AND OF COURSE THEY BLAME IT ON CLIMATE CHANGERY: Almost all of the snow at the Beijing Winter Olympics will be fake.
And they’ll try to shame westerners into serfdom to their climate insanity. But China? they’ll never utter a word against filthy, polluting China. That would be racist! After all commies are the idiots favorite “race”.
THE RULE SAYS PEOPLE MUST WEAR MASKS. NEWSOM AIN’T PEOPLE: California Gov. Gavin Newsom defends himself over mask debacle at NFL game
Quod erat demonstrandum.
ZUCKERBERG IS TRASH:
Meta decided on Monday, per an internal memo obtained by the @FreeBeacon, that it would continue allowing potential migrants to solicit the services of smugglers and human traffickers on its platforms https://t.co/sO2JAbVqpt
— Joe Gabriel Simonson (@SaysSimonson) February 2, 2022
MORE GUTS THAN A LOT OF COPS NOWADAYS: Based Grandma Confronts Shoplifter: “Fuck off, asshole!”
Based Grandma. pic.twitter.com/0YqH8nYZOi
— Adalia Brand (@BrandAdalia) February 1, 2022
STORIES FROM AMBULANCE DRIVERS.
OPEN THREAD: I paid no attention, left my books at home.
THE TRUCKERS FIGHTING DYSTOPIA:
The general tendency is toward disciplining, if not erasing, the human element—especially where the human element might inconveniently resist the world our elites wish to bring into being. Lockdowns and business restrictions, for example, just happened to target small biz, but not the Walmarts and Amazons of the world. Workers in retail, service and similar industries, meanwhile, are required to quite literally efface themselves and to stand partitioned off from the people they serve. Trucking ideally would be totally automated, but for now, truckers must be made to submit to the vaccine mandate.
Well, that last group isn’t having it. In Canada, truckers have been making themselves seen and loudly heard, rallying a mass convoy to Ottawa that has apparently sent Prime Minister Justin Trudeau into seclusion (he claims he has contracted Covid). Similar convoys are rolling into power centers in Europe, as well. This is as organic and peaceful and compelling as working-class causes get, yet as the Marxist writer Edwin Aponte notes at the Bellows, the professional and media left is trying its best to ignore the movement or frame it as “fascist” and “racist.”
These false and stupid charges ring increasingly hollow, especially as more people discern what’s really at stake in the battles of the Covid and post-Covid eras: namely, defending the human element—man as a rational, political animal—that global elites would seek to mask, mandate, automate, and social-distance out of existence.
Honk for the freedom-truckers.
Click over to the Small Dead Animals blog for more on the Canadian truckers, including this endorsement:
VISION: The James Webb Space Telescope will map the atmosphere of exoplanets.
I remember back in the ’70s when Jerry Pournelle was writing about space-based telescopes that could map the cloud patterns on planets around other stars. Now we have one of those.
OLD AND BUSTED: Snowfalls are now just a thing of the past.
—The London Independent, March 20th, 2000.
The New Hotness? Climate change may be fueling increase in major Northeast snowstorms.
—The Washington Post, today.
AS HEADS IS TAILS: The hippies have become the cops.
You either die a rebel or live long enough to see yourself turn into a snowflake. The generation of free love and free expression have gradually transformed into the baton-wielders.
I’m referring to Neil Young’s demand that Spotify either pull his entire catalog or do away with Joe Rogan’s podcast. Spotify reportedly paid $100 million to acquire Rogan’s podcast in 2020. You’d imagine their contract includes legal bulwarks against such demands. Young is reportedly upset with Covid “misinformation” (the media’s new favorite vague term) and is no longer willing to abide by a streaming service that plays host to Rogan.
It took Spotify about three seconds to make their decision: Neil Young is no longer on their platform. Soon after, Joni Mitchell issued the same demand, as did some fella who played in a Bruce Springsteen cover band or something. Thus far, no artist on Spotify under the age of seventy has rallied against the streaming service.
Take a bow, flower children: you’ve officially become the authoritarians you always warned us about. Just as in politics, the hippies have decided they are not leaving our culture without a feeble hypocritical fight.
* * * * * * * *
These older musicians are demanding censorship and fealty to the Man. That should be Neil Young, Joni Mitchell and Howard Stern’s legacy from here on out.
Speaking of fealty to The Man: White House Advocates for Big Tech to Censor Health Experts They Disagree With.
Related: These Two Tech Platforms Are Standing Up to Twitter Mobs and Defending Free Expression.
WELL, HE’S OLD, HE’S FRAIL, AND KAMALA’S AWFUL. All-out effort to keep Biden COVID-free; no ‘normal’ yet. “When President Joe Biden met with U.S. governors at the White House on Monday, he was the only one given a glass of water — lest anyone else remove their mask to take a drink.”
I’M SURE IT’S SOCIALLY CONSTRUCTED: The Mysterious ‘Pareidolia’ Phenomenon Turns Out to Have a Surprising Bias.
WHAT’S SAUCE FOR THE GOOSE ISN’T SAUCE FOR THE GANDER: The Biden Administration’s Department of Education doesn’t seem to be all that interested in enforcing Title IX–at least not if the complaint concerns obvious discrimination against men. For example, the University of New Mexico has a specific “Women in STEM” program. The university publicly states that the program is “open for women faculty,” that “eligible applicants include tenure-track and tenured women faculty members,” and that the program was “supported by an anonymous gift … to support research by and professorships for women faculty.” Yet the Department of Education dismissed a complaint filed by the American Enterprise Institute’s Mark Perry on the ground that he could point to no specific male faculty member who had been denied the benefits of the program. As far as I’ve been able to to tell this is a new policy for facial discrimination. Would the Department have done the same for a “Men in STEM” or a “White People in STEM” program? It seems unlikely.
AFTER THE COVID DEBACLE, EVERYONE SHOULD BE AFRAID OF THE W.H.O. AND NO ONE SHOULD LISTEN TO IT: Why the drinks trade should be afraid of WHO. “This year, The World Health Organisation is unveiling ‘a global strategy to reduce the harmful use of alcohol’, and the drinks trade should be fearful of the proposed ‘high-impact’ interventions.”
LIVING WITHOUT A LIVING ROOM:
For one thing, its absence takes pressure off parents. Home buyers, particularly parents of young children, often purchase with dreams of family recitals in their living room. Visions of a child’s vocal solo enthralling after-dinner guests—the “von Trapp trap”—thrill their hopeful imaginations. But since these performances never actually happen, people without living rooms are never disappointed.
The living room was the least-used room in my childhood house, something I suspect is still true today. I’m grateful my home has an oversized study with built-in bookshelves instead. Like a bespoke suit, a home should fit its owner, not the other way around.
If my youth is an indication, worse than infrequency of use is the purpose to which living rooms are put. This is where I was taken to be told my golden retriever (Derry, not Brandy) had chased her final bumper and various relatives had joined the choir invisible. Much death was discussed in the living room.
It was a venue for more than the macabre. It’s where on Christmas 1979, my elder sister, Brig, my younger brother, Jack, and I learned the truth about Santa Claus. (We’d heard St. Nick cursing the night before over toy assembly, in the familiar phrasing of our father.) Later the living room was where, for reasons never made clear, my dad told me he was confiscating all my AC/DC cassettes.
In a final indignity, the living room is where my parents told Brig and me we’d be leaving summer sports camp early. We were departing in solidarity with Jack, who’d been kicked out for the physical aggression that impressed football scouts but not the umpire of his tennis match.
All this strangeness went down in the living room. Looking back, I think better name for those four walls might be the hard-truth room or the surely-we’ll-unpack-this-later-in-therapy room. Whatever the living room is called, my house is better off without one.
Heh.
FLASHBACK: Are We Living in the Hunger Games? “You know the story: While the provinces starve, the Capital City lives it up, its wheeler-dealer bigshots growing fat on the tribute extracted from the rest of the country. . . . Washington is rich not because it makes valuable things, but because it is powerful. With virtually everything subject to regulation, it pays to spend money influencing the regulators. As P.J. O’Rourke famously observed: ‘When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things to be bought and sold are legislators.’ But it’s not just bags-of-cash style corruption. Most of the D.C. boom is from lobbyists and PR people, and others who are retained to influence what the government does. It’s a cold calculation: You’re likely to get a much better return from an investment of $1 million on lobbying than on a similar investment in, say, a new factory or better worker training. . . . It’s no coincidence that as the federal government morphed from an entity that did a few highly visible things well, to one that did a whole lot of not-so-visible things less well, respect for the federal government plummeted even as the political class’ wealth climbed.”
BECAUSE THE BIDEN WHITE HOUSE IS THE REAL WORLD: Psaki Mocks Violent Crime Concerns as ‘An Alternative Universe.’
SOUNDS A BIT MORE ACCURATE THAN MY P365: Review: SIG Sauer P365 Custom Works Pistol. Spare me the gold-bling trigger and barrel, though. Sheesh.
IT’S WEIRD WHAT HAPPENS WHEN WASHINGTON PRINTS UP FUNNY MONEY BY THE TRILLIONS: Inflation is High, Will Remain Elevated for Years.
The Federal Reserve (Fed) is officially committed to a 2 percent average inflation target, as explained in its Statement on Longer-Run Goals and Monetary Policy Strategy. But supply constraints and a surge in nominal spending have pushed prices well above target. In December, the price level was 3 percentage points higher than it would have been had prices merely grown at 2 percent since January 2020.
The Fed reaffirmed its commitment to a 2 percent average inflation target on January 25, 2022. But, so far, it has done little more than say it would tighten monetary policy in the coming months.
Following last week’s Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) meeting, the Fed announced it would leave its federal funds rate target and the interest rate it pays on reserve balances unchanged. It will reduce its monthly asset purchases, but the size of the Fed’s balance sheet will continue to grow for now. None of this really amounts to tighter monetary policy, and yet the Fed seems to have convinced markets that it is serious about bringing down inflation.
Inflation isn’t that tough to tame if it is nipped in the bud. But the longer the Fed and Congress put off making the necessary changes to interest rates and spending, the more painful the correction will be.
HAVE YOU TRIED VOTING FOR ANYTHING OTHER THAN A DEMOCRAT? Portland residents criticize city officials for rampant homelessness: ‘They’re straight up idiots.’
NOTHING TO SEE HERE, MOVE ALONG: Covid-19 news: 119 people test positive at Beijing Winter Olympics.
APOLOGIZE FOR WHAT? Joe Rogan Apologized and Now He’ll Have Hell to Pay.
FASTER, PLEASE: Harnessing a natural geochemical reaction to combat antibiotic resistance.
Antibiotics have allowed for the widespread control of bacterial infections, which had been the leading cause of death historically. However, the overuse of traditional antibiotics in humans and animals has resulted in the emergence of stronger, more potent bacterial strains that are no longer treatable with conventional antibiotics.
Researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) are exploring alternative treatment options when antibiotics fail. Certain naturally occurring clay deposits have been shown to harbor antimicrobial properties and kill antibiotic-resistant bacteria. These clays have been proposed as a new paradigm for fighting the potentially devastating effects of the post-antibiotic era. Despite their effectiveness, these naturally occurring clays, by their inherent heterogenous properties, exhibit variable antibacterial effectiveness and the synthesis of minerals with reproducible antibacterial activity is needed to harness their therapeutic value. The research appears in Scientific Reports.
Waiting for the reaction when Joe Rogan mentions using clay to fight antibiotic resistant bacteria.
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