Not only did The Washington Post mess this up in their tweet (left) about how George Floyd died, they did the same thing on their own website (right) pic.twitter.com/nWhNEAvFke
— Curtis Houck (@CurtisHouck) May 24, 2022
So much has changed in those two years. Two years ago, he died because he had taken a fatal dose of fentanyl, and now he’s been shot. But even more has changed:
Sigh.
This is a damned odd thing: across London (and apparently much of the rest of Britain), an inexplicably vast number of shops have opened up that purport to sell American candy and treats and junk food. I say “purport” because the prices are apparently insanely high, and they seem to always be empty. This is not the sort of thing that can be supported by any reading of free market capitalism; it’s really only explained by either criminal activity or socialism (but then, I repeat myself). A lot of locals believe them to be some sort of money laundering operation, but it’s vague on how that works. Perhaps someone comes in now and again and buys an armload of Oreos for the street price of, say, a trunkload of Afghani opium. If so, fine. But why are all these stores almost the exact same thing, that close to each other? And if they are a front for a criminal enterprise, why aren’t the British cops doing anything about them? Oh, wait… these are the same police who were scared of the grooming gangs and let them murder and traumatize vast numbers of British children rather than risk being called names…
Here we go again:
Rather amazingly, they’ve already released the ID of the shooter: 18 year old Salvador Romas. I suspect that might be an attempt to get ahead of the inevitable political narrative that pops up about this sort of thing. A narrative that’s usually wrong, but serves a purpose.
If you were thinking about buying an AR-15 and/or mags and/or ammo… it’s *really* time to get on that. The politighouls will be all over this; there’s nothing professional gun grabbers love more than dead children. It’s unclear what weapons were used… a handgun almost certainly and *perhaps* a rifle. He seemed to have at least two AR-15’s, based on the social media posts he made.
Salvador Ramos: Suspect in Uvalde Elementary School Shooting
This makes for an interesting read:
The SFWA is the formerly respected “Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America,” presenters of the formerly respected Nebula Award. Mercedes Lackey is a… well, I guess now *formerly* respected writer of left-leaning science fiction, quite popular and successful, and now her reputation and potential future career could be trashed because she off-handedly referred to a black guy as “colored” rather than “person of color.” She’s 72. I suspect she spent a good many formative decades in a time when “colored” was the preferred term. So now the SFWA and the baying ghouls who populate it and Twitter are out for the blood of an old lady who many of them, five minutes earlier, considered a hero because she had gay characters in her stories back in the 80’s.
According to her husband, whose Twitter account virtue signals at a professional level, she has been badly emotionally damaged by the treatment she’s received. You tear up old people, sometimes you break them. I wonder just how happy and proud these bargain bin revenants will be if they manage to bring her to an end. I suspect “a lot.”
Here’s a potential explanation as to why so much of modern science fiction seems so awful: the gatekeepers have changed from the people who know what they’re doing and are good at it… to just whoever. And that invites the political whackaloons.
As the creep of leftist identity politics has spread throughout the organization, a startling erosion of quality came with it. This is perhaps most objectively apparent in their membership qualifications, which were changed in May of 2014. Until then, to be considered for “Active membership”, an applicant had to have sold three pieces of short fiction at a 8c per word or one book for $2,000 or more in a Qualifying Professional Market (in other words, a top-tier publisher like Tor or Del Ray).
It was after this time that the “Associate Member” tier was introduced, which came with a gallingly low bar for entry – one paid sale of short fiction at a pro rate OR one that has been self-published, or published by an indie or small press for an amount equivalent to 8c per word. In other words, slap a thousand words or more up on Kindle, fork over your $90 annual fee, and you get to vote on the finalists for the Nebulas.
I remember this when it happened. Thought I’d seen the last of this guy. Now it looks like I’ve seen the last of affordable gas and food.
Stumbled across this montage from the doomed Biden ‘88 campaign and I’m crying at the McLaughlin Group reactions at the end. pic.twitter.com/A9etqn8J4H
— Jimmy (@JimmyPrinceton) May 23, 2022
Max is a Maine Coon from Bucha. He was taken by Russian soldiers & left in Belarus. Thanks to kind people who used his QR tag to find his owners, Max has been reunited w/ his family. @USAID is proud to have helped make this possible thru our partnership w/ the 🇺🇦startup Animal ID pic.twitter.com/GYNyEuAjov
— USAID Ukraine (@USAIDUkraine) May 20, 2022
Stealing washing machines is weird, but it’s understandable if you assume that they have no basic appliances back home. But stealing pets is done purely out of malice.
This is the best product I’ve seen today:
$25.00
Out of stock
Just the thing to drive a fan *nuts.*
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.