Tuesday, March 19, 2024

Roland Fryer redux

Amala comments:

How biased is the research on racial motivation in police violence?



victory! (we hope)

It is done. The toilet's floater valve has been replaced, and the misbehavior has disappeared. Before, the tank would fill until the "balloon" kicked in* and tipped the valve to the "off" position, then the water would start up again for no apparent reason until the tank was overflowing out through the flush handle. At a guess, the floater valve was just old. Replacing the assembly was a matter of watching a 90-second-long tutorial, then grunting as I got into awkward positions (with my paunch in the way) to do all that unscrewing and re-screwing... et voilà—with a new valve assembly, the toilet seems to be working fine. I flushed the tank several times to be sure, and everything seems to be working. To minimize the Murphy, I'll check on everything again in a week, then if I remember, in a month. Meanwhile, I'll be on the lookout for stray drips. For the moment, though, it seems I can do my business in relative peace. Praise Cthulhu! How shall I celebrate this minor victory?

__________

*On the modern valve I got, it's not a balloon like in the old toilets. It's basically an inverted plastic cup that traps air beneath it and acts like a balloon. The assembly I pulled out was the same. No balloons anywhere.



Fani Willis and the historical pattern of corruption

How many times does this bitch get let off the hook?

Everyone's too scared of holding a black woman accountable. But whites are privileged, right?



President Shambles: 46 minutes in

We now get to the "fax machine" part of the exchange, in which Joe Biden (so his critics claim) seems unfamiliar with fax machines. Page 41 of the transcript:

[0 : 46:41.8]

MR. HUR: And now I have a similar set of questions with respect to the lake house in Wilmington. So, when you were serving as Vice President, did you have -- did you bring classified material with you from the West Wing or the Naval Observatory to the lake house?

PRESIDENT BIDEN: Occasionally, because I did a lot of business from there. If you're in there for 99 hours, or whatever the hell you were, with 375 people, or whatever the number was -- I'm teasing you.

(Laughter)

PRESIDENT BIDEN: You left everything in place. I just hope you didn't find any risqué pictures of my wife in a bathing suit. Which you probably did. She's beautiful. But all kidding aside, I have a library, and the library has a -- two filing cabinets in it, and it has built into the walls -- when I built that home, built into the walls, a space for a copy machine, for a -- what do you call it, when they send these --

MR. SISKEL: Fax machine.

PRESIDENT BIDEN: Fax machine. I have shelves that I have, I have binders like this in it that I put together that aren't classified. They're about speeches that I made on this matter, speeches I made on that matter.

PRESIDENT BIDEN: I just warn you all, never make one great eulogy, because you get asked to do everybody's eulogy.

(Laughter)

So Biden glitched on the term "fax machine," but I've glitched like that before myself, blanking on a specific phrase. This in itself isn't nearly as earth-shaking as the previous geezer moment. It certainly doesn't mean he doesn't know what a fax machine is; it's more that he simply couldn't find the word for it in his rusty, creakily turning Rolodex of mental vocabulary.

Not the best look, but not the worst look. I really could've done without the visual of Taco Jill in a bathing suit, though. "Risqué" to whom? You can keep her, Joe!



humor: woke chick tries to report a crime





Monday, March 18, 2024

tomorrow, we slay the dragon

My toilet stuff came today, and tomorrow morning, I'll replace my floater-valve assembly. It won't solve the leakage problem at the base of my toilet, but I'm hoping like hell that it solves the constantly-running-water problem inside the toilet tank. Manually closing the main valve every time I use the toilet kinda sucks. Unboxing:



all the pieces laid out

the main piece that needs replacing




be careful, righties, re: employing Carlin as your weapon of choice

For righties to get behind George Carlin, they have to forget that Carlin was a liberal even if he did score points against the woke left with rants like the one below:

Righties are more apt to quote lefties when the lefties make rightie points (e.g., quoting Bill Maher or Bill Burr or Ana Kasparian when it's convenient which, yes, I've done, too) than vice versa, but that often results in a kind of ideological Stockholm Syndrome. Maybe the idea is to virtuously avoid the genetic fallacy to show how open minded one is, but when leftie-quoting becomes a pattern of behavior, something pernicious may be at play.



the proposed TikTok "ban" is not a ban





the "bloodbath" hoax

When in doubt, quote Trump out of context, then run around screaming as if your head were on fire.* This is a favorite "tactic" of the left, but with X/Twitter no longer suppressing the right, corrections are possible, and sooner than before. So, no: in his recent speech, Trump wasn't saying there'd be a "bloodbath" if he's not elected. He was talking specifically about the auto industry, something that very few news outlets were honest enough to point out:


While we're at it, someone put together a supercut of leftist media outlets all using the term "bloodbath." As usual: they can say it, but the right can't.

Hypocrisy and projection are all the left has. I hope people remember nonsense like this come election time. This is how the left operates, and how it's been operating for a long time.

__________

*And the left loves to accuse the right of fearmongering. More projection.



Judge "McWussy," says Doug

Judge McAfee's attempt to be Solomonic has led to derision from the right, who see him as a spineless squish worried about reelection to his post:





EVs again

Headline:

Electric cars pollute 1,850 times more than fuel-based vehicles, study finds
The 2022 U.K.-based Emissions Analytics study found that after driving both a gas and electric car 1,000 miles, the number of particles collected from the EV was vastly greater than the gasoline-powered car.

A 2022 study found that electric vehicles (EVs), which left-leaning governments in Canada, the United States, and elsewhere are pushing on the population, pollute at a rate far higher than their gasoline or diesel-powered counterparts.

The 2022 study from the U.K.-based Emissions Analytics group found that during a 1,000-mile journey, EVs release 1,850 times more pollutants into the surrounding environment than gas-powered vehicles due to the heavier weight, which eats through tires.

While many think of emissions from exhaust, tire wear plays a significant role in emitting pollutants. The synthetic rubber used to create tires includes certain chemicals that get released into the air, and EVs are significantly heavier than conventional cars because of massive lithium batteries.

Overall, EVs weigh about 30 percent more than gas-powered vehicles and cost thousands more to make and buy. These issues are in addition to the fact that they are not suitable in colder climates (such as Canada and the northern U.S.), offer poor range and long charging times (especially in cold weather), and have batteries that take tremendous resources to make and are hard to recycle.

Both the government of Canada under Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and the government of the United States under President Joe Biden are hoping to ban, or severely limit, the sale of new gasoline-powered cars after 2035 despite these deficiencies. The EU (European Union) also has an EV mandate in place for the same year.

EVs don't fill me with confidence. And it's no surprise to see upside-down and backwards priorities from our illustrious leaders, Trudeau and Biden.



President Shambles: barely 12 minutes in

From the Hur-Biden transcript, page 12:

PRESIDENT BIDEN: And you learn more from that as you learn anything else. So one of my -- and the President gave me carte blanche to engage any member of the Administration. So, for example, we used to have meetings at NIH where there was all the medical -- what did, I made sure that the Defense Department was there. made sure that the, the -- NASA was there. NASA knows more about, about dealing with some of the things that have to do when working that cancer. Many people die trying to -- when they kill the cancer, they use a proton -- anyway.

We're barely 12 minutes into this conversation, and we're already seeing signs of how Joe Biden's mind will wander into the weeds. Nothing here is damning, but it's a harbinger of what's to come. We'll be seeing plenty of sentences that end with, "...anyway."

It's true that Robert Hur may have instigated the above thoughts on cancer research by referring to Biden's book, titled Promise Me, Dad. (Up to now, Hur has made no direct reference to Beau. Joe Biden did that on his own.) "Promise me" is supposedly a quote from Beau Biden, said while he was sick with glioblastoma, in an attempt to make sure Joe Biden would run for office, presumably as a way to keep the Obama legacy alive.

NB: I've chosen to title this series "President Shambles." I was inspired by John McCrarey's suggestion to title the series "The Walking Brain Dead." John's suggestion evokes zombies, and most zombies shamble from place to place. Biden the shambling zombie has left our country in a shambles... and thus was President Shambles born.



Sunday, March 17, 2024

the Joetato is out to lunch

It's been weird watching Joe Rogan come around to Trump:

Well, Joe's going. Is he gone yet?



too late for Mom, but maybe not for others

A new therapy for glioblastoma (GBM), the most common and most aggressive brain tumor, may finally be here.* It's too late to help Mom, but maybe others can benefit.

Headline:

Breakthrough Therapy Obliterates Deadly Brain Tumor in Days

Brain scans of a 72-year-old man diagnosed with a highly aggressive form of cancer known as a glioblastoma have revealed a remarkable regression in his tumor's size within days of receiving an infusion of an innovative new treatment.

Though the outcomes of two other participants with similar diagnoses were somewhat less positive, the case's success still bodes well for the search for a way to effectively cure what is currently an incurable disease.

Glioblastomas are typically about as deadly as cancers can get. Emerging from supporting cells inside the central nervous system, they can rapidly develop into malignant masses that claim up to 95 percent of patient lives within five years.

Researchers from Mass General Cancer Centre in the US suspected a treatment based on the patient's own immune system, known as CAR T-cell therapy, might succeed where other therapies fail.

Having been approved for treating blood cancers, CAR T-cell therapy's impressive ability to sniff out cancerous cells just might present advantages in destroying glioblastomas.

Patient T-cells are collected and re-engineered to recognize identifying surface markers on the outside of cancer cells before being returned via an infusion, meaning CAR T-cell therapy is somewhat like employing a local bounty hunter to slip silently through the alleys in search of a wanted villain.

One marker prevalent across a range of glioblastomas, a mutated variant of a protein called epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR), has potential as a target for CAR T-cell treatment. Unfortunately glioblastomas wear a variety of disguises that make the re-engineering process a real challenge.

To overcome this, researchers have found a way to encourage CAR T-cells to also produce antibodies that seek out non-variant EGFRs. While these proteins aren't usually expressed by brain cells, they are found on cancer cells, providing an extra identifying feature for the recruited bounty hunters.

This could be something. Or someone just got lucky.

__________

*Famous victims of this tumor include Ted Kennedy, John McCain, and Beau Biden.



a knockout blonde


Another brutal, beautiful knockout, this time via roundhouse kick in a women's-kickboxing match. The recipient of the kick didn't have her guard up high enough. Not the best roundhouse form I've ever seen, but the kick did what it was supposed to do.

ADDENDUM: I forgot to add the link! Sorry. Added now.



Slainte!

She might be A.I.-rish. Her left hand and arm are strangely connected. Or maybe she's not Irish at all, but Inuit.

Happy Saint Patrick's Day!


"ethical" veganism

I don't know whether I agree with this. It feels as if it needs to be unpacked further. My own argument against ethical veganism is future-oriented: vegans presume that the vegetal world isn't sentient, but with more and more studies of plant sentience seeming to suggest that plants may, in some limited way, possess a level of consciousness, that argument is on the edge of fraying and disappearing. What are your thoughts?



celebrate the day with buttholes!





"white rural rage": the new imaginary enemy

And a happy Saint Patrick's Day to you! Especially to all of you angry white people!

Freitas with his thoughts.

Here's Styx:

And here's the angriest white person—Matt Walsh:





if it's not one thing, it's another

I came home Friday evening to the sound of a constant drip-drip-dripping noise coming from my bathroom. Grimacing, I turned on the light and peeked in, which is how I saw a leak from out of the side of my toilet tank, right where the flush handle was. I lifted off the tank's lid to see the water level was way too high. I flushed the toilet experimentally; the water in the tank descended; the lid at the bottom of the tank closed up; the water began filling again until the floater valve's "balloon" rose to a certain point, and the water flowing into the tank shut off... until it didn't. The water flow started up again, despite the balloon's position, and the tank kept filling until it overflowed again.

Sighing, I closed the water valve connected to the wall, washed my hands, then went to consult the YouTube gurus. Most of the basic videos about this problem said the cause could be one of two things: a bad floater valve or a bad lid. The lid in my toilet tank seemed fine, and the most common recommendation for the floater valve was to manually adjust the balloon downward to make the water flow shut off earlier. Another suggestion was to open up the floater valve's top and de-gunk it in case there were any buildups of calcium, etc. inside it. There was nothing to de-gunk when I checked, and I adjusted the floater valve's balloon downward. I opened the wall valve and let the water fill again. The lower balloon did indeed cause the water flow to shut off earlier, but as before, the shutoff was only temporary, and the water started flowing again. The other recommendation I saw was that, if these two fixes aren't working (lid and floater valve), replace the floater valve with a new one. So I have one on order.

In the meantime, I'm manually shutting off the water every time I use the bathroom. I flush; I let the tank refill; I shut off the wall valve. In a few days, the new part will arrive, and I'll try to replace the floater valve myself. I could, in theory, call the toilet repairman back; I still have that other leaking problem, so he could fix both in a single visit. I email my HR department when I have a plumbing problem, and thus far, I haven't been charged anything (unlike when my A/C needs work), so I could do the lazy thing and let a pro handle both of my problems. But part of me wants to get in there and do the valve repair myself. It doesn't look that hard, and I need to get handier, anyway. Just in case some hot woman with an overinflated chest and nipples pulsing in seductive Morse Code asks me to work on her pipes.



Saturday, March 16, 2024

comedy sketch: Wolverine's powers





touchy, touchy

Does Tim Pool have a point about this guy?

I think what Pool is saying is that the whole trans thing is easy for most of us to tolerate until trans people's demands become unreasonable. One thing I've observed is that, when trans women (i.e., biological males) flip out about being "misgendered," their reaction often strikes me as a moment of masculine anger, not feminine anger. This is not true for all trans people.



even Italy hates Biden





Viva Frei on the Scott McAfee judgment re: Fani Willis

Shit don't make no sense.





"stupid judge in New York"

"Make America Florida!"

Make America Florida... but without all the Floria Men, nasty bugs and swamp creatures, woke school districts... and goddamn Disney.



the third Weird Sista

The evil triumvirate* of Fani Willis and Letitia James wouldn't be complete without this unscrupulous witch, Tiffany Henyard—a cancer on her community:

__________

*Is triumvirate the right word here? It has the Latin root vir, meaning "man," and not "man" in the abstract sense of "human," but in the specific sense of "male."



Friday, March 15, 2024

Crooked Fani still on the case

Disappointing. Very disappointing.







some "Bill Maher goes silent" videos

Does he really go silent, though? Does the man ever go silent?









Trump and "shithole" countries

Trump got dinged—and yet again called racist—for using intemperate language about certain poor, chaotic countries even though he never mentioned race as a factor in these countries' straits. (This leads me to think that Trump's accusers are themselves the racists for jumping to conclusions.) But as it turns out, certain countries are indeed shitholes, just as many big American cities can now be labeled as shitholes. 

Was Trump right to use such language? PJW argues yes.





startling! but in a good way

I'm in the "get it all out" phase of my recovery from COVID, i.e., all the mucus still in my lungs and nasal passages has to be sneezed, coughed, and blown out of me. There's still a vestigial stuffy/runny nose, some coughing, and some annoying hiccupping associated with the coughing. The best hawk-the-mucus moments come when I'm in the hot, steamy shower: I hawk up a huge wad of mucus from deep in my lungs, and it's satisfying to watch the gunk slide grudgingly and resentfully down my sink's drain.

Overall, recovery seems to be happening faster than last time, and get this: my senses of smell and taste are already coming back. I'm nowhere near 100%, but today, as I was boiling my Korean stew for lunch, I blew my nose and was suddenly able to smell the jjigae's aroma from across the room. So I'm hopeful that my smell and taste will be up and running by, oh, late next week. I'll also be restarting my staircase work next week, and all that gasping ought to hasten the unblocking of my airways and the bringing-up of any remaining mucus. 

Now, as gross as mucus is, I do realize that its very existence shows my body is doing what it's supposed to. Mucus catches all sorts of bacteria and viruses; they get trapped and eventually horked out. So God bless Brother Mucus. This time around, the path to recovery is swift, and this, I think, may be a benefit of natural immunity.



is Trump racist?

A perennial question, this time posed a year ago:





Chappell on China

China creeps closer to invading Taiwan:

China's influence on so-called "fact-checkers":

Foul play by China or sheer random happenstance? I lean toward happenstance:

The Philippines hit back at China:

Just how tight are China and Russia?





when men don't hold back

This isn't about showing you a bunch of guys hitting women. It's about showing women getting disabused of their fantasies about overpowering men. Are there edge cases where a woman could beat a man in a fight? Of course. Gina Carano in her heyday (she's gone a bit soft lately) could wipe the floor with me. But that's because I lack her training. Put Gina up against a man of similar age and level of training, and I guarantee that, ten times out of ten, she'll be defeated. Hollywood likes promoting the girl-boss action-movie fantasy, and while I don't see that as inherently evil, young ladies shouldn't take that fantasy too seriously.





Thursday, March 14, 2024

"I ain't black"





I think I'm gonna do it

For your entertainment, and mine, I do believe I shall look through the entire transcript of the Hur-Biden conversation referred to in my last post and—once per day, as I move through the transcript—put up a part of the transcript that reflects Joe Biden's senescence and senility. After I quoted part of the transcript in my previous post, I went on to watch some alt-media videos related to the transcript, and I saw that many other people had seized on the same details that I had, e.g., Biden's hesitation in recalling the year of his son Beau's death, as well as the year Donald Trump was elected (Biden guessed 2017; it was 2016), both problems occurring within a few minutes of each other. Biden later lied that Robert Hur was the one who had brought up the topic of Beau; the transcript apparently shows that it was Biden himself who evoked his son's name (several times, in fact, from what I saw when scanning the transcript); he's had a tendency to evoke sympathy by waving Beau's cadaver around.

So this ought to be a fun little treasure hunt. What should I call this upcoming series of posts? Joetato's Pearls of Wisdom? The Alzheimer Chronicles? Write in with your suggestions.

Posts will start appearing on Monday.



attack of the estrogen beast

It's funny, but there's a small cohort of commenters in the Instapundit comment threads who think we should revoke women's right to vote. It's hard to tell how many of these people (read: men) are serious and how many are just blowing off steam. But what if—and bear with me, here—there really is a "woman problem," not just in America but all over the world?





it's official: Trump vs. Biden is definitely happening

Both Donald Trump and Joe Biden garnered the requisite number of delegates, through the various primaries and caucuses, to cinch their respective party nominations for president, so it looks as though—barring untoward circumstances—we'll be seeing a version 2.0 of the 2020 election. Rematch! I realize that a lot of the public is disappointed in having these two men as their choices, but here we are. "Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard," said HL Mencken. Well, here are your choices, America. Fraud less this time, and vote more wisely. Here's Styx's take:





negative today

negative

I guess I was just a day late: my previous result was positive because it was my final day of being infected, so the couf took six days to leave my system as opposed to five. While I still have some flu symptoms, today's COVID test was negative, and I definitely feel better. So I'm going in to work, albeit a bit late. Hell, I'll stay late. It's just a relief to be out and about.

The only remaining obstacle is, once again, the loss of my senses of smell and taste. This'll be with me through part of the spring, alas. My boss joked over the phone that this is the best time to eat all the foods I don't like.



Jimmy versus the rest-stop food court





Biden on repeat

I had no idea, but Joe Biden has apparently been giving the same speech every year.

If you think old people are notorious for repeating themselves, this takes things to a new level.



Nerd Cookies with a more-aggressive-than-usual take

Nerd Cookies with some big disagreements about how parts of "Dune, Part 2" got cut and will never be shown to the public.

Nerd Cookies takes the "death of the author" route (the author doesn't own or exclusively judge his creation once it goes public; his intention counts for nothing, and the public interprets the work as it will*) and flatly declares that "Dune, Part 2" does not belong exclusively to Denis Villeneuve, so she can't understand how Villeneuve justifies not making a director's cut of the film, or at least releasing extras to allow us to see the deleted scenes and imagine what could have been. She is fair enough to release Villeneuve's own statement on why he's doing this, and while I, too, would probably like to see the cut scenes, I didn't think Villeneuve's reasoning sounded insane. His reasoning is, however, predicated on the idea that the film is ultimately his, and I can see why Nerd Cookies might deny that. Your thoughts?

__________

*I've never liked this attitude. It's too cavalier to say the author has absolutely no say in what his work was intended to be, especially if the work was an act of communication meant to be understood and properly (according to the author/creator) interpreted. At the same time, the author's work will inevitably escape his/her control. Look at how we treat our nation's founding documents and the Bible. Would first-century Jews agree with "Jesus was a socialist!" or "Jesus was a capitalist!"? Would they know what that meant?



the uncommonly honest Robert Hur

Special Counsel Robert Hur (R) is the man who had been tasked with examining and cross-examining Joe Biden regarding questions of document mishandling and Biden's fitness to be charged with a crime. The Hur report concluded a jury would see Biden as a "sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory." This conclusion caused no small amount of fury among the left. Major left-wing newspapers lined up to defend Biden. The usual set of raving left-wing TV anchors insisted Biden was mentally coherent—certainly a lot sharper than that mandarin orange! Hur's evidence for his assessment, though, was clear and stark: Biden couldn't remember things such as when he'd been vice president, nor could he even remember when his son Beau had died. Wikipedia claims that Hur lied about the Beau Biden portion of the transcript, asserting that

The transcript of Hur's discussion with President Biden show Hur lied about President Biden not remembering the date of his [son's] death. The transcript [shows] President Biden remembered exactly the date unlike Hur's summary, etc. (emphasis added)

Keep in mind that Wikipedia is itself a tool of the left. Here's what the Hur-Biden transcript actually says:

[PRESIDENT BIDEN:] And so I hadn't, I hadn't, at this point -- even though I'm at Penn, I hadn't walked away from the idea that I may run for office again. But if I ran again, I'd be running for President. And, and so what was happening, though - what month did Beau die? Oh, God, May 30th --

MS. COTTON: 2015.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE SPEAKER: 2015.

PRESIDENT BIDEN: Was it 2015 he had died?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE SPEAKER: It was May of 2015.

PRESIDENT BIDEN: It was 2015.

MR. BAUER: Or I'm not sure the month, sir, but I think that was the year.

MR. KRICKBAUM: That's right, Mr. President. It - 

PRESIDENT BIDEN: And what's happened in the meantime is that as -- and Trump gets elected in November of 2017?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE SPEAKER: 2016.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE SPEAKER: '16.

PRESIDENT BIDEN: '16, 2016. All right. So - why do I have 2017 here?

MR. SISKEL: That's when you left office, January of 2017.

Basically, as you clearly see in the transcript, Biden hesitated on the year of his son's death, which got filled in by others. If you interpret date to mean, US-style, month-day-year, then Old Joe didn't know a crucial part of the date. Beau Biden died on May 30, 2015. Essentially, Wikipedia was edited by a partisan and now shows false information (i.e., that Hur had lied). Also note that the exchange shows Biden forgot Trump's election had been in 2016.

Rather than accept the truth of the report, the Democrats elected to grill Robert Hur, with wily Adam Schiff leading the effort. This didn't go well.

Congressional Democrats and their enablers in the Executive Branch haven't quite figured out that their totalitarian fantasies haven't yet come to reality. They are under the impression that they and their agitprop minions in the mainstream media can sell any manner of fiction to the American public. They've had a lot of success, to be sure, but they are still at least eight months away from getting their Soviet jollies.

It was this lack of a grasp on reality that led them to believe that they might be able to turn Special Counsel Robert Hur's Tuesday appearance on Capitol Hill to their advantage.

Democrats had basically two objectives on Tuesday: create the impression that the Hur report exonerated Joe Biden, and repair the damage done by his assessment of Joe Biden’s poor memory.

Well, they failed at both objectives. Special Counsel Hur explicitly said that his report was not an exoneration of Joe Biden. As for the issue of Joe Biden’s memory... they didn’t do any better. In fact, anyone who reads the transcript will see just how bad Biden’s memory was while he was answering questions. Is the average American going to read the transcript of Joe Biden’s interview with Special Counsel Robert Hur? Not a chance. So, what are the Democrats and their allies in the media going to do? Just make stuff up about what the transcript actually says.

It's true, they did make up a lot of stuff, but Hur was too good to let any of it stick. 

They wanted to be crafty about creating a false narrative, but they had Adam Schiff running point for the effort. Any time that Schiff isn't talking to a friendly, he embarrasses himself. He's too stupid to know that he's embarrassing himself, of course, so he never stops doing it. 

Over at Townhall, my colleague Madeline Leesman chronicles the exchange between Schiff and Hur. The gist of it is that Schiff takes extreme umbrage with the fact that Hur accurately described the Joe Biden that we all see every time he's on camera. Schiff rails against the "political" nature of Hur's conclusions, which is the mother of all projections. Throughout it all, Hur remains unflappable, while Schiff flails and gets increasingly condescending. 

From Madeline's post:

“You were not born yesterday; you understood exactly what you were doing,” Schiff continued.

“What you are suggesting is I shape, sanitize, omit portions of my reasoning and explanation to the attorney general for political reasons,” Hur responded before Schiff's time ran out. 

I don't know much about Robert Hur, but he seems to be a stalwart. Unfortunately, I think the pressure got to him, and he just retired from the Department of Justice, where justice only seems to happen when the Democrats aren't steering the ship.

A note about the original transcript of the DOJ interview with Biden: it's available online at any number of sources. If it was released by the DOJ, there's a big risk for the Democrats that anyone can dig into the script and find all sorts of damning information about Joe Biden and his eroded memory. In the small bit that I quoted above, we saw that Biden hesitated on the year of his son's death, and he got the year of Trump's election wrong. Supposedly, there's evidence that Biden was unsure of when he was vice president under Obama. What other treasures lie buried in the interview? I happen to have the Adobe Acrobat full suite, so when I downloaded the entire transcript PDF, I took the time to convert everything to searchable, optical character recognition text. With the power of the search tool now in my hands, I might do some digging of my own.

The Democrats were under the impression that everyone in the Department of Justice was a political tool to be used as they needed. Hur killed that vibe for them. That's the true source of the anger of Schiff and his colleagues. Oh, they're plenty mad about Hur's forthright description of the greatly diminished state of Biden's memory too. They need all the help that they can get selling him as fully functional to the electorate, after all. 

I'm not a fan of psychologizing, but this seems about right.



Wednesday, March 13, 2024

Crackermilk with a cracker joke

Asians can't drive.



Joey Swoll: the crusade goes on

Fitness culture has become toxic on many fronts. There's a whole subculture of women who dress in super-tight clothing and film themselves as they work out. When a man happens to glance at them, they shame him by slapping a video up online and claiming he's some kind of pervert. Joey Swoll (obviously not his real name) has been combatting these narcissistic twats for a while now. Here's one of his videos.

Swoll notes that these women don't help the real victims of real harassment by posting these stupid videos. Amala Ekpunobi notes that dressing in a way that leaves nothing to the imagination is also not helping. Obviously, a man who does more than just glance is a creep, and full-on rape is never a woman's fault no matter how provocatively she dresses, but come on, ladies: maybe try dressing more conservatively at the gym to minimize stares. And don't assume a single glance means the guy is eye-raping you.



guess who got the couf again?!

The timeline, near as I can figure, was this:

Friday, March 8: wake up, do stairs, see "Dune 2." Sore-throat symptoms in the evening.
Saturday, March 9: full-blown flu symptoms—sore throat, fever, stuffy/runny nose, etc.
Sunday, March 10: same level of suck.
Monday, March 11: feeling much better, but still symptomatic. Go to work.
Tuesday, March 12: sick day. Not feeling awful, but resting anyway.
Wednesday, March 13: Feeling even better, but a COVID test shows me as positive.

COVID-positive results. If quizzes make you quizzical, then tests make you...

This is disturbing because, when I first got COVID, I tested at the beginning of the five-day self-isolation period (positive), then again on the morning of the sixth day (negative). This time around, I became aware of my symptoms on Friday, so if Friday is Day 1, then today is Day 6, and based on last time, I ought to be better now, and testing negative. Upshot: this is a longer, lighter, gentler COVID than last time: I got knocked on my ass over the weekend, but I felt good enough to go to work on Monday (where I must've been shedding the virus like a champ). The boss heard my voice, though, and suggested I knock off early. On Tuesday, still symptomatic, I took it upon myself to have a sick day, and as I thought the matter through, I decided I'd give myself a COVID self-test, which turned out positive. So: no work for Kevin today. I'll be staying home.

I'd originally thought this wasn't COVID because the symptoms weren't nearly as bad as last time. Guess the symptoms fooled me. In pondering how I got the couf again, I've tentatively concluded that when I went to see "Dune," I used the subway—Lines 3 and 8, transferring at Garak Market Station—to go to and from Jamshil Station. The subway was crowded both ways, and at the best of times, a stuffed Korean subway is a petri dish, so I'm thinking I got the virus that way. Taking those subway rides was also a big departure from my normal weekday routine, taking me deep into the precincts of Virus City.

In the US, they've made a big deal about dropping the self-isolation protocol and treating COVID as if it were the flu—something the American right had been saying to do for years, but which the leftie media mockingly dismissed and rejected in sanctimonious article after article. That said, I'm self-isolating for today; I'll test myself again tomorrow, and if I'm negative, I'll head in to work.

The biggest disappointment in all this (aside from once again losing my sense of taste) has been natural immunity. Did it or didn't it help? I can only theorize that it helped a little, hence the alleviated symptoms, but it didn't help nearly as much as I'd thought it would.

All my friends, coworkers, and acquaintances got the shot and still got COVID. Some have, since then, gotten infected a second and even a third time. So injections don't seem to help, and natural immunity isn't quite the aegis that it had been made out to be. The moral of the story seems to be that life comes with no guarantees.

I'm sure I'll be better by the end of this week. Not my senses of smell and taste, though. If it's anything like last time, we'll be well into spring by the time I can enjoy food again.

Final note: I haven't done the stairs at all this week, and I'm just taking it easy for now. Since I now know this is thanks to COVID, I understand why I've been so out of breath on any set of stairs these past few days. COVID is, first and foremost, a respiratory infection. I'll restart the stairs next week, dialing back my workout and rebuilding myself until I'm finally back at 1.25 staircases... then onward to 1.5!



decriminalizing hard drugs

For a long time, I've been an advocate for legalizing drugs from soft to hard, but with the proviso that a deep and thorough care infrastructure be put in place—special rooms, detox centers, clinics, psychiatric help, etc. Simply letting the animals loose with a ton of drugs is a recipe for disaster, as the above video illustrates.

I've begun to think, though, that my original idea of putting the government in charge of addict care is not a good idea: as with everything else, the government would find a way to fuck this up, too. So we'd need a market-driven solution. I still think legalization is possible if there are safety nets in place, but I have little faith that drug users can manage themselves on their own. Addictive personalities need help.



it's bots all the way down

Stats-wise, March started off the way February ended: quietly, and with relatively few hits. But within a few days, my unique-visit numbers were back in the thousands, then the teen-thousands, and even though I'm not even halfway through March, I've already broken the February stats record. For the past few days, I've been getting over 20,000 visits per day. Yesterday ended with over 28,000.

And I'm convinced it's all bots.

Remember how February was a strong month, with 10K to 15K visits per day before the end? And remember how it all suddenly fizzled out? I called that "swarming behavior" for lack of a better description, and I now think that that's what I'm seeing. Over 20K daily visits is unimaginable for me, and it's not translating into any sort of fame or infamy. I'm not getting comments from strangers who have declared themselves to be new readers—not even AI-inflected comments. I suspect I can lose all of these "visitors" by ceasing to post for a day or two: within 36 hours, 20K visits will drop down to 400-600 visits per day, easily.

So this whole thing is grade inflation, if you will, and while the average proportion of bot visitors for normal blogs is around 50%, in my case, I'd say it's closer to 90%. So I do not give myself any credit for the inflated numbers.

It's bots all the way down.



is this Michael Moore or AI?

Presumably, this is from before the 2016 election of Donald Trump.* I doubt Moore believes, any longer, anything he said in the following video. I assume that's why the video's title contains the word "flip-flop."

So I guess that's Moore's one allotted moment of clarity.

__________

*In fact, the clip is from a 2016 Moore documentary called "Michael Moore in Trumpland." And it's taken out of context.



The Attack: review

Kurt Schlichter is a retired US Army colonel who is a thinker, podcaster, and writer of fiction and nonfiction. As I learned very quickly in reading his 2023 novel The Attack, Schlichter leans decidedly rightward, and his novel essentially panders to every suspicion the right currently has about the damaging nature of an open-borders policy. This novel is not nuanced in the slightest. That said, the quality of the prose is good, and the story, told as a series of interviews, is an easily digestible page-turner. While I do lean a bit more right than left these days, I also tend to feel a little tingle of skepticism when a story confirms pretty much every belief I have without challenging me in any way. So in a sense, I was the perfect audience for this book while also holding myself at a critical distance.

The book is about a three-day event simply called The Attack, which takes place on August 27 in the near future, sometime during Joe Biden's term although neither Biden nor VP Kamala Harris is mentioned by name. (Both executives are portrayed as arrogant idiots, of course.) The novel is essentially a collection of interviews with people who've survived The Attack—first responders, cartel bosses, military officers, Reaper Team members (those tasked with tracking down and killing the enemy all over the world in the aftermath of The Attack), and even a few left-leaning folks. The Attack itself, happening over three days, is divided into three phases: Day 1 is devoted to terrorist mass shootings in high-traffic public areas. This forces the government to reflexively institute a lockdown and a shelter-in-place order. Thus, Day 2 is more mass murder, but the targets are American homes. With the police and the National Guard scattered and distracted, the armed people fare better than the unarmed. Day 3 is about attacking major infrastructure from airports to power stations, and even stores as a way to mess with the US food supply.

The idea behind The Attack is to envision an event similar to the October 7 event that hit Israel. How would Americans respond? The book declares that the terrorists assumed America had gone soft and would easily lose the will to fight, but The Attack had the opposite effect: with over 100,000 citizens killed, America ends up initially imposing martial law and holding expedited trials of every terrorist captured (including leftist campus insurgents who've helped the enemy). Most of these terrorists come from Muslim countries, but they get help from the Chinese, the Russians, and Mexican cartels. The terrorists hit us everywhere at once, all over the country (hit the mainland, at least: Alaska and Hawaii are never mentioned). American infrastructure is temporarily down, but with the people finding their fighting spirit again, repairs are made, new laws are written, and many legal reforms are put in place, including—at long last—the securing of the US-Mexico border. The book suggests that it would take a great shock like this for America to get back to basic priorities.

If you lean further right than I do, you'll read The Attack and see nothing but truth in it: the scenario seems all too plausible. If you lean left, you're more likely to see the book as a febrile, half-baked fantasy that caters to a fearful and fear-mongering mindset. I found the book to be both readable and cartoonish, and while I respect that it brings up issues like vulnerable infrastructure and the problem with porous borders, there were moments when even I couldn't quite take everything seriously. That said, the telling chapters in which Schlichter depicts what certain leftists thought of The Attack were at least an honest attempt at empathizing with the enemy. I doubt a motivated leftist writer could get into the minds of righties to the same degree. I'm sure leftists who read the book will disagree.

For me, in thinking about 9/11 and how much worse it could have been, I have trouble imagining terrorists ever wanting or needing to do anything on such a massive scale even though Schlichter provides us a glimpse of the enemy's super-simplified command-and-control structure that made coordinating The Attack so much easier. If anything, Schlichter may have given the enemy too much credit. Personally, I think that, if you want to really strike terror in the hearts of Americans, if you truly wish to demoralize us as a people, you grab a couple hundred super-famous celebrities (politicians, journalists, actors, celebrity chefs, talk-show hosts) and TikTok influencers (whom all the young people would know), then torture and kill them on camera—high-quality footage only, please, none of the usual shaky, grainy, low-battery nonsense! Tripods, good lighting, and lots of celebrities reading forced confessions before getting their heads sawn off.

So I'll leave it up to you: if you're a leftie, read The Attack for a good laugh but at least consider how some of this dark scenario might be plausible. If you're a rightie, read The Attack to confirm your fears but be skeptical enough to see the pandering agenda.



the reality checks keep coming

Bill Maher is a personal friend of Gavin Newsom, but he can't think of a single positive thing to say about Newsom except his dubious claim that "he [Newsom] can win." Meanwhile, Maher keeps receiving reality check after reality check about how this monkey has run California into the ground. That's literally what this lady says.

A comment to the linked video says:

We tried recalling him but noooooo, California wouldn't listen. Now here we are.



Tuesday, March 12, 2024

NYC Fire Department: Styx's hot take + Liberal Hivemind

Styx sees a double standard: if you're a FDNY (offically, Fire Department of the City of New York) fireman at a public event, you can applaud Letitia James, but you can't boo her. Another double standard: if a Republican had appeared on stage, would the fire-department brass have sent out a threatening memo? We all know the answer to that. New York City keeps on dredging up new reasons for people not to invest in it.

And here's more NYC nonsense: Eric Adams sides with local environmental bard to crack down on NYC's most sacred product: pizza.

And here's Liberal Hivemind's take on the situation: the false narrative about Trump is fracturing—





wheel-kick knockout

They normally tell you never to use spinning kicks, wheel kicks, etc. in a real fight because, at some point during your spin, you're leaving your back open to your opponent. I'd say that that's generally good advice, but every once in a while, this happens, and someone gets lucky. (That's a beaut of a knockout, by the way.)



PJW on some of those "immigrants"





NYC protest stupidity





"I'm pregnant!"

I'd really like to believe most trans folks aren't mentally ill. Then something like this happens.

To be pregnant, you need a uterus. Does this fool think he has a uterus? Let's see the ultrasound pics! And let's check in again after nine months!