Provoke, Whine, Rinse, Repeat

Basically chihuahuas displaying nervous aggression
Heh. At ten-to-one or thereabouts, they comfortably outnumber their intended victim, a lone driver they presumably plan to menace and dominate, and when he takes exception to their delinquent provocation and responds accordingly, and effectively, they squeal for back-up. Like the nasty little bitches they are.
But it does, I think, capture a defining dynamic, a rather telling one – and the extent to which the phenomenon could be seen as a middle-class parenting failure. I mean, the juvenile psychology, the uncorrected narcissism, is hard to miss.

More of that please.

Karens in balaclavas.

Like the nasty little bitches they are.
Reminder that it’s exactly these same nasty little bitches that want to defund professionals of this calibre.

randian
I take the royal caste point; but I also think that the fact that one or two of them might have got HURT had they tried might have influenced them somewhat.

the Antifa Expanded Universe
[ Muffled chortling. ]

Also, if I vote for this Chinaman in my GOP primary, does this make me more or less racist? Or more pro- or anti-American?
https://yukongzhaoforcongress.com/

Pathologizing. Happy. Women.
It’s certainly been my experience that leftist women tend to be discernibly less happy and much more neurotic, regardless of actual circumstance, so far as I could determine it. And as we’ve seen many times, the mental landscape of many leftist women doesn’t exactly lend itself to happiness. Or self-possession. Or coherence, or realism.
One might reasonably infer, then, that the problem isn’t so much the world as the bong rip of leftism.

The number of people on that thread insisting that the problem is false consciousness ignore another possible reason for the study result: people who believe Satan is lurking in their sock drawer are likely to be less happy than people who don’t.

They’ve done a hundred studies and written ten thousand magazine articles documenting that contemporary 21st Century gender roles are making women miserable, as they stretch themselves to be white-collar professionals and mothers and wives and household managers and community organizers and a hundred other roles simultaneously.
They’ve done three studies showing that women who embrace more traditional gender roles seem to be happier.
Now they’re going to twist themselves into knots trying to find a way of explaining that these findings are contradictory. Because they HAVE to be, you see.

As the scurrying mob stays 20 feet away, the stillness that surrounded one lone voice echoing through the suddenly silent streets was overwhelming.
One man, angry enough to show it, and all the silliness melted away instantaneously.
We are losing against the weakest human beings in our species’ history.
[ finishes whiskey bottle, opens another ]

David, in this interview Somali-born immigrant Ayaan Hirsi Ali has a few things to say about the left’s attacks on Western civilization.
The Case against Revolution with Ayaan Hirsi Ali
Jun 30, 2020
Hoover Institution
Recorded on June 25, 2020

As the United States and the world embark on fraught conversations about race, history, law enforcement, and the underpinnings of our very civilization, Ayaan Hirsi Ali joins Peter Robinson for an enlightening conversation. A refugee from Africa, Hirsi Ali fled to Europe to escape an arranged marriage, becoming an activist, (now former) member of the Dutch Parliament, and now a research fellow at the Hoover Institution. With a different set of life experiences and perspectives from American-born Blacks, Hirsi Ali discusses how, as a Somalian, she views America as the best place on earth for minorities to grow up and achieve their potential. While acknowledging the hardships and miseries that American Blacks have endured and that racism still exists in many quarters of American society, Hirsi Ali emphatically believes that America is more than capable of solving racial inequalities, provided it preserves the institutions that ultimately ended slavery and empowered the protest movements of the 1960s that birthed the Civil Rights Movement. As she wrote in a recent column for the Wall Street Journal, an opinion she reiterates on this show, “There will be no resolution of America’s . . . problems if free thought and free speech are no longer upheld as sacrosanct. . . . Without them, honest deliberation, mutual learning, and the American ethic of problem-solving are dead.”

The gibsmedat projection is strong with Nerd Jesus.

What nice people.
Here, too.

But the lessons that ought to have followed the election—lessons about the importance of understanding other Americans, the necessity of resisting tribalism, and the centrality of the free exchange of ideas to a democratic society—have not been learned. Instead, a new consensus has emerged in the press, but perhaps especially at this paper: that truth isn’t a process of collective discovery, but an orthodoxy already known to an enlightened few whose job is to inform everyone else.
Twitter is not on the masthead of The New York Times. But Twitter has become its ultimate editor. As the ethics and mores of that platform have become those of the paper, the paper itself has increasingly become a kind of performance space.

More.

I will be, as ever, a dedicated reader of their work. But I can no longer do the work that you brought me here to do…

So, as ever and despite the lesson taught by a strict taskmaster, nothing will be learned.

. . . . nothing will be learned.
Ehn, if he was being a dedicated reader of, oh, The Colonial Chronicle, then he hadn’t been learning . . . .

Re: Bari Weiss

and all sorts of reputational damage all around
To whom, gov? One must first hold that disgusting rag in esteem and the only ones who do are not physically capable of shame.

This chap has had to resign as curator…
I have little sympathy for someone who swam in (and I suspect, encouraged) that fetid PoMo, CM swamp, but leave that to one side. Would it not have been just as easy (or even easier) to offer the employees who signed the petition the immediate opportunity to work in a more congenial environment somewhere else?

Dutch tulip bulbs and money laundering. The quality of the art is irrelevant, so there is no reason for them not to chase identity (con)artists.

The article about the curator has helped my understanding of the word “tenure”. For a white male it means he’s been around for too long and has to go. For a black female it means she can do or say whatever she likes without fear of retribution.

the power to spoil
That.

Dutch tulip bulbs and money laundering. The quality of the art is irrelevant, so there is no reason for them not to chase identity (con)artists.
This.
Modern seems mostly to be a money-laundering scam perpetrated by ‘artists’, critics and dealers that, in it’s entirety, has produced nothing of value to Western Civilisation but has lined the pockets of those involved in the scheme. Indeed its aim seems to be to undermine Western standards of beauty and replace them with ugliness and then call that great art. It is, like PoMo culture in general, the product of people who feel inadequate when faced with the glories of the West and want to to tear it all down like the Barbarians when they conquered Rome.

What’s remarkable, to me at least, is the widespread accommodation of such behaviour, and the fact that many people will see scenes like those above and not register, or not admit to registering, the obvious motivation.
If you criticise such behaviour, you leave yourself open to accusations of callousness, racism, white-supremacism, insert-here-phobery. You know the kind of thing: do you really consider a few broken windows, smears of graffiti or black eyes too high a price to pay when insert-here-victims have been savagely oppressed for a thousand years?
Of course, such arguments can’t withstand a moment’s scrutiny, but then they never receive a moment’s scrutiny with today’s rules of argument: shout “racist” and retreat to your group of friends and stand jeering and nose-thumbing until your interlocutor retires, frustrated.
On the other hand, if you express approval of such behaviour you can present yourself as progressive, intellectual and deeply, deeply caring. Only the most sophisticated can see past the oafishness and squalor to what it truly is: a gesture of sacrifice and magnanimity.
The desire to approve of, and celebrate, overindulged narcissism is, in itself, a form of narcissism.

“If you weren’t Andy, you wouldn’t be antagonizing”
“They all look alike to me”, antifa style…

Oh, I’ve seen Rothkos in London. Tate Modern wasn’t around then though. It was an special loan of some of his last works.
My friends and I were young at the time and didn’t know who he was. We were indeed taken by their power. We started to speculate about the mental state of someone who could produce those paintings until the guard told us to stop, given his suicide.
$50 million to buy the works of any genius is mental enough. To pay that to buy a disturbed man’s output is, disturbing. You’re not putting such a painting on the wall because you like it, but because you want to buy the story.
I could have a Pollack or Warhol or Lichtenstein on my wall. They’re mostly pretty, if largely meaningless. Rothko is just depressing.
If you subscribe to his power, why would you sell his works? What Chicago have done, then, is get rid of genius to buy trendy tat. That’s not making it better as a decision.
(Note Rothko is mostly pre-1945. He went a bit later, but his good stuff not much more. It’s still a convenient cut-off for me.)

Two episodes in, so far so good.
I wasn’t even aware of it. The BBC’s aggravating bore-fest of last year rather put me off modern adaptations.

Matt Christiansen on Portland, where Antifa, the left’s screeching id, roams uninhibited.

Well, this is great use of American tax dollars.
So, rationality and industriousness, along with an appreciation of personal property and individual autonomy, are things that The Dark Folk Who Live In The Forest™ can’t quite get the hang of…?
The irony being that if we were all “actively anti-racist,” as these peddlers of woke hokum insist, they would be the ones being horsewhipped through the streets and chased out of town by parents armed with nail guns.

So if one were to move to Asia or Africa to pursue a life based on self-reliance, industry, delayed gratification, rational thinking, punctuality and hard work, would one wind up destitute and homeless because one was out of step with the predominant culture in these non-white regions of the world?
If one taught these values to one’s 2.3 children, would the neighbors call the authorities to remove the children from such an abusive environment?

I work with a lot of school districts, and they’re chattering about a recent Axios-Ipsos poll of parents and their worries about sending their kids back to school in the fall. Apparently, they’re all scared shitless that little Jayden and Madison are going to get the Covids and die.
So I wander over to the CDC data portal and pull up COVID deaths by age. If I’m reading the tables correctly, total deaths by COVID for children up to 14 years of age is 30. That’s thirty. Three-zero. Across all 50 states. Since February.
By comparison, deaths of adults 55 and older comes in at 106,088. By further comparison, deaths of children 14 and under from non-COVID causes is 10,574.
Now, if I’m a 70-year-old obese diabetic cancer survivor raising my great-grandkids, I suppose I’d be worried about them bringing home a bug that could kill me. But the kids themselves? They’re way more likely to fall off a ledge or drown or get hit by a car than they are to catch the COVID cooties. If humans had any capacity for risk analysis, or if America had a news media worth a damn, then maybe people would understand that their kids are worlds safer in school than they are running around the neighborhood. Alas, that’s not the world we live in.
So now I have to find a way to tell a bunch of school board members to remove their heads from their nether regions, and then help a bunch of superintendents come up with ways to get the parents in their communities to do the same. So far, my leading slogan is, “Jesus H Christ, could you cretins pretend to have a brain for ten fucking seconds?!” (It may need some workshopping.)

Reuters, you say?

“War of the Worlds” – set in contemporary France
There is nothing wrong with that–and in fact we should remember that although Wells’ story covers events in England it nonetheless mentions Martian landings in other parts of the world. Various authors have written their own War of the Worlds stories set in locations of their choosing–I vaguely recall one short story by Howard Waldrop set in Texas with snipers picking off Martians from 1000 yards away. I believe he envisioned the lead character as being played by Slim Pickins.

There is nothing wrong with that
There’s everything wrong with that.
The French can have their Jules Verne – let them set “Vingt mille lieues sous les mers” in the contemporary Seine. They should bloody well leave H.G. alone.

I vaguely recall one short story by Howard Waldrop set in Texas with snipers picking off Martians from 1000 yards away. I believe he envisioned the lead character as being played by Slim Pickins.
Not to mention Orson Well’s radio show that (supposedly) had people freaking out believing it was real.

Having the French as the front line of defense has not worked out well for civilization in the last 100 year (more?) or so.
Oh, I dunno . . . Civilization seems to be doing fine. The circumstances just haven’t worked out well for the French . . .
—Since that straight line was just hanging there . . . . !

Seven ships ablaze in latest Iran mystery fires.
Wasp

I’ve always found the British hate for the French so charming.
[ Glares across Channel, shakes fist. ]

I’ve always found the British hate for the French so charming.
See Death to the French by C. S. Forester.

. I mean, even we Americans hate on the French all day and we owe our entire Republic to them.
When people question why we Americans celebrate Cinco de Mayo while to Mexicans it’s kinda…Meh.,. I like to point out that it we tend to view it as French defeat that didn’t cost us anything. Thus worthy of a few Margaritas and Dos Equiis.

Some 14 year old Twitter sage opined that a social worker could just as well be trained to do infant CPR, and anyway “copaganda” and likely staged for the camera. Oh yeah, and why can’t cops be so nice when dealing with unruly drunks?
An alternative explanation might be that this young cop has been well-trained and is in full command of himself under extreme pressure.
It’s just a theory.

The unfortunate and unstated reality of school reopening is that if even one child contracts COVID, or heaven forfend, dies, the school system will be sued and shut down. At a minimum, the superintendent and school principal will be fired. No one is willing to take that risk. Would you?

I could have a Pollack or Warhol or Lichtenstein on my wall. They’re mostly pretty, if largely meaningless. Rothko is just depressing.
I’m more of a Kandinsky sort of guy. Genuinely playful and imaginative and and funny and thoughtful modernism from a foundational figure of the movement.
Maybe in a few centuries most of these names will be forgotten but I do find the heroic aims of modernism very interesting – discard all representation, take the viewer to a world of pure geometric figures, etc. For a few artists – Malevich, I suppose – it came from a genuine, earnest spiritual desire. It did lead to a lot of frauds and mountebanks taking up the profession, though – pity.

A century and more later, it’s much harder to accept that a space-faring alien intelligence “vast and cool and unsympathetic,” one that’s been scrutinising the Earth for decades, or centuries, would somehow have no inkling of bacteria.
If they didn’t have bacteria equivalents, then it would be hard to explain their importance.
My concern is that the Martians are smart enough to arrive, yet military numpties. Why land in the middle of the most industrialised military nation on earth at the time (except maybe Germany)? That’s just asking to be defeated.
You attack at a point of weakness where there are no issues with your rear. The tip of Spain in HG Wells’s time, say.

Some 14 year old Twitter sage opined that a social worker could just as well be trained to do infant CPR
*I*m trained to do CPR but I’m not riding around in a patrol car for someone to flag down. Or are we going to have CPR patrols each night in their own cars with special lights??
good lord this bovine excrement is tiring.

The punchlines, they write themselves . . . .
Man’s Body Wrapped in Plastic Found on McDonald’s Roof in New York
. . . patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions, on a sesame seed bun.
The article doesn’t say what rating was given by Michelin as a result.
Or by C.M.O.T. Dibbler . . . .

. . . .stretch themselves to be white-collar professionals and mothers and wives and household managers and community organizers and a hundred other roles simultaneously.
They’ve done three studies showing that women who embrace more traditional gender roles seem to be happier.
And a newspaper article posted in early July telling of a Marine lieutenant colonel who’s been running an engineering battalion, with a comment of a civilian wife definitely giving support . . . .

In other news, tomorrow’s Ephemera has been compiled and should materialise just after midnight. UK time, obviously. Not whatever heathen time some of you may be burdened by.

The circumstances just haven’t worked out well for the French . . .
No the dead Americans, Brits, and Canadians on Omaha Beach, etc.

I’ve dealt with Europeans all my life. I know all about us parvenus from the States who come over here and race around your old cathedral towns with our cameras and Coca-Cola bottles… Brawl in your pubs, paw at your women, and act like we own the world. We overtip, we talk too loud, we think we can buy anything with a Hershey bar. I’ve had Germans and Italians tell me how politically ingenuous we are, and perhaps so. But we haven’t managed a Hitler or a Mussolini yet. I’ve had Frenchmen call me a savage because I only took half an hour for lunch. Hell, Ms. Barham, the only reason the French take two hours for lunch is because the service in their restaurants is lousy. The most tedious lot are you British. We crass Americans didn’t introduce war into your little island. This war, Ms. Barham to which we Americans are so insensitive, is the result of 2,000 years of European greed, barbarism, superstition, and stupidity. Don’t blame it on our Coca-Cola bottles. Europe was a going brothel long before we came to town.
–Paddy Chayefsky, as spoken by James Garner, The Americanization of Emily