Friday Ephemera (753)
Just a bit of a bump. || Boiling water is hard. || How to build an omni-directional bike. (h/t, Elephants Gerald) || Bills above. || The adventures of Rupert the Bear. || Because he has been deemed more important than you, ladies. || Dinner and a show. || I’m guessing it tickles. || Good to know. || I suppose it would pass the time. || And it’s wipe-clean, which is always a bonus. || Clearly, she was feeling it. || Venting, near and far. || Vending-machine diplomacy. || Does a doctor’s self-vasectomy video count as oversharing? || Fat Japanese mascots jammed in infrastructure. || More joys of public transport. || Today’s words are time and place. || Pianist enhancement. || Pottery and LEGO, together at last. || Four legs good. || And finally, the experiment in time travel was not without its hazards.
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So… he IS condemning the subway system as a lawless labyrinth.
Layers of editors and fact-checkers. Yup.
[Paraphrasing “Chinatown”]
Forget it, Di.
It’s the New York Times.
“My new gender is defiance”, and the world quakes in terror.
Meanwhile, for reasons that are no longer important, I have had to set type by hand and because of that know the difference between typeface and font though the latter fits better in a drop down menu, however, I’m just glad I never had to hand set this new typeface which is, “…an unapologetic celebration of self-care for all skin…”.
Or, mentally ill man is mentally ill.
Truly, we live in an age of wonders.
I wonder if it is possible to go after those who persecuted him. That would be an excellent form of additional winning.
Change “more likely” to “absolutely certain”.
Those who advocate such lunatic policies–and especially those who exercise power to achieve them–should be treated in the spirit of what Abraham Lincoln said:
Let them be the ones to freeze in the dark.
And in their eyes were are not really people, rather mere pawns to manipulate in their games of power and status.
That.
Yes, I wish I’d thought of that one myself.
And ours is an age in which the most appalling naïveté – to put the kindest possible spin on things – is regarded as a virtue, the very measure of virtue.
More importantly, a government actively working against the well-being of its populace has forfeited any expectation of fidelity and obedience.
Why? It’s not as if these malevolent trolls masquerading as well-meaning naïfs are deserving of kindness.
A reminder that not all security guards are particularly competent or moral. (With the caveat that the lawsuit’s claim needs corroboration.)
THE CASE AGAINST DR. EITHAN HAIM IS DISMISSED!
I had never heard of him so I googled his name to see what the case was about. I found an AP article from last June entitled “Texas doctor charged with taking private patient information on transgender care.” The story begins with “A Texas doctor who calls himself a whistleblower on transgender care for minors . . .” Not a real whistleblower, obviously. That phrase “transgender care for minors” appears several times in the article. Not once is there a mention of just what that “care” consisted of. Compassionate medical procedures like massive drugging or mutilation of children, even castration. That’s what the AP calls “gender affirming medical care.”
Truly, we don’t hate the media enough.
Heh. Well, I was thinking more of the people who regurgitate such pieties with little thought beyond green is good, as in the discussion mentioned upthread. The kinds of people who don’t know about, or enquire about, the obvious downsides of the policies they support, albeit in fairly vague terms. As if downsides and trade-offs couldn’t exist, and as if those entrusted to make policy decisions couldn’t possibly be incompetent, or worse.
But yes, you’re right. I shall endeavour to be less forgiving.
[ Flicks kitten in eye. ]
I don’t get this. I would think/hope that taking one’s borders seriously should be the very first order of business for any country. Energy policy not being taken seriously is a far more recent and less concerning trend. The Big Red Flag was border security/immigration. It’s just that all the electricity going off is a harder thing for the proles to pretend isn’t happening. Though it won’t surprise me if they gaslight (NPI) them over that as well. I’m sure the bureaucrats and MSM will resent having to work harder to sell that one so…hope?
Not, perhaps, the wisest move.
Well, you’d think that the most basic functions of a government would include enforcing the law, keeping the lights on, and repelling invaders. You’d think those would be somewhere near the top of the list.
Yet on all three counts, our government is failing in ways that a younger me would not have thought possible.
Nor Google, etc.
16 years old, driving across country on what was later known as The Great Family Trip, driving along a road heading into El Paso a summer afternoon /evening I was shocked to actually see Mexicans wading back across the Rio Grande into Mexico. I had heard about such things. They had been mentioned in the news. But actually seeing it happen drove it home to my young mind how out in the open it was. These weren’t people sneaking across a thousand mile desert border undercover of night, dodging rattlesnakes and Canis latrans, this was their regular commute. I was amazed by it and it did occur to me that they didn’t have to all be Mexicans. It just worked out that way.
Last November we had five power outages in three weeks, only one of which might plausibly be attributed to bad weather.
In the heart of Silicon Valley. Absolutely unheard of during my youth here.
Oh, and the largest-by-far water reservoir in the area has been empty for a dozen years, and will no doubt be empty for another dozen.
Welcome to California!
Via the Babylon Bee.
Oh ho ho. But anyway, there’s no way this could go wrong, as Robert Schumann could tell you.
The Critical Drinker pans the new Star Trek movie.
Seen online: It’s Portlandia in space.
They still make those?
What motive would Middle Eastern asylum-seekers have for hanging around an English primary school?
Answers on a postcard.
Most people really don’t have the disposition or intellectual wherewithal to think in terms of second-order effects or unintended consequences. The thought of breaking from the herd terrifies them. They’d rather die than be associated with Those Awful People.
“Questioning Net Zero is what fascist right-wingers do. I don’t want to be [thought] a fascist. So I’m not going there.”
Low in trait openness, in other words. Prolly not their fault. They’ll have to fall in the pit themselves before they believe it exists.
“unapologetic” = we have no shame
“Speak now or forever hold your peace.”
They make them using the Crap-o-Matic 9000 Franchise Sequel Extruder.
Sinister.
Useful guide.
Feds.
A touch of opera.
Indeed:
This sort of stuff is a nice antidote/palate cleaner to the usual news.
If you watch a video in the X app, full-screen, it will play video after video in sequence, no pause. I’ve trained the algorithm to give me birds, kittens, and flowers.
X giveth the stress and X taketh it away.
As is this.
Huh. Earlier this week I had been assured that Patriot Front had been disbanded.
Not that the footage itself has any obvious dates.
I think they call this “tipping your hand.”
Stephen King novels have nothing on this scary story.
I mean, wow. That is so over-the-top it’s criminal. Trump needs to drop the hammer on a LOT of people.
Not unrelated, this.
Meanwhile, on Reddit.
And let us not forget, this was a real thing. A thing that occurred.
People actually sat there, cowed and deferential, without laughing loudly.
Meanwhile, on Reddit.
Redditors are truly the retards of the world. Presently mods of subreddits like r/knitting – knitting, for fuck’s sake! – are banning links to X because Elon gave a totes Nazi salute. It is a foum of epic cringe.
David, your three words should join the lexicon of short phrases with clearly nuanced meanings in our pop culture, much like Seinfled’s “not that there’s anything wrong with that.” Whenever someone wants a subtle way of saying that’s some retarded shit, they should simply say, “Meanwhile, On Reddit . . .” and look away.
It’s been my experience that Reddit moderators are among the most weirdly neurotic of any platform moderators, which is saying something. There’s a bizarre zeal. Trying to unpick the thought process, the basis for prohibition, could drive a person mad.
Meanwhile, on Reddit.
Right. Their argument that Musk is a Nazi is so strong that they had to change the logo to make their alleged point.
Given the number of Reddit links of late, I worry, David, that you are spending too much time over there. Is an intervention in order?
…which might explain why some conservative men appear to liberals to be more, “afraid” of big cities. I think what’s happening is that these are men who are especially attuned to implicit threats of violence and who are correctly picking it up everywhere they go in urban areas.
Change “afraid” to “alert”. I have known libtard men who were utterly unaware of threats until they were arrived up in their faces. A dramatic example: I saw, 100 yards away, a “diverse vibrant” individual harassing a young couple. My liberal friend noticed nothing until he began to bother us. Even afterwards he had difficulty correctly processing the things that creep said to us.
It only needs a monolith to be complete.
Guys.
It’s quite maddening, in that, during the week I’ll find things to include in the Ephemera, only to discover, just as I’m compiling the thing, that most of them have been deleted by moderators. And rarely for any discernible reason. In this respect, it’s much, much worse than any other platform.
Except, perhaps, BlueSky.
Back in the Nineties, when we lived in an unglamorous part of Nottingham, we would routinely register this. I recall one afternoon when three of us were heading home from the cinema, walking through the city centre, when I spotted a group of four ferals pointedly spitting at the shoes of passers-by, so as to provoke an altercation. They seemed to enjoy the looks of disgust and the air of intimidation. Luckily, they’d run out of spit before we were in range.
To some extent, you may age out of their radar. They seem especially focussed on provoking conflict with others of similar age. Though not, of course, entirely. And it goes without saying that the ferals in question should have had their jaws forcibly dislocated.
More cuteness.
Feds: Another thing Trump needs to do is Patel needs to send orders down immediately that there are to be no false flag operations of any kind. No marching around in Khakhis pretending to be “patriot front”. No more governor kidnapping stings. Also, the identity of any mass shooter must be released, not hidden if inconvenient.
Heh.
Fulminating MDS.
Or Orson Welles doing a voiceover.
How dare you reproduce.
You have to wonder who they think is going to pay for their retirements if not those born in this country.
The notion those invading the country will become respecters of law & custom, gladly paying taxes & the like, once they cross the border is delusional to the point of requiring pharmaceutical intervention.
A wariness of criminal and antisocial behaviour is really just a fear of “poor people,” says he/they.
The scare quotes around ‘crime’ were a cute touch.
Or, person of fabulist, imaginary sex embraces fabulist, imaginary politics.
She has an OnlyFans, obviously. Where you can ogle her mastectomy scars.
If that’s your thing.
I’m betting it’s another troon and sooner or later he will become “justice involved”.
Her X bio reads, “i live to punish god.”
Which possibly conveys more than was intended.
See also the Guardian‘s Zoe Williams, who would have us believe that the only problem with ‘problem families’ is that they’re poor. That, apparently, is the only reason one might not wish to live next door to violent, thieving ferals who blast out loud music at 3am and throw pets from upstairs windows.
Needless to say, Ms Williams does not live anywhere near the kinds of creatures whose sociopathy she excuses. A convenient distance that I recently suggested shrinking.
I spend a fair bit of time on Reddit. The whole insane Elon thing has yet to invade the subreddits I inhabit, like Aviation and Machinists. The general subs and of course the news and politics subs have all gone (stayed?) visciously, aggressively, bonkers.
If even a quarter of this story checks out, it’s pretty frightening. People need to go to prison and our legal system needs to be completely overhauled. Tho I give that a 1% chance of ever sufficiently happening. If that.
Doh. I see Dicenta posted the same thing. Thx.
So you asked for flying cars, this is the best 21st century can do.
[ Gorged, rolls onto sofa, watches Grand Tour Colombia Special. ]
Since you ask, it’s the one with the cocaine hippos. And the donkey shagging. And in which the music system of Clarkson’s Jeep Wranger is sabotaged so as to blast out It’s Raining Men.
So this happened…I was posting on a comment on a Facebook group page regarding the JFK assassination. There was all sorts of conspiracy theories running wild concerning multiple gunmen, etc. I find it very weird how confident these people can be. Not wanting to get into every single theory’s flaws, I said the only one I could possibly believe is that maybe, just maybe the CIA got to Oswald and he shot Kennedy because they presented to him a window of opportunity…or something like that. But that all these other crazier and crazier theories are perpetrated by the CIA as cover stories for that much simpler explanation. So here’s where it gets really weird…just as I post that I get logged out of Facebook.
So I go to one of my other devices and try to make a comment on my own timeline saying, “heh, isn’t this funny”. I then relate the story above and as soon as I post that I get logged out of Facebook again. I could not get back in nor access my account. Go to wife’s phone, as she refuses to get her own account, piggybacking on mine. Same thing happens. I check my email that is clearly associated with my account but there is nothing there. So…if I suddenly disappear here…well… not suicidal and I know nothing that will lead to the arrest and conviction of Hillary Clinton. Well, not anything that anyone else wouldn’t know.
Yet another security guard who is a killer.
No lie detected.
I am not sure about that. Trump is moving fast and breaking things. I think going after J6 abuses is one of the things he wants to do.
I also don’t know how deeply engrained that abuse is. Are there other times prior to J6 when people were persecuted like this? Is it something the system does regularly, or was it a one-off thing?
If new leadership says “this BS stops, and it stops now,” how many lower-level folks will be relieved they don’t have to carry out crooked orders? How many have enough institutional memory to know how to behave with integrity?
Watch and wait, I guess.