Provoke, Whine, Rinse, Repeat

“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