Friday Ephemera (729)
It’s all about a heightened awareness of the road. || Welding helmet of note. || Massage, drumming, and fire, together at last. || Skillz. || Not skillz. || I have concerns. || Assisting the encore, or lady not left hanging. || Surprisingly calm, considering. || Some clutter, toilet needs attention, £80,000. || I’m told it can get competitive. || Parenting. || Night vision. || New Doctor Who monster detected. || Scenes of duck up-picking. || And in pub-purchasing news. || The progressive retail experience, parts 566, 567, and 568. || Airbending attempted. || At last, the statistics of simultaneous blinking. || A little kicking required, methinks. || Incoming. || Incoming 2. || Lost flock of sheep found. || He had four hamsters in his pants, not gerbils, as stated. || And finally, fear not, he has jugs and jugs of it.
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Can we call it an art form now? Because I think it’s become an art form.
I’d regard anyone who indulges in such tossery, who chooses to participate and encourages others to do the same, as being neurotic, compromised, and morally unreliable.
Oh, they’re all that. But look at how finely tuned their neuroticism is! They use the actual written characters from the indigenous languages. (Characters devised only after encountering European languages, mind.)
You almost have to admire such exquisite self-abasement. Can you get more morally pure than they? No matter how many mattresses you pile on, their sensitive souls will always feel the pea!
Here, I’ll add my entry:
Dicentra spectabilis
Double Mayflower ancestry, bitchez.
I mean the morally compromised bit in a physical sense, too, by the way. If I were in a dicey situation, one likely requiring physical intervention by onlookers, supposed friends, I would be significantly less confident that a self-styled progressive, a person who mouths such things, would be willing to help out. Even if the aggressor and their wrongness were glaringly obvious.
Methinks that they’d likely be doing the menacing. Either that or they’d materially help the aggressor. Lie to the cops about the incident. Shame you for being peeved by the assault. That kind of thing.
One weekend, decades ago, I was helping some right-on, anti-capitalist ‘creative’ types to unload heavy boxes of fairly fragile items from a van and carrying them into their offices, adjacent to our own. While doing this, and while holding several such boxes, arms effectively pinned, an angry, unhinged black guy walked over and, seemingly at random, went out of his way to provoke a fight with me. He appeared quite determined to punch someone, anyone, though his reasoning and justification were far from clear.
Minutes earlier, I’d pointed out to him, politely, that the person he’d wanted to see wasn’t around at the weekend and had suggested he call or come back during office hours. He’d walked off muttering, but had returned, surlier than before, and seemed to feel personally injured by the humdrum fact that not everyone works over the weekend. Such that he felt entitled to grab me by the collar and be about as aggressive and menacing as he could be, fractionally short of an actual fight.
I therefore had to choose between dropping the heavy boxes containing fragile items and getting into a brawl with a burly and emotionally unstable stranger, or staying calm and hoping that the half dozen or so onlookers – the right-on ‘creatives’, the people who saw me every day and from whom they often begged favours – the people I was helping out – might intervene.
They were, after all, standing mere feet away. And they looked on for quite some time, silent and entirely inert. They’d watched the entire drama unfold, and could see which party was being gratuitously, recreationally aggressive. And yet they did nothing at all. Not even a hint of verbal protest. Presumably, they were weighing the racial characteristics of the parties, rather than the obvious moral aspect.
Happily, The Other Half arrived and intervened, alone, and calmed things down just enough to prevent the menacing and one-sided threats turning into an actual scuffle. But I remember the event quite vividly. It was, as they say, instructive.
In the days that followed, none of the right-on, anti-capitalist ‘creative’ types acknowledged what had happened, and they didn’t seem inclined to explain their own remarkable inertness. They did, however, continue to ask for favours and to engage in their usual mooching. As if my opinion of them, and my willingness to indulge them, couldn’t possibly have been coloured by recent events.
Just recalled from half a century ago: In Sam Levinson’s autobiography Everything But Money, he described growing up in the tenements of New York. All the kids were crammed into one bed. So I guess that means all kids are not just gay but queer. Right? Right?
This. A thousand times this.
I have lost track of the number of acquaintances who have joined in the liberal chorus condemning a crime victim for successfully fighting back and killing the attacker.
Without a doubt IMNSHO. It is a necessary thing in a social animal. The problem with it has been our approach to dealing with it. This “low self esteem” crap is part of it but the “all violence is wrong” mentality, one favored by the women who run our primary schools, is what enables the bullying to get out of hand. It’s the same stupid mentality that wants to ban guns and sets grossly unreasonable limits on police and military rules of engagement. Consequently we have allowed all sorts of freaks to rule over our society. Re weirdness or weakness, bullies usually only attack the kinds weirdness that project weakness. The bully crowd is more sympatico with the boldly freaky.
One reply stated it was a parody account. I took it as fake myself but fake in the sense of bikers taking advantage of an opportunity to both play the victim yet again and to bully those who dare intrude on their sacred bikelane territory. Real videos of which are numerous.
OK, what is this thing? Is it just a British thing? Please tell me it’s just something way over there. I’ve only seen two of these now, both of seemingly UK origin, this being the first to include a guy…well a “guy”.
OK, this is the second Sam Levinson reference I have seen in the past 12 hours. Last night while watching a rerun of The Rockford Files, Rockford made a passing reference that I didn’t understand the context of. We also had that book in our house growing up. One of the very few books we had that wasn’t some sort of reference book or instruction manual. Which brings to three (maybe four if you count Rockford twice and assuming that I paying attention the first time) references to Sam Levinson in my lifetime. I’m starting to believe in this simulation thing. OK, not really. But still…
More information, please, I am working on my Harvard PhD thesis, “California Dreaming; Pre-1930s LGBF4UM1+/+ Early-teen Polyamorous Foot-Fetishist Interstate Migration”
Can we call it an art form now? Because I think it’s become an art form.
This sort of crap is why the field of public health and preventive medicine has become a joke. There was another loon featured here recently on a school of public health staff of over a dozen that had one actual “I have touched a patient” doctor.
That the ghosts of John Snow and Walter Reed aren’t haunting these guys is a shame.
Farnsworth M Muldoon, 17th year PhD candidate
(Potato Famine; Crikey! The Bolsheviks let’s get the hell out of here!)
Cowardice masked as concern/caring explains so much.
The Mayo Clinic is now the Past Expiry Date Salad Cream Clinic.
Guess her skin color: Florida mom incites 500-person riot at skating rink after daughter’s birthday party is canceled: ‘Tear this bitch up’
“make them crackers work” and “stress them the f—k out.”
More easily watched. Repeatedly. With much chuckling.
And here I thought British Columbia less insane.
Progressive always will. That’s why they’re ‘morally unreliable’.
Well, again, it was an instructive experience. One that fits a pattern I’ve subsequently noticed many times, though not usually from such close quarters.
Jugs and jugs
Well, at least I know now that my gag reflex is still working.
self-esteem: another cargo cult belief. One observes that high functioning individuals have high (not outrageous) self-esteem. Therefore, giving people high self-esteem will cause high functioning. Of course, that is backwards. The accomplished person has high self-esteem because they have accomplishments. Giving someone with no accomplishments high self-esteem leads to trigger finger responses to slights, sometimes literally.
It is the same with home ownership. It was found decades ago that those who own a home are middle class or higher, therefore getting people into homes would make them middle class. We found out in 2008 that this was false when those who got home loans they could not afford defaulted. Or going to college–admitting people who cannot do the work to “give them a college degree”. The woke simply cannot understand cause and effect and get it exactly backwards more often than not.
All part of the service.
Indeed. These leftist “researchers” invent theories, never test them, and spend decades insisting their theories are irrefutable fact.
And they will deny you funding if you want to do research to test those theories. Maybe even get you fired.
More precisely, never honestly test them.
And here I thought British Columbia less insane.
Not sure where you got that impression. BC has always been Canada’s land of fruits and nuts. Something about the water in the Pacific I’m guessing.
That would also explain Oregon and Washington and California.
Pity that. I was under the impression things got saner going West above the 48th parallel.
https://thompsonblog.co.uk/2024/07/friday-ephemera-729.html#comment-174967
“eco-friendly glitter” “made from plants”
WTF? Looks like mylar to me.
I just had a discussion with someone close to me who seems to be getting their news from woke sources. They were claiming that the overturning of Chevron defference would gut agency ability to act. ie was a bad thing. I pointed out that it only gives courts the ability to review agency actions when they are basicly making things up and going beyond the statutes. That is all it does. They were upset about the presidential immunity ruling. I said if a pres commits an actual crime, he can be impeached and then tried and jailed. The immunity covers official actions. Local gov officials and agencies are already assumed to have this immunity. People are being lied to and swallowing the lies.
My liberal acquaintances reject all facts that contradict those lies.
Yes. It has been going on for decades. The vast majority of people, left and right, exist mostly in their silos. Some do make the effort to get outside of their perceptions but should they dare report back to those within the home silo about what is going on elsewhere, they get pummeled for having done so. Especially if what they find out is especially discomforting. See, the discovery becomes their fault for associating with whichever devils the other side is. Some resort to simply picking some middle ground between the two and blaming “both sides”equally. Saves a lot of thinking. Others just go mad.
Often after my wife has some text conversations with her sister, she looks at me astonished at how her sister has no idea about say, Hunter Biden’s laptop or problems with Boeing aircraft. Yet SiL does pay attention to “the news”. She’s a retired medical professional. She knows stuff.
Added, re My liberal acquaintances reject all facts that contradict those lies.: I know a few Trump supporters who believed the drink bleach hoax and/or the Charlottesville “fine people” hoax. They rationalized it away, similar to the rejection of certain facts.
Pity that. I was under the impression things got saner going West above the 48th parallel.
They sort of do until you get to BC. Alberta and Saskatchewan are far more clear thinking. Although, that’s changing. Edmonton and Calgary are being taken over by progressives.
Truth isn’t a Leftwing value. Indeed, even when facts are on the table, if they contradict the narrative, it is the facts that must be jettisoned.
At one time leftists could honestly believe their myths–that socialism brings prosperity and freedom, that all inequality is due to oppression, that crime is caused by poverty, etc. But as the evidence has built up, they have been forced to resort to ever more absurd lies in order to justify clinging to their cherished myths.
Let’s accompany that with some Offended Performance Art.
Reposting a comment I made back in 2020:
In the 1950’s the entire left, from liberals to communists, was cheerfully confident that progressive education policies would quickly eliminate the black-white achievement gap. Integration. Busing. Affirmative Action. Massive subsidies. Therapeutic handling of misbehavior. This did not happen. As the years went by, the left became every more desperate and ever more angry. It is now fair to say that they are maddened by the failure of their policies. They are not sane.
Thorazine, stat.
A little shoe leather dentistry is in order for the “artist”
Fucking hate these leftists and the rest of the TDS lunatics, especially those NeverTrumpers on the right who give legitimacy to those who have promoted this raging hate. It’s a wonder to me that this didn’t happen sooner. Pray that no one in the background was harmed or killed.
Things just got crazy. Trump shot at rally.
A historical reminder.
Meanwhile, my liberal ex-friends continue to incite hatred of conservatives while making excuses for leftist thugs and terrorists.
Sounds like Secret Service security was not what it’s supposed to be.
Obviously a reliable witness.
? I am always willing to honor the 72 hour rule. But do you think he does not sound credible?
But still, how could the shooter get into position like that? Combine my question with the denial of a request for increased Secret Service protection, and the Democrats who want to deny all Secret Service protection for Trump.
For an illustration of the value of the 72 hour rule, the description of the shooter changed from “a Chinese man” to “a white male” in one hour. (Internet Archive Wayback Machine is useful that way.)
My money is on “Antifa affiliated” or “Bernie Bro”, but one cannot know.
He sounds credible but the muppet hair gives me pause.
Well, most of the Never-Trumpers are too lardy to climb up on a roof and would likely have an attack of the vapours if they had to handle a firearm.
This is a British blog, so should we start talking about “those gingers”?
. . .
No, better to stick to safer topics of vitriol, such British vs. American food, given what I’ve heard about anti-redhead bigotries.
In the video it seems like it was a bit windy. Perhaps that made the difference. I see estimates of the distance being between 135-150 yards. Not exactly Lee Harvey Oswald but seems it would be someone with some idea about what they were doing.
Sounds like Secret Service security was not what it’s supposed to be.
Assuming the ginger is not just MSU, it could just be that the guys he talked to just assumed that it was their own SS or local rozzers setting up their counter-sniper teams. Who the hell knows how many cranks these guys have telling them stuff.
The shooter (the guy on the roof with his head blown off) could also turn out to be (to have the social media profile of) a mentally ill loner, a conspiracy nut, or something not-pin-downable like the 2017 Las Vegas shooter.
One way or another, the media associations for “political violence” will be January 6, American gun culture/toxic masculinty, and not Antifa, and the left will not be put in a position where they have to backtrack and disavow because the shooter liked one of their posts.
You are certainly correct about those possibilities.
But I cannot forget that this happened after years of liberal incitement.
I’m afraid that one man was shot in the head and killed instantly, while at least one woman was hit in the arm.
So I guess we’ve all switched sides on “stochastic terrorism.”
Watching the initial coverage, I told my husband that soon the media would pivot to making the story about Republican reaction (and how dangerous it might be) and SURE ENOUGH, along comes some network slattern to blame Trump for not “lowering the temperature”
You CANNOT hate the media enough.
[ Slurps coffee. ]
Morning, all. Did I miss anything during the n…?
Oh.
I have to say, as a new campaign photo, this is damn near perfect.
Not entirely unrelated.
Absolutely textbook Cluster B reversal going on. It’s like they can’t help themselves.
This was actually…pretty funny.
Bugger. Tried to replace the fuzzy thumbnail attached to your comment with a clearer image. But it seems I can’t do that.
Anyhoo.
Lincoln was straight.
And if he wasn’t, he’s still dead.
I have to say, as a new campaign photo, this is damn near perfect.
I’m seeing a Pulitzer for that photographer. Doug Mills of the NY Times.
See what happens when you annoy Democrats?
Bob is a cyclist and doesn’t like big cars. “Tax them to oblivion,” says he.
Also, “I live in London. No need to drive.”
It seems the t-shirts are already out.
And remember, dear readers. Always respect the media.
There’s your problem.
I used to live in the middle of a big city. Not owning a car put serious restrictions on what I could do.
What with the thrill of public transport.
But I cannot forget that this happened after years of liberal incitement.
When Godwin went Godwin.
So, anyway… what else is new?
Pretty much the same approximate topic but TIL that significant numbers of talking heads, especially conservative talking heads, don’t seem to have any spacial grasp of what a millimeter is.
You CANNOT hate the media enough.
“Because it is common for snipers to shoot people in the ear, we can’t call it an assassination attempt”
And in weather news:
Be alert at all times, readers.
And in weather news:
Heatwave? 96°F predicted high isn’t exactly a heatwave in summer in Birmingham.
Oh wait, you mean the other one – 65°F. Stay hydrated Brummies.
Here it’s grey skies, drizzle, and 15°. In other words, British summer time.
[ Monitors temperature closely. ]
[ Puts plastic sheeting on all bar stools, just in case. ]
In weather news
“Symptoms of these conditions would manifest relatively quickly and would include … a mild temperature.”
Don’t mean to brag, don’t mean to boast but aside from liking hot butter on my breakfast toast, it’s been lows in the mid-60’s, highs in the mid/upper 80’s here. I don’t know what everyone else’s problem is. It’s July.
[ Hands out deeply intrusive colon monitors. ]
[ Stares at thermometer. ]
Labour’s not been in power for a fortnight and there’s already sewage spilt into open water?
Expecting 96°F (35.5°C).
In case of swamp ass.
Yep, we moved to the hills of southwest Washington last year. Loving these summer temps after a lifetime living in SoCal.
More mental illness proudly displayed.
Nerdrage jihadists get 72 women like her if they achieve martyrdom.
Youth self esteem…
Back in about 1980 there was a big movement to “improve self-esteem” among lagging students, in California.
Numerous studies, pilot projects, editorial noises.
Somehow a study snuck into the public eye, that concluded that self-esteem was a downstream consequence of actual achievements and learned capabilities.
Causal or not, a couple years later the whole effort faded from view. After having spent vast sums, distracted from actual teaching, and perverted the psyches of many thousands. Oh, well, they *meant well*. Maybe.
And now the old is new again.
Godwin…
Mike choses not to mention the corollary that almost immediately followed after Godwins Law became well-known.
Corollary: the person who first introduces Hitler/Nazis into the argument, thereby loses the argument.
Someone was lamenting to me that Biden was now so obviously senile and unfit for office, but that Trump was crazy and scary. He said who can one vote for when it is like this. I wanted to ask: “so you didn’t like $2 gas, low unemployment, 2% inflation, and a closed border”? but never argue with someone who believes shit like that.
The reason people believe shit like that is that they rarely encounter anyone willing to challenge their belief in shit like that so why wouldn’t they continue to believe it? And there’s no use in arguing because why should they change their beliefs because one or two people try to tell them otherwise? Best everyone keep their heads down and invest in helicopter futures. Of course there’s no guarantee which group will be flying the helicopters and which group will be learning to fly.
You CANNOT hate the media enough.
Newsweek notices the Trump campaign has started a Gofundme for the PA victims, and dutifully reports it in their own special fashion.
Suicide bomber goes to the beyond. Is met by George Washington and a bunch of soldiers. Says George: “sorry about the mistranslation. It is 72 Virginians you meet in the next world, not virgins.” Aahhhhhhh!! says Ahmed
I’m in the middle of a two-week spate of triple-digit temps (in freedom degrees) and about 20% humidity.
Blast furnace.
Farther south of here, where they get 100+ days for most of the summer, a father and daughter from Wisconsin went for a hike without sufficient water, got lost, and perished.
Hot tip: Do NOT go hiking in Utah’s national parks in July or August. Not only is there blistering heat that will desiccate you into jerky, but there are flash floods that show up out of nowhere (the rain is happening upstream of you) and sweep you away. Try September or April instead. April has wildflowers.
The last tweet of the man who was killed by the assassin.
The indominable cat.
Heh. TIL that Poland has a mountain.
Cat: “Now I have an endless supply of things to push off other things.”