Well, this is going to make for some interesting spin…

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Mar 272023
 

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.

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…

Society is going… silly.

 Posted by at 5:28 pm

Begun the food wars have

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Mar 252023
 

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.

 

 Posted by at 5:02 am

You’d think he’d get a medal from the White House

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Mar 232023
 

It’s nice that Elisjsha Dicken is getting *some* recognition for his heroism, but it really does seem like it should go higher than just the local police chief giving him a hearty handshake and a printout. Not that the local PD was wrong to do so… but the fact that he’s not being touted on the national stage is something of a scandal.

Armed civilian who stopped Greenwood Mall shooter named Citizen of the Year

I guess President Biden is just too busy to bother with actual heroes…

Mindy Kaling Was Awarded A National Medal Of The Arts

Oh.

 Posted by at 12:59 pm

OK, so how do you game the system on this one?

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Mar 212023
 

OSU requires DEI statements from mechanical, aerospace engineer job applicants

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.

 Posted by at 11:03 pm

And it only took me four decades

 art, awesomeness, blather, books, Crazy, dumbassery, Forward!, Gah., history, Hmm..., politics, science fiction, Worldwreckers, ಠ_ಠ  No Responses »
Mar 162023
 

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.

 Posted by at 8:44 pm

Say goodbye to South Korea

 blather, Crazy, Forward!, Hmm..., news, politics, Worldwreckers  No Responses »
Mar 152023
 

Apparently life is bad for women in South Korea, with a heavily patriarchal society that treats ’em like garbage. So, perhaps not surprisingly, a lot of South Korean women are doing what they can to avoid the worst of it. And for some number of them, that means avoiding men entirely:

A World Without Men

The women of South Korea’s 4B movement aren’t fighting the patriarchy — they’re leaving it behind entirely.

The “4B” movement is essentially the “Men Going Their Own Way” movement of South Korean women, separating themselves from any relationships with men, including family and male friends. They’re cutting their hair short (or bald) and avoiding makeup in order to be less attractive, and are either living alone or shacking up with other women. And according to the article, a lot of these women seem satisfied with this arrangement. There is, of course, the inevitable result:

In December of that year (2016), as Korea’s fertility rate hovered at 1.2 births per woman (it has since slid to 0.78, the lowest in the world)

The birth rate has plummeted from 1.2 to 0.78 in well under a decade. And 1.2 was *well* under replacement rate. South Korea will soon begin to run low on young people, though likely not on old people. This will mean that the burden of caring for an elderly population will fall more and more on fewer and fewer younger Koreans, likely driving some kind of an exodus… And quite possibly driving an *influx* of cheap, low-paid “migrants.” This will lead to South Korean culture being gradually replaced with some other culture. And the question will be… what is this other culture’s views on such things as women’s rights? Just as Europe celebrates gay and trans while not making their own babies and importing *vast* numbers of people from cultures that not only like to make babies but also like to throw gay people off rooftops, there will be an inevitable clash. A South Korea filled with elderly Koreans and young non-Koreans seems like a poor force to stack up against an invasion of young, armed North Koreans. All the Norks needs to do is wait and keep making babies, and the peninsula is theirs.

If you won;t make the next generation, someone else will. That might well suck… but there it is regardless.

 Posted by at 10:06 pm

Meanwhile, in “England…”

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Mar 122023
 

English traditions confuse me:

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:

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.

 Posted by at 6:07 pm

Priorities!

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Mar 122023
 

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.

While Silicon Valley Bank collapsed, top executive pushed ‘woke’ programs

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.

 Posted by at 3:40 pm
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