Unauthorised Jam Consumption
And other modern dramas.
First, from the comments, where Clam warns,
What grates, I think, is the routine overstepping of boundaries, the casual insult. Judging by the transgressive sandwiches, to which the note is attached, it seems the child was prevented from eating and, presumably, publicly embarrassed.
A while ago, one of my nieces received a snotty note scolding her for sending her son to school with a packed lunch consisting of a banana and a peanut butter sandwich, an occasional treat. Apparently, peanut butter, like jam, is a verboten foodstuff. And so, as a result, someone is employed to poke through children’s lunch boxes and to then write snotty notes to parents. A function doubtless enjoyed.
But here’s the thing. If you aren’t paying for something directly, even if you’re still paying indirectly, via taxes, you won’t by default be regarded as a customer, for whom some minimal regard might be shown, and whose boundaries should be respected. Instead, it’s quite likely you’ll be treated as an inconvenience, an irritation, someone who can be insulted and subjected to condescension.
See also, our glorious NHS.
The item linked above recounts, in abbreviated form, my attempt to return a set of crutches to the local NHS hospital – and how an ostensibly simple task became a 45-minute ordeal with farcical overtones. Entailing a trek of a half a mile or so, down endless corridors on multiple floors, from one department to another, then another, then another. An odyssey enlivened by encounters with bizarrely rude and unhelpful staff, and while walking past posters stressing the moral imperative of patients returning their crutches. An undertaking made as impractical, as maddening, and as absurdly complicated, as would seem humanly possible.
And it’s not entirely heartening to realise, as you trek down yet another corridor, that you’re entrusting your wellbeing, perhaps even your life, to an institution that can’t organise a practical system for the returning of crutches.
Oh, and while I have your attention, I bring dating instructions from the land of the badly tattooed and terminally self-involved:
Please update your files and lifestyles accordingly.
Also, open thread.
I don’t mind peanut butter/nuts being left out. There’s a kid in my daughter’s kindergarten with multiple allergies – it causes anaphylaxis – and it must be somewhat terrifying for her parents to send her off, knowing how grotty kids naturally are, and how much they share their food anyway. And I grew up with peanut butter sandwiches for school lunch, and the jokes of the era (‘caution: contains nuts’). But the school lunch box system still operates on trust, you know… I don’t want my daughter’s friend to have anaphylaxis either. A busybody prying around in my daughter’s lunchbox is next level craziness!
Big *this*. On steroids. 2020 was my tipping point. Especially with the “conservatives” who are milquetoast/”civilized” with the leftist scum yet can so easily find their chi gestapo when others stand up to the leftists.
@WTP,
Part of the problem we have is that there’s no clearly stated “operating manual” for our civilization. It’s a product of an accretive process conducted over millennia, and there are inclusions and growths in it all of it that don’t make much sense, while there are other things that are unseen and unknown, yet vitally important to the vast organism being functional.
In short, Chesterton’s Fence. You don’t know why that feature, that custom, that value is there, but you will know once it is gone. Modern life seems to mostly consist of idiots playing civilizational Jenga, pulling out this, then that, and all while watching for the whole thing to collapse into a pile of rubble. What’s worse? Most of the idiots don’t even know they’re playing, but there they are, pulling out the pieces all the same.
I take a somewhat mechanistic view on it all. I see the world as a succession of Skinner Boxes, interacting with the organisms in it. Do they get what they want? Well, then the behavior they exhibited while in that specific “box” will continue. Should it fail them, then they’ll try something else… Maybe.
The major problem is that the people running all of these things never seem to get out of their offices and examine what is really going on out there; what cues are their laboriously-constructed boxes actually sending, and what responses do the people finding themselves inside those boxes make to those specific stimuli?
This is why so many government programs go off the rails from the very beginning; they’re constructed on false premises and a mindset that seems to be predicated on “If I think it, it will happen…”
Which leads us to Ms. jam Gestapo: This is very obviously an individual without much in the way of ability to consider others and their likely responses. She thinks it appropriate to send off a nasty little passive-aggressive note to a parent, who for all that person knows, might not be able to afford more than a jam sandwich for their child. Ms. jam Gestapo appears to have a mindset that says “nasty little notes work” when she wants to modify behavior; from this, we may extrapolate and work out that she is likely one of those people who “live in their own heads” more than is really healthy. In her worldview, her behavior is both appropriate and effective. And, since she doesn’t get any failure-feedback, she will continue along her delusional path until she runs into someone truly intractable, who will likely do very unpleasant things indeed to her. At that point, learning may occur. I wouldn’t lay money on the odds of it, however…
Well, teaching, like the world of the G.P., does tend to attract people with a certain attitude, a tendency to overstep. There is, I think, a high concentration of people who like to chide and condescend. I’ve seen attitudes that would be jarring and unambiguously offensive if encountered during almost any other kind of interaction. Say, while, say, buying shoes.
But without even the leverage of paying directly – and the prospect of taking your custom elsewhere and doing damage to their commercial reputation – that doesn’t usually leave you in a great position. As I said in the linked thread, regarding encounters with the NHS:
And that was my lingering impression – the tacit understanding, shared by both parties, that, however inadequate the service, short of an actual catastrophe, there’s bugger all you can do about it. Because they already have your wallet.
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I laughed and I’m not sorry.
Context, for those unfamiliar with niche British TV.
@Farnsworth M Muldoon,
Sent that hilarious “fact check” link to a few friends.
One of those friends is a very nice but increasingly liberal guy, and his immediate response was to reject it, because Twitter is “biased”.
That’s the scary place we are at – supposedly highly educated and doubtlessly very intelligent people, who think the definition of “unbiased” means to be very biased towards regressive liberals, while an open platform like Twitter is “biased”.
Also, they are incapable of thinking freely and judging things based on evidence. I am sure he would not find the fact checking by the debate moderators biased, but the evident, visual evidence of Kamala lying is to be rejected as “bias”.
Ooh, new commenter registrations. It’s all terribly exciting.
[ Resumes preparation of baked potatoes. ]
Communist graveyards?
Zombies are not noted for high functioning brains.
A high-functioning Frenchman comments:
It seems overwhelmingly likely that George Monbiot would prefer a charity which raises funds for those disabled while committing violent crimes.
Not only do Clarkson & company have a sense of humor, they are willing to laugh at themselves. Leftists, on the other hand, are psychopathic narcissists and thus incapable of laughing at themselves or indeed at much of anything other than their victims.
I’m still pondering the claim – for which no evidence was offered – that the series was, among other alleged sins, “homophobic.” In two decades of watching the thing, I don’t recall ever being offended. In fact, some of the funnier moments were gay-tinged, as it were. A rather camp jeep comes to mind, as do Clarkson’s impromptu hot pants, and the running gag about his interview with Will Young. All funny.
And again, the series has plenty of gay fans. Though not being offended by tiny changes in air pressure, they’re obviously the wrong kind of gay people. The kind that doesn’t count.
Remember Al Capp’s S.W.I.N.E., Students Wildly Indignant about Nearly Everything?
A in-some-ways-sad part of growing up.
I’m still pondering the claim – for which no evidence was offered – that the series was, among other alleged sins, “homophobic.”
In the world of pinheads looking to be offended, anything not explicitly pro-gay is homophobic. Some of these alleged sins from the pinheads.
Several factors immediately come to mind:
The teaching profession attracts meddlesome personalities.
The teacher education complex indoctrinates meddlesomeness and excludes those who are not properly meddlesome.
Retail establishments are subject to immediate customer feedback: Bad products or service and I will quickly and easily switch to other businesses. Schools, on the other hand, have your kids and your money for an entire school year and it’s much more effort to switch.
What, nothing about lesbians and Subarus?
An un-heard-of problem when I was a young child. I have read multiple articles attributing this trend to an excessively clean world: Young kids would not develop these allergies if they played in the dirt more.
I know/knew liberals whose opinion of Twitter reversed 180 degrees when Elon Musk bought it and halted the leftist censorship. Ditto their opinion of Musk himself and all his business ventures. Before, Tesla and Starlink were ultra-cool, but now they (and Musk) are targets of hate.
An irony being that Pink News has almost certainly done more harm to the public perception of gay people. Say, by giving the impression, relentlessly, that gay people are whiny, neurotic and insufferable.
Say, by giving the impression, relentlessly, that gay people are whiny, neurotic and insufferable.
That. Also the LIBMAFLCIO&/+ never, ever, ever utter an unkind word, even in jest, toward any race, creed, color, religion, sex, or national origin. Ever.
What, nothing about lesbians and Subarus?
In 20+ years there must be, “…I know I’m not homophobic as I very much enjoy watching lesbians on the internet.” [Clarkson]
Leftism/liberalism/progressivism involves, among other things, wholesale projection.
The joke is, unsurprisingly, based in reality.
In the 70’s/80’s there was a huge war in “the lesbian community” between butch lesbians who wore jeans and boots and flannel shirts and “lipstick lesbians” who enjoyed wearing makeup and dresses, shaved their legs, etc. The lipstick lesbians didn’t care what the butch lesbians wore, but the butch lesbians were furious that the lipstick lesbians were “having fun wrong”. At the same time there was a great deal of angry back-and-forth over whether it was acceptable (acceptable!) for lesbians to use dildos or any other penetrating toy. In both cases, the controversies revolved around political criteria, AKA “the personal is political”, but at root I think it was all psychological. (But then, leftism is also at root psychological.)
I still recall that time, albeit with some loss of detail, because although I was only an observer I knew more than a few lesbians and leftists who were always going on about political things. The anger was at times bemusing and at times downright creepy.
How about extra bar snack options?
[ Slides bowl of chili-flavoured toenail clippings to pst314. ]
They’re spicy.
A squeeze of lime helps.
Not much, admittedly, but every little bit.
I’ll add it to your tab.
[ Orders another, larger sack of toenail clippings. ]
The woke mind has created a strange inversion of concepts or risk and harm. Straws are banned for some abstract harm (based on a child’s essay if I’m not mistaken) and people are afraid of all sorts of food things. And yet the very real harm of getting murdered is pooh-poohed as just paranoia.
@ccscientist, who said:
There’s an interesting correlation, here: The idea of a “lockdown” was first (per some reports…) proposed by a schoolgirl in a science fair experiment. Nobody with any authority in epidemiology thought it was a good idea, yet it somehow became public policy around the world.
Methinks that founding public health policy in the wishful thinking of a schoolgirl whose mindset likely includes as much “school avoidance” as possible…? Well, I wouldn’t throw the idea out, based on its source, but I’d damn sure be careful to evaluate its merits thoroughly and on a much smaller scale before enacting it nation- and world-wide.
There’s far too much “SCIENCE!!!” based on wishful thinking, bad observations, and anecdote misinterpretation. It’s about gotten to the point where I automatically disbelieve any of these ridiculous white lab-coated prophets when they stand up and make their statements. Often, you go digging into their work, and what you find is a bunch of badly-conceived “experiments” and highly questionable premises.
Couple cases in point… Starting in the early 1990s, they basically bankrupted the timber industry in the Pacific Northwest, based on the premise that “logging was killing off the spotted timber owl…”
Industry has been dead, lo these last few decades. Spotted owl isn’t doing so well, either… Oddly enough. The population of barred owls, however, is going quite well, as they are rather better at being owls than the spotted variety. They’re functionally indistinguishable in the environment, interbreed, and damn near require a specialist to tell apart.
The Forest Service has now begun a program of barred owl eradication.
Original “SCIENCE!!!” that all this was based on was highly questionable, in the first damn place. I knew a woman who was a field observer for the initial program that “discovered” this fact. She was a grad student in biology at the time, and fully on-board with the whole thing… She believed what she was told by her seniors. Then, she went back and compared her actual field notes to what the data was in all the reports, and found that someone had revised all of her numbers downwards by significant numbers. The areas where she’d done her surveys, the owls weren’t doing so well, but they were also not going extinct. The numbers reported to Congress in support of the timber bans showed that extinction was imminent… She raised the issue, and promptly got black-balled from any work in her field. When I knew her, she was working as a paralegal and barista. With all of the degree requirements completed for a Ph.D, yet unable to get into a program due to her insistence on the truth.
I suspect that there is a lot of this same sort of malfeasance going on in the public health world. Follow the money, find the corruption…
@David,
Might I recommend a bottle of Tajín Clásico seasoning, for your toenail clippings…?
https://www.tajin.com/us/tajin-clasico/
No idea if the stuff is available in Europe, but it is an extremely popular seasoning in Mexico and the western US…
With a seasoning that classy, I’ll have to up the price of the toenail clippings.
Also, good to see that the @username mentions work. I think that may have been my first one as a recipient.
Many people in government and academia deserve tar and feathers.
All the awards are fun to read about, but I particularly noticed this one:
Remember Dr Stephen Maturin’s “cures”?
And then there’s David’s bar snacks. Not sure what they’re intended to cure, though.
It’s more of a research project.
Weight loss – take a look at the offerings and you’ll lose the urge to eat. For days.
@pst314,
Tarring and feathering would be far short of what they deserve, unless you were to do the tarring with boiling hot tar and then light them on fire afterwards… Something akin to what Nero was supposed to have done to the various “Christian martyrs”.
Some few of whom deserved everything they got, having deliberately gone in and disrupted/profaned “pagan” religious rites, there in Rome. They don’t talk about that much, for some reason…
In any event, you have to maintain a certain credulity when dealing with the modern world.
I knew a guy, a microbiologist by training, and an Army officer in the Chemical branch, where they study things like Nuclear, Biological, and Chemical warfare. We had him because they periodically send the guys working at places like USAMRIID out to get experience of the “real Army”. We pulled duty together several times during command post exercises at a Corps Headquarters unit we were both assigned to, and the night shifts were incredibly… Boring. You struck up conversations, and they were wide-ranging. He was a fascinating conversationalist, because he had an extremely jaded view of the entirety of the US biological warfare/defense effort. He knew where all the skeletons were buried, and had zero fear of calling them out… It wasn’t like anyone had a way of replacing him, so he was essentially immune to internal politicking.
Couple of things stand out about those conversations we had. One of the points he raised was that the investigation capability of the “system” was nil, and if anyone ever did anything like, say… The post-9/11 anthrax attacks? He basically laid out exactly how they’d f*ck that up, and that they’d almost certainly settle on some scapegoats among the community he worked in.
That particular conversation happened in the mid-1990s, well before 9/11. He even mentioned Fauci’s name as an example of the party-line hacks working inside the system, and that nearly all the competent people had left government service for work in the burgeoning genetic engineering industry. He had few illusions about their competence, and related things he’d personally observed during what they’re now calling the “Reston Virus” outbreak. One of the issues he described as being endemically ‘effed up was the PPE provision, and the training.
If you remember the CDC effort with the cruise ship in Japan early on during the COVID “epidemic”, then you might recall them showing up without PPE, and then sending infected people back without precautions…
Dude knew his stuff. I wish I knew what the hell he was doing during COVID, and where he is now. I doubt he’d have played ball with anyone in the system, and since he was a deeply pragmatic type, and politically conservative, I suspect they purged him well before COVID happened. He’d have been up for retirement sometime in the early 2000s, anyway…
Another point he raised, which was why I relate this, is that he was the first person I remember talking about mRNA and its potential. At the time, he simply said it was a promising technique, but they were having issues with it in animal testing. Because of that, I paid attention to the literature on that stuff ever since, knowing what it all implied. I never saw anything saying that they’d overcome the problems with mRNA vaccines in testing, either… They were having issues with reproduction, cardio-related issues, and cancers in all the test animals. As I wasn’t keeping track of it past casual interest, I was sorta surprised when they started talking about it for COVID; I was initially pleased, thinking that they’d finally overcome all the problems I’d been reading about for the last 20 years.
Then I went and looked at the literature: There was zero sign that anything had changed, in any of the animal testing, before they approved it for use on an “emergency” basis. This fact alone persuaded me that trusting theses incompetent bastards in regards to the COVID shots was probably a Really Bad Idea(tm), and I’ve avoided them like the literal plague ever since.
Anyone trusting the “SCIENCE!!!” these days is a credulous fool. Look at the work, examine it, see if it accords with your own experience.
Every single person I know who’s gotten the COVID shots and boosters has gotten COVID, suffered horribly from it, and has experienced vastly reduced health ever since. Anecdotal? Dunno… Last time I tested positive for it, I threw it off in a couple of days of discomfort, and haven’t had much residual effect at all. The immunized I know? Dear God, but the misery and medical bills they all have…
I fear that we’ve all been gulled by the very people we put into positions of trust to “take care of us”. I would also suggest following the money; the funds that the NIH has disbursed to its employees from the pharma industry are… Illuminating, when trying to work out “motive”.
Please alert me when you present your results to the Royal Society.
It seems there was at the time a cult of martyrdom–converts doing everything they could to provoke the Roman authorities so that they could become martyrs and thus be perfect Christians.
I got the first two jabs before I wised up. I got COVID once afterwards, but it was a mild case–much like a moderate case of the flu. My health since then has been okay, but with the caveat that I am after all an old fart. Most of the people I knew also got the jabs (how many I don’t know) but I don’t know much about their heath–few talk about that and the liberals have become too annoying to have anything to do with. So what do I do instead of those jabs? Extra vitamin C and D, chicken broth, lots of greens, lots of sleep, lots of exercise. And besides, like all other pandemics before it COVID seems to have declined in virulence.
@pst314,
The point I meant to make, with all that…
How many “vaccines” do you have experience of where the vaccine fails that consistently and that completely? Do you know anyone who’s gotten the polio vaccines who has developed polio? How about all the others, like tetanus or MMR?
I’m told that this is a vaccine; yet, it does not seem to work like other vaccines that I have experience of, where the incidence rate of “vaccine failure” is tiny enough that you have to go to the research literature to find it.
Another point is this: I spent one hell of a lot of time in the Army around mass vaccinations, as in “You guys are going overseas; get in line for your med records and update your vaccinations…” Literally thousands of guys getting shots, all at once. Everything from smallpox to yellow fever vaccinations on issue. In all of that, I can’t recall ever seeing or hearing of anyone having an adverse reaction that wasn’t psychosomatic in nature.
The incidence rate with the COVID shots was noticeable. Adverse reactions were routine, enough so that the local clinic started mandating people coming in with partners who weren’t getting the shots, just in case. You actually saw people passing out and having “issues” once they got the shots. One of the nurses giving the shots told me later that she’d seen all sorts of things with those supposed immunizations that she’d only ever heard of in textbooks. Scared the sh*t out of her, and she really wanted to refuse the immunizations, but wasn’t in a position to do so at the time. She also claims a lot of her immune-system issues date back to that set of shots, and she’s been diagnosed with something that’s mimicking symptoms of lupus, yet isn’t diagnosable as actually being lupus… While her family has exactly zero history of lupus in it.
I do not trust anything these bastards are telling us, any more.
Not limited to social matters, I see this as a big reason technology/software is going to shit. So many things that used to work or were easy…
Do not over-interpret what I wrote. I merely said that I was an exception to the “everyone has suffered horribly” pattern you perceived–and that I do not know enough about my former acquaintances to say much about their health–except that I haven’t heard of any deaths. (And note that I got COVID after I was jabbed.) Your point about reasons to distrust the “authorities” was already clear in your prior comment.
When I was jabbed I was required to remain on site afterwards for 15-30 minutes in case I had a reaction. Didn’t have one and didn’t notice any among the others, but that was just a small sample.
You know…well as a lesbian trapped in a man’s body…oh, never mind…huff…
You mean buying a Subaru will not get me a date with that cute lesbian next door?
Has Labour decided to drop the mask?