Where Trump is likely to get arrested for the sort of thing Clinton and Obama got fines for, but this sort of criminality is just shrug-worthy:
Mar 202023
Mar 182023
Heh.
Mar 162023
At last, my collection of “Tom Swift Jr.” novels is complete. Since I’m a miser/dirt poor, I was only willing to spend a pittance for each book, but if you wait long enough pretty much everything shows up on ebay.
Woo.
And because why not, here’s the next shelf over:
On a related note: turns out that last year a bit of good news slipped by me un-noticed. The CW a few years ago decided to make a TV series about Tom Swift Jr… it could have been good (I mean, it’s not beyond the bounds of the physically possible), but CW decided instead to make an abomination. The series began airing on May 31, 2022. It was promptly cancelled on June 30, 2022, due to low ratings. And of course: Tom Swift had been turned from a no-nonsense STEM-focused blond blue-eyed teenager with a girlfriend into a flamboyant gay black adult. Thus assuring that the existing fanbase would be uninterested. And who among that fraction of the population for whom “flamboyant gay black man” is a draw would be interested in a crappy sci-fantasy show?
From the Wikipedia article on the series:
Lead actor Richards said of the adaptation, “The original Tom Swift was great for his time and what he represented. At the time, that was the face of young boys, All-American kids full of possibilities. But in 2021, that can look so different. It can look like someone like me—a Black guy who is chocolate, who is queer, who is all those things that we’re told aren’t the normal or the status quo.” He added, “We’re going to dive into so many sectors of identity. We’re going to talk about Blackness—and a different kind of Blackness than we’re used to seeing, which is the Black elite, the 1 percent, the billionaires. We’re also going to talk about a queer boy’s journey into becoming a queer man. Not only self-acceptance, but acceptance as a whole, having the community and people around you.”
Gosh. I wonder why it failed to grab ratings.
Mar 162023
This video from at least 7 years ago lays out some of the reasons why the Russians may well have gotten rather adventurous of late: they are running out of Russians, but they’re not running out of routes to invade Russia. So rather than cultivate good relations with the surrounding nations or get on about the task of making more Russians, they seem to have gone the other route of trying to seize all the invasion routes while they still have a military with which to do it. As the last year of their little two-week “military operation” has shown, that hasn’t gone so well.
Note the “demographic pyramid” he shows here. It lays out the population of Russia by age; a growing population has a wide base of young people, but back when this video was made (circa 2015) Russias base was looking kinda weak. However, it did seem to be growing somewhat:
So how is it looking today?
Oh, dear. It looks like baby-making fell off a cliff right after this guy made his video, so instead of things maybe getting better they’ve gotten much worse.
“Population pyramids” are interesting things to consider. Nations like this with shrinking young uns are in serious trouble; the pyramid for South Korea looks especially dire:
China’s not looking so good:
Nor is Japan:
Iceland, in contrast, looks kinda ok:
but if you really want to see where the population of the future is coming from, you need pyramids that look like this:
Or this:
The nations with wide bases will have greatly increased populations, with greatly increased pressures for those populations to leave and colonize low-population regions. The dying nations will, like Russia, likely try to defend themselves with constantly diminishing human resources, or they will, like much of Europe is currently doing, simply allow themselves to be colonized and replaced, culturally, religiously, ethnically.
Gonna be an interesting century.
Mar 152023
Apparently life is bad for women in South Korea, with a heavily patriarchal society that treats ’em like garbage. So, perhaps not surprisingly, a lot of South Korean women are doing what they can to avoid the worst of it. And for some number of them, that means avoiding men entirely:
A World Without Men
The women of South Korea’s 4B movement aren’t fighting the patriarchy — they’re leaving it behind entirely.
The “4B” movement is essentially the “Men Going Their Own Way” movement of South Korean women, separating themselves from any relationships with men, including family and male friends. They’re cutting their hair short (or bald) and avoiding makeup in order to be less attractive, and are either living alone or shacking up with other women. And according to the article, a lot of these women seem satisfied with this arrangement. There is, of course, the inevitable result:
In December of that year (2016), as Korea’s fertility rate hovered at 1.2 births per woman (it has since slid to 0.78, the lowest in the world)
The birth rate has plummeted from 1.2 to 0.78 in well under a decade. And 1.2 was *well* under replacement rate. South Korea will soon begin to run low on young people, though likely not on old people. This will mean that the burden of caring for an elderly population will fall more and more on fewer and fewer younger Koreans, likely driving some kind of an exodus… And quite possibly driving an *influx* of cheap, low-paid “migrants.” This will lead to South Korean culture being gradually replaced with some other culture. And the question will be… what is this other culture’s views on such things as women’s rights? Just as Europe celebrates gay and trans while not making their own babies and importing *vast* numbers of people from cultures that not only like to make babies but also like to throw gay people off rooftops, there will be an inevitable clash. A South Korea filled with elderly Koreans and young non-Koreans seems like a poor force to stack up against an invasion of young, armed North Koreans. All the Norks needs to do is wait and keep making babies, and the peninsula is theirs.
If you won;t make the next generation, someone else will. That might well suck… but there it is regardless.
Mar 142023
From three days ago, the only news source Google seemed to find:
Kazakhstan Seizes Russian Assets At Baikonur Spaceport
Russia, it seems, isn’t paying its bills, so Kazakhstan sent in the repo men. Apparently. The bulk of the story is behind a paywall.
Mar 122023
English traditions confuse me:
Manchester: population and cultural replacement. pic.twitter.com/jarZ6HBHdu
— Tony #VoteAnyoneButLibLabConGreen (@Tony40335450) March 12, 2023
I guess that slots in somewhere between “Cricket” and “Blimey.”
Oh, and something to look out for in the future of a culturally enriched Britain: “Taharrush.”
Such as:
On Pakistan's independence day on the 14th August, 2021, a lady TikToker went to film the event at Lahore's Greater Iqbal Park.
She was molested, groped, assaulted, stripped, harassed & robbed by literally hundreds of men.
Police arrested 126 from the video evidence. pic.twitter.com/hWuZCf1aFW
— David Atherton (@DaveAtherton20) February 25, 2023
Get used to it, Brits. It’s the future you chose when you installed (or at the very least allowed) a government that took your guns and decided to replace you and your culture.
Americans: witness this. Keep it in mind when you vote.
Mar 122023
So it looks like Silicon Valley Bank employed people to do fundamentally pointless time- and resource-wasting stuff. This, sad to say, is hardly unique; lots of companies devote surprising amounts of effort end employees time to things that have nothing to do with the companies business or mission. Company baseball teams, for example, have nothing to do with, say, an auto manufacturers core function; claims about “building morale/cohesion” *might* have some validity, but if the company is in dire distress, spending resources on that is a bit unwise. However, a baseball team is unlikely to be a major source of revenue drain.
DIE (Diversity, Inclusion and Equity) initiatives, however, CAN be a major drain on a company. Not only directly by consuming payroll in hiring these people, but in consuming productivity in redirecting employees to do stuff on company time. And probably more importantly, indirectly by tearing apart the fundamental cultures that promote productivity and setting employees at each others throats and by causing HR departments to drive away – or not hire in the first place – good employees due to them not filling Enough checkboxes, and retaining less qualified employees because they identify with the current politically favored victimhood groups.
So, any time, money, resources devoted to “woke” policies is of course a bad thing. But how bad it was for SVB is yet to be determined, but it looks like they were at least at the standard American major corporate level of wokist self-sabotagery.
While Silicon Valley Bank collapsed, top executive pushed ‘woke’ programs
Perhaps this will serve as a valuable lesson to other companies to avoid this sort of nonsense. I’m not optimistic, though… a century of blood driven by big-government collectivism, from the socialists to the Nazis to the Commies, has hardly stopped people from “but this time we’ll get it right.” Additionally: since the list of “conspiracy theories” being proven right seems to grow day by day, conspiracy theories that hold that failures like this are all part of some long plan to centralize power into fewer and fewer institutions seem undismissable.
Mar 112023
Banks failing are hardly good news. But for most people, FDIC insurance *should* mean that most people shouldn’t lose a dime, though there will definitely be heartburn and inconvenience. This insurance covers up to, IIRC, $250,000 in savings, which is more than most people have. But some people have a *lot* more than that.
The Prince and Princess of Canada suddenly finding themselves utterly commoners is kinda hilarious. Oprah getting taken down a notch is kinda hilarious. She’s a billionaire ($2.5B or so), so losing half a billion seems like it won’t harm her much.
I keep seeing people say that SVB was a “woke” company with a lot of leftist policies, but I’ve not seen specifics. but I’ve not really looked, either, so I’ve no idea. It might simply be that they made generically bad business decisions. But it might also be that they backed a lot of crappy DIE investments and the like. Which would invoke a fair amount of schadenfreude, but then it’s likely a safe bet that a whole lot of *other* banks are doing the same.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>ALERT<<<<<<<<<<<<<<
OPRAH STANDS TO LOSE $590 MILLION AFTER COLLAPSE OF SVB
"All her biggest accounts were with the bank." said a source familiar with her finances, "Like other tech savvy investors she banked with SVB and now it's all gone." pic.twitter.com/Wvi9x7ZbJ6
— iSource News (@isource_news) March 11, 2023
Mar 102023
Yeesh. Bad news on the culture *and* economic fronts:
‘You’re probably going to see a dumbed down version’: Amazon Diluting Henry Cavill’s Warhammer 40K Series Like They Did With ‘The Rings of Power’?
Nobody knows *anything* about Amazons 40K adaptation yet… but basically everyone assumes that it’ll be trash. not because of the soruce material, but in spite of it.
– – –
William Shatner on ‘Star Trek,’ Space Travel and Mortality: ‘I Don’t Have Long to Live’
He’s 91 so, yeah, he’s probably not wrong. But he seems depressed. And not just because of the impending inevitable, but because society is going to hell.
– – –
Silicon Valley Bank collapses after failing to raise capital
Oh, goody. Bank failures.
NEW: Massive line forms outside Silicon Valley Bank in California as customers panic.
Welcome to Biden’s America. It will only get worse.pic.twitter.com/MNCQuKIc9h
— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) March 10, 2023