Methane levels in the atmosphere seem to be rising steeply. Since methane is a much more potent “greenhouse gas” than CO2, this could, perhaps, maybe, result in the end of the ice age that we’re currently in… within a few decades. The one good thing is that methane does not have a long lifespan, getting oxidized within a few years. But that’ll only help if the methane release – which seems to be coming from African wetlands – stops. of course, if the climate suddenly gets way hotter, the African wetlands releasing methane via decomposition of dead vegetable matter might turn into desert area, resulting in the eventual end of the methane release. Which means within a dozen or so years of that the methane will have burned out and the climate can descend back into good ol’ ice age status. *Proper* ice age, with glaciers covering continents and land bridges everywhere. This will be aided by the fact that humans will have been largely wiped out at that point. Doubtless industrial civilization will have either moved off-world or simply been exterminated; and with no easy access to oil or coal anymore, anthropogenic CO2 emissions will be minimal.
Before there was the Budweiser Disaster, there was Gillette. Back in 2019 they released one of the worst ads in history… a company whose primary market was men used an ad to tell men that they were evil for being men. This, unshockingly, did not result in an increase in sales. It did do some damage to the brand and to their stock price, but nothing like what happened to Bud; perhaps this indicates a shift in the culture, with sane people beginning to realize their power to boycott.
I thought the ad was simply bad planning married to bad marketing. But then, I don’t spend my time trying to analyze propaganda techniques (perhaps if I did, I’d have better sales). However, this feller seems to have a channel devoted to such things, so, perhaps somewhat delayed, he went through the ad almost frame by frame. He came up with some interesting discoveries and conclusions, both about what was done and what was done wrong.
J. Robert Oppenheimer is justly famed for his role in developing the A-bomb. He is considered to be something of a martyr for what happened later… during the “Red Scare” he was stripped of his security clearance. But was it actually wrong to do so? Was his interest in the Communist Party some minor childish dalliance from his earlier years… or was it more serious? The recent movie, and most modern depictions, portray him in a positive light.
But he *was* a Communist. What’s worse, there’s good evidence – lots of it from the actual Soviets – that he actively worked for them. He apparently slipped them heaps of data to help their bomb program, and then once the Soviets had the bomb, he worked to sabotage the American bomb program.
It’s probably well past time that Oppenheimer be re-examined. And if it’s finally concluded that he was a traitor, which there’s good evidence that he was, his name needs to be appropriately blackened as any Communists should be. We tear down statues of people who supported slavery 250 years ago; we tear down statues of people who supported the CSA for *whatever* reason 160 years ago; we would tear down statues of anyone who supported the Nazis 80 years ago. We should tear down statues and monuments and hagiographies of anyone who supported Communists a hundred years ago, fifty years ago or today.
Communism is every bit as bad as Fascism, and arguably worse; Communists *today* are universally terrible people because they have a century of blood-soaked failure that they *choose* to ignore. Communists, their supporters and their wishy-washy Socialist wannabes need to be called out for the monsters and morons that they are. And that includes historical figures.
One woman (40) donated her womb to her sister (34) who was born with a malformed womb. So both women can have kids. This is good news. The first uterus transplant was in 2013 in Sweden, so this has been going on a while, if not widely.
But since we can’t have anything nice, here’s where this will go:
The curious thing is that the Venn Diagram of “people who support taxpayer funding it so guys can get pregnant” and “people who thing we should reduce the population if western nations” probably overlaps a *lot.*
Besides the basic insanity of using surgery to affirm delusions, there’s the issue of what it’s gonna do to the prospective offspring. At the least they’ll know that they’re the product of Mad Science; they will also be raised by someone claiming to be their mother, but who does not have the upbringing of a woman. *THEN* there’s the issue of… even if the womb works, what’s going to happen to the fetus? DudeMom won’t produce the same hormones a woman does. HShe’ll doubtless have to spend the term of the pregnancy constantly getting shot full of drugs and hormones in a desperate attempt to give the embryo a hope in hell of gestating correctly. And then, there’s the end: the new womb probably didn’t come with a new pelvis. The male pelvis does not have space for a proper birth canal. So any offspring resulting from this will, like French Bulldogs, likely have to be brought about via C-Section.
And then there’s this to consider: in the second article above, it’s suggested that it’ll be 10 to 20 years before transplanting wombs into males becomes a reality. But… in 10 to 20 years, chances seem decent that bespoke organs can be produced via 3D bio-printing, cloning, etc. Use the “mothers” own DNA to create a womb with “moms” own DNA.
And then there’s this: in 10 to 20 years, the United Kingdom will be a fundamentally different place. When the UK becomes London writ large, the culture will be upended. It seems a bit unlikely that these sort of surgeries will be performed in a Britain, any more than they’ll be performed in Uganda or Saudi Arabia.
“Our investigation found that SpaceX failed to fairly consider or hire asylees and refugees because of their citizenship status and imposed what amounted to a ban on their hire regardless of their qualification, in violation of federal law,” Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke said.
How about No. SpaceX is building the future of national security. I say let them be as got-dayum picky as they want to be *especially* when it comes to hiring people of dubious loyalty.
The next time we get a President who is non-insane, non-senile and pro-America, they need to go through the halls of the Federal Government with leafblower hooked up to a backpack full of pink slips.
People who have lived in a place for centuries often hold eccentric, old, downright obsolete facilities in higher regard than people who hav4e just moved in and have no links to the place. Example: a centuries-old pub was sold to a developer. It was signed up for historic protection, but before the paperwork could go through a pile of rubble was mysteriously dumped into the road leading to it. And then it mysteriously caught fire, with the pile of rubble blocking the fire department. The brick structure remained standing, opening up the possibility of being restored; it was then very quickly razed to the ground mechanically. Gosh, I guess it’s gone, nothing left for it but to built cheap housing on the very valuable plot of land…
Academic researchers condemned students’ irreverent and offensive responses to an LGBTQ survey, claiming the pushback indicates “fascist ideologues” are “living ‘inside the house’ of engineering and computer science.”
In an article for the Bulletin of Applied Transgender Studies, academics from Oregon State University wrote about their shock at receiving sarcasm and mockery in response to their research into undergraduate LGBTQ students studying in STEM fields. …
According to the article, when the “malicious” subjects were asked to fill out demographic data, “12 respondents (24%) indicated their gender as being related to a helicopter or aircraft” ranging from an “Apache Attack Helicopter” to a “V22 osprey.” In the section declaring one’s disabilities, responses ranged from claiming to be “illiterate” to lamenting “My country is run by communists,” or even declaring that identifying as transgender is a disability in itself due to “the inability to come to terms with biological reality.”
One respondent claimed to identify as a gift card as their gender. Under racial and ethnic identities they said, “I’m an ethnic gift card,” and for disability the answer was “I don’t have enough gift cards.”
There is hope for the future; these kids have their heads on right.
Are you questioning whether there is increased mental illness in Certain Special Groups? Maybe this bit will help you make up your mind on the subject:
The research team declared that the mockery they received “had a profound impact on morale and mental health,” particularly for one transgender researcher who was “already in therapy for anxiety and depression regarding online anti-trans rhetoric.” The paper claimed that “managing the study’s data collection caused significant personal distress, and time had to be taken off the project to heal from traumatic harm” of having to read students’ responses in the survey.
BWAHAHAHAHAHA!!!
The whole article is entertaining as hell; the “researchers” are so screwed up that they think any mockery of their views is down to “fascism.”
Photos have emerged from the next Disney live action remake of one of their classic animated films, “Snow White.” You know, the one about the Germanic princess with skin so white it looked like snow, who ended up running around with seven dwarves? Well… about all that, Disney has decided to continue the unprofitable trend of de-whitening European folk tales.
There are claims that these *aren’t* the actual “dwarves.” But given that “Snow White” is to be played by a Hispanic woman… why assume that these *aren’t* an accurate depiction? And remember, Hollywood is hardly above lying to the public’s face. Remember when Benedict Cumberbatch *wasn’t* playing Khan? Or when all the remakes and reboots of classic animated series were supposed to be faithful continuations that the existing fans would recognize, love and appreciate? Yeah… lying liars who lie have a tendency to lie.
And… it turns out that those claims of “fake” are probably themselves fake:
Asked for comment on the brouhaha, a Disney spokesperson initially told The Daily Beast “the photos are fake and not from our production” and added that the Mouse House wanted a correction from the Mail.
Hours later, however, Disney’s PR shop completely backtracked and said the photos were from the production but were not official “photos”—chalking up the earlier statement to a misunderstanding.
Dear readers, consider this: somewhere out in the multiverse there’s a version of the Disney corporation that decided to do a live action remake of “Snow White,” and decided to try their hardest to make it look like the original animated classic. And somewhere else out there is another Disney that decided to do a “Snow White” remake that was faithful to the Grimm tale as written. And somewhere further down the multiverse line is a version of Disney that decide to say “Fark it” and make a truly messed-up remake that swaps out all the “disneyfication” for hard-core “let’s make this thing like Germans a thousand years ago would have made it, with friggen’ terrifying monsters and death and horror straight out of Teutonic legends and myths and folk tales,” likely directed by del Toro with the aid of the ghosts of Lovecraft and Giger.
Any one of those is something I would have been interested in. *This* worlds Disney? Nah.
Note: the “dwarves” from Norse/Germanic folk tales weren’t just short humans. They were a different order of being entirely.
Anyway, Hollywood is basically on strike now, with writers and actors on the picket line. I imagine this might effect “Snow White,” as well as every other movie and TV show out there. But you know what? Who friggen’ cares. Things have gotten so slow in Hollywood that people have come to expect *years* between seasons of shows… seasons with a tiny number of episodes. long gone are the likes of *good* Star Trek series where you could expect 20+ episodes every year. now… Eight? Ten? And with many shows, the gap between seasons lasting a number of years. When did season 3 of “The Orville” end? When will season 4 start… if it ever does? And let’s face it: there are a metric fark-ton of old movies and shows available for streaming, more than enough to tide most people over for the most extended of strike. And beyond even that… YouTube and the like are loaded to the gills with lone creators who are far more entertaining than quarter-billion-dollar productions. So you go right ahead and shut down production, Hollywood. if it strangles nonsense like “Snow White,” so much the better.
How long before I’m able to say “Hey, AI, make me a four-hour faithful adaptation of ‘Snow White’ Using the production team from “The Lord Of The Rings” and starring Marylin Monroe as Snow White’?” Because that’ll be the end of Hollywood.
The pendulum *may* be beginning to swing the other way on some issues. For a number of years the bulk of the populace has been cowed into obedience over LGBTQ/Pride stuff with threats ranging from being called names to losing their jobs… but more and more people are ceasing to care. Some of this is doubtless due to the over-use of Cancel Culture tactics. And a lot of it is doubtless due to people being fed up with the utter insanity that many weirdos are trying to normalize. “Drag Queen Story Hour” may go down in history as the moment when people, parents of small children in particular, said “enough.”
The video below describes a *lot* of recent events, both of the weirdos trying to threaten people for not going along with the ideology, and with normal folk pushing back.
If Turkey becomes an EU member, it will immediately be the most populace EU member, with about 85 million compared to second-place Germany with about 83 million (some sizable number of which are actually Turks). Those Turks would have the right to go anywhere in the EU and settle; any “migrants” who get to Turkey – certainly easier than getting to Italy or France – would immediately be able to go anywhere in the EU and live on the local taxpayers dimes. This will flood Europe with non-Europeans (even more so than is happening already) who have neither the desire nor intention of assimilating into the local cultures. As Turkey is officially in Asia, not Europe, being in the EU would be just weird regardless of all other arguments.
The Turks in the form of the Ottoman Empire spent the better part of a millennium invading and attempting to conquer Europe; their main remaining success is Turkish-occupied Constantinople. If the EU admits Turkey, that conquest could finally be completed, without the need to fire a single shot.
Turkey seems to believe that they will finally receive EU membership after agreeing to let Sweden join NATO. Which, again, is weird… the EU is not NATO, NATO is not the EU. But if they are correct… better by far for Turkey to be booted from NATO and Sweden admitted than to let the Ottomans conquer Europe at long last.