Memes that made me laugh 308

 

Gathered from around the Internet over the past week.  Click any image for a larger view.

Sunday morning music

 

I'm not particularly sympathetic towards the environmental movement, particularly because so many of their claims have proved to be hyperbole, exaggeration and failed prophecies of doom.  Two well-known examples would be the late Paul Ehrlich's "The Population Bomb" and Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth", neither of which has been borne out by events - but both of which are still lauded by environmentalists for promoting awareness of their respective causes.

Nevertheless, I acknowledge there is empirical evidence of some environmentalist's concerns, which can be independently confirmed.  One of these is the retreat of the glaciers, which is undoubtedly caused by rising global temperatures.  What causes these temperature changes is the subject of fierce debate that is still ongoing, of course.  However, I think we can agree that it's a subject worthy of concern and further investigation.

Swiss singer/songwriter To Athena decided to highlight the issue.

Singer To Athena, accompanied by a small ensemble of musicians, staged the performance inside a glacial cave on the Morteratsch glacier in southeastern Switzerland on March 25. The group hiked through the snow before sunrise, instruments in hand, to reach the cave in time for filming. The performance was captured for a music video of her song "Collide," organized in collaboration with Greenpeace Switzerland.

The Morteratsch glacier, located near the resort town of Pontresina in the canton of Graubünden, has been shrinking for decades. Scientists estimate it is retreating by roughly 50 meters (about 164 feet) per year, with meltwater steadily carving tunnels and caverns into the ice from within.

. . .

Swiss glaciologist Giovanni Kappenberger, who was present at the site, said the cave is a stark symbol of accelerating ice loss.

"The more meltwater there is, the more caves form, and the faster the glacier disappears," he said.

Kappenberger added that the cave is unlikely to survive another summer. He noted that the glacier is losing at least 10 meters of ice from above annually, while warm air flowing through in summer simultaneously melts it from below.

There's more at the link.

Here's the video of her performance.

Regardless of our feelings about climate change and/or globular worming, I think we can agree that was a very attractive piece of music, and a great way to highlight a very real problem.

Peter

Almost beyond parody

 

When I first heard about this a few days ago, I dismissed it as a fake news gimmick.  I mean, who would be dumb enough to actually say something like this?

Turns out I was wrong.  Jim Treacher reports:

Okay, let me try this: MMIWG2SLGBTQQIA+.

That stands for: Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, Two-Spirit, Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, Questioning, Intersex, Asexual, and additional identities.

Again, that’s MMIWG2SLGBTQQIA+. I find it helps to go three letters at a time. Like when you’re giving your account number to the customer service guy, who says his name is Steve but he has an Indian accent.

The speaker there is named Leah Gazan. (Oops. There’s a warning sign right there.) Who is a member of [the] Canadian Parliament. She’s in the NDP, whatever that is.

There's more at the link.

Rick Moran adds:

MMIWG2SLGBTQQIA+ is an all-inclusive, all-encompassing, balls-to-the-wall, slam bang, wham-bam-thank-you-ma'am acronym for the totality of the gender bending, sexually "unique" population of Canada. 

. . .

Budgeting for each and every identity, preference, and fantasy spirit in the MMIWG2SLGBTQQIA+ community would blow up the Canadian budget. 

I fondly recall when sexual preference identities were simple: LGB and maybe T, XYZ, believe you me. It was easy. It was a simpler time then. We didn't have to worry about offending someone by using the wrong pronoun. We didn't have to worry about making some poor, disturbed "T" or "Q" explode in tears from being misgendered.  

It would be so much easier (and we'd be less likely to offend) if the MMIWG2SLGBTQQIA+ "community" would just walk around with name tags identifying which gender they are, what their sexual identity is, and most importantly, what pronouns they prefer to be referred to.

Yes, that's a joke. No Nazi "Star of David" references, please.

Not that I'd use them. But since misgendering is going to be an Olympic sport in 2030, it would be helpful to know who we should insult.

Again, more at the link.

And yet . . . even when they come up with absolute howlers such as the acronym above . . . the LGBWTF crowd actually expect us to take them seriously.  They (well, some of them, anyway) expect us to take the acronym seriously.

What are they smoking???  Whatever it is, where can I buy some?  If I'm going to have to read, or listen to, or endure that sort of crap any longer, I'm going to need all the help I can get!

Oy, gevalt...

Peter

The state and "Cheddarisation"

 

The word "Cheddarisation" threw me when I saw it in the title of an article at Off-Guardian, but having read it, it makes sense.

Once, Britain was a landscape of cheese. There were hundreds of distinct regional varieties, each rooted in a particular place and shaped by local conditions and practices.

These cheeses were not interchangeable. They reflected differences in soil, pasture, climate and animal breeds. Their characteristics shifted with the seasons. They were products of specific environments and the knowledge of those who worked within them. But that diversity has largely disappeared.

Today, most cheese available through mainstream supply chains is standardised. It is consistent in taste, texture and appearance, regardless of where it is produced. Variation has been minimised with predictability the defining feature.

The turning point came during the Second World War. Faced with the challenge of feeding a population under rationing, the British government intervened in food production through the Ministry of Food. One of its key decisions was to consolidate cheese-making into a single, standardised form: Cheddar.

The rationale was practical. Cheddar was durable, transportable and relatively straightforward to produce at scale. In wartime conditions, these qualities made it suitable for centralised distribution. Efficiency took precedence over diversity.

. . .

What occurred in the British dairy sector can be understood as an early example of a wider process: the replacement of complex, localised systems with simplified, standardised ones. For the purposes of clarity, this process might be described as cheddarisation.

Cheddarisation is not confined to cheese. It refers to a more general pattern in which diversity is reduced in favour of uniformity, and local variation is treated as an obstacle to efficiency. Systems are reorganised so that outputs can be standardised, scaled and controlled ... Once a system is simplified enough to be managed from a central desk, the people within that system lose their ability to act outside of it.

There's more at the link.

Off-Guardian offers a number of articles about what it calls "the anti-human agenda", of which the above article is one example.  Categories include:

War on Food

War on Money

Climate Change

Health Tyranny

There are many interesting discussions under each heading.  Recommended reading.

Peter

The real problem of "living up to your income"

 

I know plenty of people who are using almost everything they earn to support their lifestyle.  Some do it because they earn so little, they can't afford to do anything else with it!  Others do so because they want much more than they actually need, and they earn a salary high enough to afford wants as well as needs, so they spend all their "excess" money on those luxuries.

That's where the trap comes in for everybody, but particularly for higher-earning individuals and families.  They're committed to repaying hire-purchase accounts, credit card bills, leases, and what have you.  They've used their surplus income to "bring forward" consumption that they'd otherwise have had to put off until they managed to save enough to buy it.  Instead of saving money, they borrow money in order to spend even more.  Psychology Today examines this behavior.

For decades, America has operated on a simple yet precarious principle: Borrow from tomorrow to pay for today. This mindset, deeply embedded in our economic systems and individual behaviors, has created a teetering tower of debt that threatens to collapse under its own weight. As a nation, we've normalized living beyond our means—from federal deficit spending to consumer credit card debt—with seemingly little consideration for the inevitable reckoning.

. . .

The national debt has grown exponentially rather than linearly, suggesting that each generation has become more comfortable leveraging the future than its predecessor.

. . .

Historical evidence suggests that debt-fueled economies eventually face correction. The 2008 financial crisis provided a preview of what happens when leveraged systems begin to unravel. Yet instead of fundamentally restructuring our approach, we responded with even more borrowing and financial engineering.

There's more at the link.

The problem is that such spending habits last only as long as there's money to spend.  I'm seeing more and more cases where income is suddenly cut off (as in being fired, or made redundant) or greatly reduced (getting a new job, but having to accept a much lower wage or salary than you made in the old job).  Having weighed oneself down with debt and spending patterns based on a higher income, suddenly one is faced with creditors demanding repayment, vehicles being repossessed, and all the other burdens of an over-leveraged household.  Kids whine when they're told they can't have all they're used to, spouses blame each other for the sudden hole in their finances, and in some cases families break down altogether under the strain.

Karl Denninger sums up the problem.

The real problem for ordinary people in the economy is that anything that is unsustainable over a sufficient amount of time will blow up in your face.  But when will it blow up?  That's a more-difficult problem.  For example we know that housing is largely locked up in a large part of the country -- indeed, most of it.  In those places where it sort-of-isn't there are other serious problems including property tax and insurance concerns that might as well have it locked up from a standpoint of actual affordability.  Add to this that many formerly thought of as "safe" professions which earn a nice wage, including computer science and medical, are rapidly being destroyed in terms of forward earnings capacity by both AI and foreign worker imports.  There are plenty of stories already of people living quite high on the hog having accumulated a lifestyle with mandatory monthly spend commensurate with $250,000 wages suddenly being laid off and finding no replacement for that wage at even half what they formerly made.  If you've managed to get yourself into a leveraged position with a forward requirement for such earnings and they disappear you're in very serious trouble indeed.

Again, more at the link.

Just this week (so far) I've heard from friends and acquaintances fighting that very issue.  Examples:

• A family has been reduced from three cars to one, because they couldn't afford the lease payments, insurance, etc. for the two very nice vehicles used by father and mother.  The remaining old beater had been given to their teenage son, but he's had to give it back to the family.  Neither he nor they are very happy about that.
• Two families are urgently seeking low-cost rental accommodation because their nice big McMansion-style houses are being repossessed.  They're finding it almost impossible to locate anything as nice as what they had, and even lesser houses are more expensive to rent than they had anticipated.  It's gotten to the point of screaming fights with their kids because they're going to have to share two rooms, one for the boys and one for the girls, rather than each have their own space.
• Two families have had to give up their pets to shelters for (hopefully) adoption.  It's been a real trauma, particularly for the children, as they can't be sure their pets will go to loving homes where they'll be properly cared for.
• I know too many people who are using one credit card to pay off another each month, never reducing what they owe.

With those problems fresh in mind, you can bet that my wife and I are checking on our monthly expenses to make sure we can fit into a reasonable budget, and keep our heads above water if any sort of financial emergency hits.  Recent medical bills would have made that very problematic, except that you, dear readers, came to our rescue last year, to our deep and abiding gratitude.  Even so, it's up to us to use what we have wisely, and not waste it.  We also made a decision early in our marriage to get out of debt as far as possible (following Dave Ramsay's advice), and pay cash for routine expenses wherever possible, and pay off our credit cards and other accounts in full every month rather than accumulate a balance, and save money in an emergency fund.  Those decisions have been a Godsend for us, sparing us more than a little worry.

I guess more and more of us are going to be facing this conundrum as prices increase and jobs become harder to find.  It's a good time for all of us to take stock of where we are, what we're spending, and how we might cope if similar problems rear their ugly heads in our lives.  If you have helpful suggestions that might help others to do that, please share them in Comments.

Peter

Faith, incentivized!

 

Stephan Pastis does it again.  Click the image to be taken to a larger version of the cartoon at the "Pearls Before Swine" Web page.

At least it wasn't bourbon.  That would have been filled with the wrong kind of spirit...

Peter