Archive for November, 2021
27th November 2021
Posted in The Hunt for Heretics and Sinners | Comments Off on Today in Witch-Hunt Culture
27th November 2021
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on Today in Progressive Totalitarianism
27th November 2021
Posted in Axis of Drivel -- Adventures in Narrative Media | Comments Off on Today in Global Warming Hysteria
27th November 2021
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | Comments Off on #BidenRemorse: The Biden-Harris Slow-Motion Train Wreck
27th November 2021
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | Comments Off on Pandemic Panic – It’s Titanic
27th November 2021
Posted in Whose turn is it to be the victim? | Comments Off on Today in Black Privilege
27th November 2021
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Footprints found at White Sands National Park in New Mexico provide the earliest unequivocal evidence of human activity in the Americas and provide insight into life over 23,000 years ago, scientists report.
I guess the so-called First Nations are just immigrants like the rest of us.
Posted in News You Can Use. | Comments Off on New Evidence That Humans Populated the Americas During the Last Glacial Maximum
27th November 2021
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Bhutia Busty is said to house the original manuscript of the Bardo Thodol or The Tibetan Book of the Dead, a Buddhist teaching composed in the eighth century by Guru Rinpoche, the Indian saint who brought Buddhism to Tibet. A kind of pilgrim’s guidebook, the teaching is intended to help the dead navigate the “bardo” after-death journey to rebirth and has enjoyed great popularity in the West since it first appeared in English translation in 1927.
I assume that ‘don’t trust Chinese Communists’ is part of it.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on What The Tibetan Book of the Dead Teaches Us About Life
27th November 2021
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(Is there such a thing as a non-shoe cobbler?)
Shoe repair isn’t exactly a hobby one can simply fall into. Often, it’s the family business, passed on to the next generation. The store front, along with the machines, the customers, the skills are all transferred. “It’s wild to think that you used to be able to go to a trade school and take a course on shoe repair with a professor and a textbook,” Fortune says. “That’s not a thing anymore — you’re totally on your own.”
Getting into shoe repair is opaque, but Fortune had an in. His background in the fashion industry certainly gave him cursory knowledge of the trade, but it was a childhood friend whose family ran a shoe repair shop that really gave him a leg up. The shoe repair shop was in need of a refresh and Fortune pitched in to help. That’s where the shoe repairing journey started.
Posted in News You Can Use. | Comments Off on The Next Generation of Shoe Cobblers Isn’t Repairing Boots
27th November 2021
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We’re here to help. First, we gathered data for thousands of towns and cities on more than 30 metrics, such as school quality, crime rates and affordability. Then we used that data to make a quiz: Select the criteria you find important, and we’ll show you places that might work for you.
Here’s how I used it, and what I learned.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Everyone’s Moving to Texas. Here’s Why.
27th November 2021
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on PA Home a “Total Loss” After Charging Tesla in Driveway Spontaneously Combusts
27th November 2021
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That essential discipline was ditched in the 20th century as part of “architectural education”, because it did not fit in with the nihilism of Modernism’s total rejection of the past. The dismal results can be seen on all sides. Students nowadays have virtually no feeling for how buildings are put together, or how ornament (a dirty word today) was once an integral part of architecture rather than plonked on as an afterthought. They simply do not understand the importance of context (another dirty word, as Modernism demands the tabula rasa).
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on A Drawing Is Worth a Thousand Photographs
27th November 2021
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Rather than use off-the-shelf models, San Francisco has engaged in a years-long process to design cans that’ll cost thousands of dollars apiece. And it’s not nearly done.
When all your money belongs to the government, there is no limit to the amount of spending you can achieve.
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | Comments Off on Garbage Odyssey: San Francisco’s Bizarre, Costly Quest for the Perfect Trash Can
27th November 2021
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Adam Leeb ’07 is not a writer, but he’s devoted a lot of the past decade to improving the writing process. For him, it’s about designing products to increase focus and productivity, which is exactly what the modern-day typewriters created by Astrohaus do, he says.
And of course you can’d do that on your own, millennial slacker, so we’re going to create another widget for you to buy and stick in your closet after a month. KA-CHING!
Perfect for use in the railroad dining car.
Leeb graduated from MIT with a degree in mechanical engineering and an interest in entrepreneurship and product design, thanks to business courses he took through MIT Sloan as a senior. He felt like he’d finally figured out how to optimize his skills and interests—only he couldn’t get a job.
Gee, I wonder why not?
“He was telling me about a software that he had used to do some writing, just for fun. I started learning about all this distraction-free writing software and I was like, ‘Why isn’t there a dedicated device that can do this?’”
Maybe because you don’t need one? Software runs on a computer, and who doesn’t have a computer these days?
Posted in Is this a great country, or what? | Comments Off on Less Is More, Says Engineer Designing Modern-Day Typewriters
27th November 2021
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More buzzwords than you ever believed possible in one place.
If you could write like this, you could make a million.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Hacking the Child Brain: The 5 Step Process to Unlock Every Kid’s Potential
27th November 2021
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The selling of daughters used to be rare in Afghanistan, but it is happening much more because of the country’s desperate situation. The UN calls it the worst humanitarian disaster in the world today. Food is short because of a drought over the summer — the most extreme in twenty years — and because fighting stopped the harvest in many places. What’s more important is the fact that three-quarters of all government spending and 43 percent of the country’s income overall used to come from foreign aid. That’s all gone now with the Taliban in charge. It didn’t help that the American-backed government appears to have fled with much of the money in the country’s central bank. The Taliban are broke.
The dog has a problem when it actually catches the car.
Posted in Living with Islam. | Comments Off on Daughters for Sale: Afghans Are Growing Desperate
27th November 2021
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There was no reason for the world ever to hear the name Kyle Rittenhouse. Except that in the summer of 2020 this country was staring over a precipice. The Covid lockdowns effectively ended after the killing of George Floyd by a Minnesotan policeman. Suddenly mass gatherings in the name of BLM were a public-health duty and, because it was an election year, neither Democrats nor Republicans seemed to know how to react to protests that soon degenerated into serious disorder.
For a country that is only one bad police interaction away from meltdown, it was inevitable that something would happen again. Sure enough in August a man called Jacob Blake was shot by police in Kenosha, Wisconsin. There was a warrant out for Blake’s arrest and he was shot after fighting with police, wielding a knife and having already been tasered. Though Blake was not killed, BLM and other protest movements immediately had another martyr to hold up as evidence of systemic racism in America. And once again the peaceful movements turned very violent indeed. For two nights businesses were looted and burned to the ground. “Fiery but mostly peaceful protests” was how CNN captioned events as its correspondent reported from in front of the fires.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on Kyle Rittenhouse and the American Identity Crisis
27th November 2021
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Thought for the Day
27th November 2021
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The migrants who have fetched up on the Belarusian side of the border with Poland are finding conditions there far less salubrious than those that obtain in the Club Med facilities set up on the Italian island of Lampedusa. The Belarusian and Polish guards don’t treat their guests with the same tender solicitousness that the migrants experience at the hands of the Guardia di Finanza. And, more importantly, now that winter is coming on, the weather is far harsher in the Belarusian forests than it is in the balmy southern Mediterranean.
As a result, the culture-enrichers are complaining about their lot to reporters for the Western press.
Posted in Living with Islam. | Comments Off on “We’ll Wait Until Germany Takes Us In”
27th November 2021
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I’ve been leaving CovidLand every weekend now for about eight weeks. It started with my vacation in western New York, then continued as I started the “restoration” of the dining room (i.e., removing the old wallpaper and painting) in the family’s western Pennsylvania home. Mom has set the deadline as Thanksgiving, when we expect about a dozen or more family to come to dinner. A far cry from the 30 or more that was a regular feature of my childhood, but a vast improvement over last year’s six.
Funny thing about that. We never asked if we should limit it to six last year. It was before any vaccine, and the family is aging to the point it just seemed prudent not to expose a lot of the older members of the extended family to the risk. Another funny thing. This year mom was shooting for 20, and we didn’t ask anyone about that either. You see, we don’t live in CovidLand.
Somewhere outside the DC Metro area, maybe by Frederick, certainly by Hagerstown where I often stop, I’ve left CovidLand behind. The masks, aside from those working for some sort of corporate affiliate like Dunkin’ Donuts or Wendy’s, are gone. There may be a sign on the door, but nobody is wearing them anymore. And it doesn’t seem to freak anyone out. It’s a wonderful feeling and just serves to highlight how much I hate life in CovidLand.
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | Comments Off on CovidLand
26th November 2021
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on Today in Progressive Totalitarianism
26th November 2021
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on Pandemic Panic – It’s Titanic
26th November 2021
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | Comments Off on #BidenRemorse: The Biden-Harris Slow-Motion Train Wreck
26th November 2021
Posted in Whose turn is it to be the victim? | Comments Off on Today in Black Privilege
26th November 2021
Posted in The Hunt for Heretics and Sinners | Comments Off on Today in Witch-Hunt Culture
26th November 2021
Posted in Axis of Drivel -- Adventures in Narrative Media | Comments Off on Today in Global Warming Hysteria
26th November 2021
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It is the hardest known glass with the highest thermal conductivity among all glass materials.
Posted in News You Can Use. | Comments Off on New Ultrahard Diamond Glass Synthesized Using Carbon Buckyballs
26th November 2021
ZMan attempts to read the witch-hunt tea leaves.
Lost in the rush into the holiday season is the Charlottesville monkey trial concluded last week with a verdict for the plaintiffs. The jury had no verdict on some of the claims but agreed there was some sort of conspiracy by the defendants. They also decided that the plaintiffs suffered no harm as a result of it, but the defendants were doo-doo heads who deserved some sort of punishment. As a result, they awarded the plaintiffs eleventy billion bars of gold-pressed latinum in punitive damages.
The jury did not fall into Star Trek jargon, but they may as well have, given the structure of their decision. According to lawyers who followed the case, the punitive damages are symbolic due to rules governing the relationship between punitive and compensatory damages in civil cases. Typically, courts limit the ratio to a single digit. That is, punitive damage awards are capped at something less than ten times the compensatory damages, which in this case were one dollar.
This reality is of no consequence as the trial was always political activism on behalf of the ruling class. In a sane society this never would have been in a courtroom and the lawyers who brought it would be deported. Ours is a society in crisis, so ridiculous things like this are common now. The lawyers got their win and regime media was happy to promote it as a great blow against free speech. For a day, the blue-checks on Twitter were celebrating the win.
Posted in You can't make this stuff up. | Comments Off on Order and Chaos
26th November 2021
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The Friday after thanksgiving is called black Friday because that’s when retailers finally turn profitable for the year. Not so much for market, however, because this morning it’s red as far as the eye can see. The culprit: the same one we discussed late last night – the emergence of a new coronavirus strain detected in South Africa, known as B.1.1.529, which reportedly carries an “extremely high number” of mutations and is “clearly very different” from previous incarnations, which may drive further waves of disease by evading the body’s defenses according to South African scientists, and soon, Anthony Fauci.
British authorities think it is the most significant variant to date and have hurried to impose travel restrictions on southern Africa, as did Japan, the Czech Republic and Italy on Friday. The European Union also said it aimed to halt air travel from the region.
“Markets have been quite complacent about the pandemic for a while, partly because economies have been able to withstand the impact of selective lockdown measures. But we can see from the new emergency brakes on air travel that there will be ramifications for the price of oil,” said Chris Scicluna, head of economic research at Daiwa.
The problem isn’t the disease, but the panicked reactions by governments to the mere thought of the disease.
Posted in Whose turn is it to be the victim? | Comments Off on Black Friday Turns Red on “Terrible News” – Global Markets Crater on “Nu Variant” Panic
26th November 2021
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Thought for the Day
26th November 2021
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If you went up to any random group of people and mentioned that behind their seemingly normal elementary school was a tale of Prussian Kings, Rockefeller interests, and theories of social control, they would surely look at you as if you were crazy. Well shame on him for not knowing his history! The number of people who have gone through school and yet remain willfully ignorant of how and why they were ushered for years through the system is a glowing testament to the effects of school itself: School works to actively neuter curiosity, impair intellect, halt questioning of the status quo, and restrict deviance form approved norms. Despite what you are instructed to believe, schools harm kids, they do not help them. This is a bold claim, I know, and that is why I have littered the history and analysis below with primary source references and quotations from the men (and they were mostly men) behind our current system of public schooling – their own words are damning enough. For longer and fuller critiques on schooling and its history I would lead the reader to the works of John Gatto, Ivan Illich, Diane Ravitch, and others whom I have relied heavily upon in creating this post. This is certainly a longer-form piece, but I found the extension was necessary to even begin to approach a complete picture of the true behemoth system of schooling we have.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on Beyond Conspiracy Theory – The Sick History of Public Education
26th November 2021
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Reporter Dennis Wagner wrote: “Weaponizing of vehicles is a practice sometimes used by terrorists abroad. But the wanton attacks have also surged in the United States. The increase began after the police murder of George Floyd prompted Black Lives Matter demonstrations, which in turn prompted angry or fearful motorists to run over protesters.”
This framing makes it sound like protesters are “peaceful” and not “angry” and pose no threat. Wagner added “A Boston Globe survey identified at least 139 incidents in which vehicles ran into crowds of demonstrators since Floyd’s death in May 2020. Fewer than half resulted in criminal charges.”
Really? The original Globe story appeared on Halloween, by reporter Jess Bidgood, who sounds more like an opinion writer. She began with the usual sympathetic figure, a man who was paralyzed after falling off an interstate overpass while blocking drivers in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Bidgood was outraged no one was arrested, despite admitting that the red pickup involved felt threatened as “protesters banged on its hood and threw things at the vehicle as it moved in.”
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on The Politics of Weaponized Car Attacks
26th November 2021
CNN.
Yet another world crisis.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Canada Taps Into Strategic Reserves to Deal With Massive Shortage … of Maple Syrup
25th November 2021
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on Today in Progressive Totalitarianism
25th November 2021
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | Comments Off on #BidenRemorse: The Biden-Harris Slow-Motion Train Wreck
25th November 2021
Posted in Axis of Drivel -- Adventures in Narrative Media | Comments Off on Today in Global Warming Hysteria
25th November 2021
Posted in The Hunt for Heretics and Sinners | Comments Off on Today in Witch-Hunt Culture
25th November 2021
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | Comments Off on Pandemic Panic – It’s Titanic
25th November 2021
Posted in Whose turn is it to be the victim? | Comments Off on Today in Black Privilege
25th November 2021
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While the supply chain crisis left American store shelves bare, Biden went to a UN climate conference to save the world. Saving the world is a whole lot easier than stocking shelves. Ask any teenager.
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | Comments Off on Don’t Ask About Empty Shelves, Our Leaders Are Too Busy Saving the World
25th November 2021
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Imagine if former governor Andrew Cuomo had been as concerned with the safety of nursing home patients during the pandemic as he was with cranking out his crappy memoir. Perhaps more people would be seeing their grandparents this Thanksgiving.
Alas, the Luv Guv had his eyes on a $5.1 million prize and therefore he had to quit, or at least check out of, his day job.
He couldn’t possibly be as bad as I thought he was.
Posted in Democrats: Party of Fear--Party of Hate--Party of Death | Comments Off on Andrew Cuomo Is as Bad as You Thought He Was
25th November 2021
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Jim Puckett put all his eggs in one basket when he started building what he hopes will be the tallest topiary in the world. But his dream tourist attraction cost him his job as mayor — and now the steel framework of a giant chicken looms over the town of Fitzgerald, Ga.
Posted in Is this a great country, or what? | Comments Off on Georgia Politician Stands by Giant Topiary Chicken That Got Him Ousted as Mayor
25th November 2021
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Just in case you were wondering. I know I was.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Why Do Frozen Turkeys Explode When Deep-Fried?
25th November 2021
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At a time when President Biden and congressional Democrats are pushing to expand the breadth of entitlements to include free preschool and subsidized child care, little attention is given to the fact that the country’s biggest existing entitlement program—Social Security—is a financial wreck.
The program’s payouts have exceeded revenue since 2010, but the recent past is nowhere near as grim as the future. According to the latest annual report by Social Security’s trustees, the gap between promised benefits and future payroll tax revenue has reached a staggering $59.8 trillion. That gap is $6.8 trillion larger than it was just one year earlier. The biggest driver of that move wasn’t Covid-19, but rather a lowering of expected fertility over the coming decades.
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | Comments Off on Social Security Steams Closer to Crisis
25th November 2021
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Days after GoFundMe tried to justify its Rittenhouse ban, the platform is under fire for allowing–and then deleting–a fundraiser for the suspect in the parade massacre.
GoFundMe tried to justify its Rittenhouse ban after his acquittal, claiming it did not allow fundraisers for defendants accused of “violent” crimes.
“GoFundMe’s Terms of Service prohibit raising money for the legal defense of an alleged violent crime,” the platform tweeted. “In light of the Kyle Rittenhouse trial, we want to clarify when and why we have removed certain fundraisers in the past.”
It seems to me that someone who has not yet been convicted of a crime deserves the benefit of the doubt.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on GoFundMe Deletes Bail Fundraiser for Suspect in Parade Massacre
25th November 2021
The Other McCain faces a conundrum.
The basic problem with David Brooks is that he hasn’t been punched in the face as often as he deserves to be punched in the face.
Which is to say, repeatedly, on a daily basis.
On two occasions, I happened to be at conferences where David Brooks was a speaker, and in both instances, I walked out of the room, overcome by rage, struggling to resist an urge to rush the stage, grab hold of that swine and pummel him until the cops hauled me off to jail.
Don’t hold it in, Stacy, tell us how you really feel.
Posted in Axis of Drivel -- Adventures in Narrative Media | Comments Off on David Brooks Fisking Day Returns?
25th November 2021
Being retired means never having to suppress your Inner Wally.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Thought for the Day
25th November 2021
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Twice a year, Center of the American Experiment presents its Golden Turkey Award to highlight wasteful government spending in the State of Minnesota. Each contest features four nominees, and thousands of Minnesotans vote to select the winner. This time around, the nominees included a $261,000 grant to the University of Minnesota to teach eagles not to fly into wind turbines; $6.2 million to study development of a half-mile long “land bridge” over the major highway between Minneapolis and St. Paul, the purpose being to remedy “road racism” that occurred 60 years ago when the highway bisected a black neighborhood along with various other neighborhoods; and $2.5 million from the City of Minneapolis to pay “Violence Interrupters” to patrol the streets in brightly colored t-shirts, in lieu of police officers.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on And the Golden Turkey Award Goes To…
24th November 2021
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on Today in Witch-Hunt Culture