I just...
Look, at this point, the Pelosis are millionaires many times over. She's the second in line to become President. They don't just have a nice three-bedroom in a Tenderloin walk-up. Their home must have unfathomable amounts of security.
So if some peanut in his skivvies barged into their house toting a hammer, somebody's getting fired. A few somebodies, really. But I have major doubts that's what happened.
A couple of years ago I tried watching Dario Argento's The Bird With the Crystal Plumage and wound up bailing pretty early. Tonight I gave Argento another go, watching the original Suspiria. I don't know that giallo is my scene, but I'll give the movie this: It's nuts, and there's a kind of commitment in it being just this nuts.
Jessica Harper plays a new student at a ballet school in, I think, Germany. It's a (really gory) horror flick, so there's a killer and there are witches and some other awful stuff. But just getting around the town and dealing with the people feels like enough of an ordeal. I suspect the movie was sponsored by the Americans Stay The Fuck Out of Europe Council.
The Goblins' musical score is really hyperactive, with rinky-dink keyboards paired with proto-black metal vocals.
In recent years it's often seemed that left wing ideology has gained its greatest power―or at least institutional acceptance―just as it's lost touch with human values. And that's probably not a coincidence. It wouldn't be the first time those two traits have gone together.
As Matt Taibbi notes in the preamble to this interview, Tim Robbins has frequently drawn fire for his political outspokenness. And he was and remains a man of the left. But he has his own values above political fashion. I'd heard about his opposition to the vaccine requirements held by the big acting unions before, and this is an opportunity to find out more of where he's coming from. Quite refreshing.
So protesting by destroying, damaging, or at least threatening art is definitely a thing now. For the Earth and the climate, sure. The relationship of protests to topic is rather Underpants Gnome, but there you go.
I've heard it suggested that the real purpose is to provide an excuse to pull these works of art out of public view. How surprising would this be, really? If there's one thing that unites CEOs, nonprofits, and the activist class it's the belief that regular people shouldn't have nice things. Now to do something about it.
The younger generation of scientists are like children who have been raised by wolves. They have learned the techniques but have no feel for the proper aims, attitudes and evaluations of science. What little culture they have comes not from science but from bureaucrats: they utterly lack scientific culture; they do not talk science, instead they spout procedures.It has now become implicitly accepted among the mass of professional ‘scientists’ that the decisions which matter most in science are those imposed upon science by outside forces: by employers (who gets the jobs, who gets promotion), funders (who gets the big money), publishers (who gets their work in the big journals), bureaucratic regulators (who gets allowed to do work), and the law courts (whose ideas get backed-up, or criminalized, by the courts). It is these bureaucratic mechanisms that constitute ‘real life’ and the ‘bottom line’ for scientific practice. The tradition has been broken.
Web surfing recently I saw an article on Stephen King's Salem's Lot and the difficulties of adapting it (as the studio keeps shifting the release date of an upcoming movie). It's not a bad piece and I certainly don't want to pick on it given the paltry sums that online entertainment pieces tend to bring in. But a passage stuck out to me:
Salem’s Lot also, in the final analysis, needs to be a period piece like Scott Derrickson’s recent The Black Phone. In the current age of smartphones, GPS, internet, and social media, there’s no way that the population of an entire American town, no matter how small, could disappear into thin air without the outside world noticing.
How long have I been hearing variations on the argument that horror and thriller plots are obsolete because cell phones? If this observation were human it could vote, join the army, and―this is the good news―go into a bar for a drink. So I guess that's why nothing bad or weird ever happens anymore.
Salem's Lot is about an ancient vampire traveling with a fussy antique dealer as his Renfield and how they cause havoc in an already soapy Maine town. It's far-fetched by definition. I'm not sure how putting it in the present would strain your suspension of disbelief any further.
Recently my building got a new lock on the door, so we all got new keys to get in. Nice looking key, too. Only problem was, at least initially, the Post Office didn't get a copy of this key. Meaning there was more than a week that we got no mail.
This agitated me, although I didn't put it together at first. I thought it was just me and the PO somehow thought I had moved or died. Eventually I figured it out.
A very nice and savvy neighbor took care of things, so we have service again, hallelujah.
I'm now reading Ivan Illich's Medical Nemesis: The Expropriation of Health. It's not the first book I've read by Illich, but it holds a special place, I think, in terms of his coming into his own as a writer and thinker. In a number of places you could even call it prophetic. A passage:
Diagnosis always intensifies stress, defines incapacity, imposes inactivity, and focuses apprehension on non-recovery, on uncertainty, and on one's dependence on future medical findings, all of which amounts to a loss of autonomy for self-definition. It also isolates a person in a special role, separates him from the normal and healthy, and requires submission to the authority of specialized personnel. Once a society organizes for a preventive disease hunt, it gives epidemic proportions to diagnosis. This ultimate triumph of therapeutic culture turns the independence of the average healthy person into an intolerable form of deviance.
In the long run the main activity of such an inner-directed systems society leads to the phantom production of life expectancy as a commodity. By equating statistical man with biologically unique men, an insatiable demand for finite resources is created. The individual is subordinated to the greater "needs" of the whole, preventive procedures become compulsory, and the right of the patient to withhold consent to his own treatment vanishes as the doctor argues that he must submit to diagnosis, since society cannot afford the burden of curative procedures that would be even more expensive.
In these two paragraphs you can see the root of some things that would grow to immense proportions. The ability of a single disease to dominate the entire public agenda as long as government favored scientists choose to make it the top priority, perhaps for more than two years. Countries with legalized euthanasia getting trigger happy with it. The driver of much of this is the increased power of the pharmaceutical industry, which in many cases becomes untouchable. This is a danger Illich saw coming as well.
The topic of breed specific legislation (BSL) seems to come up a few times per year. Pit bulls are generally the target, and they're already banned in a few places. Up for debate, I guess. In my experience they're not the dogs with the shortest fuses. They just have strong jaws. There might be a few different ways of dealing with that.
Anyway, this is a clip of deer standing around, then running. I found it soothing.
This may seem like a weird thing for me to blog about―or not, it's kind of hard to tell from the inside. But I have to express a certain admiration for the Benjamin Moore. They sell paint. A lot of different colors of paint. The site allows you the chance to see what each color looks like on its own, and then in the context of a room. It's quite illustrative.
Granted, the décor of each room is more spare than anyone who isn't a serial-killing stockbroker is likely to keep in their home. But we're talking about Platonic ideals here.
The area behind the skating rink was a developer's crown jewel. It's at the entrance to Waterplace Park, which can still be downright pretty. This little nook has the locations for 3-4 restaurants, which have been through various names/owners, but used to be pretty busy. The number being used now? A nice round zero.
But going through it today I found a nip bottle with a burn hole in it from being used as a freebasing pipe, so at least someone is making use of the area.
What do you do or say when the masks come off, when the monster reveals itself? Don't they usually do this because they figure you can't escape? Isn't the premise that you're about to get eaten either way?
That seems to be the thinking of Adam Posen. Posen represents the Peterson Institute which, judging from its website, is one of those think tanks where thinking goes to die. Speaking at a recent CATO Institute gathering, Posen said that the concern a few souls have with keeping manufacturing on American soil is just a “fetish for keeping white males with low education in the powerful positions they are in.”
Now obviously white males aren't the only people engaged in American manufacturing, and at this point may not even make up the majority, but never mind that. Never mind also that the great power that comes with these "powerful positions" boils down to feeding your family and maybe being able to put away something for the future.
No, Posen knew that his words would spread around the globe, accompanied by however much disbelief. And to those listening he wanted to make clear―on behalf of capitalism's brain trust―that he could make his case using all the fashionable woke lingo. It seems rather a missed opportunity that he didn't say anything about incels, but I suppose he has to leave something for the encore.
To say the least, I was not fond of the COVID lockdowns, and am hoping that the past tense is appropriate here. But there was sort of an upside in that they cleared out the buses, meaning buses were also more likely to be on time. Now buses are back to being crowded, and also in some cases being twenty minutes behind schedule.
The good news, thanks to the federal courts, is that you don't have to wear masks on them anymore. Put that together with all the other stuff and it would be a capital ordeal.
I have to admit not being a big fan of iced coffee. Iced caffeinated beverages in general, really. One of two things tend to happen. Either I drink the stuff with flavor and then have half a cup full of ice to get rid of. Or maybe I draw the drinking out long enough for the ice to melt, but then the beverage is watery. Drinking water is very good and important, but you don't have to spring for an ice latte to do it.
Only reason I bring this up is that the weather is getting cooler, and I still see a lot of people toting around iced coffee. And I'm sure I'll still see a lot in January. Are they trying to fool their bodies into thinking it's still summer? Fine if they want to do that, but I'll pass.
The world's second-largest fork resides in Springfield, Missouri. No idea what you'd eat with it. But I have to like it. There's no profound message to it. They just liked the idea of having a huge fork in the middle of town. They didn't give up on it when the restaurant it was part of went under. And they weren't discouraged when a city in Oregon built an even taller fork. Which I'm sure is quite a story in its own right.
