Archive for May, 2021
17th May 2021
Posted in Axis of Drivel -- Adventures in Narrative Media | Comments Off on Today in Global Warming Hysteria
17th May 2021
Posted in The Hunt for Heretics and Sinners | Comments Off on Today in Witch-Hunt Culture
17th May 2021
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on Today in the Biden-Harris Slow-Motion Train Wreck
17th May 2021
Posted in Whose turn is it to be the victim? | Comments Off on Today in Black Privilege
17th May 2021
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Under “progressivism,” anything old is suspect and if there is the slightest hint of incorrect thinking about it, then it certainly must be denounced if not destroyed.
Progressives believe that progress is inevitable; so long as things are allowed to change, time T+1 will inevitably be better than time T.
Hence, for any time T there was a time T-1 that represents Less Progress and is ipso facto Less Good. So the older something is, the less progress it embodies, and this is the very definition of inferiority.
Posted in Think about it. | 1 Comment »
17th May 2021
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Plexiglass — or, rather, Plexiglas® — is one of several trade names for acrylic, shorthand for polymethyl methacrylate, a thermoplastic that can be molded at high temperatures but hardens upon cooling. 9 Transparent, lightweight, and shatter-resistant, the material derives from natural gas, and was developed in the late 1920s and ’30s as a safety glass for automobiles, an alternative to silica-based glass. German chemists Otto Röhm and Walter Bauer trademarked a version as Plexiglas® acrylic; British chemists Rowland Hill and John Crawford of Imperial Chemical registered their product under the name Perspex; and E.I. du Pont Nemours & Company, based in the U.S., introduced Pontalite, later renamed Lucite. 10 Acrylic proved useful for many wartime applications, including submarine periscopes, aircraft windshields and canopies, and gun turrets. 11 Moreover, acrylic, like all plastic, affords formal variety, and after the war it was put to myriad commercial uses: bulletproof “glass,” picture “glass,” ice-hockey-rink walls, aquarium walls, salad-bar sneeze guards, surgical instruments, storm doors, paint, jewelry, dentures, and housewares in exciting curved and folded shapes. Acrylic rods became “crystal” chandeliers and towel holders and stands for scale models. Acrylic tubes were bent into point-of-sale displays, decorative furniture, bulk-food dispensers.
Look but don’t touch.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Towards A Cultural History of Plexiglass
17th May 2021
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Interpol isn’t an international police agency, even though Hollywood likes to depict it as such. It’s actually more like an electronic bulletin board on which police agencies around the world can post their “wanted” notices.
Other police agencies can read the notices—or ignore them—as they choose.
Interpol isn’t supposed to get involved in politics. But not all of its members—and almost every country, except North Korea and Kosovo, are members of Interpol—are so scrupulous.
Interpol abuse happens when a nation (usually an authoritarian regime) puts a “wanted” notice on the Interpol bulletin board on a political opponent.
This abuse is generically known as transnational repression, because it cuts across national borders and it involves everything from spyware to assassinations to Interpol. But Interpol abuse is an important facet of the wider problem.
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | Comments Off on What Americans Should Know About Interpol Abuse
17th May 2021
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Until I wrote the adjacent post this morning I had forgotten the article I wrote for the February 4, 2008 issue of the Weekly Standard. In the article I took a look at widely circulated AP and Reuters photographs of Yasser Arafat allegedly donating blood to the United States in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. I titled the article “He didn’t give at the office.”
Posted in Axis of Drivel -- Adventures in Narrative Media | Comments Off on Terrorist Propaganda, AP Style: A Case Study
17th May 2021
ZMan takes a look under the covers.
In a world where the end always justifies the means, even when the end is not achieved, truth must always be a secondary consideration. In fact, the truth is often the enemy, as it serves the interests of your opponents. By attacking the truth of something, or even the concept of truth itself, you take away the legitimacy of the opposition to you and your schemes. When morality is determined by who wins, rather than by some objective standard, partisanship is the new morality.
This is the modern age. You see it in the language. The public space is full of people juggling neologisms that have a nice ring to them as a replacement for old words or labels. They sound better and the best people always love hearing new ways of saying old things. It makes them feel smart and sophisticated. The intellectual in a liberal democracy is primarily concerned with appearing to be unconventional and heterodox, so the new words and phrases quickly become popular.
Popularly used smears are ready to hand. ‘Price gouging’. ‘Profiteering’. ‘Robber baron’. ‘Windfall profit’. ‘Pay your fair share’. ‘Oligarch’. ‘Racist’. ‘Sexist’. ‘Bigot’. ‘Homophobe’. ‘Islamophobe’. ‘Denier’. ‘Black market’.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on The Weapon of Language
17th May 2021
Posted in Think about it. | 1 Comment »
16th May 2021
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The first court test of whether local governments can ban police from enforcing certain gun laws is playing out in a rural Oregon county, one of a wave of U.S. counties declaring itself a Second Amendment sanctuary.
The measure that voters in the logging area of Columbia County narrowly approved last year forbids local officials from enforcing most federal and state gun laws and could impose thousands of dollars in fines on those who try.
Second Amendment sanctuary resolutions have been adopted by some 1,200 local governments in states around the U.S., including Virginia, Colorado, New Mexico, Kansas, Illinois and Florida, according to Shawn Fields, an assistant professor of law at Campbell University who tracks them. Many are symbolic, but some, like in Columbia County, carry legal force.
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | Comments Off on Second Amendment Sanctuaries Facing 1st Court Test in Oregon
16th May 2021
The Other McCain spreads the love.
In response to that threat, we organized “Everybody Blog About Rebekah Jones Day.” For a while, it seemed that our efforts to publicize this situation had little impact, but Hoge kept pounding away at the story, and earlier this month, a Maryland judge dismissed the Jones v. Pushaw case.
Then last week, Charles C.W. Cooke did a National Review article about Jones that got widespread attention, including from The Daily Caller (“The Media Elevated A COVID-19 Conspiracy Theorist To Hurt Ron DeSantis”). So now everybody knows the story — demonstrating again how “The Streisand Effect” operates. The truth is great and will prevail.
Shucks, I missed it.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on The Streisand Effect and the Results of Everybody Blog About Rebekah Jones Day
16th May 2021
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | Comments Off on Pandemic Panic – It’s Titanic
16th May 2021
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | Comments Off on Today in the Biden-Harris Slow-Motion Train Wreck
16th May 2021
Posted in Whose turn is it to be the victim? | Comments Off on Today in Black Privilege
16th May 2021
Posted in Axis of Drivel -- Adventures in Narrative Media | Comments Off on Today in Global Warming Hysteria
16th May 2021
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on Today in Progressive Totalitarianism
16th May 2021
Posted in The Hunt for Heretics and Sinners | Comments Off on Today in Witch-Hunt Culture
16th May 2021
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A couple days ago, the Israeli military destroyed a building that they said was used by Hamas. The Israelis gave their customary warning to everyone in the area to get out, and it appears that no one was hurt. I don’t recall Hamas giving a similar warning to the residents of the Israeli civilian centers it destroyed with rocket attacks last week. Anyway. As it turns out, the Hamas building was also used by the Associated Press. AP claims that they had been in that building for years, and had no idea that Hamas was using the same office space. AP is shocked – shocked! – at Israeli allegations that the building housed hostile forces.
…
Next, what are the odds that AP really didn’t know that Hamas was in that building? In fact, what are the odds that the reason the AP used offices there was to have close access to those they were working with to develop the stories they sought to produce about Israeli brutality and so on? One would presume that AP chose those offices for a reason. Perhaps not. But what a remarkable coincidence – out of all the offices they could have used in that region, they chose those in the very same office building as Hamas. Who knew?
Posted in Axis of Drivel -- Adventures in Narrative Media | 2 Comments »
16th May 2021
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The Explanation of ideology: Family Structures and Social Systems (1985) was based on the insight that the world map of communism corresponded extremely closely with a specific family system, that of the exogamous communitarian family. Following Walt Rostow, the Kennedy intellectual, Todd argued that the violent process of modernization exposed societies to communist subversion in a brief window when the traditional institutions, such as the authority of the landlord, have decayed but new institutions and higher standards of living are still not in place. Todd’s corollary to Rostow’s dictum was that, while all societies are traumatized by the process of modernization, some societies were more exposed to communist subversion than others. And what determined this conditional exposure to the risk of communism subversion was a specific sort of traditional family system where marriage was exogamous (cousin marriage was taboo) and there was coresidence of the father and all his married sons.
Don’t ever say we don’t deal with Really Obscure Shit here.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on The Church’s Crusade Against Cousin-Marriage Did Not Create the Western Nuclear Family
16th May 2021
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The power is not in the device, for it merely channels, dowsers say; the power is out there, and an attuned hand and quieted mind can discern it.
Whenever I go dowsing for stupidity, the rod aways dips toward Washington.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Into the Mystical and Inexplicable World of Dowsing
16th May 2021
Freeberg nails it again.
The Internet is a raucous and noisy place, because people have this need to defend the indefensible, and when that germinates into a need to do some arguing when they don’t know how to argue, they use these templates. The templates exist on what might be thought of as a sort of tree, just like a tree you’d find in a redwood forest, or — forgive me, it’s become part of my vocational discipline to see things this way — a sort of class-inheritance tree you’d find in an application or module written in an object-oriented language. “You see” is at the root. Some well-known and often-seen you-see stuff includes
1. Gender is nothing but a social construct
2. Mankind is a poison on the planet
3. Capitalism is the disease and socialism is the cure
4. “Robber Barons” blah blah blah…
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Templates
16th May 2021
Posted in Living with Islam. | Comments Off on Hamas’s Rockets Are Killing Palestinians Too
16th May 2021
Freeberg nails it.
I’m celebrating Liz Cheney’s defrocking by thinking about her constituents, and I don’t mean Wyoming people. I mean her real constituents. The #NeverTrump types can see with their own eyes that someone’s performing competently at a job, and still wish to replace him because they don’t like his vibe. They’d rather let a building burn to the ground than call a fireman who happens to chew tobacco, or use profanity, or skip Church, or watch Beavis and Butthead, or, or, or…
…
They hate Trump because they don’t value what he did. They’ve never had to count on a job actually getting done right, never lost anything because it didn’t happen. They don’t even understand the concept of “an important job”; to their way of thinking, a job is important when it’s a job done by a person who is important, and what makes a person important is their power over you. Their parents paid their college tuition, and to this day, they’re not too sure of how it got done. Their graduation was a ritual and everything after that has been a ritual. You can explain to them until you’re blue in the face that they’re safe because hard men protect them, and are unafraid of doing terrible things, and they’ll nod and agree like they understand. But they don’t. There’s no reason.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Liz Cheney’s Real Constituents
16th May 2021
Severian is ready to give up.
When it comes to philosophy, at least, the idea’s the thing, not the prose, a few obvious exceptions like Nietzsche aside. It’s important that you know what e.g. Kant and Hegel said, not how they said it, and since any competent “intro to” book will give you both the “standard” (consensus) view and the most common alternate readings, you really don’t have to plow through The Critique of Pure Reason or, God help us, The Philosophy of History. Intros are fine*, and they’re especially fine for guys like Marx, whose Collected Works with Engels run at least fifty (!) big honking volumes.
…
Just as Cultural Marxism was nothing more than question begging, a smokescreen of ponderous Teutonic prose to keep Marxists from believing their own lying eyes, so #Woke is an increasingly unhinged attempt to convince the True Believers that a society which is actually pretty fucking great for almost everybody is, in fact, a benighted hellhole of oppression. We’ve all seen it, so a single example will suffice: I’ve met three trannies in my life. One of them was in India, where there’s apparently some kind of sub-caste ritual thing they do, which though fascinating in itself isn’t germane.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Letting Go of the Tiger
16th May 2021
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After its customary warning to protect civilian life, the IDF took out the 12-story Jala Tower housing Hamas military intelligence offices as well as offices for Al Jazeera and the Associated Press. As far as I can tell from reports such as this photo-filled story in the Daily Mail, no lives were lost in the bombing.
The Biden administration nevertheless found the occasion fit to lecture Israel yesterday “that ensuring the safety and security of journalists and independent media is a paramount responsibility.” According to the Jerusalem Post, Israeli authorities have showed Biden administration officials the “smoking gun” proving that Hamas worked out of the building. I demand proof that intelligent life exists within the Biden administration.
Posted in Axis of Drivel -- Adventures in Narrative Media | Comments Off on The AP goes Sgt. Schultz
16th May 2021
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And if you believe that one they’ll tell you another one.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on The Suez Canal Will Be Widened by 131 Feet to Avoid a Repeat of the Ever Given Chaos, Authorities Say
16th May 2021
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In California and other parts of the West, the fresh water that is provided through snowpack provides clean drinking water, renewable forms of energy and a healthy ecosystem, and one man is responsible for the way the water in that snowpack is measured, even more than 100 years after he introduced the method.
Each year, the state’s Department of Water Resources conducts a water survey and compares it to years prior. Last month’s water survey found below-average precipitation across the entire state.
Posted in News You Can Use. | Comments Off on Father of Snow Science: The Legacy That Lives On More Than a Century Later
16th May 2021
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The news tells us less about Israel than about the people writing the news, a former AP reporter says.
Posted in Axis of Drivel -- Adventures in Narrative Media | Comments Off on What the Media Gets Wrong About Israel
16th May 2021
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SINCE THE Romans began doing it with great panache more than 2,000 years ago, road-building has been a sweaty, grubby business, involving heaving great quantities of rocks and stones into place and, in more recent times, covering the surface with asphalt or concrete. Now a group of Swiss researchers think they have come up with a more elegant solution. Strange as it may seem, this involves knitting.
Martin Arraigada and Saeed Abbasion of the Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology use a robotic arm to lay out string in a series of elaborate patterns. As the knitting takes shape, layers of stones are added and tamped down. The string entangles the stones, keeping them in place. The result is a structure that is surprisingly stable and strong. In one experiment a section of pavement put together in this way withstood a load of half a tonne. The encapsulated stones hardly moved at all.
Posted in News You Can Use. | Comments Off on Knitting a Road With Stones and String
16th May 2021
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way since that Stanford-modified Volkswagen Touareg won the first DARPA Grand Challenge back in 2005, but we’ve still got a long way to go before full Level 5 autonomy. No matter what anyone says. In case you don’t believe me, why not check out this video of a Waymo robotaxi getting very confused by some traffic cones and causing all kinds of trouble, including escaping from Waymo’s own support team.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Waymo AV Freaked Out by Traffic Cones, Blocks Traffic, Evades Support Vehicles
16th May 2021
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Thought for the Day
15th May 2021
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An office building destroyed by Israeli airstrikes on Saturday was reportedly used by the Associated Press and the Islamic terrorist group Hamas. According to national security expert Noah Pollak, the building contained several Hamas facilities, including weapons manufacturing and military intelligence units, and the AP journalists were aware of the terrorist activities.
“Spoke to a well-placed friend in the IDF just now,” Pollak wrote on Twitter. “The bombed AP office building contained multiple Hamas operations & offices including weapons manufacturing and military intelligence. The building also housed an Islamic Jihad office. And AP’s local reporters knew about it.”
Lie down with dogs, get up with fleas.
Posted in Living with Islam. | Comments Off on Exclusive Look Inside Jala Tower, the AP-Hamas Coworking Space Destroyed by Israeli Airstrike
15th May 2021
Biden’s Green “No” Deal Exposes Virtue-Signaling Americans’ NIMBY Views On Wind Power
New NASA Data Sheds (Sun) Light on Climate Models
Posted in Axis of Drivel -- Adventures in Narrative Media | Comments Off on Today in Global Warming Hysteria
15th May 2021
Posted in Whose turn is it to be the victim? | Comments Off on Today in Black Privilege
15th May 2021
Vaccine Virtue Signaling And The Cult Of Woke
CNN Panics About Dropping Masks for Vaccinated: ‘It’s Very Scary!’
Libertarians To Begin Wearing Masks Now That Government Says They Don’t Have To Babylon Bee.
Despite New CDC Guidance, New York, New Jersey Keep Mask Mandates The Narrative trumps The Science.
MASK MANDATES CRUMBLING
78% Of UK Businesses Have No Plan To Require Vaccine Certificates, Survey
Mask Fetishists Mourn End of an Era
Panic! Newsweek’s Scary Cover: ‘Forget Herd Immunity!’ ‘Deadly New Variants’
“I Don’t Care If You’re Vaccinated, You Dink!” – Wisconsin Teacher Put On Leave After Verbally-Abusing Maskless Student
Apple Stores Will Continue to Require Masks for Now The Narrative trumps The Science.
Fauci Admits Only Around Half Of His Agency’s Staff Are Vaccinated
COVID Deaths Plummet As Excess Mortality Falls To Pre-Pandemic Levels
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | Comments Off on Pandemic Panic – It’s Titanic
15th May 2021
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on Today in Progressive Totalitarianism
15th May 2021
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | Comments Off on Today in the Biden-Harris Slow-Motion Train Wreck
15th May 2021
Posted in The Hunt for Heretics and Sinners | Comments Off on Today in Witch-Hunt Culture
15th May 2021
The Other McCain peeks behind the curtain.
Gosh, it sure was a smart decision to put your objective journalism offices in a building controlled by a terrorist organization.
Posted in Living with Islam. | Comments Off on Just Think of the Media as Hamas Propaganda Operatives With Bylines
15th May 2021
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The claim was that EV owners need to pay their fair share and make up for fuel taxes that they don’t pay.
Which fuel taxes pay for the upkeep of roads and bridges.
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | 1 Comment »
15th May 2021
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Hamas is raininng thousands of rockets at random on Israeli civilians and the Biden White House is concerned about threats to journalists.
Nice to know where their priorities lie. ‘Fuck the Jews, we have to protect the journalists!’
UPDATE: Biden in call with Netanyahu raises concerns about civilian casualties in Gaza
No concern about civilian casualties in Israel, of course.
UPDATE : Oops! AP Reporter Forgets To Remove Hamas Headband Before Going Live Babylon Bee.
Fake but accurate.
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | Comments Off on White House Worried About Journalists Following Israeli Bombing of AP Building
15th May 2021
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First, beyond a few spats that make headlines, it’s getting harder to detect any serious division among rank-and-file Republicans. In Congress, and at the grassroots, the dominance of Donald Trump over the party is more or less total. The small handful who denounced the former president for his massive lies about the election and his seeding of an insurrectionist riot are now either silent, or have embraced a mealy-mouthed argument for “election integrity.” The same state officials who pushed back against Trump’s attempt to overturn November’s results have embraced a series of restrictive voting measures ostensibly designed to combat non-existent “fraud,” all aimed at hobbling voters inclined to vote for Democrats. Mitch McConnell, who denounced Trump’s behavior in high-minded tones in the aftermath of the riot, also—on the exact same day—voted to exonerate him of wrongdoing.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on A GOP Civil War? Don’t Bet On It.
15th May 2021
The Other McCain does some recruiting.
Do you have what it takes to be a Hamas leader? The main thing it takes is hate — psychotic hatred of Jews. We’re not talking mere prejudice here, but murderous, genocidal hate, the kind of atavistic rage that makes you want to fire hundreds of rockets at Israeli civilians.
If you’ve got that kind of hatred — if you’re a Hitler-style Jew-hater — then you could be a leader of Hamas, which now has quite a few vacancies in upper management, because the Israelis blew them up.
Posted in Living with Islam. | Comments Off on Career Opportunities in Gaza
15th May 2021
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Thought for the Day
15th May 2021
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Or you could just buy a gun and defend yourself — if the government will let you.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Demand For Active Shooter Insurance Soars As Post-Pandemic America Reopens
15th May 2021
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I’ll bet you didn’t know that.
Posted in News You Can Use. | Comments Off on Pigs And Rodents Can Breathe Through Their Butts, And This Could Be a Vital Discovery
14th May 2021
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A professor in Ohio was sentenced to 37 months in prison Friday for failing to disclose work for China funded by federal grants in what prosecutors say was an immunology research fraud scheme.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on Researcher gets 3-year prison term for covert China work
14th May 2021
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‘Be sure to vote for me in the recall election2!’
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | Comments Off on Gov. Gavin Newsom Announces California Will Eliminate Traffic Debt Ffr Low-Income People Owed Since 2015
14th May 2021
Posted in Whose turn is it to be the victim? | Comments Off on Today in Black Privilege