Friday Ephemera (746)
Incoming. || I don’t know if you want one, but they’re out there somewhere. || Suboptimal situation. || Hazards of cooking. || Failure to comprehend. || Hard to refuse. || A five-year pregnancy. || Singaporean punishment, a poll ensues. || The thrill of ballpoint pen alignment. || Publicly funded healthcare. || “Vaginally presenting” persons. || Are your contemplations situated? || “Mentally stable clients contradict the social justice worldview.” || Swift response. || Strategic withdrawal. || Simulated shrooming. Hilarity not included. || For when you’re transporting fluids at close to the speed of light. || Dissatisfied customer. || Maximum sparkle, only £11,095. || Meet Sissy the minx. || In case you missed it. || Good haul, methinks. || Dog-sitting, but with extras. || And finally, good as new.
To be notified of new posts, you can follow me on X / Twitter.
To enable extra commenting options – including @username mentions, upvotes, and live notifications – scroll down to the black ‘Meta’ box at the very bottom of the page and click register. It’s free and quite painless.
This blog is kept afloat by the tip jar buttons below.
The bien pensant intellectuals cannot understand this–or refuse to understand. How about a series of experiments in making them understand?
Regarding our society’s departure from reality, this is a pretty good measure:
one way or another. Reading through the replies and questions, something doesn’t smell right. Can’t find any other info via Perplexity.ai. The only solid info to go on is the town name. Everything else is generic. Seems very suspicious that no one else there could help. Though either way families with babies and small children should not still be sleeping in tents there. Adults on the other hand, as miserable as it may be, with sufficient clothing (which at this point there should be plenty of) should be ok. It’s cold but not that terribly cold. Especially at lower elevations and out of the wind.
Added: Also finding significant skepticism regarding this lone source on a Hurricane Helene relief Facebook group:
The lies that trans loonies tell themselves are hilarious.
And yet it’s hardly an esoteric point.
I was reminded of my school days and the bullies who roamed the corridors, assaulting anyone who looked vaguely studious, for entertainment, and seemingly with impunity. On a couple of occasions, I saw their unfortunate targets make vain appeals to some non-existent better nature.
When I briefly became a target of one of the bullies, I found that swinging a chair at his head and drawing blood, in front of a classroom of onlookers, was quite effective at deterring further aggression.
This. “Intellectuals” just don’t want to know:
In hindsight, I think it worked – quite well – by showing, emphatically, that he, the bully, no longer had the initiative. He and his peers were accustomed to having the advantage of knowing how things would generally play out. Cowing the bookish was a familiar routine. But when the intended victim has just slammed metal chair legs into the side of your head, making you bleed, in front of an audience, the expected victory is less clear.
Also, I was quite an angry teenager. Not the gentle sophisticate you see today.
And we thank you.
[ Glances significantly at correction booth. ]
The best way to show you are not grandstanding is to go on a national show.
Meanwhile…
“…for the first time I dressed fully feminine in public…”
Band name.
Or the name of a spin-off solo project, after our hypothetical band finally breaks up.
The left has such a deep and abiding fondness for eugenics.
Given they are often among those most in need of a good caning . . .
Curious if they punished you for retaliation or did no one in authority know?
It was unseen by any staff, and I doubt the embarrassed bully was keen to make the episode widely known.
You left out
[ Gets love and hate tattooed on knuckles. ]
Band name.
…or a Finnish Palestinian?
Can confirm.
Sadly, the full outpouring is behind a paywall.
Removing it doesn’t help, sounds like he is just trying to blame his malfunctions on his parents..
The urge to frame fatherhood in terms of some ostentatious pseudo-moral contrivance, a political project, doesn’t bode well. And I’m still processing the fact that he acknowledges the importance of genes and genetic lineage, while simultaneously dismissing the value of having a genetic connection with your own children.
And I’m still processing the fact that he acknowledges the importance of genes and genetic lineage…
…while also apparently dismissing any possibility that his football bat philosophy (and probably personality) could have any adverse affect on “his” novyy sovetskiy chelovek offspring.
and
—————————–
If you understood these posts, you can now understand the Israel-Pali conflict
and the seemingly inexplicable behavior of the Israeli “establishment”
and their loathing of Bibi and other center-right people who saw/see reality as it is.
One line I use when talking to bien-pensant hand-wringers is that “the schoolyard rules always apply”. Especially in geopolitics.
Some cultures build upon that, but you cannot pretend you are above it.
Removing it doesn’t help, sounds like he is just trying to blame his malfunctions on his parents..
Caplan and Cowen, his mentors in George Mason University, have (or had) an economics podcast where this sort of rhetoric was often deployed. They knew that Earthlings found pure economic reasoning to be unanswerable but unpersuasive, and sometimes even indecent, unnatural, or inhuman. So on top of the layer of pure economic reasoning, there was a layer of “no, shame on you“, where they argued for economics as the true moral compass while Earthling moral intuitions are fallible, biased, racist, etc.
He’s putting on an Earthling suit and characterizing a normal human intuition, a universal source of belonging, meaning, joy, as immoral. Meanwhile his Twitter bio advocates for open borders now! So on one side, universal human instincts are being repressed in favor of refined abstractions, and on the other side, the irrepressible bearers of universal human instincts are flooding in to Make a Better Life for their own children, not anyone else’s, and is a Substack blog post going to tell them otherwise?
If you understood these posts, you can now understand the Israel-Pali conflict. . .
In fact, the Arabs have made in crystal clear that what enrages them is:
One doesn’t seem to run across bald statements of this nowadays, but they were common enough before the Arabs learned to bamboozle Europeans by pretending to be innocent victims.
I don’t read enough of what that “establishment” says to have independently formed a definite opinion, but that would fit with what we see throughout the Western world. Being utterly illiterate in Hebrew doesn’t help. (I can stumble through Western European newspapers with the help of Google Translate, but Israeli newspapers, like Japanese ones, are a completely closed book. Not to mention the lack of time….)
They sound like monsters.
I mean that literally, not in some loose rhetorical sense. Lizard people who are unable to understand, much less respect, normal human beings.
Didn’t his contemporaries refer to the Emperor Caligula as a reptile?
Tangentially related: Many years ago a historian of Classical Greece made some observations regarding envy, distinguishing between constructive envy (“He is more successful. I must learn from him in order to do better.”) vs. pathological envy (“He is more successful. I must bring him down .”)
Mountain lion discovers physics.
Twitter vs Bluesky: a comparison.
Nothing is more important than arguing about British English vs. American English.
Is this the pride of the Midwest or the shame of the Midwest?
…And what would a map of the UK look like?
And here’s the Jew-rub. Jews excel. But not only do they excel at reasoning positive, civilization advancing stuff, they also excel at rationalizing not only their own destruction, but also the destruction of whatever civilization they inhabit. I don’t like it myself but after October 7 (2023) it’s gotten harder and harder to ignore. Seeing some Jews like Bill Ackman wake up to how stupid they have been is heartening at one level but I also find it increasingly harder to write off some of the more anti-semitic elements in debate spaces. While I do not agree with them, I can understand their point if they are not aware/experiencing the Jew self hatred against their own society. Absent that, Jews certainly look suspicious as a group and a threat to whatever civilization they inhabit. Including their own.
Turns out you were right to be suspicious.
I’ll be more circumspect in the future.
It’s a bathrobe. It’s what you wear after showering. Look at the towel-like fabric. It’s designed to absorb water.
If it were made of silk or similar, you could call it a dressing gown.
So there’s a Democrat whose sister just lost an election, and now he says he’s ready to listen.
Not so fast, Mr. Warren:
@dicentra
So . . . his sister was making a feint to gull the voters.
OTOH, the part about people living in tents in Swannanoa NC, in the snow — that part is real.
Notice that the tents contain wood-burning stoves, tho. While not ideal, it does take the edge off.
Another example of how the Left thinks that discourse and narrative are more real than reality. They can’t believe that voters moved right because of the trans issue, because Kamala didn’t campaign on that.
Yes, you can botch a campaign with bad messaging. But you can’t win an election with perfect messaging if it doesn’t address what people see with their own eyes.
Yes, it’s dumb, but so am I.
There was an attempt to manipulate.
“There was an attempt to manipulate.“
Needs subtitles, the screeching is so high pitched only dogs and bats could make it out.
Yes. I have also seen the “tiny houses” thing jumping on this opportunity. On the one hand I’m curious how that is really playing out on the ground. OTOH, I’m afraid to go down that rabbit hole. These disaster stories are full of misinformation and partially true info that gets twisted one way or another.
Lurid rumors start extremely quickly and spread faster than electricity. I remember right after Hurricane Katrina the reporters were standing outside the Superdome, saying the place was full of dead bodies and human waste and rape, but none of the reporters ventured into the building to see that the rumors were fake.
Who starts them? Is it a sporting event for sociopaths? Or does one person muse, “what if this bad thing were happening,” and an eavesdropper picks it up and runs with it?
I suppose the idea is to make shrill, obnoxious noises and generally behave in an unnerving way so that the actual victim will drop the matter and allow Miss Meltdown to continue being selfish and antisocial, and to continue screwing over others.
Despite the tears and wailing, it looks a lot like a temper tantrum: “How dare you expect me to behave like a responsible adult? I hate you!”
Clinical demonstration of Cluster B eyes, owned by a pedo enabler.
What is it about pedos that makes people want to defend, conceal, and run cover for them?
When worlds collide.
I think we’ll give that one a post of its own. Comments that-a-way.
That’s like when I load too many mods in Skyrim.
Oh, that brought back memories. They’re local boys.
I’ve found that among nerds d’un certain age, you can identify who read Ender’s Game and who didn’t.
Well, now that’s just dishonest.
At the time, it seemed the necessary thing to do. To not play the expected role.
And I was quite annoyed.
By necessary, I don’t just mean expedient. It also struck me as morally correct.
Still does, in fact.
Messaging. It’s telling that he could write that without realizing what it revealed.
That forced me to go back and check “a certain scene” in Ender’s Game, which I haven’t read in a good decade. Ender doesn’t use a chair leg, so clearly you were referring to the rational choice of extreme violence rather than the choice of weapon.
I had already absorbed that lesson before that story was published, but cannot recall any earlier influences.
Bonus points if you read the (superior) novella.
[ Raises hand. ]
Don’t forget the cannibalism.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/new-orleans_b_6643
For @David, to help him further degrade his browsing history.
What, another Dune movie?
An extremely hasty scan of the transcript seems to indicate that they found Dune Prophecy boring, a sort of Game of Thrones in space. That would be ironic, given that the books became increasingly boring with each new sequel.
Back in the 70’s and 80’s, maybe even earlier, there would be an earthquake in Azerbaijan or Turkey or some other godfersaken place and the headlines would read something like “millions feared dead!” I would think to myself, millions? Really? That seems kinda…unlikely but…ok. That’s gotta be one hell of a cleanup. As the days/weeks passed I would scour the back pages of the newspapers tracking followup stories and watch as the death toll would…decline. By significant magnitudes. I would mention this occasionally but no one else seemed to find it interesting. Then the next earthquake in some other godfersaken place would happen and the stories would repeat themselves. I used to wonder if the “journalists” had boilerplate for each event and just change the names of the places and bump the numbers up or down a bit in case anyone was paying attention.
I was hoping it might be good. The Bene Gesserit being one of the more interesting aspects of the yarn. I may still give it try, for a couple of episodes, but I’m a stickler for pacing.
Frank Herbert himself had an unfortunate penchant for plots-within-plots, which quickly became boring and are no substitute for interesting people and situations. I abandoned him after the first few books, and never touched any of Brian Herbert’s books.
I quite like Emily Watson as an actress, and the trailer looked suitably expensive and grand in scale, but I can’t be dealing with inept pacing in a drama. As Daniel pointed out, there’s no excuse for it in an age of streaming, when episodes can be pretty much whatever length is needed.
I enjoyed Dune–and Dune 2 somewhat in spite of the deviations from the original novel–but the soundtrack was a persistent problem: I had to turn up the volume for the dialogue and then down dramatically when the events became particularly dramatic or even bombastic. I wish DVD players came with a sound compression option. (No point in wishing for Hollywood to return to the dynamic range found in 50’s movies.)
Heh. Bit of a faff. Also, DVD players.
You got a problem with that?
Just sayin’.
[ Gets “physical media or death” tattooed on chest. ]
See also:
(TED Talk in which NPR CEO Katherine Maher (and former chief executive of Wikipedia) explains that “the truth” is an outdated concept.)
You just need to use Closed Captioning.
Perhaps my biggest complaint was how they altered the character Chani. Bad.
I also struggle with the concept of Zendaya as an actress.
Well, she does know how to pout and scowl….
Which accounts for 87% of her performance in the Dune films.
Which calls into question the judgement of whoever hired her. Was it politics? Was she someone’s relative or lover? Was everyone smoking crack?
A friend of mine who used to work security taught me this trick. First, don’t let them get within arm’s reach. If accosted, reach behind your back with your right hand as if you might plausibly have a firearm in a rear belt holster, and say in a loud flat voice “STEP BACK NOW. DO NOT COME ANY CLOSER.” This is what cops do, and the opportunistic will dash if they think they’re about to tangle with one.
Many modern AV receivers do. Which amuses me as a practical audiophile, because the problem is that audio mixing has gone to shite even if you do have a 5.1 system. God help you if you’re relying on downmixing to 2.0 stereo. You need expensive audio gear to fix a basic recording mistake.
My current receiver (~$400USD) is a delight. It comes with a microphone and a cardboard stand; you assemble the stand and put the mic where your head is going to be, and then start the configuration test. It sends tones to all the speakers and automagically adjusts the levels so that the proper volume is sent to all of them. I haven’t had a problem with soundtracks overwhelming dialogue tracks since. Science!
What was the line? “I don’t believe she’s an actress, much less an FBI agent?”
It’s a bit disconcerting going back and re-watching the first Spider-Man movie; not only is Kirsten Dunst a terrible actress, it’s painfully obvious she’s strung out on heroin. It’s like seeing the coke nail on Princess Leia.
I had no idea.
My setup: Stereo integrated amp, 30 year old AM-FM tuner. I’ve never considered getting an AV receiver, as I wasn’t interested in setting up additional speakers for more channels.
Historical curiosity: Back in the 70’s there were some cassette recorders with dynamic range compression options: compress when recording from LP, expand when playing back from tape. And I vaguely recall some auto gear with compression on playback to deal with the road noise situation.
It’s like seeing the coke nail on Princess Leia.
The degrading acts she did to score free coke: