Storms took out my power this morning. I drove around and looked at the damage…. it was quite extensive. I figured it would be days before power came back, but it was restored a little while ago. My neighborhood saw little actual damage, but just a block away big trees were yanked out at the roots. The derecho a a few years ago did not do this sort of damage, so I wonder if small tornadoes came through.
…the premiere of Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power TV series had 25 million global viewers on the day it premiered. That’s quite a lot! But as it turns out, by the time the first season ended, a shocking number of those viewers as had already given up. In a new examination of Amazon Studios, the Hollywood Reporter mentions that only 37 percent of Rings of Power’s U.S. viewers stuck around through the Prime Video series’ eighth episode.
Yes, I’m surprised. I’m surprised that a full 37% stuck around to the end of that garbage show. I imagine most that did did so, like me, out of pure spite. And to see just how disrespectful the writers/showrunners would be to the source material. Answer: All. All the disrespect. Every last bit.
For some reason, a Chinese construction company was hired to do highway work in Serbia. For some reason, the Chinese construction company decided to demolish a war memorial.
Lots of WTF in this story. The first being: “Why is a European nation using a Chinese construction company?” The second being “Why can’t a European nation do this sort of work themselves?” Third being “What exactly did you expect?”
When you hire people who are not of your nation, culture or people to do your work for you, don’t act surprised when they don’t value your nation, culture or people. And hiring ChiComs? That’s just asking for trouble.
It shall prove interesting when the ChiComs start paving over Russian cultural locations.
Brandon Herrera covers some initial memes about the Nashville mass shooting:
Donut Operator did a breakdown of the bodycam footage of the sweep of the school and the takedown of the transurrectionist. *THIS,* as many have pointed out to the Uvalde police, is how you do it: get it done quickly and efficiently, before the badguy (or badgirl, in this case) has time to prepare and before they can turn a mass shooting into an absolute massacre. The shooter got shot by two copes, one with a carbine, the other with a pistol… essentially the weapons *she* had.
A case can be made that mentally ill people should not have access to firearms. I’m all behind a legal approach that takes care of this… not those BS “red flag laws” that allow the authorities to strip you of your rights without a proper review or anything resembling due process. Self-harm would seem to be a giant sign that someone is a danger to themselves or others; a woman pumping herself with testosterone, or anyone chopping their bits off, would seem to apply. Men, who are designed and built to be full of testosterone, can go buggo if they are pumped full of the stuff; I can only imagine how whackadoodle it would make a woman to be loaded with the stuff.
More and more I’m suspecting that Lovecraft was right about at least some of his creations. Nyarlathotep, for example. Of all his Old Ones that posed a threat to mankind, the “Crawling Chaos” was one of the few that actually *cared* about humanity. Most were vast cosmic entities that didn’t even really notice us, or noticed us only as bugs to be trod upon, or not, without much thought. Malevolent entities to be sure, but they barely gave a damn one way or the other. Nyarlathotep, on the other hand, actively walked among humanity, often taking on human form, and worked to bring down and drive mad civilization. He didn’t do this by using brute force, but by whispering in ears, showing people visions, hell, giving lectures. Those who witnessed often went bugnuts and tore civilization down around them in their insanity.
Sound familiar?
From his “prose poem” Nyarlathotep:
I recall that the people went about with pale and worried faces, and whispered warnings and prophecies which no one dared consciously repeat or acknowledge to himself that he had heard. A sense of monstrous guilt was upon the land, and out of the abysses between the stars swept chill currents that made men shiver in dark and lonely places. There was a daemoniac alteration in the sequence of the seasons—the autumn heat lingered fearsomely, and everyone felt that the world and perhaps the universe had passed from the control of known gods or forces to that of gods or forces which were unknown.
After decades of race relations getting better, everything is worse now: mobs of racists are beating the tar out of random targets in shopping malls and on streets. Criminals are not only not being arrested, they’re being undercharged, or not charged at all, when they do get arrested. People with acknowledged violent streaks are being unleashed on the public to offend again and again. People who are so delusional that they mutilate their bodies to fit what they think they are supposed to be are *celebrated,* not given treatment; this form of madness is exploding in popularity, becoming statistically significant… and is now not only threatening the lives of those who don’t celebrate them, they are celebrating those who actually take the lives of children. The threat of nuclear annihilation disappeared thirty years ago… and now it’s fricken’ back. The Chinese look like they might replace the American dollar as the default world currency. Perverts and deviants are demanding – and gaining – access to children on an almost industrial scale; anyone who complains risks the wrath of not just the mob but the law. The upper echelons of political leadership are filled with the senile, the stupid, the brain damaged. How does this *not* seem like Nyarlathotep is standing in the shadows, whispering vast numbers into madness?
What I find especially bothersome is that we are on the precipice of *hope.* SpaceX, for example, is perhaps weeks away from a test launch of a rocket that could begin the process of freeing mankind from dependence on this one rock. Hell, we’ve finally got good Star Trek for the first time in decades… and it could all be flushed.
YouTube decided that I needed to see a scathing review of “Dinosaur with Stephen Fry.” So, what the H, I watched it. Not having seen “Dinosaur with Stephen Fry,” I had no opinion of it going in, but I’m always interested in a good dinosaur show. “Walking With Dinosaurs” and “Planet Dinosaur” and “Sea Monsters” and “Prehistoric Park…” the facts may sometimes be dubious, but the shows were always awesome. But there have been a *lot* of these CGI dino docu-dramas over the years, and I’ve certainly not watched them all. I hadn’t heard of “D with SF” before; as I watched clips of the CGI dinosaurs and their “interactions” with green-screened humans, I quickly concluded that this was a show made by the BBC or some such twenty or so years ago. The CGI was dodgy at best; it looked like something that was quickly cobbled together in the wake of “Walking With Dinosaurs” as a cash-grab. But the quick glimpses of Stephen Fry looked… *not* twenty years ago. So I looked the show up.
It came out in February… of this year. 2023.
Yikes.
So earlier today there was a mass shooting at a Christian grade school in Nashville, with six people murdered and the shooter killed by the police. That’s bad (well, except that last bit). Then it came out that the shooter was a 8woman,* which is unusual to say the least. Now it has turned out that she’s transgender. She was a biological female who “identified” as male, but all the reporting so far has referred to her as “her,” which is a novel development. One wonders if she was on testosterone, which can make some act kinda rash if they’re new to it. Of course, garden variety “bugnuts” is also a perfectly cromulent explanation for this sort of thing.
🚨#BREAKING: Nashville police has officially confirmed the school shooter that killed 6 as 28 year old Audrey Hale and has been Identified as transgender pic.twitter.com/TrDYHPnNJy
— R A W S A L E R T S (@rawsalerts) March 27, 2023
One wonders what Jane Fonda might have to say on this. The same “logic” that would hold Trump responsible for January 6 would seem to apply here.
And of course…
Don’t forget this … pic.twitter.com/77G9nHt5Nb
— Catturd ™ (@catturd2) March 27, 2023
Society is going… silly.
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.
