Friday Ephemera

River bottom findings:
Hem, hem:
https://thompsonblog.co.uk/2018/06/friday-ephemerarent.html?cid=6a00d83451675669e2022ad39cef9b200b#comment-6a00d83451675669e2022ad39cef9b200b

’And finally, his patience tested, Zeus shoots back.’
Can’t stop laughing!

Will ‘she’/‘zie’/‘zey’ be in charge of who can have what?
The people making these noises generally seem to imagine that they’d be the ones wearing The Bejewelled Marxist Sorting Hat – merrily deciding whose wants are permissible and – the fun bit – who should be denied. Quite how one would construct a morally superior system in which the self-imagined righteous oversaw the rest of us in such detail and made sure that we couldn’t just buy things we deem important with our own earnings, is unclear. Just as it’s unclear how such a nightmarishly overbearing system would avoid the usual results, like economic catastrophe and people eating rats.
Though frankly, I see no evidence that Avery, our smasher of capitalism and remaker of worlds, has thought that far ahead.
Such is woke piety.

Capitalism is primarily that each person is an economic unit, as opposed to organisation via workplaces or other collective groupings. It leads to each person being respected as an individual. Which means it is tolerant of deviance — historically of religion, now of pretty much everything.
That a Trans person should oppose the very system that allows xim to be openly different is one of life’s little mysteries.
At least if we do go corporatist it will be end of such whining.

If anyone has trouble with comments not appearing, email me and I’ll give the spam filter a good probing.

[ Sounds of giant cannon launching underling into the Sun. ]

“Pizarro and others have found that disgust induced by a foul smell can affect how judgmental people are of minority groups, how conservative they are”
Nothing is safe from research into why some people are conservative, not even a prank doo-doo smell.

Feminism: the haunting fear that some white guy, somewhere, somehow, is having a good time and not feeling particularly guilty about anything.

“Queen of nuance”
Correction. That’s “Comedian. Queen of nuance.” – where it seems the latter is very much a defensive fall-back position for the former.
See, if you don’t laugh at this , it’s your sense of humour that’s at fault. She can’t be held responsible for your lack of refinement.
Pass us one of them pickled eggs, will you?

Re: Liquid Ass
There’s a serious point about that. Which is that this evil free market stuff means that a couple of guys can muck about and create a smell for a joke, and enough weirdos want to buy it. And then it turns out it has a practical use in medicine. And then an experimental use in science.
This simply does not happen under the various totalitarian/socialist regimes.
For a start, no humour. Maoist China wouldn’t produce this. Nor the Taliban. And if you don’t have that foolishness and free play, you stifle creativity. A commissar would say that you are wasting resources with such olfactory frivolity, religious nuts would say you are disrespecting Allah. Even if a ‘genuine’ need for such a smell was recognised there would be badly organised bureaucratic projects to produce it, at daft expense, resulting in overproduction and something a bit like the smell they were after. And it would take five years.
It’s a general point about the failure of central planning. Nobody knew how useful this would be until it was produced. And it was only produced by a couple of guys for a laugh.

“Why did the rescuers have to be white people?”
The esteemed Elfwick once again channeled The Amazing Criswell…

Godfrey Elfwick
@RealElfwick Jul 8
2 British white males at the head of this rescue mission. Their privilege is staggering. Ability counts for shit when there’s zero diversity. I demand they be replaced with 2 differently-abled transgender people of mixed race to offer those children a more empowering experience.

For a start, no humour. Maoist China wouldn’t produce this. Nor the Taliban.
Khomenei proclaimed “no humor in Islam”.

so small you need binoculars to see what the hell it really is from two blocks away.
For £20,000, I was expecting a second sun.

*raises hand*

The stench so realistically mimics the human colon, it’s the perfect training tool to teach medical responders how to maintain focus and professional demeanor in the midst of a truly overwhelming smell.
#1 attended a top nursing school for her RN and they used state-of-the-art training mannequins (along with clinicals). I should ask if they used LA. Though she had been a paramedic before going for her RN so I believe her own professional demeanor from exposure to the gross had already been obtains (whoa, the stories!)

I wasn’t even aware that they existed…
https://www.thecollegefix.com/post/46509/

I wasn’t even aware that they existed
As Glenn Reynolds says, “When taxpayers tire of funding this sort of thing, we’ll be told it’s because of ‘anti-intellectualism’…”

Liquid Ass demonstrates one of the most profound ideas in economics: Supply creates its own demand.

Speaking of bodily horrors
Strzok summed up in a gif

The Trump balloon:
DrumpfHitler is finished this time!

I think we have our guy for the Pee Wee’s Playhouse reboot! Tell the casting director she can take the weekend off.

Agenda detected.
Via Damian.

“Are you wearing your anti-motion-sickness spectacles?”
Not at 99 Euromarks, I’m not. They look like something out of a Christmas cracker.
I mean, looking a bit daft is a small price to pay for curing motion sickness. But 90 quid is a very large price to pay for a bit of plastic and some tubing with coloured water in it.
“Nothing is safe from research into why some people are conservative, not even a prank doo-doo smell.”
But it’s such a mystery.
PRM: “There’s a serious point about that.”
Absolutely. I’m trying to add something to that, and I’m not coming up with much. It’s a very important point.
“Goodwood Festival of Speed Live Feed.”
Thanks, Farnsworth. I hadn’t realised it was this week. Well, that’s my weekend spoken for. Hold my calls.

They most certainly rant.

Bosh, like Hieronymus? That Bosch?

After apparently attending a struggle session Scarlett Johannson bails from “transgender” gangster flick.

“I’ve learned a lot from the community since making my first statement about my casting and realize it was insensitive.”

In English I think that means, “I didn’t want my career to be ended just now.”

I’ve just discovered Bosch and am halfway through season one. So far, so good.
I started with the books … 20 of ’em (I’ve stopped at 19 because I’m saving the last one a bit …)
I’ve now gotten to season 3 of Bosch and I’m so glad the author is the exec producer, even as a few things are changed (e.g. the books start in the 80s with Bosch as a Vietnam “tunnel rat” Vet) … the series really captures the books.
I usually don’t read a lot of mysteries but I got hooked from book one.
Oh, it really captures the rhythms of Los Angeles quite nicely. It’s a strange city – and I say that as someone who was born in El-Lay and grew up in The Valley.

For Darleen, the Valley Girl:
https://www.imaginaryforces.com/work/bosch-main-title
Been trying to get people to watch this for the last couple of years, and just tonight talking to my leftard friend about it (he’s halfway through season 3)

“Have you tried Patriot?”
This is a type of condom?

Bosch is good, but I’m cheap, so most of my power tools are Ryobi.
What?

For Darleen, the Valley Girl
Love the opening theme.
BTW … I get a kick that a jazz musician that Harry goes to see in the later books, Grace Kelley, actually appears in Season 2 of the tv show. No clip from the show, but she composed a piece for her appearance and performs it later here, too.

“Why did the rescuers have to be white people?”
Don’t worry, when the BBC do their dramatisation they won’t be.

Been trying to get people to watch this for the last couple of years,
Thanks to nagging by The Other Half, I’m halfway through season one, where another grim twist is emerging – and so far, the series strikes me as well played, and paced, and shot, if not altogether original in terms of genre tropes. I don’t usually go for police procedurals, but I was drawn into its story threads quite easily. No small feat.
Have you tried Patriot?
I don’t know what that is. Is it a deodorant?
*while jabrwok is looking around the room for approval, quietly slips a pickled egg into his beer*
[ Slides along bar a large, overfilled ashtray. Nods towards Jabrwok’s beer. ]

Farnsworth M Muldoon:
Yes the one-eyed, without depth perception, were much more suitably employed in the 1950s.
Andre De Toth for example directed the 1953 film House of Wax… in 3-D.

Zer/zem’s parents must be proud.
Quite.
We’re told, “Remember, babes, there’s nothing moral about work.” What Avery means, of course, is that there’s nothing immoral about habitual, opportunist freeloading. I.e., parasitism. And so, according to our self-imagined moral better, if you choose not to work and support yourself, some other sucker should be made to pay your bills as well as their own, indefinitely. Because hey, you’re just so fabulous, babe.
You’d think that being trans would be enough of a challenge in life without also being quite so obnoxiously narcissistic.

How they call cows in Sweden.

Andre De Toth for example directed the 1953 film House of Wax… in 3-D.
Strangely, however, the cinematographers, who only required one eye to operate the cameras, had binocular vision…

But my anecdata shows that “let’s compete by eating something so stupidly hot that the pain in both our throats, and somewhat later, the bottom ends of the digestive tract make us want to kill ourselves”, which is what that Yank program(me) seems to be celebrating, is an almost exclusively male stupidity?
“For the two things that a healthy person hates most between heaven and hell are a woman who is not dignified and a man who is.” (G.K. Chesterton)
https://thompsonblog.co.uk/2013/07/two-balls-bad-no-balls-good.html

One of the rituals of the barbecues I’ve attended is the good-natured parodying – one might say acknowledgment – of precisely those conventions. “Man make fire. Man cook meat,” etc. But perhaps we’re to imagine that only the keen social observers who write for the Guardian have ever noticed such things or found them worthy of amused comment. More to the point, it doesn’t seem to have occurred to Mr Power that quite a few people, male and female, actually enjoy the role-play opportunity of the barbecue – the theatre, the ritual, the fun. Even – heresy! – gendered fun. But hey, the point is that some of you heathens are still arranging your leisure time and social gatherings in a way of which our Guardianista disapproves. Your barbecues aren’t being gender balanced in the way he would like. And gosh darn it, people. That really drains the joy from his summer breeze.

Wow … as in Holy crap, Salem witch trials couldn’t have been much worse.

Wow … as in Holy crap,
Yet another illustration of how flashing one’s woke credentials just happens to coincide with all manner of spiteful and unsavoury motives. Strange, that.

I’m not surprised at Avery’s attitude. He obviously has no problem declaring his right to steal the identity of women.

Gif as art.
Damn it. I’ve just wasted five minutes watching that. Yes, I know – no refunds, credit note only, etc.

Do I understand correctly from the Galloway story that the graduate student on whose word he blacklisted a job applicant is the same person who in the next paragraph accuses Galloway of sexual assault and is the same person who two thirds of the way into the article he admits to have been sleeping with (which turns the the blacklisting incident from a story about unaccountable institutional policies into a sleazy soap opera). If so, isn’t the job applicant the one we should feel sorry for, and isn’t Galloway just taking some of what he admits to have dished out?
Yes, that was my reading of it as well, though my sympathy gave out about two paragraphs before the “sleeping with” part that I just went back to see. The story winds its way around to that in a rather odd manner. Not that I don’t believe this guy but as you said he blacklisted another person on even less “evidence” than what was had on himself. And yet he got awarded $167K. As I said, I gave up on it and no desire to read through the rest of the TL;DR but I am curious if he ever expresses contrition for the blacklisting.
I have far more sympathy for a guy no one gives a damn about, one George Zimmerman, whose life has been completely ruined, even down to his personality. Who could stand up to such an onslaught? An entire nation, and beyond FWIU, hates him. And he didn’t get a dime from the slanderous news media attacks, the lies, the selectively edited 911 call. And to this day, nobody give a damn about what happened. Nobody cares that even “conservative” media would not support a man using a gun to defend his own life. All of these witch hunt stories are important, especially in the light of the most prominent one that has been going on for two years now, and the exposure of the nature of the mob attacks is very important. Yet I find it very, very hard to have an ounce of sympathy for this Galloway clown.

Speaking of attitudes and senses of entitlement, Deep Thoughts™ from the loser of the last presidential election:

I believe that the test of any society is how we treat the most vulnerable. Right now our country is failing that test. We’ve never seen such organized cruelty, distain and contempt for our values.

1. I can’t help but to have noticed that “the most vulnerable” to whom she refers have been the ones disrupting traffic, setting fires, shouting down speakers, and generally rioting.
2. “Contempt for our values”; if by “our” values she means her values, well, yes there is, if, OTOH, she is pretending to speak for the values of most ‘Murkans, again, yes, but the obvious thing is it is her side to blame.

have you ever really *looked* at your hand before?

It should wear off in 8-12 hours.

Ten bucks for naked pics of Ms Edison? This is so sweetly naive. Photoshop, babe.

I’ll assert there’s nothing moral about my job (bookkeeping) but nothing particularly immoral about it, either. It’s just there, paying the bills.

Incidentally, and belatedly, I’ve just discovered Bosch and am halfway through season one. So far, so good.
The actor (Titus Welliver) who plays the protagonist bears a striking resemblance to a slightly older James Nesbitt.

Zer/zem’s parents must be proud.
More of Avery’s deep wisdom. Apparently, wealth causes poverty.

“As a woman, you should know this.”