« March 2017 | Main | May 2017 »
April 30, 2017
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 5:39 PM | Your Say (7)
Ideologies that seek purity
will burn everyone that doesn’t capitulate eventually (Yes, modern Progressivism is a new strain of Puritanism). Eventually your choice will either be to face it or submit to it. Any other capitulation just buys time, and costs you your principles. OT74: Copan Thread | Slate Star CodexPosted by gerardvanderleun at 3:37 PM | Your Say (0)
Totalitarian religion – again.
This time a different religion, but with the same problems.
Replacing fact with feeling; debate with canons; investigation with doctrine – “nasty little orthodoxies” protected by thought police controlling our centers of learning. The death of truth and fact and objectivity – our Westphalian nation states are tired and burned out; political innovations that brought us democracy also brought us constipated congresses unable to make decisions and constituencies unable to think about the common good, the long game, or entertain the idea of sacrifice. And why should they? When it is always they who have been asked to sacrifice – to give their lives for the nobilities who prefer to eat in Paris, France than Paris, Idaho; of course within the ring, tourists snapping pictures of the Eiffel tower trying to ignore the soldiers. History is Rhyming | Joel D. Hirst's Blog
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 3:01 PM | Your Say (0)
The 10 Ugliest Cars of All Time
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 11:31 AM | Your Say (10)
The cursing pols, the anathematizing abortion advocates, the screeching students
This is what America sees now as the face of the Democratic Party. It is a party blowing itself up whose only hope is that Donald Trump blows up first. He may not be lucky in all of his decisions or staffers, or in his own immaturities and dramas. But hand it to him a hundred days in: He’s lucky in his main foes. Trump Has Been Lucky in His Enemies - WSJ
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 10:44 AM | Your Say (12)
Who would watch an industry banquet — giving out awards to itself — on TV?
I'd be bored if I were in the industry and forced to attend and sit at one of the stodgy tables, so why would I watch such a thing on TV?
Because it's on television? Because at some point — they're promising — a comedian will appear behind the lectern and tell jokes? Because the jokes will be about the President? But all the comedians have for years been telling all the Trump they can think of. What could possibly be new? There was the possible newness of Trump having to sit there on the dais while the jokes were being made, but that depended on the participation of Donald Trump. Althouse: Trump did his Harrisburg rally, and the White House Correspondents Dinner stumbled on without him.
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 9:02 AM | Your Say (2)
April 29, 2017
If we study the history of Rome and Carthage,
we can understand what happened and why.It is not difficult to understand and form an intelligent view about the three Punic Wars; but if mortal catastrophe should overtake the British nation and the British Empire, historians a thousand years hence will still be baffled by the mystery of our affairs. They will never understand how it was that a victorious nation, with everything in hand, suffered themselves to be brought low and to cast away all that they had gained by measureless sacrifice and absolute victory -- " gone with the wind." Winston Churchill Danube Basin Speech
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 9:59 AM | Your Say (5)
It is raining again today in Africa.
Before the rains things are still: puffs of brown, a remaining dust girding itself for a final fight with the wetness – below the rolling dark of the clouds above. Then one by one the drops plunk into the brown, throwing up a tiny plume of dust. Then another, and another, and another still – a falling torrent. We have made it through the heat. - - Africa And The Peacemakers | Joel D. Hirst's Blog
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 9:07 AM | Your Say (6)
Momernts
Owls are still calling to each other and deer are wading in the water as the sun begins to paint the day. It's windy today and the trees, all leaved out in green, are undulating as though to a song only they can hear. Rain is in the forecast. I can smell it's promise in the air. - - True NorthPosted by gerardvanderleun at 8:25 AM | Your Say (2)
April 28, 2017
Their faces show how much time they have spent hating others.
You see this sort of smug, superior grin in the face of an SJW.
But behind it is utter madness. These are broken people, whose actions are no longer rational in any sense. Some can only gain satisfaction from submission, from emotional and intellectual (and sometimes physical) masochism and self-flagellation. Some can’t even gain it from that, anymore. Some have surrendered completely to animus possession. These people are no longer free-thinking individuals, capable of making decisions. They are, rather, individuals who have completely lost touch with reality. Unable to cope with the weight of the world, they seek to unload it on others. It’s your fault, not theirs. Nothing is their fault, they are perfect, you are to blame for everything.The Weight of the World | Declination
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 1:23 PM | Your Say (4)
“Political correctness is communist propaganda writ small.
In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, nor to inform, but to humiliate;
and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is to co-operate with evil, and in some small way to become evil oneself. One’s standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to.” — Theodore Dalrymple
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 12:23 PM | Your Say (4)
Just a little off the top, please.
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 9:50 AM | Your Say (5)
Party On Suckers
Bahamas festival backed by a host of A-list models and with packages costing up to £10,000 ($13,000) has descended into chaos amid reports guests have been stranded at an unfinished site overrun by feral dogs.'We thought it was just going to be out of this world. The photos on the Fyre homepage were sensational, lots of famous models like Bella Hadid playing in the sand and sea, promises of five-star boutique camping with even waiter service and gourmet food. 'We were even going to be whisked from Miami by private jet to the festival, it just seemed like a once in a lifetime thing that was going to be fantastic..... She said: 'He was absolutely gutted. He said the place was a complete dump, just a rain soaked mud bowl. There was basically nothing there. The boutique tents hadn't been put up, The stages were tiny. He said there was filth everywhere and more worryingly really fierce dogs running about. He said angry locals had started threatening people as well. 'He said basically it was worse than a refugee camp.'
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 7:54 AM | Your Say (4)
April 27, 2017
Vantablack
Since then, the team behind the invention - from Surrey NanoSystems - has upped its blackness, and in early 2016, announced that no spectrometer in the world was powerful enough to measure how much light it absorbs.
"Even running a high power laser pointer across it barely reflects anything back to the viewer," the researchers explain in a YouTube video. "We have never before made a material so 'black' that it can't be picked up on our spectrometers in the infrared."
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 11:48 PM | Your Say (11)
Climate Change Amongst the Liberal Elite
MICHAEL: I can’t.I can’t wake up at 4 AM on yet another Saturday to board yet another bus for yet another five-hour ride to slowly shuffle through our nation’s capital then re-board that same bus that now reeks of old kefir and paleo protein bars after sitting in the sun all day for yet another five-hour ride home. Also am I the only one who sees the irony in throngs of people burning fossil fuels to commute to a march intended to lessen the burning of fossil fuels? - - McSweeney’s
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 7:44 PM | Your Say (1)
Why would a government want such a database? For intimidation purposes, of course!
“Show me the man and I’ll find you the crime.” Imagine that the following conditions were to be satisfied:
Liberty's Torch: The “Are You Paranoid Enough?” Edition
- All electronic communications is monitored and stored by the NSA or an equivalent.
- The storage technique is sophisticated enough that an analyst can isolate one particular person’s traffic in no more than a day.
- WiFi “hotspots” have expanded to map the entire United States.
- Commercial transactions, whether by dint of convenience or through the effective elimination of cash, have become entirely digital.
- Internet-enabled devices capable of monitoring and digitizing domestic conversations have become ubiquitous; at least one such device is “awake and alert” in every household, at every instant of every day.
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 6:47 PM | Your Say (1)
When folks argue that Ann Coulter cannot speak at Berkeley because she will "incite violence",
they don't mean that she is expected to stand up and urge her supporters to go do violence against others -- they mean that they expect her opponents to be violent.This is a horrible newspeak redefinition of a term. It is implying that a speaker is responsible for the violence by those who oppose her. By this definition, the socialists of 1932 Germany were guilty of "inciting violence" whenever Nazi brownshirts tried to brutally shut down socialist meetings and speeches. - - How The Left Is Changing the Meaning of Words to Reduce Freedom -- The Phrase "Incite Violence" | Coyote Blog
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 4:47 PM | Your Say (3)
The Quest for a Psychiatric Cure
Early on, the actual cutting was done by his neurosurgeon partner, Dr. James W. Watts. He sawed two holes in the skull and, with a device called a leucotome, lopped off cells in the brain’s frontal lobes. The partnership dissolved a decade later when Dr. Freeman embraced a procedure called a transorbital lobotomy. It was not for the squeamish. Dr. Freeman would insert a tool resembling an ice pick beneath each eyelid, hammer it into the patient’s brain through the eye socket, and maneuver it to cut away frontal lobe cells believed to be trouble spots. - - The New York Times
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 12:09 PM | Your Say (3)
A Message to ANTIFA from an American Infantryman
Alright fucksticks, this circus has gone on long enoughand the audience has gotten tired of the clowns doing the same act for months on end. Your special snowflake brand of socialist revolution (black masks and tipped over trash cans) is sputtering out from underneath you. You’re not any more dedicated and disciplined at seeing this through than you were moving out of your parents’ guest bedroom after your “one semester off” 4 years ago. It’s time to take off the Doc Martins, wash your dreadlocks, remove the 9 facial piercings, and go get a job. You are not a revolutionary. You’re not changing the world. You WILL NOT win. All of your goals are stupid and you should do what you do best…quit. – Iron Mike – GruntWorksMedia
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 11:36 AM | Your Say (3)
Most studies show that 70 percent of divorces are instigated by the wife.
A large inheritance can skew the power dynamic. If her dead dad is providing for her more than the breadwinner, he tends to lose his authority. Besides, a woman’s libido crashes before a man’s, so being constantly hounded for intercourse when you don’t want it is going to lead to some animosity. When women are in their 30s and now 40s, they are getting harassed by kids all day. The last thing they want to do is answer to their husband’s demands when the house is finally quiet. After the kids move out, solitude becomes even more inviting. The temptation is there for a woman to ask that one last kid—the one her age—to move out, too. Ah, serenity at last. - - Divorce Your Wife
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 9:49 AM | Your Say (6)
Leftists are more likely than rightists to get away with unsavory sexual indiscretions.
Because when your platform is all about an aborted fetus in every Dumpster, a tranny in every bathroom, and a glory hole in every stall, who’s going to bat an eye if you uninvitedly squeeze a boob or get a BJ from a subordinate every now and then? This is why leftist darling comedian Louis C.K. consistently skates past whispers of sexual harassment and lewd conduct. When your routine consists of making jokes about pedophilia and how your own young daughters are “cunts,” who’s going to act shocked if you’re accused of dangling your dirlywanger in the presence of a female colleague? “Oh, that Louis, such a free-spirited scamp. Nothing’s sacred to him!” - - Be Like Mike (Pence)
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 8:09 AM | Your Say (3)
April 26, 2017
So it would seem that the indians are not only not "native," they aren't even "first."
Ancient humans may have reached Americas 100,000 years earlier than thoughtPosted by gerardvanderleun at 10:45 AM | Your Say (6)
“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims
may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies.The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. This very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be "cured" against one's will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals.” -- C.S. Lewis, in "God in the Dock: Essays on Theology" [HT: Hale Adams]
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 9:06 AM | Your Say (2)
What we see going on in America with the slow removal of Christianity from the culture.
The ruling class long ago converted to the new religion of multiculturalism.They have been slowly erasing the old religions from the public institutions and replacing it with their own. Now they have moved into privateinstitutions by forcing Christians to worship at the altar of multiculturalism. The next step, and there are already rumblings, is to force churches to adopt gay marriage or face sanction. The Death of You | The Z Blog
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 8:36 AM | Your Say (3)
Obama's $400,000 last laugh on liberals
By the master. By the biggest Bogart-er in the Choom Club. Barack Obama has always been about Barack Obama and that is all Barack Obama will ever be about. Populism? Try Onanism. That's closer to what he stands for. - - Don Surber
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 7:52 AM | Your Say (0)
April 25, 2017
When God sends a Plague of Wild Boars against you, he's done sending messages, and is now sending armored bacon.
Three Islamic State jihadis have reportedly been killed by rampaging wild boars near Iraqi farmland.The three Islamic State militants were cut down by the feral boar known to inhabit Kirkuk in the the al-Rashad region, a local news site claims. They attacked the militants and left three killed, Iraqi News reports. -- Ace of Spades
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 4:58 PM | Your Say (9)
Torching the Modern-Day Library of Alexandria
Somewhere at Google there is a database containing 25-million books and nobody is allowed to read them.It’s like that scene at the end of the first Indiana Jones movie where they put the Ark of the Covenant back on a shelf somewhere, lost in the chaos of a vast warehouse. It’s there. The books are there. People have been trying to build a library like this for ages—to do so, they’ve said, would be to erect one of the great humanitarian artifacts of all time—and here we’ve done the work to make it real and we were about to give it to the world and now, instead, it’s 50 or 60 petabytes on disk, and the only people who can see it are half a dozen engineers on the project who happen to have access because they’re the ones responsible for locking it up. - The Atlantic
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 11:01 AM | Your Say (8)
The Japanese: Nuked too much or not enough?
Mr. Sato tones up dramatically in five days to become a better pole dancer | SoraNews24
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 10:31 AM | Your Say (3)
I want to go to church on Sunday.
I want to go dancing with my wife of many years on Saturday. I want to be buried in the same suit I was married in. I want people to stand there and look at my cold face and say I was no great shakes but I was alright. Sippican Cottage: I Still Want
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 10:06 AM | Your Say (1)
What if the apparent uptick in Western IQ was accelerated by smoking?
Everyone smoked. It also corresponds with the Industrial Revolution. Once tobacco use became universal, Western technological progress took off like a rocket, culminating in a rocket literally taking off and putting men on the moon. Once the anti-smoking crusades got a purchase in the 60’s and smoking rates declined, it does appear that the West began to decline. Perhaps that small boost to our cognitive ability had a huge impact on our intellectual achievements. Now that the crutch is gone, we’re doing idiotic things like putting minorities in charge and inviting in low-IQ barbarians from the fringes of civilization. Perhaps the lunacy that has gripped the West is simply the withdraw symptoms of kicking the habit. Bring Back Smoking
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 9:34 AM | Your Say (5)
April 24, 2017
True conversation I had with a self-described atheist some years ago:
HE: I might believe in God if there was only some evidence.
ME: What about the universe? Does the universe count as evidence?
HE: No.
ME: So you require evidence, but reject the universe as evidence. So for you, if there is evidence, it has to be evidence that is actually greater than the entire universe! Please describe what that evidence could be.
HE: How's the weather up your way?
--Donald Sensing
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 3:20 PM | Your Say (14)
Mt. Fuji Versus the Clouds
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 1:55 PM | Your Say (3)
The Ancestry.Com True Believers
Were the white settlers raping the Indians, or were the Indians raping the white women when they overran the settlements? Because I guarantee you nobody was going down to the county courthouse and saying, “I would like to register the marriage of Anthony V. Crawford III to Running Deer, daughter of Laughing Wolf.” Just a question. Because there’s a whole lot of white people claiming this partial Cherokee heritage. Then Again, Maybe I’m a Black Man - Taki's Magazine
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 1:11 PM | Your Say (11)
There's nothing "Native"about "Native Americans"
I don’t get replacing "Indians" with “Native Americans.”
Yes, I know that the legends of a lot of tribes say that they were created here, but holy heck, are we going to go on that testimony now? Then we should refer to Christians as Edenintes, because that’s where they believe they were created, right? No? Then what makes a religion true and the other false, from the outside? Oh, yeah, because one is exotic and stuff. In fact, from a scientific point of view we have more than enough proof that the people’s Europeans found in the Americas didn’t evolve there, weren’t created there, and weren’t the first ones there. I.e. they displaced other people. Words And Meanings | According To Hoyt
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 12:52 PM | Your Say (1)
"A carnival of degenacy...."
Today, the people making movies largely despise the native stock of the country and they really hate the white men.
A remake of Casablanca would most likely have the story set at Ellen’s Place, rather than Rick’s Café Américain. The proprietor would have to be a gender fluid lesbian of color, hounded by white males trying to oppress her. The whole thing would be a carnival of degeneracy intended to rub the nose of viewers in a steaming pile of cultural Marxism, as a reminder of who is in charge now.The Olden Thymes | The Z Blog
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 11:46 AM | Your Say (6)
And They Want Me to Go to Jury Duty? You Gotta Be Sh*tting ME
And they want me to go to jury duty? You gotta be shitting me. No lawyer who has half a mind would want me on a jury box with my intense loathing of the kangaroo court judicial system we are all living in. I no longer have the capabilities to pass judgment on anyone, whether they are innocent or guilty because I lost all respect for the law. We have Judges sitting in court rooms who are knowingly bypassing and failing to uphold the constitution with smirks on their faces. And they want me to go to jury duty? You gotta be shitting me.
Our elected politicians (I call them legal Welfare Queens), approve of the police robbing citizens to pad their budgets. Oh, you have not heard of Civil Asset Forfeiture? You must be watching CNN and all the other fake news media. The police can blatantly kill citizens and their dogs, yes, their dogs too, and get away with Qualified Immunity. Seriously? And they want me to go to jury duty. You gotta be shitting me! - - By Cilla M@Theo Spark
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 9:41 AM | Your Say (7)
Somewhat like Elvis, Hitler has become far more valuable dead than he ever was alive.
And as a dead-man brand, Hitler is a Ferrari.This brand is so influential that the most powerful men on Earth can be routinely manipulated by the simple fear of being literally him. Wielded by skillful hands, Hitler can exert black-hole gravity on the decision-making process of all but the most fashion-indifferent political consumers. Consider the power of such a property. Obviously the owners are going to jealously guard its value. Protecting the Brand
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 9:40 AM | Your Say (0)
April 23, 2017
In the absence of sincere belief in the practice and presence of Our Lord, playing dress-up starts to feel silly.
Instead, that irrepressible sense of awe is transferred to, for instance, high-class restaurants,with the candles on the table and the reverent “servers” chanting, almost liturgically, items from the menu. For the religious impulse will never go away, with its longing for a certain elevation and tone. If not foodie, every man and woman born will find something holy, and be outraged by blasphemies against it. The codes of speech and gesture that now govern our public behaviour are “spilt religion” of an obvious kind. Those who dare breach them are the new Infidels. Among the new Infidels : Essays in Idleness
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 11:30 AM | Your Say (0)
The center may hold in France but it is unlikely to hold for long.
The long and agonized effort rearguard effort to explain away the challenge posed by Brexit, Trumpism and now Franceas just the result of yahoos hearing themselves hog calling have been one futile exercise in self delusion. There's a hole in the bottom of the Titanic and the water has reached F Deck and now gurgling up the staircase. It's time for the passengers in first class to seriously consider they may actually actually drown before the night is out. Sneering comedy skits on the Daily Show, Full Frontal, and Last Week Tonight won't cut it any more. SOS
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 11:16 AM | Your Say (2)
Thank You, Internal-Combustion Engine, for Cleaning up the Environment
And when you walked around in New York City, you were breathing pulverized horse manure—a much worse pollutant, than the exhausts of automobiles. Indeed in the United States, the automobile was considered the solution to the horse problem because pulverized horse manure carried a lot of deadly pathogens. - - Foundation for Economic Education
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 10:52 AM | Your Say (1)
April 22, 2017
Please, God, Stop Chelsea Clinton from Whatever She Is Doing
Unkind as it is to say, reading anything by Chelsea Clinton—tweets, interviews, books—is best compared to taking in spoonfuls of plain oatmeal that, periodically, conceal a toenail clipping. Take the introduction to It’s Your World (Get Informed! Get Inspired! Get Going!). It’s harmless, you think. “My mom wouldn’t let me have sugary cereal growing up (more on that later),” writes Chelsea, “so I improvised, adding far more honey than likely would have been in any honeyed cereals.” That’s the oatmeal—and then comes the toenail: I wrote a letter to President Reagan when I was five to voice my opposition to his visit to the Bitburg cemetery in Germany, because Nazis were buried there. I didn’t think an American president should honor a group of soldiers that included Nazis. President Reagan still went, but at least I had tried in my own small way.Ah, yes, that reminds me of when I was four and I wrote to Senator John Warner about grain tariffs, arguing that trade barriers unfairly decreased consumer choice. | Vanity Fair
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 8:59 AM | Your Say (12)
When Women Campaigned to Prohibit "That Newfangled, Abominable, Heathenish Liquor Called COFFEE"
Coffee, so insist the Buxome Good-Women,
renders the men of England “as Lean as Famine, as Rivvel’d as Envy, or an old meager Hagg over-ridden by an Incubus. They come from it with nothing moist but their snotty Noses, nothing stiffe but their Joints, nor standing but their Ears.” These charges drew a response in the form of the “Mens Answer to the Womens Petition Against Coffee, Vindicating Their own Performances, and the Vertues of that Liquor, from the Undeserved Aspersions lately cast upon them by their SCANDALOUS PAMPHLET.” - -
The Coffee Revolt of 1674
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 8:38 AM | Your Say (1)
April 21, 2017
Who are we to judge the way Russians feel about bears?
In Russia, Bear Eats YOU. Well, Actually, He Eats Your Cookies – BSBFBAmericans have fallen into a dumb habit of calling brave people dumb. They post pictures of Darwin every time some misadventure befalls any person who’s doing anything other than cowering in mom’s basement. Who are we to judge the way Russians feel about bears? For all we know, a gigantic bear with arms like a furry Schwarzenegger holding five paring knives is like a squirrel to them. Nothing to be worried about. Maybe they’d call an exterminator if they found a bear in the attic, but other than that, it’s live and let live.
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 10:47 AM | Your Say (3)
These are popping up in a town that is 99%+ white and affluent.
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 10:22 AM | Your Say (8)
The Scorecard so far? Let's go to the video tape!
How’s everything else looking?The economy? Looking good. North Korea? Looks like China is on our side. Good sign. Syria? Those Tomahawk missiles were downright “Presidential” Illegal Immigration? Already down 70% from Trump’s persuasion alone. Supreme Court? Gorsuch is respected and qualified, even if you don’t like his ways. Healthcare? No one said it would be easy, but the focus and energy are in place to get something done eventually. Tax reform? Too slow for the country’s taste, but observers expect something good to come out of it. That’s why business optimism is high. Climate change? Anecdotally, it seems to me that the debate has evolved from mindless bullying of non-believers to a lower confidence in both the climate models and the economic models (which are not science). That seems like a step toward clarity. Generally speaking, if your critics are reduced to complaining about what might be in your tax returns, you already won. -- The Air Comes Out of the Anti-Trump Balloon | Scott Adams' Blog
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 10:15 AM | Your Say (1)
"Trying to squeeze blood from a rotten turnip." [Bumped]
Welcome to the liberal media’s manufacturing of “cool.” Leather jacket? Check. Overzealous airbrushing? Check. Humanizing grin? Check. Democratic establishment pedigree? Checkity-check-check. This is just the latest attempt by The Media Resistance to make Chelsea Clinton a thing.
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 10:03 AM | Your Say (26)
Outrage du Jour
This fresh terrorist shooting in Paris is going to knock the media's non-coverage of the Fresno terrorist shooting right off of the bottom of page D23. I lied. The Fresno shooting isn't on D23 either. More details to come as the media buries them and teams of forensic news archeologists sift through the artifacts of this soon-to-be buried non-event. Ace of Spades HQPosted by gerardvanderleun at 9:53 AM | Your Say (0)
The Japanese: Nuked too much or not enough?
Sumo Wrestlers Enjoy Cherry Blossom Season
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 9:05 AM | Your Say (6)
The Elements of Bureaucratic Style
The term “officer-involved shooting” is a perfect example of bureaucratic speech:It invariably is paired with an active verb (“an officer-involved shooting occurred”) and yet the entire purpose of the construction is to imbue the scene with passivity. Police did not kill anyone; a shooting just occurred and it happened to involve officers. There is no actor in an officer-involved shooting, and not even any real actions. We don’t even technically know who was shot, only that an officer was somehow involved. An entire syntactical arrangement consisting of a subject (“police”), a verb (“shot”), and an object (“a civilian”) are transmuted into a noun (“shooting”) with a compound adjective (“officer-involved”) attached. It’s almost as if nothing took place at all. - - Longreads
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 8:49 AM | Your Say (0)
Jihadi and drone speech are deadly because they do not require complete messages to guide them.
Apparently there are ideas, like the incantations that Coulter is likely to utterthat are dangers in themselves, which summon devils from the vasty deep and provoke an involuntarily reaction in whoever is unfortunate to hear them. .... What the Antifa, Howard Dean and the Venezuelan regime call contemporary "hate speech" is code for a culture to rival their own. They fear culture not speech. What makes it so dangerous is it dares to do what the progressives have done themselves. Critical speech could be tolerated for so long as it lacked a sense of identity but it became an existential threat with the first stirrings of self-consciousness behind the words. - - Skynet
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 8:40 AM | Your Say (1)
April 20, 2017
If you want more people working, make it simpler to hire them.
Exempt more small businesses from regulations.Double the exemption numbers. That is, if a regulation stipulates that it applies only to firms with ten or more employees, make that number 20. If 9 make it 18. I would go further, and double exemptions up to 99 employees; certainly, up to 50. There are a lot of businesses that might expand were the regulations not so expensive and/or oppressive. This simple exemption would let tens of thousands of firms hire more people, and would cost not very much. It could be passed in a week by Congress, but a Presidential Executive Order could accomplish a lot. - – Jerry Pournelle
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 6:13 PM | Your Say (1)
The Dark Secret at the Heart of AI
You can’t just look inside a deep neural network to see how it works.A network’s reasoning is embedded in the behavior of thousands of simulated neurons, arranged into dozens or even hundreds of intricately interconnected layers. The neurons in the first layer each receive an input, like the intensity of a pixel in an image, and then perform a calculation before outputting a new signal. These outputs are fed, in a complex web, to the neurons in the next layer, and so on, until an overall output is produced. Plus, there is a process known as back-propagation that tweaks the calculations of individual neurons in a way that lets the network learn to produce a desired output. - - MIT Technology Review
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 2:58 PM | Your Say (0)
What became of America's Drive-Thru Fotomat?
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 10:22 AM | Your Say (2)
"We got black and a white actor in the commercial, and they're gay with an asian baby. No one can complain!"
There is no longer a mass market.The white consumer population is falling. Companies need to sell more to minorities to maintain growth. Minorities no longer want to be token add-ons to white advertising or white policies, they want their own. Blacks want black ads and policies that favor blacks, Spanish-speaking people want Spanish language programming. Advertisers tried race-mixing. This is interpreted as a conscious decision to force race mixing on the Alt-Right, but it might be a way to increase diversity (we got black and a white actor in the commercial, and they're gay with an asian baby. No one can complain!). That backfired and more people complained, plus the sheer number of them caused more people to notice that ads are social programming. - - Peak Diversity: The Mass Market Is Dead
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 9:29 AM | Your Say (4)
April 19, 2017
Chelsea Clinton Gives Advice on How Millennial Women Can Be As Successful As Her
Clinton's jobs have apparently valued her quite well.Clinton was first hired at 23 by top consulting firm McKinsey & Company, earning a $120,000 annualsalary. She was their youngest hire and made as much as fellow employeeswith MBA degrees, even though she only had a bachelor's in history. In 2006, she moved on to work at hedge fund Avenue Capital Group, run by high-powered Democratic billionaire Marc Lasry. Lasry has contributed more than $460,000 to Democratic causes since the 1990's. Most infamously, Clinton was hired by NBC as a special correspondent to the tuneof $600,000 annually, or approximately $26,724 for every minute she was on air. Among her most probing interviews was her grilling of the Geico gecko. - - Freebeacon
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 9:53 AM | Your Say (4)
Dumb Birds of North America
Also, if you live near a garbage dump. Gulls literally don’t care whether they’re eating a small marine invertebrate from the ocean or a rancid french-fry from the trash. Yeah. They enjoy eating garbage and shitting everywhere. Fun bird fact: The gulls in Alfred Hitchcock’s movie The Birds were fed a mix of wheat and whiskey so they would attack a children’s birthday party.Field Guide to Dumb Birds of North America
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 9:41 AM | Your Say (8)
A horse is a horse, of course, of course, And no one can talk to a horse of course.
the only person to whom Mister Ed would speak on the show, says that Harvester actually died accidentally following a shot of tranquilizer in California and was cremated, his ashes spread around by his trainer, Lester Hilton. Young says the horse buried in Oklahoma was a different palomino horse named Pumpkin, who died in 1979. Pumpkin was used for publicity shots for the show, and took up the mantle of Mister Ed after Harvester died, but never played the role on television. A third story has Harvester dying in California and being buried in Oklahoma.
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 8:01 AM | Your Say (1)
Just when we think we're out, they pull us back in.
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 7:49 AM | Your Say (1)
The women of the Hell’s Angels were bad, brassy, bombshell ‘old ladies’
“One thing about the Angels that I found fascinating,
and something I’d never given much thought to before I started photographing them, was the role that the women played,” he said. “The girls weren’t there in chains, or against their will or anything. They had to want that life if they were going to be accepted by the Angels. These guys were kings of the road. I don’t think they ever felt they had to look around for girls. Girls would come to them, and they would take their pick. And then they’d tell them where to sit and what to do.” - - TimeLine
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 6:57 AM | Your Say (2)
April 18, 2017
The Income Tax Then... and Now
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 6:04 PM | Your Say (5)
The population of addicts is like the population of deer.
It is highest in rustic places with access to urban supplies.Missouri’s heroin problem is worst in the rural counties near St. Louis. New Hampshire’s is worst in the small cities and towns an hour or so away from the drug markets of Massachusetts: Lawrence, Lowell, and Boston..... The implicit accusation is that only now that whites are involved have racist authorities been roused to act. This is false in two ways. First, authorities have not been roused to act. Second, when they do, they will have epidemiological, and not just tribal, grounds for doing so. A plague afflicting an entire country, across ethnic groups, is by definition more devastating than a plague afflicting only part of it. American Carnage by Christopher Caldwell | Articles | First Things
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 3:40 PM | Your Say (2)
Why No Civility Is Possible Today
When spelled out, what we have today in this country is an unbridgeable disagreement about what the family is.Misunderstand the family and all its coherent complexities, what follows is that nothing else will go right. We have no common judgment about the transcendent meaning of our lives. One division maintains, with no real proof, that man has no given nature. Logically and politically, step by step, consequences, that are not accidental, follow. We legalize contraception, then, when that does not work, abortion, euthanasia, fetal experimentation, homosexual marriages and adoptions. We can even decide if we are male or female. A “family” is configured as we wish it to be. These practices have all become “rights” under positive law. They are systematically enforced. No criticism of them is allowed, no matter how scientifically or reasonably based it may be. - Crisis Magazine
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 11:28 AM | Your Say (4)
"Not a racial issue but a religious or cultural one"
With regard to the Islamic presence in Europe,do we need reminding of the wars in the Balkans, of recent memory, in which Christians and Muslims in Bosnia and beyond, killed each other in a frenzy of hatred and “ethnic cleansing”? Do we need reminding that all of those doing the killing, on both the Christian and Muslim side, were impeccably white? Do we need reminding that such ethnic cleansing has been part of the demographic dynamic of that region ever since the Muslims first invaded centuries earlier? Do we need reminding that the very word “balkanization” entered the language because of such enmity between peoples and the destructive fragmentation that is its consequence? The point is not whether Islamic immigration to Europe is a major threat to peace—obviously it is—it’s that Islam is a multiracial religion as Christianity is a multiracial religion. It’s about a clash of cultures, not a clash of races. In such a clash of cultures, a black Christian and a white Christian are one side of the divide, and a black Muslim and a white Muslim are on the other. It might well be the case that the influx of Muslims into Europe is leading to the balkanization of Europe with all the harmful consequences that this entails; however, it’s not a racial issue but a religious or cultural one. Is the West Lost Forever? - The Imaginative Conservative
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 11:26 AM | Your Say (0)
Stephen King's Stranger Love Songs
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 11:18 AM | Your Say (0)
Poof-Berries
Liberalism is the secular religion for the girls, mostly single white girls.They try to cobble together a coalition of hues for political reasons, but it is mostly a religion for cat ladies and the women who intend to be cat ladies. Buckley Conservatism is trying to fish in those waters, but that hole is all fished out and take that however you like. - -The Z Blog
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 10:48 AM | Your Say (0)
The Heart asks Pleasure -- first --
And then -- Excuse from Pain --
And then -- those little Anodynes
That deaden suffering --
And then -- to go to sleep --
And then -- if it should be
The will of its Inquisitor
The privilege to die --
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 9:05 AM | Your Say (1)
America is not Weimar Germany. It is not even 1960’s America.
The days of hard men enforcing ideological discipline on the streets are long over.The days of disaffected youth upsetting the social order are also past. Ricky Vaughn did more for the disaffected with his twitter account than any of these guys playing make believe on the streets of Berkeley. The bros had a good time beating up on the punks from Antifa and that’s not a terrible result in itself, but it is not the Spartacist uprising. If there’s any lesson here at all it is that in the current crisis, the old tactics are more for theater and entertainment than advancing a political agenda. Going on campus to harass Charles Murray is not changing minds and it is not intended to change minds. It’s just something to do in order to show off to friends. Its bored children coloring on the walls, even though they know mom with be pissed. Since mom is not going to give them up for adoption over it, the act is just pointless, risk-free theaterAlt-LARP | The Z Blog
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 8:31 AM | Your Say (0)
April 17, 2017
Only Way to End North Korea’s Nuclear Weapons Program Is to ‘End the North’
“I would be very wary of Chinese assurances that they’re going to help persuade North Korea to give up the nuclear weapons program.”“They’ve said that for 25 years, and they haven’t done a single thing to materially impede North Korea’s nuclear program. I think further discussions with North Korea, further efforts to pressure North Korea, are basically a waste of time. The way to end the North’s nuclear program is to end the North – merge it, reunify it with South Korea.” - - John Bolton
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 3:03 PM | Your Say (6)
The Most American Thing You've Never Heard Of: Tanking
The uniquely Nebraskan water “sport,” tanking, is like tubing on steroids. Groups of three to six people comfortably float down stream, all held buoyant by giant metal tanks. Large livestock tanks outfitted with seating and coolers carry passengers on calm waterways. The stream provides the motion, and a paddle on board can gently change course. Because of the tank’s cumbersome and circular shape, they bob up and down and rotate like a slow-motion tilt-o-whirl.- - Gear Junkie
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 12:35 PM | Your Say (3)
Don't Force Our Hand
Look, the Hard Right has no desire to fight in the streets.No sane person wants to live in a society where there is constant, realistic expectations of ongoing bloodshed. That is why we advocate the removal of undesirables. We do not want to kill anyone. We want them to simply go away. Go home. Go back where you came from. Just leave us alone. In fact, if there is an overarching theme to the Hard Right position, it is that we just want to be left alone to live our lives as we see fit. Unfortunately, the left has horribly misread the situation. Rather than realize the superiority of our position, they have chosen to bring the fight to us. They have mistaken our forbearance to this point for weakness. That is dead wrong. It is not that we are not capable. It is that we do not want open conflict. But if we are forced into a corner, all hell is going to break loose, and the left is not going to like the result. - Men Of The West
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 12:21 PM | Your Say (3)
The biggest obstacle to ensuring the 10,000 Year Clock actually lasts 10,000 years is
“When you start thinking about building something that lasts that long, the real problem is not decay and corrosion, or even the power source. The real problem is people,” Danny Hillis wrote in Wired in 1995. “If something becomes unimportant to people, it gets scrapped for parts; if it becomes important, it turns into a symbol and must eventually be destroyed. The only way to survive over the long run is to be made of materials large and worthless, like Stonehenge and the Pyramids, or to become lost. The Dead Sea Scrolls managed to survive by remaining lost for a couple millennia. Now that they’ve been located and preserved in a museum, they’re probably doomed. I give them two centuries — tops.” Forever Now — Real Life
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 11:22 AM | Your Say (2)
How dangerous and unstable would Asia become without the Seventh Fleet?
The Navy points to two different threats.The first is China, which has territorial claims against most of its neighbors. Taiwan comes immediately to mind, of course, but the Chinese government is also disputing ownership of the oil-rich Spratly Islands with Vietnam and the Philippines. If North Korea were to collapse, moreover, the Chinese Army could take over its territory before South Korea or the U.S. had time to intervene. China is building a very large deepwater fleet—the first in its history. (South Korea and Japan are similarly increasing their naval power.) Thus far, this Chinese fleet seldom moves far from China’s territorial waters, something that surprises the Seventh Fleet leadership. The lack of a high-seas tradition, perhaps? - - George Washington Patrols the Pacific
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 10:20 AM | Your Say (3)
The first line of a paper she published has a similar error in the first line -- one that would disqualify a person from being my assistant:
"The consumption of Nollywood films in the United States is a site of complex translational engagements and a location of disjunctured processes that illuminate how Diasporas are imagined, created and performed. "Advice Goddess Blog
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 9:51 AM | Your Say (2)
Leftists are r-strategist migrant psychologies, programmed to crave being surrounded by the strange and the foreign.
The only thing is, given those urges to be surrounded by the foreign, they have to choose –
is it better to migrate out to some third world shithole, or is it better to stay put and import that foreign quality which they are programmed to want to be surrounded by? Even as it is blatantly clear that Islam is death, and their migrant policies will only fuck up the entire continent for decades at least, they cannot deny their urges. They need that foreign component. So they import it. - Liberal and Conservative Politics
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 9:35 AM | Your Say (2)
"A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within."
It wasn't Brexit or Trump or even Putin who unmoored the world. Gramsci did. Unmoored it so thoroughly that public debate over culture now has descended to the level of whether McDonald's is guilty of cultural appropriation by offering Szechuan sauce with its Chicken Nuggets. The Google which can remember Cesar Chavez has pointedly forgotten Easter. - - LostPosted by gerardvanderleun at 9:26 AM | Your Say (1)
Even sucking the lifeblood out of Millennials is not enough to feed the greedy academic beast.
The bright new idea – one embraced by that commie from New England, that other commie from New England who tricked her college into thinking she was an Indian, and that firewater aficionado who lost the election – is “free college.”Let’s set aside the fact that community college exists to give everyone the opportunity to get some higher education; today, it’s job is to occupy high school students for a few extra years by intermittently teaching them the things the incompetence of unionized teachers ensured they didn’t learn in public high schools. The “free college” idea offers those of us who have already paid for our own education the opportunity to pony up for someone else’s. Academia Is Our Enemy So We Should Help It Commit Suicide - Kurt Schlichter
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 9:06 AM | Your Say (1)
"Nothing like hanging out with the poor people....how's your carbon footprint these days Obama?"
A picture perfect moment! Barack and Michelle Obama pose on billionaire David Geffen's superyacht during day out with Oprah, Bruce Springsteen and Tom Hanks in French Polynesia Barack and Michelle Obama were guests on David Geffen's 454ft superyacht Rising Sun on Friday Oprah, Tom Hanks and Bruce Springsteen were also on board the stunning $300million vessel The Obamas have been holidaying at the Brando resort in French Polynesia for the past month Since leaving the White House, they have also visited Palm Springs, Hawaii and toured the Caribbean[HT: Althouse]Posted by gerardvanderleun at 8:39 AM | Your Say (6)
April 16, 2017
Exploring the Spiritual World of the 19th Century
Gardner pulled a single print and then discarded the plate, so only one such portrait exists. The crack seems to trace the path of Wilkes’ bullet. Some saw it is a symbol of the Union reunited through Lincoln’s own body. - - Smithsonian
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 10:55 AM | Your Say (9)
April 15, 2017
"How does my hair look," she asked before blowing out the candles on her 117th birthday cake last year.
Morano's death, at the age of 117 years and 137 days, means there is no one living known to have been born before 1900. Her first love died in World War I, but she married later and left her violent husband just before the Second World War and shortly after the death in infancy of her only son. That was 30 years before divorce became legal in Italy. In an interview with AFP last year, she put her longevity down to her diet. "I eat two eggs a day, and that's it. And cookies. But I do not eat much because I have no teeth."
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 3:17 PM | Your Say (4)
Parent Failure
I guess she figured that the Boy, being all of 6 years, had pretty much mastered the egg dunk and decided to move him up a level to glue, paint, glitter, googly eyes, and felt. The results were predictable, and were a prelude to a tantrum. But more interesting is the Girl's egg art: The text reads: "Do you ever cook something in the microwave but it's still cold in the middle but you just keep eating it because entropy is unavoidable and the universe is filled with casual and callous destruction?" Clearly, I have failed as a parent.
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 11:31 AM | Your Say (11)
[Bumped] The law of trespass, which is common throughout the civilised world is at the basis of this hoo-hah.
The doctor had no right to refuse to leave and the ejection was lawful. If more force than necessary was applied, then that is a case for assault and battery, causing actual or grievous bodily harm. But the court will have to take into account the resistance of the doctor during the ejection, as he had no right of refusal to leave.
Having said all that, the damage to the reputation of the airline in provoking this incident through crass management practices will be costly and it serves them right. But don't knock the law of trespass if you own a dwelling or a cabbage patch. Some asshole might decide to occupy it and then you need the law to undecide him. Comment here by Posted by: Frank P
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 11:06 AM | Your Say (24)
OUCH! Now that's going to leave a mark.
If mediocrity can ever be said to shine, then it shines from these pages.The writer, though a journalist, has no literary ability whatsoever. He writes entirely in clichés, there is not a single arresting thought in over 400 pages, wit and even humor are entirely absent, and he seems unable to use a metaphor, almost always tired to begin with, without mixing it ("We are likely to succumb on this if they get on their high horses and cry foul"). He has no powers of analysis and no sense of history; there is no plumbing his shallows. Unleashing Arrogance, Complacency, and Mediocrity
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 10:48 AM | Your Say (1)
The final rule of Trump Club
is total detachment and living life the best you can. - - Jewel.
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 7:26 AM | Your Say (0)
There is also the problem of moral grandiosity, perhaps seen in purest culture in Sweden.
There the government agreed to take 160,000 refugees or migrants from the Middle East in a single year (who did not want to claim asylum in Denmark, where the social security payments were lower).The government did this because it (and its supporters) wanted Sweden to be an ethical superpower, a country responsible to and for the whole world, rather than to and for itself. Even these ethical narcissists soon realized, however, that if they proceeded in this fashion for, say, ten years (by no means an eternity in the history of a country), Sweden would have become, with the aid of a little family reunification and a higher birthrate, a semi–Middle Eastern country stuck in the Baltic, and they promptly closed the borders. In effect, they wanted to close the stable door before too many horses got in and ate up the supply of oats. - -Immigration Follies
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 7:24 AM | Your Say (1)
In order to ascend to the rarefied world of the enlightened elite,
You must be “awestruck” at the brilliance of obvious idiots and their ideas; “moved to tears” by ugly art, discordant music, unreadable novels, and tedious movies and theatre; fake laugh at the correct comics; cite approvingly propaganda masquerading as serious journalism, and praise the statesmanship of criminals. The elite unfortunately set the agenda for what the rest of the populace reads, views, and hears. The incantations are the elite’s public entrance exam; who knows what’s required privately. It’s undoubtedly unwholesome and disgusting, entangling its members in a vast, inescapable web: everyone kissing everyone else’s ass all at the same time. - - No Need to Ask
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 7:05 AM | Your Say (2)
April 14, 2017
As Niccolo Machiavelli would've said, "You could look it up."
Let's review:We burned up some aging cruise missiles, to erase an entire squadron of Assad's dwindling loyalist forces. (Bet your ass the other squadrons will bear that fate in mind from here on out.) We gave the surface Navy in the Med some good training and a great live FIREX. Putin has his pants around his ankles. Assad has a bloody nose. And Kim, Xi, and the mullahs in Teheran are leaning forward much more attentively when we speak. President Trump, and the US, are much more feared. Which means respected. Raconteur Report: Take A Breath
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 6:26 PM | Your Say (4)
A grip. Get one.
Seriously, get a grip."TRUMP HAS CUCKED AND BETRAYED US ALL, THE END IS NIGH AND REICHSFUHRER KRISTOL REIGSN UBER ALLES!" doesn't make you look clever, or smart, or even sane. There is not only no need for you to announce your opinion of every zig and zag of foreign policy, but the unpredictability of the God-Emperor all but guarantees that you're going to look like a complete buffooon within days, if not hours, regardless of what you say. - - Vox Popoli: On vulgarity
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 9:43 AM | Your Say (6)
In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function.
We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful. -- C.S. Lewis
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 8:12 AM | Your Say (0)
"This geriatric generation of white Democrats is the last of a dying breed "
Schadenfreude is on the horizon as we watch the Coalition of the Fringes come apart.The 2020 presidential election is full of potential. There aren't any viable white candidates on the Democrat side. Bernie Sanders and creepy Joe Biden will be in nursing homes. Fauxcahontas, whose national appeal is reminiscent of Michael Dukakis', is the youngest known quantity of any significance and she'll be older than Trump was when he was elected the oldest president in US' history. The Audacious Epigone: Intersectionality
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 7:54 AM | Your Say (5)
April 13, 2017
The first rule of Trump Club is: Don’t believe anything the Leftstream Media reports about him.
The seventh rule of Trump Club is: Trust YOUR instincts, and stay loyal to Trump. The media wants to sow dissension within Trump’s ranks and among his supporters. Refuse to take their bait. This doesn’t mean criticizing Trump is off-limits, but abandoning him to the jackals every time he makes a trivial move that violates some arcane alt-tenet will betray you, not Trump, as the untrustworthy party. - - The Rules Of Trump ClubPosted by gerardvanderleun at 6:11 PM | Your Say (4)
Notes for a White Kid in University:An Introduction to the Blindingly Obvious
Calculus: Limits, continuity, differentiation, integration. Physical chemistry. Organic chemistry. Biochemistry. Classical mechanics. The indeterminacy principle. The wave equation. The Parthenon. The Anabasis. Air conditioning. Number theory. Romanesque architecture. Gothic architecture. Information theory. Entropy. Enthalpy. Every symphony ever written. Pierre Auguste Renoir. The twelve-tone scale. The mathematics behind it, twelfth root of two and all that. S-p hybrid bonding orbitals. The Bohr-Sommerfeld atom. The purine-pyrimidine structure of the DNA ladder. Single-sideband radio. All other radio. Dentistry. The internal-combustion engine. Turbojets. Turbofans. Doppler beam-sharpening. Penicillin. Airplanes. Surgery. The mammogram. The Pill. The condom. Polio vaccine. The integrated circuit. The computer. Football. Computational fluid dynamics. Tensors. The Constitution. Euripides, Sophocles, Aristophanes, Aeschylus, Homer, Hesiod. Glass. Rubber. Nylon. Skyscrapers. The piano. The harpsichord. Elvis. Acetylcholinesterase inhibitors. (OK, that’s nerve gas, and maybe we didn’t really need it.) Silicone. The automobile. Really weird stuff, like clathrates, Buckyballs, and rotaxanes. The Bible. Bug spray. Diffie-Hellman, public-key cryptography, and RSA. Et cetera at great length. | Fred On Everything
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 1:51 PM | Your Say (2)
Frantic and angry and late is no way to go through life, son.
But that's exactly how the general public acts about everything all the time now.They're lost. Almost everyone is traveling to a location they cannot name, but they seem hell bent to get to. Every milepost, sign, and touchstone that formerly directed their travel through life has been defaced or destroyed by vandals. They have map books that consist solely of dead ends on other planets. They started off edgy but by now they're entirely unglued. They will turn on anyone that comes into their line of sight. Even a Good Samaritan better watch out, as no amount of help is ever enough to turn back a clock. Anything resembling advice is seen as vilification, and even the mildest sort of criticism is an imperative to immediately drop the gloves. - - Sippican Cottage
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 8:07 AM | Your Say (0)
April 12, 2017
In reality, it lies in desiring another to kiss your a– for having just before threatened to kick his;
for I have observed very accurately, that no one ever desires you to kick that which belongs to himself, nor offers to kiss this part in another.
It may likewise seem surprizing that in the many thousand kind invitations of this sort, which every one who hath conversed with country gentlemen must have heard, no one, I believe, hath ever seen a single instance where the desire hath been complied with; – a great instance of their want of politeness; for in town nothing can be more common than for the finest gentlemen to perform this ceremony every day to their superiors, without having that favour once requested of them. -- Henry Fielding, A History of Tom Jones (1749)
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 6:01 PM | Your Say (0)
A people who will not rule themselves – who will not defend themselves, or one another – are nothing but serfs, and so they shall be treated.
The part which most stood out to me about this video was how nobody came to Dao’s defense.
A small, 69 year old Asian man is being beaten by uniformed thugs, and the only response was mewling; a people who cannot defend themselves, who rely upon the police to moderate every conflict in their personal lives, will be at an utter loss when those same police turn on them. If there’s one take-away from this situation, it is this: submit or bleed from the forehead. A people who will not rule themselves – who will not defend themselves, or one another – are nothing but serfs, and so they shall be treated. The current reaction is not a principled protest (the few who are principled were already protesting); it is nothing but the bleating whines of agitated rabbits, failing to comprehend that this was the system they’ve been asking for all along.Corporations, United Airlines, and the Open-Air Prison Planet - Stares at the World
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 5:28 PM | Your Say (10)
Pop Quiz: When is a gun NOT loaded? Bueller? Bueller?
Man Shows Friend How His Gun's Safety Works By Blowing His Own Brains Out A 911 caller reported that his friend was holding the gun to his own head when he pulled the trigger and it discharged, said Officer Jimmy Pollozani, police spokesman.
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 10:07 AM | Your Say (4)
The Incoming Roar
The people who create such billion-dollar boutique diversions assure us that they are the future, and that the likes of the Stockholm jihadist are momentary aberrations, freakish eruptions in the otherwise smooth progress to a world in which the seductive siren of the unending song can be piped directly into your cerebral cortex 24 hours a day. The killers of Stockholm, Petersburg and Alexandria are betting otherwise.... The toll of the dead in Stockholm numbered Maïlys Dereymaeker, the young mother of an 18-month-old baby: She'd worked as a psychologist at several Belgian migrant centers helping "refugees" whose asylum bids had been turned down. Her killer could have used her assistance: Rakhmat Akilov had had his application for Swedish asylum rejected last year, but the authorities couldn't be bothered to rouse themselves to deport him. She was, in a certain sense, on his side. But he killed her anyway, because that's not how he saw it. :: SteynOnline
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 8:46 AM | Your Say (3)
Trump declares Mid East "Overbooked" with dictators, one has to go
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 8:23 AM | Your Say (2)
If It's Worth Doing, It's Worth Overdoing
and that's where we got our hands on a very special 6,000-yen (US$55) chocolate Easter egg. The chocolate egg, called the Uovo di Pasqua (literally "Easter Egg"), was a limited edition item of which just 50 in total were sold at the Il Cioccolato shops in the Ginza Tower and the Matsuya Ginza Department Store. --| RocketNews24
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 8:04 AM | Your Say (2)
April 11, 2017
"If you go down in the woods today / You'd better go in disguise"
I do my woods cruising "ghosting style"—a dozen steps, stop, repeat—without a backpack, I toted a rifle in .22 WMR, crank-action, topped with a low power scope. Sighted for ahunnerd yards with 40 grainers. Good for feeling dangerous. It carries well muzzle down. And a big ol' Schrade knife with a quarter-inch thick fixed blade sharpened to where its shadow alone will cut paper. My trusty Sunto wrist compass, natch. Around here compasses are like small town newspapers, people read 'em to make sure they got the facts right. North stayed just where it should be the whole time, a few degrees off the pointer. Check. - - If it's Tuesday it's a new Woodpile Report
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 6:03 PM | Your Say (0)
Give Into Your Craving: It's National Grilled Cheese Day
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 2:16 PM | Your Say (1)
10 Terms to Be Used by United Airlines Personnel When Addressing the Public
10. Unscheduled Equipment Retirement (crash) “United regrets to announce that Flight 80 from Boston to Las Vegas experienced an unscheduled equipment retirement. As soon as our United crew reaches the flight’s bonus destination, we will announce how many passengers, if any, we will re-accommodate.” - McSweeney’sPosted by gerardvanderleun at 2:09 PM | Your Say (1)
The Swedish Solution: Raped, Cucked, Fucked, Killed, and Happy to Limit the Use of Cars. Fondue Forks Next.
It's The Perfect PC-Storm. From now on any Swedes killed by Muslims can thank all their fellow Swedes who made it possible over and over and over and over and over again. 'Ban Cars to Stop Terror' Says Sweden's Best-Selling Newspaper After Stockholm AttackPosted by gerardvanderleun at 1:10 PM | Your Say (3)
Say "Ahhh..... just kill me now."
which contain marks that suggest a pointed instrument, likely a stone, was used to enlarge cavities in the teeth and scrape out decayed tissue. The Neolithic dentist then seemed to stick dark bits of bitumen—a type of naturally occurring tar that Ice Age people used to waterproof baskets and pots—to the walls of the cavity. The researchers also found bits of hair and plant fibers stuck in the bitumen, though they are not sure what purpose they served.
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 12:48 PM | Your Say (3)
Cannonballs and bayonet charges are terrible things,
It would seem blazingly obvious that unless you have an answer for the machine gun, much less the new artillery, you don’t willingly go to war. That’s not what happened. Two great industrial wars latter and the West was just about dead..... It’s fun to speculate, but flying death robots alone change the way the world will be fighting wars in the future. Things like carriers can quickly become white elephants in a world where a swarm or drones can fall out of the sky or come up from the depths of the ocean. Everyone forgets about the coming proliferation of a independently controlled torpedoes that can literally roam the ocean looking for targets. The microprocessor goes from being a force multiplier to a force nullifier. - - The New Ways Of War
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 9:50 AM | Your Say (2)
Torn From the Virtual Pages of the Maine Craigslist
They are bereft of whimsy. This Maine Craigslist Cultural Encyclopedia is a great example of the heartfelt sincerity of the place. There is nothing ironic in the Maine Craigslist. Or more accurately, there is nothing deliberately ironic. It's refreshing to live in a place where you are what you is, as they say. - - Sippican Cottage:
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 9:33 AM | Your Say (1)
April 10, 2017
Your Appalachian medical lesson of the day. Use it wisely.
If not sealed it will evaporate over time and if you have ever had tooth pain you'll appreciate the suggestion. Uncap the bottle, remove the seal, hold a tightly wadded paper towel over the opening and turn it upside down for a moment saturating it. Then quickly hold that wad tight against the painful tooth for a full minute. Within 10 seconds the pain will completely disappear.... While eating a hard shell taco an upper molar snapped off at the gum line. I didn't know there was a problem with it beforehand. The pain was instant, overwhelming, and went all the way up into my eye and forehead. If a gun was at hand I might have used it. It was THAT bad. Then I remembered a passage in Foxfire 1 and ran for the vanilla. In a way it saved my life. Posted by: ghostsniper.
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 12:54 PM | Your Say (10)
The War against Reality
Political correctness; so-called climate change;
wide-ranging policies favoring the "religion of peace," which is actually the religion of perpetual war; the distortions of radical feminism; the celebration of transgenderism; redistributive economics; open borders; no-fault crime; the dilution of educational rigor to promote the canard of "social justice"; the rejection of medical reason; the rampant slaughter of the unborn; the belief in human equality in the realm of talents, merit, and cultivation; the dogged quest for an egalitarian utopia; and many other such perversions – all such convictions and practices fly in the face of reality and will inexorably lead, sooner or later, to civilizational disaster. - - American Thinker
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 12:49 PM | Your Say (3)
Nuclear proliferation has undermined great powers,
even America's rivals, because it has destroyed their veto power over Armaggedon, a prerogative arguably more important than starting it.In a proliferated world no one completely rules the roost, not even Russia or China working in concert. The joker is wild. - - LostPosted by gerardvanderleun at 8:38 AM | Your Say (0)
April 9, 2017
Salt grinders are bullshit + Organic spices are a racket
I’m not done with salt yet: Don’t put your salt in a grinder. All you’re doing is making your salt smaller than it was before. Unlike pepper, which is actually processed in the grinder, salt does not need to be ground and is not fresher after coming out of a grinder. It’s just smaller. Use a shaker.There’s a whole other piece to be written about organic spices, but the short version is that demanding organic spices is never going to be good for the farmers growing them. The U.S. standards for organic products amounts to ridiculously expensive and oftentimes unnecessary practices for small farmers who just don’t have the resources to do it. There are plenty of ways to arrive at ethical treatment of animals and land that are not part of our complicated organic laws. And that’s not to mention the people who demand organic products but will also freak out at the sight of a bug or won’t buy something that’s even a little bit misshapen or with a tiny brown spot on it. You can have pesticides or you can have pests. -- The A.V. Club
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 11:09 AM | Your Say (7)
Le Cinq, Paris: restaurant review
a halved and refilled passionfruit, the vicious passionfruit supplemented by a watercress purée that tastes only of the plant’s most bitter tones. My lips purse, like a cat’s arse that’s brushed against nettles. The cheapest of the starters is gratinated onions “in the Parisian style”. We’re told it has the flavour of French onion soup. It makes us yearn for a bowl of French onion soup. It is mostly black, like nightmares, and sticky, like the floor at a teenager’s party. | Life and style | The Guardian
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 8:19 AM | Your Say (12)
We know liberalism is about toddler-rules and the feeling of winning,
because if the conversation was an exchange of these ideas and the challenges that invigorate them — that would settle the matter right then & there. Of course that isn’t what happens. What happens is a lot of posturing, as in “You still haven’t said what this single-mom with 4 kids earning $9.50 an hour at McDonald’s is supposed to DO.” Or, false accusations of “strawman argument,” as in “No one has suggested thirty, we’re talking about fifteen, please stick to the subject.” Or, some more tear-jerking about the plight of the poor, or some kind of rant. In short, they’ll discuss ideas and logic and common-sense and cause-and-effect, for exactly as long as a toddler respects the concept of ownership — as long as it benefits them. - - House of Eratosthenes
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 7:32 AM | Your Say (7)
April 8, 2017
Onion
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 5:40 PM | Your Say (2)
Me, too, Neo. Me too.
I was merely middle-aged when I started the blog, but somehow here I am and I’m—well, let’s just call it “older.” Prioritizing my time seems more important now than ever for that reason. But getting and spending we lay waste our powers. -- The Rise and Fall
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 1:29 PM | Your Say (2)
The Mystery of the $2.5 Million Rare Book Heist
of a building near Heathrow Airport and rappelled 40 feet to the floor, bypassing the security alarms. They went straight to six specific crates that contained three dealersâ worth of books that were en route to the California International Antiquarian Book Fair in Oakland. Over the course of several hours, they unloaded the books they wanted into duffel bags, belayed their loot to the roof, and took off in a waiting van. The haul totaled nearly $2.5 million. - - The Daily Beast
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 12:58 PM | Your Say (0)
Though President Trump initiated the violence, he does not get to call it war or not-war.
Bashar Assad does. To expect that Assad sees the strikes as anything other than war is fantasy thinking.This doesn't mean that Assad won't be cowed away from using chemical weapons again. My point is that no matter how the strikes are spun by the administration or others, they opened an actual war against Syria. The war may be brief, it may not. Syria may respond, it might not. But war it is. And we must remember that it takes both sides to end a war. The United States unilaterally began it, but we cannot unilaterally end it. This war will not be ended until Assad either says so or is removed from power. And even then his successor may choose to continue it. - - Sense of Events: Just War and Syria Strikes
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 11:29 AM | Your Say (11)
April 7, 2017
One of the targets demolished by the cruise missiles was the talking point that Trump was Putin's slave.
Suddenly all the problems the commentators worried about turned out to be the wrong ones. Gone is the orange-gutan caricature replaced overnight by a figure at once more mysterious yet also more formidable than the fantasy figure purveyed by the media. Everyone is now scrambling to understand who Trump really is, the one who appeared suddenly in a cloud of smoke. - - Surprise
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 5:38 PM | Your Say (3)
"Remember all the WMD's everyone said Saddam had? That couldn't be found? Remember all the satellite images of truck convoys racing onto Syria? I do."
- - - Curmudgeonly & SkepticalPosted by gerardvanderleun at 10:07 AM | Your Say (7)
"The message is clear: You had six air bases, Now you have five. Do you care to try for four? Or fewer?"
Apparently all 50 Tomahawks struck home. Assuming that to be true, several deductions are possible.First, those are slow missiles. Top speed, about 500 miles per hour. They are very accurate, but they are slow. They were in the air for at least half an hour. They went past areas defended by Russian missiles of SA-6 and newer, any of them capable of shooting down a slow cruise missile like a Tomahawk. It is unlikely that the fleet of 50 Tomahawks, fired in a time on target pattern, were not observed; but so far as I know, not one was intercepted.
Second, the attack was limited to a single military installation which was presumed to be the base from which the chemical attack on the Syrian civilians including children. While limited to that base area, the attack was massive: over fifty Tomahawk missiles, each carrying 1,000 pounds of high explosives, in a time on target attack by highly accurate missiles fired from ships who we may assume took a carefully controlled course during launch. We may assume the base was entirely destroyed. - - Chaos Manor
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 9:10 AM | Your Say (12)
"The criticism is the exact opposite of reality, because reality is formed by everybody hearing the criticism all the time and over-reacting to it."
The first accusation is about forty years out of date, the second one a misrepresentation of ideas that are themselves fifteen years out of date. Even worse is when people talk about how psychiatrists ‘electroshock people into submission’ – modern electroconvulsive therapy is safe, painless, and extremely effective, but very rarely performed precisely because of the (obsolete) stereotype that it’s barbaric and overused. The criticism is the exact opposite of reality, because reality is formed by everybody hearing the criticism all the time and over-reacting to it. Yes, We Have Noticed The Skulls | Slate Star Codex
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 8:41 AM | Your Say (0)
My Pitch for a Soft Reboot of the Iraq War
We base our soft reboot in Syria.It’s got a dictator, stockpiles of chemical weapons, and an extremist insurgency of radical terrorist warlords. Of course, we modernize it all a bit for our audience — I think ISIS is a particularly nice, soulless reimagining of their Taliban source material — but it’s all largely the same song and dance. The Syrian War. Picture that in lights. On news headlines. In protest songs. On magnet ribbons supporting our troops. It practically rolls off the tongue. The Syrian War. - - McSweeney’s
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 8:31 AM | Your Say (1)
April 6, 2017
The Japanese: Nuked.... (sigh)
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 5:03 PM | Your Say (5)
Royal quantitative easing.....
a velvet-cushioned, portable seat called a close-stool, below which sat a pewter chamber pot enclosed in a wooden box. Even the king had one duty that needed attending to every day, of course, but you can bet he wasn’t going to do it on his own. From the 1500s into the 1700s, British kings appointed lucky nobles the strangely prestigious chance to perform the king’s most private task of the day, as the Groom of the Stool. This is not the glamorous job you normally would imagine in a palace, but being Groom of the Stool—named for the close stool, the king’s 16th-century toilet—was actually a highly coveted position in the royal house.
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 10:32 AM | Your Say (2)
100 Years Ago Today: America Enters the Great War
Untried in battle yet eager for the fight, the American Expeditionary Force only participated in one major campaign on the Western Front, the Meuse-Argonne Offensive, which kicked off in late September and ran until the armistice on November 11, 1918. In 47 days of brutal fighting, the AEF proved its mettle, pushing the defeated Germans back all along the front, but at a frightful cost of 122,000 casualties, including 26,000 dead Americans. Although nearly forgotten by the public, the Meuse-Argonne remains the bloodiest battle in American history. | Observer
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 10:09 AM | Your Say (2)
#FakeParents using their children as antiracism props in #FakeStories
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 9:39 AM | Your Say (13)
Snake Oil: With two you get eggroll...
that worked on the First Transcontinental Railroad. People used to give this traditional Chinese remedy to workers that had arthritis problems or some other joint pains. They claimed that rubbing some snake oil on the joint helped them reduce the pain. 20 Wacko cures and medical procedures from the past
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 9:22 AM | Your Say (1)
"I don't care if I ever come back...."
It was shown in an ad on a scorecard for a game hosted by the Atlantic City Base Ball Club against the Cuban Giants. Cracker Jack was first sold at a Major League ballpark in 1907. So it already had a presence at games, and Norworth cemented that by including it in his song
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 8:58 AM | Your Say (7)
Listen. And understand. The Stooge is out there.
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 8:33 AM | Your Say (3)
April 5, 2017
Bad news for “nones” and atheists.
Their current numbers are much higher than gentle reader might estimate, owing chiefly to the many in China.But there, as everywhere, they don’t breed. They have the world’s lowest birthrates — lower even than Buddhists, and far below replacement levels. Their only real hope is for a fresh spurt of faithlessness thanks to Capitalist and Socialist excess. Who, from information available in 1915, could have predicted the situation in 1960? Demography & destiny chronicles : Essays in Idleness
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 11:16 AM | Your Say (0)
Still Raining. Still Pouring.
The ad team came up with a long list of marketing plans. They pitched their most promising concepts to the salt company’s executives, but it was Morton’s son who saw genius in one of the throwaway ideas – a little umbrella-wielding girl, accidentally pouring salt in the rain. The illustration epitomized wholesomeness and innocence. It also demonstrated the value of Morton salt – it will pour easily, even if you’re standing in a rainstorm. The company paraphrased an old adage for the accompanying catchphrase: “When it rains it pours.” The ad debuted in Good Housekeeping magazine in 1914. In the years since, Morton’s little girl hasn’t aged more than a few years, but she has made some changes to keep up with the times. The first makeover came in 1921, when her hairdresser changed her blonde mop to straight, dark hair. In 1933 – as Shirley Temple’s career as a child actress took off – she co-opted the child star’s trademark curls.
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 9:32 AM | Your Say (4)
Rights are only protected through their use.
Just as a muscle grows strong from labor; or a mind becomes sharp through study– so our rights are only strengthened as we exercise them. Freedom dies not in an epic explosion of violence, an assault against those who defend her, but instead with a shrug as the lazy stop caring and wander off. Free societies, we forget, are a luxury; made of free people unsupervised by a sovereign or a big brother, interacting with each other in our perfect spontaneous order which has led to great prosperity product of those liberties. It’s Ink They Worry About | Joel D. Hirst's Blog
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 8:26 AM | Your Say (3)
Our particular cultural moment is favoring puppies over babies.
the dog gets more attention and questions asked about it than the most adorable baby girl on planet earth (yes, I know I’m not objective, but still, she’s a baby!). Clearly I’m not the only person noticing that our particular cultural moment is favoring puppies over babies. The top-grossing movie in the country this week promotes a similar message: the plot of Dreamworks’ animated film Boss Baby centers around a cynical baby (voiced by Alec Baldwin) who is sent on a mission by his corporate bosses at “Baby Co.” to figure out why puppies are getting more love than human babies. Why Subaru Thinks Puppies are the Same as Babies - Acculturated
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 8:14 AM | Your Say (7)
April 4, 2017
The mind is, if anything, too calm.
and in the exceptions, prefers flight to fight. The gut is more of a wild animal. Calmness is satiety to the gut, and after eating it will go to sleep. When disturbed, however, it goes to fight or flight directly, and the brain is forcefully dragged along. Actual wild animals have better âinstinctsâ than we have, and donât come to grief so quickly as we do, when we obey ours. Custody of the emotions
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 7:05 PM | Your Say (4)
"Obama is Holed Up:" Well, you got that right at least.
Obama Is Holed Up Writing His Book On The South Pacific Island Of Tetiaroa [aka "The Brando"]Posted by gerardvanderleun at 4:27 PM | Your Say (3)
Donald Trump fronts Twitter ads on Japan's rail network
To answer the question, the hashtag #トランプ政権 translates to #TrumpAdministration, and the “あなたの知らない今がある” that can be seen alongside the Twitter logo is read as “Anata no shiranai ima ga aru”, which loosely translates to “There is a ‘now’ you don’t know about”. | RocketNews24
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 4:02 PM | Your Say (3)
The left is a treasonous movement.
Sultan Knish: The New Civil WarThere is no form of legal authority that the left accepts as a permanent institution.It only utilizes forms of authority selectively when it controls them. But when government officials refuse the orders of the duly elected government because their allegiance is to an ideology whose agenda is in conflict with the President and Congress, that’s not activism, protest, politics or civil disobedience; it’s treason. The left is a treasonous movement. The Democrats became a treasonous organization when they fell under the sway of a movement that rejects our system of government, its laws and its elections. Now their treason is coming to a head. They are engaged in a struggle for power against the government. That’s not protest. It’s not activism. The old treason of the sixties has come of age. A civil war has begun.
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 3:19 PM | Your Say (9)
She falls for a “repulsively ugly” hypnotist in Honolulu,
dumps him after an incident at a leper colony, and reports not un-gleefully that two years later he put himself into a “hystero-cataleptic” trance, was presumed dead and was autopsied while still alive.But by this point she’s only just getting going: off to Japan and Hong Kong (where she finds the British Raj absurd), and to China, where she ransoms a girl from a cathouse and becomes the prisoner of a warlord, who makes her watch an execution by a thousand cuts and informs her, “I am the master of all that is beautiful in this house. I may keep those things, give them away or break them if it pleases me”. Naturally she escapes by night after her dressing gown gets impaled by an assassin’s knife, has a naked orgasmic experience when an old man plays a stringed instrument – “rhythm after rhythm consumed me and lighted fires of passion and madness” – and comes round in the Ladies’ Dressing Room of an expat club – “with an Irish attendant holding smelling salts under my nose”. The exhausting and exhilarating tale of Aimée Crocker | Libby Purves
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 8:45 AM | Your Say (3)
It's probably nothing.
This was the first Japanese aircraft to enter service since 1945. The Hyuga class are 197 meter (610 foot) long, 18,000 ton warships that operates up to eleven (mostly SH-60) helicopters from a full length flight deck. Although called a destroyer, it very much looks like an aircraft carrier. While its primary function is anti-submarine warfare, the Hyuga will also give Japan its first real power projection capability since 1945. The Hyuga was also the largest warship built in Japan since World War II. The Japanese post World War II constitution forbids it from having aircraft carriers, which is the main reason it is called a destroyer. That, and the desire to not make the neighbors anxious. East Asian nations still have bad memories about the last time Japan had lots of aircraft carriers.
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 8:15 AM | Your Say (5)
In the city, you don’t build, you hustle.
You don’t own, you rent. Nothing is permanent because a stationary target is an easy target.Instead you make what you can and you move onto the next thing. If you can shift the burden onto someone else, all the better. That’s how the game is played because in the city, everyone is a stranger. That’s the new economy we are experiencing. No one thinks about the long term, because that’s a sucker’s play. The money is in the short hustle, You make your money and move on. The game is to pick the fruit, squeeze out all the juice and then toss away the rest, leaving it for a sucker to clean up later. The housing bubble is a good example. Everyone involved knew it was a grift. They are too smart to not have known. The game was to make money and not be the sucker left holding the bag. - - No Footprints | The Z Blog
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 8:10 AM | Your Say (1)
This Week's Woodpile Is Racked and Stacked
The downside was, and there's always a downside, Cleveland Union Terminal was a significant distance from the main lines paralleling Lake Erie. Further, steam locomotives weren't allowed in the city so every train had to swap out for an electric locomotive when entering, then change back when leaving, which lengthened schedules considerably. The Pennsylvania Railroad took a pass for that reason and even some "member" trains bypassed the city. - - - Woodpile Report
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 7:53 AM | Your Say (2)
April 3, 2017
Jesus Wept
Abingdon Press acquired world rights in all formats to Strong For a Moment Like This—The Daily Devotions of Hillary Rodham Clinton, a collection of daily devotions written for the former secretary of state and the 2016 Democratic presidential nominee. Slated to publish on August 15, each of the 365 devotions are written by pastors who provided Clinton with spiritual support during the presidential campaign, including her pastor and friend, Rev. Dr. Bill Shillady. “During the campaign, the emails from Bill were the first I opened each morning. They gave me strength,” Clinton said in a statement released by Abingdon.
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 10:04 AM | Your Say (17)
Bill Nye, The Not-A-Scientist Guy
He has a B.S. in mechanical engineering from Cornell University, and worked at Boeing in the mechanical engineering department. His entry into TV was not because of any science expertise but because he won a Steve Martin look-alike contest and began moonlight as a stand-up comic by night. Eventually he quit Boeing and became a comedy writer and performer on a sketch comedy television show in Seattle, Washington, called Almost Live! The host of the show, Ross Shafer, suggested he do some scientific demonstrations in a six-minute segment, and take on the nickname “The Science Guy”. That’s right the Science Guy persona began in a comedy sketch and now he’s joke. I Anti-Trump "March For Science" Protest Has Problems W/ Bill Nye Because He's A White Guy
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 9:58 AM | Your Say (6)
How 1,600 People Went Missing from Our Public Lands Without a Trace
On August 4, 2015, after Joe had been missing for 13 days, Sheriff Galvez pulled the plug on the official search.
What had begun as a barnyard musical was now a ghost story. The river—already dropping quickly—had been searched and ruled out. Dog teams had scratched up nothing. Abandoned cabins had been searched and searched again. “I mean, we checked the pit toilets at the campgrounds—we did everything,” Galvez said. “We even collected bear crap. We still have it in the evidence freezer.” - - | Outside Online
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 9:49 AM | Your Say (5)
Real sugar and tropical flavors give Mexican sodas their refreshing powers
Jamaica soda, widely available in both glass and plastic bottles from Jarritos, is made from hibiscus flower; the deep red pigment comes from anthocyanin, a flavor molecule that contributes to the slightly astringent flavor and faint notes of over-steeped black tea. This flavor is notable for being one of the closest to a traditional agua de jamaica, which is tart, slightly syrupy, and sure to stain your white T-shirt if you dare to spill it. The carbonated version rounds off some of the mouth-puckering effect with effervescence and the magic of artificial flavoring. - - Gateways To Drinkery
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 9:45 AM | Your Say (2)
The Russiagate Scam Will Blow Up In The Democrats’ Smug Faces
As Hugh Hewitt says, this scandal has three silos.
The first silo is the question of whether the Russians somehow “hacked our election.” The second silo is whether any Trump people “colluded” with the Russians. The third silo, the one patriots care most about since it’s the one that isn’t a ridiculous fantasy, is whether anyone in Obama's administration used our intelligence apparatus to spy on his and Hillary’s political opponents. The answers are “No,” “No,” and “Yes.” The end results are going to be a stronger Trump, weaker Democrats, and various Obama minions exploring new career opportunities in the exciting fields of license plate-making, large-to-small rock transformation, and artisanal pruno distilling. - - Kurt Schlichter
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 8:21 AM | Your Say (3)
April 2, 2017
Who says there's no good news?
We’re now told that the NFL has “blackballed” Colin Kaepernick It’s been a couple of weeks since NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick entered the free agency market and, as of today, he remains gainfully unemployed.Posted by gerardvanderleun at 5:52 PM | Your Say (5)
"Field of Dreams":
People will come, Ray…. And they’ll walk off to the bleachers and sit in their short sleeves on a perfect afternoon. And find they have reserved seats somewhere along the baselines where they sat when they were children… And they’ll watch the game, and it’ll be as they’d dipped themselves in magic waters. The memories will be so thick, they’ll have to brush them away from their faces… This field, this game… reminds us of all that once was good, and that could be again. Baseball, the Prodigal, and ParadisePosted by gerardvanderleun at 10:37 AM | Your Say (3)
And All That Jazz
before him the mad musicians who had paraded on official days and broke up their Sousa marches into ragtime. Then there was swing, and Roy Eldridge, vigorous and virile, blasting the horn for everything it had in waves of power and logic and subtlety--leaning to it with glittering eyes and a lovely smile and sending it out broadcast to rock the jazz world. Then had come Charlie Parker, a kid in his mother's woodshed in Kansas City, blowing his taped-up alto among the logs, practicing on rainy days, coming out to watch the old swinging Basie and Benny Moten band that had Hot Lips Page and the rest--Charlie Parker leaving home and coming to Harlem, and meeting mad Thelonius Monk and madder Gillespie--Charlie Parker in his early days when he was flipped and walked around in a circle while playing. Somewhat younger than Lester Young, also from KC, that gloomy, saintly goof in whom the history of jazz was wrapped; for when he held his horn high and horizontal from his mouth he blew the greatest; and as his hair grew longer and he got lazier and stretched-out, his horn came down halfway; till it finally fell all the way and today as he wears his thick-soled shoes so that he can't feel the sidewalks of life his horn is held weakly against his chest, and he blows cool and easy getout phrases. Here were the children of the American bop night. From the Chicago sequence in Kerouac's On The Road
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 8:39 AM | Your Say (1)
April 1, 2017
Repeat Offender Charged with Arson in Atlanta Overpass Fire
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 6:29 PM | Your Say (8)
This reality denying madness we see going on with Progressives, has a late phase degeneracy vibe to it.
Most of this nonsense is happening in well insulated compounds like the college campus.
The Progs have total control so all of their worst instincts are free to run riot. It’s not some new phase in the long civil war, but the final burst of maniacal lunacy before there is the knock on the door and reality bursts in. A society in which no one knows the rules, except the rulers, is a society that cannot self-organize. It must fall into authoritarianism. In fact, it must embrace authoritarianism, because there must be order. Even the madness of North Korea beats anarchy, where it is a war ofall against all. To no small degree, the people pushing the denial of biological reality are doing so in order to expand their authority over the rest of us.I Am Invisible | The Z Blog
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 6:13 PM | Your Say (4)
Like miserable, ugly, spinster feminists who wasted their entire lives in feminism and women's studies,
nobody in Silicon Valley is going to admit they were wrong about this fake religion that has stolen half their life's toil.
It's too harsh a pill to swallow. Even if, through some miracle, they would start to wake up and ACTUALLY EXERCISE INDEPENDENT THOUGHT, I doubt the human mind or their egos would let them admit they had effectively been slaves for half their lives to the leftist political and parasitic classes. Captain Capitalism
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 4:52 PM | Your Say (1)
A Burglar in Baggy Pants Just Wants to Hang Out
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 8:31 AM | Your Say (4)
Our students’ ignorance is not a failing of the educational system – it is its crowning achievement.
Efforts by several generations of philosophers and reformers and public policy experts— whom our students (and most of us) know nothing about — have combined to produce a generation of know-nothings. The pervasive ignorance of our students is not a mere accident or unfortunate but correctible outcome, if only we hire better teachers or tweak the reading lists in high school. It is the consequence of a civilizational commitment to civilizational suicide. The end of history for our students signals the End of History for the West. How a Generation Lost Its Common Culture
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 5:27 AM | Your Say (2)