It’s been a difficult week. Totally slammed with work, pulling very late nights, and skirting my now-yearly depression around SP’s birthday. Bless her, Tomb Raider has been totally supportive and understanding, despite the rather formidable ghost that hovers over our relationship. She may be a Prog, but she manages to be a pretty fine human. And of course, this being Groundhog Day, I have a smile remembering watching that movie several times with SP and both of us laughing our asses off and throwing lines at each other. Then we’d watch Caddyshack to kill our last few brain cells.
Anyway, besides our beloved Phil, today is a birthday for the usual odd assortment of people, including the crappiest novelist to ever get a cult following; and another contender for the same award; one of the icons of my youth; another of the icons of my youth; another of the icons of my youth; and the erect nipples that launched a billion boners.
So, without further delay, the news.
Speaking of aggressively retarded…
What if they don’t want it back (which they don’t)?
Maybe because it’s just total bullshit? Note the writer’s affiliation.
Everything is better with monkeys.
You probably know how to code. Go get honest work.
Old Guy Music is a whole performance, not just one song, but dayum, what a performance! And what a band (Mingus, Jaki Byard, Eric Dolphy, Clifford Jordan, Danny Richmond). Mandatory listening unless you’re an uncultured tard like Sloopy who thinks jazz is just playing scales.
You are wronger than both Hyperbole and Ted S. It’s impressive.
Those sound like the words of someone who has never experienced the simple joys of a monkey knife fight.
I’m not very good at fighting monkeys with knives. I have to resort to using flamethrowers to deter the blade-wielding miscreants.
That would smell really bad. Surely birdshot is the answer.
See, if a minkey comes at me with a knife and I kill it, I’ll be the one arrested it’s like they’re little po-po.
Classic. But I still prefer “does your dog bite?”
And tough to beat a monkey telling the penguin joke.
That was a good beer.
And even better with the Monkees.
OM, I knew the poster without looking, but I looked anyway. My 14 YO son had that in his BR about 50 years ago. Some things never get old
She did. But not too old.
Speaking of, Greta might be a resident of HMP if you have any way of becoming a guard.
The wife HATES monkeys. I wanted to give her a trunk monkey for Xmas one year, damn near divorced me.
For those who don’t know the joy of Trunk Monkey.
—“Everything is better with monkeys.”—
Yes. Yes it is.
I’ll just leave this here for the killjoys.
I am. I’m also going to write a Glibs article about it.
To be fair, I knew how to code, I just didn’t know how to code in C. (I’d done C++ in high school, a crapload of Java in college, some Pascal and COBOL, but not plain ole’ C)
Will your article cover your foray into Journalism school, how you made fun of blue collar workers that had their lives wrecked by the climate cult, and then “Oh, woe is me” us all now that you have faced a similar fate?
No. This article is nonfiction. I didn’t do any of that journamalism stuff.
Abandoning Pascal in educational contexts was criminal. There are some better intro languages but not many.
The only worse choice than Java was C++. Unless educators deliberately wanted students to hate programming.
My high school computer science classes were organized as – Machine language -> Assembly -> Pascal -> Desktop Publishing -> Java -> C++
The idea was that people who were looking to play video games would get chased off by the bare metal level material first.
That’s like teaching calculus first in order to scare off anyone interested in math.
I don’t get the point other that hatred of your students.
We are talking about the New York Public School system, so they probably did hate the students.
I attended similar and got a pretty good education.
The schools I attended did their darnest to beat the inquisitiveness out of the students and make them hate the subjects being “taught”.
In grade school, I had to tell the teacher what a barb on a harpoon looked like. And this was born out of a discussion regarding an assigned book, not something I’d done outside the curriculum.
It’s one way of weeding out the weak.
That’s not appropriate in high school.
In college, sure.
No, it is appropriate in high school. It’s preparation for the real world.
I went to Catholic school. If you couldn’t hack the work or were a discipline problem, the school kicked you out. Much better preparation for the real world than public school.
Whippersnapper!
Basic -> pascal -> c -> too many to mention.
My big claim to fame was working on an alpha version of Java. The application we built was so big and inefficient that Sun used it for years to benchmark jvm’s. That said, Java developers are a tedious lot. They are convinced that every task has to be solved with Java. Parsing lots of text files? Maybe use perl? NO! Gotta use Java to do that.
Once you know one language, you can hack along in just about anything. My entire career has been littered with times someone has handed me a book on a language, pointed at a bunch of code and given a list of all the things that needed to be fixed. Just dig in and figure it out.
My only bias is against any language that insists that whitespace be important (Looking at you Python!)
I found out the hard way that tabs and spaces are treated differently by the interpreter.
I’d much rather just use brackets than have to keep changing the indentation on my code when I adjust the logic to add or remove conditionals or loops.
I would much rather use perl than python, but for some reason python has become a standard in the data world.
And most of the time, let me just stick with sql, its designed for this task.
Perl is the spawn of evil. Almost as bad as JavaScript.
Yeah, I was put off by significant white space.
Not a huge deal with a modern editor and it probably does make it easier to read, but it definitely pushed me away from Python for a while.
My only bias is against any language that insists that whitespace be important (Looking at you Python!)
Hear, hear! Bravo! Standing O!
That’s without even getting into the tab and whitespace stuff usc mentions below.
what might be even worse is allowing array indexing to overrun ‘allocated’ memory. Var[-1] means wraps the array?!??! talk about creating nearly impossible to track down bug potential. A bug that accidentally indexes an array with a negative number will just merrily wrap the array and grab some number and your code will execute and give an answer. it will be the wrong answer, but no-one’s the wiser until something else fails.
I remember some writer explaining the power of FORTRAN to make meaningful modifications to the operating system using negative indexes. He was only being partially sarcastic.
Python’s handling of significant whitespace is pretty tame and makes the code nice to look at IMHO – and I’m not a big fan of Python for other reasons.
But if you want a language where whitespace makes you pull out your hair, try Haskell.
In grade school, I got to go to a special summer computer camp where we learned programming. I was the youngest one there (by several years), and we learned the new up and coming language Logo. When I got to high school, we got to learn BASIC on Apple IIe’s…
At home I learned BASIC on a TRS-80, a touch of QBASIC, and dicked around with Pascal.
Catholic schools may be better, but bastions of technology they were not.
I remember Logo. Couldn’t remember the name of it for years and years, but I did work with it when my age was in the single digits or low two digits.
I learned BASIC at home when I was 8. We had a Sun-manufactured XT clone with no hard drive (but two 5.25″ disk drives).
That’s because Catholic schools just can’t raise taxes and force people to pay for whatever new technology comes down the pipe.
The only worse choice …was C++
On the scale of wrongness, with degree of wrongness increasing to the right, you are somewhere over there in the right-iest of extremist right wingers, MAGA-ier than MAGAPrime.
I’m not sure I understand.
(pulls on ‘joke’ explaining gloves)
You see, I read that as rhywun claiming teaching C++ was bad, worse than teaching Java, early in ones programming education. He’s, of course, wrong. So I defined a scale of wrongness with the independent variable being a measure of your evaluation of programming languages – lets call it the x-axis – and the dependent variable being how wrong that evaluation is – lets call it the y-axis. So in the normal way of plotting on a 2-dimensional manifold – lets call it a sheet of paper – generally the independent variable increases to the right. One can assume a functional form for the dependent variable as a function of the independent variable, so long as it is increasing at some rate as the independent variable increases – lets just call it exponential for illustrative purposes. So if I assume – it’s really a given here – that rhywun is wrong about C++ being a bad language, I can assign him a value of the dependent variable on the curve. Now he’s so wrong, that we need to identify a location on the curve that, when projected down to the dependent variable, is so far off to the right on our hypothetical plot, that we can add the twist and substitute a political ideology for our ‘programming language evaluation axis’ and we’re so far to the right that it’s at MAGA-Prime level of extremist right wingerism, at least in the evaluation of a typical prog. Now of course, this is an imperfect joke, partly because the definition of the independent variable is not really clear, mostly because it’s early in the morning and I’m just fucking around and I suck at jokes anyway. However, the implication was that rhywun was wronger than wrong, to an extreme degree.
(removes joke explaining gloves, puts on breakfast making gloves)
You clearly misunderstood my confusion.
I wanted to know why you believe C++ to be a good learner language, or at least better than Java.
c++ is a horrible learner language, he is wrong.
c is fine, imo.
Disclaimer – language holy wars, even given my intense dislike of python – are pretty silly. Coding is understanding conceptual logic, how one achieves that can be good, bad, indifferent but BASICally, however you get to understanding conceptually, you can very quickly pick up other languages.
That said, I don’t understand the C++ hate as a learning language. You can learn – or not if you choose – object orientated programming and/or pointers, you can learn memory management and clean coding practice. It won’t let you do sloppy programming that is prone to hard to find bugs (strong typing, strict variable declaration and sizing). With the vectors, strings, STL, you can avoid some of the memory management if you want and access powerful ‘built-in’ algorithmic functions, but you will still need to be mindful of what’s going on under the hood. The compilers work very hard at backward compatibility – your code won’t suddenly stop working if you compile it 10 years later, unlike other code *cough* python *cough* that will break shit on minor version changes (slight exaggeration, but not much). To me those are fundamental ideas that one should learn when learning to program – you can leave them behind once you understand them, and understand the tradeoffs of putting them under the hood. I don’t c c++ as being particularly bad at teaching those concepts. The best? Maybe not and a lot of what is ‘best’ depends on how your mind works.
So I guess it comes down to ‘do what you will’ – the answer will be different for different people. How terribly libertarian.
I haven’t used C++ since before the STL was introduced.
Back then you could use the preprocessor to change private to public.
… pointers, you can learn memory management …
Dropping those things on people new to programming is a mistake, IMO – those are implementation details and a good way to scare people away from programming.
Does a professional programmer need to know those things? Of course. But they are in no way needed from the get-go.
Dropping those things on people new to programming is a mistake
Different strokes, different folks I guess. I learn better when I understand the fundamentals, how things work. When you understand those fundamentals, then you are equipped to know when they can be ‘hidden’, what that hiding means, and what the implications are. The school of programming that you ‘don’t have to know the implementation details’ leads to people using black boxes without understanding whats going on and whether the details under the hood are actually appropriate for the problem you are solving. Of course those issues are closer to algorithm implementations and the like, but the principle is the same; Understanding *why* you can hide those implementation ‘details’ makes for a better programmer in the long run.
Disclaimer – not a professional programmer, rather developing algorithms to solve particular problems which requires lots of programming while not being ‘formally’ trained. Most professional programmers would probably blanche in horror at my code!
(puts on house cleaning gloves – literal this time – to prepare for week long guests)
The school of programming that you ‘don’t have to know the implementation details’ leads to people using black boxes without understanding whats going on
I’m not arguing that, though. I’m saying you shouldn’t start with that. Get into the details after people understand things like assignment, control flow, various data types, etc.
You don’t have to get into how an internal combustion engine works in order to learn how to drive.
Lots of people can be productive without knowing how it all works under the hood. That’s a good thing. A subset of those (us) will dive deeper as they move deeper into the field.
Top down learning
Bottom up learning
They both work.
Just make sure you have a coherent plan when you start.
Ideally, the lesson plan is tailored to take advantages of the skillset and mindset of the student.
at slum – I think you can learn those things in C++ too; more easily than some other language? Maybe not. But you also have access to more fundamental ideas as well should you choose to put some focus there as well. But you damn well better understand flow control, data structures, and data types learning c++!
Anyway, I’m getting the stink eye for not having my house cleaning gloves on yet, so I’m checking out for the day! Be stoic and enjoy the invariably rocking tunes Ron will provide us with.
Intro to programming was in WATFIV. Later classes were in Pascal.
First time was FORTRAN 77 and assembly. Later we moved up to C. That’s were I got of the bus in ’94.
First
timejob was FORTRAN 77 and assemblyI haven’t done any FORTRAN. I’m not sure if I’m missing out.
You can solve any programming problem with the Computed GO TO.
That reminds me of the time I took a class in Visual Basic just for fun (and an easy A – I was one point shy of a perfect score for the whole set of projects in the class). It was too easy so I wrote a program that handled all of its internal communications by throwing exceptions and triggering GOTO commands – just because you were not supposed to do it that way.
If you try FORTRAN, go for FORTRAN 90. Whitespace doesn’t matter like it does with FORTRAN 77.
Learn to code but have the wisdom not to.
“They had been giving the monkeys sweets, fizzy drinks and cereal – sugary treats which are well known to make monkeys more hyper and sexually-active.”
* looks at 12 pack of Jolt Cola and 3 boxes of Cap’n Crunch *
Valentines Day is coming up.
Looks FOR a 12 pack of Jolt Cola and 3 boxes of Cap’n Crunch. See if it works.
It either works, or you have a visit to the hospital…
If the right of conquest does not apply (to Jooz) this the only sane alternative.
If they don’t want the land back they’re free to declare them independent territories, but then Israel is under no responsibility to clothe and feed the Palis.
Egypt doesn’t want Gaza.
They were offered that shithole before, and refused to take it.
And Jordan doesn’t want the West Bank Arabs back, either- they remember what happened last time.
Just like giving DC back to Maryland. It is more useful for propaganda purposes in the current status.
Or Toledo back to Michigan.
Or Youngstown back to Pennsylvania.
Giving DC back to MD wouldn’t increase the number of (D) senators, unlike giving it back to VA.
VA got it’s share back.
Yup, and went from solid red to leans blue.
You seem to have forgotten the old Byrd machine. VA was deeply Democratic from post Civil War to Reagan, then began to transition to purple. Never was solid red.
They don’t care about being able to vote. They care about power.
No kidding.… standing on the shoulders of giants.
“Everything’s better with monkeys.”
*Takes notes
I always believed that everything was better with loose women and good whiskey, but I will have to research this monkey thing…
So it’s not just tornadoes that trailer park residents need to worry about. V Tail Doctor Killers are also magnetically drawn to them.
Wonder if Martin Mull has got another song in him?
Apparently no one has ever copied Sex and Violins to the internet. Is this a glitch in the matrix?
“just total bullshit?”
Not sure about that. I know a couple of people who have had Thyroid Cancer. In one case, she was constantly talking with her cell phone against her ear. Her oncologist even told her that was a likely cause.
Post hoc ergo propter hoc?
Better than ante hoc ergo propter hoc.
But yeah, without any sort of plausible mechanism it’s not enough/
Maybe worth looking into? (although not necessarily with a big government study)
Sure, and rather than statistical inference, let’s talk mechanism – what causes the cancer to develop.
Ionizing radiation?
“She may be a Prog, but she manages to be a pretty fine human.”
Good on her. And a good reminder that people, with some (a few?) exceptions, aren’t defined by politics.
Politics only define a person if that is how they choose to define themselves.
The leftist cult demands you define yourself by whatever whim they demand the cultist take on at any point…
Everyone of them decides that individually – they want to be part of that cult.
How is Tomb Raider at bike robbing? Any moral compunctions at acting as your lookout?
She specifically asked where you were living now so she could help. She’s spry.
Missing man may be connected to Virginia Beach Fishing Pier crash, police say
A body immersed in water for a week can’t be in good shape.
Fishing with himself as bait?
Yeah, they get pretty bloated, squishy and like to pop. We just had a dead guy that was in his bathtub for about a week.
including the crappiest novelist to ever get a cult following; and another contender for the same award;
Only because you haven’t heard my wife gushing about Sarah Maus or Maas.
Surprised no one has mentioned Rowling, Jordan, or Martin yet.
Why? I’ve read one book between the three of them, and it was so unmemorable, I’ve forgotten what happened in it.
All three have series with cult followings.
But how do I know that they are the crappiest if I’ve never read andthing from 2/3 of them?
My wife harassed me about reading the game of thrones books during the height of the hbo series. I finally gave in a started the first one. I think my bookmark is still on page one hundred and something. I think the potter cult influences peoples of the books. They’re fine for who they’re written for.
Potter is fine. It’s the cultists that are odd. My one complaint about them is that they don’t seem to lead the readers to other places. Tolkein readers often get drawn to reading Homer, Mallory, Beowulf, books on medieval architecture which lead to reading a bunch of other stuff. Potter fans never seem to make it past Potter.
I read one Jordan and wisely bailed out. Way too much ink for way too little story.
I read 3 Martin books. Then it became obvious to me he had some interesting ideas and characters, but no clue where the story was headed or how the pieces fit together. Wisely abandoned.
Is there even a Potter cult anymore? I thought she had been cancelled.
Potter fans never seem to make it past Potter.
Yes, the Necronomicon is the next logical thing.
You’d think Potter fans would drift on to the Butcher Dresden books, the Grossman Magician books, or the like (both even have television adaptations to ease them in).
You’re assuming they would have even heard of these things. I can only identify one – and I haven’t read any of it.
Where would the natural conduit be?
I thought R.R. Martin was all about writing long pages worth of descriptions about people’s cocks…
I do think the cock merchant profession was a stroke of genius.
The Lev Grossman books? Yes, lets rip off Bret Easton Ellis and and Harry Potter! It will be great!
Yeah, but are they the King of cult followings?
Fuck, I hate that a-hole.
My first thought was Stephen King.
^^^THIS^^^
Like Rand, see my comment below, he works better in short formats.
This is probably true of lots of authors. Niven’s best (solo) works are his short stories and novellas.
His early works were quite good.
As he became famous, he became un-editable (he wouldn’t let the editors do their jobs) and his work suffered mightily.
See also Clancy, Tom.
WHEEL OF TIME RULES!!!!!!!
Sounds like stockholm syndrome.
You’re yanking your braid at me right now, aren’t you?
I enjoyed reading them. Same with game of thrones(though to be fair, I actually listened to those, best bang for the buck on audible)
Neither of the links was to L Ron Hubbard, so I am confused.
And seriously, people like to bash Rand as a novelist, and her writing style has some flaws, but it isn’t awful. Yeah, her two big works drag on a bit, but Anthem gets right to the point. No where near WORST.
She wasn’t really a novelist, but a polemicist who hid in fiction.
Orson Scott Card feels left out.
Oh, why did you have to remind me. The one book of his I listened to I really fucking hated the protagonists, and it was all entirely pointless as it was just setting up the next book without having enough plot to justify its own existence.
The only reason I finished it was becuase it was playing during a road trip with my Dad and it was his turn to pick the audiobook.
Which one?
I don’t remember the title. It was about some Oort cloud miners making hostile first contact with Ant aliens.
Dipshit didn’t even understand basic physics, and acted as if a transfer between two ships with a matched velocity was anything particularly difficult for people who supposedly lived their entire lives in these craft.
There was also an entirely pointless and stupid side plot (not a sub plot because it Never intersected with the main plot) about some “international super special forces” team that strained credulity past the breaking point, especially with even a basic understanding of politics.
With the transfer scene, let me elaborate – The suspense was supposed to come from how fast their absolute solar orbital velocity was – while the relative velocity of the two vessels was effectively zero. This wasn’t about possibly getting struck by slower moving particles, or anything like that. He treated it like transferring between two aircraft in an atmosphere. There was so little material outside the closed frame of reference, that throughout this “tense” scene I kept going “these ships are effectively stationary relative to each other”
Ender’s Game is an adolescent power fantasy for picked-on nerds.
But I will say that OSC does some excellent world-building. The Alvin Maker series is a good example, as is Pastwatch.
The other thing I enjoy about OSC is he takes advantage of the implications of real-world physics that traditional scifi glosses over. In the Enderverse (initially) FTL travel isn’t a thing, so the MC takes advantage of the dual magic of time dilation and compound interest. In Pastwatch, random things are always random. So going back in time means you don’t know what the lottery numbers are going to be, and more importantly to the plot the same sperms won’t find the eggs of future generations.
The gains from compound interest are largely erased by inflation.
I tried to read Ender’s Game once. It bored the everloving crap out of me, I don’t think I got more than a few scenes in.
Yes but needing no residence and eating two meals during your multi-decade trip helps build up a nest egg (and IIRC, he also had a military pension).
Sounds like Earth Unaware.
Might have been.
Was one of the designated protagonists a whiny shit who kept moaning about how much he loved his cousin after she was sent away to prevent them from fucking?
I don’t know, I considered reading the series at one time but then decided not to. It’s a prequel trilogy to Ender’s Game describing first contact between humanity and the formics, the ant-like aliens we’re at war with in that novel.
I read the short-story version of Ender’s Game. Then tried the sequel…
The sequels which followed Ender I strongly disliked. The ones that were the Ender’s Shadow series, I enjoyed quite a bit.
Somebody at work just told me that too. I might try the Shadow series at some point.
I read one Card novel. My response was basically, “Yeah, I see why this is a classic, and I have no interest in reading anything else of his.”
Bonus music link from the sidebar on OMWC‘s offering.
Thanks for that.
My favorite version.
See my previous comment about “strategy”.
They have this shit down to a science.
It’s not like they are learning anything when they are in school.
Or that they are all that safe.
Are you sure that wasn’t just to get the kids out so they can turn it into another shelter for migrants?
Since I didn’t get to add to the beary goodness yesterday,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NiIz3apsVA8
You rang?
Not surprised to see people defending the attempted vandalism of the Mona Lisa on the grounds that political violence is acceptable when it’s for a cause we agree with.
The Canadian truckers were far more peaceful.
Yes, but Canadians only have whatever rights the government decides they have at any given place and time, so they have no reason to complain.
Same people who tell white people they have no culture (particularly this month) – while attacking one of our culture’s masterpieces.
Wait a second… since when did we start letting Italians be white people? Next you’ll start counting Irish, Germans, and Slavs as white.
Irish, Germans, and Slavs are whiter than Italians.
They are aspiring whites, particularly northern Italians.
Southern Italians are just baptized Arabs.
One of my gun clubs is having an indoor 2-gun match, so basically cinematic-style CQB. One of the stages requires 62 rounds, which considering this is N-fucking-Y where magazines are capped at 10 rounds is a bit excessive. I deliberately set up my PCC to take CZ75 mags thinking it would simplify matters. I do own enough, but I’ll have to stuff them in my pocketeses hobbit-style.
Daily Ray of Sunshine
background for the Ray
That’s what a real man does. The rest of us are pretenders.
Concur. Also a pleasure to see the classic British stiff upper lip again.
They made a movie about it starring Anthony Hopkins.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ae46hTS6dY
I saw that review. The movie is now on my list to watch.
the crappiest novelist to ever get a cult following
Happy birthday L Ron!
*wild applause*
Crappiest?
You must mean……”diarrhetics”
For Pie, Zeihan takes note of Romania.
right…
I have to believe that the victims of Minnesoda Man were …. marked men
What body parts are we talking about?
Dicks. He kept hearing people tell each other to go eat a bag of dicks, noticed there was no such thing at the grocery store, and saw a market opportunity.
So this was a modern day cock merchant?
Target seems to have a real problem identifying stuff correctly.
First they couldn’t tell boys from girls in the big trans kerfuffle. Now this.
They’ll have a stern word with the Chinese factory that churned out that crap.
They all look arike!
Who…Blacks? or Chinese? or both?
*Checks Prog Opression Handbook to see who’s lower on the pole*
*nelson laugh*
Well, the world needs ditch diggers, too.
Yeah, but the world doesn’t need so many people who help bald magical women. A definite cap on witch wiggers.
Or good progressive people can just round up all the wrong thinkers and make them dig ditches
Cabin on 10 Acres Backing Up to National Forest
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0k5t51xUqk4
71 Aspen Rd, Pagosa Springs, Colorado
🏠 Features:
* 3 Bed / 3 Bath Cabin
* Updated Kitchen
* Large Gameroom
* Large Metal Barn
* Fenced For Horses
* Short Walk to Rio Blanco River
$795,000
I like that one.
3 beds, 3 baths, not exactly the same as we had in Canada on fishing trips
This seems like a pretty good deal. Wolf Creek is a helluva ski mountain.
Shame it’s in CO, though. I like it otherwise, a lot, but I’m less than excited about living in a leftist controlled state. AZ is on its way there, too, unfortunately.
A lot of the bullshit melts away when you get far enough away from the Front Range. Counterpoint is that Denver is sort of a libertarian paradise now, since pretty much nothing is illegal.
Learn to code.
to be fair reddit programming subredits are full of doom and gloom about how bad the market for software developers is . better to learn to mine cobalt.
Oh, no, I would never take jobs away from those poor Congolese children in the artisinal mining industry.
Titillating temptresses and bathykolpian busty beauties with boundless breasts to arouse your ardor.
https://archive.is/WRblH
Friday Funbags.
The third one down looked almost like it was AI generated.
I, for one, welcome our new robot overlords.
From the overnight dead thread overnight, I thought it was hilariously ironic that the UK government designated Orwell’s work as a potential trigger for * right wing * extremism.
You really can’t overparody the modern day Airstrip One wanting to memory hole Orwell, a life-long socialist, for writing heretical thoughts about where Stalinist IngSoc totalitarian thinking could lead to.
/Chef’s kiss 💋
Derpy didn’t post a link so I hesitated to believe it was even real.
A quick Google search shows it’s from a Fox News article from 3-28-23.
It does illustrate the difficulty of parodying progs.
It can’t be said enough. “Maybe we’re the baddies.”
Wendy Williams has a new documentary about how shitty her life is….
Caption Contest!
ATTN: Tres.
https://www.dailystar.co.uk/diet-fitness/size-22-model-slips-gym-31965158
To be fair, she does have a gorgeous face.
If she lost half her body weight, she could be a supermodel.
It looks like they photo-shopped a pretty woman’s head onto a fatty body.
Offsets the two baggers with a Farah body.
Yes, Yes, Yes.
She’s just about Jugsy’s size, only smaller.
Well, there’s no way she “slipped into” that gym gear.
Pigeon suspected of being Chinese spy released by police after eight months
https://twitter.com/SkyNews/status/1753121189373804991
Why would you release a pigeon? Pigeons are filthy sky rats, put it out of our misery.
Supposedly they were brought to the US because they’re tasty.
“City Chicken”
What’s pork got to do with it?
They can be cooked to be very tasty, but a lot of work because of the bones.
—“Supposedly they were brought to the US because they’re tasty.”—
“Squab. Squaaaab. Squaaaaaaaaaab.”
Jake Harper
A World In Crisis: Why We Need Revolutionary Change
https://www.socialistalternative.org/2024/02/01/a-world-in-crisis-why-we-need-revolutionary-change/
The case for ending capitalism and beginning the socialist transformation of society couldn’t be clearer. The scale of the problems we face and their urgency begs for a rational and democratic planned use of resources for human needs. The working class under capitalism has created productive forces on a completely unprecedented scale which lays the basis for ending all of these crises, but they can’t be properly deployed because of subordination of the economy to profit.
In the last five years, especially in 2019, we have seen a wave of massive social struggles across the world from Hong Kong and Myanmar in Asia; to Iran in the Middle East; to Chile and Colombia in Latin America. In the US we had the George Floyd Uprising in 2020; in France in early 2023, a massive wave of strikes to defend French workers’ hardwon pension gains threatened to become a full scale confrontation with the ruling class. We have seen huge feminist struggles and an unprecedented level of involvement by young women in social struggle generally. Young people have also displayed a tremendous level of internationalism in these struggles, a desire to overcome all traditional divisions.
I noticed the unironic oxymoron, “a rational and democratic planned use of resources”.
Rational = what I want
Democratic = everyone else doing what I want
transformation of society
Without any actual plan.
Almost like “revolution” is the entire point. Into what? Who cares.
Good grief commies are so tiresome.
Gonna work this time, fasho.
I just finished reading 2 books on the Chinese model of how the CCP manages everything.
If anyone is interested I’ll be happy to forward them along.
“Has China Won?” and “We Have Been Harmonized”
If interested:
latvia2112@ the yahho thingy
The story has legs
An attack on Swift would carry significant risks for Trump, given his existing vulnerabilities with women and young people.
“Waging a war on Taylor Swift is certainly not a way to win over the young voters and women that they’ve been hemorrhaging because of their stance on so many issues and the people, the abusive men that they’ve elevated into positions of power,” said Kaivan Shroff, press secretary for the Gen-Z progressive group Dream for America.
Just this week, a poll from Quinnipiac University underscored Trump’s weaknesses with women, who make up a large part of Swift’s fanbase. The survey found Biden opening up a 6-point lead over the former president amid growing signs of a gender divide, with 58 percent of women saying they support the incumbent.
That poll has only amped up fears that Trump’s unpopularity with women could cost him in what is expected to be a close election. He has long been accused of sexism and recently sparked criticism for his attacks on primary rival Nikki Haley in the wake of his victory in New Hampshire.
Is the typical Taylor Swift fan old enough to vote?
Women in their 20s and 30s can vote, yes.
Who allowed such a thing?!
TIWTANFL
In response to the conservative fury over the singer, former Rep. Liz Cheney (Wyo.), one of Trump’s most vocal Republican critics, called Swift “a national treasure” on X.
It’s a done deal.
people are still getting paid to do this
https://twitter.com/literalbanana/status/1753322694408556892
“Republicans struggle to reach young voters because of their policy, but then further alienate themselves from that voting bloc through frivolous attacks on people like Taylor Swift,” Hammett said.
Everybody I know wants retroactive free college and completely unrestricted abortion. Why don’t the Republicans hear and obey, instead of saying mean things about Taylor Swift?
Jeff Bezos’ new wife is less manufactured than this news item. And it’s been going on for a week.
LEEROOOOY JENKINS
https://twitter.com/HiddenOG/status/1753112628556382595
I think this is historically inaccurate and misleading. Wang Yangming was a major figure in Neo-Confucianism, not psychology. One field is a superstitious pre-modern trash pile of fraudulent just-so stories meant to control peasants, and the other is Neo-Confucianism.
https://twitter.com/St_Rev/status/1753351124193571187
Watching Linfamy’s history of Japan series makes me believe Kong Qiu should have head his skull crushed with a rock as an infant.
Youtube served up a nice clickbait clip about a Toyota engine running on ammonia. I did a little digging this morning. It’s an interesting concept, but there are, as always, a lot of practical obstacles. Blending ammonia with gasoline or diesel fuel seems to work. It might be better suited to ships than automobiles.
*this is all based on the premise that carbon dioxide is a lethal “pollutant” of course.
The NOx emissions will make it illegal.
And ironically, ammonia is used in SCR scrubber systems to remove NOx.
The case for ending capitalism and beginning the socialist transformation of society couldn’t be clearer.
A global socialist dictatorship is precisely what we need. Trust me on this.
Question for glibs – is the “Shoo-in” vs “Shoe-in” textual version of the phrase a regional thing, or just whatever the person latches onto growing up?
Yes?
I just assume that “shoe-in” is wrong.
You are correct, sir.
Regale us with the etymology please
https://grammarist.com/spelling/shoo-in/#:~:text=The%20conventional%20spelling%20of%20the,usually%20by%20waving%20one's%20arms.
The conventional spelling of the noun meaning a sure winner is shoo-in, not shoe-in. The term uses the verb shoo, which means to urge something in a desired direction, usually by waving one’s arms. The idea behind the word is that the person being shooed—for example, into the winner’s circle, into a job, or into a field of award nominees—is such a lock that we can shoo him or her in without hesitation.
The term originated in the early 20th century. The earliest instances relate to horse racing, with the shoo-ins being horses that are destined to win through either dominance or race fixing. The earliest instance listed in the OED is from 1928, and we are unable to find any examples from earlier. The word seems to have blown up in the 1930s, though, and historical Google News and Books searches uncover numerous examples from that decade and the 40s. By the 1960s it was in use outside horse racing.
“shoo in” makes sense
“shoe in” does not
I’m glad I’m not alone, but I so often see people using the footwear and can’t figure out why.
Yeah, tow the lion for the OED.
ah there ya go.
Popular new literary genre mixes romance and fantasy
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/popular-new-literary-genre-mixes-romance-and-fantasy
TikTok’s popular BookTok channel has been buzzing about a new genre called “romantasy” that is spawning whole sections in bookstores. Jeffrey Brown visited the stacks and talked to author Rebecca Yarros to see what’s driving this trend. It’s part of our arts and culture series, “CANVAS.”
New?
Well how many romantasy books have you written?
Not my Genre. I do adventure.
But the fusion of romance and fantasy is older than dirt. The use of a fantasy setting for the recognizable modern romance genre is as old as the modern iteration of romance.
There’s nothing new but the derpy label.
I prefer zombie apocalypse romance.
DED
Book Tok is ChickLitTok.
https://www.amazon.com/XXXenophile-Collection-6-Heart-Stone/dp/1889061123
Also known as “fairy tales”?
Experts baffled
In the year since his dramatic escape, Flaco has become one of the city’s most beloved characters. By day he lounges in Manhattan’s courtyards and parks or perches on fire escapes. He spends his nights hooting atop water towers and preying on the city’s abundant rats.
To the surprise of many experts, Flaco is thriving in the urban wilds. An apex predator with a nearly 6-foot (2-meter) wingspan, he has called on abilities some feared he hadn’t developed during a lifetime in captivity, gamely exploring new neighborhoods and turning up unexpectedly at the windows of New Yorkers.
“He was the underdog from the start. People did not expect him to survive,” said Jacqueline Emery, one of several birders who document the owl’s daily movements and share them online with his legions of admirers. “New Yorkers especially connect to him because of his resilience.”
But as Flaco enters his second year in the spotlight, it can be easy to forget that his freedom is the result of a crime, one that has improbably remained unsolved.
——-
In internal emails obtained through a Freedom of Information request, zoo officials urged the Parks Department not to publicly describe Flaco as “raised in captivity.” Likewise, the term “escape” should be avoided.
“That puts the blame on the animal rather than the perpetrator,” the zoo’s then-communications director, Max Pulsinelli, wrote in one email. “This was a crime.”
No victim-blaming, please.
They should bring in a female and turn her loose in Central Park.
Lefties are all about confining wild animals now? I’m confused.
Joe Flaco escaped?
Yeah, he upgraded to… Cleveland. Ok so it was more of a lateral move, but still,
urban wildlife: Growing up in a gun/hunting culture I learned that each kind of animal has it’s own unique habits, patterns of movement and shape etc.
Once you have seen them a few times your brain subconsciously learns them. Once you have learned them you will start seeing that critter much more often and in unexpected places. Urban bobcats, wolves, coyotes, trash pandas, raptors etc exist in surprisingly large numbers. Once I learned how to see bobcats I started noticing them all of the time, most notably in cities.
They are baffled, are they? I once saw a bunch of eggheads tugging on their chins and speculating about how in the world people could have domesticated canines. Immediately I knew that none of those assholes had a dog and grew up in an urban environment.
Wild animals, at least the ones that have social habits are easier than hell to domesticate. In fact, I am torn as to whether we domesticate them or it is the other way about. Just give ’em some food and I dare you to get rid of them after that.
*rips tin foil*
This exchange has fascinated me this week. Is it as simple as Mark being a cuck? I can’t imagine just sitting there and taking shit from Lindsey Graham, THEN turning around and offering an apology to (mostly) bad parents. Or is he in on the entire charade of giving a shit about this? Questions for Plato.
Because if he just says some stuff it’ll go away and he can go back to his life?
Congress has this kind of bullshit all the time. Most people ignore it.
It didn’t matter how he answered. The grandstanders were still going to bully him.
He’s just going along to get along.
Which is understandable if you are trying to get back to your Hawaiian compound.
I had to laugh at the “ermagerd, he’s building a survival bunker at his Hawaiian compound” stories.
If I had his kind of scratch, I’d have a multi-square mile compound also (maybe even in Hawaii) and it would damn sure have a survival bunker on it. Partly because I think the process of designing and building it would be fun. Partly because, why the hell not?
Yeah. What’s the point of being the evil genius if you can’t have a lair to hide in.
Last bit before I drop off for the weekend:
I saw “Godzilla Minus One Minus Color” last night.
I think the movie looks better in black and white than color.
Praise Biden
Job growth posted a surprisingly strong increase in January, demonstrating again that the U.S. labor market is solid and poised to support broader economic growth.
Nonfarm payrolls expanded by 353,000 for the month, much better than the Dow Jones estimate for 185,000, the Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Friday. The unemployment rate held at 3.7%, against the estimate for 3.8%.
Wage growth also showed strength, as average hourly earnings increased 0.6%, double the monthly estimate. On a year-over-year basis, wages jumped 4.5%, well above the 4.1% forecast. The wage gains came amid a decline in average hours worked, down to 34.1, or 0.2 hour lower for the month.
Job growth was widespread on the month, led by professional and business services with 74,000. Other significant contributors included health care (70,000), retail trade (45,000), government (36,000), social assistance (30,000) and manufacturing (23,000).
Health care, government and social assistance; the welfare industrial complex. The foundation of a strong economy.
Labor Dept. is determined to drag Joe Biden’s corpse across the finish line in November ahead of Trumphitler.
“On a year-over-year basis, wages jumped 4.5%, well above the 4.1% forecast.”
Awesome, that will more than make up for the 15-20% price increases since we got Biden.
Who got those 4% raises?
Not here. I might not even get a bonus.
We dont’ really do much in the way of raises, it’s all in bonus/RSUs. I’d be surprised if I got 3%.
I got 3% this week.
“Job growth posted a surprisingly strong increase in January”
Correction incoming!
Why does anybody take the headline number at face value. How many times do you have to get slapped in the face with a dead fish before you say “Hey, I’m not putting up with this any more?”
Is it as simple as Mark being a cuck? I can’t imagine just sitting there and taking shit from Lindsey Graham, THEN turning around and offering an apology to (mostly) bad parents.
Act of contrition.
Go forth, and sin no more.
It’s nice that Punxsy Phil shares his day with the Prognosticator of All Prognosticators.
“Michigan school shooter’s mom Jennifer Crumbley and her firefighter boyfriend used swingers app ‘adult friend finder’ to recruit strangers for hotel sex parties while ignoring son’s pleas for mental health help”
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13037993/Michigan-school-shooter-mom-Jennifer-Crumbley-Ethan-cross-examination.html
Somehow this story keeps getting worse.
I’m finding that often in a really bad story, there are multiple really bad actors.
“Look kid, just try getting laid. That’ll sort out your problems.”
No matter how bad a person she is, she is not responsible for her son pulling the trigger.
Prosecute her for neglect and parental abuse if you want, but not for manslaughter.
Until DAs can be found liable for undercharged recidivists, little people should have immunity.
A more encompassing measure of unemployment that includes discouraged workers and those holding part-time jobs for economic reasons edged higher to 7.2%. The household survey, which measures the number of people actually holding jobs, differed sharply from the establishment survey, showing a decline of 31,000 on the month. The labor force participation rate was unchanged at 62.5%.
Those people are being paid to not work, so everything’s cool.
Don’t they also wind up revising every single one of these down?
Yes. They will report it next month, on page 17 of the New York Times, in size 4 font.
Takes one to know one
In private, he doesn’t stop short.
The president has described Trump to longtime friends and close aides as a “sick fuck” who delights in others’ misfortunes, according to three people who have heard the president use the profane description. According to one of the people who has spoken with the president, Biden recently said of Trump: “What a fucking asshole the guy is.”
Is there anybody who doesn’t know Biden is a bitter, vindictive asshole?
Get my coat. I’m going to track that motherfucker down on the quad and beat his ass!
When I read things like this it makes me think Biden really in in charge.
The only way that story could be surprising is if it said Biden considers Trump to be a smart, formidable opponent.
update:
“Kansas City Chiefs fans found dead had three times lethal amount of fentanyl plus cocaine, THC: reports”
https://nypost.com/2024/02/02/news/dead-kansas-city-chiefs-fans-had-cocaine-thc-and-3-times-lethal-amount-of-fentanyl-reports/
Surprised by that.
Oh, wait, no I’m not.
Now, that’s a watch party.
I am a little disappointed that it is a case of overindulgence… I was hoping for something more interesting, maybe some light organ harvesting gone wrong with a dash of something canibal adjacent.
Who got those 4% raises?
Teamsters and auto workers. the true heroic backbone of the economy.
https://twitter.com/messedupfoods/status/1753167840855888134
lesson here about the social value of not allowing ppl to wantonly threaten public figures
good grief britain
https://twitter.com/eigenrobot/status/1753339594630705313
i don’t know… politicians should feel a little fear once in a while
I’m starting to have a theory that part of the problem with our current political economy is the absence of violence, believe it or not. Fear of the ruled is the only thing that can keep a ruling class in line in the long run. They certainly won’t do it themselves.
I do think that the quality of governance directly correlates with a politician’s likelihood of getting an involuntary Big Bird Costume
Flood your country with barbarians, you will have barbarism.
Tough to see coming, I. know, but there it is.
The epithets may cut against the image Biden often projects as someone eager to take down the level of incivility and acrimony in politics. But they also illustrate a core anger he has developed toward the man he ousted from office and may very well face again.
Biden has long been troubled by what he has perceived as Trump’s encouragement of political violence, which the incumbent believes is a direct threat to the nation’s democracy and deeply un-American, according to the three people familiar with his private conversations, who were all granted anonymity to describe them. His disgust toward Trump has never been a secret but has only grown in recent months as the former president tightens his grip on the GOP nomination.
Political violence, as in insufficient deference to the ordained ruling caste.
“That Trump guy, what an upstart. I belong here. I paid my dues.”
The epithets may cut against the image Biden often projects as someone eager to take down the level of incivility and acrimony in politics.
Listen, fat…
Joe Biden has been a thin-skinned bully during his entire public career. The idea that he’s some standard-bearer of civility is laughable.
Is this the Joe Biden that has repeatedly threatened American citizens with violence? Made good on some of those threats? Whose acolytes organized and provoked riots, looting and mob violence? Imprisoned political dissidents? Attempting to jail his political opponent? The same Joe Biden whose lickspittles tell us we aren’t allowed to vote for Trump in order to save democracy?
All projection, all of the time.
I’m starting to have a theory that part of the problem with our current political economy is the absence of violence, believe it or not. Fear of the ruled is the only thing that can keep a ruling class in line in the long run. They certainly won’t do it themselves.
The Consent of the Governed as a meaningful concept needs to be revived. By which I mean withdrawn.
I just checked the calendar and the Stoic Friday wasn’t scheduled.
Then I went to my posts to make sure I had sent it to be published and it doesn’t show.
I typed it up last night and am pretty sure I hit the button to send it for review.
I just looked as well, not on the calendar,
Hi!
Urgent
An incorrect font size is displayed on the instrument panel for the Brake, Park, and Antilock Brake System (ABS) warning lights. As such, these vehicles fail to comply with the requirements of Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standard number 105, “Hydraulic and Electric Brake Systems” and 135, “Light Vehicle Brake Systems.”
The recall applies to the following vehicles:
Tesla Model 3 2017-2023
Tesla Model S 2012-2023
Tesla Model X 2016-2024
Tesla Model Y 2019-2024
Tesla Cybertruck 2024
As per usual, this is not a recall in the traditional sense. Tesla says it will push out an over-the-air software update to correct the font size to comply with FMVSS, which is how it typically corrects these mistakes.
Catastrophe averted.