Well, here’s a sufficiency of stupid for the day:
I honestly can’t tell if the people referenced here are trolling – which is entirely possible – or if they’re really that fookin’ weird. I guess it comes down to this: do people *really* wash their chicken with dish soap and/or Clorox? It’s not something I’ve ever heard of. I would’ve assumed it to be a joke. But I just can’t tell anymore.
Yes.
The French protests have escalated. Protesters against Macron torch the entrance to the Bordeaux city hall. pic.twitter.com/Qyi3Wx4C08
— Ian Miles Cheong (@stillgray) March 23, 2023
JUST IN: Stunning video emerges of what appears to be FIREFIGHTERS JOINING THE PROTESTS in Paris — The large group of protesters are purportedly headed to the center of the city..
— Chuck Callesto (@ChuckCallesto) March 23, 2023
The French: "This is fine." pic.twitter.com/tIKV9h3s11
— Ian Miles Cheong (@stillgray) March 23, 2023
On the one hand, Macron is operating by decree, which should never be allowed. On the other hand, what he’s doing is actually necessary… he’s raising the retirement age from 62 to 64. And even 64 seems kinda ridiculously low. France, like everywhere else in the West, has a birth rate that is less than replacement (1.83, better than pretty much everywhere else in Europe); their population numbers seem to be buttressed by importing Algerians, Moroccans and other North Africans. The result of that is relatively few young people for lots of old people, especially going forward. Keeping the retirement – and thus pension payout – age low is going to be economically infeasible. So the French people are rightly pissed at a tyrannical government… that’s using tyranny to do what needs to happen. So… France seems kinda screwed.
Scholars seeking a job in Ohio State University’s College of Engineering must pledge their allegiance to diversity, equity and inclusion as part of the process.
University officials ask applicants to provide a statement that describes their commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion, along with “specific examples such as teaching and/or mentoring students from underrepresented backgrounds, outreach activities to underrepresented groups, or conducting research that address social inequities,” according to a copy of the application rubric recently tweeted by John Sailer with the National Association of Scholars.
One suggestion I have: use the current terminology against them. What, exactly, is an “underrepresented” group? That’s nicely vague. One could simply assume that it means “minority.” Okey doke. Well, what is one of the “progressives” most favoritist descriptions these days? “The Global Majority.”
“Global majority” is a collective term for ethnic groups which constitute approximately 85 percent of the global population. It has been used as an alternative to terms which are seen as racialized like “ethnic minority” and “person of color” (POC), or more regional terms like “visible minority” in Canada and “Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic” (BAME) in the United Kingdom.
OK. Cool. Then that means “The Global Minority” is anyone not described by that 85%. You know… white people. So… say “why yes, I’m committed to mentoring minorities.” By doing so, and keeping it vague, it means you’re committed to mentoring EVERY TYPE OF HUMAN IMAGINABLE. Because by one definition or another, everyone is a minority.
Also:
High scores are given to candidates who have a “sophisticated understanding of differences stemming from ethnic, socioeconomic, racial, gender, disability, sexual orientation, and cultural backgrounds and the obstacles people from these backgrounds face in higher education.”
This can also go pretty much any way you want it to. “Yes, I fully understand the importance of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion programs. (Because I understand how they cause a general reduction in competence and quality.) I understand how all these different factors can play into the difficulties people face. (Because I’ve seen how Asians and The Global Minority are shut out of educational opportunities due to quotas.)” And so on.
There is a way to game any system, no matter how devious and malicious. However, better still would be to toss out this nonsense. *Especially* in stem fields of education and endeavor, where competence and merit are the only metrics by which someone should advance. otherwise buildings burn, bridges collapse, planes crash and people die. But in the mean time, people have to decide to either stand up to the bullies and risk it all, or undermine the bastards.
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.
The very latest in breaking news from a year and a half ago:
An Australian former soldier broke in to an animal shelter to get his emotional support cat back. The cat had apparently been lost and someone found it and took it to the shelter, and the dude wanted his kitty. I get that. I can even get behind the idea of a soldier with PTSD being so enthusiastic about it that he breaks in after hours. But he brought a fake firearm with him and full tactical gear and ended up holding a woman hostage… and in the end, he didn’t leave with his cat. Not cool. He was sentenced to six years in prison for this.
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.
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.
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.
Yeesh. Bad news on the culture *and* economic fronts:
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.
– – –
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.
– – –
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
Worth watching, I think:
The threat from these Great Value Fascists isn’t over.
Short response: eat me.
Longer response: let’s take a look at what this idea is, shall we?
But Dr Pamela Conrad of the Carnegie Institution of Science said the focus should shift away from seeking to exploit discoveries.
Speaking ahead of a panel event on Saturday on the ethics of space exploration at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) meeting in Washington DC, she said: “If we were willing to seize that as not just a possibility, but an imperative then oddly enough, the Star Trek series and culture becomes a prime directive for how we could explore space: seeking not to interfere.”
In the Star Trek series, the Prime Directive, or General Order 1, of Starfleet Command sets out that the Starfleet should not interfere with the social, cultural or technological development of any other planet.
Conrad said that rather than setting out to own or take resources from space, humans should endeavour to be “gentle explorers”.
Tell me you’ve never actually watched Star Trek without telling me you’ve never actually watched Star Trek. The Prime Directive – which they broke all the freakin’ time – said not to interfere with the development of an intelligent species. but strip mining moons and asteroids? Hell, yes? Starfleet and the United Federation of planets were *all* about resource extraction. Hell, they were in favor of the damned Genesis Device which would completely pave over entire solar systems to build brand new ones with shiny new planets. Because of course they were: the UFP weren’t stupid.
Oh, but it gets worse. So much worse:
What’s more, he said Indigenous people had deep connections with bodies such as the moon.
“Part of that connection is inherent to the culture and the way of living and way of knowing,” he said, adding any damage to such bodies was therefore a concern.
As a result, Neilson said those working on space missions, such as the Nasa Artemis programme – which seeks to establish a long-term presence on the moon and eventually send humans to Mars – should engage with Indigenous people in advance.
Haha no. Why the frak should NASA give a damn what a bunch of ignorant boobs who think the Moon is a space fairy think? When they build their own rockets, then they, too, can have a say.
Around a week ago I read yet another article about how cloning the woolly mammoth was right around the corner. Well, maybe. But what stuck with me were some of the comments: the scientists were “playing God,” and the mammoths being extinct were part of “Gods plan” and that it was wrong to try to upend that. Well, here’s the thing: if one assumes God exists, then humans de-exticting the mammoth would either:
1) Also be part of Gods plan
2) Be proof that God ain’t so great; mere humans can reverse what a supposed omnipotent being did.
So if some “indigenous group” thinks the moon is some neato-keen religious symbol that should not be tinkered with, and the United States and China race to pave the place with mines and solar panels… maybe those indigenous groups need to rethink their religion.
Leaving the future of humanity in the hands of people who are stuck in the past is not just dumb, it’s criminal.
The United Federation of Planets didn’t screw with primitives. But they also didn’t put primitives on the Federation council.