Spendable Encouragement
The time is upon us when I rashly appeal to the better nature of my patrons, with a reminder that this establishment is made possible by the kindness of strangers. If you’d like to ensure this place exists a while longer and remains ad-free, there are three buttons below the fold with which to monetise any love. Debit and credit cards are accepted. If what happens here is of value, this is a chance to show it.
If one-click haste is called for, there’s a QR code in the sidebar, at which you point your phone camera, and my PayPal.Me page can be found here. There are also SubscribeStar and Ko-Fi accounts, via which love may be monetised, whether as one-off donations or monthly subscriptions. Should you be gripped by an urge to express encouragement via currency, by all means succumb.
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Sordid business, I grant you, but it’s what keeps this place here.
For newcomers wishing to know more about what’s been going on here for nineteen chuffing years, in over 3,500 posts and hundreds of thousands of comments, the Reheated series is a pretty good place to start – in particular, the end-of-year-summaries, which convey the fullest flavour of what it is we do. A sort of blog concentrate. If you like what you find there… well, there’s lots more of that.
Do take a moment to poke through the discussion threads too. The posts are intended as starting points, not full stops, and the comments are where much of the good stuff is waiting to be found. And do please join in.
As always, thanks for the support, the comments, and the company.
Consider this an open thread. Share ye links and bicker.
As if another reason to raze academia was needed.
Lefty pronouncements: from supporting Hamas to claiming there is a patriarchy, those proclaiming have a uniform ignorance about the topic. They do not know that women are getting more college degrees, more medical degrees, live longer etc etc. They just proclaim a grievance for which they expect to be praised. Relative to Israel, they fail to grasp that rockets by the thousands have been raining down for decades. How would they react to that?
Renaming obesity: sure, remove any incentive to lose weight. What could go wrong?
O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!
Or they pretend to not know because they hate their own society and will embrace any enemy bent on our destruction.
Another problem solved!
[ Compiles Friday’s Ephemera, slumps back, dabs brow, emotionally spent. ]
Channel 4 once again not asking the obvious questions.
Better get Cathy “So What You’re Saying Is” Newman on it!
You do not hate the BBC enough.
On mailbox bashing. And other matters.
There are only so many hours in the day.
Ping! 🍷
Bless you, sir. Should you find yourself obliged to offer improbable blessings on receipt of cash – in keeping with a ten-year tradition that seemed like a good idea at the time – may you have the foresight to prepare a list in advance, unlike certain proprietors of long-running blogs.
#TrueLifeDrama
Well dangit, now I need to dig out the special credit card when I get home and do a midnight (your time) ping, just to see what’s next on the blessing list. I have to say – I thoroughly enjoy reading what you come up with for everyone during Keep the Rusty Barge Afloat fundraisers. Some of your #TrueStories I can relate to, and some make me laugh out loud.
Haven’t followed MLB much since the kneeling and the woke BS started but ever since Mamdami hugged the Mets’ mascots, they haven’t won a game. I got curious and followed the final three innings of their game last night on my general sports app. Had a 3-2 lead over Minnesota going into the 7th and lost 5-3. Heh.
“Older Americans deserve a say over the future even when they might not live to see it. But they do not deserve the stranglehold over it they currently enjoy through overrepresentation in elections, which produces too many regressive policies and too many seniors in the highest offices.
Older Americans are owed the care that everyone else funds. Indeed, they should get more of it than they get now — including funding for long-term care at home or in nursing homes. But they also need incentives to give up accumulated housing, jobs and wealth.
.
.
.
It is not ageist, finally, to impose policies to transfer jobs, houses and wealth down the generational chain.”
***
You didn’t want to keep the things you worked and saved for in retirement, did you? “Incentives to give up accumulated housing, jobs and wealth?” “Impose policies to transfer jobs, houses, and wealth?”
So, that movie, “Logan’s Run” – when does it become a reality?
(Link is to a gift article in the New York Times. The author, Samuel Moyn, is a law professor at Yale. His upcoming book is “Gerontocracy in America: How the Old Hoard Power and Wealth — and What to Do About It.”)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HpF_aXPnNzU
As promised, the stealth ping in the middle of the British night to help keep ye olde rusty barge afloat.
Professor of law and of history.
Oh dear. What are those claws going to do to that pleather?
There is a strange incongruity in that passage: On the one hand, older Americans are needy and dependent on the State. On the other hand, they are unjustly wealthy.
And why should anyone be coerced into giving up their job? Does he hate older people that much? Does he see older Yale professors as impeding his advancement? Or (based on the comment thread) does he want (often older) Americans to “get out of the way” of younger “migrants” so that they can, more quickly, transform America into something very un-American? Or maybe he’s just a generic commie scumbag.
Jobs already get transferred when people choose to retire.
Houses and wealth get transferred when people die.
But that’s not soon enough for this jackal in sheep’s clothing.
My mother passionately wanted to stay in her home for the rest of her life, the home and surroundings she was used to and loved, and remaining near the neighbors she had known for so long. She did not want to be relocated far away*, into an unfamiliar and cramped apartment, at close quarters with strangers who would be an unknown quantity, dependent on services over which she would have no control.
How can this Wise Professor not understand such things? Because he is, deep down, an inhuman monster.
* And for the elderly, even one mile is far away. All casual, day-to-day contact ends.
It’s not the elderly who “need” this, but the rapacious leftists.
Counter-proposal: Yale professors need “incentives” to give up their housing, jobs and wealth.
And their tenure, academic privileges, status, awards, degrees, social networks, etc. They should be made no different from an apartment building janitor.
“Hoard”
Nobody uses that word unless they’re up to no good.
Bless you, madam. May that thing you saw decades ago and which you’re planning to watch again be every bit as good as you remembered.
On which, more tomorrow.
Not God-level pranking but still respectable good.
He goes through his day like a normal gal.
Just the ILLEGALS.
Not unrelated:
What he said.
And let’s just check in on the BBC’s comedy department.
Okay, then.
Fashionable apostasy.
As you might imagine, I have questions.
Happy St. George’s Day to you lot in Blighty if celebrating, or even acknowledging, it won’t get you a visit from the rozzers.
[ Removed in order to add image. ]
Seems right:
Sure that wasn’t the news department?
Green, Greenhill, Green.
At some point there will be a reckoning between the different, and differing, factions and it promises a certain amount of . . . drama.
I’s perhaps worth pointing out that those “trans rights” that are supposedly being crushed underfoot – and which, simultaneously, are rarely specified – amount to a right to falsify one’s identity and a right to coerce others to lie, while robbing them of the right to say what is obviously true.
So, well, screw that.
It’s the conflict, when it erupts, between the burgeoning Islamists and the head-in-the-clouds (well, head-in-something), fashionably opinionated, eco-luvvies that should make for a spectacle not seen since the 1930s.
Don’t worry, we’re not judging you or anything.
[ Sound of intense, withering judgement from all sides. ]
Whose unrealism – whose imperviousness to even the most glaring of realities – is an endless source of wonder. Again, if sociology were a credible field and not itself ideologically captured, this is the kind of phenomenon that you’d think might be of interest. Maybe a study or two. A little… what’s the word… interrogation.
[ Checks tomorrow’s Ephemera links one last time. ]
[ Muffled chuckling. ]
Many libertarians, so-called, want in as well.
Also, two band names:
THE fashionably opinionated
opinionated eco-luvvies
All three in one name would just be a bit much
As it’s been at least a whole day since the last one, I suppose we’re due for one of those Things That Never Happen.
[ Checks haz-mat gear ]
A candidate for water cremation, no expiration needed.
There’s at least one band name in this batch.