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.