Friday Ephemera (707)
Incoming. || Incoming 2. || Incoming 3. || Early Chinese typewriter – with over 5,000 characters, not an easy thing to master. (h/t, Things) || Volcano tourism. || Dress in layers, they say. || Just in case you should need them, Controlled Demolition, Inc. (h/t, Things) || Daylight robbery. || Meanwhile, at Davos. || On being “educated,” a thread. || Or you could just press ‘defrost‘ on the app. || Pretentious guilt, level ten. || Our betters, perturbed. || Upside detected. || Today’s words are learning environment. || All-terrain wheelchair, built from scraps. || King of the jungle. || “Live who you are,” or rather, aren’t. || The thrill of duty-free. || It’s a family rave, for parents who can’t let go. || For fans of feet. || And finally, being a robot, she does not experience human emotions.
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In other educational news.
Bets?
From further down on the “Speaking of education” thread link, Camile Paglia from 1995. At that point she was already fed up with the BS in our educational curriculum and culture that she had seen back then. And people today, even “conservative” people STILL want to pretend not to understand why things are as they are. Also, Charlie Rose was clearly a d-bag back then. But hey, PBS…
https://twitter.com/RyanGirdusky/status/1747811812941135970
From the “Heh”:
I ran across a story on this Fritzl guy yesterday. Apparently he’s up for parole or something. I don’t believe I saw that story before. Is it something that just didn’t hop the Pond? Or maybe I saw it and forgot about it. We in the US had our share of women-held-captive stories a few years back. I suspect that these stories are far more common, they just become fashionable to report on. Suspect or fear…
In place of what?
I’ll just leave this here, I think.
Read the same. The unseriousness of the authorities is more blatant by the day.
Mating season in the aviary.
From the replies,
Since I have been b**ching about this for a couple of years now, and even just yesterday, I feel the obligation to report that the local library system where we are staying for the next two months, St. Johns county (St. Augustine…”Bridge of Lions raised when lights flashing”), not only had Bastiat’s collected works available for checkout but I was also able to place a hold on Hobbes’ Leviathan and Hayek’s Road to Serfdom. Maybe a glitch in the Matrix or I am just unlucky with libraries…or something else?
The trans swimsuit cover didn’t do it? Sports Illustrated’s entire staff is to be laid off.
—Instapundit
OT: Today, January 19, is the anniversary of the pardoning of “Tokyo Rose” by President Ford.
Well, to be a surgeon, you have to de-humanize the person you are about to slice into. That doesn’t mean that you must be sadistic (or else they’d all be pushing against anesthesia because the screaming is great) but it may mean that you view the thing you are cutting as a meat machine that you’d like to fix.
I think that those plastic surgeons who treat anything other than those who have been disfigured by external forces are primarily driven by their need to repay their medical school bills and are willing to do what it takes to get the money. There are arguments about gaining reconstructive skills prior to mass mutilation events (like a war or non-fatal mass causality event) but I rather doubt that motivates all of those surgeons.
Heh. My father was not happy about that. He felt that she was a traitor who got better than what she deserved and that should have been the end of it. That and surrendering Okinawa back to Japan, which happened about the same time, he was not happy about.
Added for context…Similar to the things I “learned” in school that were not exactly compatible with what he experienced, I had the impression that the American troops were more amused by her than angered. Well…
Well, there’s https://americanveteranscenter.org/avc-media/magazine/wwiichronicles/issue-xxxiii-winter-200506/setting-the-record-straight/ but I haven’t checked to see who actually controlled that organization back then (or now, TBF).
That was a common sentiment at the time. That is indeed the popular view that surrounded me during my childhood in the sixties. But I am inclined to remember that as an American citizen living in Japan, she was extremely vulnerable to the murderous Japanese regime. What she did to “cooperate” without propagandizing for the Japanese seemed clever.
I’ve had glue traps trap local lizards as well. It’s somewhat shit to stick a critter on a surface to starve to death or die of dehydration. I’m not against killing rodents but the killing should be somewhat humane. (No, I don’t have an opinion on the rat poisons that slowly kill the creature after it drinks water. Yes, that makes me somewhat of a hypocrite, since the poisoned rats can kill some critter that saw a snack.)
Hey, you can always get ideas from this guy: https://www.youtube.com/@ShawnWoodsMousetrapMonday He feeds his catch to wild animals.
FTFY
British sentimentality.
It’s somewhat shit to stick a critter on a surface to starve to death or die of dehydration.
Fine, use this one instead.
Outside of fixing the cultural desert many/most of those kids live in when they go home (which will never be solved from the outside), one immediate fix is to stop warehousing these studens in huge numbers. Break up these industrial size high schools, bring back jr. high (7/8/9) senior high (10/11/12) and cap their student population at under 1K each. Or even lower. NO jr or sr high should be thousands of kids. It’s like crowded urban centers where anonymity of numbers breeds aggression.
Oh? Not enough campuses? How much education really needs more just a classroom? Start throwing up temporary office trailers where needed empty lots/parking lots and drain the mobs.
re: Sports Illustrated…
More than 100 in-house journalists for a monthly sports mag? No wonder it’s going under.
Re: The Good Life – Richard Briers described Tom Good as a “selfish parasite”.
Well, indeed. The MouseTrapMonday guy had a variant of that. I’ve had more murderous mousetraps in my previous home’s garage, only to find out that the other mice were a bit peckish and ate everything that the trap’s jaws didn’t cover. Mice aren’t nice but I don’t want to unknowingly torture a mouse to death.
I do like cats, after all.
Oscar Wilde only wishes he were that gay.
[Name that reference!]
Or she’s deeply autistic. Or has something similar to Cotard’s syndrome. I seemed to detect a little bit of word salad, which suggests a touch of schizophrenia.
Richard Briers on Tom Good:
Natural lefty hero.
Indeed.
As Lancastrian Oik noted in the original thread,
And again, the Goods’ experiment in supposedly rejecting bourgeois values – their “sustainable and non-greedy alternative” – only seems remotely possible after an awful lot of use has been made of those same bourgeois values. And even then, only when other people who still embrace those values are available next door. And then there’s the final episode, mentioned in the thread, which casts further doubt on the whole sustainability thing.
That the socialist eco-loons quoted in the post hadn’t registered these obvious details, on which half the jokes depend – or chose not to mention them – possibly tells us something.
I hadn’t even heard of this bullshit.
At least in America schools are required to be free of religiosity. Here in the UK they’re trying to make secular schools illegal.
Well, non-Islamic ones.
Any bets on the outcome?
You left out climate chaos.
Drag queen “Alora Chateau” performance to celebrate Christmas: pulls out a baby Jesus in an abortion and swings the prop around for cash.
We know all drag queens are insane, but until recently I didn’t realize that so many are this depraved.
It’s almost as if, like Twitter, some organizations are just full of bullshit jobs. Possibly as a result of Elite Overproduction.
Arena Group is a licensee who pays Authentic Brands Group (owners not only of the Sports Illustrated brand, but of the branding rights to dead celebrities such as Marilyn Monroe and Elvis Presley) for the rights to use the brand not for a keyring or a tote bag, but for a paper and web publication with the quaint commemorative name of “Sports Illustrated”, recalling an old-timey magazine that millions of American men imprinted on when they were 15 and still have nostalgic feelings about even though the current version has been spitting in their faces for the past couple of decades. When Arena lost the name for not paying their licensing bill, they evidently didn’t think that the actual sportswriting was compelling enough for the operation to be commercial under another name. Meanwhile, Authentic Brands Group says the name is still there and, like switching their janitorial services firm from Aramark to Sodexo, it’s just a matter of finding another service provider to put out the magazine.
Well that would fit in with the uniparty lines we were taught in school. Like how Hirohito was just a poor little emperor who wanted to tend to his plants and flowers but mean, mean Mr. Tojo had other plans for him. Or other similar historical ‘facts’ that under further scrutiny seem highly suspicious and conflict with the recollections of people who actually lived through those times. Of course not everything that is believed at a given time in history turns out to be true. Until it is. Until it’s not. Gulf of Tonkin (cough, cough), JFK assassination (cough, cough, cough), the French navy forces didn’t fire on the allies landing in North Africa, French “resistance” for that matter (cough, cough, cough, cough…), others more glaring that slip my mind. The greater question/point being, why was Ford bothering with such a minor detail 30 years later? It was what it was, why not let it be? . Meanwhile Hirohito lived to a ripe old age of 87. One of the longest reigning monarchs in world history.
In the honor department Tojo > Hirohito.
I laughed – more than once, I might add – and I’m not sorry:
https://twitter.com/PicturesFoIder/status/1748581253119365260
The second guy’s faceplant into the tarmac is a joy to behold.
Two videos for your enjoyment and edification:
1: From Sweden, one day everyone just woke up with blonde hair and blue eyes. Probably endocrine disruption from eating all that lutefisk.
2 From PragerU, a look into a virtual crab bucket as seven of the usual suspects play Oppression Olympics for a grand prize of $1000.
The results will amaze you. (video is longish, but worth it)
Because there had been significant reporting on the embarrassing details of how Mrs Toguri was railroaded? Not to mention the shameful treatment of thousands of patriotic American citizens of Japanese ancestry? And perhaps because it allowed him to publicly demonstrate justice and mercy while shaming a previous, Democrat, administration?
Besides, a full pardon was not “a minor matter” to Mrs Toguri, who was still alive.
I think this is it, “The First Swedes”, “De första svenskarna, Faktaserie från 2019”.
“Losing in the High Court will not just damage Michaela. It will also strike a blow to adult authority in schools across the land.”
Which is why it’s likely Michaela will lose.
I thought it implicit.
I thought the list should be complete. (Or less incomplete. What did I leave out?)
My college roommate’s father and grandparents were in an internment camp. The issue of reparations was in the news back then. He told me his grandfather thought such a thing was ridiculous. Yes it sucked but they were treated well, they moved on with their lives, were successful in this country and considering the circumstances an acknowledgment and such was sufficient. Yes it was wrong. So was the whole bloody war. His mother lived not far from Nagasaki. Smaller village/town, a safe distance but…? Meanwhile American (and other allies) citizens, POWs were used as slave labor and literally beaten to death. I recall a case from a couple decades ago where an American ex-POW tried to sue Mitsubishi in a US court. The US judge ruled in Mitsubishi’s favor telling the serviceman that he had already received his deserved reparations by the US winning the war and his being able to benefit from the post-war economic boom.
Compared to how Imperial Japan treated people, yes indeed, extremely so.
But it wasn’t all “well”. Many lost personal property, farms, and homes.
The cruelty of the Japanese government is irrelevant to what these people experienced. Why use that to criticize President Ford’s pardon of Mrs Toguri?
Given the various dodges and re-branding used to obscure the dubious arguments, I fear that will be difficult to achieve.
That will “give us something to do”. 😃
The predictable consequences of “woke” indoctrination:
Black woman intentionally plows her car into a New York City police officer, telling authorities she wanted to teach him a “lesson.”
As illustrated here more times than I can count, there’s an industry devoted to the cultivation of pretentious resentment, racial gaslighting, and outright psychological abuse.
And its proponents would have us believe that they are the good guys.
Missed this:
Agree. But as awful as the specific surgeons who are motivated by evil, for lack of a more PC-word, what disturbs me much more than the Dr. Frankensteins are the Igores. These surgeons generally are not the fly-by-night liposuction kin. These people have other medical doctors referring them, nurses assisting them, anesthesiologists and possibly other medical professionals in the OR at the time. Then there are the numerous administrators approving and making the arrangements. Moving one step beyond, doctors in other specialties continue to be associated with the hospital. Like they can’t find work elsewhere?
Yes. Thank God things like that don’t happen in America, or in western civilization in general today. The pardon was a grandstanding by Ford. Just another part of the shaming of America that was gaining ground back then.
Anyone who lost personal property I am pretty sure had been compensated as reasonably as they should be. I’m talking about punitive “reparations” considered due to people like my friend’s grandfather who himself thought it was a bit weird. But then why drag ethnic Japanese internment into a discussion regarding a pardon…30 years after the fact…for one Tokyo Rose? Because the media was banging on about it at the time? And why was that? Were they genuinely concerned about this lingering wrong that was done? Or maybe…something else?
Here’s something totally irrelevant, IYKWIM…I got a bit curious about what became of Tojo’s family. Seems they went on about their lives, their connection to his evil followed them a little but eventually it dissolved into quasi-anonymity. As it should. Actually I believe someone, like a grandchild I think, got involved in Japanese politics but I could be misremembering. But that AH fella…his genealogy has its own Wikipedia page. His relatives were hounded for decades. Those in the Soviet sphere persecuted for simply existing.
I’m pretty sure it’s called “De sista Svenskarna” and it’s a reality TV series following newly arrived migrants from the vibrant south.