a demonstration.” The judge, first. The teacher gets to watch.
“How many times do we have to tell you these aren’t coordinated attacks? It’s a coincidence. One of the protesters had a softball game coming up and was responsible for the team’s equipment. And he had to get the delivery of equipment en route so he could both protest and meet his softball obligations. And if you say that sounds crazy, you’re just a racist.” Antifa seems to be reading the same books that I am. This article describes the quartermaster weapons delivery plan, right out of 1980’s Northern Ireland.
They have obviously been studying the ancient texts, shame about the upper body strength part.
“The Vancouver businessman paid Singer $200,000 to have someone pose as his sons using a fake ID to secure higher scores on their SATs, prosecutors said. Sidoo also worked with Singer to craft an admission essay for his son with a bogus story about the teen being held at gunpoint by Los Angeles gang members and saved by a rival gang member named “Nugget,” prosecutors said.”
OFFS!
Hey, Mugget is a killer.
Almost as plausible as “Corn-Pop”.
Straight outta Compton, crazy motherfucker named Grape Nuts
Nobody messes with Fruit Loops, that muthafucka crazy.
the hamburglar couldn’t be reached for comment
Nugget, Son of Corn Pop!
Shit. I’d like to be able to plan travel again. Got a weekend trip coming up and DeWine’s afternoon presser yesterday made me nervous that I was going to have to cancel it. Instead it was just threats and garbage.
And yet, the state has far too many people saying “Keep me safe Daddy Government!”.
Shelter in place and quarantine with mask so you don’t become a white supremafascist.
Stealing that.
I’ve got the perfect beer to drink for that.
Comedy is D-E-D.
No joking allowed! This is a Comedy Club!
Supremafascist sounds awesome, doesn’t it? End the duopoly!
I read those comments on Dewine’s speech. Dammit!
I made it through a couple before I noped the hell out of that article. I figured I got the general idea correct from those couple.
“This might be a bit hyperbolic. Maybe more than a bit, even. ”
Very hyperbolic. They could have done all that shit, and all they did was part Bitcoin from some morons.
The bitcoin thing was a cover.
Obvs. The fact the Trump’s account wasn’t hit proves that he was behind the whole thing.
No idea why they didn’t hack Trump.
Stronger password?
If this was a twitter employee that was convinced to help, it’s entirely possible that Trump’s account wasn’t accessible to them. Wasn’t there already some incident where a yahoo at twitter vandalized The Hat’s account?
“This is all game of made-up bullshit at this point.”
Unfortunately, yes. I blame the media.
” One of the protesters had a softball game coming up and was responsible for the team’s equipment. And he had to get the delivery of equipment en route so he could both protest and meet his softball obligations. ”
I’ve got it! A group of protestors is blamed for the assassination of a protest leader, and has to make it back to their homebase of Coney Island by dawn, avoiding groups of competing protestors–rabid trans-rights folks, feminist protestors with baseball bats on roller skates, white supremacists counter-protestors dressed up as clowns, etc.
“Republicanss… Come out and play-ay!”
Damn your eyes, man.
::clang clang clang::
JATNAS. Come out to play. JATNAS. Come out to play! JATNAS. Come out to pla-e-ay!
/raises first mug of coffee in salute
Clanking cans doesn’t impart the same sort of gravitas, though.
Beer bottles…
There was once a yearly Warriors Rally – an overnight bike race from Van Cortland Park to the Coney Island Boardwalk, with mandatory check-ins at various film locations. I think the last one was in 2006 or so.
How you making out, L0b0t? Greener pastures soon?
This seems excessive.
Saw something about another player that got disciplined for “hate-speech” because he said, essentially albeit not eloquently, that marriage/intimate relationship is between a man and woman. And he was clear albeit not eloquent, that this was his personal preference.
These people read “Brave New World” and “1984” and decided these were instruction manuals of how to run things…
“One of the protesters had a softball game coming up and was responsible for the team’s equipment.”
Softball has been cancelled. I blame the media.
“Foie gras is back on the menu in California after a federal judge ruled the health code doesn’t prevent the rich dish from being brought in from out of state.”
Woah, freedom to do something is being upheld in California. Don’t see that very often.
Not exactly. It didn’t legalize producing foie gras, just importing it.
But even importing it was illegal before…
I assume that grevious shortsight will be addressed by further legislation shortly.
The judge probably likes fine French cuisine.
Judges always find a way to protect the habits and choices of their social class.
All of these bullshit EO’s are just a test run for the first Wednesday in November. Bend over and say ten Hail Marys if Biden lurches across the finish line. You guys (and by extension, us) are done.
You are too pessimistic. In the US the newly elected President does not take office until January 20 of the next year. There won’t be any Biden EOs for 2 plus months after the election.
Bottoms holds that since the airport is owned and operated by the city, it’s within her jurisdiction to enforce, and not wearing a mask can be punishable by a citation, fine and even up to six months in jail.
When “Because I said so!” isn’t enough.
“As reported by ProPublica, Judge Mary Ellen Brennan found Grace “guilty on failure to submit to any schoolwork and getting up for school” and is a “threat to (the) community.””
WTF.
What level in Dantes Hell would that put the judge in?
The level where its residents are sprayed against the walls by the Holy Woodchipper.
Violation of probation conditions – the threat part was because she attacked her Mom (which was why she was on probation to begin with).
The threat part is odd, as she was not accused of any threats or violence in the probation violation.
Petty tyrants are the most tyrannical of all, aren’t they?
“Judge Mary Ellen Brennan found Grace “guilty on failure to submit to any schoolwork and getting up for school” and is a “threat to (the) community.””
But closing the schools, camps, libraries, etc. is fine?
““guilty on failure to submit to any schoolwork and getting up for school”
Holy shit, my son’s going to be in trouble.
I would have been dead at age ten.
Is the Cult a good band? I used to like Firewoman when it came on the radio, I think they had one or two other hits, too. I liked their sound but never got around to investigating them.
They’re decent. Their hits were solid hits but there’s also a lot of meh there. So pretty much like most other bands.
When they on they were really good and it was different than the hair metal. Harder-edged. I dug them okay.
I liked Electric, the album the link is from, but that’s it. Incidentally, it’s the album least representative of their usual sound. Somehow, they let Rick Rubin talk them into making his version of an AC/DC album and their old fans hated it, but I loved it.
I’m a big Cult fan. I have early stiff and later work. Saw them about 5-6 years ago again and they were tight.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nGYIoz0wRPo
“I have early stiff“
I remember those days.
I saw them in concert in the 90’s. What a shitshow. Astbury was completely shitfaced and the drummer was so coked up that I was waiting for him to explode, a la Spinal Tap.
” I have early stiff and later work”
Memories are made of this
/Younger Fourscore
Too slow again…
Hell yeah.
Their first album was good and they were a bit of a unique revelation back in the days of the terrible hair bands that were so prevalent at the time. They’re still listenable for me out of sentimentality but that’s about it.
Obviously, NY needs to implement the NYSAFEFROMBATS act. First we’ll need a blue-ribbon committee of relatives and donors to come up with the acronym.
We already gave them white nose syndrome, what more do you want New York to do to the poor mosquito-eaters?
“How in the holy fucking fuck is this even possible? Oh I know, because they’re union cops in the biggest cop union in the country. And because they have a DA who drops charges even though the case appeared pretty strong on its face”
Did NY adopt Hawaiian police practices?
“The teen was put on “intensive probation” back in April following a hearing that stemmed from an incident where she attacked her mom.”
““I told her she was on thin ice and I told her that I was going to hold her to the letter, to the order, of the probation,” ProPublica reported Brennan saying during Grace’s sentencing. Because of her past troubles, the judge also also called Grace a “threat to the community.” ”
I’m going to stand down on the woodchipper until I hear a few more details about this. I suspect this is not the young lass’s first court rodeo.
Doesn’t matter. You can’t set terms of probation and then toss someone in juvie for doing something that wasn’t in them.
“You can only use a computer for schoolwork” and “you didn’t do your schoolwork” aren’t the same thing.
See below. It helps to read the whole thing.
I personally, if I were the school, would just let her fail and not worry about it. But they may have been required to report.
I missed the comma that said she had to complete schoolwork. I thought it could only be used to complete schoolwork.
Either way, once the school set her on a special track that requires additional personal instruction and oversight, they are the ones that failed to provide her with that additional instruction and are therefore not able to hold her to the same standards as other kids. In fact, I’d wager she has a case to sue for an ADA violation since it’s a medical condition.
Either way, throwing a kid in jail for not doing schoolwork is a chipper-able offense. I don’t care what other factors are at play. You can flunk her, you can hold her back a grade, you can even expel her. But you can’t throw a kid in jail for not participating in something that shouldn’t be mandated by the state in the first place.
It sounds like they’re jailing her for assault, which she was on probation for.
I don’t have a problem with jailing teenagers for violent offenses, though automatic emancipation might be a better “punishment.”
Jailing people for incorrectly closing em tags would be a bit excessive though.
You should have thought about that before moving to the PDRNY.
^this. She was jailed for assaulting her mother. She was not jailed for not doing her homework. She was let off from the initial sentence on a set of condition and she couldn’t be bothered to comply with those conditions. This is not wood chipperable. This isn’t even the judge getting it wrong.
Not just that, but as POC she can add in the racial power boost and really rack up some dollars.
If I were the parent, I’d have one quote for the papers “It’s Feigertime!”
Couple more choice quotes:
“Fifteen-year-old Grace was removed from the Beverly Hills, Michigan, home she shared with her mom…”
” The terms of the probation included a GPS tracking monitor, regular check-ins with a court caseworker, counseling, no phone and no computer unless being used for educational purposes, and completing schoolwork.”
The article then goes on to cite some statistics and some more quotes about minority lack of access to internet and social services, etc. and strongly implies that the child is in this situation because of being a poor black child. I never heard of Beverly Hills, MI so I had to look it up. 2010 median household income was over 90K. Median home price is currently $417K. I don’t think this is a case of poverty, and it’s not clear why ProPublica would include stuff about lack of internet access in an article about some spoiled brat in a wealthy suburb.
and it’s not clear why ProPublica would include stuff
Since when do facts matter to the narrative?
Yes, Beverly Hills MI ain’t Beverly Hills CA, but if you landed there you are doing OK in life and certainly OK enough to have high speed internet and a computer.
This is all game of made-up bullshit at this point.
Truth > Facts
What do we do when the shit hits the fan on November 4th? Hide in our non-existent bunkers or just carry on like nothing ever happened? I’d wager there will be gallons of salty ham tears but it will be us instead of them crying over more of our rights being stripped away by government fiat.
127) Great news as plastic pollution continues to break down in environment
A follow-up of sorts to Thought Not Sermon 121 (everybody is tracking these at home, right?), where I talked about the natural breakdown of plastics in the ocean into microparticles, which was presented in various news sources as some sort of environmental catastrophe despite no evidence whatsoever that it was anything but a normal and benign process.
Now we have news that plastic on land breaks down into microparticles smaller than the human eye can see, essentially becoming dust. I love this article’s alarmist tone: “plastic fallout seems to always be persistent, billowing and falling like invisible, indigestible snow.” Oh my God, it’s everywhere!
I had to laugh at this part: “they reveal just how much plastic is landing on protected areas in the West: more than 1,000 tons each year.” Good Lord! More than a 1,000 tons, across the entire US West! That might constitute like .1% of all dust landing there!
One scientist asks: “How much microplastic is in the atmosphere in comparison with other natural particles, and does this actually have the potential to affect weather patterns?” You know, that is a good question. Maybe she should conduct a research experiment to find out, instead of just wringing her hands over it?
A Scottish scientist mentions the “mutagenic, carcinogenic and endocrine-disrupting chemicals that plastic carries,” without citing any evidence that this is actually the case. Later on, he says “The human health effect of breathing this material is almost unknown, in spite of the first study on human lungs being back in 1998…Simple logic tells us this cannot be good for us. It is hard to imagine a sentence starting with: ‘The health benefits of breathing airborne microplastic.’”
Okay, got it. Twenty-years of studies have produced no evidence that there is an adverse effect on human health, but you know there just has to be a problem with it. Great sciencing there, guy.
Faith-based alarmism aside, what this article tells me is that discarded plastic products are subject to the same natural processes of erosion and break-down as anything else. There’s no need to worry either that plastic products will persist in unaltered form for millennia, covering our planet in debris, which used to be the fashionable concern (see Wall-E for an example in the popular culture). Nor is there a need to worry that tiny plastic particles are somehow uniquely harmful to human health or local ecologies, as if they’re somehow different from rock or wood or soil or anything else that breaks down and becomes part of the normal load of dust in the atmosphere.
Everything is biodegradable; people are just impatient.
It may not be biodegradation, but sunlight, abrasion, and chemical erosion.
Would you accept “Everything organic is biodegradable; people are just impatient.”
True. The market works, (think alternative fuels); people are just impatient.
The start of that Phoebe Cates scene should illustrate the LP’s descent into cocktail party chasing. It was all a fantasy and then someone forgot to lock the damn door.
Never be sorry for a rant, Sloop. Spot on.
“Dr Pin-up! Fauci appears on cover of InStyle magazine and says he’s ‘walking a tightrope’ with people trying to ‘pit’ him against the President”
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8529359/Dr-Fauci-says-walking-tightrope-amid-Trump-criticism.html
I blame the media.
‘Walking a tightrope’ or just enjoying the attention? You decide.
“‘On your dime, in the middle of a pandemic, they’re selling beans!’ Cuomo had also said.
The products were displayed on the Resolute Desk in the Oval office, a detail that seemed to set off Cuomo even more.”
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8528665/Chris-Cuomo-goes-offensive-rant-against-Trump-shifting-attention-op-ed-slamming-Fauci.html
LOLOLOLOL
CNN: Serious news for serious people.
On your dime, in the middle of a pandemic, they’re putting people sick with Covid into nursing homes also works and it’s actually justifiable outrage.
“There’s only one problem…it’s not a fucking law. In fact, none of these “laws” we keep hearing about are laws.”
Fugget about it man… It’s Covid-town
I gave them my rights and the intubation pipe tastes fleshy. Don’t open your eyes.
Yeah, but since it belongs to a bureaucrat at least it is small and flacid.
“enigmatic soccer player Christian Bale”
Um, the enigmatic Welsh soccer player is Gareth Bale, and today is his birthday. The foul-mouthed Welsh actor is Christian Bale, not his birthday.
Yeah, that was a bit of a fuckup.
::lays prostrate before the mob::
Don’t apologize to me, apologize to the Welsh.
Welsh – I’m sorry you’re Welsh.
*incoherent angry noises*
*synau defaid blin*
WHEN IS IT MY BIRTHDAY!? TELL ME!!! – BATMAN
Um, the Greatest Actor of Modern Times that’s never made a bad movie can certainly play the role of an enigmatic soccer player.
He was Batman. Three times.
Don’t we have a three-strikes law?
I like The Cult. I don’t love them but after that set of links it was pretty much any port in a storm. It’s going to get worserer, isn’t it Sloop?
It probably will. I just hope the bottom doesn’t fall out in the next week before my sale. Because this one is a big one.
“Nick Cannon apologizes for being anti-Semitic but NOT for calling white people ‘evil, rapists and savages’ – as black stars back him and Charlamagne Tha God says ViacomCBS firing proves ‘Jews have the power’ ”
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8527305/Diddy-Dwyane-Wade-speak-support-Nick-Cannon.html
Privilege for me but not for thee. Some blackish pigs are more equal than others. To borrow from Ted – “Hateful!”
Ted wrote animal farm?
I find that unlikely. There’s no passage in it about banning the animals from watching Ohio State football being the one positive outcome of the pigs taking over.
If a Harbaugh continues to go without a conference championship appearance and nobody’s there to watch, does it still make a whiny sound?
but he failed to address calling white people ‘evil, rapists and savages’.
He wasn’t fired for that.
So not entirely wrong about firing proves ‘Jews have the power’.
Charlamagnes the best.
Whitey really needs to step up. Everyone else – Jews, Muslims, blacks…, have interest groups that will attack as soon as they are insulted.
We can’t because we are white. Colorless and lesser.
That necessarily WILL happen if politics continue to be racialized primarily against white people. It’s an unfortunate but understandable inevitably at this point.
And it’s not going to be pretty. They’re children playing with fire.
I say it half in jest but yes. Whitey has been kicked around freely since the civil rights movement at least.
Explicit job exclusions for whites like we’ll see in California soon and talk of reparations and land reapportionment tends to radicalize the targets.
Isn’t his adopting the name Charlamagne an act of cultural appropriation?
“‘If I’m fly, and daddy’s fly, then so is the kid’: Cardi B defends husband Offset after he buys their daughter Kulture, a $8k Birkin bag for her second birthday”
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-8528649/Cardi-B-beams-Chanel-skirt-Offset-gives-daughter-Kulture-Birkin-bag-own.html
Offset?
This is what happens when you give a million monkeys a million dollars each. You don’t get Adam Smith, you wind up with this.
Yes, middle name “Carbon”.
“Karbonn”
Wasn’t that Mya Rudolph’s pimp in Idiocracy?
Nah, man, that be “upgrade”. Emphasis on UP.
Imma say I was close!
Offset sounds like some kinda fag pimp.
Upgrayedd. With two D’s for a double dose of his pimping.
Meh, it’s their money to spend as they see fit.
This.
“EXCLUSIVE: Trump Halts Fulbright Program, Which Saw Academics Use U.S. Resources to Undermine America and Boost China
The National Pulse can exclusively reveal details of Fulbright grant recipients campaigning AGAINST the U.S., on the American taxpayer dime.
Subsidized by taxpayers and administered by the Department of State, the prestigious scholarship is “the largest U.S. exchange program offering research, study and teaching opportunities in over 140 countries” – one of which includes China.
Beyond subjecting American students to propaganda teeming in CCP-run universities, increased academic collaboration between the two countries lays the groundwork for intellectual property theft and espionage.”
https://thenationalpulse.com/politics/trump-halts-fulbright-program/
“increased academic collaboration between the two countries lays the groundwork for intellectual property theft and espionage.””
Better to just go to war with them.
At this point it seems unavoidable…
Inevitable. If the US Navy can get their heads out of their own asses and learn how wars are won, we might be baking some biscuits.
https://cdrsalamander.blogspot.com/2020/07/diversity-thursday_9.html
I honestly don’t understand the mindset of the war-hawks. What do you SERIOUSLY think you can accomplish? Are we going to invade China and establish a new govt there?
They seem accustomed to autocrats, so a puppet Emperor would suit purposes.
In the old days I would’ve agreed, but the neo-con era seems to have some strange ideas.
From a straight forward grand strategy perspective, sink the Chinese fleet and then destroy as much naval infrastructure as possible. Kill as many sailors and skilled naval workers as possble, to buy another few decades without a blue water peer. Secure Taiwan, Japan, the Phillipines, and Indonesia, plus the sea routes of same. Basically make sure the Chinese remain a land power.
Of course, the idiot neocons would swear a 5,000 year old culture of autocracy and deference to centralized control is just itching for Jeffersonian democracy.
Left unexplained: why we should subsidize (a) non-citizens and (b) higher education in the first place.
NPR high larrity from this morning’s drive.
They did a report about ZOMG GUNZ! with (of course) a former BATFE agent now working for Giffords (of course!) saing that all of these new gun owners are going to kill themselves, because of course.
The three best parts were:
-Saying that an interviewee had just spent $450 on a powerful handgun (emphasis in the original). Now I of course though they must be talking about a Taurus revolver or some other low-end .357/.44. Nope a SIG P365. Now I want to know WTF you can get one for that price so I can pick up a spare.
-The interviewee said that one of the things influencing her decision was prisoners being let out becasue of the ‘vid. NPR immediately edited in a piece of tape saying some states were letting prisoners out, but only those who were near the end of their sentences or determined to be not a risk.
-They then followed up with an interview of some guy I’m supposed to take seriously who did a super-sciency analysis that determined that people were buying gunz ’cause racism. Of course. Apparently part of his deep learning big data algorithm computer model was look at the Google searches for “buy gun” and then also look to see if any racist word searches wen up at the same time. I shit you not, they actually said this.
$450 on a
powerfulhandgunGood to know there are other people as cheap as me.
I shit you not, they actually said this.
Only racists buy guns? Well, shit…
It doesn’t look like they’ve made a transcript of it yet, but I did find this Lololol:
https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2020/07/15/891404076/npr-radio-ratings-collapse-as-pandemic-kills-listeners-commutes
Ha! Ha!
Broadcast ratings for nearly all of NPR’s radio shows took a steep dive in major markets this spring, as the coronavirus pandemic kept many Americans from commuting to work and school.
Nearly all and due to lack of commuters… exactly how long are those commutes? All day and evening? And on weekends?
NPR: agitating for the infringement of your rights with your money, since…
Welcome to the CBC. We are benevolent masters! Bend over, this won’t hurt a bit.
I like how racists are always Googling racist words. Gotta keep up with the new slang, bro.
You are underestimating the number of words that are deemed racist. For example this post contains eighteen distinct examples.
That was part of his grievance studies masters thesis dude. Why you so anti-intellectual?
Apparently part of his deep learning big data algorithm computer model was look at the Google searches for “buy gun” and then also look to see if any racist word searches wen up at the same time
Makes sense if you consider guns to be racist, which is a common left talking-point. I’m assuming they found 100% of “buy gun” searches to be racist.
Destroying life as we know it is a full time job
Trump claimed that “mountains and mountains of red tape” slowed the approval and development of infrastructure projects, but added that “all of that ends today.”
“Today’s action completely modernizes the environmental review process under the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969. We are cutting the federal permitting timeline … for a major project from up to 20 years or more … down to two years or less,” Trump said, later adding that at “the same time, we’ll maintain America’s gold standard environmental protections.”
Trump announced his administration’s plans to rewrite the NEPA regulations in January, saying at the time that the existing regulations “(led to) endless delays, waste money, keep projects from breaking ground and deny jobs to our nation’s incredible workers.”
The administration claims the change will speed up the process for getting environmental reviews approved that are required for major infrastructure projects.
“You spend three, four, five years on the environmental review before you ever break ground. That’s a problem,” Environmental Protection Agency administrator Andrew Wheeler said in an interview with Gray TV.
Environmental advocacy groups view the policy change as another example of the Trump administration dismantling important conservation safety guards that protect the environment and public health from pollution.
President Cartoon Villain will personally be responsible for the destruction of planet earth.
that ends today.
Huzzah!
“A former Canadian Football League player has been sentenced to three months in prison for hiring someone take the SATs in place of his two sons as part of the college admissions cheating scheme”
This is a sub headline about academic cheating and there’s a pretty blatant absence of a word that is jarring to me. Don’t they have editors?
Thot Thursday. ‘Nuff said.
http://archive.li/qOS8w
*Arsenal* fans are cocky?
I don’t get it, I mean they just make cider and mead.
You’re as reliable as the sun rising in the east…
This is what happens when you give a million monkeys a million dollars each. You don’t get Adam Smith, you wind up with this.
Holy shit.
*outright, prolonged laughter*
You do get Adam Schiff…
Oh, Adam Smith, nah
More huffing and puffing:
“The Trump administration is turning back the clock to when rivers caught fire, our air was unbreathable, and our most beloved wildlife was spiraling toward extinction. The foundational law of the modern environmental movement has been turned into a rubber stamp to enrich for-profit corporations, and we doubt the courts will stand for that,” Hartl said in a statement.
Environmental advocacy groups such as the National Resource Defense Council Inc. and the Sierra Club believe that the change will harm minority communities more than others.
“NEPA gives a voice to communities whose health and safety would be threatened by destructive projects, and it is despicable that the Trump administration is seeking to silence them,” Sierra Club executive director Michael Brune said in a statement. “As the country faces a global pandemic and grapples with persistent racial injustice, the last thing communities need is an attack on this bedrock environmental and civil rights law.”
You-know-who hardest hit.
Limousine liberals to the rescue! Let the billable hours flow.
“The Trump administration is turning back the clock to when rivers caught fire, our air was unbreathable, and our most beloved wildlife was spiraling toward extinction.”
Remember when the EPA dumped a bunch of shit in the Colorado River?
Call me crazy, but I wouldn’t have put that beyond the Obama Admin as punishment for Western States who saw a loss or tourism.
I’m sick of the hero worship that teachers get, they’re coming up with every excuse in the book to not have to go back to school. Meanwhile I haven’t missed a single day of work at the grocery store since this started (and even picked up some extra shifts) and I’m only complaining to the dozen libertarians on this site instead of writing op eds in major publications after marching shoulder to shoulder in protests. Yes I’m mad.
I am not sure how much of this comes from the teachers vs. the unions, but yeah, worshiping teachers has never been something I have appreciated or understood.
Yeah, but, like- teachers are- like- super important. And they like don’t get paid or recognized enough.
“They should make as much as pro athletes!”
-retarded person
I had 3 teachers from K through 12 that were competent and who had a positive influence on my education and development. 3, out of something like 50 total teachers. I had more than twice that number who had a negative influence on my education and development, including my second grade teacher who ‘caught’ me reading Ivanhoe during reading period and loudly mocked me to the class because “He jus showin off. He ain’t really readin it.” With apologies to those 3 good teachers, fuck teachers.
My kindergarten teacher was worried that at coloring time, I could only think of apples to draw. She was so worried, she talked to my parents about it.
My first grade teacher told my parents to get me into private school as soon as they could because public school was no place for me. I ran into her about 20 years ago. She remembered me! I told her she was the security question on all my sites. “Who was your favorite teacher?” FWIW, she was the only black teacher I ever had.
Of the rest, I had one I thought didn’t like me, but I also kind of think she was hard on me to bring me up to her snuff. I don’t know what’s the truth about that.
Otherwise, I have rarely had a bad teacher experience. Fifth grade comes to mind. Second was no picnic.
Wait until you find out she’s logging in to all your sites.
One day, 5th grade, coming back from recess or something. 5th grade teacher and 6th grade teacher talking in front of their respective classrooms. Both were young, late 20s or so, (hey I was 10-11 years old). My 5th grade teacher grabbed me from behind, hugged me and told the other teacher, “You’re lucky, you’ll have Little Fourscore in your class next year”
I was so proud. Now I wonder if Miss K didn’t do that to all the kids. It made a big impression on me at the time and was a great motivator . I told my Mom and she was so pleased with her little boy. I’ve never forgotten and to this day believe I was singled out.
In today’s world she’d be looked at as a pedo, to Little Fourscore, well, I’m still in love.
If they don’t want to go back they can stay at home all they want. It’s called quiting. The fact in my county I’m going to pay them through obscene property taxes while they stay at home is probably the most infuriating thing that I can think of. They are pretending like millions of people aren’t going to work in person and have been all through this the entire time.
People ought to organize a Tax Revolt.
Tear down the schools! Give them to the homeless! Community gardens!
My neighbor is a kindergarten teacher. She’s been traveling to the beach (multiple times), traveling to buy a puppy, still has a cleaning woman come twice a month, and is irate about going back to in person teaching because it’s not safe. Of course, she’s not doing any teaching now, not that it works well with kindergartners, so. But, no sympathy from me.
But Tulip! We are all in this together!
As long as we don’t have to pay her to sit on her ass at home.
Um – Growing ass I presume.
She’s getting paid.
Because children were never known to transmit diseases before.
I think I dislike teachers more than any other professional group. Also if they are distance learning that’s fine we don’t than pay bus drivers, admin or 30% of the teachers as less people can teach more kids as they aren’t constrained to classroom sizes.
The good news is kindergarten is bullshit and we should really just ditch it anyway.
“Good! Now let’s get those hate birds (the birds that hate) back where they belong: having food shoved down their throats instead of at parks terrorizing people.”
Sloopy, you and my wife would get along splendid. She sends our kids out with a Hittin’ Stick specifically for coyotes and geeze.
Government cover-up
The Trump administration confirmed Wednesday that it has ordered hospitals to send data on coronavirus patients straight to the Department of Health and Human Services, instead of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The change raised questions about the integrity of the process. Some former health officials worry the move could result in less transparent data, although they acknowledged in interviews that the CDC’s data collection system is outdated and doesn’t meet the demands of the Covid-19 pandemic.
“The CDC’s old data gathering operation once worked well monitoring hospital information across the country, but it’s an inadequate system today,” HHS spokesman Michael Caputo said in a statement to CNBC. “The President’s Coronavirus Task Force has urged improvements for months, but they just cannot keep up with this pandemic.”
The New York Times first reported on the Trump administration’s updated guidance on data reporting for hospitals and laboratories. The new guidance, which was quietly updated on July 10, was posted on the HHS website. The agency, which oversees the CDC, Food and Drug Administration and other U.S. health agencies, will now collect daily Covid-19 reports directly. That includes the number of hospitalized patients, available beds and medical equipment like ventilators as well as information used to organize the U.S. pandemic response.
What are they hiding?
Covid is just the cover Trump is using to enact his genocide!!! Wake up sheeple!
the CDC is part of HHS. I’d imagine the head of HHS want’s to take data collection off their plate so they can focus on their mission of solving gun violence and why there aren’t enough trans astronauts or something equally stupid and unaffiliated with infectious diseases.
or something equally stupid
If only. No, I raise you – racism as a public health issue.
When you hungry, you loot, yo!
All the people saying it should be easy for cops to arrest the looters, because they aren’t wearing face masks, are unwittingly showing the systemic racisim at play in law enforcement. The cops can’t arrest them because to them they all look the same.
Now do thirsty
“Twitter put shadowbanning in their Terms of Service on January 1st, 2020.
We all signed that shit and then continue to play a game where the rules are rigged.
A reckoning may finally be coming…”
https://twitter.com/RubinReport/status/1283592144314175488
“Twitters admin panel has a button to “blacklist trends.”
So yeah twitter lied, they manually edit trends. The ones advocating violence are kept up. By their choice.
They aren’t a platform. They are a publisher.
Abolish Section 230.”
https://twitter.com/Cernovich/status/1283570221584793600
The Babylon Bee
@TheBabylonBee
·
13h
Since
@CNN
is currently unable to tweet, you’ll just have to follow us for your fake news.
Huh, The Bee doesn’t have a blue checkmark for some reason.
Abolish Section 230
Well at least he recognizes that it doesn’t say what he wishes it says.
But this is still the wrong attitude. Section 230 is a strong and useful protection for online freedom. The U.S. prospers where more authoritarian and less free regimes cannot compete for the lack of it.
You want to shake this shit up?
1. Make terms of use enforceable on both sides. Right now, they are contracts of adhesion where one party has all the power. The platform operators lie all the time, make those lies legally actionable and things will change.
2. Make it more difficult for the platform to unilaterally change the terms of use. The more powerful party being able to change a contract of adhesion at any time is ludicrous.
#2 may happen as a result of the Patreon lawsuit.
No kidding, I wanna get booted from twitter. Advice? I’m thinking: I wouldn’t have sex with a retarded minor.
Suggestions? I want to make them think a bit before booting me.
You’ll get a 12 hour timeout.
Hmmm. OK. “I wouldn’t have sex with a black retarded minor?”
The lower case “b” is a hate crime, so that should do it.
Go find a trans-activist and start citing this:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK9967/#:~:text=Primary%20sex%20determination%20is%20the%20determination%20of%20the,individual%20must%20have%20at%20least%20one%20X%20chromosome.
You’ll be gone in no time.
Making them think first is the tricky part. Autobans are easy. Maybe strike up a conversation with Leslie Jones, Brianna Wu or Chelsea Van Valkenberg and mention how much you like the Harry Potter books?
Tell a transwoman that those jeans makes xer ass look fat?
Those tight jeans make your shenis shine.
Okay I larfed at this one.
Also, Straffin-san: I saw your shout out about the military force-vaccinating those
guinea pigssoldiers. We’ll never fucking learn. Not a peep about it from anyone. It couldn’t be a more clear-cut violation of the Nuremburg principles, but everyone just yawns ‘cuz… military. I have to wall off my emotions because the rage bubbles up in me, but there it is.Thanks for the link, though.
On the “bright” side (??), I guess it’s a good marketing opportunity for my anthrax e-book, which the lovely Miss Mojeaux just finished cleaning up and assembling for me. I’ve got a few tasks left, but it should be available shortly.
Ozy, I stood in line with the rest. Good soldier.
Sir, I wish I could claim I was somehow above it, but I got the first three of the anthrax series, as well. I was at justice school and another officer and I had heard some of the rumblings, but we (and I am not making this up) both looked at each other while sitting in the chairs in the waiting room and said: “Our senior officers wouldn’t let us get some poison…” (!)
I kid you not, we were that brainwashed. No one, and I mean NO ONE, can brainwash like the Marine Corps.
Advocate for traditional mores.
I don’t wanna lie.
I’m not seeing any problem then.
I’m flattered and insulted at the same time.
Nice!
Do they care about blue collar jobs like miner and ore smelters? Maybe should try something that they have personal experience with – brand ambassador and barista.
This is from the Smithsonian Museum of African American History.
https://pjmedia.com/instapundit/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/white_culture_in_the_us_7-15-20-1.jpg
Politeness, work ethic, independence and rational thinking are all “white culture”? Does that indicate that non-whites are rude, lazy, irrational parasites? How fucking racist is that? Boy am I glad that my tax dollars pay for Nazi propaganda.
The lunatics are running the asylum.
That’s been around for a few days. The more I think about it, the more racist it seems to me too. It’s like something straight out of a Klan brochure.
Except they’re arguing that those behaviors are inherently racist, because they’re associated with white people, or more specifically the stereotypical WASP.
They’re actively promoting tribalism and sloth, calling it an antidote to racism. It’s nuts.
I mean, the fact is this shit is in the black community, and it wasn’t imposed from above. Studying, getting good grades, working hard in school is “acting white”. It’s betraying your people. It’s cooning. You’re an Uncle Tom.
That’s not something invented by the wypipo, that’s black people in black schools with black teachers calling the smart kids traitors to their race. I’ve seen it with my own eyes.
I’ve also seen it not happen, in private and charter schools. The fight to keep school choice is about a lot more than just petty union attitudes.
That’s not something invented by the wypipo
Yes it was. Most of the framers of cultural marxism are white.
“How many Twitter employees, exactly, have access to a twitter admin tool that can start wars and crash stocks?
Are they even screened? For anything?”
https://twitter.com/Grummz/status/1283614950787649536
Beginning to think the Luddites weren’t such Luddites all along.
Just this thing.
That person identifies as a deer.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ajpedaMw9sc
They SAY they identify as a doe, but have you noticed for all xer complaining about everything else, xey’ve never complained about there being no salt lick at xer desk?
“What’s a salt lick?” – Deer lady.
I’m wondering why a doe would have antlers.
Reindeer?
“Trans Species Activist GAINS POWER On Twitch??”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xzLLzIuWzG4
Tottenham’s win technically eliminated Everton from Euro contention. It was already dead, but now it is official.
You’re welcome.
It was the gun what made me do it.
Led by Julia Schleimer, the team similarly found a massive increase in gun-buying during the first half of the year. They then focused on the question of whether, at the state level, those purchases are linked to an increase in gun violence.
To do that, they turned to data compiled by the Gun Violence Archive, an organization that maintains a real-time database of shootings by scouring news reports, police reports and public records. The analysis attempts to correct for a number of other factors that would plausibly affect rates of gun violence, such as covid-19 cases and deaths, the presence of stay-at-home orders, social distancing adherence, demographic factors and even temperature and precipitation.
In the end, they estimated, firearm violence nationally jumped nearly 8 percent from March through May because of excess gun-buying; that’s “776 additional injuries associated with purchasing spikes.” That may be an undercount: The Brookings study indicated gun sales jumped even higher in June, with potentially even greater effects on rates of gun violence.
I’d bet this is just a basic regression analysis, where “correct for” means they included those variables in their model.
The sooner this type of approach is largely left behind the better – you teach these social science/econ people one mathematical technique and they just spam it over and over and over without giving any sort of thought as to the limitations, assumptions, weaknesses etc. of the approach.
And who knows, maybe their analysis is correct, I’m not going to waste my time reading it, because the entire study is pointless – if you want to know the excess due to the increase in gun buying, you go through all the reports, you contact the people, you determine whether it involved a new purchased gun, you learn the details of the incident, etc. etc. There is no need for a model, you just need to do the legwork. There’s a really good paper about this in relation to Cholera epidemics in London back in the 1800’s.
THIS!! I thought “Gee, seems like there’s a way we could figure this out, without resorting to some statistical estimate”.
It’s pretty bizarre.
For anyone interested, here’s the paper:
https://psychology.okstate.edu/faculty/jgrice/psyc5314/Freedman_1991A.pdf
causal arguments based on significance tests and regression are almost necessarily circular
regression models are not a particularly good way of doing empirical work in the social sciences today
the real question is what can be done ex ante, before the right estimate is know
okay, if you use cool Latin phrases without explanation assuming your cool readers understand or you skip them entirely: one or the other
as ever: statistics have zero to do with rights
maybe their analysis is correct, I’m not going to waste my time reading it
Me either. If they discuss seasonality, outcome ranges, and confidence intervals, they might get somewhere. Of course, even if they did present such findings, the headlines wouldn’t transmit any of that depth.
I notice they didn’t “correct” for the defund the police movement and Democrat cities rolling back community policing, as well as ongoing violent “protests” and riots. Because those couldn’t have anything to do with more shootings.
It’s nonsense because the shooters aren’t legal gun owners. Their purchases don’t get counted as gun sales.
It’s a coincidence. We have a way of investigating “coincidences” like that called RICO. You start with batman there and the guys delivery pallets of bricks. Eventually you arrive at this guy. The ones at the bottom get deals if the talk, the ones at the top get the full weight of a federal prosecution.
That assumes the deep state actually wants to put a stop to this.
Or Trump and Barr (if willing) could find enough willing prosecutors and judges to do it as a special taskforce.
Orville Redenbacher is from our town. We have a statue of him on the square, and every year we have a popcorn festival and parade. Which of course is cancelled this year.
Instead, there’ll be a protest, and that statue’s comin’ down ‘cuz a white guy selling popcorn is cultural appropriation.
A white guy selling white food? Can’t be more racist than that.
I doubt that protest is coming, though. We live in what Mrs. TOK calls the “guns and bible belt” and there are few people into that kind of thing. BTW plenty of room out her for Glibs fleeing blue states.
White food? Get a load of the cultural appropriator here. Well known that it was stolen from the Jeefee Pohatop peoples.
::holds “CORN POP NOT POP CORN” sign::
::smashes store window::
Wagons were circled
Former New York Times executive editor Jill Abramson told Fox News on Wednesday that “the idea that The New York Times is edited by a cabal of left-wing journalists is just not true,” responding to claims of left-wing bias and bullying by conservative former columnist Bari Weiss.
The comments from Abramson, who was fired by the Times in 2014, comes one day after Weiss posted a resignation letter on her web site, claiming a “hostile work environment” by fellow staffers because of her conservative views.
Weiss also alleged that editors were reluctant to go “against the grain” with pieces that could spur a backlash on social media.
But Abramson pushed back on that assertion, saying the resignation of a “junior-level opinion editor” did not “spell crisis” for the Times. She also rejected Weiss’s bias claims.
“The idea that The New York Times is edited by a cabal of left-wing journalists is just not true at all,” Abramson said.
“Most of the opinion columnists at the Times are centrists. They are center to liberal,” she later argued.
Somebody wants her old job back. “We’re not radical left wing agitators. It only looks that way to you, because you’re all a bunch of Nazis. Reality is liberal, nyah nyah nyah.”
Why isn’t Abramson the editor anymore?
They’re less of a “cabal” and more of a “tiger team” really.
But who is championing the effort?
“Most of the opinion columnists at the Times are centrists. They are center to liberal,”
The huge spread of the ideological spectrum, from Paul Krugman all the way to David Brooks.
And maybe that was all true when she was still editor but a lot has happened in 6 years. Even if many of the faces are the same the social and professional pressures are radically different.
They are center to liberal
So…leftists. Thanks for proving the point, Jill.
I volunteer in our local schools and churches a lot. So I work with a lot of teachers. Our local teachers unions are adamant that they will not be in the classroom this fall.
This is coming directly from the teachers as well as from the top. Down here they got to do the last quarter from home. A very large percentage of teachers simply uploaded a list of assignments and called it a day.
So you have a combination of Aging teachers who are afraid to risk of infection and a selection of lazy teachers who have figured out that they can work for an hour or two a day from home and get the same pay as working a full day with kids at school.
It is critical that our children get back to school as soon as possible. They need the social interaction as well as the instruction.
Interestingly, while our schools are being closed because of the risk of having many students groups, the school system and local governments are also working to increase daycare options for parents who work. So instead of putting kids groups in school, we will be putting them in groups in daycare.
This is, of course, the result of running things by committee. A single competent executive with overarching authority and a degree of intelligence would be able to see the Folly of this set up. But because these decisions are distributed across multiple committees, rational people make aggregate decisions that are irrational.
Then of course there is the underlying motivation from those partisan Democrats and fellow travelers from the Socialist and communist movements. They all have a vested interest in sowing as much chaos as possible in destroying the economy as much as possible. All of which is impossible to disentangle when you were talking about the complex motivations of groups and individuals.
It is critical that our children get back to school as soon as possible. They need the social interaction as well as the instruction.
Instruction based on a Prussian model about obedience and conformity are hardly critical for children, especially when heavily laden with leftist propaganda. Homeschool children do just fine. Same with alternative forms of social interaction that don’t consist of being forced to sit in rows and only speak with permission.
Some public schools are great and kids do well in them. Let’s not overstate the value though. There’s a reason teachers in Chicago have banned parents from observing online instruction sessions.
This. People rely on public schools so that someone can watch their kids while they go to work. This is reasonable, but not necessarily important developmentally for the kids.
Maybe this schooling bullshit results in more options away from public schools, but I doubt it.
Make N95s and face shields available. If you are worried about infection, use PPE. If you refuse to use it and don’t show to teach, you’re fired.
Funny how I haven’t heard this obvious solution being proposed.
We have given up that battle for the moment.
The wife and I are fighting hard to make sure that teachers show up at the school and work from their classroom.
Perhaps you won’t be surprised to hear this, but there has been an astonishing amount of push back on that one. Several of the teachers I know are putting their foot down that they will not be going to a school building. They’re worried about the Covid.
Of course, the same teachers post to social media showing a nice dinner out with friends, or having a few friends over. So I don’t have a lot of patience for that. Sitting alone in a large classroom is hardly a high-risk activity.
The problem I’m having is that there are some fantastic teachers in this group. The really great ones went above and beyond during the lockdown and I have no doubt they will serve their children well. But they are not most teachers. Most teachers are doing as little as they can get away with.
In this there like most employees anywhere. If you can get away with showing up at the office, punching a clock, and hitting the break room for 6 hours out of the day and still get paid and get promotions, why would you do anything more? This is the attitude a major chunk of the workforce has. I know. I had to deal with them as a boss.
So working from home is no impediment for excellent employees. But it absolutely destroys the productivity of the average worker. Most people need accountability in their day. Accountability to a team. Accountability to a boss. However that accountability comes, they have a hard time maintaining their productivity if there is no mechanism for accountability.
In any rate, I see no reason why the teachers can’t drive to work and work from their classroom where they have all of their materials and technology that we have paid for. Unfortunately, our Administration is so busy with other aspects that they have not even considered this as an option.
So working from home is no impediment for excellent employees. But it absolutely destroys the productivity of the average worker. Most people need accountability in their day. Accountability to a team. Accountability to a boss. However that accountability comes, they have a hard time maintaining their productivity if there is no mechanism for accountability.
The real issue with that is there aren’t well defined and accepted metrics by both the employer and employee. When accountability consists of showing up for 8.5hrs a day, it translates poorly to remote work. “Hey, my status was set to available for the whole day, what more do you want?” If work consists of delivering concrete widgets, you either produced them or you didn’t.
excellent point.
And something that most people don’t understand. I put it as “you get what you measure”. If you measure widgets, you get widgets. If you measure hours, you get hours.
We put this in place with our sales team – they wanted to increase incentives, so they added a $500 minimum commission to each deal, where it had been straight percentage of profit. So what happened? Within 2 months they figured out that the strategy was to split deals into the minimum amount possible – making one deal into 2 or 3. This increased costs to the company and harmed customers – but it increased their commission.
So they canned that idea. Then they went with a bonus for each contract they sent out. Guess what? A metric crapton of contracts went out. No additional contracts came back though.
So this informs my interactions with the schools. The result parents want is a well rounded kid who gets a full academic scholarship to any university in the country. But how do you measure that?
Here in Florida they have fully embraced testing. Teacher bonuses are dependent on testing. Administrator bonuses and promotions are dependent on testing. So we get good test results. Now the issue is making sure the tests are properly aligned with the ultimate goal. Because everyone is laser focused on those tests.
Except now with the lockdowns nobody seems to be getting measured on anything. And we are way out in the forefront of the nation. We already had remote learning tools in place, so we were able to instantly transition, despite some server scaling issues as traffic increased by orders of magnitude. So we counted attendance based on students logging in to the system. But there still is no way to ensure that anyone is teaching or learning. The tests are out the window with the covid, so nobody is accountable.
I put it as “you get what you measure”.
I call this “metric hypnosis”, by both the managers and the foot soldiers.
When we went to WFH for some employees, I told my boss there was no objective measurement that mattered of what legal and compliance do day-to-day. She was going to have to rely on my subjective sense of whether they were still delivering at the same level.
I’d add:
Nothing wrong with MBO if you have the M talent to usefully characterize the O.
Quality is designed into a process, not inspected into it. Having an excellent cost-of-quality database does not remotely assure that a firm will improve its strategic marketing, product concept, or process design.
Watching a BLM Riot Develop
A black guy (and a very mixed crowd) is trying to enjoy his evening when a bunch of fucking assholes – mostly white – show up and ruin it. I have to agree with the first commenter.
I like that guy. He nails it.
I’ll tell you who nailed it. The New York Times last year.
When they declared that their attempt to get rid of trump via the Russia Scandal had failed and they needed to find a new method of attack oh, that wasn’t the mask slipping, they just took the mask completely off.
The 1619 project was the result of this exploration for A New Path to get rid of trump. The plan was to foment racial unrest. They have been working through all media outlets for the better part of a year to push racism and racial unrest in every way they possibly could.
Race relations in this country are so solid that it took several months of an economic lockdown combined with a year of pressure and an egregious act by one police officer to finally get enough energy to get people out protesting in the streets. And even with this, there still is not widespread racial animosity.
The racial angle is being used as a smokescreen by hard marxists who hijacked the movement and wouldn’t be raising hell if that was the only issue. The animus isn’t really as bad as it seems.
They are doing lasting damage to race relations in this country. People like me who grew up in the 70s and 80s had a philosophy (treat people fairly and equally) and an objective (a colorblind society where race was not important). Chuck it all out and the race hustlers won’t like what most people replace it with.
Yeah, I was a young adult in the late ‘80s/early ‘90s and this is the worst I’ve seen it and it’s mostly due to contrived nonsense. We were making considerable strides and now we’re seeing Balkinization.
I am of a similar age and have a similar grounding in my belief system.
That is one reason this new push is so appalling. The idea of a colorblind Society is not even an ideal for them. They consider that to be racism.
They are pushing for a society where people are primarily judged by the color of their skin and not by the content of their character. They want all people equal. Equal in a Harrison Bergeron kind of way.
And race is one of the measuring sticks. You divide people into groups by race, sex, orientation, religion. And then you measure outcomes. Any difference in outcomes among groups are the result of discrimination. Discrimination that the government will crush.
I think there are two camps within BLM.
1. The Marxist useful idiots who know they are working for a front group and just hate Western Civ in general.
2. Those who want tribute (they call it reparations). Get past all their words and they are no different than Ragnar the Viking demanding tribute from the French and threatening to burn Paris.
“They want all people equal.”
No, they don’t. They are anti-white racists and/or anti-American Marxists. They want you subservient, not equal.
Equal in a Harrison Bergeron way.
Equal, prostrate on the ground with a hobnail boot on your face.
That kind of equal.
Maybe I can find a facemask with an image of a boot to wear on my face.
Got it, cyto.
Same here.
You know how some have stories of meeting [blacks/whites/fill in the blanks] for the first time in the military? Well for me, it was the first time hearing Jim Crow era racist comments & slurs. And from an NCO i respected. It was a bit shocking to realize that people like that still roamed the earth. Later, I became a bit more cynical.
Not the first time hearing them, just hearing them coming out of someone’s mouth live not in a movie or a book. And it wasn’t some joking stereotype either.
I’m beginning to hate white people.
We can’t help it. We’re savages by nature.
*sharpens knives*
You may want to rethink that.
You;re right. They can be tasty.
*sharpens knives*
*shoots scruffy*
^^^ More white Violence. Don’t Blame UCS though. He can’t help himself.
He likes long pig?
We should throw them into a black hole.
Leave that to the Indians.
It’s about time somebody joined me. But as stated previously, we misanthropes hate all people.
So say we all.
You know what? You aren’t even speaking the same language as the people that want you dead.
Broken clock.
Jake Tapper
@jaketapper
NY state has lost more than 32,000 lives to COVID-19. So while it’s great that the numbers have gone down, it’s perplexing to see crowing, Cuomo going on Fallon, etc. No other state has lost as many lives, not even close. New Jersey is next with 17,000+
That was a good thread to read. But is this because DNC is seriously considering replacing Biden with Cuomo? And Tapper is on #TeamBiden?
Tapper does this thing where about once every week or two, he drops a tweet that is mildly critical of the Democrats, and coasts on those tweets to be thought of as a “straight shooting nonpartisan just the facts reporter.” But he never takes these criticisms to his show. He’d never bring Cuomo on and relentlessly badger him about why NY has the most deaths of any state. But he’ll fire off a tweet that he can point to and say “I hit both sides equally!”
It’s a total waste of time to ask why anybody on team blue does anything other than because it’s for team blue.
I’m out. Have fun you tiny proportion of the electorate. I need to eat a bowdlerized version of a quesadilla cooked by my American Wife and then head to bed. Chins up! Rhywun, if you’re out there listening good, strong thoughts to you!
I’m beginning to hate white people.
Let your hate be colorblind, bigot.
Instruction based on a Prussian model about obedience and conformity are hardly critical for children, especially when heavily laden with leftist propaganda. Homeschool children do just fine. Same with alternative forms of social interaction that don’t consist of being forced to sit in rows and only speak with permission.
Hear, hear.
Natural social interaction (games and play) is good. Schoolhouse enforced submission and conformity, they can probably do without.
I wasn’t aware of the Prussian model until I listened to a podcast a couple of years ago by either Malice or Dave Smith (might have even been Molyneux, I can’t remember) and it blew my mind. I had always figured that the dysfunction we see in our educational system was mostly due to an unhappy accident and not to a systematic model. It all makes sense once that’s taken into account.
unhappy accident? no, it was well planned out to get the type of people big business / government needs to fill seats in the factory / cube farm and pay their taxes.
Linked to it other times but John Taylor Gatto has a book about it. The book is kind of rambly at times but it lays out tons of information about how we have the school system we do.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B017ODVVGM
When paired with some thoughts from Hayek in Road to Serfdom about the Prussian / German way of thinking it’s no surprise we have socialist / commies inundating our school system.
You can’t buy it now from Amazon. It’s “currently under review.”
Amazon is now part of the problem. Wokeism has infected Bezos’ brain and they’re censoring wrongthink.
You may condemn me now for a thieving, conniving asshole.
If the explosive gasses and bullet were rendered perfectly silent, how loud would the cycling of an AR-platform’s mechanism be?
I ask because there are characters in the Tarnished Sterling universe that could silence the bang, and I’m wondering what’s left.
I am not going to google it from my work computer, but there are plenty of videos of people firing suppressed rifles. I don’t know about the AR, but I have seen recent videos of supressed Ruger PC9 and Ruger Mini-14 300 BLK that are very quiet. The cycling of the hardware is not much noise.
It also depends on the velocity of the round. Supersonic rounds make a fair amount of noise simply traveling through the air.
I did see an unusual custom Frankenstein creation back in the early 90s. Some guy who was a business acquaintance of my father created an air powered 22 caliber Gatling gun. Fully suppressed.
It was an amazing machine. I believe it fired about 2000 rounds a minute. And the loudest sound that came from it was the whirring of the air powered rotors. It was still quite enough that the other loud sound was the sound of all of the brass flying out and bouncing all over the ground.
He used it to cut down small trees. At least, that’s what happened during the demo. I was pretty young, so I was astonished at the display of wealth. Not from having a ranch big enough to have your own range. Not the fact that he was able to build and obviously very expensive and complicated prototype weapon and get the necessary licensing for a fully automatic suppressed weapon. But simply from the fact that he blew through more ammunition just a few minutes then I had seen in my entire life.
Definitely noticable, to the point where when people want to make quiet handguns, they will put some kind of locking mechanism to prevent the slide from moving.
As loud as you can manually cycle an AR, the powered cycling would be louder.
I would think most of the noise is from the bolt closing, which should be same either way (unless you manually ride it closed, a good idea if you use plastic snap caps. Ask me how I know.).
Remind me tonight, and I’ll cycle the action on one of my ARs next to my SPL meter.
I’ll try to remember.
You guys are going to get us all on some kind of watch list. 🙂
A new one? Or one of the ones we’re already on?
Fair point
It’s the same list. But now you have an (another) asterisk.
For the SPL meter? I’m pretty sure they already know about the ARs…
Remember that there are three sources of noise from the discharge of a firearm. One is the gas escaping the muzzle, one is the supersonic crack of the supersonic bullet, and the third is the cycling of the action.
A “standard” AR shoots a .223 bullet, which is very light weight. To transmit the amount of force deemed needed for an intermediate caliber cartridge, it has to go very fast. If you slow the .223 down so it doesn’t produce a crack, it won’t have much energy at point of impact. But also importantly, it probably won’t reliably cycle the action. If he can just magic away the crack while keeping the bullet at supersonic speeds, that’s fine.
What us non-wizard types have to do if we want a non-crack, but sufficient energy, is to transition to a heavier bullet. The .308 bullet in a .223 case goes slower with the same powder charge as a standard .223. If you lower it to subsonic speeds, you still get “enough” energy delivery at the target for wetwork and will reliably cycle the action.
Like Not Adahn said, a good solution if you want really quiet firing it to step away from semi-automatic actions so you can shoot-and-scoot without making a sound. A regular old .308 bolt action with subsonic rounds (rare on the retail market, but they exist, and can be hand loaded) would do this. OR, since you are writing about it in a book, I’m going to make a suggestion.
Suppressed
Lever
Action
Rifle
.44 Mag lever guns are a thing. You probably have to hand load subsonic .44 rounds. There’s a Forgotten Weapons episode with an integrally suppressed .44 bolt gun called the “Silent But Deadly” (because we are in the best of all worlds) that does something like this.
And, finally, if you wanted to get really off the wall, you could have him or his benefactors develop an electrical-motor-driven belt feeding system. Those could be far quieter than pneumatically actuated bolts, and it doesn’t matter how much or little energy is imparted by the powder.
“You probably have to hand load subsonic .44 rounds.”
You could just use .44 special.
Yesterday I flew from Boston to Los Angeles without wearing a face mask anywhere: Lyft, BOS, JetBlue, LAX, FlyAway bus, another Lyft. Other than the TSA guy who noticed that he didn’t have to ask me to remove a face mask cause I didn’t have one, it was uneventful. Granted, I flew in a Mint suite that has a door and nobody sits next to you, so other passengers wouldn’t even see me unless they were returning from the front lavatory. I was thinking of donning a mask for boarding and removing it at my seat by the Lyft ride to the airport was late, so I had to run to the closing gate and didn’t have time to worry about masks. The things probably would have been different if I flew in coach, but still it wasn’t a private jet.
To my pleasant surprise, the Mint service has mostly returned to normal.
Yesterday I flew from Boston to Los Angeles – are your arms tired?
Yes, but he was given some nice mints as refreshment.
Hack Suspected As Biden Posts Complete, Coherent Thought On Twitter
Antifa Throwing Bricks, Molotov Cocktails At Nation’s Eagles Due To Association With Nazi Party
Business Owner Charged With Hate Crime For Painting Over BLM Graffiti On His Storefront
That one is barely parody.
@UCS, I read your story. Your worldbuilding is impeccable. I could see every inch of the landscape. My only real problem was the disparity between what the main character said he could (or couldn’t, as the case may be) do versus what he actually did do. It was a little disconcerting, even though I believe the point was to make sure the reader knew the skald was right about a) his feats in battle and b) his false modesty. Good writing.
Praise does not improve him. He needs vicious criticism.
Thank you.
I’ve noticed a pattern in my writing. Pretty much all of my first person narrators have some major fact or set of facts that they are flat wrong about, usually involving the motivations of other characters, the rules, or their own ability.
Pretty much all of my first person narrators have some major fact or set of facts that they are flat wrong – just like you not being an actual libertarian
I censor my opinions for the audience I’m speaking to.
It’s a habit I developed living in a lefty-infested area.
I am a little hesitant to believe that pirates who’ve been that successful that long would be that stupid (to eat the dragon), but everybody has their pockets of ignorance. I mean, I wouldn’t eat a snake, but that’s because I’m a supertaster.
As a CYA, I’m going to say that there are some varieties that are perfectly fine to eat.
that was my criticism yesterday 🙂
although I phrased it different
You said deus ex machina, which I can see. The prisoners not being given anything to eat is convenient, but also logical.
However, having them been given dinner, that they refused, would have made the pirates suspicious and drawn the story out and then you’d have to write yourself out of that corner.
I have a tendency to use deus ex machina a little more broadly than the actual meaning…
It’s shorthand. We humans (especially ones who know each other fairly well) use shorthand all the time.
The internet is not good for transmitting shorthand correctly.
The unreliable narrator needs to be used sparingly across novels or else the reader will be able to anticipate you. Now, I realize I just contradicted myself with regard to the dragon-slayer here (Hermann?), but I think there needed to be some clue that he was lying to himself before he acquit himself in battle so elegantly.
But this was a short story, so there was little time to do anything more, and I can also appreciate that.
Every first person narrator is unreliable, and relays the facts as they believe them to be.
The pattern I’m talking about is a rather significant blind spot rather than generally unreliable narration.
I’m trying to think of an example that isn’t also a spoiler.
Yes, that’s true. However, the reader goes in trusting that the narrator knows what’s really going on for the sake of the storytelling. For a reader to go into a book knowing that “there are 3 sides to every story: yours, mine, and the truth” makes the reader work too hard right out of the gate and we are not trained to do that. We are trained to trust the storyteller until such a time as the storyteller obviously lies to himself.
I have exactly one unreliable narrator in my catalog. The clue is that though she claims never to cry, she does have a huge problem with allergies, thus training the reader to question everything she says.
Understanding is a three edged sword.
I don’t think you are correct here. In a third person narrative the reader trusts that they are being told the truth, but in a 1st person narrative I think intelligent readers remain aware that what they are getting is that speaker’s view of things. All 1st person narrators are unreliable, because all humans are unreliable and omniscient 1st person narration is bad writing.
Pretty much all of my first person narrators have some major fact or set of facts that they are flat wrong about
See, also, every person who has ever drawn breath.
Not me.
See, you’re wrong.
Our point is proven.
Interesting that you guys are talking about world-building.
I have been moving files from the vacation off of my phone. For some reason connectivity to the phone shuts off no matter what power saving mode I use unless I keep the screen active.
So I left YouTube playing while I transferred files. It slipped to a video critique of the new Star Wars trilogy. The focus of the critique was on the World building. The claim was that despite all of the action and number of characters, because there was no overarching plans for the story nobody had spent the time to build all of the world that is not showing on screen. So nothing gives you that sense that you are a dipping a toe into a vast ocean.
Then last night I had Firefly on as background noise while I was doing some work. Primed by the video about World building, I noticed the world-building that Whedon did in that series. It all rang true to me. Everything that you saw on screen in Firefly lead you to believe that there was a huge World Beyond that these characters were operating end and that moved an evolved off-screen when we were not looking.
I never really thought of it in those terms before. But now that I think about it, successful fiction really has to excel at this, particularly in Science Fiction and Fantasy. It made me realize that movies and TV shows that I felt like I should have liked but found to be weak and underwhelming failed at their World building. The world felt like a coat of paint on a canvas background, not like a complete world.
So this is the third time that a World building discussion has come up in the last 12 hours. I’ve pretty much gone my entire life without discussing world-building oh, so it is quite the coincidence.
All of which leads me to comment on the World building we are experiencing. They must have changed writers a few years back here on planet Earth. Because they’re world-building is failing. By having Donald Trump rise to power, they have shown themselves to be a Rian Johnson type writing staff. They are just trying to subvert expectations. They have quit with the idea of having any logic or consistency of character.
I should have figured it out when they put Obama in charge. The guy ran as a Rorschach test instead of having any beliefs or programs. But the twist of having him be and Nixonian figure was a bit too heavy on the subverting expectations side. And now we randomly have worldwide pandemics and race riots out of nowhere? Come on people, you really expect us to buy that?
Elon Musk should have been another giveaway. One guy starts 3 Industry altering businesses? Really? That’s just goofy. That’s just plain bad writing.
So yeah, the last few years have really strained my willing suspension of disbelief. And I think it is all down to the world-building aspect. All of this background with characters like Trump just kind of wrecks the continuity of the universe.
Regarding world building. A writer only uses about 0.5% of what he knows about any given subject that contributes to his world. What’s important is that the writer has knowledge of this world to give the story flavor. Like salt. There’s a ton of salt in the ground, but you only use a pinch in a dish. A writer who starts throwing in stuff is generally in love with the subject and wants the reader to love it, too, but the reader only wants to love the STORY, not the stuff behind the story, backing it up, bracing it, as it were.
Regarding who’s writing our world, they jumped the shark and the showrunner is only interested in getting a paycheck.
RR Martin can no longer keep track of his world. to much of it
World building is one of the fun parts of writing for me.
I could say a lot about the society of Xaxitan, despite the kingdom never having been even mentioned in a story (even a draft) to date. I could tell you the tale of the exodus of the Drakoi from Kydessa after the events of “Prince of the North Tower” and where the people ended up. Figuring out that the rain shadow of the Tular Guul Mountains made it reasonable for Xaxitan to never expand south of the range due to the desert it created was a moment of great satisfaction. And so on…
YouTube keeps pushing advertisements for some dude who wants to tell me about his alternate dimensional knowledge or some such. He might be rifling through your notes.
Nothing wrong with careful and elaborate world building.
Absolutely, as long as only a fairly minimal amount leaks into the actual book.
For world-building, I think the Malazan books are top-notch. Possibly too much leaked in, but the sense of depth and difference is all you could ask for.
With my contemporaries, I let my knowledge of a location and its history do the heavy lifting. With the historicals, I let the actual history do my heavy lifting. The Prohibition book was very difficult for me because though I know Kansas City like the back of my hand and I know the Machine’s workings almost as well, I didn’t have a good flavor for the culture of the time period, which was too close for me to fudge. Also, I was watching Boardwalk Empire at the same time as I was writing it and I felt totally and completely outclassed. I felt I simply couldn’t get a handle on the time period the way Boardwalk Empire did. It’s the little things, the small details.
My heroine in that book loves catawba flips and NuGrape pop. There was also mention of Polly’s Pop. That’s a thing and it was very regional, but my heroine liking grape pop doesn’t hold a candle to the richness of Boardwalk Empire.
That said, it was made easier by the fact that the Machine here did not tolerate Mafia from anyplace else, so I didn’t have to try to wade through an additional six layers of politics.
World building is probably Dune‘s biggest strength and also why the sequels have never been as popular as the original.
I liked Heretics. Chapter house not so much.
I’m still convinced that Chapterhouse was the middle book in a post-Scattering trilogy.
My favorite authors are great at world building. Some of them are absolutely terrible at writing plots and/or characters. I think Anne McCaffrey has only written four characters in her entire life, but her worlds are fun.
The only Anne McCaffrey I’ve read is the Crystal Singer series. I generally don’t care for worlds that involve dragons and suchlike.
The only paranormal world I’ve built/still building is my demon hunter, and that’s a lot more mythology than a fantasyworld, and there is no magic; only technology normal people don’t understand.
Well, the Pern setting isn’t exactly a standard fantasy. It was settled by spacefaring religious fanatics who deliberately eschewed technology. That gets hinted at during the first trilogy and as the series goes on the people eventually develop their own Industrial Revolution.
Pern is SF not fantasy. The dragons are genetically engineered lizards.
Maybe you should read my books…
I’m getting there! I still need to finish Black as Knight. I hate starting a second book before I’ve finished one.
The story yesterday was fun — my response to his ability to shoot the eyeballs out of a striking serpent was more that he must have had a LOT of training, and that the people who kept beating hum during that training must have been even better. Which honestly, the difference in fighting ability between someone in the military classes and the peasant classes was enough to make the trained people seem superhuman.
He was trained by the best available, and he compared himself to them, rather than against the common rabble.
So you successfully communicated the situation then.
Yay!I hope it’s not dragging.
Not yet, though between getting ready for my first match, trying to get enough sleep, and playing LOTRO with my brother and niblings, my reading time is very low.
I don’t know if you saw it, but since this is the first book I’ve purchased using my Amazon Fire, all of my suggestions are now shirtless torsos with swords. Sean’s isn’t as bad — only one in his.
I found the worldbuilding in Book of the New Sun immersive
What I read into the protagonist’s modesty was the fact that he had not yet been blooded until this point. That fact would have strong psychological restraints on a person’s self-image.
777 cases today for covid in Romania and the government models say we could reach 1600 a day in AUgust. Well it seems we are all going to die of covid and me I never got the chance to visit the US of A. Oh well the food would have probably been bad anyway
*blinking lights and sirens go off, Covid Coins start streaming out of the Romanian Health Service*
Mmmm… American Food… that reminds me, the crawfish pies should be arriving any minute.
crawfish – poor people food at least traditionally in Romania
Don’t be snobbish. It only hurts you.
Same here.
But poor person food is typically delicious.
you never ate polenta with raw onion and nothing else
If you took the time to cook the polenta, why did you leave the onion raw?
the general poor meal was polenta with raw onion and cheese, but sometimes you might not afford cheese. Romanians eat a lot of raw onion.
Oh, and if you added crawfish to those grits, carmalized those onions, you’d have a much better meal.
the problem with crawfish is that, unlike shrimp, it is almost impossible to get the meat out of the tail. it takes an hour to eat enough for satiety
The Cajuns don’t seem to have that problem.
well swamp living must have mutated the Cajun
Lemme clarify:
Poor person food in America is typically delicious. The Sicilian peasants would have poured some sort of salty-animal fat-flavored sauce over the polenta. Or stale bread.
pouring stale bread over polenta sounds weird.
200+ years ago in America lobster was only fed to prisoners and the poorest of the poor. That doesn’t make it bad food, only plentiful (at the time) and cheap.
Nice knowing you – would have bought you a steak if you visited NJ. Now the steak restaurant is closed and you’ll soon be a plague victim.
would have bought you a steak if you visited NJ – thanks but, no offense, NJ is veeeery low on the list of places to visit
It is normally surprisingly pleasant once you leave the NY metro area (which tourist seem to love for some reason) – if you can ignore the politics.
Smart.
They are doing lasting damage to race relations in this country. People like me who grew up in the 70s and 80s had a philosophy (treat people fairly and equally) and an objective (a colorblind society where race was not important). Chuck it all out and the race hustlers won’t like what most people replace it with.
As I remember it, there was not a serious attempt to pretend there aren’t differences between races (and cultures), but everybody considered on his or her individual merits deserved an equal opportunity to be happy and successful. I don’t honestly know what the fuck the current crop of “activists” is after.
I guess I’m a racist.
Congratulations! You have successfully completed step one.
“She lives in Romania, is 28 and the mother of three children, all with different dads.”
https://www.thesun.co.uk/dear-deidre/12132879/no-climax-so-girlfriend-took-off/
Sounds like you missed out on a real gem.
Romanian women doing the good work of fucking virgin dudes then leaving them be
Dude dodged a bullet
28, three kids and can take time off to jet to London to bang some dude she met on the internet.
Maybe there is some advantage to this whole “welfare state” thing.
I’m guessing he paid for the trip and probably still sends her money.
Did you notice that she had sex with an ex “the very next evening” and got pregnant? He might want to have a paternity test done.
Take your meds.
Anchor Nicolle Wallace said, “Well, I guess, Jason, the only thing scarier than Donald Trump continuing to show us who he is, is asking the question, what will he do if he’s facing a defeat? What is sort of in your bucket of worries about the desperate measures he’ll turn to ahead of November?”
Johnson said, “Well, so, you know, he’s already made it clear he’s stoking racial violence. I remember back in the 2016 Democratic convention when all the people got on stage, most of us were probably there and they were singing, you know, “What the world needs now is love, sweet love,” and I thought it was corny at the time, but now it actually makes sense. That is actually what America is looking for.” …
“You going to have militia showing up at vote counting places threatening people,” Johnson added. “We are in for a very, very difficult couple of months. We may be comfortable at the polling numbers now, but we have to remember that we have a president that is a proto-dictator and will do anything in his power to stay out, regardless of what the numbers say.”
“You going to have militia showing up at vote counting places threatening people,”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Black_Panther_Party_voter_intimidation_case
Old news, conservatives pounce, nothing to see here, they had it coming anyway
HAHAHA
They are really going hard on this line. I suspect that militia was a slip up because if unrest continues, I can see the NatG at polling places that are still being burned.
“he’s already made it clear he’s stoking racial violence”
IMAX projection
I said this in the begining and nothing has changed my opinion. If we had furloughed teachers through this lockdown it would have been over in april. The loudest most annoying screechers on social media are almost always teachers.
I said this in the beginning and nothing has changed my opinion. If we had furloughed teachers through this lockdown it would have been over in april. The loudest most annoying screechers on social media are almost always teachers.
Worth saying twice…
so sayeth the squirrels.
I can’t argue with this.
I need more wine. Today I find myself, to quote Ebenezer Scrooge, a year older and not an hour richer.
I need more whine. Somebody turn on The View.
I have nothing on except glibs. I am contemplating my mortality.
Happy Birthday?
Thanks
You da man, Pie. Big welcome to being a year older. Don’t look back.
Happy Birthday!
Happy Birthday!
la mulţi ani! ?
Deny deny deny.
In a conversation Tuesday with Washington Post Live, Rice — known to have personally unmasked officials in the Trump campaign during the election — denied, denied, denied. Oh, and blamed Russia, of course.
“Absolutely no, it did not happen. That is false. That is another lie designed to deflect from the president’s own very bizarre relationship with Russia; to distract from the much validated reality that Russia interfered in the 2016 election to benefit Donald Trump,” she said. “President Trump is in some sort of fever dream about the Obama administration when all we tried to do was to execute, despite the Trump administration or incoming administration’s reluctance, the most responsible transition we possibly could have presided over.”
Ladies and gentlemen, your future Vice President.
She’s pissed, because her CYA memo isn’t doing the CYA thing she wanted it to do.
Yuck, physically unattractive, corrupt as hell, and not that bright to boot is the opposite of what we need right now. Plus I could see her actually pushing for war with Russia which would be a terribly dangerous thing to do.
She’s a dumb bad liar and keeps getting caught in her own web of lies.
So you are saying we truly had a female Kissinger.
If the outgoing Bush administration had done to you what you did to the incoming Trump administration, you would not be singing the same song.
I don’t blame her. I blame the scum in the Press who place party above country and refuse to do their job as a fourth estate.
Obama was a public official for 12 years and then we have had another nearly four years since then and he has still never been asked a tough or probing question other than the one posed by Joe the plumber.
“asked a tough or probing question other than the one posed by Joe the plumber.”
Oh, and when he dared to ask the Annointed One a question the media and government employees colluded to share with the whole world his finances and tax status. Multiple government employees used government databases to dig up dirt on him, and received no punishment.
Joe the Plumber was more thoroughly vetted than Barack Obama was.
Not an exaggeration.
Now, it can be told
https://www.ajc.com/news/local/could-this-long-lost-photo-have-derailed-obama-2008-campaign/jC8NKhQr6a72VjRYY9o0EM/
I don’t think it would have done much, and I don’t think it’s a particularly good criticism of Obama; politics is what it is. But it is instructive how much effort was put into hiding it anyway.
You would dare to challenge the messiah???
The @ManhattanDA
charged this man being punched in the face with violent felony assault on the cop. The claimed injury was the *swelling to cop’s fist.* Read that again. Take it in. Then read this: This happens routinely. Prosecutors are shameless enablers of police violence.
https://twitter.com/ScottHech/status/1283425336412307458
I am enjoying all of the woke left who are waking up to this as if it never existed and we haven’t been talking about it for decades. Of course, it is their very newness to the topic that has led them to the diversion of racism.
That didn’t happen, cops never fuck up white people for no reason, CNN told me so.
That was a quick escalation. Maybe there’s something to this defund the police thing after all. Oh, and screw that prosecutor, eliminating absolute immunity is needed too.
This is absolutely critical. The fact that our lawyers have invented a shield of immunity for those of their profession that choose to to work for the state is unconscionable. And almost nobody is even aware this exists.
When the Supreme Court ruled that a prosecutor’s office that routinely framed people for murder could not be sued, the people should have risen up and demanded change. But the Press did not even cover it. It’s almost nobody even knows about it.
Those of us who have been following this beat 4 more than a year or two recognize a pattern. Some guy gets beat up by the police and the prosecutors charged him with resisting arrest or assaulting an officer. Then some noise gets made about a video being released. Then the charges are dropped. Then we find out that the guy was violently assaulted and everything in the charges was a complete lie.
Almost universally that is the end of it. Maybe if there is enough press attention the officers will be charged but not convicted and then they will be reinstated with full back pay.
Nobody ever even looks at the corrupt prosecutors who brought the charges in the first place. Nobody even thinks to question their integrity or the corruption of a system that protects them from any consequence whatsoever.
Attempting to frame people and deprive them of their civil rights, particularly in the light of exculpatory video like this, should be a chargeable crime in and of itself. Any prosecutor who would push for that charge in those circumstances is a criminal in a suit.
You clearly are not qualified to sit on the supreme court.
Meta-Analysis: Gay men exhibit spatial and verbal skills typical of straight women, despite having been socialized as boys; lesbians exhibit spatial skills typical of straight men, despite having been socialized as girls.
https://twitter.com/SteveStuWill/status/1283562267343085568
Doubtful.
Or at least not accounting for confounding variables.
Not buying it. Not unless they drew their sample of gay men from stereotypical gay men’s professions.
Umm… there have been plenty of other indications that it’s propaganda for quite a while now.
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/ted-cruz-bari-weiss-resignation-reveals-new-york-times-is-propaganda
Self-awareness, you have none.
Murtaugh concluded his remarks by referencing the recent protests and stating that there wasn’t an “organized effort” to ensure precautions at the protests, and “I do not recall MSNBC or CNN or anybody else being concerned about the safety of people who attended those gatherings. But, suddenly, when it is involving a President Trump rally, then, of course, then these safety measures are of a paramount. But when it’s a large gathering with a political message that MSNBC would agree with, suddenly, safety measures are really on the back burner.”
Tur concluded the interview, but remarked that “the president is the only one having indoor rallies or events of that scale in the entire country. Again, the protests were outdoors. All of the doctors and health experts say that that is a safer place to hold them. I attended a number of those rallies, everybody was wearing a mask, hand sanitizer was handed out. And we just saw the images of those rallies, people were not wearing masks inside the president’s rally. There was not social distancing being practiced. We saw the signs being removed from seats. So, you can say you handed out hand sanitizer and gave out masks, they weren’t wearing them. And also, Dr. Fauci today has said that the incubation period for this disease could be longer than just two weeks.”
Murtaugh sarcastically remarked, “I appreciate that speech, Katy. Thank you.”
Before going to commercial, Todd stated, “And just a reminder, for what it’s worth, there is no editorial point of view here on any of these newscasts on MSNBC in the daytime.”
Having actually watched this it _seems_ like Todd was actually trying to smack Tur back into line. I believe after the above quote Todd says “for what it’s worth.” Todd is a partisan and a numbskull but I think a part of him believes he’s a “journalist.”
I saw that, and i’m split on weather he was chastizing Katy or Murtagh. He Looked pretty annoyed/uncomfortable while Katy was giving her speech (which she was doing). She wouldn’t let him get a word in edgewise, and raised her voice and kept going whenever he tried to speak. I don’t know anything about Murtagh, but the way Katy handled herself is what i come to expect from MSNBC.
How about their condemnation of protests to end the lockdowns? Those were “dangerous” and going to spread the virus, too.
https://www.vivino.com/chateau-montus-madiran/w/86847?year=2010
This is not bad. Not fab, but good.
Hit the gym earlier hope the booze don’t kill my gains
XY broke his beloved headphones and I am busy supergluing the pieces together. I now will be picking glue off my skin for the next 2 weeks.
in the good old days you would have sent xer to the mines to earn the money for new headphones. Parents these days are to soft.
He bought them in the first place. He was just so heartbroken I had to try.
Nail polish remover is going to be your best friend.
Excellent. Thank you!
(I don’t wear nail polish and thus, I have no remover. I had no idea.)
I don’t wear nail polish, but I have remover for the acetone solvant.
you should. black like the soul
You don’t know how hilarious that image is until you’ve met him.
I can just see him picking .22LR out of the Browning box with his ebon-hued nails and loading his BX-1s. And I’m giggling.
I can just see him picking .22LR out of the Browning box with his ebon-hued nails and loading his BX-1s. – you have some random letter and numbers in there
random, like this?
https://www.google.com/search?q=BX-1+magazine&tbm=isch&ved=2ahUKEwiG2oqxjNLqAhVIjOAKHWOwB-gQ2-cCegQIABAA&oq=BX-1+magazine&gs_lcp=CgNpbWcQAzICCAAyBggAEAUQHjIECAAQGDIECAAQGDoGCAAQCBAeUKsEWIkNYLoOaABwAHgAgAGeAYgBkwaSAQM1LjOYAQCgAQGqAQtnd3Mtd2l6LWltZw&sclient=img&ei=e3MQX8awLMiYggfj4J7ADg&bih=444&biw=1589&rlz=1C1GCEA_enUS863US864&hl=en
Boil some water, cast a playlist of This Old Tony to the TV, and as soon as you can stand the heat put your hands in the water. After five minutes, start scrubbing at the glue with your fingernails.
Works every Time
I’d rather just wait the two weeks.
Sandpaper
Bullshit. Who would pass up an opportunity to rewatch a bunch of This Old Tony episodes. His coring auger build video was art.
Ew.
https://www.dailystar.co.uk/diet-fitness/slim-teen-transforms-herself-record-22352355
Agreed.
she probably gives good handjobs
By good, you obviously mean “M to F gender reassigning”
She looks like a bad photoshop.
and one dose of steroids at a time.
https://twitter.com/ClassVengeance/status/1283773611946450945
https://twitter.com/dfsparks/status/1283269781253025794
https://twitter.com/ClassVengeance/status/1283784337113194498
In response to a comment about the gulags. Maybe what i like most about tankies is taht they don’t try to claim the gulags didn’t exist, but that it was totes ok because the people in there were political prisoners who opposed socialism.
A related thought from a Jordan Peterson interview. Some Brit lady was talking about how there is no oppression of speech in the west and brought up some iranian comedian who was jailed for joking about the regime. He countered with the British guy who taught his ex’s dog to Nazi salute and was prosecuted.
Literally prosecuted for a joke. And the interviewer said that didn’t count because it wasn’t a joke. Literally a joke is not a joke because I don’t agree with it.
This is precisely who we are dealing with. Political prisoners are not political prisoners if they are not on my side.
These people will happily send us off to the gas chamber and call it justice.
Attempting to frame people and deprive them of their civil rights, particularly in the light of exculpatory video like this, should be a chargeable crime in and of itself. Any prosecutor who would push for that charge in those circumstances is a criminal in a suit.
Something something under color of authority.
Capital offense.
Hence the invention of absolute immunity for the government side of the legal profession. Eat it, plebes!
Nail polish remover is going to be your best friend.
aka acetone
“Boy, 16, was given estrogen for behavioral disorder while in L.A. juvenile hall, suit alleges
A 16-year-old boy being held at a Los Angeles County juvenile hall developed enlarged breasts after he was prescribed estrogen to treat a behavioral disorder, a move that baffled doctors who said the treatment defied medical logic, according to a lawsuit filed last month.
The teen, whose identity is being withheld because of his age, was diagnosed with oppositional defiant disorder, or ODD, two days after he was arrested and housed at Eastlake Juvenile Hall in June 2019, the lawsuit said. Medical records reviewed by The Times show that the teen’s testosterone levels were “slightly high” when the doctor who diagnosed him prescribed daily doses of estrogen.”
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-07-15/teenage-boy-was-given-estrogen-developed-breast-tissue-while-in-l-a-county-juvenile-hall-lawsuit-alleges
WTF??
https://witnessla.com/new-lawsuit-tells-of-16-yr-old-boy-allegedly-forced-by-probation-officials-to-take-estrogen-as-medication-to-control-his-behavior/
“doctor who diagnosed him prescribed daily doses of estrogen.”
What, are you questioning an EXPERT’S diagnosis?
I wonder if someone went through the porn on that doc’s computer what they’d find.
Who put money on Tentacles and underage ladyboys?
Yeah. Thinking the same thing here, and it’s not exactly brightening my day…
Obviously, since “boys will be boys” is hatespeech, the correct idea is “boys should be girls.”
Why are you assuming two genders?
“Girls” is the first step on the infinite gender spectrum which includes everything other than “male.”
The people with an agenda are positioning themselves so that they can implement it at the end of a gun.
I’d put a bullet in someone for that.
That’s just CIS White lies!
The boy’s parents were not aware that he had been diagnosed with ODD or was undergoing treatment until late July 2019. Doctors said the treatments should not have been carried out without the parents’ consent.
No shit. The fact that they were makes me think they are “treating” minors without consent a lot. Pretty sure that makes this a crime, also.
Amazon doing some censoring.
This is what happens when you lose the Kulturkampf.
Somebody should let Otto von Bismarck know.
Bezos is a big donor to Reason. No surprise they are more into Kulturkampf than libertarianism.
Bezos, Soros…. birds of a feather.
Well if libertarians were serious about their political project they would get rich off of government cheese and use their money like the other billionaires do. Until we start doing that, we really can’t complain.
Bezos was one of the more resistant originally. I’m not sure why the change has happened, exactly, though perhaps his sordid (extra)marital affairs went deeper than what has been revealed.
The world seems to be crazier every time I wake up. Maybe if I don’t wake up things will get better? Rockadoodle!
The teen, whose identity is being withheld because of his age, was diagnosed with oppositional defiant disorder, or ODD, two days after he was arrested and housed at Eastlake Juvenile Hall
Why didn’t they go with electroshock therapy, or lobotomize him?
Chemically neutering is obviously more humane.
Who ever heard of a pubescent male that was oppositional or defiant?
That. But some far more than others.
As someone who’s dealt with a kid who has ODD, it’s far beyond what you’re used to dealing with. It’s typically a precursor to sociopathy (Antosocial Personality disorder)
I believe I can attest to this.
“Who Funds The Lincoln Project? Exactly Whom You Expect
If The Lincoln Project was exclusively campaigning against Donald Trump, one might be tempted to believe it wasn’t merely an arm of the Democratic Party. If one of its co-founders, John Weaver, hadn’t been registered as a foreign agent lobbying for a Russia-owned nuclear-energy company against U.S. sanctions not long ago, one might accept that the group believed the conspiracy theories it spreads. If the group wasn’t working against the moderate Republicans senators for the sin of supporting originalist Supreme Court justices, who will transcend the Trump presidency and help preserve the traditional constitutional order, one might believe that its mission was to preserve the system. If you target moderates like Susan Collins and Cory Gardner — politicians who not only parted with Trump on issues but have quite un-Trumpian dispositions — you’re not working against Trumpism, you’re working against the GOP.
The media can keep calling you “Republicans,” but if you support Democrats, take Democratic Party positions, make voting for Democrats all the way down the ticket a binary choice and moral imperative, and then take most of your money from big Democratic Party donors, you’re a Democrat. That’s fine. You should embrace it.
I’m not really a fan of making a big deal over a group’s funding. Your arguments should stand on their own. I don’t care who pays you. But if you advertise your cause as something it’s not, you’re a fraud. And the biggest funders of The Lincoln Project aren’t distraught Republicans but long-time Democratic Party operatives.”
https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/who-funds-the-lincoln-project-exactly-whom-you-expect/
The Niskanen Center for Republicans
This kind of makes me think of Malice’s critique of people who say “X politician isn’t a real Republican”. If they hold that seat, and hold it as a republican, i think that gives more credence to the idea that that the are an example of what a republican is. Rather than having this pie in the sky idea of what a Republican is, just acknowledge that the republican party has a huge swath of people who would rather see other GOP people out of power than loose the power themselves.
So does that make Sarwark and the Niskanen center representative of what a libertarian is?
For some range of Big L Libertarian. Except Niskansen institute dropped the libertarian designation so thats good.
Sorry, I understand the no true Scotsman fallacy, but at some level of tolerance when you accept that a person can adopt any name and that the person then defines the name by their actions you are basically denying any meaning to names. Down that path lies chaos. Or more accurately down that path lies totalitarianism, because the totalitarians will defend their names and subvert their opponent’s names, which is exactly what your post demonstrates.
Nit picking and excluding people based on any deviation from the group think is wrong, and what the Democrats do. Accepting that Jennifer Rubin and Bill Kristol are conservatives or Republicans because they claim to be is not fighting against nit picking, it is letting your enemy define the terms, and leads to impotence.
“Libertarian” is an ideological position. “Republican” is a member of a group. That said, there’s no reason why somebody who supports the competing group/Democrats down the line should get away with calling themselves a Republican. Don’t wear the laundry if you are actually playing for another team.
Don’t wear the laundry if you are actually playing for another team.
Spies get exectuted.
If they were advancing conservative Democrats, it’d be a lot easier to take them seriously. But conservative Democrats don’t exist anymore, and while in some states they are not that far gone (<10 years in southern state legislatures), they are now gone pretty much everywhere. What remains is a radical anarcho-communist wing being protected and nurtured by a larger “moderate” wing that doesn’t want to recognize what a danger the radicals have become, even as they get picked off one by one by the radicals, and is willing to be pulled leftward to avoid any appearance of being wrong. That is a coalition that hasn’t yet decided it if wants to conquer its opponents or just stuff them into a ghetto, but has nevertheless settled on those being the only two options. The last thing they need right now is more power.
This is all very johnny-come-lately even if it isn’t as disingenuous as National Review suggests. The LP, for all its faults, at least manages to (usually) get full ballot access every year.