... according to Jennie Breeden and her "The Devil's Panties" comic strip. Click the image to be taken to a larger version at her Web page.
"Renewed our vows". Gigglesnort!
Peter
Friday, July 5, 2024
Again I say it: There is NO, repeat, NO trustworthy news coming out of the Ukraine war...
... unless and until you verify it through at least half a dozen reliable (well, as reliable as possible) sources. I don't care whether Ukraine or Russia is claiming something: they're all lying.
The latest example is the "scandal" over Ukraine leader Zelensky's wife's alleged purchase of a Bugatti sports car. It was made up out of whole cloth by Russian propaganda sources. You can read all about it in this BBC report, which shows how it was created and disseminated, and why it's "fake news".
I've gotten to the point where, if I know that a news report originated from one or the other side's official sources, I automatically disbelieve it. The only people I'll listen to are those that use independent sources (particularly satellite imagery, reports from people on the ground who've established a reputation for reliability, and so on). If they report and/or confirm something, all well and good. If they don't . . . fuggetaboutit.
The same goes for video clips of fighting in the area. We've seen "recycled" video footage dating back years, even decades, purporting to show atrocities. I'm sure there are some real clips among them, but when it's so difficult to verify any of them, why waste time trusting them? Given modern technology and editing facilities, the camera can - and does - lie like a trooper.
Trouble is, too many of our legislators believe - or pretend to believe - such biased sources, and use them to justify voting for a few dozen billion dollars more for Ukraine, or more sanctions against Russia. They don't want to know the truth, because if they did (and their constituents did) they'd be voted out of office for being spendthrift wasters of taxpayer dollars. US veterans need health care? Victims of natural disasters in our country need help to recover? None of that matters as much as funneling more of our dollars into the bottomless pit of the Ukraine war - not to mention the few billion here and there that get kicked back to our politicians as a "Thank you!" for their compliance.
One of the nicest things about President Trump's term of office was that he didn't get America involved in any more foreign adventures; in fact, he pulled a lot of US troops out of areas they had no need to be, and brought them home. That alone offers good grounds to vote for him next time round, IMHO.
Peter
So much for globular worming and sea level rise
Courtesy of Pascal Fervor, commenting at Liberty's Torch, we find this object lesson in reality. Click the image for a larger view.
Next time a climate alarmist tries to pull "The seas are rising!" on you, show them that picture, and ask them to explain it. They won't, of course - because they can't, unless they admit that sea levels on the whole are not rising.
Thank you, ancient Romans!
Peter
Thursday, July 4, 2024
"America grew tall out of the cramping ache of old Europe"
That's from a 2013 article in Vanity Fair, examining why European elites unjustifiably feel so smugly superior to Americans and their country. I thought it might be fitting, this July 4th, to bring it to your attention. Here's an excerpt.
Enough. Enough, enough, enough of this convivial rant, this collectively confirming bigotry. The nasty laugh of little togetherness, or Euro-liberal insecurity. It’s embarrassing, infectious, and belittling. Look at that European snapshot of America. It is so unlike the country I have known for 30 years. Not just a caricature but a travesty, an invention. Even on the most cursory observation, the intellectual European view of the New World is a homemade, Old World effigy that suits some internal purpose. The belittling, the discounting, the mocking of Americans is not about them at all. It’s about us, back here on the ancient, classical, civilized Continent. Well, how stupid can America actually be? On the international list of the world’s best universities, 14 of the top 20 are American. Four are British. Of the top 100, only 4 are French, and Heidelberg is one of 4 that creeps in for the Germans. America has won 338 Nobel Prizes. The U.K., 119. France, 59. America has more Nobel Prizes than Britain, France, Germany, Japan, and Russia combined. Of course, Nobel Prizes aren’t everything, and America’s aren’t all for inventing Prozac or refining oil. It has 22 Peace Prizes, 12 for literature. (T. S. Eliot is shared with the Brits.)
And are Americans emotionally dim, naïve, irony-free? Do you imagine the society that produced Dorothy Parker and Lenny Bruce doesn’t understand irony? It was an American who said that political satire died when they awarded the Nobel Peace Prize to Henry Kissinger. It’s not irony that America lacks; it’s cynicism. In Europe, that arid sneer out of which nothing is grown or made is often mistaken for the creative scalpel of irony. And what about vulgarity? Americans are innately, sniggeringly vulgar. What, vulgar like Henry James or Eleanor Roosevelt or Cole Porter, or the Mormons? Again, it’s a question of definitions. What Americans value and strive for is straight talking, plain saying. They don’t go in for ambiguity or dissembling, the etiquette of hidden meaning, the skill of the socially polite lie. The French in particular confuse unadorned direct language with a lack of culture or intellectual elegance. It was Camus who sniffily said that only in America could you be a novelist without being an intellectual. There is a belief that America has no cultural depth or critical seriousness. Well, you only have to walk into an American bookshop to realize that is wildly wrong and willfully blind. What about Mark Twain, or jazz, or Abstract Expressionism?
What is so contrary about Europe’s liberal antipathy to America is that any visiting Venusian anthropologist would see with the merest cursory glance that America and Europe are far more similar than they are different. The threads of the Old World are woven into the New. America is Europe’s greatest invention. That’s not to exclude the contribution to America that has come from around the globe, but it is built out of Europe’s ideas, Europe’s understanding, aesthetic, morality, assumptions, and laws. From the way it sets a table to the chairs it sits on, to the rhythms of its poetry and the scales of its music, the meter of its aspirations and its laws, its markets, its prejudices and neuroses. The conventions and the breadth of America’s reason are European.
This isn’t a claim for ownership, or for credit. But America didn’t arrive by chance. It wasn’t a ship that lost its way. It wasn’t coincidence or happenstance. America grew tall out of the cramping ache of old Europe.
There's much more at the link.
It's worth a read, if others' opinion about America bothers you. Since moving here almost thirty years ago, I've become more and more proud to be an adopted American. Despite all this country's innumerable problems, I wouldn't choose to be anywhere else. I'd rather stay here and help fix my home.
A happy and blessed Independence Day to us all!
Peter
A tourist trap disappears
It seems an old sword has vanished. It's deemed by locals (particularly those in the tourist trade) to be the original, real, cross-my-heart-and-hope-to-die, pinky-swear Durandal belonging to the mythically-enhanced, legendary Roland, one of Charlemagne's military governors during the 8th century AD. The Telegraph reports:
It is southern France’s answer to Excalibur, the mythical sword that King Arthur legendarily pulled from a rock to obtain the British throne.
However, Rocamadour has no idea who managed to wrench its famed Durandal sword from the stone in which it had been embedded for centuries, particularly because it was 10 metres (32.5 feet) off the ground.
All the town knows is that one of its main tourist attractions has vanished. It is presumed stolen and an investigation has been launched.
Durandal was the sword of Roland, a legendary paladin (knight) and officer of Charlemagne in French epic literature. According to the legend, Durandal was indestructible and the sharpest sword in all existence, capable of cutting through giant boulders with a single strike.
Its magical qualities are recounted in the 11th-century epic poem The Song of Roland, the oldest surviving major work of French literature.
. . .
Medieval “myth” has it that before it was given to Roland, Charlemagne received Durandal from an angel. Before his death at the Battle of Roncevaux Pass, Roland is said to have tried in vain to break it on the rocks to prevent his enemies from seizing it. He finally threw it into the air to save it. Miraculously travelling hundreds of kilometres, it is said to have embedded itself in the rock face of Rocamadour.
There's more at the link.
I can't help laughing at the fuss and bother. It's patently obvious to anybody with two working brain cells to rub together that Rocamadour installed a fake Durandal to attract medieval tourists, who were rather more credulous than their modern equivalents. It's the same sort of fake as the "pieces cut from the sail of Saint Peter's fishing-boat!" that pedlars sold to pilgrims, or the fabled "Holy House of Loreto", the purported original home of the Virgin Mary. It supposedly flew (powered by angels) from Nazareth in the Holy Land, via two other locations, until it landed in Loreto, Italy (which proceeded to make a fortune from pilgrims thronging there to see it).
(Perhaps Boeing might like to hire the angels concerned? They need all the help they can get right now!)
So, a long-standing fake has been stolen. So what??? Just whip up a convincing copy of it, put it back in place, and Bob's your uncle. It's not as if the stolen fake has any value, intrinsic or otherwise. "Flew from Roncevaux to Rocamadour", my fundamental jujube!
(On the other hand, if President Biden turns up wielding the stolen Durandal copy during his next debate with former President Trump, all sorts of things might get more interesting! It might help his cutting remarks . . . )
Peter
Wednesday, July 3, 2024
This year, next year, sometime, never...
The latest Sequential Art cartoon made me grin wryly - and snarl a little, too. Click the image to be taken to a larger version at the comic's Web page.
I've had far too many one-sided telephone conversations like that. When can we have a menu tree that includes, "Press hash to permanently, utterly destroy the company's automated answering system"? I reckon that would be the most popular and most-used option out there!
Peter
Fireworks
I come from a country (South Africa) where fireworks were never a big cultural "thing". The 5th of November (Guy Fawkes Night) was celebrated as a sort of hangover from colonial days, but not in a big way. Dad would buy a small box of mixed fireworks, and us kids would wave sparklers enthusiastically while Roman Candles and small rockets lit up the sky over the garden - but it wasn't that big a deal to us. It was almost exclusively a family affair, with few or no public displays of fireworks. We didn't spend the rest of the year breathlessly waiting for the next round of bangs, booms and zooms.
Thus, when I came to this country, I was taken aback by the enthusiasm shown by almost everyone, adults and kids alike, at the prospect of converting large sums of money into smoke and (particularly) noise. I can do that on a shooting range and get some useful practice out of it, but just blowing paper, cardboard and powder into the sky? It simply doesn't do much for me. Last weekend, when the town we live in held its annual July 4th fireworks display a little early, I didn't even bother to go out and look. I did some writing at my desk, comforted the cats (who were being driven frantic by the excessive noise) and endured as patiently as possible until it was over. I know some (a lot?) of my friends here can't figure that out. To them, this is a highlight of the civic year, and the more noise we make, the better. Well, I'm glad they enjoy it.
Something I could never figure out was the seemingly immense number of small fireworks stalls and outlets along the sides of local roads. Within a couple of miles radius of my home there are at least five, all operating seasonally for major celebrations like July 4th. A couple of weeks before the day they'll open their doors, and close them again a week afterwards, reverting to their usual status of derelict old shipping containers and garden sheds, locked up until next time. I wondered how on earth their owners could make a living off such haphazard businesses . . . until I read Mr. B's explanation.
One of the guys that hangs around the airport works for an FBO….and his side job is managing at a Fireworks Outlet.
He was telling us that their market research tells them that the average customer spends nearly 820 dollars for the Independence Day holiday….And their average customer is on welfare or other government assistance, has 4 children, and gets some form of housing subsidy. They nearly all live below the poverty line.
Yet, oddly, they have enough money for fireworks.
He also said that the year they gave out Covid subsidy checks was the best year ever for the business.
There's more at the link.
The average customer spends $820 for Independence Day celebrations? I don't know if that's for food and drinks as well as fireworks, but even so, ye gods and little fishes! Those fireworks are over and above the bigger displays put on by almost all cities, towns and villages all over the country. Around this time of year, you could fly over rural northern Texas and think you were having a flashback to World War II, with every town in sight trying to shoot down everything passing overhead!
I'm sorry. I must be holiday-spirit-deficient in some way, because the thought of that much money being blown sky-high at this time of year - when many, many people are finding it so hard to make ends meet - is just . . . weird.
Peter
What if this happened to the Mississippi River?
I was interested to read that an ancient course of the Ganges River in India, some 2,500 years old, has been discovered.
Earthquakes, caused by the shifting of Earth’s tectonic plates, have the potential to transform the face of the world. Now, for the first time, scientists have evidence that earthquakes can reroute rivers: It happened to the Ganges River 2,500 years ago.
. . .
In a July 2016 study, Dr. Michael Steckler ... had previously reconstructed the tectonic plate movements — gigantic slowly moving pieces of Earth’s crust and uppermost mantle — that account for earthquakes experienced in the Ganges Delta.
His models showed that the likely source of earthquakes in the region is more than 100 miles (160 kilometers) away from the sand volcanoes that Chamberlain and her colleagues found. Based on the large size of the sand volcanoes, the quake must have been at least a 7 or an 8 magnitude — approaching the size of the Great 1906 San Francisco earthquake.
. . .
About 50 miles (85 kilometers) away from the sand volcanoes, the scientists also found a large river channel that filled with mud at roughly the same time. This finding indicates that 2,500 years ago, the course of the river dramatically changed. The proximity of these events in both time and space suggests that a massive earthquake 2,500 years ago is the cause of this rerouting of the Ganges.
There's more at the link.
The now-demonstrated fact that a major earthquake can change the course of even a huge river like the Ganges, moving it 50 to 100 miles away from its previous course, made me think hard. I don't know that we've ever seen the like in North America; most of our rivers have changed course through a combination of erosion and silting (as far as I know, anyway). However, what might happen if something like the New Madrid Fault let go in a big way?
Earthquakes that occur in the New Madrid Seismic Zone potentially threaten parts of seven American states: Illinois, Missouri, Arkansas, Kentucky, Tennessee, and to a lesser extent Mississippi and Indiana.
The 150-mile (240 km)-long seismic zone, which extends into five states, stretches southward from Cairo, Illinois; through Hayti, Caruthersville, and New Madrid in Missouri; through Blytheville into Marked Tree in Arkansas. It also covers a part of West Tennessee near Reelfoot Lake, extending southeast into Dyersburg. It is southwest of the Wabash Valley Seismic Zone.
Again, more at the link.
What's more, the New Madrid Fault runs slap bang underneath the Mississippi River. If it really let go, it could easily produce an earthquake with a magnitude of 7 to 8 - it already has in the not too distant past. If it were big enough, and lasted for long enough, what might that do to the biggest river on our continent? If a waterway that big were to be displaced by 50 to 100 miles east or west, how much of our economy, our cities and our population would it take with it? And what would happen to anything in the way?
It's a fascinating subject for speculation. I wonder if it might make an interesting novel - perhaps set in older times, around the Civil War or Wild West period, as alternate history? There were powerful earthquakes along the Fault in 1811-12. What if they were repeated, say, 60 or 70 years later, at even greater intensity?
Hmmm . . .
Peter
Tuesday, July 2, 2024
And so say all combat veterans, cops, firefighters and paramedics!
Found on MeWe:
(Presumably referring to this study.)
And all of us who've "been up the sharp end" in our joint and several ways nod our heads in agreement, and say (loudly, with feeling, in well-lubricated chorus):
Of course it is! You don't think we'd have been there without being demented, do you?
Sheesh!!!
Peter
Doofus Of The Day #1,115
I guess this post could also be titled "Headline Of The Day":
A man was arrested Monday after he allegedly used fake IDs and information to make purchases at several St. Tammany Parish stores.
Later that same day, his believed accomplice was also arrested for using a fake ID to try and bond him out of jail.
One would think that, knowing your buddy had just been arrested over fake ID's, you might perhaps consider that the cops would be familiar with them and looking for more, wouldn't you?
Oh, well. Looks like itinerant criminals are now in the business of providing entertainment to otherwise bored cops in Louisiana!
Peter
Larry Correia on Presidential elections after the Chevron decision
In his usual famously polite, delicate, shy and retiring way, author and friend Larry Correia points out what's needed after the Chevron precedent was overturned. I've edited it for language (this being a family-friendly blog), but if you want the unexpurgated original, it's at the link.
In honor of today's argument about Chevron, here's my proposal for a new government agency that I wrote on here years ago. The Department of **** Your Job Security. :D
##
We need somebody who actively HATES the government to run it.
If I was President (ha!) I would only create a single new executive branch entity. The Department of **** Your Job Security.
The DoFYJS would consist of surly auditors, and their only job would be to go into other government agencies to figure out -
A. do you ****ers do anything worth a ****?
B. which of you ****ers actually get **** done?
Then fire everyone else.
Right now it is pretty much impossible to fire government employees. The process is asinine. It is so bad that the worst government employees, who nobody else can stand, don’t get fired. They get PROMOTED. It’s easier, and then its somebody else’s problem.
But the DoFYJS don’t care. If your job is making tax payers fill out mandatory paperwork and then filing it somewhere nobody will ever read it? **** you. Gone. Clean out your desk.
We need to get rid of entire agencies. Gone. WTF does the Department of Education improve? NOTHING.
Gone. Fire them all. Sell the assets.
Any agency that survives this purge, move it out of DC to an area more appropriate to its mission. Do we need a Dept of Agriculture? Okay. Go to Kansas.
This will also cause all the DC/NOVA power monger set to resign so I don’t have to waste time firing them.
Oh, and right wing pet causes, you’re not safe. I worked for the Air Force. We all know that we could fire 1/3 of the GS employees tomorrow and the only noticeable difference would be more parking available on base.
Cut everything. We never do, because somebody might cry. Too bad. They’re called budget cuts because they’re supposed to hurt. Not budget tickles. **** you. Cut.
Shutting off the money faucet will also destroy the unholy alliance between gov/media/academia/tech.
Right now there is a revolving door, government job, university job, corporate board, think tank, the same crowd who goes to the same parties and went to the same schools and all that other incestuous **** just take turns in the different chairs.
Sell the ****ing chairs.
Every entity that gets tax money inevitably turns into a pig trough for these people. Cut it all off. All of these money faucets ALWAYS cause some kind of financial crisis later anyway.
See the student loan crisis caused by the government, here is free money, oh college has become expensive and useless, so now we need more government to solve it. You dummies get to pay for it. Have some inflation.
It’s all bullshit.
Quit pretending any of this makes sense.
The only way the leviathan shrinks is we elect people who actively hate the government to the government, and then only let them stay there long enough to **** the government without getting corrupted by it.
The instant you see the small government crusader you sent to DC going “Oh, well maybe an unholy alliance between the state and OmniGlobalMegaCorp to develop a mind control ray is a good thing” FIRE HIM.
So there you have it. That’s my platform if you elect me president. Fire ****ing everybody. And only give me one term. Thank you.
I think I've found my ideal candidate for November 2024 . . .
Peter
Monday, July 1, 2024
Animals can be a darn sight more loving than many humans...
Click over to this tweet by Flappr and watch the brief video provided (it's just over a minute long).
Dang, it got dusty in here all of a sudden . . .
Peter
This gets to the heart of the matter
I'm long since sick of the talking heads that are yammering on about the Biden-Trump debate last week. The essential elements could be figured out by anyone with two working brain cells (or even less) in a few minutes. Nobody yet knows how it'll work out (although it promises to be a cross between a tortured melodrama and a laugh-a-minute yuckfest finding out).
There's one commenter who seems to have his finger on the political pulse of last week's encounter. Speaking in Australia at a conservative conference, Tucker Carlson had this to say. Even if you've seen or heard bits of it before, it's worth taking nine minutes out of your day to hear it again.
I wasn't very enamored of President Trump's performance last week either. Bombastic, sometimes shrill, sometimes childish, sometimes downright dishonest . . . he did not come across as presidential, I'm afraid (at least, not by my somewhat old-fashioned standards). Nevertheless, if the choice is between him and President Biden, I think most of us will line up behind him.
Unless . . . we could persuade Tucker Carlson to offer himself as a candidate?
I'm not sure that would be a good idea; Carlson is invaluable as an honest, no-holds-barred observer of the scene and a trenchant commenter. We need him doing his present job, and calling the rest of our political establishment to account (frequently). Nevertheless . . . what if we had a mind like his in charge - whether from the left or the right, I don't care - taking a long, unafraid look at the catastrophe which is our federal government at present, rolling up his sleeves, and starting in on the cleanup?
Tempting thought . . .
Peter
Memes that made me laugh 216
Gathered from around the Internet over the past week. Click any image for a larger view.
