Friday Ephemera (743)
Suboptimal scenario. || Evolved for smartphones. || How to make a simple thing needlessly complicated, parts 1, 2, and 3. || Bedtime snacks. || Large objects. || Incoming. || Incoming 2. || For recreational purposes. || Pyramid building redux. Previously. || Mortal remains. || Hallucinate in mud, 1969. || There was smoke, some shouting. || Meanwhile, in Japan. || Autoerotic scenes. || Fly repellent? || At last, toe shoes. || Paranormal furniture and uncanny bangings, 1983. || Parking is hard. || For the children, you say? || How to stretch your daughter. || I’d say bullet dodged. || Gloopiness. Previously. || Malayan leaf frog. || Questions from 1964: “Is Wales rife with witchcraft?” || Furniture for “even the most delicate female.” || Flesh-eating bees make meat honey. || It’s good to polish those language skills.
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I wonder if his friends will figure out that they should shun idiots like him.
Every day I see bad drivers and marginally competent drivers. Makes you wonder.
A Halloween tradition.
Well I learned something today.
I like a happy ending.
“Malayan leaf frog.“
Want!
Morning, all.
For educational purposes.
If you want to see more of madam’s morony, the full twenty-minute video can be viewed here.
Am I seeing that right, that as soon as the fire starts, people try to leave the store, but there’s a knot of people at the entrance that won’t let them out?
Cluster B, of course, but aren’t most of them who get on those shows?
I somehow doubt that either party is the catch that they think they are.
At least they take it in turns.
And because you can never have enough unhinged election content.
“Bedtime snacks.“
I cannot abide monkeys and apes (have a hard time even adding them in ‘Planet Zoo’) but these species of proto-simians are adorable.
Apparently, they can produce a flesh-rotting venom.
Does that help?
Ah, the joys of insomnia and waking at 2:00 am – at least I have the Ephemera as consolation. I am eternally grateful.
You took your bloody time.
[ Taps watch. ]
[ Slurps coffee. ]
Have you tried a half-measure of Night Nurse liquid?
Mortal remains.
I am impressed that the job can be done in a business suit. I was sort of picturing people in white Hazmat suits.
Of course, the cameras were on – at other times, the clothing of choice is likely to be jeans and a commemorative t-shirt from a 2012 bar crawl in NOLA. Which I find oddly comforting for when my time comes – please, be comfortable, I don’t want anyone going to unnecessary lengths.
Due to the editing, I did briefly think that the chap was wearing nail polish.
Fly repellent?
So that’s where my copy of Huey Lewis and the News’ Sports went.
Earlier this year, we were tasked with scattering the combined ashes of my parents-in-law at their favourite spot in the Peak District, a bench overlooking a valley. Wonderful views, all terribly scenic. However, our gathering, which took place on a day of significance for the departed, coincided with The Windiest Day In Human History, which lent the proceedings a certain comedic aspect.
[W]hich lent the proceedings a certain comedic aspect.
There was some shrieking and quite a bit of laughter. I like to think they would have approved.
In other news, the Samizdata blog is apparently 23 years old today.
All she had to do was not be a childish arsehole for five minutes.
Yes. But somehow, I doubt that was ever a practical option. For some, misfortune is destiny.
And so, despite being given endless opportunities to defuse the situation, and despite being indulged with patience and forbearance that she simply doesn’t deserve, Madam persists in being combative and delinquent, and doing the very thing that can only go badly for her.
Rinse and repeat, tens of thousands of times.
Theme from Psycho.
The end card from the early Ingrid Bergman movie Dollar:
Reality show and hip-hop, so a double whammy of depravity.
It will always be our fault–in her eyes and in the eyes of the liberal activists.
Another dirty movie from Sweden.
Band name.
Call him a Biden-Harris terrorist.
The product of a sick mind. 😃
I do not have the patience to be a cop.
I think the endless, fabulist prattle would have had me reaching for the taser.
Band name.
Also, meat honey.
Everything communication wise is f****d. It is increasingly hard to discern sarcasm from earnest attempts at persuasion. The meanings of a critical number of words have now become so corrupted that the last tool of communication will become violence. I’m watching people that I used to work with, work closely with, very smart people, fall for clearly, objectively, irrational and easily disprovable lies. It’s not that they’re dumb but they sure can be stupid. Smart people, smaaaaart.
Re: The Great Cheese Robbery: The thief has been arrested.
Verminous influencers. Was a three year sentence enough?
On social trust. And how to lose it.
Not entirely unrelated.
When the help gets into the cooking sherry.
I’m still processing the idea of transvestite hoovering as an erotic ambition.
(posted with my errors. post with errors corrected soon.)
GET IT TOGETHER, WHILK.
Bloody disgrace.
White supremacy?
Yes, sir.
From the responses:
https://x.com/RichardHanania/status/1852145715947933771
A somewhat similar experience with a much more prosaic explanation, from someone who was “studying to be in ministry” at the time. He’s the podcast partner of Amala Ekpunobi, a former gung-ho leftist activist.
White supremacy explains everything bad, including the K-T extinction event.
@Nate Whilk, whose words I’m not going to include here:
The enthusiasm with which people ascribe glitches in their buggy software/hardware to the divine is a bit of a depressing thing to contemplate, if you’re of a religious bent.
I dare say that 99.9% of things like UFO encounters, “visits to elfland”, and all the rest of the grand panoply of human spirituality stems from something in the participants having experienced unusual glitches in their cerebration, something that is a hell of a lot more “kludged-together” than we’d like to admit.
I think we’d cut down on these reported “demon infestations” a good deal by mandating instruction during schooling (to include practical exercises) in just how poorly put-together the human consciousness is. I suspect that if more people realized how fine the line was between “Yeah, conscious human with agency” and “Outright vegetable NPC”, they’d be a hell of a lot more careful in life, and they’d be a lot more cautious about their reporting.
Not saying that demons don’t exist, just that I strongly suspect a lot of the reports I’ve heard of them are really someone whose brain is glitching.
Can I have the acid without the smelly hippies?
And not entirely unrelated to that.
Can I have the sixties without the acid or the hippies?
@pst314,
Likely not… They were all a part of the zeitgeist of the times. Ya have to remember that the whole psychedelic thing started out as a mainstream sort of affair, with prominent people espousing it all.
I’m not saying that the filthy hippies weren’t responsible for their own acts, but the social contagion went downhill from the elites.
Interesting post regarding this…
What I would offer up to you is that the various iconoclastic elites of the 1950s that were “exploring psychedelics” managed to make themselves so attractive to the down-market types that they thought they’d try it out for themselves. Remember the famous actors in Hollywood who said it was all a good idea? Mind-expanding?
Details on the Cary Grant milieu
@Kirk: It was just a throw-away joke.
@pst314,
It was a throw-away that engendered some serious thought, though.
If you read that thread over on X/Twitter, you rather get the impression that even the author doesn’t grasp the implications. I was in the middle of processing it when I spotted your post, and thought “Huh… There’s an implication there, in what pst314 is referring to…”
Consider the whole thing from an evolutionary biology/behavioral perspective: Humans are not hive-based minds or organisms, yet you have to have some means of attaining consensus for group action. Nine-tenths of military training is just that, inculcating the mechanisms of obedience to the unitary whole and its cohesion.
If you’ve ever seen entire flocks of birds act as one, or schools of fish doing the same, what you’re looking at is very much the same sort of mechanism in action. Humans have to have something laid down in the genes for this, or we’d have never gotten off the savannahs.
I suspect that there’s something to be said for the existence of this mechanism, whatever it actually is, and that most people are entirely unaware of it. As well, a lot of our social problems stem from misuse and abuse of these mechanisms/techniques of collective action control.
As a further implication/corollary, if you do not understand and control your biological drives and impulses, you’re really not much more than an unthinking animal. You have to be aware of things, the reasons why your hindbrain is doing what it is. If you aren’t aware, you can’t counter the odd “intrusive thought”, and you may well do yourself damage through either following through on that thought, or blaming yourself as “evil” for it.
Case in point… I’m far from a young man, but I still have the lizard-brain responses of one. See a cute young female? Much like enjoying a pretty flower; it is not for me, but I can still appreciate the experience.
So, when I suddenly discover that that distant sexually-attractive figure is horrendously inappropriate due to age or whatever, I remain aware that what’s speaking to that isn’t “me”, but that lizard-brain that knows no better. I restrain it, sigh heavily at the impulse it created for me to suppress, and go on with life.
Awareness of it enables me to understand and control it; it also prevents me from beating myself up over it and wondering if I’m really a secret pervert… Well, maybe I am, but it’s a controlled and genteel sort of perversion that doesn’t act on impulse.
I believe that one of the key questions in modern life is “Who is to be master? Me, or my instincts?” If the answer is “My instincts…”, then you are not a civilized person.
Just a thought…
“the sixties without the acid or the hippies” is my shorthand for “the sixties without the shitty sixties”. Or, sort of, “the fifties improved somewhat by actual effing adults”.
Women have that reaction, too. I’ve listened to a few such admissions.
That reminds me: Everybody who knows anything about Greek mythology knows that Zeus was a avid rapist/molester. But not everyone knows that there were a good number of myths about goddesses abducting and “having their way” with youths.
Another on-point Devon Eriksen short essay…
He posted it in response to this, which I think someone else (maybe me…?) has already linked:
Bona-fide “Expert”
They just can’t stop, can they?
They are so bloody proud of their degrees that they simply cannot shut the fuck up about them and make a case for their actual point, using the knowledge they are so quick to boast of.
They just stomp their little feet, shake their tiny fists, and demand that you accept their every pronouncement based solely on some sort of obligation to have total faith in the institution which certified them.
These people seem to have all been sick the day their scientific education taught the class what science actually is.
Science is not a religion.
Science is not an institution.
Science is not a profession.
Science is not a body of data.
Science is not a model of the universe.
Science is an algorithm.
Science is a procedure.
And the whole point of this procedure, the whole fucking point of the whole goddamned business, is to produce a result which is indicative, replicable, verifiable, and understandable.
Truth does not come from scientists.
Truth comes from scientific results.
Scientific results come from research.
A scientist is simply a person who is paid to do research.
Their job is not to learn a whole bunch of stuff, and then become the Oracle of Delphi, roaming the landscape making pronouncements from their expertise, which must be regarded as scientific truth.
Only scientific results are indicators of truth.
The opinion of a scientist is not a scientific result.
The opinion of a scientist is a hypothesis.
A hypothesis must be tested in a properly conducted experiment, which must then be independently replicated, to be acceptable as truth.
This also goes for what they call a “scientific consensus”, which is just the opinion of a bunch of scientists.
Therefore, if a scientist expects you to accept their pronouncements as truth because their expertise, they are trying to pull a fast one.
The two questions at issue here are:
1. Whether the mRNA covid treatment is safe and non-toxic.
2. Whether the mRNA covid treatment is effective at preventing covid infection.
Ellie has an opinion on this.
That opinion is a hypothesis.
Not a fact.
In order to establish a fact, an experiment would have to be done. And then the experimental results would have to be replicated by someone else, somewhere else. And then the experimental results would have to be shown to the public.
And not, say, for example, locked in a airtight vault, guarded by trained attack panthers, for 70 years.
Now, we could spend a lot of time arguing about how meaningful it is, or isn’t, that the mRNA treatment was misleadingly called a vaccine, that it was used as a tool of political power, that the same people telling you it was safe and effective made it illegal for you to sue the manufacturers if it wasn’t.
But all of that is irrelevant, because none of those arguments are necessary.
The burden of proof is on those who make demands like “take this injection”.
Therefore the treatment is unsafe until it is proven safe. And the treatment is ineffective until it is proven effective.
And no amount of scientists’ opinions will prove that.
Only evidence will prove that.
And if they won’t show it to you, it’s not evidence. Because the word “evidence” means “that which is seen”. So that which is unseen is not evidence.
And if Ellie can get a doctorate from Harvard without understanding the basic nature of how science works, then Harvard doesn’t deserve your trust anymore, and there is no Harvard.
Only Zuul.
Reading that, I really need to up my writing game.
I very much recommend Mr. Eriksen’s writing to one and all; it’s a bit of a breath of fresh air.
Oh, my… A bit of digging produced this:
<snicker>
Ever wonder why I automatically bridle, when I encounter the self-proclaimed “expert”? This is why… They stand upon plinths of sand.
More an indoctrination factory than an institution of education and research.
Happy ending.
Known to the police.
Also known to the police, but still in need of a happy ending.
When I die, won’t you please cremate me,
Put my ashes in shot gun shells,
Invite my friends, family and neighbors,
Aim high, blow me all to …
Hey Britain, you’ve got to up your game.
Been watching this one percolate…
Exact wrong people in the position…
Wonder why your kids can’t and won’t read? It’s because of teachers like this, who fetishize their personal disabilities and then teach them to others. Some girls might like to read like that, but most boys? Holy Toledo, do you wonder why males are not reading, these days?
If you go to her threads on X/Twitter, it’s a wormhole of dysfunction and idiocy.
And, I feel this guy’s pain. The post describing someone who obsesses over the cover sheet for days at a time, and then claims credit for doing “…most of the work…” rings so true to my experience. Things like that are why I absolutely loathe “group work” in schools. Make me king for a day, and I’d utterly ban that practice and institute a regime of summary capital punishment for any teachers daring to assign any such thing to anyone.
You have to wonder…
It takes like nine or ten posts below this one before someone points out the obvious: First time in 130 years that Mt. Fuji is snow-free, going into winter…? Uhmmmm… Does that not imply something there, about the intervening time, and the facts that it’s been both warmer and colder than today, in the past?
It’s just like the idjits writing the woe-is-me articles about things coming out of the glaciers: OK, so we’ve got Medieval mining camps showing up, as the glaciers melt. Sort of an indicator, what?
However, never once will you see anyone working the hard part out, which is that the glaciers were obviously in remission when those mining camps were established, back during ye olde Medieval Warm Period and the Roman Climactic Optimum. We ought to be dancing in the streets, because we live at the apogee of another climactic optimum, and not wanting to return to the perigee. I mean, the key thing about the Great Famine of 1315 was the cold temperatures, right? Do you want famine, children…?
I do wonder if anyone kept a record of Mt. Fuji’s snow-status. I imagine some Shinto or Buddhist monastery kept something going… And, just what it’d say going back to the beginning. I don’t doubt that Mt. Fuji being bare is unusual, but I’ll also wager it isn’t unheard of, either.
Man has a point…
Highly recommend reading this piece… Dude is absolutely on point, here. About so very, very much.
Terrorists: the usual suspects seem to think Trump will win because they are already getting “parade” permits and organizing the troops for protests after the election. Use the appropriate newspeak dictionary for “protests”.
Surprised he didn’t mention the deaths of infants caused by the overly powerful ‘supplemental restraint system’ demanded by regulators unable to grasp the meaning of the word ‘supplemental’ divorced from the word ‘funding’.
Someone pointed out (perhaps linked from here) that a lot of the insanity on the Left is so insane that if you mention it to ordinary non-politics obsessed people, they simply will not believe it. They will think you are a conspiracy theorist. They assume that since Trump went to trial, there must have been a crime. If you identify a mayor or governor or Pelosi who withheld the National Guard from a demonstration/hurricane/race riot, they think that surely cannot be true.
“We had the best parties…”, damn that Emperor Vance.
At last, toe shoes.
Nailed it.
Autoerotic scenes.
While at Uni, a friend shared a house with five other guys. He arrived home early one day only to discover a similar scene playing out. Molly maid was voted off the island by the other roommates.
the “best life” of a blue-haired girl is getting high and grinding between a couple of guys who failed the Twilight auditions?
The Cluster B facial expression. Never fails to identify problematic people.
Band name.
Also
Meat Honey
Supported by Flesh Rotting Venom
Again, sometimes it’s the little things that tell you much of what you need to know.
Hallowe’en is a bit of an odd tradition, and one that’s difficult to explain to people not familiar with it. But I’ve come to rather like it. There was one year when I’d forgotten that it was Hallowe’en and opened the door to find a very small boy dressed in an oversized, home-made robot costume. It took me a second to register what was happening, which was kind of funny.
I have to say, the robot costume was surprisingly good – some effort had obviously gone into it. No store-bought rubbish. I suspect the cold-and-bored-looking father, standing by his car up the road, and to whom I waved, had had a hand in its construction. Happily, I had an untouched bar of chocolate in a cupboard. Worth the sacrifice.
And there’s something to be said for the neighbourliness that can ensue, the exchange of amused looks, etc. Again, that high-trust society. So, when people violate that trust, exulting in their selfishness, their opportunity to take, it’s not a good thing. And not without implications.
Damn that Emperor Vance
I hope someone in Hollywood greenlights this for a full-length movie. I loves me some dystopian films. Maybe they could get Margaret Atwood to lend some of her fever dream hysteria to its script. Comedy gold! I can see the older White liberal Hollywood females trying to convince their agents that they’re not too old to play Blue Haired Girl although undoubtedly it would be cast as a BIPOC.
So sue, as one does.
@pst314
White supremacy also explains why Indian and East Asian communities do so well in racist Western countries in terms of education and income, where blacks end up being doing so abysmally.
It also explains the high level of unprovoked violent attacks against those groups, even though none of those appear to be committed by “White supremacist” Republic voting evil White men.
Except for liberal judges and lawyers and intellectuals, who are “mysteriously” unable to recognize the signs.
Thanks for explicitly mentioning that. Publicly shared customs, rituals, celebrations, etc are indeed very important.
What should be done with those who work hard to destroy that trust? /rhetorical question, mostly.
Remember the left’s 2021 “Stop Asian Hate” propaganda campaign?
Remember how quickly the left dropped the matter when security cameras and arrest records showed that nearly all the attacks were committed by blacks? Not the whites which the left blamed?
Serial bank robber: “I love the life I have in prison”.
Theodore Dalrymple has written about such criminals.
It seems that not everyone likes it.
[ Looks suspiciously in David’s direction. ]
Psychology study so mostly BS, also out of China so probably even more BS, but something I have observed and suspected. Odd that this is my first seeing this correlation, that I can recall anyway.
Wayne Burkette on the growing conservative disdain for “invitations” to “compromise”:
…which is a reply to how gay marriage became drag queens in grade schools:
…and that post is replying to some hack at the Atlantic magazine (no surprise)
Which is all quite unfortunate, since letting gays quietly live their lives is an easy choice. I now wonder how many of those gay marriage activists were already planning to normalize child sexual abuse and all the other lunacies we see today.
This.
Here is Israel the MOR religious/traditional people are waking up to the “tolerance” bait-and-switch game where “inclusion” only goes in one direction…. unfortunately too many still think it’s about being “nice”.
|| Malayan leaf frog. || Flesh-eating bees make meat honey. ||
Ye gods, nightmare fuel, but the journal paper about the bees is actually quite interesting. Thank you for that! Must be something about the way we have to write papers to get published – the passive voice, the scientific language – quite soporific.
@WTP, who said:
Like a lot of things you hear out of some areas of study, it sorta makes sense when you hear it, and it does jibe with some personal experiences.
I’d like to submit that there’s a good deal going on in the human mind that we don’t pay attention to because it’s all going on very much beneath the surface.
Do consider a couple of things, though… There has to be a hardware/software solution going on in any species that acts together cohesively. We’ve identified some of the mechanisms even in bacteria. We know that bird flocks and fish schools act together and with great cohesion.
I’d start looking for those sorts of things in human beings by examining traditional activities, like dance and other sorts of communal activities. You go out, look at “primitive tribes” with their dances mimicking the hunt before they go out on a hunt, and when they come back… Trace that through more advanced cultures, note the similarities, and what the effects are. I would very much like to know how those “mirror neurons” behave in people undergoing military drill and ceremonies training, and how that physical activity conditions them better for cohesion. I suspect there’s a link there that people have not paid attention to, and that there are likely traces of how all this works in customs/traditions, if you bother to examine them. Some very proficient practical psychologists observed and made use of those neural features for millennia before the academics started noticing them.
A Halloween tradition.
That was awesome!!!!!
I’d even replace “a good deal” with “majority of cognition”.
I miss Dave Allen.
I’ll just leave this here.
…and duck out before David can set my coat on fire while I’m still wearing it.
US Senate Committee analysis found 3,483 grants, more than ten percent of all NSF grants and totaling over $2.05 billion in federal dollars, went to questionable projects that promoted diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) tenets or pushed onto science neo-Marxist perspectives about enduring class struggle. The Committee grouped these grants into five categories: Status, Social Justice, Gender, Race, and Environmental Justice. For the purposes for this report, “DEI funding,” a “DEI grant,” or “DEI research” refers to taxpayer dollars NSF provided to a research or engagement program that fell into one of these five groups.