That Was the Whopper Weekend That Was [Illustrated]

NB While you were squandering your Sabbatical from Reality Year ending world hunger through Zoom, others were saving the sanity of the world just puttering about in the backyard. Backyard Squirrel Maze 2.0- The Walnut Heist – YouTube GV

There’s a reason that this has gotten around 22 million views in less than a week and I think I almost understand what that is. Any suggestions would be welcome.

The Warrior’s Tale – Daniel Greenfield /

The tale has many variations. Sometimes there are many warriors, sometimes only a handful. They march into the village of the enemy in triumph, or they make a last stand on a rocky outcropping, spending the last of their heart’s blood to buy time they will never know. There is the weak man who becomes strong, the strong man who becomes weak, the woman who mourns the man who will never return, and the man who goes off to battle with nothing to lose. These tales have been told countless times in the ages of men, and they will be told again for as long as men endure.

It is not only the warriors who need the tale, or those left behind. Future generation learn who they are from this tale. “We are the people who died for this land,” is the unseen moral of each tale. “We bled for it. We died for it. Now it is yours to bleed and die for.”

The warrior’s tale tells each generation that they stand on the wall against a hostile world. And that the wall is made not of stones, but of their virtues. Their courage, their integrity and their craft. Theirs is the wall and they are the wall– and if they should fail, then it will fail. And the land and the people will be swept away.

What happens to a people who forget the warrior’s tale and stop telling it around their campfires? Worse , what of a people who are taught to despise the figure of the warrior and what he represents? They will not lose their courage, not all of it. But they will lose the direction of that courage. It will become a sudden unexplained virtue that rises to them out of the depths of danger. And their wall will fail.

Our songs are alive in the land of the living. But songs are unlike literature. They’re meant to be sung, not read. The words in Shakespeare’s plays were meant to be acted on the stage. Just as lyrics in songs are meant to be sung, not read on a page. And I hope some of you get the chance to listen to these lyrics the way they were intended to be heard: in concert or on record or however people are listening to songs these days. I return once again to Homer, who says, “Sing in me, oh Muse, and through me tell the story.” —Bob Dylan – Nobel Lecture – NobelPrize.org

The art of Bob Dylan: 60 years of relentless reinvention

Much more beneath the fold. Make a sandwich. Grab a beverage.

A Tour of Andrey Melnichenko’s $300-million, Philippe Starck-Designed ‘A’ Yacht – WSJ

BARBADOS—At the top of a spiral staircase lined with scalloped, silver-leaf walls (the banister cost $60,000) is a door accessible by a fingerprint security system. It opens to an all-white, 2,583-square-foot master suite wrapped in bomb-proof, 44-milimeter glass. There, a king-sized bed sits on a giant platter that rotates with the press of a silver button. Another set of buttons rotates the bed itself. The combination of the rotating bed and the rotating platter allows limitless angles for watching the sunset, sunrise or the 60-inch plasma TV, which retracts from the ceiling.

And of course, everything’s afloat.

NB: Bezos bought the Washington Post newspaper in 2013 for just $250m – so about half the cost of his new superyacht.GV

Jeff Bezos and the secretive world of superyachts – BBC News

What do we know about Bezos’ yacht? The 417ft (127m) vessel is being built in the Netherlands by Oceanco, according to a new biography of Bezos by Bloomberg News.

It is estimated to cost about $500m (｣350m), a drop in the ocean for the world’s richest man, whose wealth at one point jumped $13bn in a single day in 2020. His estimated net worth now stands at nearly $200bn.

That price tag does not include a smaller motorised “support yacht” that Bezos also plans to buy. The smaller yacht features a helicopter landing pad – Bezos’ girlfriend, TV host Lauren Sanchez, is a trained helicopter pilot.

The main yacht is unable to support its own helipad due to the three sailing masts on its deck.

The smaller yacht is also expected to be loaded with other goodies, such as cars, luxury speedboats, and probably even a submarine, experts say…

Vox Popoli: The science is unsettled

Interview with Dr. Anthony Fauci, May 2020

“Do you believe or is there evidence that SARS-CoV-2 was made in the lab in China or accidentally released from a lab in China?”

If you look at the evolution of the virus in bats, and what’s out there now is very, very strongly leaning toward this could not have been artificially or deliberately manipulated — the way the mutations have naturally evolved… a number of very qualified evolutionary biologists have said that everything about the stepwise evolution over time strongly indicates that it evolved in nature and then jumped species.

If you accept the premise, which is very strongly supported by scientific evidence, that it was not deliberately mutated and deliberately changed, and you say, if it was in the wild and evolving, the likelihood it jumped species naturally, someone will say, ‘Well, maybe somebody took it from the wild, put it in the lab, and then it escaped from the lab.’ But that means it was in the wild to begin with!

Interview with Dr. Anthony Fauci, May 2021

“There’s a lot of cloudiness around the origins of COVID-19 still, so I wanted to ask, are you still confident that it developed naturally?”

“No, actually. … No, I’m not convinced about that. I think that we should continue to investigate what went on in China until we find out to the best of our ability exactly what happened. Certainly, the people who’ve investigated it say it likely was the emergence from an animal reservoir that then infected individuals, but it could’ve been something else, and we need to find that out. So, you know, that’s the reason why I said I’m perfectly in favor of any investigation that looks into the origin of the virus.”

S.F. touts successes in moving homeless off the streets. But the reality is complicated

Comment:Ah, the city that spends 61,000 a year to keep someone in a tent or 350,000 a year for each toilet it provides them, EACH toilet I said. I just retired from a long career in government with a 6 figure salary, no, that’s not my retirement, but after working all my life starting a couple weeks after I graduated High School and never being unemployed one minute after and calling in sick fewer than 15 times, my TAKE HOME IS 4,300 a month. That’s right, 51,600 a year. I live on less than a homeless person in a tent. 

Since I am retired, I can live anywhere, but not Tokyo, and not San Francisco, so, the homeless have no business living where the costs are that high, don’t get mad, you would never argue that I should be given a apartment in Tokyo if I wanted one, would you?

We will never “fix” this issue until we admit, drugs are the problem, mental health issues are a result of their drug use and the issue exploded when we decriminalized drugs. We created this mess.

Fall/Darkness: Lecture 13: The Fallen Spirits’ Influence in the World

I have pointed out that while human bodies will develop in such a way that certain spiritualities can find room in them, the materialistic bent, which will spread more and more under the guidance of the spirits of darkness, will work against this and combat it by physical means. I have told you that the spirits of darkness are going to inspire their human hosts, in whom they will be dwelling, to find a vaccine that will drive all inclination towards spirituality out of people’s souls when they are still very young, and this will happen in a roundabout way through the living body. Today, bodies are vaccinated against one thing and another; in future, children will be vaccinated with a substance which it will certainly be possible to produce, and this will make them immune, so that they do not develop foolish inclinations connected with spiritual life — ‘foolish’ here, of course, in the eyes of materialists.

1993: “Listen to me the day is coming when you won’t have to leave your living room”

Noel Odell’s Final View of Mallory & Irvine, June 8th, 1924 | Jake Norton Unbeknownst to him at the time, Odell’s sighting of the duo going strong for the top would be the final sighting of them alive. Odell later wrote of the sighting:

At 12.50, just after I had emerged from a state of jubilation at finding the first definite fossils on Everest, there was a sudden clearing of the atmosphere, and the entire summit ridge and final peak of Everest were unveiled. My eyes became fixed on one tiny black spot silhouetted on a small snow-crest beneath a rock-step in the ridge; the black spot moved. Another black spot became apparent and moved up the snow to join the other on the crest. The first then approached the great rock-step and shortly emerged at the top; the second did likewise. Then the whole fascinating vision vanished, enveloped in cloud once more.

Police: Man arrested in the Elmwood after chasing girl, 8
I am so pissed. My wife and my daughter have been sexually harassed, followed and scared sh*tless in West Berkeley many, many times. By persons that are running around gacked out of their minds. This mugshot says one thing and one thing only to me- chronic methamphetamine use. Tweaker. He probably doesn’t even have cognition of the damage that he has done. Everyone who has any life experience with this drug knows what is going on with this person. Every city employee that is supposed to be “helping” homeless and serving the public knows what is going on with this guy. The Mayor knows what is going on with this guy. The homeless services contractors the City pays millions know what is going on with this guy. BPD knows but are effectively muzzled by the CC. Our power to call this what it really is is gone for some reason. Emily certainly works hard, but there are so many incidents that go unreported in the area from San Pablo to the Marina bounded by Ashby and Gilman. So, so many. Just in this sector. Ask the residents. Why are we letting sexual harassment and assault happen over and over and over again? When will it be dealt with in a real way? Point in time counts of the homeless population are a JOKE. There is no vetting of information at all. The unhoused can claim or hide any truth they want to. I have explained this with personal experiences many times in my posts. We do not know who has warrants. We do not know if there are unregistered sexual predators minutes or steps away- spoiler alert- I do- they are here. We have a massive addiction and mental health crisis occurring right under our noses and our hands are tied by naive politicians, a comfortable population that votes but never has to deal with the problems that they cause, and misguided civil rights attorneys. Where are the rights of my family and the families in my neighborhood that pay for this madness? Emotional and physical damage to our truly vulnerable populations is being done. If you do not live within a mile of an encampment you should really sit down and let the people that do have the floor.

Davivid Rose Berkeley5th • 11 hours ago 

More than once I have had police officers look me square in the eye in such situations and say “If we arrest this person we have to feed him, provide medical care, and provide a bed. We are required by law to protect him from other prisoners who may wish to hurt him because they heard that he tried to kidnap a child. Usually we cannot hold him for very long. Food, medical care, and a bed will help him to survive so that he can rapidly be released to commit more crimes. If we don’t arrest him he may well be hit by a car, or get severely beaten, or robbed. He may die of exposure to cold. Our job is to make the city a safer place. If he dies or gets severely injured he can no longer harm anyone and the city will thus be a safer place so WE ARE NOT GOING TO ARREST HIM. “

  We have a century of evidence of what happens to a society when it falls into the traps of centralized economic planning, suppression of free speech, and the categorization of people–especially ethnic categorization.  But an awful lot of people, including powerful and influential people, seem to want to go in these directions.

I can have some sympathy for people who became Communists and/or advocates of world government back in the 1920s.  The theory of centralized economic planning is very seductive (see this, for the actual practice), and the slaughter of the First World War led people to grasp at any possible way of avoiding such horrors in the future.

Learning From Experience, Not a Ricochet: We have a century of evidence of what happens to a society when it falls into the traps of centralized economic planning, suppression of free speech, and the categorization of people –“especially ethnic categorization.  But an awful lot of people, including powerful and influential people, seem to want to go in these directions.

I can have some sympathy for people who became Communists and/or advocates of world government back in the 1920s.  The theory of centralized economic planning is very seductive (see this, for the actual practice), and the slaughter of the First World War led people to grasp at any possible way of avoiding such horrors in the future. I have a lot less sympathy for people who have refused to learn from a century of experience…

In Walter Miller’s great novel A Canticle for Leibowitz, a global nuclear war has devastated everything. Over a period of centuries, civilization has been gradually rebuilt…and, once again, nuclear war threatens. The abbot of a monastery speaks plaintively:

Brothers, let us not assume that there is going to be war…We all know what could happen, if there’s war. The genetic festering is still with us from the last time Man tried to eradicate himself. Back then, in the Saint Leibowitz’ time, maybe they didn’t know what would happen. Or perhaps they did know, but could not quite believe it until they tried it—like a child who knows what a loaded pistol is supposed to do but who never pulled a trigger before. They had not yet seen a billion corpses. They had not seen the still-born, the monstrous, the dehumanized, the blind. They had not yet seen the madness and the murder and the blotting out of reason. Then they did it, and then they saw it.

Now—now the princes, the presidents, the praesidiums, now they know—with dead certainty. They can know it by the children they beget and send to asylums for the deformed. They know it, and they’ve kept the peace. Not Christ’s peace, certainly, but peace, until lately—with only two warlike incidents in as many centuries. Now they have the bitter certainty. My sons, they cannot do it again. Only a race of madmen could do it again—

And we today, know, with what should be dead certainty, where Communist and Fascist approaches to the organization of society lead; more generally, where Statist political approaches lead. We have seen the victims of the Gulags and of the Nazi concentration camps. We have seen the horrors of ethnic division and hatreds in the Balkans. We have seen the impoverishment of generations brought about by ‘scientific’ economic planning in the Soviet Union, and the waste of human potential brought about by statist rigidity in countries throughout the world….

Revelation 13 KJV – And I stood upon the sand of the sea, – 

16 And he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads:

17 And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name.

18 Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number is Six hundred threescore and six.

Jeremiah 5 NIV – Not One Is Upright – 

27 Like cages full of birds,
    their houses are full of deceit;
they have become rich and powerful
28     and have grown fat and sleek.
Their evil deeds have no limit;
    they do not seek justice.
They do not promote the case of the fatherless;
    they do not defend the just cause of the poor.
29 Should I not punish them for this?–
    declares the Lord.
Should I not avenge myself
    on such a nation as this?

30 A horrible and shocking thing
    has happened in the land:
31 The prophets prophesy lies,
    the priests rule by their own authority,
and my people love it this way.
    But what will you do in the end?

A Primer for the Propagandized: Fear Is the Mind-Killer – OffGuardian

The recipe is simple. Take a naturally occurring phenomenon, say a seasonal virus, and exaggerate its threat far beyond every imagining–”despite exhaustive evidence to the contrary. Suppress, silence, ostracize, and demonize every individual who dares present facts that expose the false mono-narrative.

Whip up a witches’ brew of anger, envy, and, most importantly, fear, escalating emotions to a boil so as to short-circuit our faculties of reason and logic.

Isolate us from one another, supplant real-world interactions with virtual feuds, label nonconformists as a threat to the group, and pump the public with a disinformation campaign designed to confuse and atomize. In essence, foster a cultlike mentality that shuts down thought to guarantee assent.

Cultivate and wield our cognitive biases — especially ingroup bias, conformity bias, and authority bias –”against us in a comprehensive divide-and-conquer policy that keeps us too busy squabbling amongst each other to recognize and unite against those corralling us into a Matrix-like collective delusion that enables the powerful to extract our resources for their own gain.

This ideological mass psychosis is religion–”not science. If this were about science, the Media “Pharmaceutical “Big-Tech complex would not be memory-holing every dissenting voice, vilifying every thought criminal, and censoring every legitimate inquiry in quest of the truth.

Mark Twain said,“It’s easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled.”

He also said:

 “In religion and politics people’s beliefs and convictions are in almost every case gotten at second-hand, and without examination, from authorities who have not themselves examined the questions at issue but have taken them at second-hand from other non-examiners, whose opinions about them were not worth a brass farthing.”

The next time you’re watching the news, reading a social media post, listening to a friend repeat a scripted talking point, pay attention. Learn to identify the earmarks of propaganda, the clickbait used to trigger your emotions, the mechanisms employed to engineer your cognitive biases.

JACQUE ATTALLI 1981 BILDERBERGER “THE FUTURE WILL BE ABOUT FINDING A WAY TO REDUCE THE POPULATION”

California’s Big Squirt (1951)  Construction engineer Sidney Cornell had a unique idea to fix the city’s water woes: hydro-cannons. The October 1951 issue of Mechanix Illustrated magazine included a drawing by legendary futurism illustrator Frank Tinsley that showed Cornell’s plan in action. As the magazine described, man-made geysers would shoot water from the mouth of one into the funnel of the next, in a streaming 400-mile-per-hour arc. The arc would be 6 to 12 inches wide, its trajectory adjusted to match the terrain. The aquatic artillery would be built at 1-mile intervals between Los Angeles and Northern California (where water was, and is, much more plentiful). Cornell figured each of the 400 stations would cost $300,000 and he only needed $30,000 for a pilot plant to test his theory. As far as we can tell, he never received any funding.

The wonder is
The washing never gets done.
The furnace never gets heated.
Books never get read.
Life is never completed.
Life is like a ball which one must continually
catch and hit so that it won’t fall.
When the fence is repaired at one end,
it collapses at the other. The roof leaks,
the kitchen door won’t close, there are cracks in the foundation,
the torn knees of children’s pants’
One can’t keep everything in mind. The wonder is
that beside all this one can notice
the spring which is so full of everything
continuing in all directions – into evening clouds,
into the redwing’s song and into every
drop of dew on every blade of grass in the meadow,
as far as the eye can see, into the dusk.

– Jaan Kaplinski, The Wonder Is from The Wandering Border (Copper Canyon Press; January 1, 1987) (via Whiskey River)

“The Mark of the Beast”: Georgian Britain’s Anti-Vaxxer Movement – The Public Domain Review

The story behind Rita Hayworth’s iconic pin-up photo, 1941    One day, a Columbia Pictures press agent named Magda Maskel suggested photographing Rita Hayworth in a black lace nightgown that Maskel’s mother had made. [Life’s Hollywood correspondent, Richard] Pollard and photographer Bob Landry met Maskel at Hayworth’s apartment. She knelt on a bed in the nightie, looking provocative, and Landry snapped away. Good, but something else might be done. Pollard spoke up: “Rita, take a deep breath.” That was it. The perfect frame.

The Left Continues to Destroy Itself and Others With Evidence-Free Destruction of Reputations –    Do you see what is glaringly absent from these tribunals? There is no recognition of even the remotest possibility that the person may be wrongfully accused, innocent of what they are alleged to have done. In their orgy of self-righteous recriminations and ritualistic denunciations, that thought never enters their mind, nor does any requirement of evidence. Even after these same groups endured the humiliating spectacle of having ratified a bigoted and coordinated attack on Alex Morse as a sex predator only for them to have to have to reverse themselves and re-endorse him, they have learned nothing from that travesty because this is the predominant ethos of left-liberal culture.

Even as Morse denied wrongdoing, the same leftist groups and politicians which had endorsed him — The Sunrise Movement, The Working Families Party, Justice Democrats, Rep. Jaamal Bowman (D-NY) — quickly condemned him and renounced their support, said they were “pausing” their support, or demanded he “make meaningful efforts to repair any harm he’s caused.” They had no need for any investigation let alone evidence: they were willing to endorse a narrative — based on decades of bigoted stereotypes — that a gay man was a sexual predator of young males, even if doing so meant returning Richie Neal back to his perch as Committee Chairman. The local Sunrise Movement group repudiated Morse in a statement that disgustingly proclaimed that “we believe all survivors” and “rape culture runs deep in our society”: rape culture and survivors, for sex between consenting adults.

That is because, as has been seen repeatedly, the prevailing mentality in left-liberal politics is that even grave life-destroying accusations are to be treated as true without the need for any evidence. They casually and with apparent glee ruin people’s reputations and lives without batting an eye the second someone utters an allegation of sexual misconduct. And one is required to mindlessly accept such accusations as truth — never ask for evidence if it is true — if one wishes to remain in good standing in those circles and to avoid being smeared oneself as an apologist for sexual misconduct.

Corporate Media’s Double Standard: They Attack Whomever They Want, But You Cannot Criticize Them – Glenn Greenwald

Unlike the Intercept, I don’t think of myself as a soldier fighting for an ideological faction or political party — instead, I’m an independent journalist — so this label debate is irrelevant. But to the extent they want to have it, it’s The Intercept that has moved to the authoritarian right. They still have some good reporters whose work I respect, but they are largely a dumping ground for CIA and FBI talking points. They led the way publishing the CIA’s pre-election lies that the Hunter Biden laptop was “Russian disinformation.” They brought on two former New York Times reporters — Mackey and Jim Risen — who ratified every last CIA/FBI claim about Russiagate and Trump. Anyone who launders CIA lies and does the work of the FBI — such as helping the FBI find “domestic extremists” by trolling through their personal data — has no business accusing others of having “moved to the right.”

Corporate Media’s Double Standard: They Attack Whomever They Want, But You Cannot Criticize Them – Glenn Greenwald

The other Intercept story I criticized was an expensive, highly produced 20-minute video, narrated by former New York Times live-blogging reporter Robert Mackey, designed to vilify numerous journalists with small right-leaning news outlets who do the work that The Intercept would never get near: namely, they report on what actually happens at Antifa protests. Why would a news outlet that has a $15 million/year budget, which works from a $3 million/year penthouse office on the 18th floor of a Park Avenue tower offering panoramic views of Manhattan, and which pays their senior employees annual salaries between $350,000 and $450,000, devote their vast resources to villainizing obscure, poorly paid video journalists who — unlike most Intercept reporters — do actually dangerous, on-the-ground reporting? Who is the “bully” in this situation?

Corporate Media’s Double Standard: They Attack Whomever They Want, But You Cannot Criticize Them – Glenn Greenwald

In 2018, I compiled many of those personality-driven and mental health smears that had been weaponized back then against Chomsky because, at the time, other liberal outlets — such as The New Yorker and New York Magazine — were already using the same mental health and personality-based themes to expel me from the precincts of liberal decency due to my rejection of their Russiagate conspiracy theories, which had turned into a virtual religion, including at The Intercept. Both of those long profiles were devoted to a central theme: I refused to accept what everyone who is sane and mentally healthy could see — that Trump had colluded with Russia and Putin exercised some sort of clandestine control over Trump — because I had rage-based trauma from childhood that I never resolved.

Zombies and Ghosts:   A large proportion of owned but empty residential units generates an in-between state of uncertain vitality — zombie urbanism — whereas a more dramatic proportion of vacant or unfinished units produces a very different phenomenon — ghost urbanism. 3 This divergence — again, between buildings for use and buildings for investment — complicates some widely held assumptions; chiefly, that underuse is associated with blight and decay, while new growth signals vibrant prosperity. Indeed, 21st-century urbanism abounds with newly created ruins that blur the distinction between success and failure, growth and decay. And in the process, they recalibrate theoretical and emotional conceptions of architecture.

 

People of Color Have Agency – Freddie deBoer

This is, on the face of it, anti-white ideology – all of the bad stuff in the world happens as a direct result of white actions, white power. Yet I have always felt that there’s something else going on in these debates. I suspect that placing all of the blame for historical crimes on white people is strangely comforting for white leftists: it advances a vision of the world where only white people matter. It says that the sun rises and sets with white people. It suggests that white people wrote history. It assures white people that, no matter what else is true, they are the masters of the world. That all of this is framed in terms of judgment against the abstraction “white people” is incidental. I think if you could strip people down to their most naked self-interest and ask them, “would you be willing to take all the blame, if it meant you got all the power?,” most would say yes. And of course in this narrative people of color are sad little extras, unable even to commit injustice, manipulated across the chessboard by the omnipotent white masters whose interests they can’t even begin to oppose. All of this to score meaningless political points in debates about inequality and injustice.

The leftist conception of history as a series of crimes committed by white people against the virginal and defenseless brown masses is a perfect example of where radical American politics ostensibly castigates establishment power and the white people who wield it, and yet ultimately comforts those who express them, who are themselves white in dominant majorities. And what I’ve witnessed the last several years is that this condition has been generalized to domestic politics too: in the liberal mind of 2021, white people do, people of color are done to. Were I a person of color, I would find this impossibly insulting.

You may recall the recent controversy at Smith College. A Black student at Smith, staying on campus outside of session, had entered a dorm that had been marked as closed to eat a meal. A janitor, following explicit instructions from superiors, contacted campus security, and the janitor and a security guard instructed her that she had to leave. She responded by posting on Facebook that she had been the victim of racism, racially profiled, and had been in fear for her life because of the security guard’s gun. It turns out that this last part was unambiguously a lie – Smith College security guards are unarmed – but the post still kicked off a major fracas, with many people, totally ignorant of what really happened, blasting the janitor and security guard as racists. They would both face reprisals for their roles in the incident, despite following policy. A later independent investigation by a law firm found that the young woman’s rights had not been abridged and that the employees had been unfairly punished. But Smith’s president was unapologetic and the school has barely acknowledged that any wrongdoing went down at all.

While I am sympathetic to the power relationships inherent to race, and to the tendency for authority figures to target Black people unfairly, this situation always seemed very straightforward to me. The student had gone someplace explicitly marked as closed and was politely asked to leave by people who are empowered by the institution to do so. This is not injustice, by any standard. So when the NYT piece came out and people were debating it, I asked what seemed to me to be a simple question: why could she not simply have followed the posted directive to stay out of a closed building? And, failing that, why would it be any sort of injustice for her to be asked to leave and then face no other punishment, as happened and was appropriate? I debated this topic in several different contexts, online and off, and several times heard this distressing response: you can’t expect Black students to follow such rules, as they are too damaged by white supremacy to comply.

I find this attitude, which I heard from both Black people and white, to be really ugly. Quite racist, in fact. You really have to marvel at where we’ve come in race relations in this country when “Black people are incapable of following rules” is represented as an antiracist position. While exonerating this particular girl and other Black people from their culpability in breaking rules, this attitude posits an entire race of people who are such dysfunctional victims that they can’t possibly undertake the basic steps necessary not only to survive in 21st century America but to navigate any society, which are rule-bound by their very nature. The short-term rhetorical convenience of excusing individual Black people’s behavior in this way comes wrapped in a terrible curse; if this vision of the world is true, Black liberation must be just about impossible, as the hand of white supremacy is so damaging to Black people that it’s hard to imagine a world in which they are able to rise above the bigotry that will inevitably linger into the future. I would argue that, instead, while Black America faces structural disadvantages that are certainly related to historical and ongoing injustice, the right application of policy could dramatically ameliorate their current problems and leave them better able to flourish. Racial inequality is a choice. We could choose to end it. The question is, should progressives view Black people and other people of color as empowered adults with the capacity to make their own decisions, and thus as responsible for the consequences of those decisions, or as noble, permanent victims?

Worth saying, of course, that the large majority of Black people in this country live their lives every day without breaking such rules – including most Black Smith students. But to recognize this is to give the lie to the proffered defense…
[snip]
Meanwhile, the price of the obsessive fixation on white people as the sole movers of all history and current events leaves us in a world where people of color are cast as permanent children, well thought of, constantly “honored” and “celebrated,” occasionally worthy of a little help and a little liberty, but ultimately subject forever to the whims of white people, buffeted by hatred on one side and by toxic condescension on the other. Our discourse makes liars of us and dulls the possibility of cross-racial solidarity by making hard conversations impossible. I assure you, when Asian Americans who are not political obsessives look at the news about these attacks, then read in the newspaper where some elite liberal explains that Black people have nothing to do with it, it does not convince them. It makes them more suspicious of all progressive arguments and leaves them subject to conspiratorial thinking. Again: for what? Who is helped by this condition? No one, in material terms. It just makes white people feel good and enables people’s pleasant fantasy of a simplistic moral universe.

The myth of Mariana’s Web, the darkest corner of the internet | Engadget

Depending on where you get your Mariana’s Web myths, it’s where you’ll find “the darkest secrets humanity has in its history,” the secret location of Atlantis and “the Vatican secret archives,” or a database of archives belonging to the most powerful intelligence agencies on Earth. Many believe that Mariana’s is home to an all-powerful, female artificial intelligence entity.

CNN Loses Nearly 70% Of Its Viewers Since Trump Left Office | The Daily Caller

Currently on sale: 14 Gigabit of almost any thinkable information about every single Brazilian individual, enterprise and vehicle. https://t.co/bDfPcG3mKh

— lowtechmagazine (@lowtechmagazine) February 11, 2021

The Cop-Out of “Follow the Science” — The New Atlantis   Every square foot of American soil rests somewhere within a nested hierarchy of political authority, such that a responsible party is always close by. But in the pandemic, this system built for efficiently distributing responsibility instead became a system for efficiently dodging it.

The problem with reinforced concrete  Early 20th-century engineers thought reinforced concrete structures would last a very long time – perhaps 1,000 years. In reality, their life span is more like 50-100 years, and sometimes less.

The Filing Cabinet   In Burlington, Vermont, on a weedy lot owned by the city, there stands a stack of eleven metal file cabinets slightly more than 40 feet high. 17 Constructed in 2002, the stack contains 38 drawers; eight are partially open.

The travel website Roadside America has named the installation “The World’s Tallest File Cabinet.” Its creator, Bren Alvarez, a local architect and gallery owner, has titled it “File Under So. Co., Waiting for…” Back then Alvarez’s intention was to symbolize — and satirize — “the bureaucracy of urban planning.” The 38 file drawers represented the 38 years that a local road project — then called the “Southern Connector” — had been under review.

Alvarez got the file cabinets from a local business that was discarding them. Some were vintage, with brass nameplates and handles on the outside and springs and levers on the inside. 18 Alvarez welded the cabinets together and used an interior steel post to position them in the middle of the path of the proposed roadway; were the Southern Connector ever built, they would have to be removed. Almost two decades later they remain in place, the road project still under discussion — still “waiting for…”

The file cabinet remains an icon, its meaning and symbolism reversed, because it remains operational. If, for example, you work for the federal government and you want to get paid in retirement, your paperwork must be processed, by hand, by an employee of the Office of Personnel Management whose workspace is located deep underground in a former limestone mine in northwest Pennsylvania. There your employee records will be located in one of 28,000 (and counting) file cabinets. Today these paper documents are so precious (and combustible) that hot meals (including pizza) are delivered daily to the site’s 600 workers because open flames and toaster ovens are banned in the lunchroom. Aboveground, the excess that constitutes bureaucracy-as-paperwork is no less weighty. Several years ago, at a regional office of the Veterans Benefits Administration in North Carolina, the cumulative weight of file cabinets and paperwork threatened the structural integrity of the six-story building. In this case, the backlog of claims was so great that there were some 37,000 files stacked two-feet high atop the cabinets. 22

[sniop]

Apple was hardly alone in adopting the desktop metaphor. In 1983, Commodore International introduced a ROM cartridge called Magic Desk I for its Commodore 64, one of the early and relatively affordable home computers. Magic Desk extended the metaphor to create a more detailed desktop than anything Apple would ever offer. The computer user was given a desk with drawers and a typewriter, calculator, telephone, account book, and Rolodex. Next to the desk was a three-drawer file cabinet with a clock on top of it. Most of the icons were merely for show; only the clock, typewriter, and file cabinet were operational. To save a document, you had to open a file drawer by using a joystick to position a disembodied white hand with an extended index finger over the file drawer icon. Inside the drawer were ten yellow lines placed vertically in a list; each line had a tab to simulate a “folder” that you could select and name. 27 Likewise, the Windows operating systems used file cabinet icons throughout the 1990s. As an icon within a metaphor, the late 20-century file cabinet was as efficient as the early 20-century filing cabinet.

MIND AND BODY ARE WORDS ETCHED ON THE SAME ROCK

LIFE’S AN UNREAD MYSTERY

1 CORINTHIANS 15

22 For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive.

23 But every man in his own order: Christ the firstfruits; afterward they that are Christ’s at his coming.

24 Then cometh the end, when he shall have delivered up the kingdom to God, even the Father; when he shall have put down all rule and all authority and power.

25 For he must reign, till he hath put all enemies under his feet.

26 The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death.

27 For he hath put all things under his feet. But when he saith all things are put under him, it is manifest that he is excepted, which did put all things under him.

28 And when all things shall be subdued unto him, then shall the Son also himself be subject unto him that put all things under him, that God may be all in all.

29 Else what shall they do which are baptized for the dead, if the dead rise not at all? why are they then baptized for the dead?

30 And why stand we in jeopardy every hour?

31 I protest by your rejoicing which I have in Christ Jesus our Lord, I die daily.

32 If after the manner of men I have fought with beasts at Ephesus, what advantageth it me, if the dead rise not? let us eat and drink; for to morrow we die.

⇒33 Be not deceived: evil communications corrupt good manners.⇐

Making Satan great again: The glamorization of evil | the Aspen beat

An Enemy has done this — slowly overrun our universities with Marxist ideologues, slowly filled our tolerant-to-a-fault cities with chaff, and steadily squeezed the life out of the middle class. Satan is an insidious thief — who has stolen your neighbor, perhaps your child, and maybe your belief in hard, honest labor. (In Connecticut the unemployed are now holding out for a $1,000 bonus from the state before even thinking about going back to work.)

Among the newest species of weeds to be discovered in the American wheat field are the Woke-topians, hitherto found principally in untended academia, but which are now popping up in the more highly cultivated areas around Langley, VA, and the Pentagon.

The military once had a single mission: Keeping America safe from foreign powers, But that mission is now secondary to the new mission of political correctness and social “equity.” If the experience of Space Force Lt. Col. Matthew Lohmeier is indicative, weed control will not be easy. Following his criticism of policies ”rooted in critical race theory” and Marxism, Lohmeier was promptly relieved of his command.

…

What Version 2.0 of Satan has most is a sense of drama in a securely boring world that craves it now that God, redemption and service are out of fashion. If a George Floyd is killed, then we simply have to burn down a whole city block in another city, or turn it into a CHOP zone while taking selfies. If I have gender dysphoria, then the opposite sex had better allow me to enter their restrooms and to compete against them in their sports, or I’ll have a hissy fit.

“Pretend”? No, I don’t have to “pretend” that we are being governed by “children of darkness” sired by The Father of Lies and Prince of Darkness, who govern with the reckless abandon of malignant teenagers with their parents’ credit card, who like The Joker in The Dark Knight, or the anarchists in Portland, just like to see things burn.

Dracula’s ghost ship has washed ashore, and like the weeds in the parable, the Undead are popping up all around us. Their name is Legion.

Making Satan great again: The glamorization of evil | the Aspen beat

One day a farmer is beset by workers dismayed at weeds resembling wheat that have come up. When questioned about the weeds, the farmer replies, “An enemy has done this.”

And there you have it. The imposters, who rob the productive, life-giving wheat of water and nutrients, have infiltrated the field, looking too much like wheat to weed them out. Only after the harvest, says the farmer, can the weeds be sorted, bundled, and thrown into “the fires of Gehenna.” (Yes, Jesus also spoke a great deal about hell.)

RTWT AT

“SATAN? Did somebody mention my name?”…

The Resume of Captain Kink

I’m Captain Kink. I’m Mister Scratch.
I’m your smiling, deathless dentist, Doctor Pain.
I’ve owned the Earth since Adam’s birth,
And co-authored the book on raising Cain….