13th March 2023
Posted in The Hunt for Heretics and Sinners | Comments Off on Today in Witch-Hunt Culture
13th March 2023
Posted in Axis of Drivel -- Adventures in Narrative Media | Comments Off on Today in Global Warming Hysteria
13th March 2023
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | Comments Off on Today in War
13th March 2023
Posted in The Hunt for Heretics and Sinners | Comments Off on Today in Trump Derangement Syndrome
13th March 2023
Posted in Whose turn is it to be the victim? | Comments Off on Today in BIPOC Privilege
13th March 2023
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on Today in Progressive Totalitarianism
13th March 2023
Read it.
I didn’t know that zebras could do that.
Let that be a lesson to us all.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on Zebra Bites Ohio Man’s Arm Off Before Being Put Down
13th March 2023
Why We Can’t Ever Have Nice Things.
- Costs ballooned.
- NIMBY’s objected.
- Hey, New York–’nuff said.
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | Comments Off on Plans to Build AirTrain to La Guardia Are Officially Scrapped
13th March 2023
Steven Hayward at Power Line speaks for all right-thinking people.
So I woke up this morning, looked at my watch, and thought—”Hey, slept in rather late this morning!” But then the fog lifted and I remembered: those commie rat bastards robbed me of an hour! Yes—Daylight Saving Time was a Progressive-era invention, giving Progressives a literal time to move the clock forward! (Yes, we literally get to “turn the clock back” in the fall, but I wish we didn’t do it all all.)
Can’t add anything to that.
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | Comments Off on I Hate DST
13th March 2023
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Sunday, as I was preparing to write about the Silicon Valley Bank situation, I sent an email to Professor Lawrence H. White of George Mason University, who really knows this stuff. I invited him to respond to some of the points made by Bill Ackman, who was arguing for a government rescue of depositors.
White very generously sent along some slides he uses in his undergraduate course on money and banking; they are embedded below. White also responded to Ackman’s argument that understanding a bank’s riskiness or safety was too much to ask of depositors. “Nobody is asking households with insured deposits to shop around for a safe bank,” White wrote. “With deposits insured up to $250,000, the current system is only asking people with uninsured deposits, like corporations with payrolls to meet, to hire a professional money manager who can evaluate the safety of banks versus other places to park large sums of cash. That doesn’t seem unrealistic.”
Write went on: “Silicon Valley Bank took excessive risk by carrying a huge duration gap, and didn’t hedge that risk, leading to its insolvency when interest rates rose. The current system relies on uninsured depositors shopping around for a safe bank to incentivize bank prudence (regulators being often unaware of how close a bank is to insolvency were assets marked to market) by making risky banks pay a premium for uninsured deposits. If the government lets uninsured depositors off the hook this time, moral hazard intensifies yet again. Not closing insolvent banks promptly is what made it so costly to eventually resolve the S&L crisis in the 1980s.”
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Lawrence White on Silicon Valley Bank
13th March 2023
Blue States every one.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Thought for the Day
13th March 2023
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When it comes to assigning dates to military campaigns described in the Bible, the parameters of the debate take on almost biblical proportions. Exactly when did the Amalekites wage war against the Hebrews in the wilderness? Did Joshua fight the Battle of Jericho in 1500 B.C. or in 1400 B.C. — or at all?
Such uncertainty exists, in part, because the radiocarbon analysis that scientists use to date organic remains is less accurate for certain epochs. And, in part, because archaeologists often disagree over what the timelines for different narratives should be. But a new technique, which makes use of consistently reliable geomagnetic data, allows scientists to study the history of the Levant with greater confidence.
Posted in News You Can Use. | Comments Off on Archaeologists Devise a Better Clock for Biblical Times
13th March 2023
The Other McCain jerks back the curtain.
The money has to come from somewhere, and the only source for money that the government has is taxpayers. They can blabber all they want about ‘no cost to taxpayers’ but that’s an obvious lie.
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | 3 Comments »
13th March 2023
Jean-Louis Gassê.
Just as there are no atheists in foxholes, there are no libertarians in a bank run. We now see appeals for more government intervention using taxpayers funds.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on No Atheists In Foxholes. Or Libertarians In Bank Runs.
13th March 2023
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At the bottom of the copyright page of the latest editions of Roald Dahl’s books, a new notice now appears. “Words matter … The wonderful words of Roald Dahl can transport you to different worlds and introduce you to the most marvellous characters.”
On the surface, it seems whimsical and innocuous. However, it signals a recent effort carried out by his publisher, Puffin, to rewrite his classic texts to make them less “offensive.” Words like “fat” and “ugly” have been culled, whole phrases rewritten, and, of course, gender-neutral terms have been added in places.
While highly reported on in the media, this rewriting of classic literature is just the most recent manifestation of a central facet of the new dangerous trend to label language as a form of violence, under the guise of the very mantra that introduced the new bastardization of Dahl’s work: Words Matter.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Words Don’t Matter
13th March 2023
Those who like reading the Dilbert comic strip, be advised that, as of today, it is available on on the Locals channel “Coffee With Scott Adams”. (Locals.com) Highly recommended.
Posted in Is this a great country, or what? | Comments Off on Dilbert News
13th March 2023
New York Post.
A woman who walked out on her date after he refused to pay $3.00 for a slice of cheese on his burger is copping criticism for the “insane” reason why she abandoned him in a restaurant.
New York woman Dafna was on a date having dinner with a man she’d met on dating app Hinge and things were going well – until he said no to having cheese on his burger after the waitress told him it came at an additional cost.
His refusal to part ways with an extra few dollars proved too much for Dafna who, after eating, said she was going to use the bathroom but actually went and paid the bill.
She then left the restaurant without saying goodbye, opting to instead send him a message that read: “The check is taken care of. You should have gotten the cheese.”
While walking home, Dafna took to TikTok to rant about the encounter, explaining the entire bill was just $55.00.
I wouldn’t pay $3.00 for a slice of cheese either, even in New York. Most women of my acquaintance would appreciate a guy so careful with his money (note that it was his burger, not hers.) This guy just dodged a major bullet.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on NY Woman’s Extreme Response To Date’s Burger Concern Backfires Massively
12th March 2023
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on Today in Progressive Totalitarianism
12th March 2023
Posted in Axis of Drivel -- Adventures in Narrative Media | Comments Off on Today in Global Warming Hysteria
12th March 2023
Posted in The Hunt for Heretics and Sinners | Comments Off on Today in Witch-Hunt Culture
12th March 2023
Posted in Axis of Drivel -- Adventures in Narrative Media | Comments Off on Pandemic Panic – It’s Titanic
12th March 2023
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | Comments Off on Today in the Biden-Harris Slow-Motion Train Wreck
12th March 2023
He was with Emmett Till the night he was murdered. The horror haunts him still (NPR) The Jews will forget the Holocaust before proglodytes forget Emmett Till.
Posted in Whose turn is it to be the victim? | Comments Off on Today in BIPOC Privilege
12th March 2023
Posted in The Hunt for Heretics and Sinners | Comments Off on Today in Trump Derangement Syndrome
12th March 2023
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Over the past two centuries, legislation, random chance, and a variety of land deals have left the American West with a patchwork landscape of public and private land. Within the patchwork lie swaths of alternating sections of public and private land, like the squares of a checkerboard. At every point where four squares meet, there is a property corner ripe for controversy. With the issue of corner-crossing in the news again, we decided to leverage our strengths and drill down on the data. What we discovered was shocking in its scope.
Posted in The Hunt for Heretics and Sinners | 1 Comment »
12th March 2023
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Suspected Islamist militants killed at least 19 people and burned a medical facility in a raid on a village in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo early on Sunday morning, two regional officials and a resident said.
Wherever you go,
Whatever you do,
A Muslim waits there
To try to kill you.
Posted in Living with Islam: The world's most intolerant—and intolerable—religion | Comments Off on Suspected Islamist Militants Kill 19 in Congo
12th March 2023
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At a restaurant in Miami last month, dining beside my husband, I examined the women around me for what people refer to as Instagram Face. The chiseled nose, the overfilled lips, the cheeks scooped of buccal fat, eyes and brows thread-lifted high as the frescoed ceiling. Many of the women had it, and thus resembled each other. But not all of them. Not, for example, me.
Critics call this trend just another sign of our long march toward a doomed, globalized sameness. A uniform suite of cosmetic procedures, popularized by social media, apps and filters, accelerated by both natural insecurity and injectables’ dropping costs. One by one, they hint, women will give in and undergo them. Until we all look identical, just like our restaurants do, and our hotels, and our airports, in our creep toward homogenization which we’ve somehow mistaken for a worthwhile life.
They’re wrong, because in their focus on uniformity, they’ve forgotten the premise of cosmetic work in the first place. Distinction. Good face, like good taste, has a direction: downward. The success of Instagram Face, its ubiquity, isn’t the start of cyborg aesthetics. It’s the end of it. Because what might save us from such apocalyptic beauty is something almost too ugly to say out loud: When in history have rich women ever wanted to look like regular ones?
…
Instagram Face goes with implants, middle-aged dates and nails too long to pick up the check. Batting false eyelashes, there in the restaurant it orders for dinner all the food groups of nouveau riche Dubai: caviar, truffle, fillers, foie gras, Botox, bottle service, bodycon silhouettes. The look, in that restaurant and everywhere, has reached a definite status. It’s the girlfriend, not the wife.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on The Class Politics of Instagram Face
12th March 2023
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It’s expensive to be poor. When you don’t have money, you’re often forced to make decisions that seem necessary in the short term. Those decisions often add to your long-term burden, adding to the high cost of being poor. That can lead to a cycle of poverty that’s difficult to break.
Nobody wants to be poor. Nobody wants to live with expenses that exceed income or to struggle to make it from paycheck to paycheck. The reality of being poor is that it imposes conditions that perpetuate poverty.
Conceding that this is true, so what? The Poor in America have access to sufficient public assistance that they can lead quite comfortable lives–if they want to. A large part of the ‘costs’ of being poor reflect sub-optimal personal choices, such as wasting money on recreational drugs like tobacco, alcohol, and controlled substances. Poor people tend to have character defects such as short time horizons and poor impulse control, which is why just giving them Free Stuff doesn’t ever solve the problem, as witness the Homeless Crisis that exists in its worst forms in precisely the places that bend every effort to alleviate their distress. No homeless person ever turned down a smoke, or a drink, or a hit: There’s the difficulty in a nutshell.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | 1 Comment »
12th March 2023
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Hunting and habitat loss drove many large mammals in Europe close to extinction. New data shows us that many of the continent’s mammal populations are flourishing again.
As John Hodgman famously said, “I am a friend to all the creatures of the earth, when I am not eating them or wearing them.”
Posted in News You Can Use. | Comments Off on Wild Mammals Are Making a Comeback in Europe Thanks to Conservation Efforts
12th March 2023
Ross Douthat.
I am fully prepared to believe that Establishment Pet Ross Douthat is part of the problem. Unfortunately, he shows no signs of repentance, much less any intention of being part of any solution.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on I’m What’s Wrong With the Humanities
12th March 2023
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ast week came some stern words for millennial women: egg-freezing may not be all it’s (excuse the pun) cracked up to be. That was the advice of Professor Imogen Goold, who warned at the annual conference of the fertility charity Progress Educational Trust, that clinics may be “preying on women being anxious about having children by getting them to throw money at the problem”. The chances of using eggs to have a baby, said the professor, were as low as three per cent for eggs frozen when women were aged 36 to 39.
Sometimes the old ways are best.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Cold Comfort
12th March 2023
Washington Post.
On a recent weekday afternoon, Bruce Albright arrives in the Wonder Book parking lot, pops the trunk of his Camry and unloads two boxes of well-worn books. “It’s sad. Some of these I’ve read numerous times,” he says.
Albright, 70, has been at this for six months, shedding 750 books at his local library and at this Frederick, Md., store. The rub: More than 1,700 volumes remain shelved in the retired government lawyer’s nearby home, his collection lovingly amassed over a half-century.
Piker. My wife and I have over 4,000 books, down from the 6,000 we had when we got married and consolidated our collections. “We can’t ever get divorced,” she said, “It would be impossible to sort out whose books are whose.”
This, of course, doesn’t include the thousands of books we have on Kindle, nor the thousands of books I have scanned into PDFs over the course of the last twenty years.
If we have books we no longer “need”, we donate them to our local public library. They have periodic sales of such donated books; the library gets additional funding, and the books are priced low enough that people who don’t have the money to spring for a Kindle or tablet get something they can afford to read (and perhaps treasure).
What goes around comes around.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on We’re Drowning in Old Books. But Getting Rid of Them Is Heartbreaking.
12th March 2023
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I like fusion, really. I’ve talked to some of luminaries that work in the field, they’re great people. I love the technology and the physics behind it.
But fusion as a power source is never going to happen. Not because it can’t, because it won’t. Because no matter how hard you try, it’s always going to cost more than the solutions we already have.
I suspect this mirrors similar arguments concerning railroads, steel ships, and various other technological tricks that were uneconomical when first developed but ultimately became so once associated technologies became sufficiently advanced. I expect that eventually we will have fusion power, although I don’t expect it any time soon–but I’d be very much surprised if it weren’t available a hundred years from now.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Why Fusion Will Never Happen
12th March 2023
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Israeli forces shot and killed three Palestinian militants Sunday who opened fire on troops in the occupied West Bank, the military said, the latest bloodshed in a year-long wave of violence in the region.
Wherever you go,
Whatever you do,
A Muslim waits there
To try to kill you.
Posted in Living with Islam: The world's most intolerant—and intolerable—religion | Comments Off on Israeli Forces Kill 3 Palestinian Militants in West Bank
12th March 2023
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A teacher testified before the Arizona state Senate education committee earlier this month and claimed that she and her colleagues knew better than parents what books belonged on school library shelves. “I have a master’s degree,” she said. “What do the parents have?” In the video, now widely circulated on Twitter, she continued, “The purpose of public education is not to teach only what parents want [students] to be taught. It is to teach them what society needs them to be taught.”
Back when I was a kid and teachers reflected the values of the parents, that might have been true. Since the education industry has been taken over by radical progressive unions and various species of Wokerati, it is manifestly untrue.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on Leave Them Kids Alone
12th March 2023
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If you ask OpenAI’s artificial-intelligence chatbot ChatGPT to generate a Steve Sailer tweet, it will respond, “I’m sorry, I cannot generate a Steve Sailer tweet, as his tweets often contain controversial and divisive content, which goes against OpenAI’s values of promoting kindness and respect.” Major publications are afraid to cite him. Journalists I know are afraid to be seen interacting with him on Twitter. A Florida professor was disciplined by his university for linking to a Steve Sailer article on his personal Twitter account.
Steve, along with John Derbyshire, Stacy McCain, and Baron Bodissey at Gates of Vienna, tell it like it is, rather than the way the Narrative would like it to be. (I think I now need to include Scott Adams among The Saints….)
Posted in The Hunt for Heretics and Sinners | Comments Off on Behind Steve Sailer’s Rise
12th March 2023
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Thought for the Day
12th March 2023
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A blast hit a cultural center during an event for journalists in northern Afghanistan on Saturday, killing at least one person and wounding eight, according to authorities and journalists.
Wherever you go,
Whatever you do,
A Muslim waits there
To try to kill you.
Posted in Living with Islam: The world's most intolerant—and intolerable—religion | Comments Off on Afghan Media Event Blast Kills at Least 1
11th March 2023
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The start of daylight saving time is upon us again, meaning almost all Americans – Hawaii and parts of Arizona don’t observe DST – are setting their clocks ahead one hour. Some, however, are calling for the bi-annual changing of the clocks to come to an end.
But could we really “lock the clocks” soon?
Lawmakers – both at the state and federal levels – are hoping that’s the case.
Don’t hold your breath.
Posted in Think about it. | 1 Comment »
11th March 2023
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Thought for the Day
11th March 2023
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With great interest for sailing, boatbuilding and vikings the project to build and sail the greatest viking ship of modern times started. The curator of the project, Sigurd Aase, wanted this extraordinary ship to follow in the wake of one of the most challenging viking explorations – the Viking discovery of the New World.
It always warms my heart to hear of things like this, apparently of no practical utility, being done just because people find it interesting.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on The World’s Largest Viking Ship Sailing in Modern Times
11th March 2023
Wired.
“Globally, the debate is fixed—there are more countries not changing the clocks,” says Ariadna Güell Sans, co-coordinator of the Barcelona Time Use Initiative for a Healthy Society, an organization focused on time-related policy. Research has shown how moving the clocks forward and back, even by just one hour, negatively affects the economy, road safety, and health. Still, the US, Europe, and a few other nations are finding it hard to break the habit. The issue, says Güell Sans, is whether we stay on standard time or daylight saving time forever.
One of the plainest of indicators that our political systems are dysfunctional is the fact that it is apparently impossible to change a situation that evidently everybody agrees needs to be changed.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on The Daylight Saving Time Mess Just Won’t Go Away
11th March 2023
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Mean scores on IQ tests rose generally in the U.S. beginning in the 1930s, apparently reflecting better nutrition and improved schooling. But that trend has now been reversed.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on Are Americans Getting Dumber?
11th March 2023
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I don’t even have to say anything.
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | Comments Off on WATCH: Joe Biden’s Senior Moment of the Week (Vol. 33)
11th March 2023
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Colin Kaepernick:
An actual black man:
Posted in Whose turn is it to be the victim? | Comments Off on Colin Kaepernick Says White Adoptive Parents Not Always Supportive
11th March 2023
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What happened: Max Boot, the Washington Post columnist who wears a fedora to conceal his agonizingly hairless dome, formally renounced his neoconservative affiliation on Friday.
And there was much rejoicing.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Good Riddance to Lib Rubbish: Max Boot Finally Defects from Neoconservatism
10th March 2023
Posted in The Hunt for Heretics and Sinners | Comments Off on Today in Witch-Hunt Culture
10th March 2023
Posted in The Hunt for Heretics and Sinners | Comments Off on Today in Trump Derangement Syndrome
10th March 2023
Posted in Axis of Drivel -- Adventures in Narrative Media | Comments Off on Today in Global Warming Hysteria
