May 072023
 

Interesting times *here* and interesting times forthcoming. In the past day or so Texas has seen a mass shooting with 8 dead, and an SUV *apparently* intentionally rammed a group of “migrants” at a bus stop, killing at least 7. In both cases it appears that the killer was a narrative-busting Hispanic male. In the former case, the shooter has been ID’ed as one Mauricio Garcia… and HERE the narrative is being spun that this Hispanic guy, who had a prominently displayed tattoo for the “tango blast” Hispanic prison gang, was a white supremacist and a neo-Nazi. In the latter case the suspect has been arrested but not yet identified, but a potato-cam video of him being arrested *appears* to show a Hispanic guy, though that’s uncertain.

 

With hundreds of thousands to potentially *millions* of illegal aliens preparing to invade in the coming days and weeks, expect this sort of thing to only increase. You’ll get a vast increase in third-world cartel members in the US here to sow chaos, and who knows how many native Americans losing their minds and going buggo. When you couple that with the Just In Time For Summer deaths of a nutjob on a subway train in Manhattan and a thief in Oakland, BLM and related activists are getting ready to start up another summer of burning cities to the ground. Stock up on essentials while you can; if you live in cities, your favorite stores may well be ashes and bits of broken glass before you know it.

UPDATE: A photo reportedly of the SUV driver:

 

 Posted by at 8:14 pm
May 052023
 

The AI apocalypse has just been made inevitable:

White House Names Kamala Harris ‘AI Czar’ to Save Humanity from Artificial Intelligence

How is a woman of no intelligence going to save us from artificial intelligence? The only possibility i can think of is that once a suspected threatening  AGI is produced, the CIA/FBI/NSA/USSF/NASA will plop Harris down in front of it and have her begin to babble her incoherent nonsense in the hopes that the machine will do like Landru or Nomad and burst into flames, it’s processors driven past the the point of incandescence trying to make sense of her gibberish.

 Posted by at 1:55 pm
Apr 282023
 

I listened to part of an NPR piece earlier today on the subject of art forgery and the economics of it. Part of the discussion revolved around a case where a museum had a special display of “art” produced, supposedly, by Jean-Michel Basquiat in the 80’s. If you’ve never heard of Basquiat, there are two things to keep in mind:

1) His paintings have sold for over one Hundred MILLION dollars.

2) His paintings look like this:

Yeah. That’s really what passes for “fine art” these days.

As it turns out, this museum exhibition was populated by *forged* Basquiat paintings, which caused headaches all around.

Anyway, the thing that made me laugh out loud was one of the admissions by one of the forgers: the paintings took less than half an hour to create. According to THIS ARTICLE, some of them as little as five minutes. If you can forge “art” that passes *any* sort of muster in a matter of minutes, I gotta question whether said “art” is worthy of any real mention.

 

In the NPR piece, the expert they talked to yammered on about how “important” Basquiat was, along with Andy Warhol and Jackson Pollock. There’s yer problem: you think *that* is art worthy of remembrance. But where is your reverence for Chesley Bonestell? Norman Rockwell? Robert McCall? You know, artists with actual skill and talent, producers of art that inspired and uplifted… and demonstrated craftsmanship and ᚠᚢcᚲᛁᚾᚷ effort? Artists you couldn’t create “previously unseen” art from in the time it takes to listen to a mediocre podcast?

This is just a part of the uglification of the world, the exaltation of the mediocre, the banal, the bland.

 Posted by at 6:05 pm
Apr 142023
 

Netflix will be releasing a “documentary” about Queen Cleopatra VII. This “documentary” is apparently based on the fictional notion that she was a sub-Saharan African. This is a long-debunked and remarkably silly idea, but welcome to 2023, I guess. Here’s a good takedown:

When you race swap enough fictional characters, you start in on race swapping the historical characters. then you re-write history entirely. then you *erase* and *invent* history. And then society is whatever those in power want it to be.

 Posted by at 11:12 pm
Apr 062023
 

In Colorado Springs:

Former D20 student accused of planning attacks on three campuses

“D20” here is “district 20.” The new trend isn’t “19-year-old tries to shoot up a middle school and some churches.” Guess what it is.

Go on, guess.

Here’s a subtle hint:

William Whitworth who identifies as “Lilly” has been charged with felony criminal attempt to commit murder …

Did you spot it?

That’s right: the mass shooter was arrested *before* the mass shooting.

Nothing else here is noteworthy. Nothing.

NOTHING.

 Posted by at 8:41 pm
Apr 042023
 

You Didn’t Finish Watching the Lord of the Rings TV Show

…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.

 Posted by at 12:52 pm
Mar 302023
 

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.

 Posted by at 8:05 pm
Mar 282023
 

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.

 Posted by at 5:44 pm
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