You *know* there is someone in your life that you want to give a gift wrapped in this stuff:
Let’s Go Brandon Wrapping Paper – 100% Made in America
Seems it would work for birthday presents. And Presidents Day presents.
Dec 142021
Dec 142021
Yeesh.
When they tell you they can’t give you an aisle seat https://t.co/LP5khxiUsq
— Libs of Tik Tok (@libsoftiktok) December 14, 2021
Dec 142021
Back in the 80’s if you wanted some high-quality censorship, you had to look to the Right… at least, the Christian Fundamentalist part of it. Church and parent groups freaked out about Dungeons and Dragons, and heavy metal music, and video games, and just about anything else that might be seen as fun, and those groups tried to ban or restrict them. Starting in the 90’s, though, the censorship pendulum began to swing *hard* the other way and for decades we’ve been dealing with power-mad Leftists trying to scrape society clean of the things they don’t like.
The “progressives” have had their shot… and they pushed too hard. Now it appears that on local and some state levels, right-wingers are pushing, with some success, for censorship of their own. So far, these are efforts to ban schools from mandating or even having certain texts. In many cases, these make sense: the drive to get rid of fraudulent racist agitprop like CRT and 1619 Project stuff. For the same reason children aren’t allowed to wander into R-rated movies, children should be guided through controversial or difficult subjects, and schools should *not* be teaching factually flawed topics, never mind factually flawed topics designed to psychologically harm the kiddies.
And in many cases, the individual works being banned are only faintly relevant, but it is understandable why they’ve been targeted. For too long the progressives pushed too hard; I suspect history might well show that “Drag Queen Story Hour” was the point where a whole lot of parents said “ok, I’m done pretending, that’s too much perversion for me,” and decided to just sweep the decks of anything remotely resembling that sort of nonsense. And in some cases, the books being banned don’t make any sense whatsoever apart from someone having simply read the title or done a keyword search.
The pendulum has not of course fully swung. These right-wing efforts are aimed at keeping these books from the libraries of publicly-funded schools. Progressive censorship, on the other hand, is aimed at preventing their targeted books from being published *at* *all,* to maintain a grip on the entirety of permissible thought. “Yeah, but both sides” does not really apply here given the massive disparity in goals and reach; let’s not forget that it was BLM that burned book stores.
There are limited hours in the day, and in the school year. There are subjects that schools should teach, and skills and knowledge that they *need* to impart. And then there are things that would be *nice* to teach, time and resources permitting. And then there’s “what the hell is this nonsense” that there’s really no good place for in school.
Dec 142021
Turns out, “get woke go broke” has some merit to it.
The Salvation Army is current soliciting donations for the Kentucky tornado victims. Thing is… there are other charity organizations you can donate to. Charities that didn’t sell their souls to the CRT ghouls. The Salvation Army needs to collapse and then be rebuilt sans all the morons who signed off on their racist ideological nonsense. Same for any other organization or business that has dabbled with CRT and related grifts.
Dec 142021
“The Unbearable Weight Of Massive Talent” looks like the best kind of bonkers. It also looks like a regular studio movie with a decent budget, so maybe his career will get back onto track. Not that “Willy’s Wonderland” wasn’t a hoot, but small films like that aren’t going to pay for castles filled with dinosaurs.
Dec 132021
The voyage of the USS Connecticut to San Diego sounds like a month of food poisoning.
Damaged Submarine Likely Had A “Nightmare Voyage” To San Diego Says Veteran Submariner
Likely did 6000 miles at 10 knots on the surface. Ride would have been rough because the friggen’ nose got ripped off… and because submarines aren’t designed to sail on the surface, the boat would have rolled like a drunken Bill Clinton.
They estimate repairs could take *years.* This is not the sort of industrial capability that wins wars with near-peer opponents. Early in WWII, the USS Yorktown was blowed the ᚠᚪᛣᚳ up and returned to sea after 48 hours of repair, serving admirably to lay a historic beatdown on the Japanese navy at Midway before finally being taken down by masses of aircraft and a salvo of torpedoes. None of that “years in drydock” ᛒᚪᛚᛚᛋᚻᛁᛏ… it was rebuilt in a damn hurry and sent back to the fight like a boss. Today the Navy runs one of only *three* Seawolf class subs into a friggen’ rock and it’s out of commission for a Presidential administration.
Dec 132021
… at the National Museum of the USAF in Dayton:
Some *really* interesting things there, such as a Crossbow and an Iraqi MiG 25. A lot of restoration work is needed on some; others look about ready to display. I’d kinda like to see that MiG stripped of the Iraqi markings and restored as a Soviet version… and then parked near the SR-71/XB-70.
Note also that as the drone flies down the length of the MiG the camera pans down, eventually pointing more or less straight down. *THIS* needs to happen with planes like the SR-71, XB-70, YF-12: get me some good, clear imagery of these aircraft from above. Complete coverage, please.
Dec 132021
The most toxic creatures are typically brightly colored. This makes sense: their defense comes from your reluctance to touch them, not from their ability to fight you or defend themselves. Any animal ignorant enough to go after a dart frog or a blue ringed octopus will certainly kill it, only dying later from the various toxins. Those toxins won’t have done the frog or the octopus any good, so they brightly advertise “don’t approach, crazy dangerous toxicity here” by way of coloration, also known as”aposematism.”
Humans do it too. Example:
Police: Instacart driver ran over groceries over ‘Thank You Blaine PD’ sign
Short form: an Instacart driver destroyed an elderly couples $50 worth of groceries after having claimed to have delivered them because the customer had a “we support the police” sign in the front yard. That’s nuts. Fortunately, the toxic creature in question has adopted coloration meant to warn people from approaching too closely:
I don’t use Instacart, so I don’t know if it sends you a photo of the driver before you order. If so, the presence of dangerhair on your driver should be a big warning sign. The presence of dangerhair on *anyone* should be a warning sign. Avoid dangerhair at all costs. This includes hiring and dating, unless you have a burning desire to see your business, home, property, life savings and quite possibly your immune system go up in flames.
For those interested in helping out the victims of the dangerhair in question, there is, of course, a GoFundMe.
Everything is an opportunity for *somebody*
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Dec 132021
Thanks to the Pinko Pox, a *lot* of people are now working from home. And a lot of people are discovering that their employers are less interested in actual productivity than the *appearance* of productivity, something I discovered years ago at ATK (by the end of my time there I could get my whole days work done within the first half hour, and the need to try to look busy the rest of the day literally drove me buggo until the end).
Workers Are Using ‘Mouse Movers’ So They Can Use the Bathroom in Peace
Short form: if you work remotely using a company-supplied computer, chances are that the computer has “bossware” installed that tracks mouse/cursor movement to make sure you’re at the computer and on the job. So if you get up to take a leak or answer the door, your employers will know in a few seconds that you’re not moving the mouse anymore, and you could get in trouble.
Never fear: the free market is here to help with any number of “mouse jigglers” that will give the *appearance* to bossware that your mouse is being constantly manipulated. Some of these are bits of USB hardware. Some are software. Some are actual mechanical devices. My favorite, though, are simply YouTube videos: play the video on a phone or tablet and place an optical mouse on it; the moving lines spoof the mouses optical sensor into thinking it’s being moved.
Heh. The entrepreneurial spirit will always find a way to stick it to the man.
Dec 122021
Long ago, New Zealand made the Soviet Union smile when it banned any form of nuclear power – RTGs, reactors, bombs – in their territory. This meant that US naval vessels such as aircraft carriers and subs were banned from New Zealand waters, making that region just a little bit safer for Soviet interests. Well, the Soviets may be gone, but the anti-science mindset that they set in motion in the West continues to gain steam. behold:
Māori professor under investigation for views on mātauranga Māori
…Professor Garth Cooper, who is suddenly in the news because he is under disciplinary investigation by the Royal Society Te Apārangi, the nation’s premier organisation promoting science and the humanities.
Cooper is a Fellow of the society and — alongside eminent philosopher of science Robert Nola — risks being expelled from the nation’s most prestigious academic club.
The reason for the investigation is that Cooper and Nola were among seven professors who wrote to the Listener in July questioning a government working group’s proposal to give mātauranga Māori (Māori knowledge) parity with what were described as other “bodies of knowledge” — “particularly Western / Pākehā epistemologies” — in the school science curriculum.
In other words, Māori knowledge would effectively be given equal standing with physics, chemistry and biology.
Short form: superstition and anti-science are to be granted equal standing. Even questioning that could cost you your career.
Yes, “indigenous groups” around the planet (i.e. cultures based on backwards pre-Enlightnement, pre-scientific superstitions) do know a lot of useful stuff. People who live in jungle areas often know that “this plant will cure a headache, that one will fight malaria, this one will kill ya dead.” That’s useful *knowledge,* but it’s not *science.* Science is a method to discern the truth, to separate signal from noise. To suggest that “well, this is what we’ve always believed, so it’s as valid as five hundred years of careful trial and error and methodical study and attempts at falsification and revision of hypothesis when data comes in” is not just wrong, it’s stupid. The only people who can see this sort of development as a good thing are people who want to see civilizations collapse.
The West used to know what to do with people who worked against their own countries to aid, knowingly or not, their nations enemies.