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Strange Daze

The Storybook Houses of Los Angeles A pioneer of this peculiar architectural style was Hollywood art director Harry Oliver. The Witch’s House house in Walden drive was one of his first creation, and it remains one of best examples of this particular style.40 Acres and a Mall –   “Great Replacements” can and do happen, and black L.A. is in the final stages of one. But black L.A.’s Great Replacement is unique in that it represents the complete and total failure of the post-civil-rights-era black American business model, which can be summed up as “Don’t make yourself indispensable, don’t make yourself needed, or even wanted. Shout, march, and bully for your supper, because you’re owed it.”

Black L.A. is disintegrating because blacks are surrounded by racial and ethnic groups that adhere to very different models. The problem facing black L.A. isn’t “white supremacy.” It’s that every demographic group in Southern Cal does better than blacks. Indians, Pakistanis, Filipinos, Chinese, Koreans, Vietnamese, even African blacks. Those groups have more wealth, they constitute a more vital part of the workforce, and they contribute more to the economy than black Angelenos. So as L.A.’s blacks are chased out on one end by Hispanics who conquer by sheer numbers, they’re gentrified out on the other end by every other race and ethnicity in the city.

There can be no improvement or renovation to the mall, whether by whites, Jews, blacks, or whoever, because the moment that area ceases to be crappy, all those other, more successful populations—with their capital and spending power—will flood in. It can’t be stopped. Black Angelenos are in an unenviable position where their only possible hope for survival as a “community” (as opposed to a diaspora) is to keep their last remaining neighborhoods shitty.

In the case of the vaccine, there is no reason at all to trust the government. They have simply lied too often about too many aspects of this virus. Compounding it is their communications organs have been staffed by demented sociopaths who lie for the sheer pleasure of it. The only way anyone we could trust the media is if they are the first to be inoculated. Even then, it would probably be a fake vaccine, so we would need some way to ensure they are getting the real jab and not a fake.

This is why the vaccine will be mandatory. Another aspect of liberal democracy is the rulers respond to well-founded distrust of them with coercion. In this case, we will be getting the Orwellian freedom passes. In the U.S. they will have some bland bureaucratic name because our managerial elite is functionally illiterate, but the Brits retain their pithiness, despite it all. As a result, these new internal passports proving you are up to date on your Covid jabs will be used to compel compliance.

What does this mean as a practical matter? What they are plotting is a system where everyone is issued an innocuous looking card with a vaccine stamp and date. When you get your booster shot, you get a new stamp with an expiry date. Oh, you are unaware of the regular booster shots required? You see? This is why this vaccine is a miracle. It will require you to give Big Pharma a check several times a year. Your doctor at Acme Hospital System Inc. will also be getting her beak wet.

If you think you can just blow this off, think again. For starters, there will be a massive public relations campaign to shame skeptics. Old people will be shown lining up for the jab and famous people will demand you get the jab. Soon, private business will demand proof of the jab before they accept you as a customer. Want to fly on a commercial airline or ride public transport? Papers please. Want to attend a public event like a sporting match? Papers please.

My brother and I owned 9 square inches. How many did you own?

The Yukon Square Inch Land Rush of 1955 The ad campaign was launched on the Sergeant Preston radio show in January 27, 1955. It also appeared in nearly a hundred newspapers across the country. The campaign was a sensational success. Quaker Oats cereal boxes flew off of grocers’ shelves. People bought dozens of boxes in the hope that they could consolidate all their square-inch plots into something more substantial. One guy had over 10,000 deeds which he wanted to convert them into one single piece of property a little less than a quarter-acre.

Meanwhile, letters poured in to Quaker Oats offices. New landowners wanted to know where their land was located, how much it was worth, and if there was any gold there? One kid sent in four toothpicks and some string, requesting his inch be fenced.

It is only the infinite mercy and love of God that has prevented us from tearing ourselves to pieces and destroying His entire creation long ago. People seem to think that it is in some way a proof that no merciful God exists, if we have so many wars. On the contrary, consider how in spite of centuries of sin and greed and lust and cruelty and hatred and avarice and oppression and injustice, spawned and bred by the free wills of men, the human race can still recover, each time, and can still produce man and women who overcome evil with good, hatred with love, greed with charity, lust and cruelty with sanctity. How could all this be possible without the merciful love of God, pouring out His grace upon us? Can there be any doubt where wars come from and where peace comes from, when the children of this world, excluding God from their peace conferences, only manage to bring about greater and greater wars the more they talk about peace? — Thomas Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain

The Very First Image on The Internet In 1992, after their show at the CERN Hardronic Festival, Tim Berners-Lee (the inventor of the WWW who was then working as a fellow at CERN) asked Silvano de Gennaro, a member of Les Horribles Cernettes, for a few scanned photos of “the CERN girls” to publish them on the information system he had just invented — the “World Wide Web”. Miss Gennaro had only a vague idea of what that was, but she scanned some photos on her Mac and FTPed them to Tim’s now famous “info.cern.ch”. This was the image:

The Age of Cant I think that we live in an era of cant. I do not say that it is the only such age. But it has never been, at least in my lifetime, as important as it is now to hold the right opinions and to express none of the wrong ones, if one wants to avoid vilification and to remain socially frequentable. Worse still, and even more totalitarian, is the demand for public assent to patently false or exaggerated propositions; refusal to kowtow in such circumstances becomes almost as bad a sin as uttering a forbidden view. One must join in the universal cant—or else.

Wherever people are punished, legally or socially, for expressing an opinion contrary to some recently adopted orthodoxy, or for failing to express the tenets of that orthodoxy, cant is bound to flourish; further, people who begin with an awareness that they are uttering cant come to believe that it is true because no one likes to think that he has spoken only from mere conformity or pusillanimity, or to avoid unpleasantness and the ruination of reputation. Hence, cant spreads rapidly once it takes hold in a society, and it becomes difficult to challenge, let alone eradicate.

For the first time in decades, science has gone from continuous advance to a sudden defensive against a disease in which the most likely outcome is a years-long stalemate. Even that fragile stalemate can easily be destabilized by the outbreak of another disease, or perhaps famine, financial crisis, or war, as also happened in the 14th century. The Design Margin which so long seemed adequate against all contingencies has evaporated in a single year.

I am struck by modern man’s talent for making everything he touches ugly. — Robert Cardinal Sarah

Post Office cats — Ernest journal The most famous post office cat was the esteemed Tibs the Great, faithfully serving Royal Mail HQ for a remarkable 14 years since his birth in 1950. From his lair in the refreshment club in the basement of the building, for a weekly salary of two shillings and six pence, he feasted on the mail-nibbling vermin, tipping the scales at his peak at a remarkable 23 pounds. Tibs dipped his paws into feline fame as well, attending a high-profile Cats and Film Stars party and being selected for a portrait in the book Cockney Cats.

A glossary of fog —

camanchaca

A creeping fog that forms on the coast of Chile, then moves inland in the form of immense cloud banks. In the Atacama desert, one of the driest places on Earth, fog catchers capture water droplets from the fog to irrigate crops.

The Circles are stationary As you follow the arrows the circles appear to move in the same direction. They also appear to expand and contract in size, but of course it’s all an optical illusion and the circles never move or change size.

Nothing really cemented for me the sheer scale of of the human suffering unnecessarily caused by these worthless lockdowns than seeing the half foot tall stack of suicide and attempted suicide reports sitting in the records room at my security company’s HQ all dated to Thanksgiving alone.

We provide security for at least a few hundred apartment complexes throughout NY and NJ, thousands of people live in these places. According to guys I know from other companies this is not a happening unique to our sites.

Nearly all the people in the reports cited the isolation of the last year as the primary cause, paranoia a close second. It’s only going to get worse on Christmas and New Year’s too.

One of the surprising privileges of intellectuals is that they are free to be scandalously asinine without harming their reputations. — Eric Hoffer (1902-1983) American social philosopher

The Huron King Nuclear Test | A 1,000-foot deep shaft was drilled and a 20-kiloton device was placed at the bottom of it. The Tinderbox, which was mounted on traction tread to make it movable, was parked at the top of the shaft and connected to the shaft by a vertical section. When the bomb detonated, radiation from the explosion shot up through the vertical shaft exposing the satellite to the electromagnetic pulse. A fraction of a second later, before the blast wave from the explosion could hit the Tinderbox and damage the target, mechanical closures sealed the shaft shut. The test chamber was immediately disconnected by remote control from the shaft and quickly winched to safety before the ground could subside to form a crater.

How to Handle the Beast

Lift things and clean
Physical exertion and cleaning up are the closest thing I’ve found to kryptonite for the Beast. A little of either can change a day’s trajectory, and remove more handholds.

Do a daily movement routine, even if it’s really easy. Even if it’s the equivalent of three pushups. Each one weakens the Beast, because it is an act against gravity. You are exercising your agency indirect opposition to the Beast’s inertia.

Get the house to a tidyish state if you can –- a single room if you can’t — and keep it that way the best you’re able. Clutter is madness congealed.

Walter Molino’s Amazing True Story Death Scenes : Italian Illustrator’s Mid-Century Art Must Be Seen To Be Believed Walter Molino (5 November 1915 – 8 December 1997) was an Italian comics artist and illustrator. His speciality was disaster, which often involved fire, water, falling — falling from (deep breath) cliffs, planes, helicopters, mountains, bikes, cars, boats, the floor above, trucks, stairs (you get the idea) –“ wince-inducing accidents, angry and hungry-looking wild animals (has anyone in real life brandished a massive snake to hold up a jewelry store?),  and did you know a bull could charge a passenger train — and win?

The Desert of Maine: Maine’s Unlikely Mini Desert Maine’s lone 40-acre patch of desert is a cautionary tale. The Desert of Maine was once a successful farm owned by the Tuttle family in the late 1800s. The Tuttle family failed to rotate their potato crops and allowed their sheep to graze unchecked. Massive soil erosion led to a total depletion of fertile topsoil that resulted in a swiftly growing “desert.”

Solving the ‘Great Stink’ For many years, London, which in 1801 had a population approaching 1 million, had struggled with the system of sewage disposal inherited from medieval times. Cesspools were emptied by nightsoilmen, who sold the contents to farmers just outside the city. Public sewers in and beneath the streets were intended for the disposal of rainwater, although garbage, including butcher’s offal, was surreptitiously dumped in them and the kennels, as had been observed during the reign of Edward III.

Comments on this entry are closed.

  • OneGuy December 9, 2020, 8:42 AM

    Re: The storybook houses of Las Angeles. There is a house almost identical to the first picture in San Bernardino Ca.

  • Joe December 9, 2020, 9:14 AM

    Got you beat. I had a couple of square inches on the moon.

  • Skorpion December 9, 2020, 10:33 AM

    Re the Yukon story: Recently, various individuals in the UK have been buying up junk land in Scotland and offering deeds to single square-foot “lots” on them. The gimmick here is that according to some obscure Scottish law, people who hold land of any size, no matter how small, are entitled to call themselves “lairds.” So for $30-50, you can buy one of these micro-lots and receive a deed that designates you as a *Scottish Laird*.

  • M. Murcek December 9, 2020, 10:51 AM

    40 acres and a mall – You get what you play for…

  • KC December 9, 2020, 3:12 PM

    Here all this time Al Gore claimed he invented the internet. Wonder if Tipper had a quartet too?

  • Dan December 9, 2020, 5:32 PM

    Re: the Covid “vaccine”

    Vaccines are traditionally dead virus.
    This invention of the Bill Gates Overlords is a Messenger RNA (mRNA) genetic modifier. Way different. You want to be genetically modified to satisfy government? Be my guest.

    https://nonvenipacem.com/2020/12/07/yall-really-need-to-understand-how-mrna-vaccines-are-designed-and-executed-youre-not-going-to-like-it/

  • H (science denier) December 10, 2020, 12:44 AM

    They called me Mr. Tibs.

  • H (science denier) December 10, 2020, 1:00 AM

    And then there was that time they nuked Mississippi. Twice. Which raises the question: Mississippi; nuked too much, or not enough?

    https://mashable.com/2016/11/06/mississippi-nuclear-test/

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