May Contain Drama
Or, Shakespeare For The Tremulous And Neurotic:Â
Readers will doubtless recall the Chichester Festival Theatre warning patrons that its production of The Sound of Music, one of the most famous and widely-seen musicals in the world, would contain references to Nazis. Which, for some, would apparently come as a surprise.
More recently, the Royal Shakespeare Company felt it necessary to forewarn visitors that its production of Hans Christian Andersen’s dark fairy tale The Red Shoes features both loud music and “haze.” Because in a tale of mind-controlling shoes and amputated feet, the haze is the thing you really want to watch out for.
And because you can never have enough of this tiresome contrivance:
Presumably, it was felt to be a shocking twist. Mind-wrenching stuff.
Ah, these fearless correctors of our history and culture. Whose weird mental twitching we’ve seen before.
And so, the modern sensibility, the approved outlook on things, is one in which we are to view cross-dressing perverts striding into schoolgirls’ toilets and changing rooms as in no way provocative or untoward, and regarding which one mustn’t bat an eye, while simultaneously trembling at the prospect of Shakespeare’s Tempest containing scenes of bad weather.
A mindset in which almost any dramatic work that predates Instagram must now come with spoilers. Which does rather appear to defeat the object.
And here we have Chuck Schumer openly calling for volunteers to become Stasi — with some hilarious responses.
They’ve added a D.O.G.E. clock.
She’s gotta be both. But the isolation of her deafness prolly helps her focus on minutiae.
“nice”: Something to notice about Jordan Peterson when debating or being interviewed is that he is a stickler for facts. He will not let bullshit slide (oh, there’s an image…) so he snaps back when someone tries to get by with vague terms or misquotes him. It makes him seem “unpleasant” and “not nice” but it is actually his opponents who are not nice.
Many years ago, when Jim K began wearing dresses, I said nothing because I wanted to be nice. But now I’m expected to publicly applaud and to use the pronouns of the day. Because that’s the nice thing to do. No effing way.
Wait, what?
I’d already decided decades ago to avoid Muslim doctors.
Mostly a safe play, though it depends on the Muslim. When my father passed there was an Egyptian heart doctor who was brought in to consult. Dad was dying from a brain tumor and it probably was just another chance for the hospital (and himself, though I doubt it was his idea) to ka-ching the VA. We only spoke for a few minutes but he was one of the most helpful people there, in regards to the hospital BS anyway. I had another Muslim doctor from India. I got the impression he was an outsider in a lot of ways, including Islam. We kind of connected on that. Some of what he said was boilerplate leftism that I would expect even from a conservative…conservative from EU or UK. That specific stuff wasn’t all that relevant to me. But for the most important things he was to the right/on even keel relative to most people.
Both these gentlemen were about my age or older than me so that probably makes a difference.
Best response:
My job is finance-adjacent, so I have to take a ton of training courses that have absolutely nothing to do with my actual job.
Today I did the anti-money-laundering (AML) course, and it was galling to see how strictly banks are required to validate the identities of their customers, watch for suspicious activity, and not do business of any kind with OFAC countries.
Absolutely none of which has been done by our own Treasury department. Granted, the U.S. federal government can send money more freely than a domestic bank, but for the sake of Pete, Elon says there were no controls whatsoever. No transaction codes, no descriptions for the transactions. (That’s SO against banking regs.) And employees were told to OK every payment, regardless of how dodgy the payee.
Shameless enablement of fraud on a massive scale. The Social Security database is also not de-duplicated, meaning that the same SSN can occur multiple times in the system, with some payments going to one recipient and some to another, with no effort to validate that the SSN belongs to an actual, living citizen.
Staggering the “incompetence” that looks suspiciously like mafioso-level shenanigans.
When SecDef goes for a jog.
I kinda feel bad for those 700 employees who will lose their jobs. That’s probably a pretty chill gig, and not just because it’s in a mine. It’s a time machine, taking you back to 1955. Surreal, even.
Though on second though, most federal bureaucracies are shot through with Cluster B midwits who jockey themselves into positions where they can make life hell for everyone around them, and because they’re in a mine, everyone is stuck with the toxic mid-level manager.
Religious gathering.
Oh my.
Well, I guess they are one-up on us when it comes to folk singing (or is it filk singing?), and the left always did have that going for it, but the right has better memes.
Anyone else getting the impression that — lacking those handy USAID payouts for RentaMobs and Antifa support goonage — the attendance at these demos seems startlingly feeble and the “crowds” rather thin on the ground?
Why, yes.
Yes it does.
A lot of the nonsense and shenanigans may evaporate when the mystery payments and NGOs vanish, God willing and the creek don’t rise.
[moved to next thread]
When did any civil servant do anything from dawn to dusk?
Flat. Out of tune. Off pitch.
Still, they sing better than they work.
As someone who deals regularly with long-term data security, this isn’t as odd as it sounds. Any document that can’t be read with the naked eye and handled with bare hands requires maintaining the storage/retrieval technology as well. I’ve worked at companies that maintained a data archive of tapes that could never be read because they didn’t think to keep a tape drive and a computer system that could host the tape drive, and both were long since extinct. There are entire libraries of microfiches that are unreadable because no compatible microfiche readers exist any more.
And the limestone mine is just a cheap way of maintaining temperature and humidity in a weatherproof vault rather than building a custom facility.
Now, whether any of this is particularly necessary for US government retirement records is a different question, but given how much data storage technology changes just within ten years, never mind 25, it’s not out of the question.