Laura Dern now feels that the twenty or so year age gap between her and Sam Neill was “inappropriate” in “Jurassic Park.” If she was a teenager and he was pushing 40 and they were romantically hooked up… sure. But she was in her mid twenties *and* their relationship was not shown to be romantic but professional.
Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack will be on hand to receive 132 pallets of formula produced by Switzerland’s Nestle S.A. set to arrive in Indianapolis, the White House said Saturday.
132 pallets, huh? Wow. That might cover one good sized city for… what? A month?
I guess it’s a good thing that Americans have stopped having babies, because apparently we can’t feed them ourselves anymore. But *of* *course,* we can provide for illegal invaders. Yes, we should feed those in detention. But… they should leave detention as quickly as possible. Preferably on aircraft flying directly to Tierra del Fuego or points south. In a time of crisis in the US – and even in good times – illegal aliens should be deported ASAP.
I’ve visited a number of WalMarts and grocery stores lately, and the “baby formula” aisles look about like the “toilet paper” aisles during early 2020.
It seems that the root cause of the baby formula shortage was *one* Abbott factory in Michigan shutting down due to contamination concerns back in February, and not yet back up and running. Why are things so concentrated that one single factory can control the fates of so many Americans? Shouldn’t this sort of thing have more localized and widely distributed production? That one factory could fail for any of a number of reasons, including but not limited to accidental fires, Mostly Peaceful Protests, the spiking price of gas shutting down transport to and/or from.
And as always, you can count on the far left extremists to take this situation and go absolutely whackaloon. Take, for example, this article from Vox:
It is basically a propaganda piece extolling the evils of breastfeeding, compared to the good and proper approach of formula-feeding. While some of the points are valid, it’s worth noting that the world “mother” never once appears in the article. Nor do “woman” or “women,” odd omissions given the subject of the article. The closest they come is “birthing parent.” Even then, that only appears in a single panel of a cartoon explaining that if a “birth parent” doesn’t want to breastfeed its infant, it shouldn’t have to, full stop. Because the needs of a dependent human are less important the the shallow desires of someone else. Which logic I’d be interested in seeing deployed against, say, dependent humans such as prisoners and welfare recipients. How about men who simply “don’t want to” pay child support or alimony? I just got hit with a massive property tax bill. I don’t want to pay it. Would Vox be equally as sanguine about my desire to not take care of the responsibilities that I willingly signed up for?
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Storytime: an EMP weapon goes off a few hundred kilometers over the central US, shutting down virtually *all* production lines in a thousand-mile radius for a span of a year or so. Fill in the rest.
This website is full of interesting information:
Their main page has a mugshot photo of every (known) mass shooter in the US for 2021, using this metric:
Click on the individual pic of the perpetrator (at the website, not the image below) and it pulls up their info; hover over the pic and it gives you their name, number wounded, number killed. The image below aggregates all the mugshots into one view.
The site breaks down some interesting statistics:
It also breaks things down by states and cities. Lo and behold, Illinois is the worst state… because Chicago is the worst city. Chicago had 55. The second place city, Philadelphia, only had 18.
In 2019, 508 were killed; 518 in 2020; 649 in 2021. “Defund the Police” did a fantastic job.
“Actor” Ezra Miller played the Flash in a few DC movies, and has played a freakin’ lunatic in real life. Here’s him getting arrested for being a violent jackass, and making a long series of nonsensical statements and demands, including that the police refer to him by his Preferred Pronouns. The police show him a lot more respect than he deserves.
More than anything else he reminds me of one of those whackadoodle “Sovereign Citizens” who knowingly breaks the law and films himself dealing with the police repercussions, trotting out a long string of pre-programmed gibberish thinking that somehow he can talk himself out of getting handcuffed and hauled to the hoosegow.
Where some English fellers discuss the idea of England seceding from the UK. If this resulted in the English restoring Englishness to England and formerly English cities like London and Rotherham, I can see some value in the project.
This time they caught a Twitter employee laying out how the company would rather be ideological than either fair or profitable… good reasons for Musk to *seriously* reconsider his purchase:
And this Very Special Tweep gets confronted and bravely runs away:
The whole thing is freakin’ *hilarious.* He says a number of goofy things, like saying that since Musk has Asperger’s, he is “special needs” and thus he cannot be taken seriously.” Coming from someone who makes Liberace seems like a Soldier of Fortune cover model, that’s fabulous.
I don’t know that this guy is anybody of any significance… he is a “lead client partner,” which kinda sounds like “salesman.” Still, it’s interesting to see what Outer Party members think about the Proles.
This feller is probably closer to the Inner Party and spills the beans:
Introduced by Cory Booker (D-N.J.), Bob Menendez (D-N.J.) and Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.).
Except as provided in subsection (d), it shall be unlawful for any individual to purchase or receive a firearm unless the individual has a valid Federal firearm license.
The license will be issued if the Attorney General feels like issuing it, only after the prospective gin owner has completed a lengthy, inconvenient and expensive series of bureaucratic red tape procedures. And even then, the license will only be for *one* gun (the serial number of which will be recorded with the Feds, thus creating a Federal gun registry, just the thing for when they decide to confiscate), and only last for five years. So you’ll have to spend probably around a thousand dollars every five years for each firearm you own.
This does not *technically* strip a person of their right to keep and bear arms, but it *effectively* will do so. For starters, a vast number of people won’t be able to take time off from work to drive the fifty miles to take a multi-day series of classes and tests, nor will they be able to pay the exorbitant fees. They certainly won’t be able to do this every five years for a number of guns. And since issuing the license will be at the discretion of the Feds, *after* the prospective gun owner has lost work and spent money, receiving the license will doubtless end up being a matter of who you know, how politically connected you are, how skilled you are at greasing palms.
This new law would require that this process be carried out for private transfers as well, including gifts and inheritance. You will no longer be able to sell your shotgun to your neighbor; you’ll have to go through the process *and* transfer the firearm through a federal firearms dealer, often many miles away.
What’s better: for each license, the prospective gun owner will need a background check. In the list of things that would automatically strip you of the right to such a license is included this nugget:
any recent acquisition of firearms, ammunition, or other deadly weapons
You will be barred from buying a gun if you’ve recently bought *ammunition.*
Huh. Maybe having an aggressive, conquest-driven corrupt and highly irrational nation moving a number of nuclear-capable hypersonic ballistic missiles to your border might make someone think that defending themselves is a good idea…
Iskander missiles heading towards the Finnish border. pic.twitter.com/GjOMLF7y5r
— Sentletse 🇷🇺🇿🇦 (@Sentletse) May 16, 2022
Y’all may have noticed that over the years I get kinda twerked when I hear about a local cat that has been abused by a human. A lot of this is of course because I like cats and cannot countenance abusing them; and a lot of it is that abuse of a cat is a damn big sign that abuse of humans is coming. And well what do you know, it turns out that the Buffalo mass shooter, a left-wing white supremacist nutter, did horrible things to a cat. What’s more, he published reports of this online. Given that he was on law enforcement radar, this *should* have been picked up on.
The hazmat suit thing, I dunno. It may have been that the governments efforts to create fear among the public worked especially well on this kid. Or it may be that he was having a laugh. I could believe either. But later the story relates that on March 25 he described repeatedly stabbing, beating and eventually beheading a feral cat that had attacked his pet cat. I get being irritated that a feral cat has attacked your pet. But the description of his response to this is wholly bugnuts. It was the sort of thing that should have gotten him a nice little visit from the sort of people who should pay nice little visits to kids who are demonstrably wacko.
And on the subject of mass shootings, here’s one from a few days ago that received virtually none of the media traction that the Buffalo shooting did. There are a few important differences:
One might argue that the Milwaukee incident is less important than Buffalo because there were fewer deaths. But I would argue that incompetent marksmanship is no reason to not pay attention to the attempt. I would argue that a mass shooting involving perhaps a dozen or more shooters is more important than one lone wacko. Lone wackos are… well, alone. But groups? That’s *bad* on a whole other level.
What fresh hell has 2022 done brung us? Monkeypox.
And…
And…
And…
Monkeypox is a relative of smallpox, but less utterly horrifying (one straight is 10% fatal, the other is 1% fatal). At least in its current form. What a future mutation will bring… shrug.
It can be transmitted through the air, riding on respiratory droplets, but it seems like a lot of the current cases were transmitted the old fashioned way: bangin’. Under normal circumstances, this disease would be fairly straightforward to stop transmitting… but given that the bulk of the people who have been determined to have caught the disease caught it via male-to-male bangin’… well, I’m old enough to remember the 80’s, and how telling people to Stop Doing That wasn’t even allowed *then,* and *that* disease was 100% fatal. Time from infection to display of chickenpox-like symptoms – fever, lesions, etc. – is about ten days, so a bit of self control would go far in shutting this one down.