Strange Daze

The egret, graceful and contemplative, is gone now too.

Its beauty will not be seen for many more months. —KA-CHING!

“Like an old superannuated clown on his last benefit performance, I should like to say something serious. Just that, speaking for myself, over the years, looking not very assiduously or systematically or learnedly or virtuously, but always looking for a light in a dark time, the only one that I have found shone first in Galilee.” — Malcolm Muggeridge

Raconteur Report: The 2021 Quincy Adams Wagstaff Lecture What happens from the streets won’t be vigilantism, either. It will be street justice in a dirty war, until Leviathan collapses from the Death Of A Thousand Cuts. Some folks think the population isn’t built for that, but they’re about to find out firsthand how poorly the organs of government aren’t built for it either.

How do you tax someone when there’s no mail delivery, in either direction? When the internet is perennially down? How do you patrol the streets when your police cars spontaneously combust? When the lesser minions of bureaucracy go out, and never come back? And worse.

Government here has spent 240 years ensconced in a cocoon of their utter inarguable invincibility, because they’ve never had to operate in enemy territory for so much as five minutes, since the British burned D.C. in 1814.

The American people, conversely, have been operating in occupied enemy territory non-stop since at least 1912, if not far longer, and their ingenuity and perseverance in the enterprise knows no bounds.

My money is on hangings and guillotines for the guilty before this ends, rather than camps, and collateral damage will be overwhelmingly in one direction. Anything contrary will merely hasten the fall of the illegitimate regime. A fate devoutly to be wished.

You Me and The After: YEAR ZERO One morning last week I noticed that one flower had bloomed from new wintering buds. Lemon trees do not do well in cold weather so I have been fathering them in and out of the shop each day. Their nights are spent under a warming light. Not the best environment, but better than the overnight lows of late. And the little flower is a hint of things to come. A survivor. A leader.  I have taken this little event to heart. A lesson. It most likely is no more than any other plant that endures. All living things have to struggle somewhat against down times to keep doing what living is supposed to be doing.

The airline attendant on the Delta flight home was even worse than the usher at Hard Rock Stadium.. She seemed actually looking for a confrontation with anyone who would not meekly comply with mask conformity. But you had to grit your teeth (under your mask) and quietly seethe. Which brings me back to sadness and anger. There’s only so much we can collectively take. I fear we are quickly reaching the point of many becoming the Michael Douglas character in the movie Falling Down. There’s a reckoning coming fueled by a river of underlying sadness and anger in this country. You can feel it coming.It’s famous, this house – The Las Vegas Underground House. The two realtors refer to it simply as “the bunker.” Built by an eccentric millionaire at the height of Cold War hysteria, it’s six-thousand square feet of paranoid, aspirational fantasy. The first thing anyone notices is the carpet – too-green, meant to resemble grass, sprawling out lawn-like, bookmarked by fake trees, each a front for a steel beam. Nothing can grow here. It imitates life, unable to sustain it. The leaves of the ficuses seem particularly plastic.

Standing on the Shoulders of Giants In Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder, Nassim Taleb describes the type of antifragile inventions and ideas that have lasted throughout history. He describes himself heading to a restaurant (the likes of which have been around for at least 2,500 years), in shoes similar to those worn at least 5,300 years ago, to use silverware designed by the Mesopotamians. During the evening, he drinks wine based on a 6,000-year-old recipe, from glasses invented 2,900 years ago, followed by cheese unchanged through the centuries. The dinner is prepared with one of our oldest tools, fire, and using utensils much like those the Romans developed.

Shadows From the Walls of Death – A Book That Can Literally Kill You At the end of the 19th century, about 65 percent of all wallpaper in the United States contained arsenic, and Dr. Kedzie already knew something that would later become scientific fact – that, over time, the wallpaper-decorated walls released this poison that slowly killed inhabitants. Arsenic ended up in the air, in food, on people’s hands, it made them sick, and sometimes killed them.

A horrible thought about the homeless crisis – Bookworm Room It occurred to me — and this is where I say that I had a horrible thought — that Narcan is largely responsible for the plight we find ourselves in. In the old days, people with serious drug habits died from overdoses. You couldn’t get to a critical mass of homeless drug addicts. They Darwined themselves out.

Thanks to Narcan, though, while a serious narcotic habit leads people to horrific lives of degradation and suffering, that I wouldn’t wish on anyone, Narcan means these people keep going like energizer bunnies. For example, in San Francisco, the whole equation would have been different if 3,000 people hadn’t been saved from imminent death (although I suspect many of those 3,000 were repeat offenders).

Those people would no longer have been on the streets. They would no longer have engaged in crime, and their deaths might have scared a handful of others straight. That would have substantially lessened the horrors of San Francisco streets, both for other homeless people and for the ordinary people trying to conduct their lives in the middle of a nightmare world.

Raconteur Report: Anecdotally: Keeping It Real, Yo (E.g., in this pandemic, any drug overdose should be stamped “DNR” – Do Not Rescuscitate – on the forehead in indelible ink, and left to decompose where found by EMS. And the FDA should ban all Narcan administration for the next 12 months, to cull the herd of a lot of wastes of skin and oxygen, for a generation. Public intoxication that lands you in the ER should be an automatic assignment to a chain gang starting the morning after, with summary trials conducted on the ambulance ramp of the hospital, for a six month stint of hard labor filling potholes in the desert in summer, and shoveling mud and snow all winter, full 180 days, sunup to sundown, Monday-Saturday, no parole for anyone, neither age nor gender considered. The second offense should be a yearlong stint in the state prison, same punishment, felony conviction. I doubt we’d ever see a third offense. “Change My mind”.)

World’s Largest Sea Slug Looks Like an Alien From Another Planet I knew slugs could get pretty large, but I never imagined one as big and heavy as a medium-sized dog.

How to lay and track a scout trail — Directions: Arrows constructed out of sticks are the most helpful way to give directions, but less fun for this same reason. Subtler tactics include tying a tuft of grass to point the right way, or placing one rock on top of another then using a third rock to indicate direction. This latter arrangement is particularly difficult to distinguish from any old pile of stones, and has been responsible for many a wild goose chase.

The Virginian: Stop Gaslighting the Year 2020. The people who tell you to shelter in place, don’t go out to eat and don’t travel spend their time in public – Those people go to fancy restaurants with dozens of friends and take vacations with their families obviously don’t believe what they are telling you. You are being lied to. Ask yourself why. See through the gaslighting. Fight back for the truth.

Year in review |the Top 10 Things to have for 2021
1 TP
2 Food
3 Guns and ammo
4 Alcohol – medicinal and disinfecting, at the same time is fine
5 Physical media-books, dvds, cds
6 Set of Encyclopedia
7 Birth control
8 Garden stuff- seeds, fertilizer, bugspray, canning jars and lids
9 Armor
10 black hoodie and jeans

Remaindered meat trays Every other day or so I cruise the meat aisle at my grocer looking for the ‘remaindered’ meat….the stuff that is marked down 30% or 50% to sell immediately. Perfectly good stuff, but it needs to be used or frozen immediately. And then…on rare occasions…the two combine to create: the remaindered meat tray.

Grief in the Covid era will weigh on the American psyche for years to come “I don’t think I’ve been able to complete — complete’s the wrong word but — but I don’t think I’ve been able to fully process his death,” Smith said. “It’s on television every day — every day is Covid, whether it’s reports on how the government mismanaged it, or the latest infection rate or the death rate or even the hero first responders. There’s no escape from this death. It’s glaring and fully frontal for me, and I can’t stand it but I can’t change it.”

Vox Popoli: Seems a little high If you happen to be a fly-by or new reader who isn’t likely to stick around once the election crisis concludes, I would encourage you to take this one lesson with you: everything is fake. The news, the science, the hits, the celebrities, the bestsellers, the wealthy, the economic statistics… they are all elements of a false and ever-mutating narrative intended to shape your perceptions. Perception isn’t reality, but since perception always affects Man’s decision-making, shaping his perception is one way to change future reality.

Toldya: The sodomite progression of domination is: Tolerance, Acceptance, Ratification, PARTICIPATION. Sodomites now demanding that heterosexuals engage in sodomy with cross-dressers | Barnhardt And make no mistake, the primary target of this will be children. as is clear by the imagery below. What is depicted is clearly a pre-pubescent child, presumably a boy with long hair dressed as a girl by his criminally insane diabolical mother.

Blame BLM for Gotham’s sidewalk chaos Leftists celebrated and claimed it was belated justice for the 2014 death of illegal-cigarette vendor Eric Garner while in police custody. But the decision is killing what’s left of the city’s small businesses. It’s also creating an increasingly dangerous situation on the sidewalks, making them hard to navigate, as well as allowing disreputable vendors to sell unsafe food, like the repugnant, worm-filled crabs The Post reported on.

Balmis Expedition: How Orphans Took The Smallpox Vaccine Around The World t Dr. Joseph Flores, the King’s court physician, was the one who suggested sending a Spanish corvette to the New World with a large number of children who could act as receptors to the vesicle fluid, passing it from child to child during the long voyage across the ocean, thereby forming a living transmission chain. It may not have been an acceptable or ethical vaccination method by our current hygienic and professional standards, but it was a very creative and effective way of carrying the vaccine within the constraints of the technology at that time.

Lockdown: a deadly, failed experiment – spiked The assumption that lockdown is the only way to prevent Covid deaths has become embedded in mainstream thinking. Apparently, the only permitted questions are if we are locking down early enough, hard enough or for long enough. Lockdown has similarly become the default response to rises in cases (though sometimes these now take local rather than national form). But the conventional wisdom that more lockdown means fewer deaths simply does not hold true in the real world. There is globally no association, let alone causation, between lockdowns and Covid deaths. And yet the harms of the policy are extreme.

Signaling Virtuous Victimhood as Indicators of Dark Triad Personalities

We investigate the consequences and predictors of emitting signals of victimhood and virtue. In our first three studies, we show that the virtuous victim signal can facilitate nonreciprocal resource transfer from others to the signaler. Next, we develop and validate a victim signaling scale that we combine with an established measure of virtue signaling to operationalize the virtuous victim construct. We show that individuals with Dark Triad traits—Machiavellianism, Narcissism, Psychopathy—more frequently signal virtuous victimhood, controlling for demographic and socioeconomic variables that are commonly associated with victimization in Western societies. In Study 5, we show that a specific dimension of Machiavellianism—amoral manipulation—and a form of narcissism that reflects a person’s belief in their superior prosociality predict more frequent virtuous victim signaling. Studies 3, 4, and 6 test our hypothesis that the frequency of emitting virtuous victim signal predicts a person’s willingness to engage in and endorse ethically questionable behaviors, such as lying to earn a bonus, intention to purchase counterfeit products and moral judgments of counterfeiters, and making exaggerated claims about being harmed in an organizational context. Keywords: Dark Triad, unethical behavior, victim-signaling, victimization, virtue-signaling.

Hand-colored photographs of Japan on the brink of modernity, 1870s – Rare Historical Photos After his lumber family business was destroyed by a tsunami in 1854, Suzuki traveled to Yokohama where he became an established photographer. Many of his photographs were hand-colored, which is why they appear more realistic and modern than the black and white photos of that era.