Jun 252022
 

Part of the back story to my Zaneverse stories set 500 years in the future is that the 21st century turned out to be the most nightmarish century in human history. The Pan Asian Wars wipe out about half the planetary population and trash the rest of the worlds biosphere via pollution and radiation and plagues. Subsequent to that is the European Diaspora as tens of millions of indigenous Europeans flee the continent as it transforms into a third world hellhole, dominated by the Caliphate, feeding into the resurgence of Iceland and the rise of the Texas Semi Autonomous Region. All this is far in the past of the main characters, but it helped establish the world they live in just as the colonization of the New World starting five hundred years ago established *our* world.

This was all supposed to be *decades* in the future, time enough for civilized society to get set up on the Moon, Mars, asteroids, habitats, leading to *some* portion of humanity surviving The Fall at the end of the world at the beginning of the 22nd century. I fear I was too optimistic.

 

 Posted by at 1:32 am
Jun 242022
 

… or is this pair of signs kinda contradictory?

The top sign says that there is two hour parking for the entire block from 7AM to 5 PM. But the bottom sign says that parking is only 15 minutes, from11AM to 10 PM. These two overlap from 11AM to 5PM. Which one has precedence during that time?

 

 Posted by at 7:34 pm
Jun 242022
 

UKHSA: Poliovirus detected in London sewage

Monkeypox didn’t quite work out. Maybe polio will finally allow the British government to start welding British people into their homes so they won’t see the millions of third-worlders that the British government will bring in…

In seriousness, this is unlikely to amount to anything. Polio isn’t particularly fatal, and finding polio in the sewer is unlikely to mean many infections except for those darn kids who swim in it for fun. But any excuse to cause a panic that can be engineered to increase government power will be taken.

 Posted by at 12:42 pm
Jun 242022
 

Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade in landmark abortion decision

This will be an *endless* source of entertainment. Stand by for craziness from the whackjobs PO’ed that they might have more difficulty in killing unborn children.

Gonna be a lot of this:

 

And on the subject of abortion: last nights episode of “The Orville” briefly touched on it. Our Hero Captain Mercer goes to the Krill homeworld on a diplomatic mission. You know going in that this is going to turn out poorly; the Krill have been central casting stock sci-fi badguys from the get-go, driven by a whackadoodle religious ideology. You can tell it’s going to get worse, because an Orange Man Bad stand-in is shown early on gaining political power among the Krill. And, inevitably, the Krill government is taken over by Even Worse Krill, and the diplomatic mission goes straight to hell. Mercer is taken somewhere to witness the evils of Krill civilization: he is taken to see what happens to Krill citizens who abort their unborn children. The leadup makes it pretty clear that the parents of the aborted are going to be badly treated; and when it’s shown, Captain Mercer recoils in visible and audible shock and horror. So, what do the Krill do to the no-longer parents? Do they feed them to monsters? Dissolve them in acid? Set them on fire? Flay the flesh from their bones? No. They put them into a holodeck and project an image of the child that would have been, based on the DNA. The child interacts with them, saying something along the lines of “I would like to have been born.” THAT’S IT. We’re supposed to view that as a monstrous evil.

Yes, I know “The Orville” is written by lefties, because lefties own Hollywood. But really? You kill your unborn child, and you think the greater evil is someone showing you what that child might have become? Shoot, if we had that technology today, I’d recommend it for all abortion *and* pregnancy clinics. Imagine the smarter choices people could make if they could see what sort of child – good, bad, evil or indifferent – they could get.

 Posted by at 12:29 pm
Jun 232022
 

Here’s the proof a NYC high school diploma is worthless

“‘The Three Little Pigs’ story was read round-robin style in a grade 11 classroom, which demonstrated limited student access in this class to grade-level text,” according to the department’s Office of Accountability. … At Brooklyn’s Boys and Girls High School, more than one-third of all classes were being disrupted by students’ chatter …

Sure, society needs people who are no more skilled than required to dig a ditch. But the problem is, these kids are doubtless also being taught that they are special snowflakes and that anything less than a lavish lifestyle of hookers and blow is a sign that The Other People are oppressing them. So these “students” will not only leave school utterly incapable of performing any but the most basic tasks… they’ll be unwilling to do them. One might wonder why this sort of thing would be promoted. Well… one might wonder that if one had not been paying attention. Why would this sort of thing be promoted?

1) These kids will be useless, sure. But they’ll still be allowed to vote. And who will they probably vote for? The people promising to make their lives easier without effort on their part.

2) They will consume resources without contributing. Thus they will be a net drain, requiring someone to fill in for them. And who better to fill in for them but similarly low-skill, but less offended foreign workers of dubious legality? And who will they and their offspring and their enablers probably vote for? Why, most likely those politicians who promise to not deport them.

Maybe Congress should spare a moment from the January 6 show trials to look into the matter of politicians whoa re *really* working to damage the United States. It might be worth seeing who’s getting paid or influenced by, say, the ChiComs. The Rosenbergs sizzled for doing less damage to the US.

 Posted by at 7:24 pm
Jun 232022
 

Supreme Court expands gun rights, with nation divided

In short: the USSC recognized that New York’s law prohibiting citizens from being able to defend themselves when they are not huddling in their home fortifications is unConstitutional. Unsurprisingly, it was a 6-3 decision, with Breyer, Sotomayor and Kagan caming down on the side of authoritarians and civilian enfeeblement.

And speaking of feeble:

President Joe Biden said in a statement he was “deeply disappointed” by the Supreme Court ruling, which he said “contradicts both common sense and the Constitution, and should deeply trouble us all.”

Justice Thomas was a voice of reason:

…wrote for the majority that the Constitution protects “an individual’s right to carry a handgun for self-defense outside the home.” That right is not a “second-class right,” Thomas wrote. “We know of no other constitutional right that an individual may exercise only after demonstrating to government officers some special need.”

The garbage human-simulators currently plaguing society are predictably upset that civil rights supersede authoritarianism:

 

I imagine Libs of TikTok will have a bunch of entertaining meltdowns from the NPC crowd.

 

 Posted by at 2:01 pm
Jun 232022
 

Well, here it is, the dumbest, worst thing you’ll read today:

A Belief in Meritocracy Is Not Only False: It’s Bad for You

The author believes that merit is a terrible idea, and that it should be abandoned. And replaced with what, exactly? I know you’ll be stunned: he doesn’t say. Because repalcing the concept of advancement through merit – intelligence, hard work, determination, talent, whatever – even if a lot of the time it comes down to random chance (i.e luck) with *anything* else is self-evidently an awful idea.

Consider: some singers rise to *billionaire* status. Most singers end up singing in the shower, and not much further. Some shower-singers are probably objectively better than the billionaire singers. Well, so the fabulously successful ones may have gotten there through luck. What of it? Got a better way? Lotteries?

 Posted by at 12:37 am
Jun 212022
 

This hydraulic fire gets out of hand faster than you can say “Uh-oh, I’m on fire.”

 

 Posted by at 7:33 pm