NEO: Mr. Rogers has a message from 52 years ago about boys and girls. “If he were to sing this song today, he’d probably be banned. I’m surprised it’s still up on YouTube. Pay particular attention to the second verse.”
Archive for 2023
June 25, 2023
OUT ON A LIMB: The ‘Rainbow Underground Railroad’ is even more absurd than it sounds.
🤦♂️ Can we just all agree between “Trans-Genocide” and now “Rainbow Underground Railroad” these are the most insulting narcissistic non-serious privileged assholes to walk the planet? pic.twitter.com/NJEA0LiKIm
— Five Times August (@FiveTimesAugust) June 16, 2023
STANDING UP AGAINST DISCRIMINATION: Watchdog prof files Title IX complaint against UOregon over its exclusive ’emergency support fund’ for trans students.
I find the idea hilarious that a sex-change procedure — elective surgery if there ever was such — is an “emergency.” On the other hand, whenever leftists want anything it’s an “emergency,” because they’re basically spoiled children.
OBSERVATION FROM RUSSIA: “Now we see that only armed people can resist the dictatorship.”
HARD TO SAY: Did Putin really flee Moscow as Wagner forces approached?
Related: Prigozhin’s insurrection has exposed a fragile Russia.
Plus: Why the Anti-Putin Coup Ended.
UPDATE:
Young Russian women fist-bumping Wagner fighters to say goodbye as they leave Rostov tonight.
Crowds gathered along to streets and cheered as the Wagner soldiers shot their guns in the air.
There is something very rotten in the state of Russia… pic.twitter.com/Fsqj4vbn8P
— Visegrád 24 (@visegrad24) June 24, 2023
MORE:
Those who have been part of negotiations to reintegrate 3rd world insurgents and kidnappers into regular forces know the arrangement won't last because there's money in revolting against weak states. https://t.co/bty1cybFin
— wretchardthecat (@wretchardthecat) June 24, 2023
MORE STILL: Via a friend on Facebook:
And another comments: “This coup could have been an email.”
Plus: “The caterer to warlord pipeline makes perfect sense if you’ve ever seen the inside of a high end kitchen an hour before appetizers.” – Michael Shindler.
JAMES LILEKS: The Allure of Ruins. Our rueful fascination with abandoned places stems from our desire to put our present in the context of our past.
How was the mall?” Mom would ask when you got home.
“Eh, it was dead,” you might say.
“What did you do?”
“Nothing.”
Neither was true. Every trip to the mall had a routine. You’d swing by the sausage and cheese store for samples. You’d go to the record store to leaf through the sheaves of albums, nodding at the rock gods’ pictures on the wall, content in the cocoon of your generation’s culture. Head over to Chess King to see if there was something stylish you could wear on a date, if you ever had one; saunter casually into Spencer Gifts to look at the posters in the back, snicker at the naughty gifts, marvel at some electronic thing that cast colored patterns on the wall. Then you’d find a place, maybe by the fountain in the center, and watch the world go past in that agreeably tranquilized state of mall shopping.
Dead? Hardly. Okay, maybe it was the afternoon, low traffic. No movie you really wanted to see, the same stuff in the stores you saw last week. Of course you’d go back tomorrow, because that’s what you did with your friends. You went to the mall.
A dead mall is something else today: a vast dark cavern strewn with trash, stripped of its glitter, its escalators frozen, waiting for the claws to take it apart. The internet abounds with photos taken by surreptitious spelunkers, documenting the last days of once-prosperous malls. We look at these pictures with fascination and sadness. No one said they’d last forever. But there wasn’t any reason to think they wouldn’t. Hanging out as teens, we never thought we’d outlive the mall.
Fortunately, salvation is finally at hand: Pickleball Courts Breathe New Life Into Dying Shopping Malls.
EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY: First transgender state rep in NH charged with child pornography.
A SMALL MEASURE OF ACCOUNTABILITY: House Republicans Subpoena Author Of Paper That Derided COVID Lab Leak Theory.
CHANGE: Bongbong bong BONG! Intel building new chip “foundries.”
Checking CNBC quickly this afternoon I got a little confirmation on a topic I hit yesterday – about American businesses de-risking and decoupling their manufacturing and supply dependencies from China and/or generally unstable, unfriendly areas. Yesterday, Raytheon’s CEO was saying it’s going to be just too much trouble, while today, Intel’s stock is taking a beating because they’re doing exactly that.
In fact, during the investor briefing, Intel’s CFO David Zinsner, outlined plans not only to continue making their own chips, but building plants to manufacture third party chips going forward. Literally to become a “chip manufacturing company.”
Pretty radical thinking there.
Intel stock dropped 6% on Wednesday after the company gave investors an update on the company’s turnaround plan to become a chip manufacturing company competing with Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company.
They are building multiple brand new facilities – called “foundries” – in “friendly” countries which also enables them to qualify for CHIPS Act dollars.
These countries include Poland, Israel, and the US. I don’t think China will be invading Ohio anytime soon, but give who’s in the White House, they may at least be fantasizing about it.
ICYMI: WATCH: Missing Sub Boss Brags About Not Hiring Experienced ‘White Guys’ with Military Backgrounds.
Seen on Facebook:
ELTON JOHN SINGLES OUT ANTI-GROOMING LAWS AS WHY HE’S DONE PERFORMING IN THE US:
As his farewell tour wraps up, pop singer Elton John said he has no plans to perform again in the United States due to the country’s “growing swell of anger and homophobia.”
That’s according to what the “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road” musician said in an interview he gave Radio Times, where he noted what he described as a growing number of anti-grooming laws being passed in states, including Florida, Texas, Georgia, Tennessee, North Dakota, and South Dakota. He specifically singled out Florida’s laws, calling them “disgraceful.”
John, 76, who has been a fixture in the cultural lives of both Brits and Americans since the 1970s with his string of top 10 hits, which are still played over the radio airwaves today, had plenty to say on the topic.
“It’s all going pear-shaped in America,” John told Radio Times, as written about in a piece in The New York Times. “We seem to be going backwards. And that spreads. It’s like a virus that the LGBTQ+ movement is suffering.”
I’m not sure why John is singling out America: WHO Promotes ‘Early Childhood Masturbation’ in Official Sex Ed Guidance.
But in any case:
DEAL OF THE DAY: NORTIV 8 Polar Bear Series Men’s Extra Grip Leather Waterproof Hiking Boots. #CommissionEarned
THE BIG NEWS IS THAT HE’S ACTUALLY BEING CHARGED: RI state senator caught keying car with anti-Biden sticker.
SPOILER: THOSE ECONOMICS ARE COMING BACK. The Economics Behind Grandma’s Tuna Casseroles.
You may wonder how anyone could sign something like that. But I submit that millions of us sign something much like that every day, and to a certain extent people have become desensitized to such waivers, which are seen as TL;DR cover-your-ass legalese. The majority of such waivers lie in the medical field and involve procedures and surgery, and a related phenomenon is warning labels on drugs.
The Titan waiver was three pages long; were those pages fine print? Was most of the verbiage boilerplate blabity-blah? We see that quote highlighted and isolated; did they? And what does “may be constructed of…” mean? Was it or wasn’t it? We know that it was not; did they?
Those of us who would not even consider voluntarily going down in a submersible of any sort – and I am one of those people who would not – would also not sign such a waiver, but we wouldn’t be in that situation in the first place. Nevertheless I have signed many medical waivers equally frightening and quite long. The possibility of death is listed there, even for my cataract surgery, plus plenty of other dire possibilities. Sure, I know that most people don’t die of eye surgery, but you know what? As far as I know, the people who have gone down in submersibles to see the Titanic – even this particular submersible – have not died until now. Granted, the n is tiny, but it still would give a false sense of security and might make such a waiver seem to exaggerate the risks as waivers do.
I would submit that waivers for inherently risky activities like this one should be more enforceable than waivers for everyday stuff.
HMM: Vindication in Russia, or American Folly?
Is it over? The potential abrupt collapse of Vladimir Putin’s regime would of course be a natural and entirely just cause for celebration — Putin richly deserves the fate that greeted Nicolae Ceaușescu — but Russian history teaches us that as likely as not, if that still happens, he will ultimately be replaced by something worse . . . and that getting from Point A to Point B could involve some wrenching and extremely perilous instability. Another lesson: Win or lose for Putin, Russian history reminds us that the ongoing events are of the sort that are not only impossible to determine with certainty while they are happening; historians will likely be disputing for the next century what happened.
None of that is likely to prevent a lot of efforts within the United States to spike the football and claim vindication, some of which is already happening even while nobody knows where this is headed:
Hawkish supporters of aid to Ukraine will argue that they were right that the war against Russia was winnable, and not an illusion created by Ukrainian propaganda.
Dovish opponents of aid to Ukraine will argue that this proves their case that prolonging the war would lead to far more dangerous instability.
Biden partisans will claim that this shows the wisdom of his Ukraine policy, that the United States is better off for the war having happened, and that we got a bargain for the dollars we spent helping Ukraine, which ended up possibly collapsing the hostile Russian regime.
Biden’s Republican critics will argue that he led us down a far more dangerous path. Trump, for example, will argue that the war would never have happened on his watch, while DeSantis (who initially predicted that it would be a fiasco for Russia that might bring down Putin) will claim vindication for his view that Russia by 2023 was severely degraded and no longer a formidable military force.
They may all have a point, but we’re pretty far from being able to assess the situation in a way that even tells us what happened, let alone who the winners and losers are, let alone who deserves the credit. One thing I’m reasonably sure of: It may be possible for the United States and the Western allies to influence what happens next in Russia, but there is no possible way for us to control it, and we’ve ended up regretting every past effort to do so. Woodrow Wilson sent American troops into Russia to try to affect the course of the Russian Revolution; he accomplished nothing other than the opposite of his declaration in the Fourteen Points that “the treatment accorded Russia by her sister nations in the months to come will be the acid test of their good will, of their comprehension of her needs as distinguished from their own interests, and of their intelligent and unselfish sympathy.” In the end of that period, the West sold out Ukraine to the Soviet empire.
Given our recent track record, folly seems the most likely truth. But who knows?
OPEN THREAD: It’s all you.
THE NEW SPACE RACE: U.S. and India to expand spaceflight cooperation.
EH, WHAT’S THE BIG DEAL, YOU CAN JUST IDENTIFY AS A WOMAN THEN: Losing Your Y Chromosome Could Have Drastic Health Consequences.
I HOPE THAT’S TRUE BECAUSE I ALMOST NEVER HAVE TROUBLE SLEEPING: Trouble Falling Asleep? That Could Mean You Have an Increased Risk of Stroke. “Individuals exhibiting insomnia-related signs like difficulties in falling asleep, maintaining sleep, or waking up too prematurely, may stand at a heightened risk of stroke, suggests a study recently published in Neurology, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology. The researchers additionally observed a substantially elevated risk amongst individuals below the age of 50. It’s important to note, however, that the study does not confirm a causal relationship between symptoms of insomnia and stroke, but rather it highlights a correlation between the two.”
I LOVE THIS: “Brief of Amici Curiae David Sosa, David Sosa, David Sosa, David Sosa, & the Institute For Justice in Support of Petitioner David Sosa.” “IJ and several men named David Sosa are asking the Supreme Court to grant another David Sosa’s cert petition after the en banc Eleventh Circuit said the Constitution allows police to detain anyone for three days as long as there’s a warrant out for the arrest of anyone with the same name somewhere in the country.”
WHY IS THE DNC-MSM SUCH A CESSPIT OF RACISM? Vivek Ramaswamy Blisters Liberal Newspaper for Wildly Racist Political Cartoon Featuring … Him.
Question: What happens when a liberal newspaper shamelessly uses a wildly racist political cartoon featuring 2024 GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy to attack Republicans?
Answer: Ramaswamy promptly blasts the paper and its hateful cartoon, and fiercely defends the GOP.
Iowa’s Quad-City Times’ bigoted cartoon depicts Ramaswamy as an “anti-woke crusader,” being “welcomed” by Republican voters.
The amateurishly drawn Ramaswamy figure says “Hello my MAGA friends!” while GOP attendees shout “Muslim!” “Show us your birth certificate!” and “Get me a SLUSHEE, Apu!”
Wait until the Quad-City Times discovers Joe Biden’s own (pre-Trunalimunumaprzure) anti-Indian racism: Biden explains Indian-American remarks. “You cannot go to a 7-Eleven or a Dunkin’ Donuts unless you have a slight Indian accent.”