Friday Ephemera
Local toughs. (h/t, Ben) || Lucas has been captured. || The London time machine. || The mothership wasn’t the first thing to land there. || “How big would the Solar System be if Earth were the size of a basketball?” || “His basketball game got better.” || Why dogs don’t rule the… Oh bugger. || Bond versus Bond in… Die Spy Kill Kill. || Acoustic tractor beam. || Hot steel malfunction. || It tells you quite a lot about who they are. || Lighthouse interior. || Best not to, really. || “Not a sweet smile.” || If she didn’t have double standards, she’d have no standards at all. || Gastro Obscura. || That star over there is much, much bigger than ours. || Owl buddies. || Bathroom scenes. (h/t, dicentra) || Birds in fog. || And finally, via Elephants Gerald, “I felt like my hands were just too big for this task.”
As amusing as that is, I don’t see it ending well for the Girl Scouts. At some point, someone is going to impose even more draconian rules on them. According to the comments on that Twitter feed it’s already a rule that they can’t set up right outside any business that the girls cannot legally enter (liquor stores, generally).
As amusing as that is, I don’t see it ending well for the Girl Scouts.
Mebbe. Or not.
Does anyone else wonder how much expensive court time is wasted on these frivolous prayer and Christmas lawsuits? Here’s an example:
https://www.cnn.com/2018/01/23/us/louisiana-school-prayer-lawsuit/index.html
Many years ago the mayor of Whitehall, Ohio, a suburb of the state capitol, Columbus, was threatened with a Christmas-display lawsuit from American Atheists, HQ’d in Texas (of all places). He replied that when he got a complaint from a Whitehall taxpayer, he’d look into it. Never heard from them again.
Envy scale dialed to eleven.
It’s hard enough trying to make teenagers understand that what they know now, or think they know, as teenagers, will be vastly outweighed and perhaps radically revised by what they come to learn over the next twenty, thirty years or more of actual living.
http://www.gkc.org.uk/gkc/books/GKC_Come_to_Think.html#c3
Envy scale dialed to eleven.
A grossly dishonest characterization of Peterson’s book.
A few decades ago, I started to notice that much of what I read in the mainstream news media was dishonest: It lied by omission, failing to report things that were inconvenient to the leftist program. It lied by commission, misrepresenting things that challenged leftist dogma.
A grossly dishonest characterization of Peterson’s book.
It’s not about Truth; it’s about Power and Peterson is a threat to that. Given that many are too lazy to a) go to a primary sources themselves and b) see to have their own social standing validated, the MSM can misrepresent Peterson all it wants without worry. I rather doubt that Peterson will ever be invited on to a platform like Channel 4 again for precisely this reason.
It’s not about Truth; it’s about Power
Which is why I have no problem with treating leftists as malevolent enemies rather than fellow citizens. One cannot coexist with the Left. One might as well ask a frog to give taxi rides to scorpions.
Given that many are too lazy to a) go to a primary sources themselves…
It’s not just laziness: Normal people are very busy just carrying out the mundane necessities of life. Tracking down primary sources and dissenting opinions is difficult (and before the internet is was far more so). What’s more, if one was raised to believe that the news media could be trusted to not lie then it is very easy to assume that there are no serious voices that one is not hearing. And finally, it is impossible to find the time to locate the other side of every issue that the liberal news media lie about–it’s hard enough to keep up with the news in a single narrow field.
I’m new to Peterson’s stuff—what’s the left got against him? So far all I’ve seen him say is what your mom always said.
“MSM can misrepresent”
And they have a great platform for gaslighting dissenters.
Oh dear. In the This just erupted category, there can be difficulties when communications go too well.
Envy scale dialed to eleven.
Yes. This is where and how they frequently “win”. Very few people whom I actually know in meat space…like one…have ever, ever, ever heard of Jordan Peterson. I have only become aware of him as he has popped up here in the last few months. Most normal people, those with lives, children to raise, technical or otherwise real-world jobs (plumbing, electrician, construction, etc.) to consume themselves with, will ever hear of JP and if they do, it will be second or third hand bastardized via the MSM versions of what he has had to say. This version is what they will likely hear, if they hear any such thing. Perhaps there is a chance, this time, of a JP breaking through. Perhaps. But that is the real world in which we live. The one separated so much from reality. Anyone follow what I said there? Bueller?
Heh…posted that before reading the other replies. Buellers indeed.
Envy scale dialed to eleven.
Just throwing this out there to point out that Rob Reiner, unlike his dad, is an ignorant and talentless hack, but it was common, especially for Fender, for amps to go to 12. Fender “reissue” amps still go to 12.
That is all, carry on.
I saw Ghost in the Shell in the theater. It was a disappointment. More box checking than generating any emotional connection. Visually it was great but the characters were robotic. Sometimes I wonder if it’s me.
I had rewatched the Tricolor movies before seeing it and Juliette Binoche has aged. Not that she’s aged badly, far from it, but having it fresh in my mind it was shocking. I forget, she cried in Ghost didn’t she? I expect her to cry in every movie.
I also saw Atomic Blonde. Similar lack of emotional connection. Also, Charlize Theron has anti-charisma so I found myself rooting for the East German goons.
The presence of barbed wire and signs telling you to stay out are insufficient hints? Outside of Alaska, CONUS does not have places that are so remote nobody in their right minds would attempt to visit them and thus able to hide military installations.
Only a “conservative” from Berkley would consider that as news or anything serious.
Only a “conservative” from Berkley would consider that as news or anything serious.
Well, as we agree, yes I am conservative, quite definitively so, and, by the way, it’s Berkeley, not “Berkley”.
Now as far as the collection of stories that started in the Google World news and have now even migrated to the Google US news, apparently you have never been in the military, have never been near anyone in the military, have no knowledge of anything related to anything of the military.
Oh, and you also didn’t look at any of the stories because they’re not discussing the continental US . . .
The very simple summation is that when one is off at some base off thataway, with aggressively unfriendly people nearby or even simply all around, when in such situations, letting random people know your patterns and times of motion is a really, really, really bad idea.
Envy scale dialed to eleven.
I read some of that guy’s other summaries to see the bias and he’s equal opportunity and tries to skewer everything.
I still think Peterson is about to be scuttled by his true believers. I’m like pogonip, never heard of him until the C4 interview debacle. I agree he basically sounds like your mum talking. The fact he is being painted as so radical and dangerous is preposterous.
I agree he basically sounds like your mum talking. The fact he is being painted as so radical and dangerous is preposterous.
I suspect that’s a large part of why Dr Peterson has risen to prominence. From what I’ve seen and heard, his views are largely unobjectionable and carefully expressed, often with a reminder to be cautious about how much one can claim or assert. That this is taken as scandalously provocative, whether by leftwing educators, student activists or Channel 4 presenters, tells us more about them and their assumptions than it does about him. To borrow NeoNeoCon’s phrase, Peterson is serving as a kind of plaque discloser. He reveals his surroundings, and often quite vividly.
…apparently you have never been in the military, have never been near anyone in the military, have no knowledge of anything related to anything of the military.
From you, that is rich indeed. Having been, on way more than one occasion, to 20 miles south of the middle of nowhere, the locals know nigh exactly what we were doing by word of mouth or, the minute we rolled out, by someone on a phone.
The guy with a goat overlooking a COP will know more than some clown trying to hack a fitbit to see if SPC Baggadonuts is doing PT by walking the 100 yard/side perimeter of COP Nowhere. The guy with a goat will find the mysterious “secret” airbase that all the MC-130s and C-17s keep flying into and parking apparently unnoticed way before SSgt Lunchbox’s fitbit gets hacked.
. . . trying to hack a fitbit . . . fitbit gets hacked.
Uh, huh, where, as you’re noting, getting the local intelligence is rather useful when serving military do that, and would help you in this case if you were actually doing the same.
There isn’t even any hacking going on.
Read the articles and find out.
I read the articles, and the assumptions it makes are absurd, among them being that there are any secrets about where servicemembers do PT on major bases such as Kandahar or Bagram, or that a Patriot site in Yemen was any secret to anyone in Yemen, or that patrols aren’t monitored by locals in the flesh, in real time.
Of course no random Syrians or ISIS actually on the ground noted that. Now stop and think for a minute, which is easier for the villains, to observe what is happening, or try and dope it out from a computer they may or may not actually have access to since, it may surprise you to know, 20 miles south of the back of beyond there is not always a lot of what you call “connectivity”.
Now stop and think for a minute, . . .
The local units are indeed going to have the local information. Now, with the additional long range information being openly handed out, who is it who can reinforce and specifically add support to those local forces? Or, even create a specialized plan to pop in to some site from long distance, regardless of who is nearby, do an op, and then pop back out again?
Hal, you are comparing apples to used tires, and haven’t been paying attention to whom we have been fighting of late. If we ever fight someone sophisticated enough to plan, and with sophisticated enough logistics to reinforce, they’ll likely have sophisticated enough HUMINT, SIGINT, and ELINT to render any static from fitness devices moot.
In the meantime, I’ll make the wild leap that an ODA operating in back of beyond knows better how to manage their fitbits than some random “conservative” in Berkeley.
Does anyone else wonder how much expensive court time is wasted on these frivolous prayer and Christmas lawsuits?
They’re not frivolous. They’re just one front in a war on our culture.
Farnsworth Grumpy Scale for today: 6.4 out of 10. As long as no one mentions b-a-b-i-e-s, we should be OK. 😉
If Peterson is controversial or problematic (!Lovecraft! Racist!) so is Grandma. Yours, mine, anybody’s.
“If you think I sound bitter, you’re right. On the other hand even though I’m a long way down the totem pole of the cishet partriarchy life could be a lot worse.”
I’m not particularly bitter, just angry at all these privileged intellectual-yet-idiots endlessly harping on about my imagined “privilege”. But I hear you, man. For what it’s worth, it sounds like you’ve done rather better than I did.
AK, over the last couple of years I’ve really begun to like Chesterton.
It’s rare – probably impossible – to find someone you agree with on everything (it would all depend on how those big businesses were “broken up”, for example), but I always come away from his writing feeling that I could have had an interesting discussion with the man, from which we’d both probably learn something, without it descending into yelling and name-calling.
Rob Reiner, unlike his dad, is an ignorant and talentless hack
The Meathead is still a Meathead, but he did co-produce and direct The Princess Bride. I’m not sure a talentless hack could pull that off.
But I hear you, man. For what it’s worth, it sounds like you’ve done rather better than I did.
Well, hang in there is all I can say. I had two related pieces of luck in my mid/late twenties that turned things around. Before both of them kicked in I was drinking myself to sleep every night. Now I take a pill to get to sleep every night, and a different one during the day to keep my brain on the straight and narrow.
It occurred to me last night that Peterson has another problem – his crowd funding. I read somewhere that he stopped reporting how much came in each month after it hit about $60k. Assuming it went up rather than down he’ll get close enough to $1m for 12 months.
That’s a lot of money and he will have to dance for those people and earn that money in their eyes. If he gives them what they want it’s fodder for the lunar right. If he doesn’t they might turn on him for not doing what they paid for (which might not be what he wants to give) and he’ll be getting it from both sides.
In either case I don’t think taking that money was a good idea. And with the new books sales he doesn’t need it after all. If he could have held on for 12 months his life would have been a lot easier. Although perhaps the money allowed him to raise his profile to make the book sales what they are.
In the meantime, I’ll make the wild leap that an ODA operating in back of beyond knows better how to manage their fitbits than some random “conservative” in Berkeley.
Uh huh. Yeahright.
As the conservative quite conservatively notes, again, if they had been “managing” their usage to match their environment, there would be no story. Since they did leave everything wide open and broadcasting, assorted reviews are now in progress.
—Of course, yes, I’m able to cite that for, generally, the third time, because I did actually read it the first time, but that’s me.
So, I thought I’d give an idea of how boring Ghost in the Shell was. In it Scarlett Johansson kisses a girl. David, perhaps, found himself disinterested but I, in contrast, have a significant, lifelong interest in female beauty and the female form and I would normally leap to defend their artistic decisions and come up with a justification (or at least a rationalization) as to why it was essential to the story but it was boring. It shouldn’t have been but it was. Sitting in the theater thinking “Oh, it’s not over yet” is a bad sign.