Friday Ephemera

I read that San Fran City Council cut the police budget by half and banned police from making traffic stops.
Wellll, you do realize, don’t you, that Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep is indeed complete and utter fiction, and almost as fictitious as your statement there?
Unless, of course, you do have an actual news article or something that will actually back up that wild bit of wishful thinking there . . . .
—If all you read was someone’s Wouldn’t It Be Nice blog or sumpin, that doesn’t count . . . .

A tense, nine-hour Berkeley City Council meeting ended early Wednesday morning with a sweeping set of new public safety reforms, including a pledge to eventually cut the Police Department budget in half.
So a San Francisco City Council, rather than the but not far off.
https://www.sfchronicle.com/crime/article/Berkeley-council-bans-police-from-traffic-15410326.php
But police won’t be banned from traffic stops. It just won’t be uniformed ordinary ones.
https://www.sfchronicle.com/crime/article/Berkeley-could-ban-police-from-traffic-15399680.php

…same with “ontological distance”

Um . . . what did someone do to the html?????
lesseee if something works . . . .
In the meantime . . .
A tense, nine-hour Berkeley City Council meeting . . . . . . . Ah, yes, as San Francisco has long been considered a suburb of Berkeley, that certainly must make everything the same . . . .
So just how is that postmodern EverythingIsTheSameAsEverythingElse gig working out for you?

…same with “ontological distance”
. . . . context?
If someone’s frantic handwaving is simply occurring without actually going over the details, there may be a need to pick through where something is turning up . . . .

Must……..purchase……..cat………..jigsaw.

Morning, all.
I fear a joke of some kind is waiting to be aired.
You can only pick one.
Always respect the media.

I fear a joke of some kind is waiting to be aired.
Well, onastery to you too.

Always respect the media.
They don’t even bother to hide it anymore.

What would LA look like if fireworks were permitted?
I was born in Los Angeles and lived my whole life in SoCal. NEVER have I seen as many private fireworks – especially the illegal bottle rockets. I grew up (50s/60s) with “safe and sane” with maybe a few neighborhood dads sneaking off to TJ to score some bottle rockets.
But when our tin-pot Gov Hairgel Newsom canceled every public fireworks display I think the restive populace said “fuck you” and scooted to other states to score some massive goodies.
It was as loud in my neighborhood on July 4 as if I was sitting at the park watching a professional show. And it went on and on and on.
So you were seeing on that video downtown LA and surrounding area … but it went out 30-60 miles beyond – even my kids in the high desert of Victorville just stood in the backyard and looked up for a show.

Feminist Media Studies
Did someone sit down and ponder, “how can we make media studies even more useless than it already is?’

Pernicious hustle detected.
Somewhat related.
Hey, it’s basic science, people.

Meanwhile, down at the Musician’s Union Hall…”I’m sorry Mr. Parker, we don’t care what you want to play, the Fargo Junior Symphony just isn’t diverse enough and needs a saxophone player… and take that Mr. Puentes with you”

Data collected from 500 American orchestras for a 2016 study by the League of American Orchestras paints a starkly white picture when it comes to diversity in classical organizations. Its key finding: the “proportion of nonwhite musicians represented in the orchestra workforce — and of African American and Hispanic/Latino musicians in particular — remains extremely low.”

Another tale of woe indeed…

Even well-established performers, like the soprano Lauren Michelle, have taken to voicing their experiences. In Italy, Michelle was scheduled to sing the role of Violetta in ­­“La Traviata”…
“My best was never enough for the United States,” Michelle adds. “The truth is I am an award-winning international opera singer who has only been hired once at an A-house in the United States.”

Unbelievable, because if there is one thing the US&A is famous for, is its love of opera and the Grand Opera houses on every corner.
“Democracy Dies In Darkness”, and once again the Washington Post is doing its best to turn off the lights.

From our small regional paper in the north GA mountains. Millennials…SMDH…

To show their respect for local law enforcement, Barry Kives and his sons Andy and Brian hung a “Thin Blue Line” flag in front of their Blairsville-based business Southern Polyurethanes, Inc. on Murphy Highway.
Kives had ordered one of the flags a few weeks back from ThinBlueLineUSA.com, which sells them “with the goal of supporting our brothers and sisters in blue”; all told, the flag setup with the poles and installation cost about $80. When the flag went missing in the early morning hours of July 7, it became clear to the Kives men that not everyone in Blairsville shared their tremendous respect for police. As soon as he got to work that Tuesday morning, Andy noticed the flag was gone and called 911 to file a report. Fortunately for the Kiveses, surveillance equipment near the scene captured the theft, resulting in a roughly 12-hour turnaround from the time the flag was removed to an arrest in the case, Union County Sheriff ’s Lt. Daren Osborn said.
A review of surveillance footage showed Albert Lewis Lafferty, 49, of Blairsville…

Well, it goes to page two from there..

Morning, Darleen. What ungodly hour is it where you are?
Hi David, it was 1 am … neighbors across the street decided to have a party and it broke up a few minutes before – LOUDLY. Decided to make a cup of tea and look at the ephemera prior to retiring a second time.
Now I have coffee firmly in hand.

Forced sex is not necessarily rape,
So our criminal codes should go back to pagan times where the prosecution and punishment of the crime is dependent on the social standing between perp and victim.
It used to be a king’s eye was worth more than a peasant’s so if a king lost an eye to the commoner, the commoner might lose both or his life or the lives of his whole family.
Those wily Jews had a few things to say on that.
Little wonder Wokeistan rejects Judeo-Christian principles as whiteness and now have a entirely different standard of equality.

Data collected from 500 American orchestras for a 2016 study by the League of American Orchestras paints a starkly white picture when it comes to diversity in classical organizations.
Now do professional basketball.

Data collected from 500 American orchestras for a 2016 study by the League of American Orchestras paints a starkly white picture when it comes to diversity in classical organizations.
I’d like to put a reminder here that selection of musicians, including the chair rankings, is done with blind auditions.
If racists want more diversity, then get the colors they prefer to start their kids learning an instrument starting about age 8.

What’s next? Murder?
Whaddaya mean, next? You notice a certain movement that only values politically useful lives (after they’ve been taken, of course) while outright ignoring/excusing death the movement directly causes? It’s backed by governments and billion dollar multis alike.
And rape was long ago determined to only matter based on the progressive stack in places like Rotherham and Hollywood.
As someone said, the world hasn’t suddenly gone crazy, you’ve just suddenly noticed.

I’d like to put a reminder here that selection of musicians, including the chair rankings, is done with blind auditions
Any failure of reality, and real people, to conform to some ideological colour chart seems unlikely to be a result of racism, not least for the reasons stated above. It’s more likely a consequence of the fact that the intense commitment and virtuoso-level musicianship required is expensive to cultivate and a somewhat risky investment of time and money. It’s not well-paid, certainly at lower levels, and generally requires parents who can afford to support their musical prodigy, or would-be prodigy, on an indefinite basis.

they insist on one thing … and no sooner is this achieved than they insist on the contrary
When all your ideas are grounded in theory and none in practice and when that theory is one that in the face of experience resists modification (in all except its most superficial characteristics), the outcome is more or less inevitable.
if you even mildly demur
Well, naturally so – the theory cannot brook modification by experience.
It’s not just that far Left Progressivism intentionally sets about wrecking societies and communities that are otherwise more or less thriving in the absence of their beloved theory, societies and communities which are also generally unable to accommodate that theory anywhere in actual practice, but they also – almost always and without fail – unintentionally wreck their own projects by their own activities.
Ask a fairly typical far Left Progressive in, say, 2015 what would have been the worst outcomes they could have imagined over the next five years and they likely would have said: the Brexit Referendum being won by the Leave campaign; any Republican candidate taking the US election, but especially Trump; a comprehensive and near total collapse in support for Labour under Corbyn-McDonnell-Abbott and a landslide victory for the Conservatives in the wake of austerity; the decriminalisation of the non-payment of the BBC Licence Fee and a possible defunding of the organisation as a whole.
And yet isn’t it completely reasonable to suggest that every single one of those “worst outcomes” (in their eyes) are the result of their own actions every one of which they enthusiastically supported at the time?
Leave campaigners must surely have done at least as much (if not more) to secure a Leave vote through their general arrogance and obnoxiousness in campaigning as the Leavers did themselves just as, arguably, the Democrats contributed as much (if not actually more) as Trump did himself to his election victory in 2016 (and I strongly suspect that he will win again in 2020, despite all the odds, and largely as a result of their actions not his).
Labour under Corbyn-McDonnell-Abbott, and certainly with the backing of blatant Trotskyists such as Momentum, cheerleaders such as little Owen Jones and “I’m literally a Communist” Ash Sarkar, as well as celebrity endorsements of the likes of Munroe Bergdorf or Maxine Peak, absolutely drove their support straight over a cliff to the almost complete destruction of Labour in 2019 (especially at a time when, after a succession of weak administrations since 2010, it could in theory have been theirs for the taking).
Likewise, if anyone is responsible for hastening the looming demise of the BBC as we have known it to date, it is almost certainly the BBC themselves.
How can you even begin to reason with people who are so impervious to the lessons of experience that they cannot even grasp just how often they are actively responsible as authors of their own fate?

Leave campaigners must surely have done at least as much (if not more) to secure a Leave vote through their general arrogance and obnoxiousness in campaigning as the Leavers did themselves
Leave campaigners? Don’t you mean Remain campaigners, Nikw211?

Yet another shrewd hiring decision in the Games Industry makes itself known.

This Tweet is unavailable.

Time for me to lay off those smoker’s cough chasers …
Someone’s comment about really traditional and commercialized cough medicine, before assorted medical studies got done . . . . The coughing, sneezing, sniffling, why am I lying on the kitchen floor and studying the ceiling? medicine . . . .
So anyway, what about the games industry?

So anyway, what about the games industry?
Not a gamer, but I was fascinated by GamerGate and as a consequence a string of Tweets, since deleted, from Leigh Alexander caught my eye.
It began with a kind of humble brag about her work in games development (as opposed to games criticism and journalism for which is more famous I understand), but immediately launched into a complaint about the very people who had hired her.
Essentially, her ‘complaint’ was that she had been hired too late since, from memory these are more or less her own words, about 25% of her time as a narrative developer on games is spent stripping out the layers of sexism and other such sins inserted by “the dudes” into the design and structure of game. Therefore, they ought to have had her on board from the outset.
It takes a certain amount of chutzpah, perhaps entitlement might be a more suitable word, to be invited to take part in the development of a project and use it as an opportunity to scold her employers for not having hired her early enough while simultaneously bragging about how she has ‘rescued’ the game from ‘dudes’ who would have produced a toxic piece of trash had she not been there to save the day.
For a failed actress who only got into games journalism almost by accident (which I assume is code for someone she knew gave her the job), that level of presumption is quite something to see.

I was fascinated by GamerGate
As was I, but for different reasons. My read on it was that it was just a faction split amongst extremely entitled gamers. I found it fascinating that both sides managed to be so transparently dishonest about their motives for so long, and how despite the massive amounts of handwringing and media coverage, absolutely nothing changed.
I consider it an excellent example of how Twitter spats don’t actually matter in the real world. (Yes, I know about cancel culture – the problem there is that people in charge of hiring and firing do think what happens on Twitter matters in the real world and panic. If, like the CEO of Goya foods, they just say “meh, whatever” and ignore it, nothing happens).

Another Cathedral just happens to catch Fire in France.
We still don’t know how Notre Dame caught fire do we? It must all be just a coincidence.

“… immediately launched into a complaint about the very people who had hired her.”
Charles Moore identifies the problem:

If one judges by appearances, the persecutors of Ms Weiss at the New York Times could scarcely seem less like those union bullies of 40 years ago. They are a multi-ethnic rainbow of politically correct, deadly earnest, mainly upper-middle class young people, probably more often women than men. This paper’s wreckers were fat, grey-haired, working-class, often jokey, frequently drunken chauvinists – 100 per cent male, 100 per cent white. Yet the two groups are brothers under the skin.
Both are/were guilty of what economists call “producer capture”, claiming ownership of something they do not own. They are/were not interested in the person for whom the enterprise functions and without whom their wages would not be paid – the reader. The normal logic of a free society suggests that such people eventually lose. Inspired by self-righteous rage (or, in the case of the unions, a combination of Left-wing power urges and blind greed), they cannot stop themselves going too far. In this sense, one should be optimistic.
The problem, though, is that the rage can take a long time to burn itself out if leaderships are too weak to confront it.

“bragging about how she has ‘rescued’ the game from ‘dudes’ who would have produced a toxic piece of trash had she not been there to save the day.”
This, of course, might explain why the plots in narrative games rarely make any damn sense.

bragging about how she has ‘rescued’ the game from ‘dudes’ who would have produced a toxic piece of trash had she not been there to save the day.
It seems to me games creators would do well to make games that their customers actually want to play and are willing to pay for, rather than something that conforms to the narrow preoccupations of an activist clown that they’ve foolishly employed. To the extent that I’ve encountered it, the audience for games doesn’t seem particularly receptive to woke posturing. Which, it has to be said, is quite encouraging. And hiring people who openly despise that audience, the people giving you their money, seems… counterproductive.

“There were just enough racers with the gumption to hold out, and so it fell over almost immediately.”
Unfortunately, I’m not sure it has. There was talk of it being a one-off but, although I usually skip through the pre-race rigmarole to the formation lap, I’m fairly sure I saw the same pillocks kneeling before the second Austrian race last week. It’ll be (fairly) interesting to see what happens tomorrow in Hungary.
It has to be said, though, that F1 Management only have themselves to blame. For over 60 years since the beginning of the championship, there wasn’t any official opening ceremony. The local promoter might arrange something, but the teams themselves used to completely ignore it, often carrying on pre-race interviews with the media as it went on in the background. (That lack of respect for formality and officialdom was one of the things I used to like about it. They were there to do their jobs, preparing cars to race, not to ponce around in pointless parades.)
That only changed about five or six years ago at the behest of… well, let’s just say “the organisers of the Russian Grand Prix”, because I don’t know if it actually came from Totally-Not-Gay-Vlad himself or not. So, as we say in Glasgow, hell mend them. They could have avoided the whole thing if they’d just left well enough alone.

The attempt at getting Formula One racing on board with BLM was amusing. There were just enough racers with the gumption to hold out, and so it fell over almost immediately. Wrong workers and wrong clients.
It may not have worked to the extent that Lewis Hamilton wished, but I would still consider it a victory for him.
Look at how English sport is prostrating itself at the BLM altar. Premiership soccer is practically a BLM religious ceremony with a bit of football.
The fact is that this BLM orchestrated hysteria has achieved far more in the last month than race hustlers and hard left social justice warriors would dared to have dreamed this time last year
I wish it were otherwise, but I doubt the existence of the much-vaunted silent, sensible majority which rejects all of this. It may be that such a majority exists in the over 50s, but this poison has been rife in youth popular culture and education for so long, that it has succeeded.

Stop the world – there’s an awful lot of idiots that need to be thrown off.

Stop the world – there’s an awful lot of idiots that need to be thrown off.
Ooooohhhh, my, my, my, noooo . . .
What one does is to very carefully sort them into assorted groups, and then very carefully feed each group into the next . . . .
And as they insistently slaughter each other, one can continue to enjoy the continuing world . . . .

“I imagine the Hungarian crowd will be less than interested in their kneeling to BLM.”
There won’t be a crowd, thanks to the Chinese Bat AIDS. But yes, you’re probably right. If there had been, their reaction would have been interesting.
Anyway, I’ve recently been re-reading (bits of) Booker & North’s Scared to Death. I can’t imagine why it seemed relevant right now. This, in the Epilogue, jumped out at me as oddly contemporary:

Perhaps the most notorious example of funding being refused, in an effort to stifle research that had come up with results unacceptable to its sponsors, was the American Cancer Society’s last-minute withdrawal of support from the mammoth Enstrom and Kabat study into passive smoking. …
Even though Enstrom and Kabat had all-but completed their study while the ACS was still footing the bill, the fact that they could only in the end get it published with financial help from the tobacco industry meant that this was used to discredit all their work over the previous 40 years. So enraged was the passive-smoking lobby that systematic attempts to discredit the two men continued for years. The ACS itself reported Enstrom to his university, UCLS, for “scientific misconduct”, posting its accusations against him on 1,000 internet sites. In the spring of 2007 he was finally cleared on all charges, describing the relentless campaign to discredit him as “four years of the most brutal assault you have ever seen”.

(My emphasis.) This stuff has been brewing for a while, and I don’t think it started with ill-educated “snowflake” millennials unused to criticism. They’re following a lead that was already set for them.

… Aaaand it’s reported that some drivers “controversially” chose not to take the knee at the Hungarian GP. That’s an interesting way of putting it, I think.

“White vaginas and white penises jeopardise your melanin.”
Not all racists wear hoods

Not all racists wear hoods
I’ll go farther and say that most racists in America are black.

I’m always genuinely surprised by how many people downplay or dismiss it’s significance and relegate it to a side-show of little importance.
[long list of various spectacles omitted for brevity]
Yes, and lots of people paid attention when a dentist shot a lion, too.
What actually changed, though?
Is games journalism any more “ethical” than it was prior to GamerGate? (trick question. There’s never been any ethics or journalism in “game journalism”; that canard was the most ridiculous claim to come out of GG)
Are games any less “woke”? Are they any more woke?
Was Anita Sarkeesian financially ruined, her reputation in tatters? Did she end up having any influence on the game industry beyond a temporary sinecure at a nonentity of a game studio?
Did Carl Benjamin run for parliament on a GamerGate platform, or was it because he became involved with UKIP, like many other Leave campaigners? If it was Gamergate, how does that explain Mark Meecham, who had no real connection to GG?
You’ve successfully demonstrated that The Internet lost its collective sh*t over GamerGate. The Internet lost its sh*t over Cecil the Lion, Harambe the gorilla, and a blue and/or yellow dress, too.
What actually changed as a result of GamerGate?

“White vaginas and white penises jeopardise your melanin.”
I was rather amused by that rant – ill-judged as it was, it could be pretty much done verbatim in, say, a Key and Peele sketch and played for laughs.