Friday Ephemera

treasure in the attic
I’ve seen plenty such photos in my beekeeper group. Bees love the walls or ceilings, if there’s enough hollow space.
It’s often worth contacting beekeepers to collect the hive – they’ll remove as much of the wax and honeycomb as they can and will be able to offer advice as to how to block up entrances from future swarms.
Pest management guys will probably do a less thorough job; if a big hive remains in your house with no bees, that’ll attract other pests.
The job is known as a ‘cut out’, and is distinct from swarm collection/management.

I suspect trickery.
Halfway through they reversed the video.

In re Munch, a few years back there was a series of tissue boxes that looked a lot like Ensor’s The Entry of Christ Into Brussels. Thought you’d like to know.

Straya. Where the animals will disembowel and eat the hearts and liver of their enemies.
(Or, you know, wait patiently in a queue at a Fish ‘n’ chips shop.)

Unusual business concern:
https://metro.co.uk/2019/10/23/hitman-hires-hitman-hires-hitman-hires-hitman-hires-hitman-tells-police-10971438/?ito=article.mweb.share.top.link

Bit late now, love. || Brain-eating amoebas.
ISWYDT

Sir, this is a species-neutral bathroom.

Remember, this is not a Hate Crime.
Ah, Rochdale, you think they’d’ve learned their lesson after the child sex ring scandal, but you’d be wrong.

“Please refrain from gendering us.”
“Texas jury: Father can’t stop chemical castration, gender change of seven-year-old son”
https://hotair.com/archives/ed-morrissey/2019/10/22/texas-jury-father-cant-stop-chemical-castration-gender-change-seven-year-old-son/
“a jury in Texas has ruled against a father’s petition for sole custody of his twin seven-year-old boys as a means to protect one from undergoing hormonal gender-change therapy at the hands of his mother.”
I have a sneaky suspicion the mother does not have the child’s interests at heart. Surely she can’t be acting out of sheer spite in any case?

Posted by: jones | October 25
The judge, probably due to the public outcry and the fact that the Governor and other Texas officials are launching an investigation into this farrago, has overruled the jury.

The judge presiding over the case of Jeffrey Younger, the father who is trying to protect his seven-year-old son, James, from chemical castration via a gender “transition,” ruled today that the parents will have joint conservatorship over James, which includes making joint medical decisions for the child.

Despite the gag order on the father not to speak to the press, this ruling at least buys time for the kid and for more rational people to sort this mess out.
Meanwhile, on the topic of emotionally disturbed persons, you can’t call them that in NYC anymore, thanks to a diktat from the mayor.

Calls for law enforcement that have been referred to as “EDPs,” or “emotionally disturbed persons,” will now be referred to as a “mental health call,”…Other measures taken by the city would require mental health professionals instead of law enforcement to respond to certain types of calls.

Because in an emergency you always have perfect knowledge of the actual situation. It should be interesting when they send a shrink to see the nutcase brandishing weapons, and the rozzers to the depressed dude who has locked himself in his bedroom, because the mayor and his minions don’t want to upset a crazy person by calling him “emotionally disturbed”.

Twitter rules and censors, it is almost as if they are arbitrary and clueless.

Bit late now, love.
So of course she will be resigning and throwing what political capital she has left over to the AfD (or whomever?). Ahhh, but…

“For a few years, more people have been leaving our country than entering it,” she told the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung. “Wherever it is possible, we must lower the entry hurdles for those who bring the country forward.”

Of course not. We mustn’t learn anything from our mistakes. Because that would be wrong. Unless of course “those who bring the country forward” means what it literally means and not the PC BS that such convoluted language has meant for decades now. But then again, leaving Germany has been a German tradition for centuries. On the one hand, it’s the reason that I even exist. Still TBD if in a small way that’s a good thing or not, but I digress…
Curious if anyone over yonder has noticed this…Growing up in, and frequently visiting, South Florida I saw a great number of German tourists. Also our next door neighbors were post-war German immigrants. Much more so than other non-English speaking tourists, the Germans always look confused. They seem to lighten up after a few beers or whatnot, but I can pick out the Germans on the beach (insert lame reverse D-Day joke here) even before hearing them speak because they seem terribly unsure of what to do with themselves.

Continue the research.

Will you just knock it off?
[ Carefully places ear buds in spider-proof case. ]

inadvertently comical Naomi Wolf
Wolf is – without exaggeration – every bit a conspiracy theorist as Alex Jones, yet one is too racy for most social media platforms, much less major publishing houses and mainstream organs like the Guardian.
We reside in the timeline where Alex Jones is right.

If you laugh, you are probably a very bad person.

he was probably just going to ask the cashier to put it on his bill.
I’ll get your coat.

Re: Batwoman and Terminator
A lot of this reminds me of Sleepless in Hollywood: Tales from the New Abnormal, in which the writer points out that movie studios don’t really know what sells or what doesn’t; they just produce so much stuff that the big hits pay for all the damp squibs. At the time of writing, DVD sales were completely savaging studio profits and the book was mostly stories about the studios flailing around and having no idea how to function in a market where they had to make ROI on nearly everything.
The New Wokeness is just studio execs being their usual clueless about what audiences want. We didn’t want six Transformers movies and the later ones didn’t do very well. There’s not much wokeness in the entire DC cinematic universe and half of them were absolute box office bombs.
Unfortunately this means that the poor financial performance of Batwoman and Terminator won’t likely make much difference. If the greenlight guys were capable of spotting a bankable property, we wouldn’t have gotten these to begin with.
Keep an watchful eye on Jason Reitman’s Ghostbusters sequel next year. If it does well, that may be the bellwether studios need, as it’s a clear A/B test.
Texas jury: Father can’t stop chemical castration, gender change of seven-year-old son
There’s something really off about this case. The father requested a jury trial in lieu of a bench trial; I’m assuming he felt 12 normal people were going to be a lot more sensible about the issue at hand. And yet, 11 of the 12 jurors voted to give sole custody and conservatorship to psycho mom.
The judge who overruled the original decision merely gave 50/50 conservatorship (i.e. medical decision-making) to the father. Psycho mom still has sole custody and the father is under a gag order such that he can’t talk about the case.
There’s something about this case we’re not being told.

Trans individual sets new cycling record.

Pool shot of note.

Pool shot of note.
Broken link of note. 🙁
Was it by any chance this one? 🙂
(Found via Charles Murray’s twitter feed.)

Aw, the code doesn’t work. 🙁

Something to think about…
In the podcast series “Welcome to Nightvale” there’s an announcement from the narrator (the local radio station guy):
“New research has shown that there is at least one spider on your body at all times. Yes, you. Further work is needed to clarify its intent, but it is pretty certain that it is one of the ugly ones.”

Come bask in our two-hour poverty simulation.
Two whole hours?

There’s a strain of this in (of all goddamned things) tabletop roleplaying games. It’s been sardonically dubbed by its critics “misery tourism”.

[ Slides 2%-off drinks voucher to Joan. ]

Yeah, I think I’m going to remain standing:
https://twitter.com/MarDixon/status/1187676652450582529

Gentlemen, please inform yourself about your incoherent social construct.
As Patrick Brown has just pointed out, the paper is a hoax, albeit an all-too-plausible one.

they got me,
You’re not alone there. And the quoted assessment by the hoaxers seems spot-on. The primary criterion is the affirmation of deranged woke politics. Which is to say, ideological conformity. How one gets to the preferred – and predestined – conclusion, or whether one has gotten anywhere at all, is at best secondary. And often simply irrelevant.

Come bask in our two-hour poverty simulation.
Doris Lessing’s semi-autobiographical novel Landlocked has a funny passage about what made her progressive friends different from her non-progressive friends…

But of course these were ‘intelligent’ people; some of them even ‘educated’; even – though this was a word they used with an increasingly humorous grimness, ‘progressive’ people. Yet what had changed in the talk, since Martha had chafed at the talk at the women’s tea-parties in the avenues?
These women did not complain about their servants; they deplored, instead, that they had servants, wished that they could do without them, and often indeed, took decisions to give them up. And they did not complain about their husbands, but about ‘society’, which made marriage unsatisfactory.
They did not talk scandal in the sense of have you heard that so and so has left her husband? They discussed people’s characters, with all the dispassionate depth offered to them by their familiarity with ‘psychology’. Why anybody ever did anything was immediately obvious to these psychologically educated females, and people’s motives were an open book to them, their own included.

The primary criterion is the affirmation of deranged woke politics minds.

A hoax?
There is no joy in me now.
Publican, a double shot of hemlock, if you please.

Come bask in our two-hour poverty simulation.
Remember how Marie Antoinette played at being a shepherdess?
Nice, but not an issue.
Yes, there are hipsters who are queens, but absolutely no hipster is an actual, does actual getting things done, administrator, basically by definition.
—Pre-revolutionary France got trapped in that Title By Inheritance And Nothing Else thing, and didn’t figure out how to shake it before the guillotines arrived.
—The same of pre-revolutionary Russia and the handy Tokarev, for that matter . . . .

“Just a moment… Just a moment… I’ve just picked up a fault in the AE-35 unit. It’s going to go 100% failure within 72 hours.”

Is there any higher medal in gymnastics than Olympic Gold?

Two 17-year-old boys accused of harassing four African-American middle schoolgirls — using racial slurs and urinating on one of the victims — are facing charges including bias intimidation and lewdness. [snip]
Police say the boys are of Indian descent.
While it’s tempting to see the reported ethnicity of the boys suspected in the assault as complicating the story and raising questions about whether the assault should be thought of as racist, I look at it through a different lens. Instead of asking what the boys’ reported racial identity tells us about the nature of the attack, we should see the boys as enacting American whiteness through anti-black assault in a very traditional way. In doing so, the assailants are demonstrating how race is a social construct that people make through their actions. They show race in the making, and show how race is something we perform, not just something we are in our blood or in the color of our skin.

so I guess that means all the black rappers and all the black on black crime is merely blacks acting out whiteness, then.

The boys’ actions resemble those of people who feel empowered to act out their resentment against nonwhite people who are deemed out of place, confronting them with hostility or slurs or calling the police. The people patrolling what they see as their spaces are often — but not always — white. The Yale sociologist Elijah Anderson calls areas that are policed in this way, “the white space,”

Black gangbangers, acting white, protect their “white space” when confronting people they deem out of place “Where you from?” and beating or killing the person who gives the wrong answer.
Makes sense.

Makes sense.
As a worldview to cultivate, it’s not just wrong or even laughably wrong. It’s pernicious and deranging. Again, the conclusion – Bad Whitey, Corrupter Of All Things – is obligatory, predetermined; and the route to it, however twisty and contrived, is unimportant. Any contortion, any paper-thin pretext, will do.
And this fatuous twattery is apparently more than good enough for Princeton, where the author is employed.

For People With Periods,
“It doesn’t look human”
https://twitter.com/scottmorris39/status/1188409518704807936

Holy c**p!
Sorry for the profanity, but I just had to link to This interview with Philosopher Angelo Codevilla where a member of the American Elite media gets his clock cleaned:
So, when I express my sincere concern about transgender rights, you would presumably accuse me of manufacturing a new category of clients—and at the same time, a new class of bigots for me to self-righteously oppose.
You are not manufacturing a class, or rather you are exploiting that class’ weakness to turn that class into clients.
Most of all, what you are giving them—which really in a sense they crave more than anything else—is a sense of grievance against the rest of America. Grievance is the handle by which you push these pawns into your cultural wars.
via Second City Bureaucrat

…blaming the entire world would be too nakedly pathological to get away with.
They blame America – or Britain, France, Sweden – because it’s permitted even encouraged, by the Elite Class.

…where a member of the American Elite media gets his clock cleaned:
“American Elite” is an odd way to spell “smug, condescending, generally ignorant, bubble dwelling nitwit”, but it is shorter.

I was always struck by the marginal status of those other people you mention, Republicans. Clearly, they were not as bright as me and my friends were…As a graduate of two elite American universities…

As I said before, “elite” = Yugo.

(S) You call those contemptible people the “country party.”
(C) Precisely. Here, I’m borrowing an 18th-century British term.
(S) I thought it was a good term because it brings to mind country music.
(C) That too. Have you ever been to Branson, Missouri? Do you even know what it is?
(S) I gather it’s neither Aspen nor Hollywood.

Touche, Mr. Wilde, touche, (not that you haven’t just shown your provincialism).

(S) As a sometime student of intelligence work…There are now well more than a million Americans with some form of top secret or higher security clearance. Now I can accept that something is properly a secret if only five people know it, or if 40 people know it, or even 400 people. But there is no such thing as a secret that is shared by 1 million people…[later]…
(C)…Pollard was sentenced on the basis of a memorandum, which is yet secret.

First, our self proclaimed better and “sometimes student of intelligence” reveals he knows nothing about how clearances work or how classified information is shared. A guy with a TS isn’t privy to the same info as a guy with a TS/SCI, and among the TS/SCI the whole point of the “C” is that information is “compartmented” and not everyone with a TS/SCI has access to the same “compartments”. Second, seeing as how Pollard was sentenced in 1987 and a memo still secret, one would make the assumption that absent leakers and spies, the system generally works. But, hey, he is an elite.
One could spend a week dissecting everything in that article, I would give him props for publishing himself being beaten like a toy mouse in a room full of kittens, but you could bet the back 40 he thinks quite the opposite.

Oops… David Samuels, not “Daniel”.

Jonathan
Samuels was lauding Bezos and Washington Post ….and today we have THIS obit headline on the killing of Islamic terrorist leader al-Baghdadi
Abu Akbar al-Baghdadi, Austere Religious Scholar at Helm of Islamic State, dies at 48
Our betters in journalism….

… THIS obit headline…
Marone; and that as what they changed it to. I guess they are just tying to create the darkness their masthead says democracy dies in.

Is the interviewer Daniel Samuels playing devil’s advocate or does he actually believe what he’s saying?
I found myself wondering the same thing. We’re deep in Poe’s Law territory here.
Based on same later incidences of Trump Tourette’s, I think he’s sincere.

Terms and conditions apply.

Well … that face you make …

Life imitates art, a play in three acts.

that face you make…
We feel his pain.

“And in travel news.”

Guess where I was last week.