I feel like my Uncle Eddie.
Eddie wasn’t really my uncle, he was my dad’s best friend, but still, Uncle Eddie. Eddie was a rather fearsome fellow, remarkably talented and intelligent, and (unlike my dad, who was remarkably kind and considerate) completely lacked in any shits to give regarding people’s feelings. He was smart, sarcastic, cutting, snarky, and merciless.
I loved Uncle Eddie.
In any case, Eddie’s employer decided to send him to a course, named after a best selling author of yore, which would (they hoped) help him to smooth over his rough edges. This was futile in that Eddie was nothing but rough edges, but they were tired of having person after person quit after being verbally ripped to shreds when their work was anything less than Eddie’s exacting standards. Part of the course was persuasive public speaking. The class was given an exercise: each person would stand up and extemporaneously give a speech that was supposed to arouse emotion in the audience. Person after person spoke, and because sadness is an easy emotion to tap, they all told sob stories, one after another. Near the end, a blind guy in the class got up and started speaking about his seeing eye dog. He spoke at length about the bond between them, the way the dog became almost part of him in a way that most humans couldn’t understand, how the dog transformed his life and gave him a love and devotion that could never be duplicated. He went on to talk about the dog’s eventual decline in old age, then talked about the night he held the old dog in his arms as the dog finally died. The class was in tears.
Now it was Eddie’s turn.
He stood up, shook his head sadly, and observed, “It’s tough to follow a dog act…”
This aroused emotion in the audience, and Eddie was lucky to escape alive. And that is how I feel trying to follow SugarFree. Well, no matter, links must be served.
What I’m taking away from this is that you’d do well to let incredibly corrupt and capable lawyers set up things like this rather than approaching it as a businessman. There’s much to learn from the Clintons.
As long as there’s money to be raised and publicity to be hounded, there’s people you can always count on.
And as long as there’s meaningless moral preening points to be made, there’s people you can count on to make them, while of course relentlessly self-promoting. This would be delightfully easy to intersectionally troll. “Wait, you visually decide? It’s not physical, it’s a social construct, you shitlord!”
Speaking of which, here’s an example of toxic masculinity in action.
This is the kind of shit that drives me crazy. A basic question is asked of a physicist, he gives a very standard answer, the reporter doesn’t understand it, and voila! clickbait ensues. The correct answer, Mr. They-Don’t-Teach-Science-In-J-School is, “Just because you can formulate a grammatically correct question doesn’t mean that it’s physically meaningful. There is no such thing as ‘before’ the beginning of time, it is a meaningless phrase, and Hawking tried to tell you that.” TW: Neil deGrasseTyson.
There are some questions that really don’t need to be asked.
And just because. Miss you, dude.
In today’s Old Guy music, I’m reminded of why They Might Be Giants might be the best pop band ever. This is one of their lesser-known songs, but it shouldn’t be.
Comments
414 responses to “Saturday Morning How Do I Top This? Links”
This is the kind of shit that drives me crazy. A basic question is asked of a physicist, he gives a very standard answer, the reporter doesn’t understand it, and voila! clickbait ensues.
I asked a physicist once what there was before the Big Bang, and got a very unsatisfying answer about the physical laws of our universe not applying when the universe is collapsed that much, so it’s not really right to say “before” the Big Bang.
His answer isn’t a bad shorthand, but educated adults deserve better than shorthand from each other. A better answer would simply acknowledge that the correct model (theory, law, equations) for that situation is not yet achieved.
Newton was correct until Einstein, who was more correct; and so it goes. Here’s to physics: a human endeavor where we are actually more correct each succeeding year!
To be fair, ask your parents if you were here before the big bang.
Damn, sorry about that Ted. Forgot about you losing your mom. Apologies.
Parents have to die sometime.
Tried to do that thing where you lie on your back and lift the kid off the ground on the soles of your feet today. She’s gotten much bigger and I’ve gotten much older. Felt a twinge in the lower back that reminds me that time is a slippin. *Puts on some Jim Croce*
Grammatically correct =/= physically meaningful. The answer is that there’s no such thing as “before” the Big Bang, any more so than any meaning to “where exactly is the moving particle.” Just because you can express it in English doesn’t mean it has physical or logical meaning. “Before” is a measure of time, so “before the beginning of time” is logically contradictory.
Whoa
So why is there a universe at all?
Why is there a why?
Why ask why?
Beware of the penguins
This gets back to Sorabji’s (and implicitly Zeno’s) questions about starting and stopping. What is the first moment of time? Is time “going” at that first moment or not?
I don’t get why all of you are asking physicists about what was going on before the Big Bang.
If it was me, I’d ask the definitive source: Chuck Lorre.
“As long as there’s money to be raised and publicity to be hounded, there’s people you can always count on.”
This turn off your adblocker crap is getting annoying.
It is, but there’s no way I’m turning off my ad blocker.
There are some questions that really don’t need to be asked.
Did you notice the date on that one?
Who cares?
Tell Swiss I was at least trying to comment on the links.
Sounds more like you were trying to get a date….
I’m sure they could get some good old boys with rifles to take care of the feral cattle for free. It’s a fairly big business in Australia.
http://www.australiawidesafaris.com.au/hunting-safaris/wild-cattle-hunting-safaris/
They allow feral cattle hunting in Hawaii. But because it’s California, I’m sure they only want a solution that costs tax dollars.
Homeless white guy $30. Oprah Winfrey $12. Irony? Priceless.
Counter offer six bucks because you black folks will only spend the extra money on spinner rims and malt liquor anyway…should go over well.
It’s an example of two truisms: White Guilt is an endless commodity and there’s a sucker born every minute.
They do the same in the Chef’s native Nigeria so it is culturally appropriate. Not that there are many homeless white guys in Nigeria but there are white guys, and the Nigerian Oprah Winfrey’s all have current or former ties to the government and or military.
I bet they have near zero white customers, and in about 2-3 months, no business at all.
Hawking’s answer to the question “What was there before there was anything?” relies on a theory known as the “no-boundary proposal.”
What was there before AutoPlay, “Live Science wants to send you notifications”, and “Would you like to subscibe to our emails, or do you want to continue to mooch”?
There is no such thing as ‘before’ the beginning of time, it is a meaningless phrase
There’s no there, there.
Moore’s campaign Facebook page said his “resources have been depleted.”
NY Post headline: Moore Shoots Wad Again.
Those giant foam cowboy hats aren’t going to buy themselves!
The median income for African-American households in New Orleans fell from $32,332 in 2000 to $27,812 in 2013 in inflation-adjusted dollars, according to The Data Center’s New Orleans Index at Ten. Over the same time, median income for white households in the city remained roughly the same, $61,117 to $60,070. In 2013, the median household income for African-Americans in metro New Orleans was 54 percent lower than for whites.
Could this be because the more productive black people in New Orleans decided to just GTFO instead of staying?
Does that include unreported income?
My thought was that the more productive black people just didn’t move back after Katrina.
Once they realized how much better their life was in Houston or some other place, they decided to just stay.
Perused the comments from yesterday and day before. I see many of you complaining about snow, ice and winter weather.
View of my back porch taken just now: https://postimg.org/image/a01y2tg4z/
Nice bush.
☺
I was expecting chickens and a muscle car up on cinder blocks 🙂
Just off camera there’s a giant pot boiling squirrel stew. (Nice pic)
I was expecting Suthen’s enemies impaled on stakes.
Next to a refrigerator with no door.
“I was expecting chickens and a muscle car up on cinder blocks ”
That is the other side of the yard by the old dog house and goat pen.
I got stuck in a snow bank on the lake last Sunday. So my view is much different than yours. But it has been melting all week. Maybe Spring will be sprung soon.
Yesterday due to the high winds TWO tractor-trailers flipped over on the Verazzano Bridge. Because it’s a massive choke point (the only way from Brooklyn to Staten Island and America proper, traffic in all directions was turned into gridlock. My neighboorhood was a parking lot, including many streets that are usually empty. Total nightmare.
Here and here.
Supposedly wind gusts were up to 84 on the bridge
Staten Island is America proper?
We had a lot of wind, but surprisingly, the power only “winked” a couple of times. Ten miles north they got like 10 inches of snow. Some places west of UCS got close to 30 inches or more.
I meant Brooklyn, Staten Island, then America proper.
New Joisey isn’t America proper either.
I didn’t notice anything, but I didn’t leave the house yesterday. I should have thought to check my view of the bridge in order to catch any vehicles that might have been in flight…
Instead I lost my cable and internet.
What Happened Before the Big Bang?
Better television
*rimshot
Knock knock Penny
Bazinga!
This turn off your adblocker crap is getting annoying.
What makes that even more precious is that “Business Insider” is nearly as openly anticapitalist as Jacobin.
But don’t you dare try to read their moronic blather without being subjected to their ads. Because that would be stealing.
Not surprising. It was started by Henry Blodget, the disgraced stock analyst & flim flam man, now owned by the German journalism company Axel Springer.
The difference between the $12 and $30 meals, customers are informed, will be redistributed to minorities who buy food at the stall. How do white customers react to the proposition?
“You’re a regular fucking Robin Hood, you are. You know what? I think I’ll just go to Popeye’s and redistribute my wealth to the minorities who work there.”
The listed price for the Nigerian food is $12.
Nigerian immigrant household income is $62k while the white household income is $61k. That dude owes me some change.
Jeez, the simple fact that they are trying to charge $30 for something that is listed as $12 should be enough for them to receive constant abuse in every forum imaginable. However, I’m sure the usual suspects are praising them to the heavens.
*SIGH*
Yet, amazingly, if it’s true, which is a big if:
“Some of them are enthusiastic, some of them are bamboozled a bit by it,” Wey says. “But the majority of white folks, nearly 80 percent, decided to pay.”
I have to say that I have had little experience with New Orleans since Katrina but I can tell you that before Katrina it was a pit of filth, crime and corruption that words can barely describe. Since Katrina the racial mix and economic situation of the city has changed.
It will probably change more as I know at least one restaurant that is going out of business.
I went to New Orleans once in 2000 or 2001. I hated the place. I rooted for Katrina. I figured if the ocean reclaimed the city it would be better for everyone.
“This would be delightfully easy to intersectionally troll. “Wait, you visually decide? It’s not physical, it’s a social construct, you shitlord!””
Race is a social construct.
Anyway, I was living in a largely hispanic neighborhood. Someone there opened up a new soul food take-out. Inside, there was a sign on the wall announcing a discount — that if you ordered over some specific quantity of food, you would get some amount of money taken off the bill. I don’t remember the specifics. So anyway, I when she rang up my order, she didn’t subtract the discount. When I pointed this out, she informed me that it was only for the community. After I explained I lived right near her restaurant, she said that’s not what she meant. Although I couldn’t get her to admit it, by “community” she meant “black people”. I never went back. And they went out of business in a few months.
I would have called her a racist which she is and left the stuff there.
the community
That word is like “diversity.” Thrown around all the time, never defined.
I just wish her policy were announced in bold letters in the front window so all the racists know where to go and the rest of us know where not to go.
I lived in a poor, mostly black community during my late 20’s-early 30’s and would often frequent the local supermarket(no food desert?-gasp!) before going home from work. Needless to say, during the summer months my shaved head, black shorts, muscle-t and steel toed boots didn’t go over well….I derived a sick, perverse sense of satisfaction from it.
Annual Refresher of Why Libertarians Should Hate the American League: Laws of physics and nature and markets should apply to everyone. The law in baseball will always be: if thou wouldst field, thou shalt bat; and if thou wouldst bat, thou shalt field. The designated hitter perverts, subverts, and endruns that elegant rule. Exceptions, inconsistencies, special cases, and crony influences should instinctively alienate the libertarian against the profiting (cheating/perverting/corrupting) influence.
So I will always despise the AL, and midseason interleague play will always serve to merely ruin the otherwise great pastime. I pray to Zardoz to send a meteor that bursts into 15 pieces and purifies the cities now beheld by the junior league.
I look at it more simply: the DH removes an element of strategy. Therefore, the DH is an abomination. Not as bad as rooftop stadiums and synthetic turf, but still.
No doubt; I obviously agree; goes without saying, even.
I was just trying to stretch a single into a double by pretending that there’s only one pure way to look at the philosophical elements overlaying the game’s rules: thus dragging the libertarian undercurrent of no-perverting-forces-other-than-freedom-and-markets into play. There are actually a million reasons to hate the AL that I won’t go into.
The other side of the coin is that soulless people (catbuttable?) should be able to enjoy the DH if they want to (maybe a truer market argument…ugh). People go to McDonalds, drive Kias (hey oh!), and watch FoxNews, and I’m not going to lie down in front of a tank to stop them from any of that.
Annual Refresher of Why Libertarians Should Hate the American League
The fact that it’s baseball isn’t enough?
AL = Amateur League
NL = Nazi League
I’m with Ted. MLB pissed me off with their second strike. I haven’t watched a game since.
Yes, it’s great fun watching the shitty eigth batter get pitched around so a pitcher can flail at three pitches in the dirt.
That’s fair.
And it’s also not: we already stipulate that the batting order is legitimate (the eighth guy isn’t a pitcher, but we don’t DH for him; lesser guys bat later, which is a standard element of the strategy). We could have a game where the same four guys did all the batting and none of them ever took the field, while nine other fielding experts never batted…. Nothing wrong with that…it just ain’t baseball: it is perverted.
Speaking of perverted: the market for pitchers is perverted towards guys who can’t hit because there’s a league where that doesn’t matter. If batting were more important to pitchers, more of them could bat. The AL is rent control for pitchers.
” (the eighth guy isn’t a pitcher”
Tony LaRussa routinely batted his pitchers 8th, because it gets better results.
So let’s turn baseball into football. All the weak-hitting shortstops can get DHs too. Why not just have nine fielders and nine hitters?
I don’t care either way. The DH isn’t going away. The Players Union wouldn’t allow it.
What I want is consistency…either both Leagues have it or not.
I am not a big baseball fan so I have no real opinion on this other than I am all for entertainment. I think the DH rule is fine, but they should have to pick a random person from the stands. The beer guys could keep a tally of beers sold, and the DH pool should be the fans who have drank the most.
Not a pool. Simply the guy who drank the most during batting practice before the game.
That way you could watch a bunch of delusional, fat, over the hill dudes chug beer like crazy so they could get their chance to show the team that they had missed out.
I wonder why the Players Assoc. goes along with different rules for different leagues? No DH in NL shortens careers, and there’s always some established pitcher or two who gets hurt running the bases.
1. Shortens careers? Players CAN go to an AL team when their fielding skills decline (or if they were already shitty).
2. The DH allows pitchers to not risk getting plunked by the other team’s pitchers. So maybe it’s a wash?
1) Yes they can go to the other league, but the total number of DH slots is half what it would be if both leagues used the rule.
2)Again, NL pitchers are at risk for batting, base running injuries that don’t apply to AL pitchers. Even so, when AL pitchers have to bat in interleague away games, they are more at risk because they aren’t used to batting.
Everyone has the same roster size. The DH just changes the distribution of player types – it creates a slot for guys who can hit but not field, but at the expense of weak-hitting utility players. So the union has no reason to care. (And with teams shifting to 13 pitchers, the classic “all hit” DH is becoming a rarity anyhow.)
Relax. It’s just baseball.
From the beach volleyball article
‘Women have more options when it comes to what they compete in than men do, though both genders have to wear both tops and bottoms. ‘
Something tells me Egypt’s Women’s team has less options in this case. Just a hunch.
No no no…”we are free to choose such clothing in our religion, we are not compelled.”
I actually had a former co-worker tell me this with a straight face. She dressed with the head scarf outfit every single day. Yet I don’t think she believed she was under a religious compulsion to do it, because she woke up every day and decided to put it on…so she sees it as a choice. When I asked what would happen if she decided not to wear it from personal choice I got a blank look.
The deciding not to may have never occurred to her, which is kinda sad.
How long before Trudeau dons a bikini?
“I think it moved”
Ewwwww
I refuse to use my middling photoshop skills to indulge your fetishes, straff.
Parkland students fundraising for the DNC?
Isn’t that what they’ve been doing all along? Well, I mean the pro-gun-control students who magically got blue checkmarks and a gazillion follows on Twitter. Not the anti-gun-control students who have been completely ignored.
I am pretty skeptical that those are students that survived the shooting.
As in they weren’t in the same building as the shooter and pro-2a people that actually did something in response to the shooter during the event?
Don’t criticize these innocent children who have been through a tragedy. You, sir, are worse than Hitler!
Somewhat OT
oops
http://www.foxnews.com/us/2018/03/03/police-officer-bypassed-laws-to-resell-dozens-guns-prosecutors-say.html
Dumbass cop is a dumbass.
More news like this at the top of the hour.
“What Happened Before the Big Bang”
The Galactic Empire was at its zenith before God collapsed it into a single point. He then said “I found your lack of faith disturbing”.
Nice.
The world, according to Trump
“When a country (USA) is losing many billions of dollars on trade with virtually every country it does business with, trade wars are good, and easy to win,” Trump said on Twitter on Friday.
In a later social media post, the Republican president said his aim was to protect U.S. jobs in the face of cheaper foreign products, a familiar theme in the“America First” credo he campaigned on for the 2016 election.
“We must protect our country and our workers. Our steel industry is in bad shape. IF YOU DON’T HAVE STEEL, YOU DON’T HAVE A COUNTRY!” he wrote.
Great.
*facepalm*
Like a bull in a china shop.
That’s a little unfair to the bull.
It’s no surprise. That’s what he said he would do during his campaign.
Yeap. One reason I didn’t vote for him.
But all the Trumpies assured me that it was just campaign talk and I should ignore it and accept that he’s a libertarian miracle.
Didn’t you know it was supposed to be different from all the times folks said he is a covert isolationist?
Well I guess the rest of the country can just spend more on construction and manufacturing costs in order to save some jobs for a very select few in a specialized field.
Just when I think I might be persuaded into voting for the guy in 2020, which I didn’t do in 2016, he goes and pulls some nonsensical statement out of his ass like this and I snap back to sanity.
Our steel industry is in bad shape.
Citation needed.
I don’t disagree with it being important to protect our country and our workers. I don’t think the steel industry is in great shape. I do think steel is still a vital commodity that is better to have a decent production base in country, for strategic reasons.
Of course, I would also point out that steel production actually was pretty damn strong in the 90s both pre and post NAFTA. It tanked in the Great Recession, and has not bounced back.
Personally, I think that’s far more due to the environmental jihad waged by the Obama admin that is free trade.
It’s taxes and regulation that stifle American industry, and more taxes and regulation will not make things better.
“It’s taxes and regulation that stifle American industry, and more taxes and regulation will not make things better.”
THIS
Tariffs and spending on infrastructure are what the Republican Party was founded on. They are the party of mercantilism. (The Clay/Hamilton/Lincoln Republicans anyway…)
Unbelievable! How did that happen?
Have rifle will travel. Where do I apply?
Hmmm. Wild bull? That can be a pretty scary animal. I’d give it a go but might be a good idea to travel in pairs.
This is california and as pointed out above they will choose what costs the most. I have never hunted out of a helicopter but I am confident I could do it.
More wonderful diversity.
https://hotair.com/archives/2018/03/02/lawsuit-googles-youtube-stopped-hiring-white-asian-males-improve-diversity/
They are going to go the way of the dinosaur pretty soon. For allegedly smart people they aren’t showing any evidence of being smart. Progressives turn everything they touch to shit. The tech giants wont be any different.
BitChute is an excellent alternative (I just signed up).
Cool thanks, I’ll check it out. I would love to see everyone leave YouTube to its tiny echo chamber.
They’re still a bit light on content compared to YT but that problem seems to be working itself out via content creators hedging their bets on what they think YT’s going to do next. They do have a free speech policy and favorable terms of service and also a nice and functional user interface. A lot of the right wing (I include libertarians in this) political YouTubers have a presence there.
There have been a lot of peeps I like that have been demonitized by youtube so hopefully they give that a shot.
More like the Dodo Bird.
That’s one way to cut their payroll costs.
The Babylon Bee, a satire site, gets a warning from Facebook for spreading fake news after Snopes argues a story they printed was false (again, it’s a satire site like The Onion).
https://pjmedia.com/faith/facebook-threatens-babylon-bee-cnn-satire-report-snopes-fact-checkers/
It was probably the result of some stupid automated system but still.
Selfies Can Make Your Nose Look 30 Percent Bigger
I hope this wasn’t tax dollar funded.
So that’s my new excuse, supplanting, “I’m an old stereotypical Jew.”
Now if I could only get that to work for my dick-pics…
Dick picks make your nose look 30 percent bigger, too.
What was done there has been seen. Very nice.
Good one, Ted.
Man oh man that food stall story only solidifies the notion there’s no such thing as peak derp.
“I get to break the law by engaging in discriminatory pricing because I’m doing an “experiment” on a dubious issue and I’m black and blacks have it bad and we’ll always have it bad because race is structural and systemic and I’m not sure what this will prove or solve or why I talk in a run-on sentence and shoved a flute up my ass and….”
It’s a clever way gouge and if you’re white and you willingly encourage this sort of racist, pseudo-economic experiment, you’re an idiot of mythical proportion without scant an ounce of dignity.
Like that idiot coffee shop in Australia that charges more to male customers; and the emasculated morons agree to it.
I think I’m gonna start a restaurant. I’m going to over charge SJW, women and blacks because ‘I feel like it’ and feel oppressed and want to keep price equilibrium.
Let’s see how long that lasts before guys like the one in the article come with their megaphones shouting ‘burn it down’.
It’s so weird: why aren’t State AGs ever going after racist shitheels like this?
To ask the question is to know the answer.
and the emasculated morons agree to it.
This is the concerning part to me. Why the fuck would you agree to that instead of telling them to fuck off?? Perhaps they have too much soy in their diets.
I have a used fireproof retail location you might want to invest in.
One of my more openly socialist (and rabidly anti-Trump) friends is a big fan of protectionism and high tariffs, which he believes are a great benefit the Working
ManPersonage. I should ask him if he’s going to vote for Trump, next time.High tariffs and gun control.
Wha happened?
From that Reuters article:
Canada, the biggest supplier of steel and aluminum to the United States, said it would retaliate if hit by U.S. tariffs.
What? I thought Canada only exported toothpicks and scratchy wool blankets.
I thought their only exports were maple syrup and professional hockey players.
https://twitter.com/jaketapper/status/969698963094999040
Explain how the Nazis were right wing again?
You know who else liked to march in the streets?
Most of San Francisco?
Scapegoating the Jew is a multiracial favorite pastime.
The thing that annoys me, is for the left (including the media), the sins a group (as a whole or the leaders or individuals within the group) aligned with the left does not effect the goals of the group but for the right sins of one are the sins of all. You see this a little from the right, but nowhere near as blatant or with the cheer-leading of the media. It is the strongest form of ideological tribalism. The left doesn’t seem to care how they get what they want, just that they get what they want.
In short, the ends justify the means.
I know I haven’t said this in the most articulate way. I hope someone has said (or will say it) better.
Hitler was a capitalist. He was friends with Henry Ford. Google it!
Explain how the Nazis were right wing again?
Their economic/governmental ideals are identical to modern leftists/proggies but they killed jews and were racist af, so they must be “right-wing” because reasons.
First, there was divestiture from Isreal…
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-43268446
It wont make any difference. Gun customers aren’t going anywhere.
Paging Lachowsky
Thanks Pomp. I’ll send another e-mail.
I am not a big baseball fan so I have no real opinion on this other than I am all for entertainment.
NEEDZ MOAR BENCH-CLEARING BRAWLZ
This is completely OT but I like spreading the word when there is libertarianish media for consumption. Listening to Scott Horton interviewed David Thibodeau (Branch Davidian survivor)lead me to the “Waco” miniseries on amazon prime. The series is based on Thibodeau’s book and so far seems to be objective in it’s approach (i.e. not portraying the Branch Davidians as deplorables deserving death and accurately depicting the politics in Washington at the time that did much to insight the conflict). It’s well done and is worth a watch. I was only 11 years old at the time but I can still get myself worked up thinking about the entire incident.
Also, I haven’t seen this idea floated before but does anyone think there could be a connection between Waco and the FBI carrying water for the Clintons up to present day? The administration made sure nobody ever had to answer for the massacre……….so could Russian Bot Gate have sprung from the perverse relationship the Clinton’s and the FBI stated way back when?
I just think there’s a long standing agreement among the agencies to cover each other’s asses. Hence why it takes multiple decades for things to be declassified. We wouldn’t want anyone to be embarrassed.
And Waco was on the ATF, which was trying to justify its existence at the time.
Yes started by the ATF but then more or less taken over by the FBI by the time the tanks rolled in and fires were started. I have to wonder if the FBI was more or less co-opted by the DNC in the aftermath…..you watch the hearings and every single democrat is vehemently trying to discredit any criticism of how the agency handled things.
The biggest outrage to me is that Koresh went into town all of the time and there was ample opportunity to arrest him without much incident. Instead, the government LE agencies decided to break out all of their military toys and to create the most volatile situation possible. Government equals Violence.
I don’t know if they would even dispute that they wanted a standoff….they needed headlines and the attention of the nation. A quiet arrest wouldn’t generate the PR the ATF was desperate for at the time. it’s disgusting.
Unbelievable. It’s amazing that at the time the narrative created a perception of a cult (if I remember correctly allegedly abusing kids?) deserving of such actions. But then as time went on, it made less sense and brought into question the justification of government doing what they did.
But give them more guns.
That what really scares me about the MSM’s ability to control the narrative. The truth comes out eventually but by the time it does only “anti-gubmint goobers” are paying attention anymore. Your average person would still equivocate Koresch with Charles Manson.
My understanding is the ATF wanted a big public show of strength so as to maximize the PR from the event. And things went sideways.
Yep, they were worried about their department going away and had been embarrassed by Ruby Ridge. They needed to show America how much ‘good’ they could do.
Letters to the Local Rag: Form of Cyber Defense Super Agent, ACTIVATE!
So they are arguing Obama should have been impeached? I agree. Not for that, but I agree none the less.
Derp
If someone went back to 1985 and told me that in a few decades we’d be worried about the weakened remnants of the USSR “attacking” America by buying a tiny amount of advertising I’d think they were pulling my leg.
Explain how the Nazis were right wing again?
They hated black people.
duh
In other news, Emma Roberts poses next to a giant box of Brillo pads.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-5456593/Emma-Roberts-chic-black-Proenza-Schouler-fragrance-launch.html
Their bullshit-generator needs some fine-tuning.
I keep hearing the word effortlessly used inappropriately in advertising and bullshit pieces like that.
Particularly annoying is the radio ad selling cars that are ‘effortlessly stylish’. What the fuck does that mean?
Don’t enact that car’s labor!
We don’t actually have an aesthetic design team. Hobos give us concept art for free and all it takes to keep them satisfied is regular tins of Dinty Moore and handles of low grade vodka.
It means that advertizing agencies discovered that the Daily Mail has a successful business model.
In part, it’s a development of the whole idea of ‘power words’. My take on this is that a certain consumer demographic wants to be able to get something for nothing, so phrases like “effortlessly stylish” are just like “this one weird trick” become totemic symbols.
If you can bear to devote about half an hour to those Daily Mail articles, you find that there are about 6 templates used to promote some (usually female) B-list celebrity which uses fashion as a hook, but give away some indication of the personality’s social worth in the event they’re attending (and what they’re wearing), with an ad for the clothing at the bottom. The text itself is formulaic and it wouldn’t surprise me if the content itself wasn’t highly “templatized”.
The Fail has some quite extensive analytics, managed usually by a third party, and I’d say they would be negligent if they didn’t analyze page hits to try and determine which “power phrases” seemed to yield the most click-thru’s. Given that a quick eyeballing of today’s Mail tells me that about half of those side-bar articles are actually ads, where a celebutard is co-marketing their image with a clothes designer, it’s pretty quick and easy to test a new and meaningless catchphrase like “conscious uncoupling” (sounds like me throwing a bucket of water over a couple of dogs screwing) and determine whether it’s an utter fail.
There are many of these heavily-overused subjective catchphrases at the Mail that it’s almost a parody of itself. “Effortlessly Stylish” , “toned abs”, “slender pins”,”tanned torso”,”perfect complexion” etc. Alliteration is very popular too.
The Mail is probably responsible for the revival of some slang words which have been sliding towards extinction for generations largely because the television and radio are the arbiters of ‘spoken English’ and the studied neutral tone and content deliberately excludes slang, ‘trade cant’ and regional vocabularies. The Mail is bringing them back.
The challenge of course, is picking one of these power phrases that is appropriate to the market. “effortlessly stylish” when applied to a car is sufficiently nonsensical that even the dullest of consumers thinks it sounds a little odd. If you apply it to some 23 year old nobody’s “look” at an art gathering, well, I could attend one of those, ugly as I am, if I could look stylish with no effort!
Make no mistake though, what the Daily Mail is doing is revolutionizing the media ad business.
Your explanation makes me realize how far behind I have gotten.
Me <——- grumpy old man that avoids people and pop culture. Owns shoes that have come back into style. Doesn't know who any of the recent celebutards are, doesnt even recognize their faces.
I’ve been fascinated for years by the idea of ‘power words’, which sounds like an idea you’d get from Joel Osteen or someone like that, but it really hit me when I moved to the states. It’s not a shock to understand this nowadays, but back in the 90’s, I was writing some marketing material for an employer of mine – a commodity trader – and I wrote something like this:
First reaction from my boss “oh, no, you can’t say that. Oh no, no, no.” and with that I was introduced to the special totemic value of the word ‘exploit’ in American English.
The idea of a Newspeak Dictionary is probably the greatest nightmare I have. The average American who has English as their first language probably holds a vocabulary of about 16-18,000 words. I’d hazard a guess that most of us can demonstrate 20-35,000 words – even if many of them are scatological. That gulf in word count will comprise specialist language (economics, medical, legal) which the guy who pumps your septic system probably never has a need for, and close synonyms.
I’m moving into competitive ground here and recognize that we have local expertize that dwarfs my knowledge, but I’ll wade in just like normal.
I remember a heated argument back in my college days with an English undergrad who argued that language should be simplified. This was a woman (Welsh, actually) who argued that there wasn’t any particular reason why we needed the words ‘lend’ AND ‘borrow’. Likewise ‘flotsam’ and ‘jetsam’ (after she’d looked them up) and I asked her why, just as an painter would want the full array of colors to choose from when painting a portrait, why she would want to limit the scope of her literary expression, especially when the difference between two words is meaningful, let alone nuanced. Blank stares.
A real ‘Come to Cthulhu” moment
I finally decided that vocabulary is the best measure of intelligence. When interviewing perspective employees listen carefully to their vocabulary. The more similar words you have the finer the distinctions you can make and the more ideas you have in your head. I haven’t seen any other measure that is more accurate.
Like the Welsh woman you describe, I find that the more collectivist a person is the less they seem to be able to make fine distinctions between similar ideas. I know, that is a lot of words to say ‘they are stupid’.
I meant to touch on your mention of power words. Those same people that have trouble understanding the difference between ‘fear’ and ‘respect’ seem to be the ones most effected by power words. They are also the least skeptical of the species.
Did you explain that flotsam and jetsam are like a woman floating on her back in the ocean?
“ya see dear, the flotsam are your tits rising just out of the water, and the jetsam is your ass just below the surface.” (glance at ass followed by a wink)
Nah, I was already dating her far cuter, fitter, smarter friend.
*sigh*
oops. threading fail.
The media ad business has been doing it for decades. The difference is using the internet instead of supermarket check-outs.
Well, the Internet is an efficiency platform.
Instead of analyzing the last 36 months’ sales of National Enquirer, you can look at the clicks for the last 36 minutes and modify the copy in realtime.
They aren’t brillo pads. Those are her eyebrows.
“The accumulative stress from racial microaggressions produces racial battle fatigue,” declared one slide in the presentation. “The stress of unavoidable front-line racial battles in historically white spaces leave People of Color feeling mentally, emotionally, and physically drained. The stress from racial microaggressions can become lethal when the accumulation of racial psychological symptoms from racial battle fatigue goes untreated or are dismissed completely.”
https://www.campusreform.org/?ID=10589
“The stress from racial microaggressions can become lethal”
Women and minorities hardest hit.
Standing on the racist barricades, waving the racist battle flag, fighting for racism. Who wouldn’t get racial battle fatigue and suffer racial PTSD?
In a better world it would be revealed that phrases like “microaggressions” and “racial battle fatigue” were just a long running joke minorities decided to play on whitey.
I imagine it is exhausted brooding over skin color 24 hour per day. That is all those people think about. Jesus it’s tiresome having to hear that tripe all of the time.
It’s about as exhausting as being someone that obsesses over Trump 24/7 or being a 9/11 truther.
I have no doubt that maintaining a worldview that is badly out of alignment with reality takes a lot of mental effort and is exhausting. And that’s before you get to the part where that worldview requires you to stay in a constant state of fear and/or anger.
racial battle fatigue
I, too, am fatigued by the constant injection of race into everything and being called a racist by people who view the world through a racial lens and literally dwell on race as the entirety of their existence.
BURN. IT. ALL. DOWN.
Wide variety to kick off your weekend.
http://archive.is/yH1z0
1, 10, 16, 20, 35, 38 (for the Camel Toe), 42, 62, 64, 76, 85 (for the implication), 97.
Lots of excellent choices.
2 and 12 are the same girl, pornstar Dillon Harper
I agree. Better than usual.
1, 4, 20, 85, 98.
Some of these women are going way overboard with the tattoos. Do they think it makes them more attractive?
Me and little Ms. 34 will spend a nice afternoon at the beach.
Not exactly news, but if true, this sounds pretty bad.
https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/men-apos-sperm-counts-dropping-074720787.html
Stress? Estrogen analogues in food and water? Or maybe Gaia’s just had enough of us and this is how she’s going to rid herself of us.
I heard that 30 years ago. I also heard that screwing would go out of style.
“I also heard that screwing would go out of style”
Don’t underestimate Millennials.
I’ve seen it reported that “research indicates” carrying your cell phone in your hip pocket drastically lowers sperm count. It’s probably non-sense but I’m irrational enough that I now put my phone on the table when I sit down and in my center console when I’m driving.
I note that the source was the LiveStrong Foundation, formerly the Lance Armstrong Foundation. So I can understand why sperm counts might be dropped in half…
Ha. I wonder if what Lance was doping on increased his chances/rate of growth of his cancer. Dude just interviewed Mia Khalifa on his podcast so he is doing better than me.
I thought he started doping during/after his bout with cancer, to try to recover. And then kinda just never stopped.
Could be, I’m not sure. I was crushed when it all came out though. He is the OJ of biking as far as letdowns go.
No, he was doping before. According to the wife of one of his fellow riders, while she was in the hospital room he admitted to the cancer doctor that he had been taking PEDs.
I carry my phone in my back pocket. Maybe my poop has cancer!
“Twitter Prepares Political Crackdown, Citing Need To ‘Encourage More Healthy Debate’
On Thursday, Jack Dorsey, CEO of Twitter, released a thread explaining that the service would begin censoring accounts and rejiggering algorithms in order to “increase the collective health, openness, and civility of public conversation, and to hold ourselves publicly accountable towards progress.” Here’s what he said:
This is, to put it mildly, Orwellian doublespeak.
The terms of service at Twitter have already been used in disparate ways based on the political opinions being voiced. Disgusting racism emanating from the alt-right has been targeted by Twitter; racism coming from the radical Left has been largely ignored. Nasty users on the alt-right have had their verification stripped, as though user fraud is fine so long as Twitter doesn’t like you. Just as with Facebook and Google, supposedly unbiased algorithms have turned out to be biased in practice.
Beyond this, it’s obvious that Twitter’s attempts to promote “healthy” conversation are bound to fail. Different opinions create controversy. They always will. Unless you’re willing to ban all of those who are most uncivil about politics – and usually, those people are also the ones who should most be exposed to different opinions – you’re going to have a flamewar. That’s fine. That’s how free speech works. Outlets that prize civility over harsh conversation are destined for the dustbin. It has always been so.
The problem with our political conversation isn’t Twitter. It’s us. And Twitter’s desire for a more virtuous system – i.e. top-down system — isn’t going to make us more virtuous as a people. In fact, it will make politics more contentious, given that Twitter’s leadership finds people like Deray McKesson absolutely anodyne. People on the right will correctly sense that they are being targeted, and they will rebel. And that will make the conversation far worse.”
https://www.dailywire.com/news/27780/twitter-prepares-political-crackdown-citing-need-ben-shapiro
CO House member chucked out of office on sexual harassment allegations gives middle finger to his party
I don’t know if the guy did what his accusers say, and sorry, I no longer care. Interesting how fast we moved past due process though.
*sorry about the adblocker hate at the Denver Post
That’s hilarious.
Isn’t what the House did in compliance with process rules?
Oh I am sure it is. I fear I am suffering from #metoo burn out. I might just be an asshole though.
I am sure that this move will be blocked by the courts. It obviously isn’t fair. Now if he had switched from Dem to GOP, the result would have been “rules are rules”.
We are having <a href="https://www.minnpost.com/politics-policy/2018/02/fight-over-minnesota-lieutenant-governor-has-its-day-court"a similar dustup in Minnesoda. When Franken resigned, Gov. Mumbles appointed his Lt. Gov to the seat. By law that means that the leader of the MN Senate becomes Lt. Gov.
Local Dems are screeching that that means she needs to step down from her Senate office. That would make the senate equally split and a special election might tip it their way.
In the past, the Senate leader has held both roles at least 7 times. No problems. But now, there is a lawsuit going on trying to get this ruled unconstitutional.
The GOP should use the gender card and start howling about the fact that the only reason the Dems are suing is because they hate the idea of a powerful woman.
I am sure that this move will be blocked by the courts. It obviously isn’t fair.
Its politics, and the rules of the legislative chamber. Fair ain’t got nuthin’ to do with it. Assuming he complied with the rules as written and in effect, then I don’t see that the courts have any grounds for sticking their dick in.
Prediction: 60% chance the courts award the seat to the Democrats.
Getting laid makes you happier. CUTTING EDGE RESEARCH.
https://nypost.com/2018/03/02/if-your-sex-life-sucks-you-probably-hate-your-job-too/
“A study of married couples published last year in the Journal of Management found that, regardless of how happy their marriage was, the day after an employee had sex with his or her partner, she was more satisfied and engaged with her career.”
Great. I can see the next step in pushing employee engagement already.
“A penguin supercolony of over 1.5 million Adélie Penguins has been discovered at Antarctica’s Danger Islands. The find is significant, given it was thought the species was in decline”
https://twitter.com/SkyNews/status/969671562600296448
I’m not a zoologist, but that’s a lot of fucking penguins.
“supercolony”
Sounds like an infection.
Yeah, but you have to forgive the scientists. It is really hard to count those fuckers because they all look the same.
Racist!
Do they sing torch songs about getting old and lost love?
Several chuckles over at Powerline’s Week in Pictures post.
My favorite for some reason.
Those were great My fav
That’s a regular stop for me. Powerline is kinda lockstep Team Red, but their Week in Pix is always worth a look.
Yup. They are pretty fucking authoritarian at times. I also watch them a bit because they are a bunch of locals who have some interesting takes on Minnesoda stuff.
The stress of unavoidable front-line racial battles in historically white spaces leave People of Color feeling mentally, emotionally, and physically drained.
“Don’t get out of the boat. Never get out of the boat!”
Oh, and to whoever recommended the Ratio book… big thumbs up from me.
On the beginning of time
Imagine that time is like a rope. One end is the present and the other end is the beginning of time. A rope can’t have infinite length, so if you start to to coil it, you will eventually reach the end. In a similar way, the universe can’t be infinitely old because an infinite amount of time would have to pass before the present came.
But if matter/energy can’t be made or destroyed, the universe must have always existed in some form. That implies time/universe had no beginning.
OK, so now imagine time is like a circular path. You start walking and eventually you return to where you started. This gets around the problem of an infinite amount of time having to pass before getting to the present, but leads to a new problem: is every cycle the same and how many cycles have happened?
I don’t know how to turn these ideas into something testable. It’s fun to think about though.
I like this hypothesis: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vvkIF0NlIzA
“probably some hogwash about the human spirit!”
This reminds me of the dope-smoking scene in Animal House.
First major logical flaw: your assumption that physics at the moment of the Big Bang is the same as physics later on. It wasn’t.
OK, how was it different and what is the proof? For example, was the charge of an electron different and if so, by how much?
My understanding is that it all based on a scenario that cannot be described by the current understanding of physics.
https://home.cern/about/physics/early-universe
***
Though the Big Bang theory cannot describe what the conditions were at the very beginning of the universe, it can help physicists describe the earliest moments after the start of the expansion.
***
To me, it’s basically saying: assume a hot, dense state and then fill the blanks with what is already known about how particles behave at very high temperatures.
There weren’t electrons at that point.
OK, how about the the gravitational constant and the speed of light? Were those different? If so, by how much and what is the proof?
You know, one the ways creationists try to argue for a young universe is to say the speed of light used to be different. The inevitable response is that the fundamental constants have always been the same everywhere.
https://answersingenesis.org/astronomy/starlight/does-distant-starlight-prove-the-universe-is-old/
Well for a gravitational constant to exist doesn’t there have to be gravity? And how do you measure the speed of light if there is no light?
For the record there is speculation that some of these constants have changed during the history of the universe (Unfortunately I don’t have time to look this up)
Also there are people speculating about what caused the big bang and by inference what were the conditions before the universe existed. My favorite involves string theory and these two-dimensional sheets called branes.
There may not even be a “cause.” For delta t -> 0, delta E -> infinity.
There wasn’t gravity or photons then. At 10^11K (the temperature of the early universe while still in thermal equilibrium), conserved quantities are close to zero.
There are a few hundred textbooks reviewing the nature of the early universe and the experimental evidence. For lay audiences, the Weinberg popularization I mentioned below is a good one. For more detailed treatments, Kolb and Turner is excellent (though difficult). My specialty is molecular physics, so someone closer to cosmology and high energy physics (like Q) might have better recommendations.
“Were those different?”
Dunno. There are competing papers claiming both that the fine-structure constant (proportional to e^2/(h-bar*c)) was different and was not different in the early Universe.
Long story short: we lack the capability of fully understanding the state of the Universe between t=0s and t=1^-9s either experimentally or analytically (earliest estimates for when nuclei came into being are t~10s, so we’re dealing with a highly exotic scenario). When you get way, way down to the beginning, the Strong Force is dominant in a Quark-Gluon plasma; and as stated below, we have no closed-form analytical understanding of QCD in general. So what’s going on is anybody’s guess. People can speculate theoretically or try to extrapolate using computational methods and accelerator data but the rub is that we just don’t know.
You can try a book called “The Rise of the Standard Model” if you wanna dig more into particle physics and the Standard Model.
Unfortunately, I don’t know if this will give you what you’re looking for, but you can give it a shot. However, if you’re really interested in this kind of stuff, you can audit physics courses at the local college. If you have an understanding of diff eq you should be able to understand most of it.
“how particles behave at very high temperatures”
You can’t extrapolate from data collected in accelerators because the conditions are nothing close to what they would’ve been at the Big Bang. Furthermore, things evolved so rapidly after the initial expansion that the rules of the game were changing on Planck-time level scales. There can be some extrapolation to early times, but we can’t even analytically explain QCD in our current state except in cases of asymptotic freedom; having instead to rely on empirical calculations, approximations and computation. Forget about explaining it analytically in the exceptional case of the “cosmic egg”.
As my major professor often said – “And this is why we lie to undergraduates.”
If you have a few years, there is an excellent treatise on this called The Wheel of Time.
Not too much math to handle. You will like it. Go ahead. Start reading it. I dare you.
You’re a cruel man Pope Jimbo…
/finished the series out of spite
That may be the first series that I just flat gave up on and quit reading partway through.
To Sandersen’s credit, he didn’t spend multiple pages describing the layout and contents in the room before getting to the freaking dialogue. I have a soft spot for the series but my god, Jordan could be tedious at times.
Uffda! The final books after Robert Jordan died actually were tolerable.
Had a great time at a work happy hour where I discovered that several of my coworkers had read the series and all of us (like you) finished it out of spite.
We drank and bitched about all the shit that annoyed us about that series. (My personal pet peeve is how he would invent some new form of long distance travel any time he needed it: Traveling, Skimming, The Ways)
I thought the first two books were pretty good. And the third book was pretty good until the last few pages when he realized he could drag the story out over a lot more books.
Yeah, no kidding. Those are the first books I’ve ever read where I’d have to go to the glossary because I couldn’t remember who the hell (random character) was, but he/she is suddenly vitally important to the story.
Weinberg’s “The First Three Minutes” is still the classic of the genre. Erudite but readable.
You are trying to make analogies between things that you know about the ordinary, immediate universe and parts of the universe that are different and possibly act by different rules.
Time doesnt actually exist. It is an abstract human idea. It isnt a rope or a path or a story and only the present ever exists.
You are born, you have a childhood, grow up, get married, have children, grow old and die. It’s a story with a beginning, a plot, and an end. Characters have motives. Much of our understanding follows this model. We think this way because it is how we experience life as a human. It isnt necessarily the best model for understanding the universe. It works great here on this speck of dust but be cautious using it outside of that.
After however many revisions and recalculations from the smartest people alive I have persuaded myself that neither time nor the universe are finite.
I suppose I’m glad there are people asking those questions, doing that research, answering those questions. I’m just personally not interested in; don’t really care about the beginning of the Universe or the nature of existence.
Wife, guitars, cheeseburgers, music, jogging, beer, tacos, crummy movies, concerts, cocktails. These are my intellectual pursuits. Does that make me shallow? Probably.
You can only get people thinking about answering those questions if you have a well developed, happy and productive society that can feed, entertain and generate sufficient wealth that some of its people can devote time to it rather than grubbing in mud for food.
So, you’re playing your part.
My degree’s in chemical engineering and the last math class I took was partial differential equations. So that’s where my perspective comes from.
Hawking says the amount of matter before and after the BB could have been different:
http://www.hawking.org.uk/the-beginning-of-time.html
***
At this time, the Big Bang, all the matter in the universe, would have been on top of itself. The density would have been infinite. It would have been what is called, a singularity. At a singularity, all the laws of physics would have broken down. This means that the state of the universe, after the Big Bang, will not depend on anything that may have happened before, because the deterministic laws that govern the universe will break down in the Big Bang. The universe will evolve from the Big Bang, completely independently of what it was like before. Even the amount of matter in the universe, can be different to what it was before the Big Bang, as the Law of Conservation of Matter, will break down at the Big Bang.
***
So the Law of Conservation of matter can be ignored (!?). But earlier he says:
***
But if your theory disagrees with the Second Law of Thermodynamics, it is in bad trouble. In fact, the theory that the universe has existed forever is in serious difficulty with the Second Law of Thermodynamics.
***
Why is ignoring the Law of Conservation OK but ignoring SLOT a no-go?
In other words, both scenarios lead to contradictions. Either you have matter appearing out of nowhere or a universe that is infinitely old. And not just infinitely old, but in a non-uniform state.
As for the hot singularity, how could such a state be reached? Black holes are supposedly singularities, but they are cold, not hot. And anyway, heat causes expansion thus reducing density. But BBT says the universe’s maximum density coincided with its maximum temperature.
Meh. If there was an easy answer, we’d have it already.
On a side note, I once tutored someone in college astronomy. I explained that the way scientists know the universe was not infinitely old was because there are still sun-like stars. If the universe was much older or younger, the kinds of stars we would see would be different. I made an analogy to walking into a room full of candles. You can tell which candles have been burning longer by looking at how much they’ve melted.
You should audit some upper division physics if you know PDEs.
NJR misunderstands economics again:
https://www.currentaffairs.org/2018/03/maybe-taxi-drivers-dont-hate-progress-maybe-they-just-dont-want-to-be-poor
***
It would be easy, of course, to fix everything. We don’t need to reclassify “driver-partners” as actual employees instead of contractors, or even try to get them unionized. What we really need is a rideshare system owned and operated by drivers themselves. Libertarians have snarkily pointed out that the “sharing economy allows workers to own the means of production,” which is every socialist’s dream. Why doesn’t the left love this? Well, we know exactly why: because it’s not about “owning the tools you use at your job” it’s about not being exploited by your employer, i.e. not having to turn over a substantial portion of your earnings to them merely because you happen to be dependent on them. But there is a point here: ride-sharing can be good for workers, if corporate profit is out of the picture. We need an alternative, not for profit service that actually operates in a way that servers its workers.
***
Fella, nothing happens in this world without profit, including your shitty magazine.
“not having to turn over a substantial portion of your earnings to them merely because you happen to be dependent on them”
Oh, you mean like taxes?
There is no mystery here. The taxi companies formed cartels to jack up prices, which worked out fine until technology allowed someone else to charge lower fares. Now the cartels are going broke and whining about “unfair” competition. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
And you could be the guy that designs and builds a system like this., Pal.
ride-sharing can be good for workers, if corporate profit is out of the picture
Ain’t nobody stopping people from using their car for ride-sharing totally independently. Well, except the cab cartel, but leaving that aside, sounds to me like every single UBer or Lyft driver could try doing it without Uber or Lyft. Yet they choose not to.
Once again, we see that socialists are all about denying people options and individual choice.
All together now: Fuck off, slaver.
But can the cab driver build his app, maintain the network and keeping track of costs, etc. and still make good money?
2 outta 3 ain’t bad.
http://thestir.cafemom.com/healthy_living/211010/woman-no-vagina-mrkh
*Throws flag and blows whistle
Half the distance to the goal. Encroachment on good taste posting female plumbing articles on a Saturday morning!
A thought-
It may not be an “exodus” but It seems safe to say a lot of people are leaving the googleverse, and twatter, and whatever other social interaction technoplatforms are out there, as they shift leftward. Many of those people are white, and male, and, if not “conservative” they are at least not obsessive-compulsive SJW types. Hell, a not-insignificant number of them might be women, or black, or who-knows-what, but uncomfortable operating under the mandatory goodthink which runs rampant. These people, whoever they are, know how all that shit works, and I don’t think they will have any trouble at all finding investors to back them when they decide to create an actual free and open platform for people unwilling to put up with the SJW censors anymore.
Like it or not, I’m trapped in the googleverse. I’d be happy to abandon google, but that won’t really work until I can obtain a proper substitute for my android phone; I sure as shit am not going to get an iphone.
The reason those companies got so big in the first place is because they were free and open and offered endless possibilities. Like I said above, everything the progressives touch turns to shit.
No.
https://www.thesun.co.uk/fabulous/5714898/granny-pants-marks-spencer-next-new-look-review/
The model is ridiculously hot and the granny panties knock even her down a couple of integers.
Nah. You can remove those big panties just as easily as the small ones.
Did we cover this yet?
I’d love to learn more about this.
‘Not a smidge of corruption. Most scandal free administration in history’
-Barack Obama
“But we can’t find common ground with gun safety advocates as long as they use shoddy arguments and manipulated statistics to cloud the debate. A case in point is the widely cited work of Louis Klarevas, a professor at the University of Massachusetts at Boston whose 2016 book, “Rampage Nation: Security America From Mass Shootings,” has lately bolstered calls for a renewal of the 1994 assault weapons ban, which lapsed in 2004. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) gave President Trump a bar chart attributed to Klarevas at Wednesday’s guns roundtable.
Until Klarevas came along, virtually all researchers had concluded that it was impossible to discern what, if any, positive effect the ban’s prohibition of rifles with “military-style features” had on crime or mass shooting incidents. This is why many gun-control advocacy groups, including Sandy Hook Promise, do not include a ban on their list of legislative priorities. The last ban was politically costly for Democrats and, as a ProPublica investigation reported in 2014, gun control experts said there was no evidence it saved lives.
“Rampage Nation” has energized proponents of a new ban by making the spectacular claim that, contrary to the consensus, the original was responsible for a remarkable 37% decline in mass shooting fatalities.
But there’s a serious flaw in Klarevas’ result: There are few actual “assault weapons” of any type in his dataset, either pre- or post-ban. Klarevas and his allies are taking an apparent drop in fatalities from what are mostly handgun shootings (again, pre-ban as well as post) and attributing this lowered body count to the 1994 legislation.
I say “apparent” drop in fatalities because, as Klarevas admits in a footnote, if you use the most widely accepted threshold for categorizing a shooting as a “mass shooting” — four fatalities, as opposed to Klarevas’ higher threshold of six — the 1994 to 2004 drop in fatalities disappears entirely. Had Klarevas chosen a “mass shooting” threshold of five fatalities instead of six, then the dramatic pause he notes in mass shootings between 1994 to 1999 would disappear too.”
http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-stokes-assault-weapon-ban-20180301-story.html
I’ll say it for Suthen: gun-grabbers lie.
I am too lazy to look it up but some other fuck-nut tried to peddle a book where he made the claim that guns were only commonly own by civilians in the last half of the 20th century, that Americans largely didn’t own guns until large manufacturers brainwashed everyone into thinking that guns were a big part of the history of the country.
I guess if you are going to lie, lie big.
Bellesisles “Arming America”?
Yeah that was it.
Americans largely didn’t own guns until large manufacturers brainwashed everyone
This is a lie so big that it is insulting. Virtually everyone had a gun of some sort in colonial days. And it was often ones duty (in the legal sense) to be armed in order to be at all times available for militia service.
Gun grabbers lie. It’s what they do. And even if there was a decline in violence associated with modern technology firearms (I do not acknowledge the term “assault rifle”) it wouldn’t matter. The point of 2A is to prevent the government from stopping citizens from being armed. Weapons technology changes, rights do not.
Fear not! “Experts” are here to tell us what’s what!
https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/5715121/why-do-so-many-female-teachers-target-young-boys-for-sex-experts-reveal-adults-lack-of-intimacy-and-over-sexualisation-of-youth-could-be-to-blame/
“my research has found that many (though not all) of these women appear to abuse because of their own unmet intimacy needs resulting from relationship problems and feelings of loneliness, for example”
If it were dudes they’d just be pervy predators.
So basically the significant other is who is at fault? Damn patriarchy.
their own unmet intimacy needs
We already knew they were horny and wanted to fuck. The question remains, why go with teenagers? Women as goodlooking as many of these teachers could find an adult to fuck them in, I dunno, ten minutes?
Easier to disengage from than if they hooked up with an older guy. Then – and I hate to be a pua shitlord here – there’s the sense of entitlement:
I don’t want to piss on anyone’s FLBP parade here, but I feel The Chive kinda proves my point.
Yeah, I wouldn’t invest any time, money or emotion in any of those girls. That would be very foolish.
That’s a good insight. While I appreciate those Chive girls ‘assets’ as much as any man the flagrant attention whoring is kind of a turn off. Beyond meaningless sex, I think they’d be more trouble than they are worth.
Well, the trick there is never give them your real name, and get a “burner” phone. Try not to have any distinguishing physical characteristics in intimate areas, and tell them you’re a movie producer.
“tell them you’re a movie producer”
My name’s Darvey Blienstein…
” Beyond meaningless sex, I think they’d be more trouble than they are worth.”
Isn’t that almost always the case.
“I don’t want to piss on anyone’s FLBP parade here, but I feel The Chive kinda proves my point”
You’re telling me. I went to college in a place where girls like those were a dime a dozen. Fun for a while, great to look at but not good for a whole lot else.
My best anecdote is with a girl who could’ve passed for a model that I was casually dating at the time. Deep philosophy for her was “Do you prefer Coke or Pepsi” when I said “I’m in a transitional period” all I got was a blank, deer-in-headlights look. The funny thing also is that, in my experience, true 8s and 9s (working under the theory that 10s don’t exist), at least at that age, are terrible in bed. They’re so used to being fawned over because of how they look, they don’t put effort into anything. Their sense of entitlement extends to everything in their lives and they don’t even know it.
That’s why you look for 8’s or 9’s with self-esteem issues. You can be a real force for good if you’re prepared to not be a shitbag.
It’s always fun to read articles about women who have issues, problems, difficulties, bad behavior, or outright criminal action, and find out just how long it takes for the narrative of the piece to shift into “Which man is really to blame for this?”
Seems like a lot of these girls are pretty and probably had it made when they were in HS. They want to relive that experience. It is amazing the difference in attitude towards them versus dudes that do the same thing.
They’re like pro athletes; their value is heavily front-end loaded. If they were smart, they’d land either a rich older man, or a young up-and-comer (like a brilliant pre-med) early when they have the most bargaining power. By slutting it up for years and waiting to settle down until their mid-late 30s, they’re squandering their capital.
I would love to know more about the Letorneau marriage.
because it’s not about “owning the tools you use at your job” it’s about not being exploited by your employer, i.e. not having to turn over a substantial portion of your earnings to them merely because you happen to be dependent on them.
Right. What if you look at it this way: you are paying Uber to provide a service, exactly in the same way your passenger is paying *you* to provide a service. If Uber is stealing from you, that must mean you’re stealing from the passenger. Or, perhaps, nobody is “stealing” from anybody.
I know. It’s crazy. But there you are.
“A Conspiracy against the People
Candlemakers have every right to argue that candles are preferable to light bulbs. They have every right to mount a huge ad campaign hyping the benefits of candles. But if they go to the government and persuade (or bribe) a politician or bureaucrat to penalize light-bulb makers — which is just another way of saying penalize light-bulb buyers — they’ve crossed the line. Government is not “just another word for the things we do together”; government is force, full stop. That doesn’t mean governmental force is never legitimate. Force — or, if you prefer, violence — is amoral. Violence when used to stop a rape is moral. Violence in service of rape is immoral. And so is violence to prevent people from buying light bulbs.
The funny thing is that this move toward protection is celebrated or condemned as a fulfillment of Trump’s “populist” agenda. I get that we label protectionism “populist” these days — though I’m old enough to remember when protectionism was a technocratic cause. But populism is supposed to mean putting the interests of “the people” first. (The problem with populism is that populists never mean all the people; they only mean their people.) And this move isn’t in the interests of most people. How is it “populist” to punish over 300 million consumers and the 6.5 million workers in steel-consuming industries for the benefit of 140,000 workers in the steel-producing industry? Trump says trade wars are “good” — but when other nations retaliate, farmers, truckers, manufacturers, and Americans in general will pay the price.
Not long ago, Republicans waxed quite righteous about the Obama administration ‘picking winners and losers’ in the economy.
This isn’t populism in any literal meaning of the word; it’s elitism of the rankest sort. The president is abusing a law beyond its intended purpose to heap favor on a specific industry, while telling Americans that they aren’t paying enough for cars, aluminum cans, and countless other goods. Despite the fact that the U.S. steel industry already provides 70 percent of the steel used in America. This is literally conspiracy against the public.”
https://www.nationalreview.com/blog/g-file/trump-steel-aluminum-tariffs-elitism-not-populism/
But populism is supposed to mean putting the interests of “the people” first.
I always thought populism was doing what the people wanted, be it in their interests or not.
Populism means different things to different people.
Buckley’s famous “I’d rather be governed by the first few hundred names in the Boston telephone book then the faculty of Harvard” certainly springs to mind as a populist statement.
If there’s one thing missing from my life, it’s increased costs on everything due to trade wars.
That is a little over the top, but yeah, protectionism is awful. If Trump wants to goose copper, steel and aluminum he could simply smash the EPA. Mining journals over the last 30 years have been half filled with bitching about environmental regs and how they hobble the industry. Sweep that shit away and our minerals industries would flourish.
I find typing a bit difficult this morning and was wondering why. Oooooh yeah, now I remember. I tied a pretty good one on last night. Hangover and shaky hands.
Good point about the regs…that’s the root of the problem with the US metals industry.
That is the whole point of environmentalism; to destroy our ability to create wealth. It doesnt have anything to do with red cockaded peckerheads or saving the earth.
Enviromental Regs are hurting my company right now. The price of graphite electrodes has more than tripled in the past year and half. Graphite electrodes are one of my plants signifigant input costs. There are things we could do to conserve the electrodes, but those things generate gasses that we are not allowed to put out over certain level without getting fined.
This has been an ongoing and expensive problem that I and many others have been working on lately.
Trump should read Glibs instead of watching Fox.
Seriously, I’m one of the few people in the country who will somewhat benefit from this protectionist bullshit and I can say with 100% certainty that it is bad policy.
I have been having quite a bit of fun at work the last week or so talking about this. I work with a lot of people who have never really thought much about economics. I have been spreading the good word of Hayek. The people I work with are for the most part fairly intelligent. Most of them were happy to hear about the tariff until I did some explaining as to why it is bad. A little bit of knowledge goes a long way towards influencing opinion.
Ugh. This isnt as bad as ‘under my plan energy prices will skyrocket’, but yeah it’s dumb. I usually could put a dent in the cult of personality when I explained that the majority of the price of everything you buy is the cost of the energy it took to make it and transport it. Energy goes up? So does bread, tennis shoes, cars, tap water, paint, lumber, peanut butter and jelly crackers, etc etc.
Rising metal prices wont have as widespread an effect, but it will be nearly as bad.
“In Meghan Markle, will Britain get a sleeping beauty or our first woke princess?
A ‘feminist princess’ feels a bit like an Engineer Barbie. But Markle could just drag the Royal family into 2018.”
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/mar/03/meghan-markle-princess-feminist-royal-family
The royal family has broken better women than her who thought they knew better than the royals how to run the family business.
Harry will be encouraged to become a character in Real Housewives of Bayswater and St. James’ Park, for a number of reasons. And he will be happy to go there, and when the series is canned, he and Ms. Markle will be seen mainly in the pages of the Mirror, Sun and Daily Mail.
His new role will be ‘young trendy married royal who likes sports, a beer and his kids’, and maintaining this role will be vital in securing state finances to live in relatively high style. From what I’m led to believe, he will happily comply with this because he’s not a fame-whore like some of his extended family. As time goes on, he will be honorary president of many trusts and will sit on a number of boards, and he will do very well for himself thank-you-very-much.
His ability to avoid any kind of public controversy will be the determining factor in his future fortunes. Furthermore, if his father does ascend the throne and behaves the way many people believe he will, republicanism will become a significant political force within the UK.
Which way is King Chuck III expected to behave?
Ah, scrolled down and see the answer.
One of the titles of the ruling monarch is “Defender of the Faith” – a reference to being the leader of the Anglican Church.
Chuckie notably commented in public that he would seek to change that to “Defender of all Faiths” when he ascended the throne. That comment will NEVER be forgotten and will come back to bite him. He just can’t shut his yap, and is very likely to say some really, really insensitive and impolitic things on foreign visits.
He’s a master of the unforced error, just like his father – another profoundly unsuitable man for the job.
I just noticed the page is more narrow. There is way more blank grey space on each side.
Woops. My bad. The trouble was on my end. I just fixed it.
I see just enough for the arrow box to float without obscuring text. Truly, SP is one of the best web designers of these ages. None of this anti-user trends that so many seem to get caught up in because it’s fashionable.
Agree. Thanks SP! The site looks/works great on my iPhone.
So being curious to try more Loire Valley reda which are not that many of in Romania i was surprised to find one in an Auchan supermarket. Pierre Chanau Saumur Champigny Rouge 2016 30 lei or 7 8 of your dolars it is actually not bad for the money bright red decent fruit light some tanin. Then again i overindulged last night and i should not be drinking again today but one glass cant hurt right?
Speaking of overindulging last night tried a Napa Valley cabernet made by Antinori called Antica 2007. Got it at 60% off clearence and there is always a risk in thise situations that it may be bed from improper storage but it was actually quite good. Would not pay full price though.
Also had a german red from the Arh valley northernmost red wine regio. Of germany. Not that great. Probably to cold a climate.
I love love love Loire reds. Give me a Raffault or a Baudry and I’m happy.
Also works reasonably well with a pan seared goose breast. Doing my part to eat the hatebirds although this is but a humble domestic goose so it is guilt by assosiacion really
Domestic geese can be just as much shitheads as wild ones.
One, or one more? I pulled that one last night.
*draws shades*
unmet intimacy needs resulting from relationship problems and feelings of loneliness
I’d be willing to help an attractive young teacher combat her feelings of loneliness and meet her intimacy needs. Maybe I should put a notice on the bulletin board.
lol. Bookmarked that article.
“Transgenderism and the Social Construction of Diagnosis”
http://quillette.com/2018/03/01/transgenderism-social-construction-diagnosis/
“In the Soviet Union we dont worry about the future. We know what the future is. It’s the past that’s always changing.”
Old Soviet joke.
I’m cautiously optimistic. Even if they screw it up, they can’t take the books away from me. The Watch books are my favorite cycle, and Vimes is a great character.
The link:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/mar/02/discworld-terry-pratchetts-city-watch-headed-for-tv-adaptation
Would make that comment have sense and meaning.
https://twitter.com/ArmouredSkeptic/status/969662240088641536
WTF, Canada?
Please tell me this isn’t real.
I assume it is sort of space raptor butt invasion type of work.
*swoon*
He’s so dreamy.
My brain just shrank a little bit
I think I just puked a little.
And here I was thinking that Barry was particularly vacuous and embarrassing. There is always a bigger fish, I suppose.
“Chelsea Manning to speak on ‘ethics of public service’ at UCLA”
https://www.campusreform.org/?ID=10588
I stopped reading at the headline.
It will be very entertaining if the left adopts him.
His ability to avoid any kind of public controversy will be the determining factor in his future fortunes. Furthermore, if his father does ascend the throne and behaves the way many people believe he will, republicanism will become a significant political force within the UK.
Isn’t there some sort of movement to leapfrog Chuckles and hand the crown directly to the elder son?
*can’t be bothered to look up which is which
At some point I’d heard that Chuckie couldn’t take the throne because he was divorced, but I don’t know if that’s true, or was true but they changed the rules, or just fake news.
There wouldn’t be any problem him taking the throne as a divorced man. The bigger problem was him being associated (or worse, married) to a divorcee, which has some historical relevance if you believe in god-emperors and prime nocte etc.
The divorcee issue was the public issue when it came to Edward VII. The background to that story is far more complicated and Machiavellian.
Camilla (as I think it stands at the moment) cannot be “Queen Camilla”. She will remain his consort, and will probably remain as something like “Dowager Princess of Wales” (Since Kate Middleton will become Princess of Wales” if I understand the malarkey properly)
Camilla hasn’t taken the Princess of Wales title.
edit: she has, but doesn’t use it to the Dianer legacy. Hasn’t take over as Colonel-in-Chief of the PWRR. Still Queen Margrethe II of Denmark.
Fuck that attention whore Dianer. Chuck should have married Camila in the first place.
Yeah, “movement” is the best word for it.
The issue is that there’s no constitutional mechanism for it to happen. If Charles takes the throne, and then abdicates, it would achieve the result this movement desires, but the coronation is a real and meaningful event and William. The language as I remember it is that the newly crowned monarch will “Serve the people until death take him”. It’s a fundamental and essential feudal contract where the monarch will reward fealty with the serving of justice. He (or she) is bound by that contract unto death.
Abdication would be unthinkable – the same ‘movement’ also talks about the idea that Elizabeth ‘step down’ – which isn’t going to happen until she is incapacitated in some way. That’s not to say Charles *wouldn’t* abdicate, but he can’t do it until he is King.
The problem there is that reverence for the monarchy in general would diminish significantly. When Elizabeth goes, there’s likely to be this upwelling in republican sentiment, but Charles creating these kinds of constitutional complexities will exacerbate the situation and could force the crisis.
Why do Brits continue to support the monarchy? They seem to me to be expensive and useless.
It’s complicated (no, really)
On the economic front, they’re a net drain on the public purse, but not very great. It’s complicated to calculate exactly how much they receive when you take into consideration the minor royalty costs, but we’re talking maybe $50m tops, and that’s to run what amounts to a Historical Pageant which definitely does generate lots of tourist dollars. There’s a lot of goodwill generated abroad because they do conduct all kinds of meets-and-greets, and tradition counts for a lot, just like here in the USA. Many of them run marginal- to slightly profitable businesses, and some hold down real jobs (at least as real as a lot of people you see in the Daily Mail) and the cost of security is currently minimal. It’s hard to get incensed about their existence really, unless you want to go all Corbyn on their asses and claim that the wealth the Royal Family oversees is actually their own property.
It isn’t. The Queen for example has no ability to put Windsor Castle up for sale because she wants a Lambo. All that wealth is effectively ‘grace and favor’ wealth, none of the value tied up in it can be realized and blown on gigolos and hashish.
A significant proportion of the public willingness to support the monarchy is directly due to the public’s perception of Elizabeth. In the typical British view, they could have done a lot worse than her ascending the throne in ’52, and many ‘monarchists’ will gladly tell you that they’re not looking forward to Charles and they may change their views.
I always had the impression Charles has to have a minder follow him around to keep him from eating paint chips.
Pretty much. It’s no secret that he’s as dumb a sack of hammers.
He may have learned sufficient statecraft to avoid fucking up badly in the public’s eyes, but the guy genuinely is way over on the left of the Bell Curve.
I guess there are worse symbols of statehood that the Brits could be paying for, but having a powerless monarch seems kind of silly to me
She wields the power of public opinion.
The Prime Minister has to meet her every week for a briefing, and it’s not a formality. This is why Charles is so worrying. A PM who doesn’t interact well with Buckingham Palace AND a Buckingham Palace that flexes its muscles via strategic leaks to the press can cause HMG a lot of problems.
It’s a soft power, indirect influence, but it’s real, and while the public in general are supportive of the monarch, it’s still power.
Watch The Crown on Netflix for an idea of the role of the monarchy. Of course, it’s depicting the past and may not be uber-realistic, but it does shed light on how the government/monarchy relationship works.
People who think E2 might step down have no idea how deep the anger for Edward VIII runs in that family.
As for the fundamental nature of time and reality- I don’t much give a shit.
I just bumble along in what I perceive to be the “known universe” because it’s real enough and predictable enough for my purposes.
I’m just a figment of my imagination, anyway.
“Amandla Stenberg Walked Away from Black Panther for a Very Thoughtful Reason
The actor auditioned for the role of Shuri, but dropped out after realizing “there are spaces that I should not take up.”
It seems unfathomable that any actor would walk away from a potential role in Black Panther. The Marvel superhero movie isn’t just a massive blockbuster—it’s the cultural event of the year thus far. But it seems there is one actor who would pass up on this once-in-a-lifetime gig: in a recent CBC interview, Amandla Stenberg revealed that they auditioned for the role of Shuri—which ultimately went to breakout star Letitia Wright—but bowed out of the running for a very thoughtful reason.
“One of the most challenging things for me to do was to walk away from Black Panther,” Stenberg, who uses “they/them” pronouns, revealed. “I got really, really close and they were like, ‘Do you want to continue fighting for this?’ And I was like, this isn’t right.”
In the film, Shuri is T’Challa’s genius little sister, the teen whiz who keeps Wakanda so technologically advanced. Like the rest of the principal cast, Letitia Wright is a dark-skinned black actor. Stenberg, who is bi-racial, said they wouldn’t have been a natural fit for the film.
“These are all dark-skinned actors playing Africans, and I feel like it would have just been off to see me as a bi-racial American with a Nigerian accent just pretending that I’m the same color as everyone else in the movie,” Stenberg said. “That was really challenging, to make that decision, but I have no regrets. I recognize 100 percent that there are spaces that I should not take up and when I do take up a space it’s because I’ve thought really, really critically about it and I’ve consulted people I really trust and it feels right.””
https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2018/03/amandla-stenberg-black-panther
Alex, I’ll take Shit That Never Happened for 500.
Stossel already did the racist bake sale, that food truck is behind the times. Or maybe Stossel was ahead of the times?
WHAT SEA SMITH, CHOPPED HADDOCK?
YOU DO NOT FOLLOW SEA SMITH, SEA SMITH FOLLOW YOU. THEN RAPE.
“Segregation at Comic Con: No Straight, White Males Allowed at Parties”
https://pjmedia.com/trending/segregation-comic-con-no-straight-white-males-allowed-parties/
I am thinking their bid to kill comics is going to be successful. Who the fuck do they think reads comics? And since when are signs that read ‘No Niggers allowed’ acceptable by the sooper extra tolerant crowd?
I think back to around 2005. Racism was less than it had been in my life. In fact I had watched racism die out slowly over two decades. It had been in steady decline before that. People didn’t talk about it, mixed couples and groups of friends were everywhere and I remember at least one study on the youth of the day not giving half a shit about race.
Look where we are now and who brought us here.
It’s 2018 and the people of New York, Boston, Chicago, Washington, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Baltimore brought us here.
At least around here, I don’t know that it has changed much. It has been on the decline and continues to decline. The stupidity of the radical left and their race baiting bullshit doesn’t really make it to the ears of the people I know. Apolitical people trying to make a living and raise their kids don’t have time for it. 2018 rural arkansas is less racist than 2005 rural arkansas.
Your environment is intriguing and I wish to subscribe to your lifestyle.
I don’t know thus for certain, but I think it’s true-
Get far enough away from population centers in the U.S. amd you will find that most of the people you encounter live away from those centers for a reason. That reason being they largely want to be left alone. A strong urge to be left alone IMHO produces the best kind of people.
I totally grok it. This is commuter-belt to NYC, and while we don’t have people marching around in white shrouds, there’s plenty of soft and not so soft bigotry up here. The nod-and-a-wink bigotry is alleged to be socioeconomic and not racial, but I’m not buying.
I travel south a couple times a year to various places semi-rural and urban, and while a tourist can’t accurately gauge the underbelly of a place, once I get south of DC, I’m stunned by the lack of “strange fruit”, segregated paddling pools and Klan Marches.
That is true here too. Stories like the one linked above just dont happen here. It would probably cause an outcry. It is pretty sad that 2018 Grant Parish, the location where the Colfax Riots happened, is less racist than 2018 metropolitan areas.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2003/07/the-colfax-riot/378556/
I’ve observed the same thing in WV. While it’s overwhelmingly white each tiny little town has a black family or two and they’re completely integrated. Maybe here it’s nothing new. I’ve heard it said that it’s been that way for a long time due to the shared mining history……”everyone came out of the mines the same color” is a commonly used expression.
Let’s not forget that segregation was mandated, not tolerated.
Unions played a role too. UMWA wanted members and they didn’t care what race they were. The mine wars here united some pretty disparate ethnic groups. Reading about WV history is interesting, it’s definitely unique among nominally southern states. Of course you have to wade through tons of “workers good/industrialists bad” narrative.
not giving half a shit about race.
These days that just makes you extra racist.
Thanks for the Mitch Hedberg article OMWC. He was a very funny guy. RIP
https://twitter.com/Vallmeister/status/969621369641201664
Woah
I didn’t know Mirror’s Edge was multiplayer.
I’m freaking out just watching it.
The model is ridiculously hot and the granny panties knock even her down a couple of integers.
All the more reason to get her out of them.
“It’s for your own good, Baby.”
“Diabetes is actually five separate diseases, research suggests”
http://www.bbc.com/news/health-43246261
re: apropos of nothing
i still visit TOS on occasion. its like wandering back into a city that has been overrun by an enemy army. you can’t turn a corner without being exposed to retard-fire. every 3rd or 4th comment involves painful-to-even-look-at-stupidity
a thought that occurred to me: if nothing else, it reveals something about the success of trolling
most people can tolerate 10-20% background noise. they become adept at kicking its ass. it becomes almost a form of sporting entertainment. they’d be bored *without* 10-20% being retarded.
however, when the retards creep above 30%, suddenly its not fun anymore. its work. you become tired of reading the same form of stupid argument you literally just rebutted 5 mins ago.
it doesn’t really matter what the content of the retard is, it achieves success by critical mass. and you combine enough of them, and they can destroy a community.
the trick, seems to me, is to make them of different enough variety that you cant be bothered to care which are the bots and which are the real people. Is Michael Hihn a computer program? who cares? combine him w/ Amsoc and Tony and Buttplug etc and make sure they reply to everything that makes half-sense, and you will destroy conversation in no time.
i strongly dislike conspiracy-theory thinking; however, part of me wonders sometimes how much of Reason’s demise was by its own fault (editorial, combined with shitty patron influence, combined with bad hiring)…. vs. by actual malicious intent – in this case, basically, the object of a small number of trolls.
if the latter exist at all, they can only marvel at their own accomplishments.
Reason continues its escape from individual liberty toward … the alt-right and its intellectual founder, Ron Paul
Do YOU have a child or grandchild in an American classroom?
Inconvenient facts (fully documented) (ignore the screeching guntards)
Gun rights ate NOT absolute, because NO rights are absolute – not even Life — WHEN they are conflicting or competing. THAT is what “unalienable” means
Intentional Homicide Rates (Latest available, UN) Per 100,000 population.
Per 100,000 population
5.3 United States
3.0 Europe and Asia (each)
1.7 Canada
0.9 UK
Have you ever considered that you MIGHT just be manipulated? Even a little? How would you know?
FACT: England’s 2nd gun control (1996) saw ONE mass shooting in 22 years
Adjust for population (5:1) and they had 5 shootings in 22 years … We had 8 in 6 weeks. Do the math.
Mass Shootings Per year
UK = 0.2 per year
US = 69.3 per year = 3,100% higher
Are those YOUR values on “sanctity of human life?”
Inconvenient questions:
In Britain, Ireland, Norway, Iceland and New Zealand, officers are unarmed when they are on patrol. WHY? And HOW?
And if teachers are armed, who will be shot first? duh
(NOT advocating gun grabs, just calling out the bullshit)
Left – Right = Zero
Hihn continues to mystify me. I went from absolutely hating his guts to being sort of fascinated by the level of incomprehensible cognitive dissonance and irrational rage. Somehow believing in individual liberty is antithetical to libertarianism in his warped view. One thing I’ve got to give to the crazy old bastard is he’s definitely unique among the other various unhinged trolls.
He is something else. I have seen the above post reposted dozens of times on a single article. It’s hogwash, by its by God Hihn’s hogwash and he’s going to make sure everyone sees it.
You have never met a Hihn in person? I know at least five versions of him around here. It is a special kind of crazy that looks almost identical in every case and Hihn has it in spades. The guy is nuts.
I mean unique among the other TOS trolls. Rather than standard lefty talking points al Tony, AMSOC, etc., he creates his own weird perversions of the obvious meanings of words, Like Lachowsky said “by God Hihn’s hogwash and he’s going to make sure everyone sees it.”
My maternal grandfather was crazy as hell with dementia for years before he died. It’s been 10 years or so, but I kinda remember him ranting about some pretty crazy stuff. Something about George Bush stealing his mail.
Picturing G.B. pilfer a rural mailbox, look around and then shuffle off into the bushes made me laugh
*facepalm*
Had a grandmother like that. She actually got J Edgar on the phone once, somehow, and gave him a hell of a cussin’. Apparently he was spying on her and she wanted it to stop.
The funny thing is that nowadays, the NSA is spying on all of us and we want them to stop.
I now have a new hero. If she ever flipped FDR the bird I swear I’ll pay for a monument.
You have never met a Hihn in person?
I swear I have met Tony in person. Went out with my girl and some of her friends/acquaintances once. The discussion teetered into government and politics. The guy made every fallacious and dishonest non-argument and moved the goal posts so many times I lost count. Like talking to Tony, I could have a more productive convo talking to a wall. And the guy was one of those “your rights come from the gov’t” types. Fucking irritating. Not irritating that he disagreed on any particular topic, but that he lacked the ability to even attempt to understand an idea different from his and to even attempt to debate in good faith.
For a second i thought you’d gone completely insane.
in the future, people should ensure to put hihnquotes in brackets, just to protect the innocent
It really is astonishing how a website can go on a power trip bender and try to purge its core community. Reason was actually the second incident of these I was involved in. The first was over at Cracked. I hung out over there and contributed to their photoshop contests. There was actually a purge slightly before I started going there and those people left and set up their own site. Then, while I was hanging out over there the editor, David Wong, went on a power trip on a whole bunch of contributors. Over there it was actual bans and it was such a bugaboo nobody was even allowed to talk about it after it happened. If Wong saw a post about it he would delete the post. Not long after that is when the site’s content started going left and the whole site went downhill, and now they’ve fired most of their staff. Who would have thought alienating your core audience could lead to lower profits?
There is actually some decent content over there. Seems like it goes in spurts. Maybe it’s determined by whoever is deciding what gets posted? Sometimes I go there and there are a bunch of decent libertarian articles which make me want to engage. Sometimes I’ll pull up their site, look at the articles, say WTF, and just leave.
Yeah, I would agree that if I pull up a story and it’s just been shit all over, I won’t bother with it. One thing I will say about that is that I almost never feed the trolls. PB and Tony will rarely ever respond to one of my comments because they know I won’t respond back nor will I comment on any of their derp. Their only goal there is to get people’s goat and make them respond. I think it would not be nearly as bad if people ignored the trolls instead of getting into flame wars with them that are pointless. Hihn is probably an exception because he is just an ahole and is happy to shit all over a thread whether people feed him or not.
He’s happy to continue to shit all over threads LONG after everyone else has vacated. I would respond to his comments on stories that were over a week old just to see if he’d respond. He always did, it ended up that he was more willing to keep going back into old threads than I was.
yes.
this was the magic of the Reasonable/Greasonable/FASCR plugs
they couldn’t annoy enough people to matter. the problem is that they’ve overwhelmed the barriers.
there’s also a side-chorus of fake handles which echo the stupid shit. my point was about the “threshold effect” where manageable trolling turns quickly into ‘too much to bear’. its the tipping point thing.
“where manageable trolling turns quickly into ‘too much to bear’”……..so ANY Disqus forum?
Disqus, unless i’m mistaken, has a “hide user” built-in thing.
i’m not advocating their comment system as superior, but noting that they recognized the deleterious effect of trolls very quickly, and built in measures to reduce their impact.
I have no doubt that the trolls were trying to destroy the site. I have no doubt that some of them were activists with that as a goal. Despite that Reason destroyed itself when they decided to woo the left. Hell, most of them were closet lefties anyway. Also, the staff hated most of the commenters. They despised us. It seems like I remember hearing Gillespie? make a disparaging remark about us just recently. We have been gone for a year and they still hate us.
KMW talked up the commentariat in her interview with Postrel just after KMW became editor of the mag. And Bailey often engaged. Other than that, I think you’re right.
I know, it wasn’t across the board but it is enough of them. I am tempted to use the old turd i n the punchbowl analogy but it isnt quite that bad. The more the bad ones stepped out of the closet the more they made their contempt known. The final straw for me was what they did to Sloopy. That was just spite. I put up my middle finger and walked away. I didn’t look back.
This place is great. Not everyone here agrees on everything but I dont see any malice or hatred in anyone. There is a lot of jibber-jabber here. I have to scroll past too many discussions of beer, avocados or sports, but there are some pretty damned good discussions to be found.
The money I used to give to Reason now comes here.
Reason is the H&K of individualist blogs.
+1 backward bullets in magazine
It’s because we suck and they hate us.
Do you think it kind of harkens back to the Rothbard/Cato split? TOS is definitely Cato in it’s liberaltarianism and (while I know this is a gross generalization) the commenters seem to lean more Paul/Rothbard/Mises institute…….
I came in pretty late (mid-2015) but it definitely seems that they believe Glib’s brand of libertarianism was tarnishing their rep. I’m sure they are glad some of the commenter’s here aren’t calling them out on their bullshit anymore .
“”Rothbard/Cato split””
the problem w/ Reason is not really ideological, imo
its cultural
they are perfectly happy to take principled stances on selected issues – and completely abandon them on others. the flexibility is driven entirely by “who they want to please”.
i made a comment a while back which i think nailed it.
So IOW ‘ass sex/Mexicans/weed’? Whoever came up with that is brilliant….
the “gays, immigrants, drugs” stuff is unquestionably part of some editorial mandate.
the most significant bias any publication has is more “what” to cover, rather than “how” its covered. what they focus on is always more revealing than their writer’s varied spin on things.
I agree, even before the split I was really tiring of reason’s content because it was mostly just the same old tropes about the aforementioned favored issues…..I wasn’t learning anything anymore and was basically figuring out what the article was about from the comments.
Well, I don’t go to Instapundit much nowadays, but he has a huge following, and I remember him linking to H&R a number of times, often anchored to a comment rather than an original article. The commenter was usually one of the people like us (or even us), and I can’t imagine H&R are getting as much link-love either.
To be sure, their Alexa rating must be cratering, and if you’re a real devotee of denial, it would be easy to blame us dissidents.
yes, i was not arguing that trolls were the sole reason for the decline. but that their influence has a certain ‘threshold effect’. where when they remain below a certain level, they don’t matter, but when they rise above it, they become unbearable.
reason’s shift in editorial posture is a separate matter entirely.
if the latter exist at all, they can only marvel at their own accomplishments.
I am reluctant to buy into the whole “Mary Stack” mythology, but I am utterly astonished by the amount of energy and level of intensity put into destroying Hit & Run. Whoever it was, and I believe there were multiple actors, they made an incredible effort.
If i were the type who cared about such things, i’d guess it was a cabal of progressive journos in the DC area. basically, “Dave Weigel” type buddies who resented the fact that Reason made their own shitty web-publications (e.g. slate, beast, etc) look less popular despite having far bigger budgets and right-thinking postures.
I’m guessing this gets investigated.
https://hotair.com/headlines/archives/2018/03/hmmmm-113/
“But one billionaire investor and former Trump adviser, Carl Icahn”
Just because he’s a billionaire and former trump advisor doesn’t mean he was privy to anything prior to the announcement. That being said, if he was, he’s probably toast.
He will have staff memos going back to mid-last year that talk about an appropriate exit point for the investment in that company.
When you run a vulture portfolio, or any event-driven portfolio, you know that your exit will be scrutinized in the court of public opinion. A prudent manager will direct his analysts to constantly review the investments and to look for exit catalysts which might prove more compelling than the exit conditions you currently hold.
Icahn’s been in business a very long time. He’ll have at the very least, plausible deniability. Hell, he might even have rock solid deniability. I don’t know, but it’s easy to add two and two and get five.
Icahn has been a target since he aligned with Trump.
Manitowoc released their Quarterly on Feb 8 with a surprise EPS miss.
I mean it could be cronyism, or it could be an investor reacting to a fatal accident involving the company a few weeks before.
Maybe. If it isn’t investigated, I’d be pissed if I were Martha Stewart:)
When you run a vulture portfolio, or any event-driven portfolio, you know that your exit will be scrutinized in the court of public opinion. A prudent manager will direct his analysts to constantly review the investments and to look for exit catalysts which might prove more compelling than the exit conditions you currently hold.
If you look at the 1 year chart, it’s not hard to make the case that he got out because it was time to collect his winnings and move on.
I agree, although Icahn typically seems to invest on a longer horizon, cashing out made plenty of sense. End of year, get some liquidity in anticipation of a strong Q1.
Tragedy
Greenfield and other towns across New England are learning that while they might have been able to keep out big-box stores through zoning changes and old-fashioned advocacy, there’s not much they can do about consumers’ shift to e-commerce. They can’t physically keep out e-commerce stores—which don’t have a physical presence in towns that residents could push back against—and they certainly can’t restrict residents’ internet access. “It’s one thing for me to try and fight over land use in the town I live in, or in somebody else’s town,” Norman told me, over lunch in a diner on Greenfield’s Main Street. “But e-shopping creates a real problem for activists, because on some level, shopping online is a choice people make, and it’s hard to intrude yourself in that.”
Presumptuous busybodies hardest hit.
It’s a real fucking shame that those “independent shopkeepers” can’t continue to force their neighbors to overpay for goods and services. It’s too bad they can’t impose a tariff on Amazon.
The town I live in basically kicked Boston Market out of the town when McDonalds bought them. We’re so fancy that the only national or regional stores we have are:
1 CVS
1 Waldgreens
1 Rite-Aid
1 Stop-n-Shop
1 Dunkin Donuts
1 Starbucks
1 Talbots
1 Chase Bank
Due to some major lobbying, we had a Gap for a few years and then it shut down.
The Rite-Aid will obviously close.
Dunkin – duh, where else are the police gonna hang out?
So you can imagine just how much revenue this affluent town of 28,000 is being ‘lost’ to eCommerce.
Cape Cod is proud of having limited choice for some reason.
As a vacationer, I don’t find it ‘quaint’. In fact, it’s annoying.
To get a seat in a restaurant in CC is a retardedly stressful activity. We used to go eat at early hours just to avoid being told it will be a two-hour wait for fucken average pizza.
Icahn typically seems to invest on a longer horizon, cashing out made plenty of sense.
I just skimmed that Hot Air thing, and if they said how long Icahn had held Manitowoc, I don’t recall. I took a quick look the chart, and I’d be a happy son of a gun if I had gotten in on that gain.
very few things could inspire me to change my avatar, but i think i’ve found the replacement
That guy’s got it all figured out.