Friday Ephemera (777)
Discourse was attempted. || It’s all in the tongue, I’m told. || A little snug. || Incoming. || Incoming 2. || Instant immortality, 1970. || A map of light pollution. || On why we might not want to detect, or be detected by, an alien intelligence. Previously, on relativistic weapons. || Splashes in a vacuum. || Suboptimal situation. || A spot of Chopin. || Parenting. || A project for the weekend. || When you forget you’re in charge. || The testosterone makes her sweat. || The thrill of self-touching. || “I studied non-binary identities in college.” || But he was only going to stab y’all. || Keyboard. || Discussion point. || For lovers of equations: “Why can’t you walk through walls if atoms are mostly empty space?” || It would be easier if you quit squirming. || Oh, and scenes of pumping and squeaking.
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[ Everyone, quietly appalled, stares at Tim. ]
The edit option expires after 30 minutes.
[ Staring intensifies. ]
Re Hawks…I’m not familiar with him. At first I thought, being the philistine that I am, he was the skateboarding guy but whatevs…As I said on the Twitter/X post:
As to other comments regarding Hawk’s background, which I will accept as stated, he got a good education, his parents apparently were well to do but they didn’t leave him anything material either. Presumably he gave his son a good education as well.
My parents didn’t have a significant amount of money to leave my sister and I. Just their small golf villa in The Villages (God’s Waiting Room) and a couple of low five-figure investments. After several discussions with my father regarding what to do when he passed, I emphasized to him that I was doing quite well thanks to how he and my mother raised me. I inherited the 1965 Mustang that he purchased after Mom died because that was going to be a white elephant either way. Aside form that he left money to the church (big mistake that turned out to be) and his local VFW, though when I dropped off the check I barely got a thank-you…which I found extremely awkward. Most went to my sister who was divorcing her first husband at the time and was raising two kids.
My wife and I discuss what we will do with our money. I definitely want to leave my niece, her husband and kid enough to say, pay off whatever house they may have at the time. Maybe a five figure sum for my nephew unless he starts getting his act together. If so, we will see. Perhaps a few bucks for David here…The rest…I would like to have it converted into gold and that gold dropped to the bottom of the Mariana Trench. Unfortunately there is not a living soul on this planet I could trust to follow through on that. I am praying for along, lingering death so that maybe I can dump it a few grand at a time.
[ Flicks through catalogue of incredibly fancy diamante tip jars. ]
The global moral norm is everyone unashamedly taking whatever advantage they can get from family wealth or connections, and trying to pass on their own advantages to their children, friends, communities because you’d be an ungrateful family or community member if you didn’t. Hawks says leaving things to family is not relevant any more. No Tony, you’ve got it backwards: this is the future for Western countries, which are converging to the global norm with mass immigration. Well-off whites who refuse to pass on advantages to their children are just putting them at a disadvantage compared to their peers from unashamedly and systematically nepotistic immigrant communities.
Within white countries, there’s historically a democratic anti-ostentation strain where rich men, like Hawks’ own father as he relates in the video, tell their children not to expect to live idly on the family money. This isn’t a grand Rawlsian gesture of global wealth redistribution, it’s just that they don’t want their children to be Hooray Henries. And these children unavoidably have other advantages, for example that their family dinners are like Davos seminars, so they look like fools when they pretend they pulled themselves up by their own bootstraps.
Now, Hawks is saying that there’s a job for his son if he wants it in the family charitable foundation, which is traditionally the very place where rich people park their talentless offspring to be kept in the style to which they’re accustomed without actually having to compete for the value of their talents on the open market, AND they get to fight for global redistributive justice.
Well off whites, seriously well off whites, pass on their wealth to children who generally become leftists because of guilt and a failure to achieve anything on their own. You will note that Hawk indicates his son hasn’t really achieved anything on his own even though he has had tremendous advantages in education and exposure to a wider world, with far more connections than most people. I’m not crying for the guy. His dad is at least giving him a job where he…presumably …can appreciate that others in this world did not have his advantages. Which itself I, not that it’s much of my business, don’t necessarily agree with either because I suspect he will just give that money to leftist causes if for no other reason than perhaps to spite his father. Now I admit I am reading a lot into this person and his relationship with his father but just speaking on a probability basis.
Some people proudly declare their suitability for the wood chipper.
Three “Brits” were arrested for gang rape in Croatia.
Just notice that this is Friday Ephemera number 777. Maybe you should buy a lottery ticket before your next post. Let us know if you win. Don’t just disappear like some people around here do.
Scott Adams: Obama’s Russia Hoax & ‘Fine People’ Lie Ruined My Life and Divided America:
This is also why Britain (and Europe) should implement mass demigration.
Man, it’s hot out.
[ Considers the merits of Pimm’s over ice. Maybe with lemon juice. ]
“Crystal meth Santa”
The adults aren’t doing a very good job of distinguishing between real history and make-believe.
I’ve tried reading with a cigar, but the tobacco is usually so tightly packed that I can’t see through it.
[ badum tss ]
Sorry, for that. There really are so many quality books that I don’t know where to start. If you want to continue on the Dostoyevsky theme, then you should add Crime and Punishment. There is a treasure trove amongst the Russian authors but I’m not sure if that fits your definition of Western civilization. There’s Gogol, Pasternak, Tolstoy, Solzhenitsyn et al.
Closer to home for you, I would look for Mark Twain, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry James, William Faulkner, John Steinbeck, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald and even Raymond Chandler.
For me, I would start with Dickens, though British, was so prolific, you can find his books everywhere. When I retired early ten years back I decided to re-read the whole of Dickens work. There aren’t many characters we encounter in life today that you can’t find in Dickens. If you’re adding to a library, consider A Tale of Two Cities, David Copperfield or Great Expectations as a good starting point.
YMMV just my opinion. There are many more great choices.
Yes. Thanks. Read all those guys. Except Chandler and only one thing by James tho. Twain is the only one I would keep. Not so much that the others are all unworthy but I’m looking for cream of the crop and the less 20th century+ the better. Thinking more classical literature. I had a copy of Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire but not sure where it went. I am rather weak on the ancients of Greece and Rome. I had a copy of something by St. Augustine but lost that as well.
Not sure why, this just looks like it belongs on this site under Phryday Ephemera.
Bleak House and Little Dorrit are my favorite Dickens, as are the BBC miniseries of each a few decades back.
Now, Hawks is saying that there’s a job for his son if he wants it in the family charitable foundation, which is traditionally the very place where rich people park their talentless offspring to be kept in the style to which they’re accustomed without actually having to compete for the value of their talents on the open market, AND they get to fight for global redistributive justice.
You mean like Soros père et fils?
I didn’t know that what is said inside a church is any of the government’s business.
Indeed. Given that so many NGOs are money pits which do little or no good, and which merely provide lucrative employment for talentless drones and malevolent leftists, why does Tony Hawks think he’s making a wise decision?
Remember when, back in the 1960’s, dopers would give marijuana-laced food to unsuspecting people, thinking it was both a funny prank and “liberating”?
“Hoax” is too kind of a word; Piltdown Man was a hoax. The Sokal affair was a hoax.
The malicious and evil of this organized and amplified political lying and propaganda is in a much different category from bigfoot and Loch Ness Monster.
Strongly agree. This is Soviet-level black propaganda.
I think I’ve
metsmelled the author of this article.Maybe it is just me, but sitting on one’s keister all day wading through rando’s Farcebook pages and Twitter looking for posts not approved by the Central Committee doesn’t strike me as “elite”.
I would like to have it converted into gold and that gold dropped to the bottom of the Mariana Trench.
This reminds me of the Frederick Forsyth story A Careful Man in which a dying man, unwilling to leave his large fortune to his greedy relatives, seems to do something very similar.
There seems to be a contest going on between England, Canada, and Australia for totalitarian of the week.
There seems to be a contest going on between England, Canada, and Australia for totalitarian of the week.
Don’t count out the
Fourth Reich, excuse meEastGermany.Maybe it’s just me, but it seems more than a bit dubious to claim a fear of summer riots while bringing in those who’ll kick them off.
Yes, well, that’s the sort of thing you’d expect from the Boche.
…that’s the sort of thing you’d expect from the Boche.
Or Vichy France, Marine Le Pen being unavailable for comment.
NHS, envy of the world.
I hate to break it to the NHS, but the prostate, seminal vessicles, and vas deferens are both internal, and part of the male reproductive system.
When all your medical experts get replaced with commissars….