I saw a diet ad that claimed, "In 7 days, your pants will no longer fit you."
They don't fit now!
*.*
My body is not a temple.
It is, at best, a decaying cabin in the woods with a horrifying past.
*.*
After urging from environmental activists, the World Economic Forum, and Bill Nye the Science Guy, Arby's has changed its slogan to "We Have The Bugs."
"We felt it was time for us to shed our archaic, meat-centric image and promote a more environmentally-friendly cuisine," said Samber Rothborg, the new Chief Diversity Officer for Arby's. "It's important that we acknowledge our shameful past while charting a course forward into a more sustainable future for all of us." Rothborg's eyes then glazed over and she seemed to shut down like an android.
Arby's will now offer roast mealworms, roast crickets, and roast Pfizer mRNA protein cubes instead of their traditional offering of delicious food. Climate experts agree this move could, maybe, conceivabily contribute to a 0.0000000000003 degree global temperature drop within 9 trillion years. "Vee are pvoud of ze steps Arby's iz takink, vork vill set you free," said WEF Chairman Klaus Schwab.
At publishing time, Burger King had announced they were changing their slogan from "You Rule" to "Easily Digestible Protein Sources Such As Fried Grasshoppers Rule."
*.*
My buddy Joe has lost a lot of weight on the new Dolly Parton diet.
It's made Joe lean, Joe lean, Joe lean, Joe lean.
*.*
My church serves noodles for communion.
We're Ramen Catholic.
Quote of the Times;
“Whites will be an absolute minority in America... that’s a source of our strength." – Joe Biden: https://vimeo.com/554324166
Link of the Times;
“Wants Crime To Flourish”: Joe Rogan Slams Soros As An ‘Evil’ Villain In Superhero Movie:
https://www.dailywire.com/news/wants-crime-to-flourish-joe-rogan-slams-soros-as-an-evil-villain-in-superhero-movie
Issue of the Times;
It’s Official: Leftist Researchers Lie. That’s Why Universities Are Doomed by Edward Dutton
With a few glaring exceptions, such as the late James Flynn, leftists are systematically less interested in the truth than conservatives. Or to put it more bluntly, they lie more often. Thus a major research project has shown that, when findings in psychology have proven fraudulent, the findings almost always support leftist ideology.
Leftists lie for myriad reasons. One is that they are systematically more mentally unbalanced than conservatives. High in Machiavellianism and vulnerable Narcissism, they crave status and adoration to deal with their feelings of low self-esteem, powerlessness and high mental instability. Those feelings cause them to fear a fair fight, and they therefore seek power covertly by virtue signalling about such matters as “equality.” This is particularly true for women: Over half of young, female leftists suffer anxiety or depression.
An example of their dishonesty: the way in which their actions speak louder than their words. “I think all races have equal intelligence,” a leftist will say in denying average IQ differences between whites, blacks, and Asians. But he will then speak to blacks more simply than to whites, implying that he believes black people are less intelligent. See Self-Presentation in Interracial Settings: The Competence Downshift by White Liberals, by Cydney H. Dupree and Susan T. Fiske, psyarxiv.com, September 7, 2018.
In contrast, conservatives will say “treat everyone equally” and so speak to blacks and whites in exactly the same fashion, regardless of perceived intelligence differences.
Another example: Despite their oft-stated affection for minorities, wealthy leftists are often like Bill and Hillary Clinton, who live in overwhelmingly white Chappaqua, New York. A university education gave them all the right attitudes about minorities, as Joe Sobran quipped, and the money and means to move as far away from them as possible.
The point is, leftists score higher on the “lie scale” than conservatives. They are more inclined to lie, especially to present themselves in a positive light [Corrigendum to “The nature of the relationship between personality traits and political attitudes [Personal. Individ. Differ. 49 (2010): 306–316), by B. Verhulst et al., Personality and Individual Differences, September 2016].
So we shouldn’t be surprised to find that when an academic assembles research findings in psychology that do not replicate—often due to initial data manipulation and other dishonest techniques—they turn out overwhelmingly to be studies that purport to prove left-wing ideas.
The University of Bristol’s Gavin Leech’s ongoing “Reversals in Psychology” project has found precisely this trend, although it fails to focus on this leftist-conservative difference. For helping with the project, Leech thanks such psychologists as Stuart Ritchie of Edinburgh University, who virtue-signals with a Ukraine flag in his Twitter bio and has blocked me for some reason.
But rather than speculate on Leech’s motives, let’s have a look at some of his noteworthy findings:
1. No good evidence shows “tribalism” forms around arbitrary characteristics, which would mean strong groups develop for purely environmental reasons. Social groups are a way of indirectly passing on genes, so even friends tend to be more genetically similar than chance would predict, as J. Philippe Rushton proved [Ethnic Nationalism: Evolutionary Psychology and Genetic Similarity Theory, by J. Philippe Rushton, Nations and Nationalism, September 27, 2005].
2. The evidence that “implicit bias” training helps combat “racism” is so weak as to be virtually meaningless, and the reliability of the test instrument is unacceptably low.
3. The “Pygmalion Effect”—that a teacher’s expectations improve a pupil’s performance, or colloquially, that a student will rise to the level of the expectations he is given—which would explain why “marginalized” pupils don’t do very well, is generally nonsense.
4. The evidence for “stereotype threat”—that individuals absorb a stereotype that their group isn’t good at something, which in turn makes them bad at it—is so weak as to be meaningless.
5. The concept of “multiple intelligences,” which suggests that everyone is “intelligent” in his own way—such as “emotionally,” athletically, or existentially—is inaccurate, and even the academic who proposed it in the 1980s now admits this.
6. Studies that find that IQ is mainly environmental, and can be permanently increased by environmental intervention, do not replicate and are “highly suspicious.”
7. No good evidence shows that teachers who tailor their teaching methods to the supposed specific needs of pupils—such as teaching black and minority students differently than whites and with less discipline—has any positive effect.
8. One finding that I found particularly interesting: There is no correlation between the prestige of an academic journal and the likelihood that its findings can be replicated. Leftists have taken over all of the most prestigious journals and will duly mock research, and try to dismiss it with appeals to authority, if it is published in low-status journals. But this is pretty much compulsory if the findings question leftist dogmas. Yet here we have clear evidence that the findings published in “prestigious” journals are not guaranteed to be correct. The relationship between “correctness” (in that it can be replicated) and “journal prestige” is zero.
However, for me the most interesting finding: the political skew to fraudulent, poor-quality, or otherwise unreplicable research.
As far as I can tell, Leech’s project highlights 23 instances of research that is either highly environmentalist, or substantiates left-wing ideas that do not replicate or for which there is, at best, “very weak evidence.”
By contrast, the project highlights 11 cases of such questionable research in evolutionary psychology or research that appear to substantiate conservative perspectives, including studies on the possible existence of a spiritual world. (A number of the studies, such as those with regard to the influence of brain hemispheres, led to neither leftist nor conservative results}.
So, if we’re being generous to leftist researchers, then their research is three times more unreliable than research that leads to conservative findings.
But what if we’re simply fair?
The 23 leftist research findings include the case of Dutch social psychologist Diederik Stapel, who has so far retracted an astonishing 58 fraudulent studies. Stapel deliberately concocted data, including such findings as people who eat meat being more selfish and that being exposed to litter, or an abandoned bicycle, promotes stereotyping:
• Committee: Dutch professor faked data for years, by Toby Sterling, Associated Press, November 3, 2011
• Coping with chaos: how disordered contexts promote stereotyping and discrimination, by D.A. Stapel and S. Lindenberg, Science, 2011
The 23 leftist examples also include studies by Brian Wansink, formerly of Cornell University, no less than 50 of whose studies contain “fatal errors” due to the “gross malpractice” of manipulating data.
In terms of “conservative” research, studies by the German-British psychologist Hans Eysenck have invited 26 “expressions of concern.” These include “the validity of the datasets, including the ‘recruitment of participants, administration of measures, reliability of outcome ascertainment, biases in data collection, absence of relevant covariates, and selection of cases analysed in each article’” [Expression of concern: Articles by Hans J. Eysenck, Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, 2020]. A number of Eysenck’s papers have been retracted due to these “expressions of concern” [Retraction Notice, Perceptual and Motor Skills, 2020].
But an “expression of concern” is not proof of fraud or malpractice and Eysenck can’t defend himself because he died in 1997.
But even so, we can now say that 78 percent of the instances of fraudulent, manipulated and otherwise poor research led to results that are in line with leftist ideas. If we dismiss the “expressions of concern,” as justice to Eysenck demands we must—then 92 percent of the cases of bad research involve leftist findings.
Put simply, fraudulent, manipulated research is overwhelmingly conducted by leftists. These results, as I have discussed before, suggest that universities—now dominated by leftists—are no longer interested in the pursuit of objective truth, but instead are more interested in enforcing dogmatic compliance with leftist ideology.
Leftists are liars and if they take over universities, then research by academics can be expected to be lies. And this is exactly what’s happened.
Students who pay hefty tuition will be increasingly subjected to lectures and material that are nothing but leftist lies. Which is another reason why we can expect the College Bubble to burst.
News of the Times;
TEACH Your Kids, and LEARN Yourself:
https://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?post=247716
NYC Electric Garbage Truck Plans Hit Wall After Trucks "Conked Out" Plowing Snow After Just Four Hours:
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/nyc-electric-garbage-truck-plans-hit-wall-after-trucks-conked-out-plowing-snow-after-just
Even AI Is Suspicious of the Military-Industrial Complex:
https://bracingviews.com/2022/12/26/even-ai-is-suspicious-of-the-military-industrial-complex/
U.S. Plans Combined Arms Training for Ukrainian Soldiers:
https://www.defense.gov/News/News-Stories/Article/Article/3248075/us-plans-combined-arms-training-for-ukrainian-soldiers/
Immigrant Kids Outnumber Swedes In Major City, Swedish Now Minority Language In Schools:
https://valiantnews.com/2022/12/sweden-two-thirds-of-malmo-kids-are-from-immigrant-backgrounds-swedish-shouldnt-be-used-in-schools/
Kirk Cameron's Christian book reading draws record numbers of parents, kids after Indianapolis Public Library refused to host him:
https://thepostmillennial.com/breaking-kirk-camerons-christian-book-reading-draws-record-numbers-of-parents-kids-after-indianapolis-public-library-refused-to-host-him
Court Documents Reveal Grisly Details in Butcher-Knife Slaying of Couple in Florida Retirement Home:
https://lawandcrime.com/crime/court-documents-reveal-grisly-details-in-butcher-knife-slayings-of-couple-in-florida-retirement-home/
Professor advises students to report scholars who bash white people or Christians to DEI office:
https://www.thecollegefix.com/professor-advises-students-to-report-scholars-who-bash-white-people-or-christians-to-dei-office/
Brazil's First Corn Shipment To China Indicates Shifting Trade Flows Could Endanger US Dominance:
https://www.zerohedge.com/commodities/brazils-first-corn-shipment-china-indicates-shifting-trade-flows-could-endanger-us
Egg Prices Hit A Record High and Are Still Going Up:
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2022/12/egg-prices-hit-record-high-still-going/
Mass Chicken Culling Is An Attack On The Food Supply:
https://www.naturalblaze.com/2022/12/mass-chicken-culling-is-an-attack-on-the-food-supply.html
Today’s blacklisted American: Black scientist blacklisted for doing good research:
https://behindtheblack.com/behind-the-black/points-of-information/todays-blacklisted-american-black-scientist-blacklisted-for-doing-good-research/
Racist thug who hurled boiling water at Ealing police officer avoids jail:
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/crime/racist-thug-who-hurled-boiling-water-at-ealing-police-officer-avoids-jail/ar-AA15K6Rq
Black-On-White Homicides in Gas Stations, Parking Lots, and Living Rooms:
https://www.unz.com/article/37-black-on-white-homicides-in-gas-stations-parking-lots-and-living-rooms-december-2022-another-month-in-the-death-of-white-america/
NOFX - "Kill All the White Man" at Camp Anarchy 2019:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=OJNOs42NC8U
Interested?
Real?
What do you call a man who sprays things?
Mister.
*.*
I was sitting in a bar the other night. This girl came in that was really built. And she was wearing the tightest jeans I think I’ve ever seen.
I said, “Damn! How do you get into those jeans, girl?”
She said, “You can start by buying me a drink.”
*.*
A perfectly triangular lake has 3 kingdoms on its 3 sides.
The first kingdom is rich and powerful, filled with wealthy, prosperous people, the second is humbler, but has its fair share of wealth and power. The third kingdom is struggling and poor, and barely has an army.
The kingdoms eventually go to war over control of the lake, as it's a valuable resource to have. The first kingdom sends 100 of its finest knights, clad in the best armour and each with their own personal squire. The second kingdom sends 50 knights, with fine leather armour and a few dozen squires of their own. The third kingdom sends their one and only knight, an elderly warrior who has long since passed his prime, with his own personal squire.
The night before the big battle, the knights in the first kingdom drink and party into the late hours of the night. The knights in the second kingdom aren't as well off, but have their own supply of grog and drink well into the night.
In the third camp, the faithful squire gets a rope and swings it over the branch of a tall tree, making a noose, and hangs a pot from it. He fills the pot with stew and has a humble dinner with the old knight.
The next morning, the knights in the first two kingdoms are hungover and unable to fight, while the knight in the third kingdom is old weary, unable to get up.
In place of the knights, the squires from all three kingdoms go and fight. The battle lasts long into the night but by the time the dust settled, only one squire was left standing - the squire from the third kingdom.
And it just goes to show you that the squire of the high pot and noose is equal to the sum of the squires of the other two sides.
*.*
My dad said I have no sense of direction in life.
So I packed my stuff and right.
*.*
A new study shows 9 out of 10 vegans have continuous problems with constipation.
What happens in vegans stays in vegans.
Quote of the Times;
“To be informed about how best to protect ourselves and our loved ones is the smartest thing we can do. I chose the vaccine.” - Lisa Marie Presley, 12 March 2022.
Link of the Times;
Ukrainian Defense Lines And What Happens When They Are Breached:
https://www.moonofalabama.org/2023/01/ukrainian-defense-lines-and-what-happens-when-they-are-breached.html
Issue of the Times;
Real Life Does Not Fit The Narrative by Amanda Fortini
Brooklyn. Among a roomful of scenesters about a decade older than me, I felt unworldly, underdressed, self-conscious, so I went into a bedroom to sit on a pile of coats and think. There, I met a graying man attired as a Wildean dandy—purple coat, lace cuffs—who seemed to have had the same idea as I did. We perched on the edge of the bed, shoulder to shoulder, and talked. “I like you,” he announced after a while. “You’re the only person at this party who isn’t pushing a concept.”
I think of that moment all the time these days, when every person, every story, seems to be pushing a concept of some kind.
When I teach college journalism classes, I tell my students to go out and report on events as they unfold, letting their stories arise from whatever they find, while ignoring the expectations or preconceived notions they had at the start. The real world, I tell these impressionable young writers, is always more fascinating than the ideas we hold about it. Reality, truth, the bizarre behavior of people in the wild—they will always surprise you.
In our current media climate, where facts are subordinated to various master narratives, and everything is viewed through an ideological lens, my advice might seem obsolete, I realize. For a while now, on broadcast news, in magazines and newspapers—and certainly in “content” that goes viral on social media—there is a conspicuously growing lack of stories that are complex, surprising, and seemingly told for their own sake.
The “narratives”— to use the fashionable term for what was formerly called “the party line”—often feel manipulative, intended to advance agendas. Usually, you know the moral of a tale the moment you begin to read or watch. Remember those stories about Covid patients begging for a vaccine on their deathbed? Or the operatic re-casting of Ivermectin, a well-known antiparasitic drug, as a dangerous “horse dewormer”? It was said that rubes who had overdosed on it were clogging up emergency rooms, and, according to one story in Rolling Stone, preventing gunshot victims from getting treated at an Oklahoma hospital. Not surprisingly, this story turned out to be spurious—based on the unsubstantiated claim of a single doctor—but it was glaringly so to me at the time, not least because multiple people I knew in Hollywood had been prescribed the medication by their fancy doctors as an off-label early treatment for Covid.
I can’t help laughing as I write this. Such stories seem even more absurd in retrospect, transparent attempts to influence behavior. As a journalist I know that it’s rare to find people and situations that dovetail neatly with the messaging favored by the powers that be, yet these curiously convenient tales crop up all the time now. “We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” Joan Didion wrote in The White Album, famously, but in our present era of narrative manipulation, one might instead say: “They tell us stories about how we don’t live.”
If you live in the West, as I do, you are well versed in the ways that commonly held stories are often untrue. Your neighbors are not all bigots, and most people who drive pickup trucks are not brutes gunning to run over toddlers—many are just farmers or ranchers with equipment to haul, or regular drivers who must travel rough dirt roads.
There are so many of these false narratives, in every realm: The economy is healthy even though prices are soaring. Having a Zoom party is fun. Taking a virtual tour of an art museum is almost like being there. Viruses aren’t transmitted among people protesting injustice. #HillaryOnHulu was an organic “trending topic” on Twitter.
My root objection to these fictions isn’t about politics or even ethics, purely; it’s one of aesthetics. Not only are these narratives untrue, they’re also uninspired and formulaic. They feel engineered with a takeaway in mind, assembled from a kit—with a moral, a villain, and a hero. They lack the pleasing strangeness of reality and the uncanny rightness of mimesis. As you consume them, there’s no sense of discovery or revelation. I find them pat, predictable, deadening. They bore me.
What’s the antidote? It’s a renewed focus on the real, the concrete, and the specific. This past summer, I decided to stop immersing myself in all the “narratives” and put my cell phone in a drawer. I actually did this, but it’s also a metaphor. Meanwhile, my husband and I began to spend time at my late father-in-law’s airy old cabin in rural Montana. Out there, beyond cell service and without neighbors as far as you could see, I dragged a plastic lawn chair from the garage onto the deck and sat reading for hours at a time in the blazing sun.
I read Annie Dillard, a writer who, in her granular attention to the natural world, felt like a remedy to all the blather. She portrays people, animals, landscapes, and insects in all their particularity and uniqueness, resisting, with every word, the clichés society hands us. “Examine all things intensely and relentlessly,” reads The Writing Life, which I devoured in an afternoon. “Probe and search each object in a piece of art; do not leave it, do not course over it, as if it were understood, but instead follow it down until you see it in the mystery of its own specificity and strength.”
Her words helped me to see the world again in all its mystery, rather than constantly noticing how this or that phenomenon was being mined and manipulated to dubious ends. My surroundings felt distinct and almost enchanted. I sat on the deck and did little but watch animals. There was a baby rabbit who liked to huddle near our pickup truck, as though the tires might protect him from predators. And a neurotic chipmunk who twitched and fretted, flitting to and fro, then went absolutely berserk whenever a breeze rustled the nearby bushes. One day, upset over an argument, I prayed to God for a sign that it would resolve itself and, seconds later, a yellow butterfly landed on my index finger and stayed there, opening and closing its wings for a full five minutes. Life is always so much stranger than anything we could make up.
The more I paid attention to what was tangible, the phonier the narratives began to feel. In September, my husband and I attended a tech conference in Miami where no one even talked about politics. Instead, we swam, ate, and discussed books, drug trips, herbal remedies, UFO sightings, beauty, privacy, surveillance, and the best places to visit in Utah. I once again realized what I already knew—that no one I encountered in person ever fit into a prefabricated narrative.
It is almost as though the purpose of the stories we are told is to obscure reality, not to reveal it. Because to observe reality is to trust your own perceptions. You might even start to notice that most stories are not tidy parables with morals. “The world is wilder than that in all directions, more dangerous and bitter, more extravagant and bright,” Dillard writes. A satisfying true story tends to be complicated and irreducible. Reality is messy. People have obscure and contradictory motives; we misbehave, screw up, and rarely do what we should.
News of the Times;
Who’s Attacking Our Power Grid?:
https://www.nationalreview.com/the-morning-jolt/whos-attacking-our-power-grid/
EU bans imports of products linked to deforestation, freezing Europeans cut down forests to survive:
https://hotair.com/tree-hugging-sister/2022/12/27/eu-bans-imports-of-products-linked-to-deforestation-freezing-europeans-cut-down-forests-to-survive-n520199
German property market plummets:
https://www.rt.com/business/569591-germany-real-estate-plunge/
Germany Arrests Iranian National Planning “Islamist-Motivated” Chemical Attack:
https://legalinsurrection.com/2023/01/report-germany-arrests-iranian-national-planning-islamist-motivated-chemical-attack/
Ohio Newlywed Allegedly Killed by Machete-Wielding Man While Working at Dollar Tree: 'Beautiful Soul':
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/crime/ohio-newlywed-allegedly-killed-by-machete-wielding-man-while-working-at-dollar-tree-beautiful-soul/ar-AA15Vs3R
Autopsy Shows FBI Agents Executed ‘Domestic Terrorist’ in Michigan Days Before Fake Whitmer Kidnapping Plot was Rolled Out:
https://bigleaguepolitics.com/autopsy-shows-fbi-agents-executed-domestic-terrorist-in-michigan-days-before-fake-whitmer-kidnapping-plot-was-rolled-out/
Biden Held ‘Stolen’ Classified Docs at His Delaware Home AND the Secret Service Kept No Records of Visitors While They Were There:
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2023/01/exclusive-biden-held-stolen-classified-docs-delaware-home-secret-service-no-records-visitors/
Students Speak Out On Anti-White, Anti-Christian, Anti-American Culture At Florida University:
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/students-speak-out-anti-white-anti-christian-anti-american-culture-florida-university
210 Democrats vote against bill requiring medical care for babies born alive after abortion attempt"
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/democrats-vote-against-bill-requiring-medical-care-babies-born-alive-abortion-attempt
The Year in Fantasy:
https://arkhavencomics.com/2022/12/31/the-year-in-fantasy-2022/
The Future of Holocaust Education:
https://web.archive.org/web/20181202215245/http://www.un.org/en/holocaustremembrance/docs/paper32.html
Sweden Ditches Barbaric 'Gender-Affirming' Care for Kids:
https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/matt-margolis/2022/12/27/sweden-ditches-barbaric-gender-affirming-care-for-kids-n1656568
British police spend tens of thousands of taxpayers’ money on LGBT paraphernalia amid crime boom:
https://europerenaissance.com/2023/01/11/british-police-spend-tens-of-thousands-of-taxpayers-money-on-lgbt-paraphernalia-amid-crime-boom/
New Zealand admits it has direct access to Facebook takedown portal:
https://reclaimthenet.org/new-zealand-government-facebook-content-takedown-portal/
Zelensky strips ex-opposition leader of citizenship:
https://www.rt.com/russia/569678-zelensky-medvedchuk-ukrainian-citizenship/
Mister.
*.*
I was sitting in a bar the other night. This girl came in that was really built. And she was wearing the tightest jeans I think I’ve ever seen.
I said, “Damn! How do you get into those jeans, girl?”
She said, “You can start by buying me a drink.”
*.*
A perfectly triangular lake has 3 kingdoms on its 3 sides.
The first kingdom is rich and powerful, filled with wealthy, prosperous people, the second is humbler, but has its fair share of wealth and power. The third kingdom is struggling and poor, and barely has an army.
The kingdoms eventually go to war over control of the lake, as it's a valuable resource to have. The first kingdom sends 100 of its finest knights, clad in the best armour and each with their own personal squire. The second kingdom sends 50 knights, with fine leather armour and a few dozen squires of their own. The third kingdom sends their one and only knight, an elderly warrior who has long since passed his prime, with his own personal squire.
The night before the big battle, the knights in the first kingdom drink and party into the late hours of the night. The knights in the second kingdom aren't as well off, but have their own supply of grog and drink well into the night.
In the third camp, the faithful squire gets a rope and swings it over the branch of a tall tree, making a noose, and hangs a pot from it. He fills the pot with stew and has a humble dinner with the old knight.
The next morning, the knights in the first two kingdoms are hungover and unable to fight, while the knight in the third kingdom is old weary, unable to get up.
In place of the knights, the squires from all three kingdoms go and fight. The battle lasts long into the night but by the time the dust settled, only one squire was left standing - the squire from the third kingdom.
And it just goes to show you that the squire of the high pot and noose is equal to the sum of the squires of the other two sides.
*.*
My dad said I have no sense of direction in life.
So I packed my stuff and right.
*.*
A new study shows 9 out of 10 vegans have continuous problems with constipation.
What happens in vegans stays in vegans.
Quote of the Times;
“To be informed about how best to protect ourselves and our loved ones is the smartest thing we can do. I chose the vaccine.” - Lisa Marie Presley, 12 March 2022.
Link of the Times;
Ukrainian Defense Lines And What Happens When They Are Breached:
https://www.moonofalabama.org/2023/01/ukrainian-defense-lines-and-what-happens-when-they-are-breached.html
Issue of the Times;
Real Life Does Not Fit The Narrative by Amanda Fortini
Brooklyn. Among a roomful of scenesters about a decade older than me, I felt unworldly, underdressed, self-conscious, so I went into a bedroom to sit on a pile of coats and think. There, I met a graying man attired as a Wildean dandy—purple coat, lace cuffs—who seemed to have had the same idea as I did. We perched on the edge of the bed, shoulder to shoulder, and talked. “I like you,” he announced after a while. “You’re the only person at this party who isn’t pushing a concept.”
I think of that moment all the time these days, when every person, every story, seems to be pushing a concept of some kind.
When I teach college journalism classes, I tell my students to go out and report on events as they unfold, letting their stories arise from whatever they find, while ignoring the expectations or preconceived notions they had at the start. The real world, I tell these impressionable young writers, is always more fascinating than the ideas we hold about it. Reality, truth, the bizarre behavior of people in the wild—they will always surprise you.
In our current media climate, where facts are subordinated to various master narratives, and everything is viewed through an ideological lens, my advice might seem obsolete, I realize. For a while now, on broadcast news, in magazines and newspapers—and certainly in “content” that goes viral on social media—there is a conspicuously growing lack of stories that are complex, surprising, and seemingly told for their own sake.
The “narratives”— to use the fashionable term for what was formerly called “the party line”—often feel manipulative, intended to advance agendas. Usually, you know the moral of a tale the moment you begin to read or watch. Remember those stories about Covid patients begging for a vaccine on their deathbed? Or the operatic re-casting of Ivermectin, a well-known antiparasitic drug, as a dangerous “horse dewormer”? It was said that rubes who had overdosed on it were clogging up emergency rooms, and, according to one story in Rolling Stone, preventing gunshot victims from getting treated at an Oklahoma hospital. Not surprisingly, this story turned out to be spurious—based on the unsubstantiated claim of a single doctor—but it was glaringly so to me at the time, not least because multiple people I knew in Hollywood had been prescribed the medication by their fancy doctors as an off-label early treatment for Covid.
I can’t help laughing as I write this. Such stories seem even more absurd in retrospect, transparent attempts to influence behavior. As a journalist I know that it’s rare to find people and situations that dovetail neatly with the messaging favored by the powers that be, yet these curiously convenient tales crop up all the time now. “We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” Joan Didion wrote in The White Album, famously, but in our present era of narrative manipulation, one might instead say: “They tell us stories about how we don’t live.”
If you live in the West, as I do, you are well versed in the ways that commonly held stories are often untrue. Your neighbors are not all bigots, and most people who drive pickup trucks are not brutes gunning to run over toddlers—many are just farmers or ranchers with equipment to haul, or regular drivers who must travel rough dirt roads.
There are so many of these false narratives, in every realm: The economy is healthy even though prices are soaring. Having a Zoom party is fun. Taking a virtual tour of an art museum is almost like being there. Viruses aren’t transmitted among people protesting injustice. #HillaryOnHulu was an organic “trending topic” on Twitter.
My root objection to these fictions isn’t about politics or even ethics, purely; it’s one of aesthetics. Not only are these narratives untrue, they’re also uninspired and formulaic. They feel engineered with a takeaway in mind, assembled from a kit—with a moral, a villain, and a hero. They lack the pleasing strangeness of reality and the uncanny rightness of mimesis. As you consume them, there’s no sense of discovery or revelation. I find them pat, predictable, deadening. They bore me.
What’s the antidote? It’s a renewed focus on the real, the concrete, and the specific. This past summer, I decided to stop immersing myself in all the “narratives” and put my cell phone in a drawer. I actually did this, but it’s also a metaphor. Meanwhile, my husband and I began to spend time at my late father-in-law’s airy old cabin in rural Montana. Out there, beyond cell service and without neighbors as far as you could see, I dragged a plastic lawn chair from the garage onto the deck and sat reading for hours at a time in the blazing sun.
I read Annie Dillard, a writer who, in her granular attention to the natural world, felt like a remedy to all the blather. She portrays people, animals, landscapes, and insects in all their particularity and uniqueness, resisting, with every word, the clichés society hands us. “Examine all things intensely and relentlessly,” reads The Writing Life, which I devoured in an afternoon. “Probe and search each object in a piece of art; do not leave it, do not course over it, as if it were understood, but instead follow it down until you see it in the mystery of its own specificity and strength.”
Her words helped me to see the world again in all its mystery, rather than constantly noticing how this or that phenomenon was being mined and manipulated to dubious ends. My surroundings felt distinct and almost enchanted. I sat on the deck and did little but watch animals. There was a baby rabbit who liked to huddle near our pickup truck, as though the tires might protect him from predators. And a neurotic chipmunk who twitched and fretted, flitting to and fro, then went absolutely berserk whenever a breeze rustled the nearby bushes. One day, upset over an argument, I prayed to God for a sign that it would resolve itself and, seconds later, a yellow butterfly landed on my index finger and stayed there, opening and closing its wings for a full five minutes. Life is always so much stranger than anything we could make up.
The more I paid attention to what was tangible, the phonier the narratives began to feel. In September, my husband and I attended a tech conference in Miami where no one even talked about politics. Instead, we swam, ate, and discussed books, drug trips, herbal remedies, UFO sightings, beauty, privacy, surveillance, and the best places to visit in Utah. I once again realized what I already knew—that no one I encountered in person ever fit into a prefabricated narrative.
It is almost as though the purpose of the stories we are told is to obscure reality, not to reveal it. Because to observe reality is to trust your own perceptions. You might even start to notice that most stories are not tidy parables with morals. “The world is wilder than that in all directions, more dangerous and bitter, more extravagant and bright,” Dillard writes. A satisfying true story tends to be complicated and irreducible. Reality is messy. People have obscure and contradictory motives; we misbehave, screw up, and rarely do what we should.
News of the Times;
Who’s Attacking Our Power Grid?:
https://www.nationalreview.com/the-morning-jolt/whos-attacking-our-power-grid/
EU bans imports of products linked to deforestation, freezing Europeans cut down forests to survive:
https://hotair.com/tree-hugging-sister/2022/12/27/eu-bans-imports-of-products-linked-to-deforestation-freezing-europeans-cut-down-forests-to-survive-n520199
German property market plummets:
https://www.rt.com/business/569591-germany-real-estate-plunge/
Germany Arrests Iranian National Planning “Islamist-Motivated” Chemical Attack:
https://legalinsurrection.com/2023/01/report-germany-arrests-iranian-national-planning-islamist-motivated-chemical-attack/
Ohio Newlywed Allegedly Killed by Machete-Wielding Man While Working at Dollar Tree: 'Beautiful Soul':
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/crime/ohio-newlywed-allegedly-killed-by-machete-wielding-man-while-working-at-dollar-tree-beautiful-soul/ar-AA15Vs3R
Autopsy Shows FBI Agents Executed ‘Domestic Terrorist’ in Michigan Days Before Fake Whitmer Kidnapping Plot was Rolled Out:
https://bigleaguepolitics.com/autopsy-shows-fbi-agents-executed-domestic-terrorist-in-michigan-days-before-fake-whitmer-kidnapping-plot-was-rolled-out/
Biden Held ‘Stolen’ Classified Docs at His Delaware Home AND the Secret Service Kept No Records of Visitors While They Were There:
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2023/01/exclusive-biden-held-stolen-classified-docs-delaware-home-secret-service-no-records-visitors/
Students Speak Out On Anti-White, Anti-Christian, Anti-American Culture At Florida University:
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/students-speak-out-anti-white-anti-christian-anti-american-culture-florida-university
210 Democrats vote against bill requiring medical care for babies born alive after abortion attempt"
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/democrats-vote-against-bill-requiring-medical-care-babies-born-alive-abortion-attempt
The Year in Fantasy:
https://arkhavencomics.com/2022/12/31/the-year-in-fantasy-2022/
The Future of Holocaust Education:
https://web.archive.org/web/20181202215245/http://www.un.org/en/holocaustremembrance/docs/paper32.html
Sweden Ditches Barbaric 'Gender-Affirming' Care for Kids:
https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/matt-margolis/2022/12/27/sweden-ditches-barbaric-gender-affirming-care-for-kids-n1656568
British police spend tens of thousands of taxpayers’ money on LGBT paraphernalia amid crime boom:
https://europerenaissance.com/2023/01/11/british-police-spend-tens-of-thousands-of-taxpayers-money-on-lgbt-paraphernalia-amid-crime-boom/
New Zealand admits it has direct access to Facebook takedown portal:
https://reclaimthenet.org/new-zealand-government-facebook-content-takedown-portal/
Zelensky strips ex-opposition leader of citizenship:
https://www.rt.com/russia/569678-zelensky-medvedchuk-ukrainian-citizenship/
Curse?
"I'm sorry, Your Highness, but we can't put Humpty Dumpty back together again!" said the King's man.
The King, who was drunk, replied, "Let the horses try."
*.*
What do you call a print technician who decides to start painting portraits?
The artist formerly known as prints.
*.*
The unprecedented rain and flooding in California has forced celebrities to emerge from their mansions and force more selfie videos upon the unwary peasantry. One particular celebrity who travels on private jets and collects luxury sports cars posted a distressing video from near her $14 million mansion to say you are the reason for climate change.
"Let's all do our part," said the multi-millionaire comedian who has openly bragged on numerous occasions about living an indulgent life of overabundance, with extravagant purchases of multiple luxury sports cars and their massive, gas-guzzling engines.
"We need to be nicer to Mother Nature," added the woman who whimsically jet sets across the world on private jets when her multiple estates and massive luxury watch collections bore her.
Defenders of the celebrity have pointed out that she does not always use private jets to fly to exotic destinations of Italy, Maldives, and Tanzania, that sometimes she slums it by flying first class.
At publishing time, the celebrity was seen fleeing her flooded mansion in her $460,000 Lamborghini with the license plate that read, "G0 GR33N."
*.*
I got kicked out of a choir. They said I was a jailhouse singer.
I think it's because I was always behind a few bars.
And I didn't have the key.
*.*
Why didn't 4 ask out 5?
Because 4 was 2²
Quote of the Times;
“Every high civilization decays by forgetting obvious things… The fact that a chaotic and ill-educated time cannot clearly grasp that truth does not alter the fact that it always will be the truth. Our generation, in a dirty, pessimistic period, has blasphemously underrated the beauty of life and cravenly overrated its dangers. As for our own society, if it proceeds at its present rate of progress and improvement, no trace or memory of it will be left at all.” - G.K. Chesterton
Link of the Times;
1,616 Athlete Cardiac Arrests, 1,114 of Them Dead, Since COVID Injection:
https://goodsciencing.com/covid/athletes-suffer-cardiac-arrest-die-after-covid-shot/
Issue of the Times;
Too big to live, too loved to die: Big Tech's billion dollar curse of the free by Rupert Goodwins
Users may be the product, but we come with a hell of a price tag.
Consequences can come at you fast or slow. If you’re a trillion-dollar company, you get to choose which, a bit, but you can never escape completely.
Amazon is burning billions on Alexa because voice assistants need massive infrastructure but can't be monetized. Google Cloud is $700 million in the red as of last earnings and heading south to a state of madness like a New Jersey retiree. These are mature products in saturated markets. You don't need an MBA to know what will happen. But even the dean of Harvard Business School can't say when.
The big confounding factor is reputation. Take Alexa, which, as has been noted, is overwhelmingly used for a few simple tasks: playing music, setting timers, doing quick queries, switching lights. Shopping and advertising? Not so much. The issue for Amazon over those few popular use cases is that they are very popular. For some demographics among the elderly and disabled they're now part of their daily life. Millions more are habituated, with Alexa just being quietly useful when hands are full or pulling up a calculator app is just too much hassle.
Amazon's model was to sell the hardware at or below cost and make the revenue from content and services. It's a perfectly good model, if those services and content are as engaging as video games, or user data can be folded into ad targeting. None of this is true for Alexa, and it never will be. But if Amazon cuts and runs, hundreds of millions of users have had an intimate part of their life ripped out. One, furthermore, they considered paid for when they bought the gadget in the first place. How badly does Amazon want not to do that? It costs billions. It can't keep paying. But it can't just let it go.
Google is in an even worse position, not from the amount of red ink currently bleeding from its Cloud division, but because of its room to manoeuver is far less. There are around 4 billion email accounts in the world, and around 1.8 billion of those are Gmail. When you run a service for that many users, they run you.
Forget smart speakers, the ultimate digital assistant is email. You can’t get more intimately entwined with a user’s digital life than that. As well as business and personal correspondence, email is the primary management interface for identity on other services, the major personal archive, the butler of daily life.
Losing access to your primary email account is beyond traumatic. Google is notably brutal in pulling the plug on popular services it considers no longer interesting, but surely Gmail would be impossible to shrug off. And it must be profitable, with all those users. Right?
It is very far from clear that it is. Google isn’t saying. Gmail, like G Suite-cum-Workspace and the whole bouquet of user and business-facing appified services, is reported as part of Google Cloud, which is losing a lot of money now and perhaps a lot more next year. There are subscription models and a little advertising which will be making some money. Clearly not enough.
An easier way to judge Gmail’s hue in the revenue spreadsheet is to ask yourself as a personal Gmail user, how much you’re being monetized. The old adage that if you don’t pay, you’re the product, cut both ways. Products cost, especially if you’re buying billions.
Advertising within Gmail is very low key and easy to avoid altogether, and Google is very clear that it doesn’t monetize your email content: “We do not scan or read your Gmail messages to show you ads.“ Google has played fast and loose about how it uses data, but if it cheated here it would be beyond catastrophic.
If Google isn’t making any money from you on Gmail, and there are billions like you, the numbers can explode in no time. Even if the company’s only losing a cent a day per free user, that's $3.5bn a year for a billion users. It could be a lot more - Workspace business subscriptions start at 20 cents/day, and doesn’t offer much more than free. Disentangling what each component costs is impossible from outside, probably even within Google, but there’s a tightrope here and a fall could be very hard indeed.
Google couldn’t kill Gmail, but Gmail could kill Google. You haven’t failed until you fail at scale.
Are there no off-ramps? Big losses can be attractive sink-holes for fiscal engineering – you think Musk’s Twitter investors expect an operating profit? – and one traditional way out of a corner while saving face is to hive off the haemorrhage. Amazon could flog Alexa off to a third party for lots of someone else’s money, in the way many untenable tech acquisitions are used as debt management vehicles. When the system does die or degrade, Amazon will be far from the wreckage. That’s nearly impossible for Google, the regulatory ramifications and user pushback from selling 1.8 billion active email accounts would be measured in megatons.
Will Gmail fail? Google is still immensely wealthy, and can put off hard decisions for a while. Next year is going to be very hard, quarter by quarter, and the conversation may look very different in 2024. But while Amazon can and almost certainly will find a way out of Alexa, Gmail matters incomparably more to incomparably more people.
There may be no good exit strategy for Google, and so the question becomes – is there one for you?
News of the Times;
The War on Merit Takes a Bizarre Turn:
https://www.city-journal.org/war-on-merit-takes-bizarre-turn
Charlie Brown’s Inside Job:
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/12/charlie-browns-interior-christmas-adventure/617484/
Missouri Defies Democrat Politicians, Executes Evil Transgender Child Murderer:
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2023/01/breaking-missouri-defies-democrat-politicians-executes-evil-transgender-child-murderer/
Alanis Morissette Admits Music Industry Is Run by Elite Pedophiles: ‘They’re ALL Child Rapists’:
https://newspunch.com/alanis-morissette-admits-music-industry-is-run-by-elite-pedophiles-theyre-all-child-rapists/
A federal judge essentially says parents have no rights over their children:
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/12/a_federal_judge_essentially_says_parents_have_no_rights_over_their_children.html
Guess What: Electricity isn't Free:
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2022/12/guess-what-electricity-isnt-free.php
New Crime Report Confirms 96% of Hate Crimes in NYC are Perpetrated by Black Americans:
https://www.dailyveracity.com/2022/12/31/new-crime-report-confirms-96-of-hate-crimes-were-perpetrated-by-black-americans/
US helped Ukraine target Russian generals, sink Moskva, book reveals:
https://nypost.com/2022/12/31/us-helped-ukraine-target-russian-generals-sink-moskva-book/
This mob caused a New Year’s Eve riot in Germany:
https://switzerlandtimes.ch/world/this-mob-caused-a-new-years-eve-riot-in-germany/
The naked truth on the Hunter Biden laptop coverup:
https://nypost.com/2022/12/20/the-naked-truth-on-the-hunter-biden-laptop-coverup/
Biden completes worst US-Russian prisoner swap in recorded history:
https://no-pasaran.blogspot.com/2022/12/biden-completes-worst-us-russian.html
Gall out in the ‘open’ at the US border:
https://nypost.com/2022/12/17/gall-out-in-the-open-at-the-us-border/
The ‘Green Energy Creates Jobs’ Scam:
https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-green-energy-creates-jobs-scam/
CDC Changes BMI Charts as Childhood Obesity Skyrockets:
https://legalinsurrection.com/2022/12/cdc-changes-bmi-charts-as-childhood-obesity-skyrockets/
The Perpetually Endangered Polar Bears are Doing Great:
https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-perpetually-endangered-polar-bears-are-doing-great/
The King, who was drunk, replied, "Let the horses try."
*.*
What do you call a print technician who decides to start painting portraits?
The artist formerly known as prints.
*.*
The unprecedented rain and flooding in California has forced celebrities to emerge from their mansions and force more selfie videos upon the unwary peasantry. One particular celebrity who travels on private jets and collects luxury sports cars posted a distressing video from near her $14 million mansion to say you are the reason for climate change.
"Let's all do our part," said the multi-millionaire comedian who has openly bragged on numerous occasions about living an indulgent life of overabundance, with extravagant purchases of multiple luxury sports cars and their massive, gas-guzzling engines.
"We need to be nicer to Mother Nature," added the woman who whimsically jet sets across the world on private jets when her multiple estates and massive luxury watch collections bore her.
Defenders of the celebrity have pointed out that she does not always use private jets to fly to exotic destinations of Italy, Maldives, and Tanzania, that sometimes she slums it by flying first class.
At publishing time, the celebrity was seen fleeing her flooded mansion in her $460,000 Lamborghini with the license plate that read, "G0 GR33N."
*.*
I got kicked out of a choir. They said I was a jailhouse singer.
I think it's because I was always behind a few bars.
And I didn't have the key.
*.*
Why didn't 4 ask out 5?
Because 4 was 2²
Quote of the Times;
“Every high civilization decays by forgetting obvious things… The fact that a chaotic and ill-educated time cannot clearly grasp that truth does not alter the fact that it always will be the truth. Our generation, in a dirty, pessimistic period, has blasphemously underrated the beauty of life and cravenly overrated its dangers. As for our own society, if it proceeds at its present rate of progress and improvement, no trace or memory of it will be left at all.” - G.K. Chesterton
Link of the Times;
1,616 Athlete Cardiac Arrests, 1,114 of Them Dead, Since COVID Injection:
https://goodsciencing.com/covid/athletes-suffer-cardiac-arrest-die-after-covid-shot/
Issue of the Times;
Too big to live, too loved to die: Big Tech's billion dollar curse of the free by Rupert Goodwins
Users may be the product, but we come with a hell of a price tag.
Consequences can come at you fast or slow. If you’re a trillion-dollar company, you get to choose which, a bit, but you can never escape completely.
Amazon is burning billions on Alexa because voice assistants need massive infrastructure but can't be monetized. Google Cloud is $700 million in the red as of last earnings and heading south to a state of madness like a New Jersey retiree. These are mature products in saturated markets. You don't need an MBA to know what will happen. But even the dean of Harvard Business School can't say when.
The big confounding factor is reputation. Take Alexa, which, as has been noted, is overwhelmingly used for a few simple tasks: playing music, setting timers, doing quick queries, switching lights. Shopping and advertising? Not so much. The issue for Amazon over those few popular use cases is that they are very popular. For some demographics among the elderly and disabled they're now part of their daily life. Millions more are habituated, with Alexa just being quietly useful when hands are full or pulling up a calculator app is just too much hassle.
Amazon's model was to sell the hardware at or below cost and make the revenue from content and services. It's a perfectly good model, if those services and content are as engaging as video games, or user data can be folded into ad targeting. None of this is true for Alexa, and it never will be. But if Amazon cuts and runs, hundreds of millions of users have had an intimate part of their life ripped out. One, furthermore, they considered paid for when they bought the gadget in the first place. How badly does Amazon want not to do that? It costs billions. It can't keep paying. But it can't just let it go.
Google is in an even worse position, not from the amount of red ink currently bleeding from its Cloud division, but because of its room to manoeuver is far less. There are around 4 billion email accounts in the world, and around 1.8 billion of those are Gmail. When you run a service for that many users, they run you.
Forget smart speakers, the ultimate digital assistant is email. You can’t get more intimately entwined with a user’s digital life than that. As well as business and personal correspondence, email is the primary management interface for identity on other services, the major personal archive, the butler of daily life.
Losing access to your primary email account is beyond traumatic. Google is notably brutal in pulling the plug on popular services it considers no longer interesting, but surely Gmail would be impossible to shrug off. And it must be profitable, with all those users. Right?
It is very far from clear that it is. Google isn’t saying. Gmail, like G Suite-cum-Workspace and the whole bouquet of user and business-facing appified services, is reported as part of Google Cloud, which is losing a lot of money now and perhaps a lot more next year. There are subscription models and a little advertising which will be making some money. Clearly not enough.
An easier way to judge Gmail’s hue in the revenue spreadsheet is to ask yourself as a personal Gmail user, how much you’re being monetized. The old adage that if you don’t pay, you’re the product, cut both ways. Products cost, especially if you’re buying billions.
Advertising within Gmail is very low key and easy to avoid altogether, and Google is very clear that it doesn’t monetize your email content: “We do not scan or read your Gmail messages to show you ads.“ Google has played fast and loose about how it uses data, but if it cheated here it would be beyond catastrophic.
If Google isn’t making any money from you on Gmail, and there are billions like you, the numbers can explode in no time. Even if the company’s only losing a cent a day per free user, that's $3.5bn a year for a billion users. It could be a lot more - Workspace business subscriptions start at 20 cents/day, and doesn’t offer much more than free. Disentangling what each component costs is impossible from outside, probably even within Google, but there’s a tightrope here and a fall could be very hard indeed.
Google couldn’t kill Gmail, but Gmail could kill Google. You haven’t failed until you fail at scale.
Are there no off-ramps? Big losses can be attractive sink-holes for fiscal engineering – you think Musk’s Twitter investors expect an operating profit? – and one traditional way out of a corner while saving face is to hive off the haemorrhage. Amazon could flog Alexa off to a third party for lots of someone else’s money, in the way many untenable tech acquisitions are used as debt management vehicles. When the system does die or degrade, Amazon will be far from the wreckage. That’s nearly impossible for Google, the regulatory ramifications and user pushback from selling 1.8 billion active email accounts would be measured in megatons.
Will Gmail fail? Google is still immensely wealthy, and can put off hard decisions for a while. Next year is going to be very hard, quarter by quarter, and the conversation may look very different in 2024. But while Amazon can and almost certainly will find a way out of Alexa, Gmail matters incomparably more to incomparably more people.
There may be no good exit strategy for Google, and so the question becomes – is there one for you?
News of the Times;
The War on Merit Takes a Bizarre Turn:
https://www.city-journal.org/war-on-merit-takes-bizarre-turn
Charlie Brown’s Inside Job:
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/12/charlie-browns-interior-christmas-adventure/617484/
Missouri Defies Democrat Politicians, Executes Evil Transgender Child Murderer:
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2023/01/breaking-missouri-defies-democrat-politicians-executes-evil-transgender-child-murderer/
Alanis Morissette Admits Music Industry Is Run by Elite Pedophiles: ‘They’re ALL Child Rapists’:
https://newspunch.com/alanis-morissette-admits-music-industry-is-run-by-elite-pedophiles-theyre-all-child-rapists/
A federal judge essentially says parents have no rights over their children:
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/12/a_federal_judge_essentially_says_parents_have_no_rights_over_their_children.html
Guess What: Electricity isn't Free:
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2022/12/guess-what-electricity-isnt-free.php
New Crime Report Confirms 96% of Hate Crimes in NYC are Perpetrated by Black Americans:
https://www.dailyveracity.com/2022/12/31/new-crime-report-confirms-96-of-hate-crimes-were-perpetrated-by-black-americans/
US helped Ukraine target Russian generals, sink Moskva, book reveals:
https://nypost.com/2022/12/31/us-helped-ukraine-target-russian-generals-sink-moskva-book/
This mob caused a New Year’s Eve riot in Germany:
https://switzerlandtimes.ch/world/this-mob-caused-a-new-years-eve-riot-in-germany/
The naked truth on the Hunter Biden laptop coverup:
https://nypost.com/2022/12/20/the-naked-truth-on-the-hunter-biden-laptop-coverup/
Biden completes worst US-Russian prisoner swap in recorded history:
https://no-pasaran.blogspot.com/2022/12/biden-completes-worst-us-russian.html
Gall out in the ‘open’ at the US border:
https://nypost.com/2022/12/17/gall-out-in-the-open-at-the-us-border/
The ‘Green Energy Creates Jobs’ Scam:
https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-green-energy-creates-jobs-scam/
CDC Changes BMI Charts as Childhood Obesity Skyrockets:
https://legalinsurrection.com/2022/12/cdc-changes-bmi-charts-as-childhood-obesity-skyrockets/
The Perpetually Endangered Polar Bears are Doing Great:
https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-perpetually-endangered-polar-bears-are-doing-great/
Reheated?
When my music teacher heard me sing, she said I should be tenor.
Ten or twelve feet away from her at all times.
*.*
My wife packed my bags and told me to leave...
As I was headed out the door, she said "I hope you die a long, slow, painful death!"
I said, "So now you want me to stay?"
*.*
Oneliners:
Here's a question for all you mind-readers listening right now.
I quit my job pulling bones out of hams, it was a shankless job.
I don't know the secret to happiness, but I do know I've never been sad at a Mexican restaurant.
I'm at a place in my life where errands count as going out.
I don't regret things I did wrong, I regret the good things I did for the wrong people.
Just before I die, I'm going to swallow a whole bag of popcorn kernels, just to make the cremation a little more exciting.
Look, I promise to always be fair, honest, straight-forward and considerate... all the way up until they draw my Powerball numbers, then, it's a maybe...
When someone yells "Stop", I never know if it's in the name of love, it's Hammer-time, or if I should figure out what's that sound.
In case no one has told you today, I'm beautiful.
You know, I try to make protein shakes, but they keep coming out as Margaritas.
*.*
My generation's zombies didn't run.
They walked.
In the snow.
Uphill.
They ate the brains they could find and they liked them.
*.*
Every weekend, I say to myself, "Susan, you've got to stop drinking."
Thankfully, I'm not Susan.
Quote of the Times;
"HAPPY NEW YEAR to all of the Radical Left Democrats, Marxist Lunatics, China loving Coco Chow and her Obedient Husband, Mitch, and Clueless RINOS, who are working so hard to DESTROY our once great Country. More importantly, HAPPY NEW YEAR to the Incredible, Brave, and Strong American Patriots who Built, Love, and Cherish America. The REAL leaders of our Country will always remain FAITHFUL and LOYAL to you. The USA will be back, Bigger & Better & Stronger than ever before. GOD BLESS YOU ALL!" – Donald Trump
Link of the Times;
Politics and the English Language:
https://quillette.com/2022/12/28/politics-and-the-english-language-2023/
Issue of the Times;
The Year Reheated by https://thompsonblog.co.uk/
In which we marvel at the mental contortions of our self-imagined betters.
The year began with a lesson in pronouns and pretending, or dishonesty-on-demand, courtesy of the suddenly ungendered Laurie Penny – now, it seems, a they, depending on who’s nearby and how fashionable they are. And so, we pondered animal pronouns, clown pronouns and pronouns that can change randomly, depending on whim, several times a day. Such is the hamster-wheel world of competitive self-definition.
We also flicked through the pages of The Atlantic, where senior editor Honor Jones, a woman oppressed by comfort and fidelity, shared a somewhat bewildering account of her divorce from a loving and faithful husband. Chief among her reasons were a desire to “be thinking about art and sex and politics and the patriarchy,” a feat no married woman can apparently hope to achieve, and a dislike of crumbs – a recurring topic, mentioned seven times.
And we witnessed the denouncing of racist traffic cameras. Which is to say, devices that record which demographics speed and run red lights, and endanger lives, much more often than others. Writing in ProPublica, Emily Hopkins and Melissa Sanchez conjured a remarkable series of excuses for repeat offenders, who were presented as oppressed, as “activists for racial equity,” and all but heroic, despite some committing 11 offences in a single year. Humdrum notions of personal responsibility were of course avoided, leaving readers to suppose that the only conceivable explanation for the lawbreakers’ behaviour, and consequent fines, was “structural racism.”
In February, we were treated to cultural sustenance, courtesy of Finland’s creative powerhouse Iiu Susiraja, whose artistic immensity has enthralled us before, and regarding whom, the Los Angeles Times gushed, “Kierkegaard comes to mind, as do Sartre and Dostoevsky.”
We also witnessed the mental unspooling of San Francisco school board members, among whom mismanagement and conspiracy theories are elevated to an art form, and for whom two hours spent debating whether a gay white dad is sufficiently “diverse” to join a volunteer parent committee is a perfectly normal use of one’s time.
And via The Independent, we heard of the latest moral crisis and cause of deep mental “trauma” – namely, aircraft seatbelts and insufficiently commodious plus-size bath towels.
March brought us the exquisite agonies of listening to rap while woke and white, along with an implication that one of the most hazardous of words to use, and from which All Decent Non-Racist People are expected to recoil, is simultaneously one to which All Decent Non-Racist People are obliged to be drawn. Say, when listening to rap. Failure to enjoy endless repetition of the word in question is, we were assured, “the silencing of intellectuals in music,” and, inevitably, evidence of racism.
Pale devilry cropped up again, as educator and activist Maia Niguel Hoskin, writing in Forbes, told us that when a black millionaire celebrity publicly slaps another black millionaire celebrity, this is all the fault of white people and “white supremacist culture.” You see, for an educator and activist, the way to be “anti-racist” is to erase any agency, and any expectation of self-possession, from people with brown skin.
We also witnessed a display of intersectional ruggedness, thanks to Ailish Breen, a being with pronouns, and her troupe of ostentatiously “queer hikers,” who regard a simple walk in the countryside as both “quite political” and a basis for complaint, and for whom the very air is yet another a form of oppression. Among the troupe’s many grievances was the phrase “conquering the outdoors,” a term whose weight bears down on their delicate souls. That the expression refers to overcoming one’s own limitations or imagined limitations – which among the less pretentious is generally regarded as a good thing – somehow escaped their notice.
In April, we pondered more diverse identities, and the media’s euphemistic convolutions when covering said beings and their activities. Say, when publicly using a wheelie bin as a sex toy.
We also noted several educators whose paycheque and woke status depend on propagating failure and resentment among the young and impressionable. As when Dr Asao Inoue, of the University of Washington, Tacoma, dismissed students’ proficiency in English as “selfish” and “immature,” a surrender to “white supremacy.” For Dr Inoue and his peers, a student’s ability to convey their thoughts in writing – and to formulate thoughts by writing – is merely a manifestation of “white language supremacy,” an allegedly lethal phenomenon.
And we were captivated by the parenting skills of Mr Jay Deitcher, a social worker and therapist. Writing in Today, Mr Deitcher informed us that his “mind spiralled into darkness” whenever his two-year-old son exhibited even rudimentary signs of being male. A toddler’s coverall with pictures of footballs on it, given as a present, resulted in much weeping and was promptly hidden away so as “never to be found.” Other causes of mental spiralling included a fondness for songs about tractors. At which point we were left to consider the prospects of a father-son relationship premised on a dogmatic, near-hysterical disdain for maleness, for “anything deemed masculine.” A category that includes “playing football,” “cleaning a car,” or any kind of “manual labour.”
Pronouns cropped up again, not for the last time, in May, when Kelsey Smoot, “a cultural and gender theorist, a writer, an advocate, and a poet,” boasted that her friendships – sorry, them’s friendships – are based on an ultimatum. Namely, that anyone in her orbit must perceive what they are told to perceive, rather than the physical reality staring back at them. Ms Smoot, who is not-at-all unhinged, also boasted of keeping count of even accidental “misgenderings,” which enables her to excommunicate any friends or acquaintances who fail to hallucinate. Ms Smoot, we learned, expects “concerted effort” from those who wish to partake of her personal magnificence. Her fascinating self.
We also explored the minefield of modern progressive manners, thanks to the practiced neuroses of New York Times contributor Ms Raksha Vasudevan, for whom the word “white” is a go-to pejorative, and who tells us she lives on “Arapaho and Cheyenne land,” i.e., in Denver.
We heard one parent’s account of the psychological abuse of her 12-year-old daughter, who had been told, in class, that the routine insecurities of puberty were in fact evidence that she must be transgender. We thereby entered a world of activist educators for whom a “safe space” is one in which middle-school children are ideologically groomed by unqualified misfits, conspiratorially, in secret, and while actively avoiding parents’ knowledge or consent. A subterfuge we’ve encountered more than once.
And we cast a widened eye over the middle-school libraries in Loudoun County, Virginia, where woke librarians don’t find anything inapt about 11-year-olds learning about the general awesomeness of prostitution. Because “high-end escorts” can “pull in half a million dollars a year.” Librarian Stefany Guido suggested that “some students” – again, 11-year-olds – could be considered “sex workers,” which, in her mind, is just like being an architect. Though it seems to me that an 11-year-old “sex worker” would be an abused child, a child being trafficked. Not, I think, an ideal aspiration for the pre-pubescent.
The mixed messages of campus life cropped up in June, when students at Adelphi University were told they must “not discriminate” against registered sex offenders, as if this were information of no utility whatsoever, while simultaneously being urged to report and denounce “dating violence,” “lack of consent,” and “incapacitated sexual contact.”
Elsewhere in academia, at Norway’s Oslo Metropolitan University, we met Dr Martin Moen, an activist for trans rights, and whose rather convoluted apologia for child molestation gave new meaning to the words contrived and transparently dishonest.
The radical ruminations of dysmorphic men continued in Washington, where a panel of activists and self-styled educators engaged in a taxpayer-funded mission to enlighten lesser beings. Mr Ganesha Gold Buffalo, a trans activist and prostitute, told us that his expertise, a term I use loosely, is rooted in the “sounds of my ancestors screaming from outside my window, coming from the ground, coming from the earth.” His mind, we learned, “was decolonised” in nearby woods by howling “nature spirits.” Needless to say, a great many pronouns were stipulated – among them, she, her, and goddess. Other terms of address included cyborg, unicorn, and Wakanda.
Oh, and via charts and number-crunching, we learned of the quite significant correlation of blue hair dye and serious mental health problems.
Woke theatre criticism and its complications were topics in July, as two Toronto Star reviewers, Aisling Murphy and Karen Fricker, applauded each other, and thereby themselves, for seeing an indigenous play and submitting to strict conditions on what they may subsequently write about it. Indigenous theatre, we discovered, requires approval that is both pre-emptive and unanimous, and its writers, actors and directors must be exempt from unflattering feedback, i.e., reviews of a kind that paying customers might have found useful, had they been available. Untroubled by irony, the critics, or rather non-critics, then bemoaned the ongoing, quite rapid decline of their profession and of the wider newsprint media.
Cultivated incompetence was also championed by the Oregon Health Authority, on grounds that “urgency is a white supremacist value.” Whereas, in matters of health, tardiness and lack of forethought are apparently aspirational, a woke ideal.
We also noted the scrupulously intersectional priorities of Canadian women’s shelters, where a deranged dysmorphic man roaming the halls wearing only a bra and brandishing his genitals, along with several stolen kitchen knives, was deemed of much less importance than the fact that a female resident had dared to “misgender” him. Setting aside the man’s threats to use his collection of knives on female residents, one can’t help thinking that a man who demands access to a women-only space, and to be perceived as a woman like any other, and who then goes out of his way to show, repeatedly and unequivocally, that he is not in fact what he claims… well, this probably tells us something. The words that come to mind being submissively pretend and psychological bullying.
In August, we were treated to some scholarship from the world of “queer studies” – in particular, the research of Mr Karl Andersson, a PhD student at the University of Manchester. Mr Andersson wanted us to know, at length and in some detail, just how often and how vigorously he masturbated to shota, a Japanese genre of erotic comics featuring young boys. That this paedophilic self-pleasuring – sorry, “ethnographic fieldwork” – had been approved by Mr Andersson’s supervisors doubtless speaks to the lofty standards that prevail among practitioners of “queer studies,” and in academia’s Clown Quarter more generally.
We also turned for mental betterment to Scientific American, where Camilo Garzón and science historian Rebecca Charbonneau fretted about space exploration and signalled their sensitivities with an enormous list of things that they consider problematic. A list that includes the remote locations of telescopes, the concepts of civilisation and intelligence, and the “colonial” violation of hypothetical microbes, whose autonomy and wellbeing would apparently be desecrated by human curiosity. We were also told, repeatedly, albeit unpersuasively, that those who can construct orbital telescopes and land robots on distant planets should defer in matters of science to those who can’t.
September brought us more boutique identities, thanks to activist, author and illustrator Maia Kobabe – pronouns eir and ey – whose pornographic cartoons for middle-school children had not been universally well-received by parents. These parental concerns were, however, dismissed as merely “a very organised effort to erase trans and queer and non-binary voices.” There being no other possible reason to object to eleven-year-old children being exposed to “vagina slime,” fellatio, and “strap-on hotness,” or the joys of masturbating while driving. All of which met with enthusiastic approval from TIME magazine’s Madeleine Carlisle.
Theatrical complications also came via Canada’s interim Green Party leader, a dysmorphic woman who expects everyone else to refer to her as “he” and “they,” but also sometimes “she,” and who was rendered distraught by an on-screen caption with pronouns that didn’t correspond with her preferences at that particular moment.
We also marvelled at the intricacies of progressive club-going and intersectional dancing, all of which has to be carefully organised and ruthlessly policed. Lest the wrong colour people gyrate near each other.
And identitarian struggles thrilled us once again, with news from the National Autonomous University of Mexico, where two rival student tribes – lesbians and the transgendered – were fighting for territorial possession of a ladies’ washroom. Thus unfolded a tale of nerve-shredding trauma and fearless self-involvement, as the toilets in question were given an extensive makeover via the uplifting medium of graffiti. Indeed, with so much graffiti to be scrawled on walls, and then responded to indignantly with additional scrawling, students were soon reporting queues and “lengthy wait times.”
The assumptions and psychology of the Activist-Wanker Caste were poked at in October, as vandalism and traffic obstruction hit British headlines on an all-but-daily basis, and with emergency vehicles being paralysed by the woke and well-heeled. The general public was not, it has to be said, overly sympathetic to this antisocial roleplay. However, and rather conveniently, the combination of practised self-involvement and feeling powerful at others’ expense turns out to be its own reward. For a certain kind of person.
In the pages of Scary Mommy, where wokeness and woo routinely coincide, Ms Annie Midori Atherton enthused about the merits of paranormal parenting – specifically, witchcraft. Several “real witches” were consulted for their wisdom, with their “magical knowledge” including the need to “harness the power of crystals,” and checking one’s jewellery for ancestral “emanations.”
And we also parsed some contrived racial grievance in the pages of the Globe and Mail, whose readers were led to believe that expectations of workplace professionalism are terribly racist, and that brown-skinned employees must be allowed to “bring their whole selves to work.” A wholeness of self that includes behaving in ways likely to be “interpreted as violent or aggressive.” A dislike of being bullied by the emotionally incontinent is, we were told, merely evidence of “deep, inherent bias and deeply inherent systemic racism.”
Those still getting up to speed with the notion of preferred pronouns were doubtless thrilled, in November, by the arrival of preferred adjectives, whereby the self-esteem of the psychologically marginal can be maintained, albeit shakily.
The sociopathic mouthings of Sophie Lewis also widened eyes, with Ms Lewis, a feminist “theorist” at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research, keen to “abolish the family.” By which she means, all families, including yours. This mission of familial disintegration would, we were assured, and despite all evidence to the contrary, only have positive, indeed utopian, outcomes. When not wishing for the destruction of other people’s family bonds, Ms Lewis passes the time by championing abortion, via drugs or dismemberment, as a form of “anti-violence,” a corrective killing of the “violent” foetus.
And we also met Duke University’s Kathy Rudy, a lecturer in Women’s Studies and self-styled “queer theorist,” who told us, “I know I love my dogs with all my heart, but I can’t figure out if that love is sexually motivated.” Readers who have been licked by a dog and somehow not found the experience particularly erotic were told that, “The line between ‘animal lover’ and zoophile is not only thin, it is non-existent.”
The year drew to a close with the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association, among whose members “decolonisation” and railing against “white supremacy” are very much in fashion, and “anthropology of the self” is The New Hotness. Expectations of evidence, however, are both old-hat and oppressive, on grounds that “scepticism is violence.”
Similar noises echoed at Montreal’s Concordia University, where even light is being “decolonised” – by people with salaries and lots of taxpayer subsidy. Apparently, “all physicists and other scientists” should divert time and effort from their actual work in order to become familiar with indigenous “bodies of knowledge.” Presumably, on grounds that one simply can’t do physics or astronomy without a detailed knowledge of magical talking beavers and rival chiefs stealing the Moon. “Feminist theory” and “critical race theory” will of course be brought to bear, as these things are “part of physics in a holistic sense.”
And at Carleton University’s School of Journalism and Communication, assorted luminaries of the Canadian media expressed their bewilderment at why their line of work doesn’t inspire the expected deference among the general public. The word hate was deployed frequently, with little regard for meaning, and panellists insisted that being a journalist on Twitter, where readers can tweet mockery and corrections in close to real time, is indistinguishable from surviving in an active warzone. Other mortal hazards included pejorative use of the word woke – one of many things that can induce “anxiety, depression and post-traumatic distress.” Possible explanations for the public’s failure to hold their betters in high regard remained oddly untouched, however. Even when Hill Times columnist and “anti-racism expert” Erica Ifill boasted that she doesn’t bother to interview white men. And who did so confident that she would not be challenged by any of her peers, or by any of the would-be journalists gathered in the audience.
Yes, our betters at large. These, then, are the heights to which we must aspire.
News of the Times;
House Democrats Pick Top Leadership That Includes Zero White Men:
https://time.com/6237571/house-democrats-leadership-no-white-men/
In 2019, 40 Democrats Called Ukraine’s Nazi Azov Battalion a Terrorist Org. Now They Send It Billions:
https://gellerreport.com/2022/12/in-2019-40-democrats-called-ukraines-nazi-azov-battalion-a-terrorist-org-now-they-send-it-billions.html/?lctg=85323758
Report Says CIA Is Behind Attacks Inside Russia, Using NATO Ally:
https://americanfaith.com/report-says-cia-is-behind-attacks-inside-russia-using-nato-ally/
Woke and broke U.S. Army now accepting recruits with ADHD, other "behavioral challenges":
https://hotair.com/tree-hugging-sister/2022/12/28/woke-and-broke-u-s-army-now-accepting-recruits-with-adhd-other-behavioral-challenges-n520398
NYC robbery crews drug unsuspecting men, some fatally:
https://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/nyc-robbery-crews-drug-unsuspecting-men-fatally-95767897
White Brooklyn Parole Officer Sues for Racial Discrimination in Federal Court, Called “Snowcone” By Colleagues:
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2022/12/white-brooklyn-parole-officer-sues-racial-discrimination-federal-court-called-snowcone-colleagues-told-not-safely-job-white/
Tesla Owner Stranded At Supercharger Station On Christmas Eve After Cold Weather Paralyzes Battery:
https://www.zerohedge.com/technology/tesla-owner-stranded-supercharger-christmas-eve-after-cold-weather-paralyzes-battery
A startup says it’s begun releasing particles into the atmosphere, in an effort to tweak the climate:
https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/12/24/1066041/a-startup-says-its-begun-releasing-particles-into-the-atmosphere-in-an-effort-to-tweak-the-climate/
Biden Approved Infrastructure Bill - Mandated Kill Switches coming to Cars by 2026:
https://www.musclecarsandtrucks.com/biden-infrastructure-bill-vehicle-kill-switch-2026/
Non-Profit Focused on Ending Cash Bail Shuts Down After Being Sued for Release of Offender Who Shot Man Days After Being Bailed Out:
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2022/12/non-profit-focused-ending-cash-bail-shuts-sued-release-offender-shot-man/
Hollywood lost a half trillion dollars in market value in 2022:
https://hotair.com/headlines/2022/12/26/hollywood-lost-a-half-trillion-dollars-in-market-value-in-2022-n519995
Studios Ignore Henry Cavill at Their Own Peril:
https://redstate.com/brandon_morse/2022/12/27/studios-ignore-henry-cavill-at-their-own-peril-n679705
Japan Is Getting Serious About Its Security:
https://www.19fortyfive.com/2022/12/japan-is-getting-serious-about-its-security/
Japan Embraces Nuclear Power, Cancels Phase Out Plans:
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2022/12/23/japan-goes-all-in-on-nuclear-power-cancels-phase-out-plans/
2022 was the year we realised we're now fighting Cold War II against China:
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11586705/2022-year-realised-fighting-Cold-War-II-against-China.html
Ten or twelve feet away from her at all times.
*.*
My wife packed my bags and told me to leave...
As I was headed out the door, she said "I hope you die a long, slow, painful death!"
I said, "So now you want me to stay?"
*.*
Oneliners:
Here's a question for all you mind-readers listening right now.
I quit my job pulling bones out of hams, it was a shankless job.
I don't know the secret to happiness, but I do know I've never been sad at a Mexican restaurant.
I'm at a place in my life where errands count as going out.
I don't regret things I did wrong, I regret the good things I did for the wrong people.
Just before I die, I'm going to swallow a whole bag of popcorn kernels, just to make the cremation a little more exciting.
Look, I promise to always be fair, honest, straight-forward and considerate... all the way up until they draw my Powerball numbers, then, it's a maybe...
When someone yells "Stop", I never know if it's in the name of love, it's Hammer-time, or if I should figure out what's that sound.
In case no one has told you today, I'm beautiful.
You know, I try to make protein shakes, but they keep coming out as Margaritas.
*.*
My generation's zombies didn't run.
They walked.
In the snow.
Uphill.
They ate the brains they could find and they liked them.
*.*
Every weekend, I say to myself, "Susan, you've got to stop drinking."
Thankfully, I'm not Susan.
Quote of the Times;
"HAPPY NEW YEAR to all of the Radical Left Democrats, Marxist Lunatics, China loving Coco Chow and her Obedient Husband, Mitch, and Clueless RINOS, who are working so hard to DESTROY our once great Country. More importantly, HAPPY NEW YEAR to the Incredible, Brave, and Strong American Patriots who Built, Love, and Cherish America. The REAL leaders of our Country will always remain FAITHFUL and LOYAL to you. The USA will be back, Bigger & Better & Stronger than ever before. GOD BLESS YOU ALL!" – Donald Trump
Link of the Times;
Politics and the English Language:
https://quillette.com/2022/12/28/politics-and-the-english-language-2023/
Issue of the Times;
The Year Reheated by https://thompsonblog.co.uk/
In which we marvel at the mental contortions of our self-imagined betters.
The year began with a lesson in pronouns and pretending, or dishonesty-on-demand, courtesy of the suddenly ungendered Laurie Penny – now, it seems, a they, depending on who’s nearby and how fashionable they are. And so, we pondered animal pronouns, clown pronouns and pronouns that can change randomly, depending on whim, several times a day. Such is the hamster-wheel world of competitive self-definition.
We also flicked through the pages of The Atlantic, where senior editor Honor Jones, a woman oppressed by comfort and fidelity, shared a somewhat bewildering account of her divorce from a loving and faithful husband. Chief among her reasons were a desire to “be thinking about art and sex and politics and the patriarchy,” a feat no married woman can apparently hope to achieve, and a dislike of crumbs – a recurring topic, mentioned seven times.
And we witnessed the denouncing of racist traffic cameras. Which is to say, devices that record which demographics speed and run red lights, and endanger lives, much more often than others. Writing in ProPublica, Emily Hopkins and Melissa Sanchez conjured a remarkable series of excuses for repeat offenders, who were presented as oppressed, as “activists for racial equity,” and all but heroic, despite some committing 11 offences in a single year. Humdrum notions of personal responsibility were of course avoided, leaving readers to suppose that the only conceivable explanation for the lawbreakers’ behaviour, and consequent fines, was “structural racism.”
In February, we were treated to cultural sustenance, courtesy of Finland’s creative powerhouse Iiu Susiraja, whose artistic immensity has enthralled us before, and regarding whom, the Los Angeles Times gushed, “Kierkegaard comes to mind, as do Sartre and Dostoevsky.”
We also witnessed the mental unspooling of San Francisco school board members, among whom mismanagement and conspiracy theories are elevated to an art form, and for whom two hours spent debating whether a gay white dad is sufficiently “diverse” to join a volunteer parent committee is a perfectly normal use of one’s time.
And via The Independent, we heard of the latest moral crisis and cause of deep mental “trauma” – namely, aircraft seatbelts and insufficiently commodious plus-size bath towels.
March brought us the exquisite agonies of listening to rap while woke and white, along with an implication that one of the most hazardous of words to use, and from which All Decent Non-Racist People are expected to recoil, is simultaneously one to which All Decent Non-Racist People are obliged to be drawn. Say, when listening to rap. Failure to enjoy endless repetition of the word in question is, we were assured, “the silencing of intellectuals in music,” and, inevitably, evidence of racism.
Pale devilry cropped up again, as educator and activist Maia Niguel Hoskin, writing in Forbes, told us that when a black millionaire celebrity publicly slaps another black millionaire celebrity, this is all the fault of white people and “white supremacist culture.” You see, for an educator and activist, the way to be “anti-racist” is to erase any agency, and any expectation of self-possession, from people with brown skin.
We also witnessed a display of intersectional ruggedness, thanks to Ailish Breen, a being with pronouns, and her troupe of ostentatiously “queer hikers,” who regard a simple walk in the countryside as both “quite political” and a basis for complaint, and for whom the very air is yet another a form of oppression. Among the troupe’s many grievances was the phrase “conquering the outdoors,” a term whose weight bears down on their delicate souls. That the expression refers to overcoming one’s own limitations or imagined limitations – which among the less pretentious is generally regarded as a good thing – somehow escaped their notice.
In April, we pondered more diverse identities, and the media’s euphemistic convolutions when covering said beings and their activities. Say, when publicly using a wheelie bin as a sex toy.
We also noted several educators whose paycheque and woke status depend on propagating failure and resentment among the young and impressionable. As when Dr Asao Inoue, of the University of Washington, Tacoma, dismissed students’ proficiency in English as “selfish” and “immature,” a surrender to “white supremacy.” For Dr Inoue and his peers, a student’s ability to convey their thoughts in writing – and to formulate thoughts by writing – is merely a manifestation of “white language supremacy,” an allegedly lethal phenomenon.
And we were captivated by the parenting skills of Mr Jay Deitcher, a social worker and therapist. Writing in Today, Mr Deitcher informed us that his “mind spiralled into darkness” whenever his two-year-old son exhibited even rudimentary signs of being male. A toddler’s coverall with pictures of footballs on it, given as a present, resulted in much weeping and was promptly hidden away so as “never to be found.” Other causes of mental spiralling included a fondness for songs about tractors. At which point we were left to consider the prospects of a father-son relationship premised on a dogmatic, near-hysterical disdain for maleness, for “anything deemed masculine.” A category that includes “playing football,” “cleaning a car,” or any kind of “manual labour.”
Pronouns cropped up again, not for the last time, in May, when Kelsey Smoot, “a cultural and gender theorist, a writer, an advocate, and a poet,” boasted that her friendships – sorry, them’s friendships – are based on an ultimatum. Namely, that anyone in her orbit must perceive what they are told to perceive, rather than the physical reality staring back at them. Ms Smoot, who is not-at-all unhinged, also boasted of keeping count of even accidental “misgenderings,” which enables her to excommunicate any friends or acquaintances who fail to hallucinate. Ms Smoot, we learned, expects “concerted effort” from those who wish to partake of her personal magnificence. Her fascinating self.
We also explored the minefield of modern progressive manners, thanks to the practiced neuroses of New York Times contributor Ms Raksha Vasudevan, for whom the word “white” is a go-to pejorative, and who tells us she lives on “Arapaho and Cheyenne land,” i.e., in Denver.
We heard one parent’s account of the psychological abuse of her 12-year-old daughter, who had been told, in class, that the routine insecurities of puberty were in fact evidence that she must be transgender. We thereby entered a world of activist educators for whom a “safe space” is one in which middle-school children are ideologically groomed by unqualified misfits, conspiratorially, in secret, and while actively avoiding parents’ knowledge or consent. A subterfuge we’ve encountered more than once.
And we cast a widened eye over the middle-school libraries in Loudoun County, Virginia, where woke librarians don’t find anything inapt about 11-year-olds learning about the general awesomeness of prostitution. Because “high-end escorts” can “pull in half a million dollars a year.” Librarian Stefany Guido suggested that “some students” – again, 11-year-olds – could be considered “sex workers,” which, in her mind, is just like being an architect. Though it seems to me that an 11-year-old “sex worker” would be an abused child, a child being trafficked. Not, I think, an ideal aspiration for the pre-pubescent.
The mixed messages of campus life cropped up in June, when students at Adelphi University were told they must “not discriminate” against registered sex offenders, as if this were information of no utility whatsoever, while simultaneously being urged to report and denounce “dating violence,” “lack of consent,” and “incapacitated sexual contact.”
Elsewhere in academia, at Norway’s Oslo Metropolitan University, we met Dr Martin Moen, an activist for trans rights, and whose rather convoluted apologia for child molestation gave new meaning to the words contrived and transparently dishonest.
The radical ruminations of dysmorphic men continued in Washington, where a panel of activists and self-styled educators engaged in a taxpayer-funded mission to enlighten lesser beings. Mr Ganesha Gold Buffalo, a trans activist and prostitute, told us that his expertise, a term I use loosely, is rooted in the “sounds of my ancestors screaming from outside my window, coming from the ground, coming from the earth.” His mind, we learned, “was decolonised” in nearby woods by howling “nature spirits.” Needless to say, a great many pronouns were stipulated – among them, she, her, and goddess. Other terms of address included cyborg, unicorn, and Wakanda.
Oh, and via charts and number-crunching, we learned of the quite significant correlation of blue hair dye and serious mental health problems.
Woke theatre criticism and its complications were topics in July, as two Toronto Star reviewers, Aisling Murphy and Karen Fricker, applauded each other, and thereby themselves, for seeing an indigenous play and submitting to strict conditions on what they may subsequently write about it. Indigenous theatre, we discovered, requires approval that is both pre-emptive and unanimous, and its writers, actors and directors must be exempt from unflattering feedback, i.e., reviews of a kind that paying customers might have found useful, had they been available. Untroubled by irony, the critics, or rather non-critics, then bemoaned the ongoing, quite rapid decline of their profession and of the wider newsprint media.
Cultivated incompetence was also championed by the Oregon Health Authority, on grounds that “urgency is a white supremacist value.” Whereas, in matters of health, tardiness and lack of forethought are apparently aspirational, a woke ideal.
We also noted the scrupulously intersectional priorities of Canadian women’s shelters, where a deranged dysmorphic man roaming the halls wearing only a bra and brandishing his genitals, along with several stolen kitchen knives, was deemed of much less importance than the fact that a female resident had dared to “misgender” him. Setting aside the man’s threats to use his collection of knives on female residents, one can’t help thinking that a man who demands access to a women-only space, and to be perceived as a woman like any other, and who then goes out of his way to show, repeatedly and unequivocally, that he is not in fact what he claims… well, this probably tells us something. The words that come to mind being submissively pretend and psychological bullying.
In August, we were treated to some scholarship from the world of “queer studies” – in particular, the research of Mr Karl Andersson, a PhD student at the University of Manchester. Mr Andersson wanted us to know, at length and in some detail, just how often and how vigorously he masturbated to shota, a Japanese genre of erotic comics featuring young boys. That this paedophilic self-pleasuring – sorry, “ethnographic fieldwork” – had been approved by Mr Andersson’s supervisors doubtless speaks to the lofty standards that prevail among practitioners of “queer studies,” and in academia’s Clown Quarter more generally.
We also turned for mental betterment to Scientific American, where Camilo Garzón and science historian Rebecca Charbonneau fretted about space exploration and signalled their sensitivities with an enormous list of things that they consider problematic. A list that includes the remote locations of telescopes, the concepts of civilisation and intelligence, and the “colonial” violation of hypothetical microbes, whose autonomy and wellbeing would apparently be desecrated by human curiosity. We were also told, repeatedly, albeit unpersuasively, that those who can construct orbital telescopes and land robots on distant planets should defer in matters of science to those who can’t.
September brought us more boutique identities, thanks to activist, author and illustrator Maia Kobabe – pronouns eir and ey – whose pornographic cartoons for middle-school children had not been universally well-received by parents. These parental concerns were, however, dismissed as merely “a very organised effort to erase trans and queer and non-binary voices.” There being no other possible reason to object to eleven-year-old children being exposed to “vagina slime,” fellatio, and “strap-on hotness,” or the joys of masturbating while driving. All of which met with enthusiastic approval from TIME magazine’s Madeleine Carlisle.
Theatrical complications also came via Canada’s interim Green Party leader, a dysmorphic woman who expects everyone else to refer to her as “he” and “they,” but also sometimes “she,” and who was rendered distraught by an on-screen caption with pronouns that didn’t correspond with her preferences at that particular moment.
We also marvelled at the intricacies of progressive club-going and intersectional dancing, all of which has to be carefully organised and ruthlessly policed. Lest the wrong colour people gyrate near each other.
And identitarian struggles thrilled us once again, with news from the National Autonomous University of Mexico, where two rival student tribes – lesbians and the transgendered – were fighting for territorial possession of a ladies’ washroom. Thus unfolded a tale of nerve-shredding trauma and fearless self-involvement, as the toilets in question were given an extensive makeover via the uplifting medium of graffiti. Indeed, with so much graffiti to be scrawled on walls, and then responded to indignantly with additional scrawling, students were soon reporting queues and “lengthy wait times.”
The assumptions and psychology of the Activist-Wanker Caste were poked at in October, as vandalism and traffic obstruction hit British headlines on an all-but-daily basis, and with emergency vehicles being paralysed by the woke and well-heeled. The general public was not, it has to be said, overly sympathetic to this antisocial roleplay. However, and rather conveniently, the combination of practised self-involvement and feeling powerful at others’ expense turns out to be its own reward. For a certain kind of person.
In the pages of Scary Mommy, where wokeness and woo routinely coincide, Ms Annie Midori Atherton enthused about the merits of paranormal parenting – specifically, witchcraft. Several “real witches” were consulted for their wisdom, with their “magical knowledge” including the need to “harness the power of crystals,” and checking one’s jewellery for ancestral “emanations.”
And we also parsed some contrived racial grievance in the pages of the Globe and Mail, whose readers were led to believe that expectations of workplace professionalism are terribly racist, and that brown-skinned employees must be allowed to “bring their whole selves to work.” A wholeness of self that includes behaving in ways likely to be “interpreted as violent or aggressive.” A dislike of being bullied by the emotionally incontinent is, we were told, merely evidence of “deep, inherent bias and deeply inherent systemic racism.”
Those still getting up to speed with the notion of preferred pronouns were doubtless thrilled, in November, by the arrival of preferred adjectives, whereby the self-esteem of the psychologically marginal can be maintained, albeit shakily.
The sociopathic mouthings of Sophie Lewis also widened eyes, with Ms Lewis, a feminist “theorist” at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research, keen to “abolish the family.” By which she means, all families, including yours. This mission of familial disintegration would, we were assured, and despite all evidence to the contrary, only have positive, indeed utopian, outcomes. When not wishing for the destruction of other people’s family bonds, Ms Lewis passes the time by championing abortion, via drugs or dismemberment, as a form of “anti-violence,” a corrective killing of the “violent” foetus.
And we also met Duke University’s Kathy Rudy, a lecturer in Women’s Studies and self-styled “queer theorist,” who told us, “I know I love my dogs with all my heart, but I can’t figure out if that love is sexually motivated.” Readers who have been licked by a dog and somehow not found the experience particularly erotic were told that, “The line between ‘animal lover’ and zoophile is not only thin, it is non-existent.”
The year drew to a close with the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association, among whose members “decolonisation” and railing against “white supremacy” are very much in fashion, and “anthropology of the self” is The New Hotness. Expectations of evidence, however, are both old-hat and oppressive, on grounds that “scepticism is violence.”
Similar noises echoed at Montreal’s Concordia University, where even light is being “decolonised” – by people with salaries and lots of taxpayer subsidy. Apparently, “all physicists and other scientists” should divert time and effort from their actual work in order to become familiar with indigenous “bodies of knowledge.” Presumably, on grounds that one simply can’t do physics or astronomy without a detailed knowledge of magical talking beavers and rival chiefs stealing the Moon. “Feminist theory” and “critical race theory” will of course be brought to bear, as these things are “part of physics in a holistic sense.”
And at Carleton University’s School of Journalism and Communication, assorted luminaries of the Canadian media expressed their bewilderment at why their line of work doesn’t inspire the expected deference among the general public. The word hate was deployed frequently, with little regard for meaning, and panellists insisted that being a journalist on Twitter, where readers can tweet mockery and corrections in close to real time, is indistinguishable from surviving in an active warzone. Other mortal hazards included pejorative use of the word woke – one of many things that can induce “anxiety, depression and post-traumatic distress.” Possible explanations for the public’s failure to hold their betters in high regard remained oddly untouched, however. Even when Hill Times columnist and “anti-racism expert” Erica Ifill boasted that she doesn’t bother to interview white men. And who did so confident that she would not be challenged by any of her peers, or by any of the would-be journalists gathered in the audience.
Yes, our betters at large. These, then, are the heights to which we must aspire.
News of the Times;
House Democrats Pick Top Leadership That Includes Zero White Men:
https://time.com/6237571/house-democrats-leadership-no-white-men/
In 2019, 40 Democrats Called Ukraine’s Nazi Azov Battalion a Terrorist Org. Now They Send It Billions:
https://gellerreport.com/2022/12/in-2019-40-democrats-called-ukraines-nazi-azov-battalion-a-terrorist-org-now-they-send-it-billions.html/?lctg=85323758
Report Says CIA Is Behind Attacks Inside Russia, Using NATO Ally:
https://americanfaith.com/report-says-cia-is-behind-attacks-inside-russia-using-nato-ally/
Woke and broke U.S. Army now accepting recruits with ADHD, other "behavioral challenges":
https://hotair.com/tree-hugging-sister/2022/12/28/woke-and-broke-u-s-army-now-accepting-recruits-with-adhd-other-behavioral-challenges-n520398
NYC robbery crews drug unsuspecting men, some fatally:
https://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/nyc-robbery-crews-drug-unsuspecting-men-fatally-95767897
White Brooklyn Parole Officer Sues for Racial Discrimination in Federal Court, Called “Snowcone” By Colleagues:
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2022/12/white-brooklyn-parole-officer-sues-racial-discrimination-federal-court-called-snowcone-colleagues-told-not-safely-job-white/
Tesla Owner Stranded At Supercharger Station On Christmas Eve After Cold Weather Paralyzes Battery:
https://www.zerohedge.com/technology/tesla-owner-stranded-supercharger-christmas-eve-after-cold-weather-paralyzes-battery
A startup says it’s begun releasing particles into the atmosphere, in an effort to tweak the climate:
https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/12/24/1066041/a-startup-says-its-begun-releasing-particles-into-the-atmosphere-in-an-effort-to-tweak-the-climate/
Biden Approved Infrastructure Bill - Mandated Kill Switches coming to Cars by 2026:
https://www.musclecarsandtrucks.com/biden-infrastructure-bill-vehicle-kill-switch-2026/
Non-Profit Focused on Ending Cash Bail Shuts Down After Being Sued for Release of Offender Who Shot Man Days After Being Bailed Out:
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2022/12/non-profit-focused-ending-cash-bail-shuts-sued-release-offender-shot-man/
Hollywood lost a half trillion dollars in market value in 2022:
https://hotair.com/headlines/2022/12/26/hollywood-lost-a-half-trillion-dollars-in-market-value-in-2022-n519995
Studios Ignore Henry Cavill at Their Own Peril:
https://redstate.com/brandon_morse/2022/12/27/studios-ignore-henry-cavill-at-their-own-peril-n679705
Japan Is Getting Serious About Its Security:
https://www.19fortyfive.com/2022/12/japan-is-getting-serious-about-its-security/
Japan Embraces Nuclear Power, Cancels Phase Out Plans:
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2022/12/23/japan-goes-all-in-on-nuclear-power-cancels-phase-out-plans/
2022 was the year we realised we're now fighting Cold War II against China:
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11586705/2022-year-realised-fighting-Cold-War-II-against-China.html
Begins?
Why is Covid better than Southwest?
Because it’s airborne.
*.*
What do you call a paper airplane that can’t fly?
Stationary.
*.*
Tragedy struck Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky Friday as he shot himself in the eye with a rocket launcher he had received only days before as a gift from the United States.
Zelensky was eager to try out his new gift in the backyard of his home. Unfortunately, the target of Russian President Vladimir Putin he set up was too close to his garage, causing the rocket to ricochet back and hit him in the eye. A source on the scene reported that Zelensky yelled out "Oh, fudge!" before falling to the ground in pain.
Zelensky had appeared before Congress earlier in the week asking for additional funds to support his country's war with Russia. He also made an impassioned plea for his own gift: an official, carbine action, 200 shot, range model rocket launcher with a compass in the stock and this thing which tells time.
Congress initially denied the request, with Nancy Pelosi saying that rocket launchers are dangerous and "you'll shoot your eye out." But Mitch McConnell ultimately came through, telling Zelensky that he had a similar rocket launcher when he was just eight years old.
Fortunately for the Ukrainian president, he was wearing his glasses at the time which protected his eye from any permanent damage. In the aftermath of the accident, Zelensky was able to work up some fake tears and persuade Congress to give him another $47 billion for a new pair of glasses.
*.*
A woman goes to the Doctor, worried about her husband's temper.
The Doctor asks: "What's the problem?"
The woman says: "Doctor, I don't know what to do. Every day my husband seems to lose his temper for no reason. It scares me."
The Doctor says: "I have a cure for that. When it seems that your husband is getting angry, just take a glass of water and start swishing it in your mouth. Just swish and swish but don't swallow it until he either leaves the room or calms down."
Two weeks later the woman comes back to the doctor looking fresh and reborn.
The woman says: "Doctor that was a brilliant idea! Every time my husband started losing it, I swished with water. I swished and swished, and he calmed right down! How does a glass of water do that?"
The Doctor says: "The water itself does nothing. It's keeping your mouth shut that does the trick".
*.*
The secret to a pizza joke...
...is in the delivery.
Quote of the Times;
American speech is brash, brutally honest, blunt, direct, and yes - “offensive.” Don’t let anyone convince you otherwise. This is who we are. It’s who we have always been and who we always will be. We will tell the world uncomfortable truths even when they don’t want to hear it. So take your “hate speech” and “disinformation” and go pound sand. - Torba
Link of the Times;
Buttigieg Knew: State AGs Warned Transportation Agency Of Airline Debacle Months Ago:
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/buttigieg-knew-state-ags-warned-transportation-agency-airline-debacle-months-ago
Issue of the Times;
In 2023 The Lazy Analyst Won't Keep Up With Geopolitics by Tom Luongo
Before I took on my current persona as either a “Putin Stooge,” a “shill for the Fed,” or a naïve apologist for neoliberalism, I used to be a chemist specializing in process efficiency and root cause analysis.
While I learned many things during those twenty-plus years, the most startling conclusion I came to was that laziness has a real place in process improvement.
If you really want some industrial or bureaucratic process streamlined, give that job to the guy who most hates having his time wasted. He will invariably find a way to make that ‘work’ into something he only has to do sparingly.
It led to one of my first rules of organization, if you want something done right give it to the “lazy” guy.
That “lazy” guy isn’t really lazy.
What he is, is unmotivated, because all he sees is waste and waste offends his narcissism. Nothing is worse than wasting his time doing unnecessary tasks. So, give him some tedious thing to improve and he will find not only the fastest way to do it, but also very likely the best way because while he doesn’t want his time wasted, he also doesn’t want to be yelled at by someone he sees as inferior.
Only then will you get an honest day of work out of someone like him.
It’s not like I wouldn’t know this from personal experience or anything.
When I was a chemist, I was obsessed with doing everything I could to optimize internal processes, be it shaving a few seconds here or there off a temperature program to analyze heavy metals by atomic spectroscopy or optimizing the deposition rate of a plating bath.
For me, the goal was always the same, work hard now to generate free time later to devote myself to something more valuable.
I benefited from having a less stressful work environment, the company benefits from lower COGS and the goodwill you generate leaves you far less vulnerable to middle-management scrutiny.
It was this ‘laziness’ that afforded me hundreds of hours over the years to pursue my hobbies while at work. Those were, in short, board gaming, monetary theory and politics.
One could say y’all are now the ‘beneficiaries’ of all that ‘laziness.’ (sic)
While podcasts are all the rage now, and with good reason, during my last ‘corporate’ job (which is really stretching that definition) I consumed every internet radio show I could on gold, the 2008 financial crisis, and the Buffalo Sabres.
But simultaneously I also produced reams of data in service of putting strict process controls on a novel nickel-boron coating whose lack of such had the company hemorrhaging capital.
Respect the Order
What you learn in all of this is that “order of operations” matters.
Coders understand this explicitly. So do engineers. It’s especially true in chemistry, where for one reaction to take place another reaction has to happen before it. Do it in the wrong order and you get a mess at best, or blow up the building or poison yourself at worst.
Switching metaphors, in your typical “euro-style” board game, the order in which you take the actions necessary to fulfill your strategy matters greatly. In these games, where luck is minimized or removed completely, players fight for access to a limited number of places to ‘do a thing,’ be it play a card, place a worker, build a city or whatever.
The goal is to collect more of what you need to win while subtly denying your opponent what he needs.
Sometimes you have to make a sub-optimal move for yourself in order to block someone else getting to that thing that would benefit them more. It’s incredibly passive-aggressive, but it’s also instructive, because it is so unabashedly human.
Math has it’s order of operations as well, PEMDAS for short — Parentheses, Exponents, Multiplication/Division, Addition/Subtraction. We’ve all seen the quizzes on social media testing our knowledge of this.
It is this attention to the order of operations that is important in trying to make sense of what’s going on in the world today.
One of my most common complaints with my ‘libertarian brethren’ is that they are always jumping to ‘end-game’ while not thinking through the moves that get us there.
In monetary theory we can do the math and realize the system is doomed.
By taking that variable and adding it into the political mix we can solve the geopolitical equation and then make grand pronouncements about the where everything winds up.
While this is an important first step in waking people up, it’s also absolutely why, as a political force, ‘libertarians’ are spent. Ron Paul broke through into the popular zeitgeist in 2008 and 2012 with “End the Fed” and his critiques of foreign policy.
The problem was, however, the movement never grew up. It never engaged with the world that was versus still selling the world we’ll never get.
And rightly, people wandered away looking for those with real answers to today’s problems.
I’ve been there and made many a decision based on the equation I solved only to be frustrated like many others by the future not working out like the model I’d constructed.
The typical cope then is to scream, “Corruption!” and bitch about them rigging the gold price or trashing Bitcoin or whatever. And don’t get me wrong, I’m with y’all on that. They are rigging the markets, intervening at every turn, if not turning them into completely fake markets.
But that should have been expected. Because in the proper ‘order of operations’ those with power and money will always react to defend themselves against the growing realization that they are fucking us over.
Remember, they’re trying to ‘win’ this game as well.
And so, if they can get to that richer spot on the board before you do, they will. Don’t bitch about the game board being tilted against you, accept that it is part of that mini-game and widen your perspective on the larger game afoot.
And that’s the real problem. We have too many ‘lazy’ analysts who got red-pilled, saw the game for what it was and stopped at “anger” rather than doing the hard work of reaching ‘acceptance.’
This is where we are today and why, for many, the world is so hard to make sense of.
The Larger Bowl
When you realize that everyone’s incentives map to their own particular definitions of winning that’s when real headway can be made in understanding.
Because here’s the thing. Our insights into the world aren’t novel or unique. In fact, more often than not they are just our finally understanding the reality that’s always been in front of us. We’re latecomers to a geopolitical party that’s been going on for decades.
I know I feel like that on more days than I care to admit.
They’ve finally told us what their end game looks like. It speaks to a confidence of their making that’s real. If we ignore the order of operations of how we get to our preferred outcome — a decentralized world with private property and sound money that should maximize human dignity — the irony is we’ll have a lower probability of it occurring on any time line that matters to us or even our children.
This is why I’m willing to see The Fed and the NY Boys as our temporary allies in that fight for human dignity. They have their definitions of winning the game they’re playing and should act accordingly.
So, while we should all long for the day that these assholes are dead and buried by the natural forces of decentralization and entropy, there are a thousand interstitial steps that have to happen first.
And it won’t matter if bitcoin eventually wins if the world goes through a sixty year Dark Age in the meantime. That’s not leadership, that’s cowardice.
So, yes. Davos has their definitions of winning. The Russians have theirs. China theirs.
And we need to have ours.
It is this curious admixture of incentives, this coincidence of wants, that is the interesting part. It’s where the game actually lives.
And while we don’t have a crystal ball as to how well everyone in the game will respond to these pressures and counter-pressures, with an accurate map of their incentives we can, at least make some observations.
The problem for many is they checked out long before they’d even identified the players at the table, so the game seems incomprehensible and the players wiser and more powerful than they actually are.
That’s why I think this year is going to be one of the most interesting to analyze in real time and why we all have to up our game.
Laziness only gets you so far, it may get you to the root cause of the situation, but that’s when the real work begins.
News of the Times;
Every social media firm censors for US government – Musk:
https://www.rt.com/news/569016-musk-social-media-censorship/
How Twitter Rigged the Covid Debate:
https://www.thefp.com/p/how-twitter-rigged-the-covid-debate
Zelenskyy Hires Globalist BlackRock CEO Larry Fink To Oversee Ukraine’s Money Laundering Scam:
https://newspunch.com/zelenskyy-hires-globalist-blackrock-ceo-larry-fink-to-oversee-ukraines-money-laundering-scam/
NYC crime spiked 44% in first months of 2022:
https://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/nyc-crime/ny-crime-data-recidivists-arrests-soar-nypd-20220406-3p7m5l2avrbffigozefy6gzvuq-story.html
Migrant Surge at Border Strains El Paso:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/migrant-surge-at-border-strains-el-paso-11671122056
Liberalism is a philosophy of consolation for the West as it commits suicide:
https://www.johnderbyshire.com/Opinions/Culture/homeless.html
Funny what even a flimsy border fence can do...
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/12/funny_what_even_a_flimsy_border_fence_can_do.html
GOP Sellouts Gave Biden Regime $11 MILLION to Target Gun Owners in Repulsive Omnibus Bill:
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2022/12/another-nasty-surprise-gop-sellouts-gave-biden-regime-11-million-target-gun-owners-repulsive-omnibus-bill/
The $1.7 Trillion Omnibus Spending Bill Is Being Flown to Biden's Caribbean Retreat for Signing:
https://thefederalistpapers.org/us/1-7-trillion-omnibus-spending-bill-flown-bidens-caribbean-retreat-signing-report
2022 Man of the Year: The Ghost:
https://freebeacon.com/culture/2022-man-of-the-year-the-ghost/
Vandals attack 4 power substations on Christmas – 17,000 without electricity:
https://www.theblaze.com/news/vandals-attack-4-power-substations-on-christmas-17000-without-electricity
3 dead in Kurdish center shooting in Paris; suspect arrested:
https://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/paris-shooting-leaves-multiple-people-wounded-1-arrested-95744486
Social Worker Secretly Begins Transitioning Young Girl Without Parental Consent, School Faces No Repercussions:
https://www.dailyveracity.com/2022/12/24/social-worker-secretly-begins-transitioning-young-girl-without-parental-consent-school-faces-no-repercussions/
San Francisco unveils taxpayer-funded open-air Christmas market that's become dystopian hellhole:
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11572629/San-Francisco-unveils-taxpayer-funded-open-air-Christmas-market-thats-dystopian-hellhole.html
Chip Roy Completely Explodes At Democrats On House Floor Over Omnibus:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XtKo9EEalwI&t=213s
Because it’s airborne.
*.*
What do you call a paper airplane that can’t fly?
Stationary.
*.*
Tragedy struck Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky Friday as he shot himself in the eye with a rocket launcher he had received only days before as a gift from the United States.
Zelensky was eager to try out his new gift in the backyard of his home. Unfortunately, the target of Russian President Vladimir Putin he set up was too close to his garage, causing the rocket to ricochet back and hit him in the eye. A source on the scene reported that Zelensky yelled out "Oh, fudge!" before falling to the ground in pain.
Zelensky had appeared before Congress earlier in the week asking for additional funds to support his country's war with Russia. He also made an impassioned plea for his own gift: an official, carbine action, 200 shot, range model rocket launcher with a compass in the stock and this thing which tells time.
Congress initially denied the request, with Nancy Pelosi saying that rocket launchers are dangerous and "you'll shoot your eye out." But Mitch McConnell ultimately came through, telling Zelensky that he had a similar rocket launcher when he was just eight years old.
Fortunately for the Ukrainian president, he was wearing his glasses at the time which protected his eye from any permanent damage. In the aftermath of the accident, Zelensky was able to work up some fake tears and persuade Congress to give him another $47 billion for a new pair of glasses.
*.*
A woman goes to the Doctor, worried about her husband's temper.
The Doctor asks: "What's the problem?"
The woman says: "Doctor, I don't know what to do. Every day my husband seems to lose his temper for no reason. It scares me."
The Doctor says: "I have a cure for that. When it seems that your husband is getting angry, just take a glass of water and start swishing it in your mouth. Just swish and swish but don't swallow it until he either leaves the room or calms down."
Two weeks later the woman comes back to the doctor looking fresh and reborn.
The woman says: "Doctor that was a brilliant idea! Every time my husband started losing it, I swished with water. I swished and swished, and he calmed right down! How does a glass of water do that?"
The Doctor says: "The water itself does nothing. It's keeping your mouth shut that does the trick".
*.*
The secret to a pizza joke...
...is in the delivery.
Quote of the Times;
American speech is brash, brutally honest, blunt, direct, and yes - “offensive.” Don’t let anyone convince you otherwise. This is who we are. It’s who we have always been and who we always will be. We will tell the world uncomfortable truths even when they don’t want to hear it. So take your “hate speech” and “disinformation” and go pound sand. - Torba
Link of the Times;
Buttigieg Knew: State AGs Warned Transportation Agency Of Airline Debacle Months Ago:
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/buttigieg-knew-state-ags-warned-transportation-agency-airline-debacle-months-ago
Issue of the Times;
In 2023 The Lazy Analyst Won't Keep Up With Geopolitics by Tom Luongo
Before I took on my current persona as either a “Putin Stooge,” a “shill for the Fed,” or a naïve apologist for neoliberalism, I used to be a chemist specializing in process efficiency and root cause analysis.
While I learned many things during those twenty-plus years, the most startling conclusion I came to was that laziness has a real place in process improvement.
If you really want some industrial or bureaucratic process streamlined, give that job to the guy who most hates having his time wasted. He will invariably find a way to make that ‘work’ into something he only has to do sparingly.
It led to one of my first rules of organization, if you want something done right give it to the “lazy” guy.
That “lazy” guy isn’t really lazy.
What he is, is unmotivated, because all he sees is waste and waste offends his narcissism. Nothing is worse than wasting his time doing unnecessary tasks. So, give him some tedious thing to improve and he will find not only the fastest way to do it, but also very likely the best way because while he doesn’t want his time wasted, he also doesn’t want to be yelled at by someone he sees as inferior.
Only then will you get an honest day of work out of someone like him.
It’s not like I wouldn’t know this from personal experience or anything.
When I was a chemist, I was obsessed with doing everything I could to optimize internal processes, be it shaving a few seconds here or there off a temperature program to analyze heavy metals by atomic spectroscopy or optimizing the deposition rate of a plating bath.
For me, the goal was always the same, work hard now to generate free time later to devote myself to something more valuable.
I benefited from having a less stressful work environment, the company benefits from lower COGS and the goodwill you generate leaves you far less vulnerable to middle-management scrutiny.
It was this ‘laziness’ that afforded me hundreds of hours over the years to pursue my hobbies while at work. Those were, in short, board gaming, monetary theory and politics.
One could say y’all are now the ‘beneficiaries’ of all that ‘laziness.’ (sic)
While podcasts are all the rage now, and with good reason, during my last ‘corporate’ job (which is really stretching that definition) I consumed every internet radio show I could on gold, the 2008 financial crisis, and the Buffalo Sabres.
But simultaneously I also produced reams of data in service of putting strict process controls on a novel nickel-boron coating whose lack of such had the company hemorrhaging capital.
Respect the Order
What you learn in all of this is that “order of operations” matters.
Coders understand this explicitly. So do engineers. It’s especially true in chemistry, where for one reaction to take place another reaction has to happen before it. Do it in the wrong order and you get a mess at best, or blow up the building or poison yourself at worst.
Switching metaphors, in your typical “euro-style” board game, the order in which you take the actions necessary to fulfill your strategy matters greatly. In these games, where luck is minimized or removed completely, players fight for access to a limited number of places to ‘do a thing,’ be it play a card, place a worker, build a city or whatever.
The goal is to collect more of what you need to win while subtly denying your opponent what he needs.
Sometimes you have to make a sub-optimal move for yourself in order to block someone else getting to that thing that would benefit them more. It’s incredibly passive-aggressive, but it’s also instructive, because it is so unabashedly human.
Math has it’s order of operations as well, PEMDAS for short — Parentheses, Exponents, Multiplication/Division, Addition/Subtraction. We’ve all seen the quizzes on social media testing our knowledge of this.
It is this attention to the order of operations that is important in trying to make sense of what’s going on in the world today.
One of my most common complaints with my ‘libertarian brethren’ is that they are always jumping to ‘end-game’ while not thinking through the moves that get us there.
In monetary theory we can do the math and realize the system is doomed.
By taking that variable and adding it into the political mix we can solve the geopolitical equation and then make grand pronouncements about the where everything winds up.
While this is an important first step in waking people up, it’s also absolutely why, as a political force, ‘libertarians’ are spent. Ron Paul broke through into the popular zeitgeist in 2008 and 2012 with “End the Fed” and his critiques of foreign policy.
The problem was, however, the movement never grew up. It never engaged with the world that was versus still selling the world we’ll never get.
And rightly, people wandered away looking for those with real answers to today’s problems.
I’ve been there and made many a decision based on the equation I solved only to be frustrated like many others by the future not working out like the model I’d constructed.
The typical cope then is to scream, “Corruption!” and bitch about them rigging the gold price or trashing Bitcoin or whatever. And don’t get me wrong, I’m with y’all on that. They are rigging the markets, intervening at every turn, if not turning them into completely fake markets.
But that should have been expected. Because in the proper ‘order of operations’ those with power and money will always react to defend themselves against the growing realization that they are fucking us over.
Remember, they’re trying to ‘win’ this game as well.
And so, if they can get to that richer spot on the board before you do, they will. Don’t bitch about the game board being tilted against you, accept that it is part of that mini-game and widen your perspective on the larger game afoot.
And that’s the real problem. We have too many ‘lazy’ analysts who got red-pilled, saw the game for what it was and stopped at “anger” rather than doing the hard work of reaching ‘acceptance.’
This is where we are today and why, for many, the world is so hard to make sense of.
The Larger Bowl
When you realize that everyone’s incentives map to their own particular definitions of winning that’s when real headway can be made in understanding.
Because here’s the thing. Our insights into the world aren’t novel or unique. In fact, more often than not they are just our finally understanding the reality that’s always been in front of us. We’re latecomers to a geopolitical party that’s been going on for decades.
I know I feel like that on more days than I care to admit.
They’ve finally told us what their end game looks like. It speaks to a confidence of their making that’s real. If we ignore the order of operations of how we get to our preferred outcome — a decentralized world with private property and sound money that should maximize human dignity — the irony is we’ll have a lower probability of it occurring on any time line that matters to us or even our children.
This is why I’m willing to see The Fed and the NY Boys as our temporary allies in that fight for human dignity. They have their definitions of winning the game they’re playing and should act accordingly.
So, while we should all long for the day that these assholes are dead and buried by the natural forces of decentralization and entropy, there are a thousand interstitial steps that have to happen first.
And it won’t matter if bitcoin eventually wins if the world goes through a sixty year Dark Age in the meantime. That’s not leadership, that’s cowardice.
So, yes. Davos has their definitions of winning. The Russians have theirs. China theirs.
And we need to have ours.
It is this curious admixture of incentives, this coincidence of wants, that is the interesting part. It’s where the game actually lives.
And while we don’t have a crystal ball as to how well everyone in the game will respond to these pressures and counter-pressures, with an accurate map of their incentives we can, at least make some observations.
The problem for many is they checked out long before they’d even identified the players at the table, so the game seems incomprehensible and the players wiser and more powerful than they actually are.
That’s why I think this year is going to be one of the most interesting to analyze in real time and why we all have to up our game.
Laziness only gets you so far, it may get you to the root cause of the situation, but that’s when the real work begins.
News of the Times;
Every social media firm censors for US government – Musk:
https://www.rt.com/news/569016-musk-social-media-censorship/
How Twitter Rigged the Covid Debate:
https://www.thefp.com/p/how-twitter-rigged-the-covid-debate
Zelenskyy Hires Globalist BlackRock CEO Larry Fink To Oversee Ukraine’s Money Laundering Scam:
https://newspunch.com/zelenskyy-hires-globalist-blackrock-ceo-larry-fink-to-oversee-ukraines-money-laundering-scam/
NYC crime spiked 44% in first months of 2022:
https://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/nyc-crime/ny-crime-data-recidivists-arrests-soar-nypd-20220406-3p7m5l2avrbffigozefy6gzvuq-story.html
Migrant Surge at Border Strains El Paso:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/migrant-surge-at-border-strains-el-paso-11671122056
Liberalism is a philosophy of consolation for the West as it commits suicide:
https://www.johnderbyshire.com/Opinions/Culture/homeless.html
Funny what even a flimsy border fence can do...
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/12/funny_what_even_a_flimsy_border_fence_can_do.html
GOP Sellouts Gave Biden Regime $11 MILLION to Target Gun Owners in Repulsive Omnibus Bill:
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2022/12/another-nasty-surprise-gop-sellouts-gave-biden-regime-11-million-target-gun-owners-repulsive-omnibus-bill/
The $1.7 Trillion Omnibus Spending Bill Is Being Flown to Biden's Caribbean Retreat for Signing:
https://thefederalistpapers.org/us/1-7-trillion-omnibus-spending-bill-flown-bidens-caribbean-retreat-signing-report
2022 Man of the Year: The Ghost:
https://freebeacon.com/culture/2022-man-of-the-year-the-ghost/
Vandals attack 4 power substations on Christmas – 17,000 without electricity:
https://www.theblaze.com/news/vandals-attack-4-power-substations-on-christmas-17000-without-electricity
3 dead in Kurdish center shooting in Paris; suspect arrested:
https://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/paris-shooting-leaves-multiple-people-wounded-1-arrested-95744486
Social Worker Secretly Begins Transitioning Young Girl Without Parental Consent, School Faces No Repercussions:
https://www.dailyveracity.com/2022/12/24/social-worker-secretly-begins-transitioning-young-girl-without-parental-consent-school-faces-no-repercussions/
San Francisco unveils taxpayer-funded open-air Christmas market that's become dystopian hellhole:
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11572629/San-Francisco-unveils-taxpayer-funded-open-air-Christmas-market-thats-dystopian-hellhole.html
Chip Roy Completely Explodes At Democrats On House Floor Over Omnibus:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XtKo9EEalwI&t=213s
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And someone shot a duck.
An Images & Ideas, Inc. Service.
No Vegans were harmed in the making of this site. We're looking for a new provider.