NOW!
STEVE SMITH HAVE CONTROL OF MORNING LINKS! SORRY HAVE TO THROW CHEESE PERSON OUT ON EAR LAST NIGHT, BUT NEED TAKE CONTROL OF LINKS ROOM. SEA SMITH TOMORROW, THEN GIANT STONE HEAD – BUT TODAY, GET STEVE SMITH LINKS. HOPE ENJOY! MAKE COMMENTS AND STEVE SMITH READ AND LAUGH.
SO HERE LINKS FOR FUNNY GLIBERTARIANS;
- HOW WE NO HEAR ABOUT THIS ANYMORE? MAYBE STEVE SMITH GO TALK WITH FRENCH LEADERS. BY TALK WITH, MEAN WEAR YELLOW VEST WHEN RAPE LEADERS.
- NYC MAYOR SILLY. WHY HE NOT IN NYC? STEVE SMITH HOPE HIM RUN FOR USA PRESIDENT – WOULD MAKE MANY LAUGHS.
- SCHOOL’S…OUT FOR EVER?
FREE CASCADIA!
LOL
TRY NOT HURT, BUT HIM HAVE LEAVE ROOM. MAYBE CRYPTIDS SEND FONDUE AS “SORRY”?
Yeah, nothing says I am sorry like rubbing it in man!
STEVE SMITH NO RUB IT IN…JUST THROW OUT OF ROOM.
STEVE SMITH RUB ONE OUT NOT IN
STEVE SMITH DO MORNING LINKS! AND BY “DO” MEAN…
YES.
*Runs away screaming*
The quiet yesses are the best yesses.
“A LITTLE STILL SHE STROVE, AND MUCH REPENTED, AND WHISPERING, “I WILL NE’ER CONSENT” – CONSENTED.
“Would you off your throat to the wolf with red roses?”
She can’t say no if you use duct tape first.
IF STEVE SMITH RAPE IN FOREST AND NO ONE AROUND TO HEAR, DOES HIKER STILL MAKE A SOUND?
I hear Maduro is blaming Steve Smith for the power outages out in Venezuela. Of course, Warren backed him up and told us all that the problem is rich people, not socialism…
BLAME THE RICH….
STEVE SMITH NEVER BEEN VENEZUELA. VISIT UNCLE MAPINGUARI IN BRAZIL.
Hey Steve, your uncle came up after I made the mistake of following the search suggestions to the HM post about ladies that love you and your family members! I have an appointment with a head shrink now to deal with the issues these revelations caused me…
UNCLE MAPINGUARI FUN. HIM SPECIALIZE IN ROAR THAT SCARE AMAZON RIVER TOURIST.
HOPE HEAD DOCTOR HELP.
AND BY ‘HEAD’ STEVE SMITH MEAN
SCHOOL’S…OUT FOR EVER?
I have it on good authority that literacy rates in communist countries often exceed 100%
And free health care, too!
There are no poor people either. I don’t understand why everyone isn’t a dirty commie!
We have no medicine, sober doctors or nurses, working medical equipment, or desire to help people, but we do it all for free and for everyone!
YAY!
Everyone who sent back our forms replied that they could read them.
Yes. Everyone there can read about all the other countries that have food.
“SCHOOL’S…OUT FOR EVER?”
Libertarian moment!
See. Libertarians talk a big game about not wanting government, but what happens when a government stops providing essential things and all hell breaks loose? They blame socialism.
I Think My Wife Tried to Trick Me Into Gay Sex
Shouldn’t we … talk about this first?
Dear Makes others feel better about themselves,
I married an adventurous predator. I am prey. Why doesn’t the predator communicate with me before it does what it wants?
Yeah, fuck that shit. If you are not into sausage, you ain’t. Know what I am saying?
He sounds like a Biggot. Not all penises belong to men.
My ex used to pretend she owned mine, but I was lucky enough to keep it, my balls, and the house in the divorce….
Yeah. Sausage is just a social construct.
Nigga you gay
I watched that Queen movie last weekend. That is exactly what I thought when Freddie Mercury told his finance he might be bi.
I’m going to have to see pictures of the v wife and her girlfriend before I can respond.
Dude should have asked for a blowjob. Worst case, you got a blowjob from a guy and found out you weren’t gay.
*jots down note*
I don’t think it works that way. If you try it and say you don’t like it.. And keep trying it….
I just realized the Smith family are a bunch of freaking hippies! Zardoz is the make war guy, while the Smiths are all about making love… Any of you Glibs able to confirm if the Smiths also smell like patchouli?
NO SMELL LIKE HIPPY! STEVE SMITH SMELL LIKE PINE…AND RAPE.
Wait.. Isn’t that what patchouli smells… erm… never mind,
patchouli is what they used to bathe dead people in to cover the smell of decay. Because decay is literally the only thing patchouli smells better than.
What about STATE SMITH?
Re,: Bill deblasio and I Believe I Can Fly. I don’t like imputing terrible people on to their works. Can we not enjoy Michael Jackson and still think he was a bad person?
Not when we have people that constructed a society where one had to be a non religious saint to not be an evil person…
There’s a reason I avoid learning about ‘famous’ people if I can help it.
yes – you will only be disappointed!
I tend to just have my belief that these attention whores are actually more often than not as dumb as rocks validated…
Without exception, every single person in the entertainment industry is a soulless piece of subhuman shit. Act as if they were carnies: pay them for the entertainment, run them out of town on a rail, and hope you never see them again.
Also Michael Jackson’s music was generic pop pablum. Now that he’s dead and can’t put on a stage show there is literally no reason to listen to it.
Some people enjoy generic pop pablum thank you very much!
:Turns to listen to smooth criminal in a Huff:
I listen to a lot of pop pablum as well, so I’m not necessarily in the best position to judge. Michael Jackson’s whole shtick was his stage show though. The music without the show is just… meh. Ever since he died the nutriding in some quarters has been unbearable.
I get that, I’m not a huge MJ fan, but I do enjoy some of his songs.
“Smooth Criminal” does sound a bit inappropriate at this point.
PYT?
Leon are you OK?
In regards to spelling? My phone’s auto complete is all FUBAR for some reason. I’m used to typing via swipe but it isn’t working correctly.
You’ve been *swooshed* by a smooth criminal.
And now the joke hits me…
You’ve been hit by. You’ve been struck by…
Some of the Jackson Five music was good Motown stuff. His solo music never did anything for me.
You mean to tell me that Billy Jean was not your lover?
NO, IT STEVE SMITH! BY LOVER, MEAN…
I’ve been a big pop guy but I think you’re under rating the guy’s music. To this day if you play Billy Jean anywhere people can’t stay in their seats. And even non dancing me does some sit in the chair moving about
Never been a big pop guy…
Dude had 13 number one hits in an era when that still meant something.
You can say “not my thing”, but you can’t really say his music wasn’t any good.
Like the Beatles and Elvis, you can crowdsource that one.
My personal counterargument to that point is Madonna. She had 12 number one hits, and I don’t think I found any of them to be “good songs”. But she sold way over 100 million singles – so I’m clearly in the minority on this one.
13.
Is that the over / under on the number of kids he diddled?
I’ll take the over
If chart success were an indicator of quality then Max Martin is the greatest songwriter in the history of humanity. Nearly any competent producer can crank out pop tunes that make you want to dance. The only difficulty is selling them to an act that can capture the zeitgeist and take you to the top of the charts. Strictly musically, there’s nothing particularly interesting about Michael Jackson’s streak of hits. It’s formulaic pop of the type that’s been wildly popular since it became technologically feasible to create it. His novelty was the rest of his act. He was a hell of a performer.
Neneh Cherry won best new artist with “We All Hang in a Buffalo Stance”, a song that is actually scientifically proven to be terrible. So I’ll back you up on the distinction between popularity and musically interesting.
I always assumed that expression had something to do with railroads. Computer says no.
Never read Huckleberry Finn?
How many one-rail railroads were there?
Ahem.
Sure, it doesn’t make sense syntactically, but the actual origin is at least as strange as ambiguous syntax.
I guess, but I already put up with a lot of terrible behavior from musicians. I have to draw the line somewhere, and child rape seems like it should be a pretty low bar anyway.
How brain biases prevent climate action
My brain tells me that the cooked up shit always leading to more fucking marxism that steals wealth and freedom, regardless of the problem, is really not a difficult problem to solve..
“Humans are very bad at understanding statistical trends and long-term changes,”
… which makes it easier to frighten them into our wealth redistribution schemes.
Or get them to sign up for pyramid schemes like SS
I’m pretty sure most people alive today did not volunteer to participate in SS.
You deny your signature on that social contract?
I wish I could get a copy of that contract, because it seems to be constantly changing.
Pray they don’t alter it even more!
Changing? Lol, it’s short and sweet.
“LOCKE SMITH MAKE RULES, AND BY MAKE RULES, MEAN…”
It’s part of the social contract; the one you have to sign with your feet when born.
Totally not an echo chamber. 😉
Assertion without evidence. We do not know that the warming since the end of the Little Ice Age is caused by these things or is simply a natural warming cycle. The epic failure of all of the CO2 warming models seems to indicate the latter.
But, the science is settled! Ergo, no evidence needed!
That’s another thing that irritates me, science is not some static set of dogma, it’s a process, and scientific understanding is advanced by constant questioning and testing.
False Consciousness Strikes Again!
“A recent report from international climate experts tells us that we are likely to reach 1.5C of average global warming in as little as 11 years. ”
And if you believe that, you might want your head examined. This flys in the face of many decades of climate research. But you run either it with no critical eye. I guess this is what Science! means these days. Come up with hypothesis, apply Marxism, get the answer you need.
This dovetails with the thread from yesterday about media bias and people just buying it.
It could be that this “journalist” ran with it without a critical eye, as you say. Or, it could be that they know their audience won’t read it with a critical eye and that’s the whole idea. I don’t know which it is.
It also dovetails nicely with a bit from this week’s “The Skeptics Guide to the Universe”.
They did a “name that logical fallacy” bit about an email from a “climate denier”.
The guy was basically calling out the “Green New Deal” stuff, and AOC in particular (“The world is going to end in 12 years!!”) The skeptics had a hard time separating their personal beliefs, personal politics and skepticism. So they ripped this guy as a denier – mostly by at least somewhat intentionally narrowing his point to “denial” and ignoring the larger context of “Green New Deal”…. so things like “China is the problem” are ridiculed rather than understood (Moving to 100% renewable energy in the US will simply drive up costs here to the point where all energy-intensive business moves overseas …. where it can be run on cheap fossil fuels). “China is the problem” is simply shorthand for a more complex argument about the fungible nature of cash, labor, manufacturing, etc. in a world economy.
Anyway, it was interesting to see them try very hard to control their bias…. and fail quite spectacularly.
It just goes to show – everyone’s politics are stupid. Everyone. And if you think your politics aren’t stupid, then you probably run around saying really dumb things based on your politics.
In my example it lead one self-described skeptic to vigorously defend AOC for saying the world is going to end in 12 years as “That’s just hyperbole” in the same sentence that she was ridiculing someone for questioning the wisdom of a set of economically damaging policies by using the phrase “China and India are the problem” as shorthand for the more complex economic argument.
everyone’s politics are stupid
I don’t disagree, but using somebody who uses the term “skeptic” unironically as an example of people who you wouldn’t expect to have stupid politics seems naive. The modern “skeptic” movement is one of the dumbest people groups I’ve ever encountered.
At least they said 11 years. That additional year sounds more science-y than the standard boilerplate decade.
“We know”
It’s paywalled…but here’s Michael Anton from the latest Claremont Review of Books:
““Science” has gone from being synonymous with philosophy to its antithesis and superior: allegedly exact rather than imprecise, authoritative rather than questioning, hubristic rather than humble, instrumental rather than theoretical. “Science” occasionally feigns humility and admits that it doesn’t quite yet know everything, but it’s also confident that anything it does not or cannot understand is either irrelevant or not knowledge.
The new science and history purport to expand greatly man’s freedom by opening up new vistas that vastly extend the horizon. But this “freedom” proves illusory. In the older understanding, freedom consists primarily of steering the ship of state via public deliberation. It was accepted that man cannot fully control or determine his destiny, but also believed that he can shape it by applying prudential judgment to identify and implement effective means to secure just and rightful ends, which are supplied by nature. The new understanding doesn’t merely outsource prudence’s job; it automates it. Science becomes history’s handmaiden, supplying means for achieving the latter’s ends. Subjects once open for debate become closed as science supposedly discovers the workings of History with a capital H. There is no politics because there is nothing for man to deliberate or choose. Science has spoken, and everyone better get on the “right side of History.” Man turns out to be far more enslaved to “History” in the new understanding than he was limited by nature in the old.
The administrative state, then, is the apparatus that applies the alleged insights of science to the governance of man.
The ends of our government are no longer determined by the people through public deliberation constrained by moral and natural limits; nor are they even to give the people what they want regardless of those limits. They are rather to force upon the people what “science,” the research universities and public intellectuals have determined they should want. Since these “discoveries” are held to be “scientific” and therefore incontrovertible, limits on administrative power are not merely unnecessary but harmful. When you know what’s right and necessary, why wait? Why let yourself be held up by mere procedural hurdles, or worse, by the contentless objections of the ignorant?”
So in so many words, this is saying that AGW cult’s priesthood is basically using fear-mongering through shitty “science” to peddle more power for themselves? WHo could have fucking guessed?
This is basically (although more eloquently) my response when someone touts the benefits of some social program or another.
“Our studies show that doing X will provide benefit Y, so there can be no argument that we should do it.”
Maybe that’s true, but it’s not the job of government.
Unfortunately, neither definition of Science he proffers is correct.
Science is a methodology, not a philosophy nor a seat of knowledge and power.
Declaring something to be scientific implies that it has been examined using solid scientific methodology – including testing of hypotheses by experimentation.
There are many things that are beyond science. Philosophy, religion, even politics — all are “non-scientific” in the sense that you cannot draw true scientific conclusions. You might do some science around the fringes, perhaps using scientific methods to describe their existence, but these things are fundamentally beyond the reach of science.
Humans are very bad at understanding statistical trends and long-term changes
Actually we are adept at understanding patterns. That’s how I know that weather and climate are cyclical.
We’re even more adept at understanding patterns that aren’t there.
+1 Goddam Gold Mine
“political psychologist”??
Venezuela: so, not real socialism?
I pointed that out this past weekend to a young douchebag hipster that was prattling about the joy of socialism. They were totes serious that it was not. Ah, to be young and incredibly stupid.
Venezuela is suspending school and business activities on Monday amid a continuing blackout
Go home, Venezuela. You’re drunk.
That at least might imply they had a fun night out.. It is more like they got roofied and woke up with the Smith family pulling a train on them.
Was it here that I read about some idiot who said that dictatorship and socialism are literally the opposite things?
Ummm, ok then.
/threading fail
This is just terrible. Think of all the pooed families that have kids who need those government meals.
On “The Fifth Column” podcast, Michael Moynihan interviewed Chavez Apologist Mark Weisbrot.
In that interview he talked about how successful the Venezuelan government has been, noting that they have distributed record numbers of CLAP boxes – boxes of food for families.
Weisbrot didn’t understand how this might not be a reason to applaud the government. (among a long list of things that he rather deliberately fails to understand about Venezuela and socialism)
Pooed?
Re that idiot De Blah-sio, there’s just too much smoke to all these pedo stories.
Anyone here think ‘Pizzagate’ is real in some capacity or way?
IS this that whole argument about if deep dish is better than thin crust? Or is this about those that think pineapple on pizza is unholy?
Pineapple on pizza is another level of hell in The Inferno. It’s in the ‘uncut’ and updated version.
WHAT YOU GET WHEN CROSS PEDO AND PIRATE?
…
ARRRRRRR KELLY.
Hello, “Dad Joke” SMITH.
There are getting to be too many SMITHs to keep up with.
KNOCK KNOCK
Who’s there?
STEVE SMITH RAPE!!
Can we not enjoy Michael Jackson and still think he was a bad person?
Michael jackson was a bad person who made awful music. Top to bottom, side to side.
Understanding the new far right threat
WTF? Word salad for breakfast sucks.
Bemoaning anti semitism and then offering up Corbyn as an alternative.
International Marxists upset that nationalist socialists are ascendant. Footage at 10.
I was thinking that the “right” in Europe is not really much different than the left.
The left left the left?
We got both kinds, we got country and western
We got both sports here in Texas. Football and Spring Football.
And football recruiting….. don’t forget about that!
There’s always room for talking about recruiting…
“…In office they may, at least initially, implement reforms that benefit the oppressed and workers.”
This is the part where camps, mass misery and death make their appearance.
underlying problems of the capitalist system, which is based on production for profit
Without profit what is my motive to produce?
We pretend to work and they pretend to pay us.
This is how you get a turd polisher making just as much as a doctor or engineer…
Like Krugman?
Energetic impulse effect dangerous boats sweater part.
We know that climate change is happening.
*looks out window, laughs uncontrollably*
See any cows out there farting?
The jig was up when they went from calling it global cooling to global warming to simply fuck it, let’s call it climate change so everything can be attributed to it.
These links are an hour early.
::beady eye stare::
For anybody who watches Veep, this DST thing is even funnier.
But their policies are incapable of solving the underlying problems of the capitalist system, which is based on production for profit and subject to profound economic crises.
Oh.
No socialist country ever had a profound economic crisis. They were all quite trite.
You know what other system was subject to profound crises?
The Dewey Decimal System?
You make a good point.
The prevent defense?
Child sex dolls ‘encouraging paedos by blurring line between FANTASY and reality’
PAEDOPHILES who are given child sex dolls to stop them from abusing children are only fuelling their own sick urges, a new report has warned.
I could easily buy either argument, to be honest.
Thing is BOTH arguments could be true.
The doll could very easily be a harmless way for some of them to work out their fixation and remove the pressure to seek the real thing while for others it could feed it making them crave the real thing even more. This is yet another reason why government solutions never work because often all possible courses of action on any given issue are harmful and the only correct move is to simply do nothing unless there is an identifiable victim to someone’s actions. In this case that would mean neither “giving” anyone such a doll or promoting the use of such as a form of therapy nor outlawing the use and possession of such dolls and instead just punishing those who harm real children.
Couldn’t agree more on that front. The efficacy of the dolls is something that clinical practitioners should be discussing in industry workshops to figure out what works best for their patients, not a major public policy debate.
Or they could actually do the research to find out.
From what I’ve read, upon scientific examination the pornography argument has proven to be false (that looking at kiddie porno causes or increases child sexual assaults). Not just false, but actually the opposite seems to be true – at least according to a couple of pop-sci press articles I’ve read on the topic.
It would stand to reason that a sex toy that helps expunge those urges could similarly be effective. But creating a national policy on the subject before actually doing the research seems kinda dumb.
But creating a national policy on the subject before actually doing the research seems kinda dumb.
But that’s public policy writ large.
I always wondered what Mr. Rourke would do if a Pedo showed up on the island. Shave Tattoo?
THAT’S NOT A PLANE! THAT’S NOT A PLANE!
It would be more efficacious if, instead of being given the dolls, pedophiles had to buy them with their own money.
The dolls or the children?
The 2019 Minnesoda Hockey Hair video
I love this. Will watch later. Too bad he’s stopping?
WTF? I don’;t know what to say..
Looks like I’m having salad for lunch today!
??
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez claims capitalism is ‘irredeemable’
And we’re doing a pretty miserable job of it thanks to the Fed.
I don’t think it’s fearmongering when you just said: capitalism is irredeemable and then represent an ideology that eschews Private Property.
we should be scared right now because corporations have taken over our government
So, let’s make the government more powerful and intrusive! BRILLIANT!!
Well duh. How else will she make the money if she cant hold industries hostage.
One, single corporation would be so much better.
Yeah,. Back when I had proggie aquaintences, I annoyed them by saying: 1) I don’t much like power concentrated in the boardroom. 2) more than that, I don’t like power concentrated in the pulpit. 3) for many reasons I HATE power concentrated in government, not least because that power tends to be appropriated by 1&2.
Obviously we need to create a government ministry to limit the concentration of power in 1&2 and aggressively police the appropriation of power that is properly in the hands of the government.
C’mon people… this ain’t rocket science!
Really putting that degree in Economics hard to work, isn’t she?
To be fair, I think it was her minor. Either way, she obviously didn’t learn anything.
Eh…. she went to a liberal northeastern university…. I think she learned everything she’s sharing with us there.
Actually, most of her points reflect an undergraduate understanding of the topic at hand.
(bonus weird feeling for watching an actual US congressman speaking about past presidents the way a student in history class who wasn’t really paying attention might…. she sounds like me trying to discuss the motivations and actions of Herbert Hoover.)
Her parents should demand their money back if they paid for that education…
related: Majority of Americans Don’t Want to Live in a Socialist Country
They just don’t get all the great things that would happen…
“corporations have taken over our government,”
Then why would giving you more power to FIX the problem ever work? Being as the corporations have taken over and all
My wife recently spotted a car in the Costco parking lot with a bumper sticker that said something like “Socialism is the best” and another that said “We can do better than capitalism”.
Apparently irony is lost on this person.
+1 Lada
+1 Yugo.
+1 shut up and wait for the public transit, comrade.
+1 the trains aren’t running today.
The one train running today ran on time.
CapitalismThe Free Market is freedom.Socialism is slavery.
If I were to agree with her, can I use her as living proof?
The administrative state, then, is the apparatus that applies the alleged insights of science to the governance of man.
That is the sort of statement which makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up.
This shit always ends in gulags and mass graves.
Manic Monday: Venezuela Tankies Unite!
Don’t be a stooge for the corporations! Get your news from the state news agency! That’s where you hear the real truth!
“Without providing solid evidence, our corporate-controlled government and mainstream media portray Maduro as a corrupt, repressive, and illegitimate leader with little to no support”
A man doesn’t see what he doesn’t want to see.
We have very differing definitions of “democratically elected”. To me, it does not mean a system where the executive strips the (actually) democratically elected legislature of its power, packs a new legislature with his own cronies, and then sets up a Presidential election where opposition parties are either banned from participating or choose not to participate because (i) they know it’s a farce and (ii) they know they’ll be arrested.
There’s plenty of evidence, but when Venezuelans say those things you dismiss them as wreckers and kulaks.
No, they use state-controlled Venezuelan media for that.
The Venezuelan citizens and ex-pats you choose to ignore because their thoughts go against your narrative?
Whatever the US has done in the past did not make Maduro into the despot that he is.
—–
I know I’ve said this before, but I live in a community with a *lot* of Venezuelan ex-pats. I’ve talked to them. They still have relatives there. Their relatives are suffering. And assholes like this ignore it because it doesn’t fit their narrative.
Yeah, a buddy of mine who came to the US to go to college (and subsequently got quite wealthy as a US citizen) had family in Venezuela when Chavez came to power. The government seized his father’s hotels… they eventually fled. His brother tried to work with the government and got a big contract to build homes for the poor. The government eventually just took the project (and his construction equipment) away and didn’t pay what they owed, so he lost everything he had left.
So no, not a lot of love for the Chavistas here in the US Venezuelan Expatriate community.
And now that I click, the first replies are from an actual Venezuelan debunking this crap, followed by replies saying that he’s wrong.
So you’re saying we should take the oil?
Their oil is shit. Sulfur-laden crude. We have plenty that’s actually good and easy to refine before we even touch their crap.
Thy had to essentially create a new (expensive) refining process just to deal with Venezuelan crude. Back in the days of $150 barrels, it was worth it. It’s shit now, even if they could pump it, it’d go for $10/barrel less than Brent Sea or Ogalala crude.
So racist you wouldn’t even take their oil.
It figures a dirty Scotsman would say something like that.
You just made an enemy for life!
The best retort is to ask to see all the refugees fleeing other countries to get into Venezuela. You can even ask for footage of the refugees before Maduro came to power to make it easy for them. They’ll still come up empty.
“The proven oil reserves in Venezuela are recognized as the LARGEST in the world, totaling 297 billion barrels.”
The estimated oil reserves in Venezuela are estimated as amongst the LARGEST in the world, totaling a lot. Accuracy is important.
One thing foe everyone to keep in mind – even (essentially) without Venezuelan oil, our gas prices are still around $2.20 / gallon (in America, probably higher in CA and NYC).
Even without the world’s biggest oil deposits, we have reasonable gas prices. I can’t think of a bigger “fuck you” to Maduro. We don’t need you, Maduro, we don’t need what you have. Go fuck yourself, you murderous commie piece of shit.
This dovetails with the thread from yesterday about media bias and people just buying it.
It could be that this “journalist” ran with it without a critical eye, as you say. Or, it could be that they know their audience won’t read it with a critical eye and that’s the whole idea. I don’t know which it is.
Or maybe he tracked down a “scientist!” whose “research” conforms to, and buttresses, what he believes, and what all right-thinking people should believe.
Yes, or that. Maybe most likely that.
Exclusive poll: Young Americans are embracing socialism
I think they came to the wrong conclusion. Based on the survey results they should be saying majority of Millennials and Gen Z are dumb and don’t know what socialism is.
Hey but they like the word. Just don’t explain that it means the government will decide what they do in life.
They believe it will hold back people they feel will do better than them, so many of these asshats will be fine with taking it up the ass too as long as they know that those people they dislike got fucked just as hard..
They may not be completely clear on the meaning of socialism, but they want abysmal policies and a larger government that can pretty well approximate the outcomes of socialism.
This, whether they realize it or not, they really are being the useful idiots.
So, they want 100 million deaths this century?
Substantially more, but you take what you can get.
They are going for double that number. To save Gaia!
Young Americans are always embracing socialism until they get a real job an real money taken out of their paychecks.
I just get annoyed when people who should know better – like my contemporaries – sympathize with socialists and Sanders.
It’s like dude. You OWN things they want. Smarten up.
Who is Fica and why are they taking all my money?
“Just as there’s all this fear mongering that government is going to take over every corporation and government is going to take over every business or every form of production, we should be scared right now because corporations have taken over our government,” she said.
Yes, exactly. That’s why we need that Green New Deal. So we can get in front of that parade.
Cathy Young: Socialism Chic
It’s back. And it’s worse than ever.
Obama’s policies were intended to soften us up for the real socialism by completely distorting the free market.
No they were not.
The reality is we are suffering from a crisis in political terminology
everyone keeps calling everyone else using the terminology of 20th century political movements when the reality is no one really fits those descriptions any more. Outside of North Korea and Cuba there are no Communists, hell even Chavez and Maduro are not Communists and the Chinese have not been Communist for a long time. There are very few actual socialists out there and not exactly many Capitalists either.
An honest assessment of both the policies pursued and the statements made by Obama would show him to be far closer to a variety of Fascist than Socialist or Communist only one in which he takes the nationalism inherent in Fascism and replaces it with internationalism (suppression of the nation in favor of the will of a community of nations) and a little more tolerance for actively changing social norms than is typical for a Fascist.
The problem is what do you call that? it certainly isn’t Capitalist, or Socialist, or Fascist. It is something entirely new which did not exist in the 20th century but rather than coming up with a term to describe it so that it could be properly understood and evaluated people on both sides tried t shoehorn it into those old 20th century terms because they were still busy fighting those 20th century battles.
Below I said commies. But you’re probably right but I’m not sure it’s entirely new. They’re saying exactly the same crap heard in the previous century. Rather, it all flows from Marxism to which communism springs from.
Socialism 2.0? Or is it 3.0?
I don’t dispute that, although I will point out that the ACA was designed to fail and lead to single-payer. Foreseeable consequences are not unintended.
The socialists and communists are as responsible for that as anyone since they spent half a century latching onto every conceivable type of anti-Western social and political movement and co-opting it with their own language and incremental installments of their own ideology. It’s why you see Marxist and Leninist frameworks used so extensively in the social justice enclaves in academia. Turns out not many of the proles were up for guillotining the bourgeoisie, but the oppression narrative works remarkably well in tribal contexts.
The problem is that anyone that really believed that collectivism was nothing more than the same old bullshit attempt to replace the current ruling class with another, was an idiot. All these movements are the same, regardless of what they peddle as a cure: some pissed people that don’t want to do all that work to climb the existing social order/hierarchy, decide to tear it down and put themselves at the top, and they use the greed/envy of the masses to allow them to do so.
Is teaming up with European corporations to sell rum truly communist?
Obama literally said that the way to get nationalized single-payer health care was to create a system that would fail so that the people would want it to happen….. the date for failure that he gave was 2017.
Oh, I consider government to be beyond inept, but nobody can challenge the fact that the Obamacare roll-out set a new low standard for government ineptitude ever. At first I thought it was just coincidence, but these days it looks awfully like it was designed to collapse the US healthcare system and then leave us with no other option than government taking it over.
Something like a third of Americans believe that the Holocaust never happened or that the number of deaths is off by an order of magnitude. Of course that took about 70 years to achieve. Ironically, the collective memory is getting shorter at a time when we have more extensive archives and easier access to information than ever before in history.
or that the number of deaths is off by an order of magnitude.
It probably is, Mostly because people limit “the holocaust” to Nazi Germany.
By limiting “the holocaust” that way everyone gets to say “6 million Jews” while skirting around all the other groups that were targeted for killing by socialist governments in the same timeframe. Americans especially love to sidestep the millions killed by our socialist allies Russia and China. Shit, half the fucking planet became socialist after WWII, which should make people stop to think who really won the war. (Not that Keynesianism is much different from socialism, but the capitalist roots helped slow the growth rate of Keynesianism for a generation or two.)
It’s worthwhile to remember that the Red Army Faction was able to continue as long as it did because wealthy socialites supported them in order to boost their own social credit in upper class circles.
Well, to be fair, they are commies. Derivatives of it anyway.
Socialism is sexy and intoxicating to young idealists. The less you have to lose, the more romantic it is.
Talking about something like capitalism is just not cool in a coffee house.
Better to pretend to live outside of yourself with all sorts of idealistic notions of what ought to be while sipping coffee.
I’m stunned!
A Reason alum went to a conservative outlet?
#mindblown
Without providing solid evidence, our corporate-controlled government and mainstream media portray Maduro as a corrupt, repressive, and illegitimate leader with little to no support.
Wheeeee!
Bear cam
Douse the Jess signal. Not that kind of bear.
* Jesse
WHY NO PRIVACY FOR FRIENDS OF STEVE SMITH? YOU LIKE IT IF I STICK CAMERA IN YOUR DEN?
Euphemism?
YOU LIKE IT IF I STICK CAMERA IN YOUR DEN?
Definitely a euphemism
Super zoom lens!
Not the other kind of bear, either. I see a bald eagle.
https://hdontap.com/index.php/video/stream/pennsylvania-bear-den-live-cam
I botched the link apparently. Try this one
Neat! *bookmarks*
Hey Sugarfree, did you ever get that article I sent you last week? I never heard anything back on it so I am wondering if it got stuck in your spam filter
CRYPTIDS RUN SHOW. SEND TO SUBMISSIONS? NOT EUPHEMISM!
I did, never heard back from it.
About a week later you guys posted the upcoming schedule including a request for more content. I mentioned it in the comments there and was told to send the article in but since the submissions page just wants a quick description not the actual file I needed an address to send the file to. The next day SF gave me his gmail address to send the file to but that was a week ago and I still haven’t heard anything. Just looking for some confirmation that someone has actually received it
YOU ON GOVERNMENT BLACKLIST? STEVE SMITH GO LOOK MAILBOX.
Kansas Doctor Sentenced to Life in Prison for Patient Death
Shorter government: Fuck you, people with chronic pain issues.
Ohio Doc says “hold my beer”
I saw Captain Marvel yesterday. I don’t know what all the “wokefest” complaints are about. It was a solid MCU movie, slow in spots, but overall fun and I’d watch it again. There was one sequence about her overcoming the idea of being inadequate because she’s female. It wasn’t over the top or any different from the “girl power” themes I’ve seen in the past 40 years.
The retarded shit that the lead actress said had more to do with the kerfuffle than the actual movie, I reckon.
Thankfully I’m way ahead of the curve on this one. I’ve been boycotting Marvel movies sine Toby McGuire was still Spider Man, because the movies fucking suck.
I like the Homecoming franchise. Whatever it’s called. The new ones.
I’m seeing it next weekend with the kid.
At least I’m sure it will be better than 2016 Ghostbusters.
From the reviews I read about that film that’s a low bar.
I may wind up catching it next Monday. The girlfriend and I were planning on catching it this weekend, but life happened.
2016 Ghostbusters was probably the worst film I’ve watched beginning to end in 10 years. I honestly can’t believe the amount of “reviewers” that were willing to bribed(there is no other explanation) to give it a decent fresh rating, it was irredeemably bad.
Mr. Plinkett’s review is worth a watch
Every time I eventually get around to watching one of these ‘problematic’ movies I have that reaction. They end up being just like any other movie, sometimes they’re good sometimes they’re bad. It’s almost as if people like to drum up stupid controversies just for the hell of it, that or I’m defective and can watch a movie/read a book/listen to music with seeing politics in everything.
The theater model is just stacked with inconveniences. I have to leave my home, interact with people, potentially end up in a crowded room with unconfortable seats, watch it on their schedule without the ability to pause, and pay more than I feel the product is worth to do it.
Besides, I haven’t watched an MCU film since Iron Man, and did that at someone’s house.
For me it’s the guy loudly chewing through a massive bucket of popcorn; or taking fifteen years worth of rattling to open the goddamm box of candy.
You forgot to mention all the people coughing up a lung. Nothing like going to the movies and coming home with the bubonic plague.
This. This is literally the thing that made me quit going to movie theaters.
Yesterday we noticed a new annoyance. They started selling slices of pizza at the theater. So instead of the pleasant smell of popcorn, there was the overwhelming odor of cheap pizza.
Yeah the movie was not really woke at all and that whole girl overcoming difficulties montage could VERY easily have been read simply as HUMANS overcoming adversity because we just keep getting back up. It was not an inherently feminist scene and there was nothing really feminist about the movie beyond the fact that the main character was female. There was was way less social justice crap in Captain Marvel than there was in Black Panther.
As far as the movie itself, it was generally good but I had a few complaints.
Did not like the portrayal of the younger Nick Fury. I know it was supposed to be because it was before he became jaded by decades of being a spy, I still don’t buy that it was the same guy who became the Nick Fury of Iron Man 2 less than a decade later.
Brie Larson was not very good, better than the trailers made her look but honestly not very good.
I don’t know how true to the comics Carol Danvers her protrayal was but I didn’t really buy it. She was far too emotionally loose and easy going through the whole movie for someone who is having her entire world being torn down in front of her.
Again, not an expert on the Comics and I know the Kree are not exactly cosmic good guys but so far as I know the Skrulls were NEVER good guys or sympathetic characters. Part of me wonders if they were trying to make a statement on Islam with the way they handled the Skrulls but if so they did a really bad job of it.
This retcon kind of ruins stuff that had previously been established in the MCU with the Thor movie being Mankind’s first real contact with an advanced alien race and Shield/The US getting it’s hands on a moderate of amount of Kree/Skrull tech as a result of this movie.
Goose kinda sole the movie.
Overall I would give it a solid B
Did she
A: spend decades in a coma because her powers were stolen by Rogue?
B: Start up an illegal detention center for random civilians rounded up by her teenaged minions?
C: Slowly look more and more like a man throughout the course of the movie until people started calling her Carl?
D: Get rebooted five times because her sales figures were so low that no one actually knows what the comics personality is?
I don’t get why Jude Law and Djimon Hounsou weren’t blue. When Hounsou was in Guardians of the Galaxy I just figured he was a non-Kree working for them, but here it makes it seem like he’s Kree.
I agree with Risilio’s take. Except I would give it a C+, I found myself bored too often.
Forget the wokeness.
I don’t understand why a libertarian would want to watch statist propaganda, which is the essence of all superhero comics.
Fun, entertaining power fantasy?
I like entertainment from a lot of settings I’d never want to live in, and can reject the author’s ‘message’ when there is one without rejecting the entertainment value.
?
I’m guessing you have not watched any of the Marvel movies, pretty much off of which is at least minimally anti government
Certainly Captain America is at least libertarian friendly. He’s not perfect, but he’s a more libertarian character than you will find in anything else going right now.
KIck Ass?
It was a solid MCU movie
Larson could have come out as an Omar-disciple full-on Hitler-Did-Nothing-Wrong antisemite, and this would still be the reason I didn’t see it.
Such rhetoric was meant to stigmatize Democrats; instead, it ended up weakening the stigma of those labels, just like many liberals’ habit of calling mainstream Republicans racist took the sting out of that label and helped pave the way for Trump. When you cry wolf all the time, all you really do is normalize wolves.
Phew. I was afraid she wouldn’t figure out how to work a jab at Trumphitler in there. Orange Man Bad is all that really matters.
I wish they would give actual verifiable examples of the racist things Trump has done.
helped pave the way for Trump
Trump is such a super racist that you need a new term to describe it anyway.
I try and take small breaks from the political internet to keep my sanity, but I still end up just as angry, so why bother?
Thoughts on the continuing Yellow Vest movement.
https://starvingthemonkeys.com/2019/02/04/yellow-vests-and-you/#more-1280
“A water cannon contained several hundred protesters…”
Those French cops know how to deal with crowds.
Liquified protestors, it’s the latest in crowd control.
You know who else knew how to deal with crowds?
James Surowiecki?
Winston’s Mom?
Three at a time?
The New Orleans Police Department?
How do you pack that many into a single cannon? It’s like a clown car.
Water cannon have this large reservoir tank with more volume than a gunpowder-actuated cannon
The Anti-Natalist Fallacy
Benatar is an evil prick.
Without higher intelligence, morality is a moot consideration.
Just because she sang a song about Hell being for children doesn’t make her evil.
I have a difficult time sometimes with this, because I am basically misanthropic at heart. I believe and expect the absolute worst of people, and have rarely been disappointed. Although I try to maintain a bare minimum Pascal’s wager version of the Christianity of my upbringing,if I’m completely honest, down where I live I don’t really believe that life is intrinsically valuable, let alone purposeful, and I doubt very much there will be an afterlife waiting for me thousands of years into the future when Christ gets around to collecting the dead for judgment. But I still recognize the genocidal evil that comes from death-cult nihilism as public policy.
view life as intrinsically valuable; that all children are formed in the image of a loving God. Even if a baby will one day grow to harm someone else, they’re still not denied their inner worth.
Innate. Human. Dignity.
Even if it’s bullshit, it makes for a better society than the alternative.
A philosophy created for those who are too annoying to fuck or invest any time in.
Was watching a show on Nickelodeon with the kid on Saturday. Saw you on there, STEVE SMITH. Didn’t know you were into acting.
IT PAY BILLS.
*SHRUG*
Is that why you do those Jack-links commercials? Cause their jerky isn’t that great…
Oh Shit…
AND BY SHRUG, MEAN . . .
Elderly Trump Critics Await Mueller’s Report — Sometimes Until Their Last Breath
It really must suck to have politics be your religion.
Was he also a long time Browns fan who lived in Oregon?
Maybe it was a last moment of attempted humor, but I hope he got to tell those close to him he loved them before uttering that line.
Did they tell him he had been impeached before he died?
Really, to be on your deathbed and STILL be in total TDS… I just cannot fathom how he lived this long.
Yeah, 31 is way too young to go.
Lou Reed?
That’s just sad and pathetic.
I’ll take things that probably never happen for $1000, Alex.
Fracking continues to
.
lol @ me
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/03/50_per_barrel_continues_us_oil_boom_bankrupts_saudi_arabia.html
Remember when they kept telling us we couldn’t drill our way out of an energy crisis?
I remember them saying a lot of things.
I also noticed that we keep finding new ways of turning deposits “economically viable to extract”. Combined with the gravitational measurement satellite data that shows there might be a fuckton more oil under north america than previously thought, I’m convinced that the so-called crisis is a manufacutred one.
It was. When they couldn’t convince people we would run out of oil and it looked like we would have enough oil to power the world for a few more centuries, they started talking about famine, then global cooling, then warming, and now catastrophic climate change. The solution however has always remained the same: more collectivist power to governments to confiscate wealth and take away people’s freedoms. And these douchebags keep getting angry at me for not wanting to do anything but make fun of them and their cult of Marx.
I wish they would give actual verifiable examples of the racist things Trump has done.
On some teevee show (maybe Meet the Press), there was some guy rambling about all the racist and antisemitic stuff Public Enemy Number One has been doing for the past two years, and I was waiting for the host to ask for some specifics. As if that would ever happen.
Antisemitic stuff like getting Jared top secret clearance?
60 Minutes report on the ACLU had some of that “Trump is a Racist” allegation. Lesley Stahl repeated the canard that Trump instituted a “Muslim Ban.” They showed an ACLU protests at the airport as soon as Trump banned travel from certain Muslim majority countries without mentioned it was because these countries international travel security efforts were sadly deficient (as had previously been identified by the Obama Administration). How this ties into anti-Semitism and or Racism is incomprehensible.
Since I have nowhere else to do this:
[Dad Brag]
Daughter made competitive swim team yesterday. She’s been training hard for a while. Yesterday at a practice she was beating a kid who’s been competitive swimming for a couple of years. Going to work on her endurance and she’ll be swimming meets by the summer.
[/Dad Brag]
Congrats, man. Hope the training goes well and that your daughter kicks ass when the meets start up.
It’s so enjoyable to watch your kids succeed.
congrats.
That’s great dude!
Congratulations!
The eldest got his ass handed to him in a music competition this weekend. First time he didn’t place at all. It will be interesting to see how he processes that.
I’m just happy that my (special needs) son was accepted into the rowing team. Part 2 of the season starts today.
That’s cool. The commitment to the goal is the important part.
Scruff Spawn #1 has been skating on his talents some. He’s beginning to figure out that the work matters.
My niece has been a regular in girls choirs, symphonic choirs, etc. Then she went to an audition for a community theater thing and was turned down. . . she did the power move of going first in the audition, too. She admitted readily to being under-prepared, so I was proud of her for trying to hit out of her league. She’s in 9th grade and will have a lot more chances.
If you don’t try you can’t fail
/me my entire adolescence.
Hell yeah! Good job Dad. I’m hoping when my oldest daughter moves down from Seattle in August I can convince her to start swimming competitively. I only wish I’d had access to that sport growing up.
I swam competitively from 8 to 18. It’s a great sport and, like skiing, you will always be relatively good at it if you start young. Good for her. Mix some weight training in between swim practices and she’ll improve quickly.
Congrats
How old is your daughter?
She’s 9.
Going to shell out for a membership at the YMCA or somewhere so she has a good pool to practice in. Our little backyard pool won’t exactly cut it.
OMWC Jr?
Ask sloopy about his son.
Hmmm, breeding program to make aquatic libertarians?
COUSIN SEA SMITH APPROVE.
If anyone is looking at the 2060 or just likes benchmark GPU comparisons:
https://www.techspot.com/review/1808-geforce-gtx-1660-ti-vs-rtx-2060-vs-gtx-980-ti/
Nvdia has underwhelmed with its latest generation of GPUs and lack of much use for their ray tracing.
Fortunately for them AMD still can’t put much pressure on them.
I’m just glad that I haven’t found any games that my friends and I want to play that a 2060 can’t giggle at. Civ 5 runs like a top and loads ina quarter of the time it did on my last build. LoL is laughably smooth. Anthem came with my video card. I installed it and have yet to open it. I’ve heard good things.
The game and windows boots off of the Samsung EVO m.2 are ridiculous. I feel so spoiled with my new build.
I’m totally content with just sticking to my 1080ti for a couple more years.
I have 1080GTX and feel no need to upgrade.
(high fives)
I went from a 760 gtx to a 2060. I am a happy man.
Because it devolved into the sort of garden-variety leftist protest! that the French see every other day anyway.
We really live in the best of times.
Can we all just stop posting links for just a second and take a minute to talk about how SharePoint and OneDrive are probably the two worst programs Microsoft has ever built. Ok rant over back to the links.
::working on an awk script::
say what now?
I think Word still takes top spot as the worst.
Neutering OneDrive on a brand new Win10 install is more work than building an atomic weapon, but it’s worth it.
Heh, if you have a script for that. let me know. The damn thing keeps coming back like Michael Myers.
I ended up making about 35 registry edits that I got off stackexchange, but I have absolutely no recollection what they were now. I’m not even sure if it killed off all the backend stuff either, but I managed to get it expunged from the file browser, start menu, and systray, and it’s not stealing any resources from my games.
My company is going head first (possibly shallow end) with SharePoint / OneDrive all things cloud MS. I’m a little nervous.
Teams seems an interesting alternative to emailing updated information to the team I’m on. Anyone have experience with Teams?
I know it as an application that starts on boot and has to be exited. It and Skype make rebooting a work PC a lenthy annoying affair. I don’t have any experience using it because we don’t actually use it.
Skype, yeah…. that one too just showed up one day in my tray.
Can we all just stop posting links for just a second and take a minute to talk about how SharePoint and OneDrive are probably the two worst programs
Microsoft hasever built.There, now it’s correct.
*nods vigorously*
The dumbest part has to be the way they layer shit on top of shit, pretend that data structure X functions like data structure Y, and then it takes a stack overflow search to realize that it doesn’t have half the functionality of data structure Y because it’s really just a shit sandwich with data structure X in the middle.
But what about compatability with Data Structure Z?
/manager
So I take it you haven’t worked with Teams yet?
In case anybody doesnt know, Teams is one of those layers of shit layered on top of SharePoint. IMO, the only feature it has that Slack should steal is app tabs. The ability to tab over to the trello board associated with the conversation is great.
I hate One Drive with a passion. But… I built a Sharepoint site at my last job that was incredibly useful and worked very well.
LIEZ!
Sharepoint never works well. It sucks.
POWERPOINT. IT’S POWERPOINT.
‘Jesus Christ himself isn’t worth 500 times his median worker pay in companies’ — Disney heiress slams CEO pay
Imagine being an up-and-coming CEO getting lectured to by a literal princess.
What did she do to earn her money?
I’m wagering that’s why she has this misconception that no rich people earned their fortune.
Yup. Self loathing…
I heard that Diageo is prepared to make Jesus a humongous offer to head up their Wine Division as Production Manager.
He did come up with a very efficient production technique.
Well yeah, Jesus would be a pretty bad CEO.
Meh, ‘deserve’ doesn’t enter into it, but I would agree that our managerial model of business has several significant drawbacks, one of which is the diversion of capital into CEO wages, another is the short term mercenary thinking that comes from divorcing ownership from control. Of course it is a bit rich for an heiress to complain about this since the alternative is for owners to actually run their own companies…
None of Jesus’s workers were ever resurrected. Talk about a Perk Package.
There were a few.
Jesus had a relatively short career.
Doing More, Getting Less
The unmaking of American work.
“forced to do the work”
Funny, I’ve never seen a gun held to the head of my Lyft driver. Maybe they do a really good job of hiding it?
Not being given the resources to live fulfilling lives is forcing them to work!
/prog
Just the other day, the Uber driver we had commented that doing Uber was the best job he had had.
I haven’t used it much, maybe a dozen times, but it was a pleasure to do business with every driver I’ve had.
Except for the hours (nights and weekends) delivering pizza was an awesome job. Driving around listening to music or Art Bell. As long as you didn’t push it you could fuck off a bit. Base pay was low but with tips and mileage, you could make decent scratch.
Make me a sammichDrive me to the airport!gig economy
I hate this term.
I will hate it too until they legalize the ultimate gig: prostitution.
Russian 9D Chess!
Top Russian MP compares Trump to Hitler, warns of new war
It’s a stupid thing to say but I’ll cut the Russians a little slack on their paranoia because of their history.
“Trump has been at the helm for two years, and we see the parallels,”
I don’t recall Hitler’s generals trying to keep Hitler involved in any ongoing German military operations that preceded Hitler.
Mammary Monday can hopefully compensate for your lost sleep.
http://archive.is/KqIiJ
Quality bewbies.
4, 38, 40. Nice lovely ladies, Q.
3>25>13>29
Definitely 4
Or 16
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-03-09/us-gets-its-ass-handed-it-world-war-iii-simulation-rand
I always find these articles pretty amusing. The ‘Russian Threat’ was talked up for decades. When the Iron curtain fell, it was abundantly clear how much of a lie it all was.
A modern military would mostly consist of drones and missiles. Yes, infantry would still be needed. But the majority of the initial strikes and air support would be heavily drone populated. I’m willing to wager the US would still kick ass in any war simply because of our ingenuity and production capabilities. I think China has the production but I don’t think they have the ingenuity. Russia? LOL!
A full out war between the US and either Russia or China would quickly go nuclear so who would win a conventional war is irrelevant. It’s just more fear mongering to pump up the Pentagon’s already bloated budget.
Agreed.
I wonder how many of those nukes would actually properly function now.
Enough to be a bit of a problem.
Russia’s a dumpster fire. China has millions of grunts to act as cannon fodder but I don’t know how much that’s worth in a modern war. I’m no military strategist, but I’d think you park a couple of aircraft carriers in the Yellow Sea and run sorties pounding Beijing until they say uncle.
Yet the left seems to think Trump should be tough with the Norks instead of sitting down nicely and negotiating. This meme that “Trump is running around saying he admires dictators” seems like an off-hand way to wish the U.S. got involved in more wars just to rub Trump’s nose in it.
Err, yeah China might not have much of a navy but they do have significant anti ship capability and just parking a bunch of carriers in the Yellow Sea is just asking for them to be turned into Coral Reefs.
If we had to go to war with China anywhere outside of China we’d curbstomp them as badly as we curbstomped the Iraqi’s.
If we had to invade China, I don’t think we could win
“If we had to invade China, I don’t think we could win”
I don’t think any modern civilization could stack the bodies you would need to to win a land war in China. It’s hard to wrap your head around having that many people in a place that big.
Iocaine Powder. I would bet my life on it.
Now that I think about it, China would be a hellish place if the USA shut off grain and seed shipments.
FIFY
Once we build Skynet we can send in the robots!
just parking a bunch of carriers in the Yellow Sea
Fortunately, there are a couple of large islands nearby that could also serve as bases for aircraft in the event of a shooting war with China.
But won’t those islands capsize?
/congresscritter
In terms of capabilities and hardware we probably can’t be beat. But political fortitude and strategic blundering could easily be our undoing in a modern full-scale war.
^This. The next ‘big one’ will be lost because our politicians (to willing nclude the upper echelon of the DOD) not be able to refrain from micromanaging and political I fighting. Our failures will all stem from bureaucratic inertia. He’ll, a bunch of Afghani goat herders can make us look foolish. It’s not because they are smarter. It’s because they don’t have 37 levels of command.
*damn phone*
He’ll, a bunch of Afghani goat herders can make us look foolish. It’s not because they are smarter. It’s because they don’t have 37 levels of command.
I think it’s more that we have defined victory conditions as “Afghanistan and Iraq become friendly, democratic modern States”. If we had stuck with “punish them for supporting terrorists” and “remove current government”, we could have ended all this crap the day Bush declared mission accomplished.
It’s the arrogance of DC types who think of war as a some giant live action game of Civilization. Military action can destroy stuff; it can kill people; it can topple a government; it cannot make people love you.
“He’ll, a bunch of Afghani goat herders can make us look foolish. It’s not because they are smarter. It’s because they don’t have 37 levels of command.”
And they understand that war is brutal, about breaking shit (especially the morale of the other side), and body counts. We in the west get all bent out of shape as soon as there are bodies involved. War is not a video game, and you can’t win unless you are willing to destroy the other guy (sometimes permanently).
China has the bodies, which would account for something. But our overall prowess is vastly superior. Between our navy and air force, they pose no threat to us.
The lines at IAH were disheartening, but amazingly efficient. Also, Mexican – accented Spanish is the best Spanish.
Spanish, The Musical
Pat, I went to go buy the 14″, but they only had the 11″. They said they aren’t selling any more 14″ books until the new “pro” version comes out this summer. So I guess I have to wait.
I’ve got the 11″. They upgraded it to a 1080p panel from the 720p it was supposed to ship with, which was nice. The way their ordering works is kind of wonky anyway – you basically submit a preorder until they get enough to submit a production run to their Chinese contract manufacturer and then you get yours when the whole batch ships out.
I agree it’s kind of wonky, but it’s part of how they keep the price so low. I thought of getting the 11″, but keyboard seems too tiny.
It’s comfortable enough to type on, but it’s got some really annoying key placements that you have to get used to. I use mine primarily to read and control my media center when I’m sprawled on my living room couch, so it’s not a big deal, but the keyboard is definitely the weakest point of the smaller model.
STEVE SMITH GIVE YOU MORE THAN 14″ ! PRO VERSION TOO.
Y’all the two that were discussing the el cheapo Linux computers right? Do either of you know what the price of the pro model will be because I’m intrigued.
$199 has been bandied about, but I don’t think that’s a finalized/guaranteed price point yet.
Thanks.
I’m listening to two Aposematist otherkins discuss intersectional research and team building at the departure gate as I wait for my plane. It’s still mildly shocking to me because in my daily life I rarely interact with people so up their own ass. They are using all the buzzwords; “lived experience” “bias” “white male pedagogy”. Part of my brain still wants to believe that these people are just charactitures and than nobody is that removed from reality in real life. I’m working on a hypothesis that frumpy outcasts have simply found a way to make themselves relevant in a very vain and beauty worshipping culture. More chin stroking is needed.
I blame the Internet.
It’s far easier to blame others than to accept responsibility for your own lack of excellence.
And their entire world view is built on the premise that others are ALWAYS to blame
The mental gymnastics that occur when they actually obtain power for themselves are entertaining, if not outright frightening. They cannot reconcile their power imbalance filter with their own position.
A self deluded person with power is possibly the most toxic mixture I can think of. One of these people as a boss sounds like a recipe for pure hell at work. One of these people with the power of the state at their disposal sounds like an unmitigated reign of terror.
More chin stroking is needed.
A very polite way to say “wanking”.
“U.N. Predicts Disaster if Global Warming Not Checked
June 29, 1989
UNITED NATIONS (AP) _ A senior U.N. environmental official says entire nations could be wiped off the face of the Earth by rising sea levels if the global warming trend is not reversed by the year 2000.
Coastal flooding and crop failures would create an exodus of ″eco- refugees,′ ′ threatening political chaos, said Noel Brown, director of the New York office of the U.N. Environment Program, or UNEP. He said governments have a 10-year window of opportunity to solve the greenhouse effect before it goes beyond human control. As the warming melts polar icecaps, ocean levels will rise by up to three feet, enough to cover the Maldives and other flat island nations, Brown told The Associated Press in an interview on Wednesday.”
https://www.apnews.com/bd45c372caf118ec99964ea547880cd0
But this time it’s actually true!
Whoops, someone forgot to memory hole that one!
“Britain’s Asda supermarkets to stop selling single kitchen knives
LONDON (Reuters) – Walmart-owned British supermarket chain Asda said it will remove single kitchen knives from sale in all its stores by the end of April.
Britain’s knife-crime rate is soaring and, following a wave of fatal stabbings in recent weeks, many involving teenagers, Prime Minister Theresa May has convened a meeting of ministers and community leaders to discuss ways of tackling the problem.
“We know single knives are the most common knife products to be stolen and that is why we have chosen to remove these items from our stores,” Asda Senior Vice President Nick Jones said in a statement.
It is illegal to sell knives to under-18s in Britain.”
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-britain-crime-asda/britains-asda-supermarkets-to-stop-selling-single-kitchen-knives-idUSKBN1QQ08J
When pointy-stick-crime is soaring, are they going to ban trees?
Meanwhile in the vast majority of the USA, no one is shooting or stabbing anyone. But we’re the heathens?
Meanwhile in the vast majority of the USA, no one is shooting or stabbing anyone.
Well, outside of the inner city shitholes that have been exclusively run by Democrats for at least half a century.
“Even as it stands, the Home Guard could only exist in a country where men feel themselves free. The totalitarian states can do great things, but there is one thing they cannot do: they cannot give the factory-worker a rifle and tell him to take it home and keep it in his bedroom. That rifle hanging on the wall of the working-class flat or labourer’s cottage, is the symbol of democracy. It is our job to see that it stays there.”
…George Orwell “Don’t Let Colonel Blimp Ruin the Home Guard” article for the Evening Standard, 8 January 1941
Too bad England didn’t just surrender to Germany in 1915. It would have saved a lot of future trouble and the Brits are voluntarily turning their country into a totalitarian state anyway.
I’m listening to two Aposematist otherkins discuss intersectional research and team building at the departure gate as I wait for my plane. It’s still mildly shocking to me because in my daily life I rarely interact with people so up their own ass. They are using all the buzzwords; “lived experience” “bias” “white male pedagogy”. Part of my brain still wants to believe that these people are just charactitures and than nobody is that removed from reality in real life. I’m working on a hypothesis that frumpy outcasts have simply found a way to make themselves relevant in a very vain and beauty worshipping culture. More chin stroking is needed.
Eventually, the fools who immerse themselves in this shit in academia will be released into the wild. I’m beginning to fear the real world will be unable to beat sense into them in time to stop the rot from spreading.
As an employer, I consider these people cancer.
You give me the slightest inkling that you subscribe to that tripe and I’m going to find a way to get rid of you.
Why do you suppose they’re so keen on socialism? If reality can’t be made to conform to ideology, the laws will.
Yup. #metoo.
Can you ask someone what their preferred pronouns are at a job interview?
By all accounts he really hates his day job. And he’s been running for president for like six years now. I guess he thinks he has a chance with Hillary probably out of the picture this time around. Run, Bill, run! Anything that gets you out of the city for long stretches of time!
For no raisin:
Who Dreams of Cats?
I’m starting to re-think my anti-LSD position.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zep-hHlScZ0
Dude, I didn’t say I’d taken any yet.
But yeah, they’re a good band. Definitely have their moments.
“I’m trans. I’m a person of color. I’m an immigrant. I’m a lesbian. I’m a gay man. I’m the disabled.”
https://twitter.com/Alyssa_Milano/status/1104181833124610050
I’m literally Hitler. /any white guy
So many microaggressions there. How dare she claim all those groups lived experience!
Jesus, she did drink the Kool-Aid.
“I’m an idiot.”
Alyssa is hot in the flesh but cold in the head.
I’m Poppy
Need to tell her to get naked and prove it.
Actually no, because she’d probably have several “colleagues” do the same.
she sounds poised to win the intersectionality Olympics
Tony Danza should have smacked some sense into you
Well, He’s The Boss.
Not necessarily. That was the entire premise of the show. Who is the boss? Some could argue Judith Light was the boss, since she employed Tony Danza. However, one could also argue was really the boss, since he took stewardship of her children and taught them life lessons with his awkward yet sincere sportsman outlook on life.
Some still may even argue that Katherine Helmond, as the family’s matriarch, was indeed the boss.
No one argues Danny Pintauro was the boss, though.
“From the paper: Human bipedalism is an oppressive social construct and teaching people to walk upright reinforces ableist norms”
https://twitter.com/RealPeerReview/status/811692847040708609
My heart hurts less if I pretend that it’s an elaborate troll
STEVE SMITH WALK UPRIGHT BUT SPENDS MOST OF HIS TIME ON KNEES
BY ‘HIS TIME’ MEAN ‘YOUR TIME’! STEVE SMITH NO KNEELER!
She’s libtarded. But still would.
I can put the “est or ist” sound on the ends of words, too. Like, “you’re the shittiest.”
For people who’ve actually seen the growing plants in person – How decorative or ugly are potato plants?
Sweet potatoes are better than regular potatoes, but regular potatoes wouldn’t look out of place in a landscape
Okay.
Thank you.
I’d certainly not call potato plants decorative. Equal to tomato plants but without the nice red fruit growing where you can see it. In my garden I think they are beautiful because I know that I will get some long lasting enjoyment from them. They are attractive to potato bugs, grub worms and other pests. They don’t do well in the South, they are fairly short lived, like 75 days from pushing through the soil to dead (and ready to harvest).
If you are growing a few in lieu of a garden, why not?
It’s another one of those “Something that came up in a story I was working on and I wanted a sanity check.” I’m not all that good at growing things.
Potato plants can grow red fruit.
It’s such beauty it proves the existence of God.
I suspect you have a bias on the issue.
Count on it.
When I was a kid, I look some potatoes that were sprouting out of the pantry, cut them up and buried them in Dad’s garden. They grew like weeds – literally – for the next decade until they sold the house.
Easy to grow and will regenerate as you say, if they don’t freeze too much in the ground.
This was in central Massachusetts – so whatever random strain of potato I had planted must have been pretty hardy.
Not at all surprising, as they were clones of a commercial cultivar.
The potatoes sold the house?
“Captain Marvel Writer Kelly Sue DeConnick Says Movie Will Inspire “Women’s Studies and Academic Papers” ”
https://twitter.com/BoundingComics/status/1104139648060870656
https://boundingintocomics.com/2019/03/08/captain-marvel-writer-kelly-sue-deconnick-says-movie-will-inspire-womens-studies-and-academic-papers/
given the sorts of papers these ‘journals’ accept, that was a no-brainer.
If they do it will likely be to attack it as not being sufficiently feminist because it really isn’t
Papers like how patriarchal attitudes influence dog rape behavior? Or does she mean earnest work, like papers about feminist glaciology?
That’s, of course, the main point of MCU movies.
“In other words, they manipulated the algorithm because the most popular results were negative. I think this backlash is way overblown but how is that not blatant manipulation?
Funny how both YouTube and Rotten Tomatoes have both actually changed how their sites function specifically because of this one movie.”
https://twitter.com/datnofact/status/1104367779308810240
“YouTube fought Brie Larson trolls by changing its search algorithm ”
https://twitter.com/verge/status/1104250213383004160
“If you searched “Brie Larson” on YouTube a couple of days ago, the top search results were calls for a boycott of Captain Marvel, and angry rants about Larson’s involvement in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. With one small change, YouTube made all of that disappear.
This week, YouTube recategorized “Brie Larson” as a news-worthy search term. That does one very important job: it makes the search algorithm surface videos from authoritative sources on a subject. Instead of videos from individual creators, YouTube responds with videos from Entertainment Tonight, ABC, CBS, CNN, and other news outlets first.
The algorithmic news tool was first rolled out in October 2017, following mass criticism over how YouTube’s search favored conspiracy videos over actual news after a mass shooting at a Las Vegas music festival. The change from the algorithmic search that comes from labeling an event as news can be seen below.”
https://www.theverge.com/2019/3/8/18255265/brie-larson-youtube-captain-marvel-mcu-algorithm-review-bomb-trolls
Totes content neutral platform, not a publisher at all.
I’m amused that anyone can say CNN, etc. are “authoritative sources”.
Good morning America was on in the background at the hotel breakfast bar. The US soccer chicks were on there about some lawsuit they initiated for better pay, and the marquee read “Fighting for a fair wage”. Yeah, there’s some unbiased reporting.
You mean the entertainers who don’t draw the same amount of viewership or revenues as the people they’re dmanding equity with?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TFmhWLRoLeo
I had the unfortunate pleasure of watching an episode of Broad City over the weekend. I had watched the show during its first season and it was pretty funny, but then after Trump’s election the show became unbearably “woke”. Not just “woke”, but Williamsburg “woke”. I still believe that it is incredibly difficult to argue AGAINST white genocide after visiting Williamsburg Brooklyn.
Nonetheless, in this particular episode of Broad City one of the characters finds out that she bought bitcoin way back when and now wants to cash in the currency. After cashing in the currency she is confronted by fellow white liberals who are protesting bitcoin because it is the “preferred currency of pedophiles” and it causes environmental degradation due to the amount of power is used to mine for bitcoin. It was the most nauseating faux moral panic that I have ever seen.
How could the progressive movement have moved from “Occupy Wall Street” to defending the monopoly of big banks and the government on currency? How much of a status quo apologist must you be to be upset that a currency exists which the government cannot inflate into insignificance? What a worthless lot.
I attached a clip from the episode to ruin everyone’s day.
The good thing about Williamsburg is you can live in Brooklyn for decades and never have any reason to go there. You have to deliberately plan a trip there. It is not on the way to anywhere except for newer hipsters that were priced out of Williamsburg and moved further down the L train to Bushwick.
Occupy Wall Street was not about reducing government.
Your making an assumption that the “Occupy” people have a well thought out monetary policy ideas. Whatever is the topic of the day is decided upon about being good or bad without any thought given to what has been previously decided as good or bad. It’s all relative and there is no truth.
I’m not making that assumption. What I mean is that they went from being critics of big banks to being their biggest defenders. Big banks and government are the biggest losers with crypto currencies.
Yeah, they just don’t care if they were defending someone one day to attacking them the next.
Is that supposed to be funny?
One of my ancestors literally owned Brooklyn (I’ve seen the deed, signed by Peter Stuyvestant). Why or why did he ever start selling off properties???
Because his 300 year on descendant was not the foremost issue on his mind?
Would you really want that property tax bill?
That is what developers do.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cCHTRyDs4RU
I should have used that in my SLT articles. Maybe I will in the next one, if I ever get to it.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/09/opinion/sunday/gun-ownership-blacks.html
I am an African-American historian and, on the matter of guns and most other political issues, decidedly liberal.
because words have no meaning, “decidedly liberal” means I am anti-gun and support strict gun control laws.
For all the talk about examining the historical racial basis behind laws, it’s awfully strange how often the Left pretends as if gun control wasn’t originally instituted with the specific purpose of disarming blacks. They also seem to ignore more recent gun control in the 70’s that was also used to disarm blacks.
All these dog whistles and yet they can’t hear a bullhorn.
By “liberal” he means illiberal.
And he probably is not much of a historian if he is against having a sufficiently armed populace.
Correct.
https://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/ny-oped-im-so-so-so-sorry-20190301-story.html
“I apologize for Democrats who simply refuse to staunch the fiscal bleeding, and for Republicans who, er, simply refuse to staunch the fiscal bleeding. I apologize for Donald Trump, who took the White House, in part by campaigning as a fiscal scold, and immediately proceeded to explode the country’s deficit. His largesse followed eight years of generally declining profligacy under President Obama who, in an inter-generational game of kick-the-can, still managed to double, that’s right double, the accumulated national debt during his tenure. In fact, I apologize for almost all of the tanned, bleached, toupeed and plugged worthies we’ve sent to Washington to run your life.”
But then he goes on to some bullshit about racism.
“Now if you will excuse me, I have a SS check to cash.”
We’re so far out on a reed fiscally, reliant on economic growth more than anything else to keep up the pretense of solvency, and our best and brightest and scheming to kill even that thin sliver of hope.
I wish the family land were wetter, I suspect I’ll be farming it for potatoes within a decade.
Err, you might have misread the racism stuff.
He was attacking both the fascism and socialism of the young in Charlottesville, not that it was racist and thelater on spends 2 paragraphs attacking affirmative action and the victim narrative that is so prevalent among minorities
“eight years of generally declining profligacy under President Obama”
Lol what? I must have been in a coma from ’08 to ’16, cuz I don’t remember that at all.
They were spending money on the things they wanted, so none of that was profligate wastage.
If you only look at 2009-20016 then you see a falling deficit
Which really means they weren’t accelerating as fast as the year before. The rate of deficit growth decreased, but the deficit continued to to grow year over year.
You should because it is true. Utterly disingenuous but true.
So what happened under Obama is that right at the very start of his taking office, while still under George Bush’s budget they exploded the budget to deal with the housing collapse. Then they failed to actually pass a budget for the next 6 years.
GDP is in the tank thanks to the collapse and the budget is increased to levels never before seen during the transition allowing Obama sycophants to place that on Bush. Then spending was basically flat for the next 6 years as the economy slowly improved in the wake of the recession. The net effect is it looks like Obama started his presidency with massive never before heard of levels of deficit spending in place and was able to actually bring that deficit down.
What they conveniently ignore is that Obama had a pretty big hand in setting the budget to those ridiculous levels of deficit spending and he really didn’t do anything to bring the deficit down but rather it was his incompetence in working with the Republicans to actually pass a budget which held spending steady long enough for even the anemic recovery we experiences to erode most of the deficit he started with.
Thanks for elaborating. I get what they’re saying now, definitely disingenuous though. Seems like Obama basically failed upwards in this regard.
No. The deficit decreased every year Obama was in office. But, that first year was so high, that each one of those years would have been record-breaking had they occurred prior to Obama’s election.
As the article points out, at the end of Obama’s term, the national debt had doubled; in eight years, the U.S. government accrued an additional debt equal to the one it had occurred in all the hundreds of years prior to his election.
I got the sense the author was damning with faint praise.
The biggest problem is the massive debt that no politician wanting re-election will discuss. Someday that bubble will burst, what will the pols do? My opinion is that there will be a massive cry for the government to “do something”. The socialist leaners will have a chance to see their wishes fulfilled.
While I don’t remember the Depression I heard much about it from my mother. I don’t remember much of WW2 but the rationing was a big part of our lives, how we couldn’t get some things without ration stamps, shortages of all sorts. I do remember how I would be sent to the corner grocery, waiting until there were no customers and asking Mrs Campbell about my mother’s earlier phone call and leaving with the butter or sugar in a bag.
We were taught at home not to discuss some things with our friends because we never knew who would complain. I’m guess the other kids got the same instructions. Not called socialism but government attempts at control of consumption.
How I imagine supposed socialists would react to actual deprivation.
If only Comrade Stalin knew what was going on surely he would fix it
A feminist’s guide to raising boys
Before I became a mother, I thought my feminism was a battle fought and won. But having three sons has challenged everything
I’m curious as to why she refers to sons rather than children. The workload, etc. is the same regardless of their sex. Is she resentful (and she is definitely that) because she has children, or because her children are male? Sounds like the latter, which IMO makes her a pretty bad person.
No matter how much Mike pitched in, the day-to-day reality was me, at home, trying to hold back a tsunami of washing-up and laundry and mess and boys and nappies and Lego.
Every once in a while my wife gets into this sort of funk. “oh woe is me, I’m the primary caretaker and my husband doesn’t contribute enough”
I react very harshly to that when it happens. Staying at home (or freelancing) is a job. It comes with benefits, it comes with pitfalls. I’m happy to help out where I can, but I’m not coming home from 10 hours of play time. I have a stressful, high intensity job, and I manage to respect your lower stress, less intense, more boring, more aggravating job. All I ask is the same modicum of respect in return.
I’m guessing that Mike is in the same boat, except it seems that his wife doesn’t self correct after letting her self-pity take over.
“…you had no birth control and your body belonged to your husband by law…”
Well, fuck, you lived in the 19th century? Send your time travel story to Fox movies. Otherwise, it sounds like you made a choice. Fucking live with it.
https://twitter.com/donie/status/1104831886696857600
Huh.
The biggest problem is the massive debt that no politician wanting re-election will discuss. Someday that bubble will burst, what will the pols do?
Print more money.
What did I win?
In all my years of blithely touting feminism, I had understood it only in an abstract way. Now I got it, understood that because I was the one with the womb and the mammary glands, I would be the one carrying the children and then feeding them. It was a startling window into other times and worlds, where, if you had no birth control and your body belonged to your husband by law, then you could just be impregnated over and over again, sidelined and kept at home. Suddenly my feminism was visceral.
So what she’s saying is her husband kidnapped her and turned her into a sex slave and raped her for years and prevented her from using birth control?
“it’s unfair that women are biologically designed to care for young children. The patriarchy looms large.”
I guess he also banned modern conveniences like clothes washers and dryers, dishwashers, and disposable diapers that might help her keep up with the “tsunami” of cleanup to do.
One of my ancestors literally owned Brooklyn (I’ve seen the deed, signed by Peter Stuyvestant). Why or why did he ever start selling off properties???
Ten bucks is ten bucks.
At one time my great-grandfather owned all of Taos Valley. Family legend is that he sold it to a “flatlander” for $0.03/acre and had a good laugh about it.