Genies and bottles; Tigers and tails; and other Good Ideas that Bite – a guest post by LawDog
In 1998 a record-breaking settlement was reached against the tobacco companies for providing a still-legal product to consumers.
Shortly thereafter, and citing the tobacco settlement, litigation started regarding ETS (Environmental Tobacco Smoke, or “Second Hand Smoke”). This boils down to: Joe smokes; Frank doesn’t. Frank decides that Joe’s smoking has harmed him in some nebulous way, so Frank sues the tobacco companies.
Let me state that again: Frank sues the tobacco companies for providing a perfectly legal product to Joe. The end game is clear: some folks don’t like tobacco. They can’t get this legal product made unlawful, but they discovered they can litigate it to the point that the producers can’t afford to supply it anymore. Voila! Banning a product, without the cumbersome, uncertain process of making it unlawful!
Anyone following the gun debate in this country knows that the current hotness is suing the gun manufacturers. Joe acquires a gun, does something tragic with it. Frank gets a case of the hips, fails to sue the critter, you know, who pulled the trigger, instead he sues the gun manufacturer for providing a perfectly legal product to someone (someone, not Frank).
Again, the endgame on this is clear: the gun banners can’t get guns made illegal, but … if they can litigate this perfectly legal product to the point that the gun makers can’t afford to make guns anymore … well, they don’t have to try to get politicians to make them illegal, do they? Voila! Banning a legal product without, you know, banning it.
If you’re following the watermelons, you’ve no doubt heard of the lawsuits being filed against the petroleum companies for “Global Climate Disruption”. Several dozen, as I write this, filed by various and sundry individuals and politicians.
As above, it boils down to the fact that fossils fuels are not going to be prohibited. However, if it becomes too expensive to produce this perfectly legal product …
So, several hundred million Joes are driving their cars around, or flying in planes, or heating their homes with dinosaur squeezins, or using plastic products, so Frank sues the petroleum companies.
As is the case with the examples above, the desired result is not any recompense for damages to Frank, the desired end result is to litigate the petroleum industry out of business, and thus ban perfectly legal petroleum without, you know … banning it.
Got a feel for lawfare now? You think a legal product/service shouldn’t be legal. You don’t have enough votes to convince politicians to make laws against the product/service, but if you sue enough, sooner or later a sympathetic jury will make it too expensive for the product/service to be provided. It’s a nifty little legal end run around American lawmaking.
Now let us cast our eyes to Texas, where some State lawmakers decided that “Sauce for the gander being sauce for the goose and all that”, hauled off and made it official that Francine could sue the legal provider of a service used by Jo-Betsy.
Cue the wailing, the vapours, and the rending of garments. And more than a bit of teeth-gnashing.
Sigh.
One of the juvenile traits of the American Left that tends to stick in my craw is their tendency to gleefully go for the political/legal nukes against the “loyal opposition”, but then squalling like kicked pups when those same nukes get used against them.
Case in point: The Democratic Party holding multiple solemn press conferences when they did away with the 67% of the Senate to approve a Presidential nominee; replacing it with a simple majority. The worm turned, and the Republicans stated approving nominees with a simple majority, and the Democrats screamed bloody blue murder. Y’all set the damned precedent, quit whinging.
I’m here to tell you that the Venn diagram of folks who think the gun makers should be sued out of business; and those who think that the petroleum companies being litigated out of business is perfectly okay is damned near a perfect circle with the “My Body My Choice” crowd.
Y’all grabbed this tiger by the tail and used it to savage people you didn’t agree with. Now it’s biting you. I find myself completely unmoved by your protestations. You uncorked the genie and used it against the politically icky, and now that it’s at your door, you’re screaming about how unfair it is. Wah.
Y’all set the damned precedent for this law, and continue to do so. I have no sympathy.
This is your wakeup call: Stop using the courts to get around Congress.
Idiots.
Cool idea, ain’t gonna happen.
This is exactly what happened with Glyphosate (ie RoundUp) in civil court. There is no evidence that it causes cancer. It is in fact highly safe and efficient. The Greenies can’t have agriculture succeeding and feeding people, so when the IARC report with the *made up* cancer claim didn’t work (too easy to trace that fraud) they took it in front of a jury and appealed to the chemophobia. Emotions rule over actual evidence every time. Civil court has no standards, unlike criminal (see Frye and Daubert), to establish scientific evidentiary rules. Now it’s cost too much so they are pulling it from the market.
Do the Greenies want a famine? Or do they just want to turn the US into Ethiopia if they can?
The greenies largely believe food of any sort comes from the local grocery store, silly! After all, how hard can it be to grow stuff, you put the seeds in the ground and come back in a few weeks / months and you’ve got all the corn / wheat / soybeans / etc you could want!
IOW they believe that food is made by magic!
Everything is magic to them.
Yep, pretty much. Can’t tell you how many customers I had, back when I worked in The Supermarket, who believed that all of our products magically appeared “in the back,” and were horrified to discover that the meat/fish they were eating had come from an actual animal. Had one woman actually turn green and run for the restroom when she learned that the salmon she had asked about was a real fish, vs., I don’t know, grown in a vat in a lab or something.
What? How is it possible for grown adults in America to be that stupid? WTF did they think meat was made out of?
They believe in magic. As rich as we are, and we are rich beyond imagining, it’s easy to believe in magic. Where would they learn otherwise, school? Feh.
Some schools still try to educate about that. There’re demonstration farms around that get elementary school field trips every year so kids CAN learn where food, clothing, etc. come from. How many schools…? That I don’t know. And the farm(s) can only take so many at a time.
https://www.gocomics.com/frank-and-ernest/2021/03/21
My mom, as a young teacher back in the early 80s, pointed out to the school psychiatrist at the time (this was in Utah) that they had a problem with a couple of the questions on the IQ tests: specifically, ones like “Where does ham come from?” or “Where does milk come from?” and the six year old answering was saying, quite confused as to why this was even a question “The grocery store.”
This was in UTAH. Yes, it was the SLC area, but even today Utah is really big on the farming front. And even forty some years ago, kids were not aware of where food was actually coming from…
Back in the 70s my mom’s ag college got her hooked into the Cow Belles (cattlemen’s association women’s auxiliary) where one of their outreach programs was going into schools and explaining All The Stuff That Comes From Cows.
It opened with something like “We of course all know that meat and milk are from cows, but did you know gummy bears, pills, lipstick and tires are, too?”
She was notably depressed how many kids were freaked out by realizing beef-is-dead-cow, and milk is cow juice.
She’s also the one who clued me in on even grade school kids being sarcastic when asked where chocolate milk came from, and saying “Brown Cows.” (Insulting your audience is a bad idea.)
To be fair, the kids gave a possible correct answer. “What makes milk?” would probably elicit “A cow.”
Indeed, and that was her argument: *technically* the kid’s answer was just as correct–by the kid’s life experience–as the “correct” answer the test was seeking. The real problem is with parents not ensuring their kids (and by now, because they don’t know themselves) how things like supply lines and grocery stores and field-to-market things work. *I* always knew those things, but my parents were the children of ranchers and oilfield workers, so it was a fish-in-water thing. They never specifically sat me down and said “Now, this is where food comes from and this is where gasoline comes from” because it was something that was part of everyday life. I knew those things, because I was around those things.
I’d honestly argue that it was poor test design– you shouldn’t ask a question that depends so very strongly on the kid being able to figure out what kind of an answer you want. (Who was it that mentioned they kept being marked down on flash cards because it wanted her to answer “B for bird,” not “Q for quail” or “W for wren” or “C for crow” or something? I know it was here, but….)
Of course, the question “what makes milk” would be best answered with something like “a mammal,” and there’s a good chance a kid WOULD know that….
Well, I mean it WAS an IQ test, so naturally it was badly designed by people who WANT the kid to have to figure out what they (the adults) want to hear rather than what is the actual correct answer.
Mom wasn’t like that, and when she gets irked at the state of teaching, I remind her that she got pushed out in early mid 2000s BECAUSE she was too good at her job. (In part because she was likely to win Teacher of the Year, and the principal’s wife–who had pretty much been getting it for years and years, likely because she was the principal’s wife–was having none of that.)
::grumbles:: Yes, social intelligence is a thing, but that is NOT the POINT of an IQ test! ::grumble::
/sigh
Of course, the point of Teacher of the Year isn’t “flatter the principal’s wife,” either. Grumble.
::facepalms::
I just figured out the BEST answer to the “where does milk come from” question.
A nipple…..
What makes milk?
Cows, sheep, goats, horses, wolves, foxes, dogs, cats, mice, lions, monkeys, raccoons…
What? You weren’t specific! 😛
Mammary glands.
What?
________________________________
Scores on IQ tests have to be renormed repeatedly because people get better results. But it’s not even, and my suspicion it’s mostly getting more and more people to think like people who write IQ tests.
Read an article that said that if the question is “What do dogs and rabbits have in common?”, the correct answer is “mammals” and not “four legs” or “featuring in rabbit hunts” though “four legs” would get partial credit.
I wonder what “carbon-based obligate aerobes” would get.
Now that is a stupid-ass question. There are at least half a million things dogs and rabbits have in common, and in a fair and rational world, any of them should be considered a correct answer.
Like, ‘Either one can catch and spread rabies’. 100% true, and would be called a ‘wrong answer’.
I know, right? And I have NO idea what they were thinking. Not sure I want to, either.
Meat is made out of animals, and animals are made out of meat. Works out well, doesn’t it?
Complete and total failure of parenting and the school systems.
And they vote…
They’ve played too many video games in which a plot of land just a bit larger than a hut is enough cropland to produce food for one hundred people for a year, and grows that food in roughly a day and a half.
That trope is so prevalent in video games that I was rather shocked, and caught completely off-guard, when a game I play turned out to have a more or less proper growing season.
And now I am very curious about that game, because it IS so rare! (Is it ARK: Survival Evolved? That one the crops don’t grow overnight, although the water/fertilization part is still a bit unrealistic.)
The Amazing Cultivation Simulator. It’s a game about managing a Xianxia-style cultivation sect.
Caught me *very* badly off-guard the first time I played.
Huh. Never heard of it, but I’ll certainly check it out 😀
Gameplay apparently starts off like rimworld, but this is deceptive, as following the xianxia genre take you a very mechanically distant type of gameplay.
Cultivation here is a word used for something that is entirely distinct from farming. Xianxia cultivators are kung fu wizards, and Cultivation is their process of ritually casting spells that physically transform them into wizards with more power. Xianxia and cultivators are basically inspired by the Eight Immortals.
Cultivation sects tend to have outer disciples, inner disciples, core disciples, and elders. Outer disciples tend to be assigned a lot of the scut work, chopping wood and hauling water. In ACS, they are the ones doing the actual farming. Inner are recruited from outer, and get to start learning better magic to make themselves immortal. Core disciples are the ones studying to inherit the best secrets of the sect. Elders are basically the prior generations of core disciples, who haven’t died yet. I’m not clear about how much these last correspond to ACS gameplay.
So far as I know, the game just has Inner and Outer disciples. But I’ve never played long enough without restarting to get anyone to Golden Core stage.
People who aren’t familiar with the Xianxia genre should be cautious about getting the game, and might want to familiarize themselves with the genre first. Otherwise I can guarantee that you’ll have no clue what’s going on.
But if Taoist Kung-Fu Wizards sounds right up your alley, then it’s worth checking out the genre
Yeah, probably not my cuppa tea. I tend to prefer Western-style RPGs and such. Ah, well.
Note: Xianxia are mostly a literary genre, though the Chinese have been making cartoons and live action video shows lately.
It should be possible be possible to make a Xianxia western style RPG. I kinda doubt that ACS would really fit.
CRPG pundit talks about things like world building, economy, and character development, and I’m not sure how he would rate ACS in those. And he is maybe talking about a wider range of CRPGs thna you are.
Jade Empire was a western-style Wuxia RPG. I would imagine that it wouldn’t be too difficult to tweak the basic elements, bump the power way up, and get something Xianxia themed that way. The story would need to be changed, of course. But the basic mechanics should work, I suspect.
Banished has fairly realistic crop-growing cycles. The trees are very simplified, seasons-wise, but work ok ish since distances are also squished. (I play it on very much fast forward, and there are a ton of mods.)
https://store.steampowered.com/app/242920/Banished/
I think I might actually have that one, but it’s on the “bought super cheap on sale but haven’t gotten around to yet” list, lol
That’s how I got it, I think I paid $2.50. 😀
It’s been around for quite a while, and is well done for an indie game. I’ve started it up several times. The main problem with it is that there’s no real end-game for it. It does have full-on seasonal crop cycles. On the other hand, it suffers from the problem of too-small plots of land, which is understandable given the number of people that it’s trying to cram onto the game map.
Yeah, I can accept “too small” as a reasonable limitation in a video game. Usually I just ascribe it as “this too-small plot symbolically represents the much larger area it would be in reality” and that doesn’t bother me overmuch.
Time and space are definitely compacted– like I mentioned with the trees, it’s a “representation” rather than a direct drawing; otherwise a day’s range for fishing would be roughly 50-60 feet. (based on average height being 5-6 ft and the “range” on the building being about ten character-heights wide).
*Snickers* Oh, gads, just pictured how tight they’d have to pack folks to fit the numbers that live in the starter housing into the building if it was realistic distances… the Navy is jealous.
Something like those ‘coffin hotels’ in Japan?
If they were stacked two stories tall, yes.
Maybe they figured out how to build Hilbert Hotels:
This brings to mind the urban “farming” attempts in the CHOP (Capitol Hill Occupied Protest) zone in Seattle not too long ago. They basically tried exactly that: a layer of expensive potting soil laid on a tarp, with some seeds planted in it.
I don’t know what they were expecting to happen, but then again, Commies are big on dreams rather than reality.
Pretty much. It’s obvious that these people had no clue how much work and space were needed for enough crops to sustain a group of people.
I got the same impression from the video game Division 2, which includes (among other things) a friendly fortified former school campus, with its own gardens to keep the residents fed. The part of me that’s familiar with gardening instantly knew that was completely unrealistic, even though it works in-game.
lol they have the ‘fortified school’ trope in the tv series Falling Skies (which what I’ve seen of it is fairly good). I think the last season I was watching had them in a mall…? And while foraging trips and mentions of missing things like fresh eggs, etc are brought up in dialogue and action…I’m like “Guys. You are all far too healthy and well nourished–especially given the amount of physical exertion you are putting out with, oh, things like resisting the aliens–and there isn’t any indication of HOW you are actually getting fed.” Hand-wavium, really. A token nod to “food is something we’re foraging for, and man we miss the fresh stuff” but the writers are STILL missing the whole “And also what about the nutrients?” issue. Same issue in the Fallout games. I mean, sure, you can pack something with enough preservatives that it might conceivably still be edible after 200 years, but I doubt it’s going to offer much in the way of nutrition. I mean, they found in the real-world that stuff canned properly might still be edible after 80 years at least (stuff canned circa 1930s/40s.) But it definitely wasn’t pleasant to eat, and it’s actual value in nutrition is questionable. It won’t kill you, but…
When I dump my characters in the middle of nowhere, they either forage or starve. Have a bit of contrast in one bit where (a thousand miles from nowhere and separated by the width of a canyon) the MC has a lot of experience living off the land, but the antagonist does not, and has to learn on the fly the hard way, providing the MC with considerable entertainment (and the occasional fright).
Thing is, as with all forms of energy conversion, farming is at the mercy of entropy; there are losses at all levels.
That problem crops (no pun intended) up when designing long voyage duration space craft. The assumed goal is a totally closed system where everything is recycled. Except the longer the time span, the less that’s not realistically possible. First, ships leak; some badly, some not so. Second, unusable, un-recyclable waste builds up over time. For a ship, that could be easily dumped; but not so easily recharged. Theoretically, if you had enough energy to completely breakdown and reconstitute that waste, it wouldn’t be a problem. Except we’re looking at near planetary sized energy sources to meet that requirement at today’s level of technology to fit that bill.
Someone I know was grazing sheep on a 10 acre irrigated pasture, and selling meat lambs. All well and good, except the pasture was getting poorer every year. Turns out 30 or so lambs per year works out to something like 40 pounds of nitrogen removed from the soil each year (because protein takes nitrogen to make, and that lamb protein was eaten by humans and thereby removed from the local equation), no wonder the grass looks starved. Dinged at her to fertilize it and wonder of wonders, the grass came back as lush as it used to be.
Planting pea-family stuff– clover, alfalfa, actual peas– is also a popular solution, and part of the popularity of soybeans for field crops is that they are nitrogen fixers, too.
Clover would probably work best in a lamb business, because then you can offer the area to folks with hives, too. (And sheep are notorious for loving clover.)
Problem with legumes is the risk of bloat, and that she’d have to periodically limit access, and that level of management wasn’t happening. (The sheep mainly exist to get Idaho’s significant farm discount on property tax.)
https://morningchores.com/sheep-bloat/
Also why I haven’t encouraged the isolated tufts of alfalfa in my little pasture, which is intended to eventually house a few sheep, but management beyond the basics is not going to happen (only one of me and enough on my plate, and not enough space to do significant rotation, plus for various reasons I don’t want to cross-fence it).
As the link notes, clover bloat can be an issue when you *move to* fields that are *dominated* by clover– you’d have to be rotating them in the first place, and it would be more than just seeding the field.
https://smallfarms.cornell.edu/2012/04/the-perfect-sheep-pasture/
This guy has been doing grass fed/grain free sheep for decades now, and notes that the pattern seems to be moving sheep that are hungry– he uses fields that are over twice the “get nitrogen back in” suggested level, and rotates.
They stuff themselves on rich food, they bloat– that’s the pattern in cattle as well, although beef cattle are a bit tougher. (You can lose a lot of cows if some idiot’s starving cattle break through the fence to an alfalfa field, though.)
From the size, it would have been a useful supplement to the diet of one person, in several months.
From what I heard, it was worse… they stole some tomato plants from a garden center, stuck them in the shallow pile of dirt, then wondered why they all shortly died. Water? whuzzat?? doesn’t stuff Just Grow???
Worse. Put tomatoes in a dirt patch (stolen), on a black plastic contraption to contain dirt/plant (stolen, naturally). May or may not have watered. Even if watered. “Drainage? What? Why did it burn?” Let us count the ways.
Hey. I have a black thump. I am a serial plant murderer. When I go shopping for plants the response, from both son and hubby is “Who is the victim this time?”
I mean, hell, Stardew Valley would teach them more about farming than that ignorance.
Let’s just look at how that type of thinking is going in Sri Lanka… https://theprint.in/world/how-sri-lankas-overnight-flip-to-total-organic-farming-has-led-to-an-economic-disaster/728414/
heh. Betcha not one of those twerps who thought this was such a BRILLIANT IDEA ever thought to, you know, talk to any elderly farmers or people from places where they don’t have access to such chemicals. Or if they did, they ignored the dirty peasants.
But all-organic? Yeah that actually means “subsistence level farming” by and large…
I read an article the other day, either linked from Instapundit himself or a commenter, about the supply chain difficulties and how nobody except logistics professionals ever gave much thought to it, including economists.
The operative phrase was “stuff just shows up in stores”.
Hmm. Like how suddenly yeast became so scarce at the height of the lockdown…because turns out only ONE factory in the whole world makes the packaging for all the companies that sell yeast–but they were shut down as “non-essential”?? Yeah.
Idiots, the lot of them.
*Facepalms.*
GE had lawyers in the early stages who were frantically busy issuing documents that said THIS IS AN ESSENTIAL BUSINESS for all their suppliers for essential goods.
I wondered. People were complaining of lack of packets. Shrug. I buy fast yeast by the jar, x 2. Wasn’t quite out when packets of yeast disappeared, but bought 2 anyway JIC.
Haven’t had any trouble getting baking potatoes locally. But recently they’re really low, and really tiny. Looks east across the Oregon border … what the heck Idaho? Guessing secondary harvests didn’t make it to our local. Idaho should be starting harvest now, but not getting distribution on the road. Or distribution/trucking is mucked up or all 3.
Stores still have gaps in supplies. Heck Costco even ran out of TP again. Local RV dealerships are filling in center storage areas, at least the small one we drive buy. Not packed but more units. How many new VS used? That I don’t know. Do know inlaws 5th wheel is in for warranty and getting parts is proving “difficult”.
Still a lot of “help wanted” signs out despite the extended unemployment payments have halted. Granted it has only been a week.
Flowers for the garden have been meager, I heard staff talking, it’s not just popularity of gardening.
Planting pansies in the fall has always meant bad selection because people don’t realize it’s the time to do it, but many places don’t even have them.
A gardening group on FB my mother belongs to had someone complaining that they couldn’t find daffodil bulbs anywhere and why was that? Finally my mother pointed out that there’s still a huge shortage of laborers and/or the business was deemed nonessential and/or they can’t get them out on the road so there is no one out there harvesting them…
Meanwhile, I’ve been noticing calendars. They JUST showed up in a few stores. Not many. Indeed, the store that was “calendars and games” is still all games.
Usually the first calendars appear in July, and they are picking up by now. Though November has better pickings.
Pansies in fall? I have never heard this! Please, elucidate! Also, that would apply to any variety of viola as well, so?
Pansies are cool weather plants. They grow just fine in the fall. Then they overwinter. Then they grow much better in the spring than ones planted then, because they have grown and put down roots.
YMMV. I live in a climate warm enough that pansies seldom last all summer.
I don’t know about the others, I’ve only been able to find pansies.
If you can’t find plants, then fall-seed ’em. In fact, we should probably fall-seed more stuff… after all when does nature toss down seeds? In the fall, dummies….
I don’t have a good place for cool-weather flowers (flower beds are all in the max hot spots and tough to keep watered), but have found violas are a lot more heat-resistant, and come back better than pansies. Self-seeded pansies will sometimes survive, but planted ones mostly will not.
Washington grows a lot of potatoes, too, and between mask nonsense and the pay-to-not-work, plus the weird weather, it’s probably not very fun.
A lot of it is homeschooling or stay at home moms (or dads, in some cases).
Once you’ve experienced family life and tutoring your kids at their own speed, why go back? Cheaper, too, in many cases.
Not really cheaper, in my experience. Technically, costs more, since my property taxes are going to schools that my kids don’t use, and then i (meaning me wife) am buying all the bits and bobs, and spending a good pile of silver on curricula…
We did the numbers, couldn’t afford to have me work outside the house. Second car, buying premade or mostly made meals, clothing upkeep, childcare since school isn’t the full time and we didn’t have family to do free childcare…..
A good alternative is an online accredited school like Connections Academy. That’s what Baby Brother did the years he was homeschooled. (They were originally founded to teach diplomat’s kids, it’s based out of Jackson Hole.) His experience was excellent: he could still have the freedoms of homeschooling (ie, if he was done in 3 hours with the day’s work, he was free), but it also meant that he and Mom (who is a former schoolteacher NOT of the teachers’ union views) weren’t coming into conflict because he couldn’t separate “Mom” from “teacher” heh.
Also: Connections Academy (and, I think K-12, which is another online one) provided ALL THE MATERIALS. They mailed you the books, any special supplies and even the laptop computer he would need to use for classes. And it didn’t cost my parents a dime, because schools like this have cleverly wrangled status as a “public school”–so your tax dollars, of a sort, are indeed paying for that school. (And these schools actually spend it ON THE STUDENTS.)
Connection Academy and K-12 are both public homeschooling options for all (?) Oregon districts. The nominal school district (or state?) takes 5% (?) of the student seat to monitor student progress, remaining percentage goes to the online program. Definitely newer, or at least better known, than when my child was in school. Then too our district has/had (I think they are associated with Crow/Applegate District now) a program that offers specialty subjects based on parental expertise. (Say a parent is a Chemist, the parent could offer Chemistry classes of various levels.) IDK the specifics as we didn’t have a child involved.
My mom is pretty upset that great-grand isn’t going back to in person classes. Grandmother is overseeing Connection Academy. It isn’t the academics (well it is, mom can’t understand how great-grand can be done with class in less than a full school day time … explaining goes nowhere … obviously there is no way she can be properly doing math or reading or …). Her main concern is “socialization” and forming of life long friendship bonds. We all know the absolute truth of that fallacy (knew someone for 5 years before we mutually discovered that we graduated in the same class, same school, some 30+ years prior). That is mom’s generation, not mine, not her grandchildren, and won’t be for the great-grands, whether they are home schooled or in school. And this is eliminating any issues with bullying.
Her main concern is “socialization” and forming of life long friendship bonds
::shudder::
Dave’s Mad Genius Club post has a LOT of examples of modern and last generation “socialization” at schools.
Spoiler to grandma, which all of us already know:
There is ONE GUY mentioned who did his job– everybody else, the problem was solved when it was no longer obnoxious to the authority. (I had a mom that made it obnoxious, so had better results.)
Somebody ends up beaten unconscious? Not the official’s problem. Parents find out, find that unacceptable, and do the official’s job? The officials still don’t do their job.
…unlike the ‘traditional’ public schools that spend 70% of it on useless bureaucrats. 😦
*moves up a level because it’s more on Banshee’s point, and it came up often enough to mention*
As I told WeeFree, my husband did the math all nice and formal, and even when I already had 6 years experience in a technical field (Navy), we couldn’t afford to have me work outside the home.
That got people off my back with the “when are you going to get a REAL job?” stuff…but a couple tried to tell him that we should suck it up and take the thin times, because otherwise it would stunt my career and reduce my lifetime earnings, “invest” the money we didn’t really have in sending the kids to daycare and then public school so that when we were in our 60s, I’d have a higher income.
… Notably, nobody tried it twice, and nobody who heard his responses to the idea tried it, either.
It has been funny how some of the same “you must have a job outside of the house, you’re too smart to be stuck at home with a six month old baby” folks later wondered if we could possibly manage to homeschool the kids. That, I drafted mom in on, she has waxed poetic about how much time she spent at the school with three not-deliberately-poorly-behaved by highly intelligent kids who LEARN QUICKLY.
The wife like to say she “doesn’t have time to work”. All things considered she’s right. She has a BE in Electrical Engineering so she’s certainly able, but she’s one of those women that keep civilization going by performing all the corporal works of mercy. I’m hoping that my paying her way will get me an in with the big fellah. It was Sunday’s epistle. “Show me your faith without your works and I’ll show you my faith by my works.”
My mom has been encountering that attitude towards stay at home mom’s for nigh on 40 years. Less now that she’s “retirement age”, but even so–she spent many years with people treating her with contempt because she was “just” a stay at home mom and didn’t have a “real” job and therefore had no value…ugh.
It’s a cultural poison, honestly. Even people I KNOW raised their kids with “mom stayed home until the kids were at school, and only worked part time after that” were asking it while I was recovering from emergency c-section and the baby had serious issues nursing. I wasn’t allowed to drive myself yet, for heaven’s sake….
One of the great accomplishments of modern feminism is making childcare taxable. The other is having large numbers of white middle class children raised by black or Hispanic women, what happens to their children, of course, doesn’t matter to modern feminism. They can stand with all the other brown people, wearing masks, while the aristos waltz at the Met or Pelosi’s back garden.
When Adam delved and Eve span, who then was the gentleman?
I’ve had my issues with spousal social security still being in effect, given the prevalence of women in the workplace, but that is EXACTLY the reason why it was constituted in the first place: to provide income during the “golden years” for those spouses who STAYED AT HOME TO RAISE CHILDREN.
I don’t know how many times I have ranted about “two-income families” being mostly about paying for childcare that you wouldn’t NEED if you had one spouse staying home. Childcare expenses are the bulk of that, but commute time, gas, “professional wardrobe”, and other expenses play a role, too. But people don’t want to hear it.
And yet, most women who do find a way to stay home still want to contribute monetarily. That’s why so many “work at home” scams exist.
My sister, a teacher, stayed home with her 3, then 4. Until mom retired. Then she went back to teaching, when the youngest was 2. No way could they afford daycare, until grandma could come take over.
We briefly discussed me staying home. But we couldn’t rely on hubby’s job. 35 years and he got laid off every year. Then there was the years when he got transferred out of state, when moving was a poor option, and as it turned out, a stupid one (would have been forced to move again within 18 months, and company was no longer paying to move household on forced moves).
Thank God it didn’t happen to us, but my biggest fear was being mid-40s, or older, and suddenly having to go to work to provide insurance for the family … let me list the examples: Both grandmothers, paternal grandfather died when grandma was 48 with 4 youngest at home, she never did learn to drive. The other grandmother, grandpa was injured at work, she’d been working part time so she transitioned into full time (I think to get out of the house, but you didn’t hear that from me, besides all the kids were out of the house by then). SIL – Divorce, already part-time book keeper. SIL – Nurse, went back to nursing. Mom – Dad’s stroke at 50 … she’d never worked outside the house for a salary.
With almost any careers other than Forestry or Software, I could have held out of the work economy and gone back easily. Forestry, not a chance. Software, even worse, it is bad enough if you are working in it and not keeping up with the current trends; I was lucky to find work at 48 (a lot of my co-furloughed co-workers of the same age, or younger, never did)., after the next to last company went through bankruptcy The last job was going to allow hubby to actually quit/retire at age 55, at worse 32 months, if he hadn’t wangled a transfer back closer to home, before the kid was out of HS. He’d then be the at home parent. (Parent teacher conferences were a PIA. No, not separated. No not deployed. Just transferred to middle of nowhere. Which given what we like to do wasn’t a bad location. Timing sucked tho.)
I have gotten the “you must be able, with zero warning, to completely provide for you kids because your husband could die tomorrow” lecture– from people who also did the “you must work outside the house because it’s impossible to work on a single income.”
There hasn’t been a woman in my family who’d never worked outside the home in her life in living memory, and STILL they insisted on calculating as if I had zero experience, zero training and zero resources.
This also came up EVERY SINGLE PREGNANCY after the second. Because, you see, it’s irresponsible for a married, stable family to have more children than they can easily provide for IF THE PRIMARY INCOME PROVIDER IS HIT BY A TRUCK.
These same relatives complain about their one or two children not providing more than one or two grandchildren, most of them with fur.
I swear, they’re trying to enforce Idiocracy.
Yes. I get that. It is 100% a family decision. It just kind of hit us in the face, repeatably, at times when neither of us were employed all year round. Kind of colors one’s view.
In a lot of ways, when I switched from Forestry to Software, as much as I loved Software, and the challenge, if I’d had gone with Book Keeping/Accounting, I would have been able to take an extended break, and go back into that career. Would not have gotten (paid for) the second bachelors. It isn’t like I ever had a silicon CA or Seattle, etc., salary. It is amusing how, when people hear you are in software, that the presumption is a 6 figure salary, even locally. Not even laughing, and then saying “Oh, you are serious?” makes them believe otherwise.
It isn’t like any of the examples I cited, weren’t able to go to work, even with lack of working experience that could be applied. Mom ended up with a public sector pension (modest, but there) through working on school lunch programs. Paternal grandmother opened a daycare specializing in 24 hour care.
I don’t know what we would have done with schools the way they are now. We didn’t consider them “daycare”. One thing for sure, I would have worked from home, and home schooled. No other option. Hubby says we’d have gone private school. Nope. Not good enough.
Yes. I get that. It is 100% a family decision.
I figured it was obvious enough, especially with you and here, to not even need to point out that it’s the family choice.
STILL pisses me off that this group ::waves hand around:: with far more folks who had WAY better reasons to argue Just In Case options, are more willing to listen to the case as it is.
Half the people who tried to pull this stuff on husband and I either grew up in, or married a guy who did, a household where the husband had a heart attack while the kids were at most early teens. And had three more heart attacks after that. And the wife COULDN’T go work full time at her old job. And had way more than two kids.
But no, “you’re too smart to be home with kids” plus “you must run your life as if you’re a single mother.” (That’s what it boiled down to– I was not ALLOWED to act as if my other half could be expected to stick around.)
Aaaargh.
I my case. It doesn’t help that every time I was off work, I was okay for the first 6 months (for degrees of “okay”). After that, I wasn’t. Might have been better if I was homeschooling. But we never considered that back then. Latter, when there were “examples” of homeschooling (through sports and scouts), we weren’t impressed. Sorry, we just were not. (We would have done better 😉 *grin*.)
Bad enough that the point of getting a dog, in 2009, then a puppy in 2017, with full approval of pre-adult and then adult son, is “Mom has something to mommy.” We weren’t exactly helicopter parents, in the true definition of the word. We expected son to perform, do the work (and most helicopter parents really do not). We were the volunteers, the coaches, the scout leaders, which in a lot of ways was determent to our son. Because there is always the perception of favoritism when we made an effort to NOT do that, to the determent of our son’s experience. Finally came to “fine if we are going to get the blame …” but not to the point where it hindered our son, that’d been as bad or worse. It was a PIA. To get yelled at/talked about, when if both of us weren’t there to volunteer, whatever did not happen. It isn’t like we often didn’t wait for anyone else to step up. They didn’t.
Correct answer: So who’s going to do the housework, the cooking, the laundry, and the yard work?
Occurs to me that “socialization” stopped being a value of public school and became a liability about the time the school culture shifted from farm-cooperative to urban-rat-race (see my mutterings over at MGC) and judging by the evidence, outside of smaller communities has gone downhill ever since.
If’n I had kids and wasn’t a DIYer, I think I’d be askin’ if the nearest Amish school takes “English” kids too. At least they wouldn’t be bombarded with Woke stupidity and utter lack of discipline.
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Answer: We all do. Took a lot more work. But I’ve got the most adorable pictures of kid “I hlp” yard, house, laundry, cooking, pets, … Once the kid did his Scouting Family merit badge, I never touched his laundry. Even now retired. I do not do all the laundry. Everyone does their own. I’m more particular about the household chores being done (not above saying … “Please do.”) Even when it would be faster and easier to do (NOT getting stuck doing it all). I don’t mow the lawn, hubby and son share that.
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Kids Sports doesn’t do it either. Better discipline, at least was. Nope. School and Sports were a place to meet people, then plan accordingly. Scouts, while some overlap, was a better option. Some of son’s life long friends were met in Scouts. While his K – graduation HS classmates have all disappeared socially. Even neighborhoods, defined as same or adjacent streets, it is difficult. There weren’t any other kids. Pre-school other than infant – 30 months care, which was socialization 100%, was pre-k learning/play, and most socialization took place with his cousins.
Toward the end of son’s schooling, it was getting extremely difficult. Either school discipline was over the top, inappropriate, or targeted the wrong party. That is on the student side. Teachers? Were flat out screwed. Damned if the do Damned if they don’t. Multiple sources. Son has graduated from college over 10 years ago, and we don’t have grandchildren, nor many great nieces/nephews in the system.
From what I’ve seen, from afar, niece has made the correct decision. Her school age daughter is in “public” school. They are using one of the online home school public options being overseen by grandparents. When grandparents are gone, mom and dad can oversee. Not like the hours have to be consecutively or conducted between 7 and 5 PM. Can be done in evenings. Can be done next to mom. Their bigger problem right now is not the 9 year old and overseeing schooling, but an active 2 year old, when grandma and grandpa are out being retirees. Heard rumblings about mom taking a furlough. But grandparents are going “NO! Why?” (Grandpa is learning what he missed when his girls were growing up … he worked retail management, not an 8/day, 5 days/week, job, it was lot more.)
Was a bit surprised with the other niece with a child put her stepchild back in school. Complication there is 4 adults making decisions. Okay, only 2 have legal right (co 50/50 custody), but all 4 weigh in. Then too he is in an alternative selective public school option. Note, if they decide a parent has to stay home, it will be dad. Right now they need to figure out infant care. Due from now to mid-Oct. Won’t need care until June (?) or later, even if she continues to work from home, at least part time. Some options being considered, is co-nanny, at their house, with some neighbors. Bonus, nanny gets paid more, because more responsibilities, but families pay less each, than having own nannies.
Do not know what hubby’s nieces or nephews are doing. We lost contact with most of them a long, long, time ago, except one niece. Her 10 year old is back in school (public?). Her 18 year old should be graduating HS soon with a HS and 2 year tech degree, so some specialized program.
I just had cause to look up daycare costs by state. And yeah, it pretty much does eat up the profits from a second income. Instead of a bunch of ugly copypasta, here’s the comment I made elsewhere, with links:
https://www.city-data.com/forum/61735007-post5.html
From my last link:
=====
On average, infant child care costs $216 a week, which is 17.1% of the national median household income.
Infant care in the US costs anywhere from 10.9% of household income—like in South Dakota—all the way up to 26.3% of household income in Washington, DC.
=====
And that’s just the daycare, not the secondary costs like transportation, business wardrobe, and hitting a higher tax bracket (thus more tax on the same or less net).
Occurs to me that the tertiary costs to society may exceed all of this, in that daycare is (being essentially the communist creche on a smaller scale) the opposite of forming family and community bonds, thus finalizing the breakup of the extended family that began during the Industrial Revolution.
Tactical advice for couples looking for a defense:
Look up what subsidies are available, and what child care locations have decent reviews, and be prepared to drop names and actual amounts.
MAKE SURE that you use the TAKE HOME PAY as your comparison, not the raw salary– a lot of people sell themselves into it by ignoring how much you pay in taxes.
And once you have more than one kid, or worse, more than two. . . .
I understand that conventional economics is heavily oriented to thinking of stuff in terms of government subsidies.
So the ‘well, akshully’ might well be that we should not expect most economists to have spent much time figuring out the whole, or how it actually works.
“…conventional economics is heavily oriented to thinking of stuff in terms of government subsidies.”
Huh. I think you’re right. All is explained!
Dang, that is appalling. How “unexpected”.
So, yer sayin’ we need to start hoarding tea and spices….
Now that you mention it, I am getting a little low on Earl Grey…
I was at a local charity fundraiser recently and got to talking with another couple at our table. They are recent refugees from Crook county (3 months ago). The wife unit was talking about becoming totally off grid on a little 2 acre plot they are looking to build a house on, Neither one has ever farmed and no one in their family has farmed for several generations, so they had NO clue on how much work even modern farming is. They had the same idea, you just planted the seeds and the plants magically gre without any more input, built a chicke coop and put chicks in it and started gertting eggs the next week, and the goats magically became meat in the freezer. NO idea on how much even a small tractor with a full set of implements cost. The husband was wondering why there were no electric tractors available. Both though a few PV panels and a couple of batteries would power all their household appliances and had no clue about water wells and septic tanks – couldn’t the local village just run water and sewer to them?
Another couple at our table are farmers and were highly amused at the shocked looks on the city couple’s faces as I ticked off what they needed to do to be completly off grid and self sufficient.
–
Meanie. Dashing hopes like that.
Ever watch Homestead Rescue? Most, not all, Homesteads needing rescue, are just like the city couple you describe. There are a few that were surviving and thriving until mother nature got nasty: Fire, Lava, illness, injury, etc., set them back, hard. A little help needed to get back on track.
Meanie. Dashing hopes like that.</i?
One of my favorite activities with low-information types in a social setting……..
My answer is “um. Ooooookkkkkkaaaaaayyyyyy …” while I’m backing away. Hubby takes joy, usually, in listing what they are “forgetting”.
Occasionally, he is a little more political. Take the group we met on the PCT. Conversations were had. They were headed for Obsidian Falls Campsite for that night when they had the permit for. Them “We figure it is another 10 miles or so” … Us “Um. Yes, it is all of that”. NOT said, “and more”. Someone really hadn’t mapped out their trek, nor checked out portions in person prior to the trek. By PCT it was well over 10 miles to their campsite. If they instead took hwy 242 to Scott Trail head, then headed up to the falls, it would be just under 10 miles … key word is “UP”. Fun trail to come down, not so fun to trek up; steep switch back through timber, and the trail not cleared of winter debris. It was mid day when we met them.
Then there were the HS graduates we met. No map, no bug spray (in June, in the Cascades). We dug into our packs for spare bug spray (we had enough to drown the misquotes, we sacrificed some of our stock … JUNE in Oregon Cascades!) Gave them one of our 3 maps, a (cheap) spare compass, and showed them the route they needed to go (backtrack, a lot). Patted them on their collective heads (okay, only mentally, but still). Let them go on their way. No news later about missing young adults. Dang we debated about rounding them up and escorting them out of the wilderness for their own safety.
*shaking head*
Maybe I spent too much time living without modern amenities (friends said I “camped out at home”), but when I hear “off grid” I picture virgin wilderness and nothing else, to be built up from scratch.
Thank you for making me take a few minutes to contemplate just what the wife and I would be willing to do without if / when we get our up-north property.
I know in the areas we’re looking, we’re talking septic field and a well, but yes, for power I was in the “solar and wind so we’ve got lights at least” idea.
Stove could be propane (get the big tank that needs a concrete pad,) but now I’m trying to think how to manage a (small) refrigerator…
But trying to live off the land ourselves?
/insert the “now we throw back our heads and laugh” meme
I despise gardening with a passion, neither of us have ever hunted, so yeah, weekly trips to the nearest town with a grocery store.
Now, if we have said property and it looks like the SHTF is coming? I WILL figure out gardening and I will figure out how to dress a deer and I can at least fish and filet it. Of course by then, it’ll probably also be a bit late to start that…
I despise gardening with a passion, neither of us have ever hunted, so yeah, weekly trips to the nearest town with a grocery store.
Invest in a deep freezer, the kind that make jokes about “3-5 people” fitting in them darkly funny.
Not just because then you CAN skip weeks, randomly, but because it’s NICE to be able to buy the loss-leaders and not have them go bad– we run out of 99c loaves of bread about the time that they go on sale again. 😀
Walmart has $1/14oz. fresh-baked bread every day, and it’s REAL BREAD like Buttrey’s used to make, the kind where you get high sniffing bread all the way home. (Italian, French, and roll form factors, with or without seeds, sliced or not.) This is literally why I switched to shopping there. And yep, get a bunch and freeze it. In fact I keep the usin’ loaf in the freezer too, drop it on the floor if I need to break up slices. Never a day with stale bread.
Too far for us to hit walmart, although I do stock up on their french loaves every month or change when I’m there for something or other.
And with a horde of little monsters that are DELIGHTED to make their own sandwiches, 99c/20oz is a much better deal. (Plus, my husband doesn’t like crusty bread. It’s a rare character flaw….)
I hate commercial namebrand bread (it’s Not Food!) so much that when I couldn’t get Real Bread, I stopped eating bread (until I got a bread droid). If hubby doesn’t like crusty, just heat it up slightly in a plastic bag, and the crusty goes away… no need to eat toxic waste instead of bread! 😛
Not sure what brand of bread you looked at, but the ingredients are the same on mine, other than having a little potassium in the soft loaves.
For 30% less, I’ll accept a longer shelf life and a nutrient we need anyways.
@Foxfier: I’ve NEVER seen a commercial namebrand bread that was “bread” by my lights, and per my mouth, most aren’t even “food” despite having basically the same ingredients.
Some of this may be shorting the dough on proofing (rising) time, which makes a huge difference in flavor and texture. Walmart tells me it takes 11 hours at controlled temperature to do it right…. almost as good as Buttrey’s bread…. which obviously ruined my expectations for all time. 😀
Sounds like a personal problem.
>> “If hubby doesn’t like crusty”
[blink]
When you agreed with me a couple of years ago that female shit tests were a real thing I must have just blindly assumed you were male. It never even occurred to me until now that you might be female, and honestly I’m a little embarrassed that it comes as this much of a surprise.
Live and learn, I guess.
I thought you meant Reziac, who I”M SURE must be male….
>> “I thought you meant Reziac, who I”M SURE must be male….”
I did, although now that you mention it s/he could have been referring to Fox’s hubby and I just misinterpreted the wording?
*blink* Was referring to Foxfier’s hubby, a person who obviously lacks all sense of bread. 😉
>> “Was referring to Foxfier’s hubby”
Yeah, I twigged to that after Sarah’s comment. It’s partially that I’m not used to the MEN around here referring to anyone as “hubby” and partially that I was winding down for bed at the time and not fully awake.
Sorry about that.
@DGM LOL, I was totally unaware that “hubby” was a gendered usage (I was just being lazy typist!) …wonder what other words I use that confound the normies… must learn more of them…. 😀
Problem with a freezer is when the power goes out …
But, yes, hubby isn’t real fond of a well. His parents place, high desert between Sun River and La Pine, had constant problems with the volcanic soil and the pump. Every visit meant some time spending it with his dad cleaning and fixing the thing.
I too have problem with gardening regularly. Black Thump. Yes, I could learn. Do not want to. Know how to fish. We’ve both hunted before. I’ve never shot anything (have to see the things first). Only hunting we do these days is with a camera lens. Grew up on Venison, Elk, and Trout. Was helping wrap and mark meat since I was tall enough to reach over the kitchen table, and could copy words. As far as raising our own meat? Not fond of chickens or bunnies, but even I’d have problem butchering them. I know where meat comes from to get to the butcher and grocery store. I just don’t want to be one doing the slaughtering.
Pretty sure we wouldn’t have as much trouble with a well (grandparents had one living on one of the lakes up north) and that’s where I learned (sort of) to fish. I do miss fresh walleye, pretty sure from watching Grandpa filet the walleye I can figure it out without leaving fingers on the workspace.
As for a freezer when the power goes out, that’s what a portable generator (already got one,) is for and you DO NOT open the freezer unless you have to and even then make it a “get in, get out, get the door / lid SHUT” sort of thing.
Yes. That is what we do. It is the multi-day/week/month events that become the problem. Do you have enough fuel for the generator?
My 1270sf house uses on average 1kw/hour, which is mostly the older fridge and chest freezer plus occasional microwave and oven, since I have gas heat and led lighting.
So my plan for the occasional-use small cabin at Tierra de Balzacq is to put in enough solar plus batteries to ensure about half that, with a generator backup run off the same giant propane tank that I’ll use for cooking and heating.
That’s the other reason I really like the “sized for the whole family to fit in” freezers, especially with frozen jugs of water. 😀
I’m there with you on the meat thing. I don’t mind eating it, but…I don’t want to have to KILL it unless it’s that or starve. I know how. I was forced to help a couple of times when my dad’s mother visited us, but I didn’t like it at all. (Though on the chicken front….it’s less ‘feel sorry for the chickens’–because 98% of all chickens are evil little bastards–but it was gross and really smelly. I hate the smell of boiled/burnt feathers. So much.)
Turkeys are worse. When I was 12, participated in crating turkeys for shipping out for processing as a fund raiser. A friend came along, and dad, with a lot of others. Mom made us strip in the garage before we could come in the house. We two girls waited in the carport while dad got stripped and to the (one) shower and clean. Then he was absent while we did. I think mom washed everything 3x’s, or she said she did.
I don’t even know how to de joint a whole chicken packaged at the store to cook individual pieces. I just buy chicken tender, size. If we have a whole chicken, it is the Costco Rotisserie ($4.99, cheaper than buying a raw one). Turkey, … follow instructions for whole bird. Both chicken and turkey get carved, cooked, by hubby.
Did you think about how much wood you will have to have cut and ready for winter heat?
I have. We’re suburban, city lot (large compared to new lots, but still city). We’ve heated with wood. Willamette Valley, so not comparatively cold. We went through 5 chords of wood per season. WE got wood for free, or relatively, when we were paying for it. Either a USFS permit for the pine killed forest (is that still happening), when we needed to get wood for inlaws, SIL, BIL, and us. The 4 of us (BIL, his wife, and us) would get 8 loads / weekend (two trucks, two utility trailers, per trip). We’d haul the truck and one trailer home; one in 4 loads went to mom and dad. When we didn’t have to get pine, we used Firewood Finders. Once we moved to Eugene, a lot of the log yards would have piles of wood for free for employee’s and contractors working in the yard. This dried up about 5 years ago, or so. Even retired hubby could get wood until then. Dried up mostly because of liability reasons.
Last load we got was a bin of wood from Lane Apex, same stuff as the prior piles, just that was one way the yards were getting rid of it. $250/bin or $250/little over 10 chord. Wanted to know if it was a reasonable fund raiser for troop. Answer. Not really. Value was there. Pay $25/chord. Sell for $200/chord-delivered-split, more delivered and stacked. Logistics OTOH couldn’t work, whose yard? And the youth couldn’t do most the work because chain saws were involved.
When we moved from Longview to Eugene, part of our “stuff” was 10 chord of wood (no, the movers contracted by the company would not move it). When we moved from the rental, there was 30 chord of wood to move, by my cousins, that is all they moved 🙂
I am well aware what it took.
AARRGGHH!! A ‘chord’ is either the sound of multiple musical notes, or a section of a circle. A ‘cord’ is a four by four by eight foot stack of wood.
Yeah, it’s a Pet Peeve, but ’tis mine own.
Sigh. Yes. Yes. It is. I do know the difference. I didn’t catch it. Can I blame it on auto corrupt? No? Oh. Oops.
All of them need to read The Last Centurion. Especially the chapters about sending clueless tofu-eaters to the farms.
Why not both?
they feel humanity is a plague and it should go away (but never take themselves away)
This is what burns my a—. Why don’t they set us all an example?
my reply is always “You first”
If good for goose, why not gander?
They (the lefties, that is) really, REALLY hate that concept. Most of them seem to have a hard time even understanding it. I suspect that’s because, to them, no one else–specifically no one who disagrees with them–is actually another human being. We’re not real people to them, we’re either serfs or an enemy that must be ground down and made into serfs (because of course serfs aren’t real people either)
I think it’s mostly cognitive dissonance. They simply block out anything that would cause them discomfort. You know, Lalalala I’m not listening. They’re just vicious, feral children. I tend to wonder how old they were when daddy left.
I’ve actually seen one do that.
Just not right.
They’re the good people. if you don’t believe everything they believe, and what they believe seems to change from minute to minute, you’re a bad person. If it turns out that you, the bad person, are correct then their position was bad, but that cannot be because they’re the good people, so you must be wrong, but you’re right. Lalalalala.
I have literally seen one said that even though a right-winger was right, he must have been lucky and not had evidence.
“What’s a daddy??”
They’ve learned to an extremely strong degree that humans can be divided into oppressor and victim, and that these are real, measurable, important categories. From their perspective, it is an absurd hypothetical that has no match to reality. They assume everyone sees the same criteria they do, processes it the same way, and that different perspectives are thus willful, knowing, evil.
Barbarians, and not ones with whom we have a possibility of sustainable peace.
Case study of a similar situation.
Can I admit to some training in statistics and mathematics?
I have some training. Pretty much no actual experience using in real world situations. Lot of life experience which has reinforced ‘yes, using it that way can work’, ‘no, using it that way is not sound’, and ‘what in the world was I even thinking, it does not make sense’.
So, fractional tests of ‘discrimination’, I recognize as improperly applied statistics, so I start to wonder about getting people to acknowledge statistical uncertainties in these tests. Then, because I skimmed a book or two on statistical process control, I conclude I understand why statistical process control can work, and segue into raving about humans not being widgets. I retread through ‘it does not make sense to apply discrimination tests at latter stages, when attempts to remedy discrimination at earlier stages have had unknown results, and may have made things worse’, and ‘you know, even if you could control things so that all positions were evenly distributed, the cost is so high that no achievable benefit could be worth it’.
But, if these folks were interested in even division of positions, this 40% male statistic reported for university student bodies would be an issue.
Basically, I spend too much time thinking that these are people with who are sane, and can be conversed with in a reasonable manner. Then, I spend far too much time revisiting my past conclusions, time that would only be worth spending if I could have something new to show for it. I do this because I think numerical models are important, important enough that knowing how to do them correctly matters, and assume that everyone else cares at least as much about doing them correctly. Which assumption is hilariously wrong, even before you look at the d@amned savage leftists.
But, I’ve selected people to hang around that will mostly at least humor me if I start talking about this, or asking questions. So I overlook exactly how weird I am, how poorly the company I keep predicts some of the people I could interact with.
Similar mistake, but cutting in some directions that are apparently very different.
Yep, that’s what I think as well.
“Rural deplorables had for more than a century before been regarded as beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with enlightened liberals, either in social or political relations; and so far inferior, that they had no rights which any liberal person was bound to respect; and that the deplorable might justly and lawfully be reduced to disenfranchised serfdom for his benefit.”
–a riff off of Taney in Dred Scott, seen on Instapundit
There’s a line in the movie “The Horse Whisperer” where Kristin Scott’s character asks Robert Redford’s character how come someone as smart as he is lives out in the wilds of Montana (or wherever they were supposed to be). There’s no life, no culture, no nothing. How did he stand it. He answers “I lived in Chicago for ten years. I like it better out here.” She says “Oh. Oh. Um…” I’ve thought for a long time that she wasn’t acting there…
You say is good for goose is good for gander? In Soviet Russia, goose and gander good for YOU. Ours was cook long ago. Vhere you hide yours?
It flew off. Kulak and wrecker that it was.
(One Soviet writer got back his work from the reviewer with the complaint that the plow horse was plodding. It should have been moved eagerly like the rest of the workers.)
To be fair, a good number of lefties have done this usually when driven by other lefties who do not kill themselves. If all the lefties kill themselves, it is usually in the context of a cult.
I suspect the more fanatical ones have to make sure the rest of humanity is dead before they dispose of themselves. Which is a bit creepy.
So the entire modern left boils down to a murder/suicide pact on a global scale. Scary, but it fits.
Or in the Left’s case, more like the goose that lays the golden eggs.
Once upon a time it was explained to me thus:
Life without technology (by which I think she meant anything discovered after about 1750) would be shorter for the individual but people would live so much more “intensely” the loss of years would not be a burden. I’ve taken to calling that fantasy world the AOCene after our favorite socialist bartender.
A slice of life in the early AOCene.
After dinner, the children gather around the fire and asked, “Tell us a story, Grandfather.”
“OK, children. What would you like to hear?”, Grandfather replied.
“Tell us one about when people lived in houses, had electricity, clean water, and plenty to eat.”
Earth Abides.
Very good book
Dying in agony is an intense experience, true.
The pre-modern era is full of 25-year-old engineers and 35-year-old philosophers (and also 14-year-old mothers and fathers). People knew that they had a high chance of death at any time and therefore lived in a hurry. That doesn’t mean they had a more “intense” life experience (and callow moderns think “intense” means “more fun”, like taking a black diamond ski slope), they just had a shorter and more miserable one.
“Nasty, brutish, and short” one might almost say. A war of all against all.
People who work on re-enactment farms report being so exhausted as to be unable to think.
Such was the lot of 90% of the human race for 99.85% of history.
My grandfather was a rancher.
He fell asleep every time he quit moving for long enough.
That kind of says it all, for me.
To be fair, it’s one thing to re-enact farmlife when you’re used to city life, it’s another to grow up doing that kind of work for your entire life.
Having said that, the other side of the coin is that people, having worked on farms their entire life, will, more often than not, leave the farm and go work in a sweatshop for pennies a day, if that’s an option that presents itself.
Only ten hours a day, six days a week? That’s bliss if you are used to mixed (“Safety-first”) agriculture with a variety of crops and livestock.
Yeah, in those ‘Dark Satanic Mills’. Thing is, people don’t work efficiently in the dark, because they can’t see what the F they’re doing! A well-lit workplace increases profits.
People don’t work efficiently when they’re too cold, or too hot, or the air is stale, or they’re too tired. Temperature control, adequate ventilation and reasonable shift hours all increase profits by putting less stress on both the workers AND the machines.
You’re paying for a person to operate a machine. It costs the same to pay two people to operate it for 12 hours each, or 3 people for 8 hours. You’ll get more productivity out of the second option.
———————————
It’s dark here. You are likely to be eaten by a Grue.
They just want all the “wrong” people to not be around anymore. You know, the people that are as enlightened and as thoughtful as they are…
…and the serfs needed to maintain their place at the top of the pyramid, working under the lash.
So much that. Groceries magically come out of the back of the store, gasoline comes out of the pump, and electricity out of the wall outlet.
Well, enough of them know…and those things will be boutique items, really only available to the elites and their followers. So, if you want to have clean, fresh water from a sink or a car of your own…better choose your parents carefully or have a useful skill for these people. For example, faking orgasms convincingly.
Yes.
Look up what’s jeep happening with farming in so Sri Lanka.
Yes. Because organic farming will feed the world. Despite low production rates, produce a lot of westerners would refuse (it’s got flaws!), and other wee, minor problems.
/sarc
Wormy vegetables is not a minor flaw.
No, some places it’s a feature. Added protein don’t you know.
Not to mention organic fertilizer. Which means, manure.
Humans don’t produce anywhere near enough manure, not to mention the disease aspects if inadequately processed. Feedlot cattle only produce about half what we need for fertilizer here in the U.S. So, where do they plan to get it??
Not from free-range animals, to be sure.
Do the Greenies want famine? Indeed like Scrooge at the start of “A Christmas Carol” their view is “If they would rather die, . . . they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.” They believe the current world population is unsustainable. They’d like to see it at maybe 100-500 million piled into a few cities with all the rest let go back to “nature”. As noted by many “where does the food come from? Why it just shows up”. They have NO clue how much of the surface of the planet we currently use, mostly because they never leave their little hell holes (pardon me enclaves). within 60 minutes drive of Boston (traffic being good) here in Massachusetts you’re out by Worcester where north of the city 10 minutes you’re in orchards and similar farmlands. go another hour west and you can travel for long periods without seeing much in the way of Civilization. North to northwest you’re in quite parts of Maine or NH or Vermont. This is New England some of the early colonies (Yes I know Virginia and St Augustine were earlier let alone California) some of the densest places in the US 75-100 years ago. Wyoming, The Dakotas, you’re hard pressed to find anything short places in the 10-20K range (cities, although many “cities” in the east e.g New Haven, Now London are hardly any bigger). From their view you’d think we live on Trantor or Coruscant.
They don’t really believe it will cause famine. they’re not really strong on the whole cause and effect thing. cause and effect are heteronormative.
Sorry to be so repetitive but magic, it’s all just magic.
BGE here I must disagree with you maybe their version of Proles/Hoi Polloi don’t want famine or understand famine, but the Aristoi certainly do. All their talk of breeders and contempt for those that choose to have children is clear. They actually would prefer to see Africa as one giant national park with Noble savages scattered about living as they did 100+ years ago. That is the true face of racism that is unspoken.
Point to you.
Yes, this. I spent a good bit of time in Serbia and neighboring states in the early aughts. One friend of mine, an academic, said she really wanted to visit those areas before they got “contaminated by Western development.” I said, you mean like actual flushing toilets that aren’t simply fancy holes in the ground? Then I told her to read Slavenka Drakulic’s essays.
When asked to sign petitions to “save the environment” I always answer, “No thanks. My goal is to turn this planet into Coruscant.”
Yes. They want population reduction by any means possible, but are sure it will only affect the Bad People.
At this point, they would be less guilty if they do, because the alternative is that, out of the hardness of their hearts, they are acting in affected ignorance, which makes them more guilty.
Could be both.
On FB whenever the ads came up for the ambulance chasers pitching glyphosate suits I always reported them as fraud.
I don’t see them anymore.
See also Golden Rice.
Yup a genius use of technology. Because much of the world’s diet is rice (and polished rice at that) there is little in the way of various nutrients other than starch in it. The local environments don’t grow root veggies well (or they are not naturally consumed by the locals). So stick the carotene gene from some of the roots into the rice. Voila many vitamin deficiency issues resolved. Greenies hate it (and all bio engineered food stuffs as well as many from the green revolution that were created the old fashioned way). If I didn’t know better I’d think they were predjudiced against those not of the European race(s) 🙂 .
I have a wary eye on biotech because too many people seem to want to stick soybean genes into things – and I have problems with soy (among many other things, immune system, oy). People making GMO ought to consider that food allergies and intolerances are a thing that will cost them market share from people who cannot risk cross-contamination of various proteins.
That said, the golden rice idea gets two opposable thumbs up from me!
FWIW, every instance of those looking to market to humans that I’m even faintly familiar with do look at allergies.
Frequently the reason they got into it is that stuff-with-desired-traits has too many allergy triggers. 😀
Maybe I can set them up to duke it out with the GF manufacturers intent on putting “pea fiber” in everything….
Pea fiber? That sets things off? I dislike peas (there’s a reason Mr. Yuck is a pea with a face…) but I’d not [yet] heard of whatever this is.
*Groans* Yes, it does, it does.
I suspect the darn stuff is made from chickpeas, and-
Okay, long allergen story very short. There are a lot of similarities between the proteins in milk, legumes, and wheat – soy-milk-wheat allergic trios are common in a lot of people. For me, a lot of legumes result in Pain. Green peas are okay, green beans less so, any dry beans Not of the Good. Milk – I have lactose intolerance AND an apparent intolerance to milk proteins; culturing seems to gnaw the offenders, so my options tend to be hard cheese, yogurt, and sourest of cream.
Chickpeas are showing up more and more as a milk substitute. Because people apparently think (and quote on the internet) “not many people are allergic to chickpeas!”
In fact….
https://www.healthline.com/health/chickpea-allergy
You might have luck poking at it as “chickpeas can trigger milk allergies”– a simplified form of the truth– similar to how the eat bugs folks now know about how seafood allergies can trigger off of bugs.
*Nod* From what I’ve read in the well-researched “eat a bug” books, they warn you to avoid if you have allergies to fish, shellfish, or chocolate.
(If you’ve got allergies to chocolate, you poor soul, I don’t see why you’d compound it with eating bugs, but that’s me.)
As I recall, isn’t the best use of bugs to feed chickens, then you eat the eggs?
Makes sense to ME….
Same with “joint supplements”. (In both dogs and humans.)
https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/the-latest-on-glucosaminechondroitin-supplements-2016101710391
Pea fiber and pea protein is allegedly made out of green or yellow pea hulls, and from split peas. But a lot of it comes from Chyna, so….
“…and nobody can taste Stevia or erythritol…”
No, it only tastes like licking a 9-volt battery, we’re good.
*Fistbump!*
“No, I do not want Stevia in that.”
Eventually I thought enough to add “It does taste a little sweet to me, but it has an aftertaste for me, and I mind the taste more than I would mind a lack of sweetness”, and I stopped getting offered Stevia.
Pea fiber in “grain free” [*spit*] dog food is probably what eventually triggers chronic explosive diarrhea that resists all treatment… other than putting the dog back on a more normal diet, which effects a cure within 24 hours.
((evil, eeeeeevil profit motive, going “oooh, if we avoid making people sick, they’ll buy more of our stuff! ;D ))
Why yes. I’m all in favor of appealing to a man’s pocketbook. 😉
Remember Norman Borlaug!
I had a feeling about that, as soon as the lawsuit was filed.
I have a three year supply of RoundUp laid in – after that, hmm. Maybe build the flamethrower I’ve always wanted. (Nothing in Arizona law about burning off live grass / weeds.)
Had the same premonition about pool chemicals, before the one plant that produced it burned down; same three year supply laid in.
I’m not sure where premonition is actually just paranoia, but when the results are the same…
I mean…I’ve never been all that impressed with glyphosate, but that’s probably because my experience with it was trying to control specific noxious weeds in a rangeland setting where it’s…kinda wimpy.
But…the lawsuit is stupid. I mean, 2,4-D? Yeah, that one should get some side-eye, if half the stuff about Agent Orange is true. (And we used 2,4-D in my old job as well, heh. Still kinda wimpy against some things…)
I like 2-4D. Probably the only thing I know of that will reliably kill bindweed.
Was remarkably ineffective against burdock, however.
Certainly not something to use carelessly though.
Burdock is a root vegetable, not a weed. Technically.
I don’t know why in the US don’t eat it, maybe the prep being annoying vs the calorie value. Big food in France and Asia.
The leaves have good medicinal properties as well, or so I’ve read. We’ve got it in my area, but only known to be in a couple of small patches (someday, I may try to figure out how to get back to the one I know of and bring some plants home).
Aha…haha… don’t bother. Just walk through a patch once the flowers turn brown and you’ll have enough seed clinging to your clothes to fill your yard with nothing but.
And once you have them, good luck getting rid of them. The roots are strong.
Yeah, I am aware of that… which makes me feel bad, kind of, for trying to get rid of it.
But the burrs are horrible!
Man, I hate bindweed. Dang stuff has a seed bank life of something like 70 years as well!
Trying to remember what we used 2,4-D on…I want to say cheatgrass and maybe whitetop, but it wasn’t terribly effective on either. Though that, in part, was because the areas you typically find large chunks of those plants are either on burn sites (cheatgrass) or areas of heavy grazing (whitetop), and so there’s not a lot of competition, and without other plants to come in and crowd out they just come back no matter what you treat them with. We may have used it on leafy spurge, but it didn’t do much. Then again, spurge is nearly impossible to get rid of (and you have to treat it EVERY YEAR for at *least* 10-15 years, and if you skip a year, the clock is reset. That stuff is nasty.)
And at least whitetop is a good protein source for cows, if you can “train” them to eat it rather than ignore it…
2,4-D’s wasted on grasses. It really is a broad-leaf herbicide more than anything. I’m not sure what’s recommended for grasses these days. I’ve been out of the aerial application business for a while.
Our range folks were experimenting with a fungus that targets cheatgrass, but they were doing it independently of our noxious weed department (which consisted of two people: my boss and me, and I was a contractor then, lol) so I don’t know how well it worked.
When we got this place, the back pasture was like a needle factory from the cheatgrass. So thick and healthy that the annual seed layer was literally 3 inches thick. Have managed to mostly exterminate it, tho… sprayed its monoculture patches with roundup when it was the only grass up (since it comes up early), then wait for the next crop to come up and let seed heads get almost mature, then shave it off short (might need to repeat if you get it too early). This got rid of most of it in one year, the rest the year after, and now I’m just trimming up the missed spots, and I didn’t have to rake or burn it. In fact this fall I don’t see any out there at all.
Also have found bulbous bluegrass outcompetes it, but is in turn outcompeted by pretty much any native grass (tho bulbous survives better where there’s absolutely no water for months on end).
I was told you could spray with “Premiere” for cheatgrass, but application seemed needlessly complex (timing etc.)
I had better luck against the burdock. Bindweed, tho… pretty much anything seems to be a temporary cure. Tho I was quite excited by the results when we were invaded by hordes of golden tortoise beetles, whose predations gave the bindweed the creeping crud and did more lasting damage than two years of assiduous spraying.
I’ve also noticed that contrary to contention, roundup does prevent regrowth, at least of the weeds that liked to cluster around my barn. I can now get in the back door without a machete.
When I bought my house, half the back yard was literally thigh deep in bindweed, aka morning glory. The problem with bindweed is that any segment of roots over a couple inches long will re-grow, so you can’t just chop it up mechanically.
However, it can’t penetrate sod from the bottom up, so the best defense is grass. But it will take advantage of edges where grass meets fencing or concrete, and will eventually overshadow the grass.
I’m led to understand that Roundup will work on morning glory if you paint the leaves with it instead of spraying, but you have to continue to do it until the reserves in the upper roots are expended and stop putting up new shoots. But that only knocks it back for a couple of years before the foot-thick roots thirty feet down grow new upper roots. Sigh.
It would be nice to have time machine so I could go back and find the guy who brought morning glory to North America away from its natural predators “because it looked so pretty” and, y’know, torture him to death before he did it.
Wasn’t on purpose, at least for the ones most obnoxious in field crops– came in with contaminated seeds. That kind of stuff is why there are permits for imports. Too late for that instance, but eh.
There are a bunch of plants classed under ‘bindweed,’ and some are native. Even experts scream about which is which.
I do have two different species of “bindweed”, and the smaller, dryer one is less invasive and less prolific. I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s native. The big one that spreads everywhere and has big white flowers is the annoying one.
“However, it can’t penetrate sod from the bottom up, so the best defense is grass.”
Wanna bet?? my front lawn is (mostly) some northern cultivar of Kentucky Bluegrass. This stuff is dense and has deep dense roots (it can survive prolonged drought and come back good as new). I have to spray bindweed in my yard every year, sometimes more than once, and the fact that the grass is almost too thick to mow is no barrier whatsoever. Bindweed comes up from below like there’s nothing in its way.
Some commercial sod comes with a backing of weed barrier, and that might stop it, but I’m not gonna tear up my lawn and replace it.
Also, the parts of my pasture that have dense stands of grass… have bindweed decorating every vertical stem.
I don’t know or care if it’s native… it all needs to die. Along with wild grape, wild cucumber (these both overwhelm and kill trees, even big mature trees), cheatgrass, and every sort of burr and thistle. And while I’m at it, that king of invasive weeds, common sagebrush. (No, it’s not native to North America at all.)
Interesting. Because literally everywhere there was bindweed/morning-glory and I seeded grass, the bw/mg stopped growing, and everywhere that the grass didn’t “take” (like under the big tree), the bw/mg came right back. And everywhere I cut a hole in the sod, the bw/mg came right up until I filled it and re-seeded grass.
YMMV, and I suppose your local species of bindweed might vary, too.
Apparently so. This just comes up and grows over the grass like it’s a convenient ladder to the sun. It is a type with small leaves and small white flowers (pinkish when closed) tho gets bigger when it gets enough water, but not materially different from what I’ve seen elsewhere in the West.
Depends on the plant. Some had needed several dosages.
The “rainbow agents” (orange was just one) had issues, though supposedly mainly from the 2,4,5-T (now banned pretty much everywhere) since it can’t be produced without getting at least a bit – and sometimes much more than a bit – of dioxin.
You follow the instructions, you don’t drink the stuff (DUH!), wash your hands after you use it, and as long as you’re not a broad-leaf plant, glyphosate is no biggie. 2,4-D requires a bit more respect, but again, Follow The Directions. And for the Love of Life Orchestra, do not stand under the spray plane when it comes over so you can see if the pilot’s doing a good job. He can’t see you!!!!!
Yep, when it gets broken off in the left’s asses (and lawyers), the hue and cry will be music to my ears!
Don’t forget setting up a straw case they INTEND to lose, so as to set a precedent. <cough>Consent Decrees<cough>
One hand washes the other.
Secularists began doing this with religion, specifically Christianity, in the 60s. They began using sectarian conflict about which version of the Bible to use to rule “none of them”. Although Congress is prohibited from interfering with the free exercise of religion, the Supreme Court adopted used a legal argument based on the 1st and 14th amendments to do an end run around this. With the ACLU in the lead, they used lawfare to force religion out of local public schools on a level throughout the country. Since there is no one official establishment of atheism, agnosticism, or related views, there is no legal barrier to them, and those views have filled the vacuum of moral education. Now, we are on the verge of government mandated tolerance of behavior that is specifically contrary to the historical mainstream of Christian teaching, (not to mention common observation of human biology), and it will no doubt include a hefty component of lawfare as those who uphold such teaching are sued into silence or at least out of such institutions and associations where they still remain.
To be fair if you have government run schools you deserve exactly what you get. Good and hard.
I have multiple beefs with the lack of a proper constitutional check on the power of the Supreme Court to make law.
Mmm. Yes, especially since the con to force state-run schools on us all happened, what, 100-plus years ago? Because of that rat-b*stard who thought Prussian school setups were just AWESOME because they turned out ‘obedient servants of the state’. ::spits::
Alas, that part turned out to be fairly true…
Dewey wasn’t it?
I think so. Or at least, he was definitely one of the major proponents of ‘public schooling.’ Read a pithy summary of it recently that the ‘middle class protestants’ who’d been around for a few generations rejected the idea at first, but then Dewey (and whoever else) used the argument of “but what about those dirty Catholic Irish kids? You want THEM to be educated so as not to be savages, right?” and apparently that worked. Dunno how accurate a summation it is, but certainly we’ve seen those tactics in action even now: the wealthy lefties go “NIMBY” and then are persuaded to inflict their (terrible) ideas on someone else. Usually poorer folks. And then, somehow, that (terrible) idea sneaks into their back yard anyway…
The system was built to produce factory workers who would work to time. Go onto Hathi trust and read the stuff written at the time. Then look at what the recommended syllabus was for (e.g.,) history and cry.
At least in the bigger urban areas, the Catholics opted out of the public schools. When I was a boy only the poor ones went to PS and only the ones who couldn’t pass the entrance exams, and not all the schools were that selective, went to public high school.
the only public school I remember stepping foot in was PS 32 because that was where we voted.
That solution being why Oregon tried to ban private schools…. (they lost)
Indiana was the test case I think. I know the klan was big there and rabidly anti Catholic.
Earlier in the century Archbishop Hughes, “Dagger John” told the city of NY that they’d burn the city down if one church in NY was burned. Old St Patrick’s wall is still loopholed for muskets. They believed him, as well they should.
The Klan was pretty big in Oregon, too, which isn’t much mentioned; gimmie a sec, I know that Yard Sale Of The Mind has a LOT on the subject…..
Quote of quote:
Pierce v. Society of Sisters, in which the Court stated that
Under the doctrine of Meyer v. Nebraska,262 U.S. 390, we think it entirely plain that the Act of 1922 unreasonably interferes with the liberty of parents and guardians to direct the upbringing and education of children under their control: as often heretofore pointed out, rights guaranteed by the Constitution may not be abridged by legislation which has no reasonable relation to some purpose within the competency of the State. The fundamental theory of liberty upon which all governments in this Union repose excludes any general power of the State to standardize its children by forcing them to accept instruction from public teachers only. The child is not the mere creature of the State; those who nurture him and direct his destiny have the right, coupled with the high duty, to recognize and prepare him for additional obligations.
https://yardsaleofthemind.wordpress.com/2017/11/29/on-sacrificing-children-to-educational-abstractions/
ANYBODY who is interested in the subject, that’s the blog for you.
For anybody who hasn’t heard of Dagger John, this may interest you:
https://yardsaleofthemind.wordpress.com/2020/02/07/immigration-and-politics-mid-19th-century-edition/
Damn and blast another site to read. I knew the basics of that history and know well how Tammany would meet them at the dock and say “Do I have your vote?” If yes, they’d find you a place to sleep and a job, if not, well, let’s say they had warned you on the other side.
Funny enough, I had a conversation with a black coworker about just the topic mentioned in the dagger John note but mine was based on game theory. The Democrats know they will get the black vote so they don’t actually have to deliver anything that black people might want, all they have to do is bribe the “leadership”. Al Sharpton (e.g.,) smokes his cigars at the Union League Club. Were black people to vote randomly from time to time they’d get more. An awful lot of black people are way more socially conservative than the democrat party but, unlike say the Irish, most of them haven’t walked away.
Oregon.
In Pierce vs. The Society of Sisters.
The 1905, Jacobson v. Massachusetts ruling by the SCOTUS that the government could coerce small pox vaccinations was flawed by placing an undefined “public good” superior to well defined individual, Constitutional rights. With that logic, quite literally, Jacobson v. Massachusetts could, ala Lawdog’s example, be used to remove ALL arms from the hands of individuals not approved by they government. J v. M could be used to force individuals to provide shelter to illegal aliens and homeless. J v. M could even be used to seize people’s savings. Certainly that ruling had bearing on the 2004 Kelo v. New London case where private property was seized for private development of public facilities; where fair value was NOT provided to those who’s property was seized, merely because it was for an undefined future “public good.”
Fauxident Biden’s mandate is in similar vein. You don’t get vaccinated, you’re trying to kill everyone! Funny thing is, for comparison,
Small Pox fatality rate was about 30% average (government mandated vaccination sustained)
Spanish Flu fatality rate was between 10 and 20%
Covid fatality rate for U.S. was about 1.6%
Covid fatality rate for world was about 2.1%
Influenza+Pneumonia fatality rate is about 1.52%
Influenza alone fatality rate is about 0.18%
But we don’t see flu or pneumonia vaccinations mandated (not that they had those vaccines in 1918, but they did do some quarantines with varying levels of efficacity.) Thing is, for a disease with such a low fatality rate as COVID, there is no significant “public good” for mandating vaccinations. And zero justification for violation of individual Constitutional rights.
I concur but I do question the covid fatality rate. CDC changed the death report forms immediately before the ‘pandemic’, hospitals got extra federal cash for covid and even more for putting said victims on respirators, check number of common flu deaths before and then during the’pandemic’…
then right after changing the methodology of the tests to reduce the number of false positives, they came out with a note mentioning that a flu bug will give a positive Covid result so test for flu, because WuFlu bug does not trip a flu positive. et voila there are all those disappeared flu cases from the 2019/2020 flu seasons, and a lot of the “breakthrough – I got the XiPoohFlu twice when I wasn’t vaccinated” cases and vice versa, because I hear of nearly no second checks for Flu on positives in vaxxed-but-still-got-Delta cases. Gotta keep the waters murky
I was predominantly looking at CDC sites for the data. If you really want the sources, I can dig back through my browsing history. Earlier data from 6 months or more ago showed covid fatality rates closer to 3 or 4%; so the lower reported rates I found seem more in line with more accurate reporting and ruling out many of the deaths originally attributed to COVID.
some CA counties reduced their numbers by 24-27% iirc
That the numbers were not close was evident when even low numbers (2 deaths of under 20 yr olds) were wrong. Every time someone looked they found something wrong “but that is just a few!” only works if it doesn’t happen every single time a look is taken. Apparently a local here died of wuflu after consuming too much Meth and CCP Lung Rot was used to get the money instead of a simple O.D.
Part of the problem is that the percentage-of-fatalities isn’t all infections (known to be at LEAST 50% no symptoms) it’s those-cases-that-go-to-the-hospital-plus-deaths.
The fatality rate went down rather radically once we learned how to treat it (and how not to treat it), and more unfortunately, after the most vulnerable had mostly died off and were no longer available to inflate the death statistics. So yeah, started around 4%, last I heard somewhere around 1% (still mostly in the risk categories), and I expect will hover just above influenza hereafter.
Far cry from something that can and does take out 30% (or worse) of the population in very short order. Then again, such a disease DOES pile bodies in the streets and makes it painfully obvious why vaccinated immunity is superior to “Bring out your dead!”
I stopped paying close attention to the CDC statistics last year once I determined how they collect them. Everything is misinformation in a changing environment. that’s just how it goes.
We won’t know the effects of WuFlu for at least five years, if then. That’s about how long it takes for CDC to stop revising. This is common in all government statistics, they start with small samples and revise as they go along. it’s not a lie, they’re quite open with their methodology. That’s why you see so many revisions to unemployment, or production or any of the other statistics gathered by survey. All high frequency statistics include a trailing average, they’re very bad at identifying when the trend changes. if you look at the current reporting of history it looks good but it never is so clear in real time since you’re looking at the revised numbers not what was reported.
Again, this is not a lie, it’s just the way it is. You can have high frequency, current statistics or you can have accurate statistics, you can’t have both outside liquid markets where you can always determine price.
Yeah, same way running totals look different from dailies. Anyway, lately realized that I’d paid zero attention to the CDC on covid; had plenty of other sources and didn’t even think of it.
However, given the state of of the Ficus, we should probably take this seriously:
https://www.cdc.gov/cpr/zombie/index.htm
.
Admissions against interest are probably good. Like the low rate of vaccinations among blacks.
Even assuming arguendo that all reported Covid deaths are legitimate, the pandemic in the US has been about 25% worse than the 1957-58 Asian Flu. For which we did … nothing. Because there was nothing to be done.
Virus gonna virus, and historically speaking this one isn’t that bad. But people don’t understand history any more, and are shocked and appalled when told that humans are mortal.
But SCIENCE can SAVE us!
What, you mean that “vax” that has NEVER gotten past lab testing because of all the nasty things that crop up in the test animals? That science? That’s not to say that at some point they’ll get it to work, but I kind of doubt this is the magic moment…
As opposed to smallpox which yields 30%+ in a community exposed to it. In a community which is immune naive to it (e.g. Native Americans at the time of the early european colonists) it can range upwards of 65% lethal. I will note that unless you are over 50 in the US (or had military service) you count as immune naive, and with official eradication in the 70’s US smallpox vaccination stopped.
And now it turns out that smallpox vaccination was evidently also protecting us from a variety of related viruses, notably monkeypox, which can be really nasty stuff.
Well, if you really want to know, the malignant/hemorrhagic version (~ 10% of all cases) the rate of death jumps to 90 to 100%, for any population. You can argue 30, or 65 depending on ethnicity/naitivity population, does it really matter once you’re looking at double digit fatality rates?
Yeah nasty stuff and once you break that 1 in 3 like Black Death et alia what it does to society is unbelievable.
Over 50? I never had the smallpox vaccination. Neither did my next older sibling. I have to go back to my nine years older sister to have a (living) relative that was vaccinated. (Oh, I’m 61, btw.)
All 3 of us girls have had the Smallpox vaccination. My youngest sister just turned 60 in July. Mom and I were talking about which vaccinations each of us got, why and when. Maybe it was location? FWIW we are in the PNW.
OTOH none of our children and more than a few of my younger cousins have had the Smallpox vaccine. Which is scary on all kinds of levels.
One of the things, if addressed, I’m wondering is how book 9 of the Outlander series handles this. Bree and Roger have just returned to the past with their two kids in book 8. You know Bree made sure, after what happened, and her *reaction, in a prior book about a small epidemic that wiped out a small community, that the kids were vaccinated like they were going to some modern day small world heck hole of a country (like Afghanistan). But the timeline in the books puts “modern day” right around 1980, after Smallpox vaccine isn’t available to get (normally). Bree knows BOTH Claire and Roger have experienced SmallPox first hand in the 1770 – 1780s, where they are going to end up.
* Bree’s reaction really shocks Jamie, is how the future is really an undiscovered country. An incident, while sad and tragic, it happens, but by the grace of god, it could happen to those who look to him. Her horror, to him, was over the top, unwarranted. His shock when Claire tells him that at almost 30, or so, Bree had never ever experienced this, had never ever experienced a childhood friend or schoolmates death, let alone an epidemic that wiped out entire families or communities. Death happened, yes. Death happened to children. But a high percentage never witness it, and epidemics to wipe out communities, were themselves extinct.
While written and released well before CCPFlu, the descriptions of the Smallpox incidents (both on boats) and the incident above, shows what the CCPFlu isn’t.
I was born and raised in Arizona – next older sibling, while born in Kansas, moved within weeks to Arizona. The older two were vaccinated, but they were in Kansas for much of their childhood.
So probably is a variation by location – States set the regulations on required vaccinations for school (still do, no matter what * thinks).
52. I was.
My mother remembered that my older sister had been and my younger not, but not about me. Then one day I recognized the scar.
Nana Visitor was born in ’57, and also has the vaccination scar– she’s from New York.
I remember this because in Deep Space Nine someone spotted the scar on Kira and was trying to figure out if it was the actress or the character, that’s how I found out about the scars at all. (Both of my parents have enough scars that a little one on their shoulder isn’t notable.)
I am 58. I don’t have the scar. But I HAD the beast, so, you know….
Actually I don’t know if this is true, but in Portugal they believe if your mom had it, you have SOME residual immunity, so the boys are semi protected. (If it’s true.)
At this point, I’d shrug and say “epigenetics”.
Maternal antibodies. Which last from a few weeks up to maybe a year (long enough for nature to get at least a few offspring to a stage where they can survive an active infection on their own). This is normal for anything you’re immune to, not just smallpox. It’s also why we repeat vaccinations in the young — because the first one usually does very little but get clobbered by the remaining maternal antibodies, which have to get “used up” (one antibody = one virus or vaccine particle) before the youngster can develop immunity of its own. (The fix for this is is to 4x the dose of vaccine, so the maternal antibodies get clobbered AND there’s enough left over to generate lasting immunity.)
The problem is that it’s a gradual fall-off, so without antibody testing you don’t really know when or if the youngster is immune or vulnerable. So we either wait until we’re sure maternal protection is gone (usually within a year) or we give multiple boosters to make sure at least that last one “took”.
Maternal antibody negation of vaccine is a huge problem with canine parvovirus. [Parvo in puppies is 90% fatal with good care, and 50% fatal even with extraordinary care.] Finally the vet who first developed a vaccine came out with one that has 3-4x more viral particles, and for those of us who use that vaccine, the problem went away. Our puppies get pretty good immunity with the first shot at 5-6 weeks, and 100% with the second, while conventional vaccines may need 4 or 5 shots (and up to four months of being potentially vulnerable) to get past maternal antibodies and achieve the same securely immune status.
I’m 66; I have the traditional vaccine scar. My sister is 5 years younger and has the small scar on the underside of the arm. My youngest cousin is about 55 and he doesn’t have it. Someday we’re going to be sorry we didn’t keep this one up, if only because turns out it was probably also protecting us from related viruses, like monkeypox (nasty stuff).
Born in 1954, in California. I had the smallpox vaccine scar, although I can’t find it on my shoulder now. I remember very clearly getting it – Dr. Haugen put a drop of greenish, puss-ey looking stuff on my shoulder, and then jabbed into it with a small needle, over and over, until the blood came.
We were screened at school, in first grade, I think, for TB, too.
I’m 62. Still have a very faint scar on left arm.
I have the faint scar too.
Right shoulder here. Mine was quite visible until a few years ago, when it faded and became hard to see… now it’s just a faint rippling on the surface of the skin. The scar did not tan, tho, so I suppose if I wore sleeveless shirts in summer again (a habit lost in the desert due to the need to carry one’s own shade against sunburn) it might pop out again.
Definitely antibodies can pass via nursing. I wouldn’t be surprised if they crossed the placenta. Question is would your body have had the smallpox antibodies extant when you had the boys. And here I have to say “Darn it Jim I’m a software engineer not an immunologist…” The human body is immensely complex and immunity is one of those things we’re JUST getting a handle on.
I remember getting it at the US Public Health clinic. Big oak benches and institutional yellow block walls. I can’t find the scar. I still have the vaccine passport you used to have to carry.
I got smallpox, polio and tuberculosis vaccinations in school. 2nd or 3rd grade, I think. They hurt. All I remember.
My other wanted to get us the smallpox vaccine, but it wasn’t being offered anymore.
Brother got it anyway, later in life, courtesy of .mil.
*mother, not other
I’m 60 was raised in CT, you can still see the scar on my left arm. Sister in law Just turned 50 lived in MA when young had the the shot back of the thigh, arm was apparently considered to ugly. My unerstanding was by the 80’s it was gone as 1977 was last known case, and that was an accident at a medical facility.
CDC says it was “no longer generally offered” after 1972.
Makes sense Sister in law was born in ’71 so would have had it as an infant.
Mandatory in Calfornia in 1966, when I got mine. Half a dozen mixed together in one air injector shot, then the polio vaccination a few days later. They took us out of class, lined us up in the hall, and marched us past the needle.
The local school district, as of last year, has thirty-something vaccines all lumped into one shot, over half of them for things I’ve never heard of. (according to their web site) I have no problem with the vaccinations I got as a child, but I agree with the “anti-vaxxer nutballs” that many of the “mandatory” vaccines they want to shoot kids with now are for diseases that are vanishingly rare, and it might not be a good idea to jam them all in at once. Good thing they’re nutballs, because if you’re not Woke they might start making sense…
Grand daughter born in 2005 and got 13 vacs before she was 6 months old. Ended up with a weird thing – a “disconnect” from her inner ear to the brain. All the brain got was white noise from the ears. Took her to age five and finding a teacher who recognized the problem and then some special classes. She’d have been diagnosed as autistic without that teacher. She’s mostly okay now, but still classified by the state as handicapped. To this day I blame the damn docs and their vacs as she seemed to respond to sound normally until then.
This, oh so emphatically this. One wonders what the result would have been pre email and Twitter when people might have had time to think and not all get bounced into bad decisions that had to be defended.
I remember well how this all went down back in March 2020 and made sure to keep screen prints. Perfect failure cascade that was, and is.
I doubt we’d know anything more than what CNN was telling us. We might see that we hadn’t known many, or in some cases any, people who had actually died from covid. We might know a few people who’d died from adverse reactions to the vaccines, but beyond that, we’d just be the lone voices wondering if something wasn’t entirely on the up and up.
It’s not like anyone outside of Chicago has any idea there was anything sketchy about that election either.
Jacobson v. Mass. and its even more horrifying descendant Buck v. Bell are both still binding precedent.
Binding, for now. From time to time what is bound is loosed and what is loose is bound.
Dredd Scott was a binding precedent too.
Yeah, and look what that lead to. 600,000 plus dead.
Then maybe freedom is too important an issue to be left to courts. Or not.
Depends if you agree that
“Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as FREEDOM should not be highly rated.”
How high do any of us really rate it? We’re going to find out.
The people are sovereign not the courts. The court’s reach only so far as they can compel obedience.
Can be a far reach.
True, but not infinite. that’s what irish democracy is all about. All this works only so long as enough people don’t refuse to go along. once the critical mass is met, and it can be quick, the reach of the state ends. Will it happen here? Well, I hope it’s not necessary since the cost is very high.
I, for one, would find it hard to convict anyone based solely on the evidence of a federal law enforcement official. I won’t forswear myself so I won’t get put on a jury, but I no longer trust them at all. that’s essentially where jury nullification starts and is why all the “experts” hate it.
Yes… “freedom”. Thank God we paid that price to establish the precedent that States can never leave the Union without bloodshed. :(. Or do we want to start debating kids-are-brought-by-the-stork stories we tell ourselves in school history books vs unpleasant reality here suddenly?
Probably best we stick to the old rule, especially now that our Hostess has so many other worries.
Well, presumably states could leave by constitutional amendment, with the agreement of themselves and the other states. The Confederacy didn’t even run secession through Congress – just state legislatures. (And some of the state legislatures did some hinky stuff to get a supposed majority.)
All this is IIRC.
Yeah, people keep on trotting out ‘succession could have worked then’, and implying that it could work now.
The internal violence had already started/escalated when the decision to attempt succession had been made. If the CSA had been patient, and willing to wait on process, come to an agreement with the Union, maybe the Union and the CSA could have potentially bound their own internal violent elements to peace. Deciding to pursue the issue by violence ensured that the only peaceful outcome that could occur would first require that the CSA lose. CSA victory, forcing the Union to offer terms, would have seen further splits, leaving abolitionists free to war against the slaveholders. If the Southerners had so good a security situation that they would have no reason to fear the abolitionists, there would have been little reason to accept the risk of civil war.
Likewise, succession is not a viable answer here.
There are two modes of the scenario. In one, a bunch of lunatics have frauded their way to victory in elections representing sane but busy people. In the second mode, the voters are also insane, and incompatible with peace, a majority of those voters. In the first mode, separating means leaving a bunch of innocents at the mercy of madmen, and accepting a neighboring state that is both prepared to war with us, and equipped to do us harm. In the second mode, we can only achieve peace with that state by extermination. The wars post separation would not be better than a civil war in a unified USA.
People will say, ‘Oh, we would win easily either the post succession wars, or the civil wars, because our true opposition is so incompetent’. Only in mode one is this possibly true. If mode two is significantly true, there isn’t enough counterfeit economic activity in blue areas for opposition supporters to be that much worse than us in working, implying also effectiveness in fighting.
Separation would not work because the conflicts are such that cross national boundaries is nature, and there are no true regional divisions.
The first major issue is the corporate technocrats are looking to run everything by remote. Can’t succeed from them short of banning those companies operating in your countries. I’m pretty sure we could do that on a stare level just as effectively.
The second issue, the one of regionalism, is this is mostly a rural/city conflict and an attempt to set up a national caste system through centralization than it is a regional conflict. It will essentially be every city vs their countryside, with the suburbs dividing up by who leans country vs who leans city.
There are no fixed lines. The California country side will just as happily cut the roads into Los Angeles as the Texas countryside will to Dallas.
The only major difference will be how many roads they have to cut.
We don’t know, and won’t know for several years, what the numbers for WuFlu are. What we do know is that even CDC is admitting the denominator is twice what they have and most estimates put it at 5 times as high (down from 7-10) which would put the rate at somewhere between 40bp and 1% (100 bp) When you adjust for age cohorts and exclude the people who were very unwell to begin with it is well within the range of error for a seasonal flu. This number is what we knew from the Pacific Princess, back in March 2020, which is close to a controlled experiment as you are ever likely to find.
Nope, this is BS all the way down. Back in January 2020 when everyone called Trump a racist because he was calling out the WuHan flu the risk was high because we didn’t know. Now that we do know, they’re just cynically using the people’s stupidity against them. The aristos got stampeded into a poor reaction and found out it was useful to them. I hate them,
I have screen prints of all of the news from the first half of 2020 because it’s being scrubbed from the record
Unless of course, you cite “My body, my choice” as reasoning to avoid the Fauci-Ouchi…
I marked my spot about a third through the essay so I can get back to it but had to come down here to note:
Regarding the tobacco thingy; C. E. Koop, then US Sturgeon General (Bigger than a carp) did his best (Which was pretty good.) to clear tobacco from America to reduce cancer deaths. We all learned you were five times more likely to die of cancer if you smoked, quite true, chance of cancer dying, all Americans, then 21% or so, smokers, 25% or so & yep you can roll, massage, those numbers around to get 5 times more likely.
The curious strange thing, though, chance of cancer dying, all Americans, is still, according to the mortality and morbidity tables, 21% although first, second, fifth hand tobacco smoke is for all practical purposes, (I grew up in a world where there was tobacco smoke in the theaters, on airplanes, in restaurants, bars, kitchens, dinning rooms, bathrooms, etc., etc., etc.) non-existent.
If you don’t like tobacco, I’m not faulting you, but I suspect you’re a hundred time more likely of dying from a piano falling on your head than from my second had smoke.
OK, I’ll shut up and go back up and read the rest of the story now. 🙂
What I don’t understand is that the same (or at least a huge overlap) people who are trying to ban tobacco are working to legalize marijuana. I don’t like tobacco, but marijuana smells far worse, and causes personality changes.
(On the other hand, I would not be opposed to bringing back hemp, for natural rope making, etc.)
Actually tobacco causes personality changes, there’s, or there was, it’s probably now been purged, data that suggests tobacco smokers were smarter, did significantly better on cognitive tests, than non-smokers. 😉
Sure; like caffeine, Ritalin, etc., it’s a stimulant that medicates against ADD / ADHD.
Which raises a question: what’s out there that’s safe to use for helping Odds such as us focus? Even caffeine is addictive.
I put on significant weight when I quit smoking and am only recently coming back to where I need to be. It definitely helped my ADD. I miss it almost every day.
I thought you could buy nicotine patches OTC now, for those who miss that factor.
You can, but they’re designed to help slow the withdrawal process, not replace the nicotine.
Kinda spendy, too.
Looks like a standard cigarette has roughly 1mg of nicotine, from the “equivalent to” stuff I found when poking around– so $25 for 35 smokes is not unusual. (Hardware costs between $25 and $100, but you can add the ‘juice.’)
Again, don’t want to use hacked devices, those are the ones that’ve exploded or burnt folks’ lungs.
Cigs are kinda spendy too, something like $7/pack in California, last I heard. Literally burning money!
Last I saw here in MA name brand coffin nails (e.g Marlboro) were $10 a pack. I don’t think they were that a CARTON when my Grandad had a 2 pack a day habit. Though he didn’t smoke Marlboro, Chesterfields? Camels Old gold? something with a goldish package. It was long enough ago that when we went shopping for/with my grandmother a 5-6 year old me would be sent to simply grab the carton off the shelf. 2 pack a day habit would be brutal $140 a WEEK $600 a month.
I remember hearing Nicotine is an analog for one of the brain chemicals. Except it worked BETTER than the natural chemical as Jiminalaska alluded to. And yes LOTS of ADHD/ADD folks self medicated with tobacco as well as folks with other issues. Also my understanding was that MANY of the really nasty carcinogens were from combustion of the paper which was coated to slow the burning of the cigarette as it provided a better experience. Not to say tobacco alone was not nasty. Lip cancer was a common issue in heavy pipe smokers. Throat cancer very common in heavy cigar smokers.
And yeah marijuana is not particularly good for you. Knew far to many folks that drugged themselves into oblivion with plain old Mary Jane. One guy I knew was not the sharpest knife in the draw to start with, but was basically high when he was awake (way to much money and home life that really sucked). I think he managed a 750 on his PSATs, thats math and language combined…
My understanding is the cancer risk came from the tar products. We basically have dust and king going in and put of our lungs all day, but the tar product stick it there. Since a certain amount of not is radioactive, it then decayed there, and gives you radiation damage that you wouldn’t have had of you weren’t gluing dust to your lungs.
If it’s the nicotine that someone needs– why not look in to one of the tiny vapes? they have straight nicotine options, although of course avoid “unofficially sourced” items.
Or a nicotine patch. OTC now, yes? thought I saw some in the cig lockup at Walmart.
Just responded on the other comment. 😀
I know some of the guys used the gum that way. Not to quit, to get the advantages of having a cig….
Yeah, I know someone who would point at her patch and say, “I’m smoking!”
Of course it’s not nicotine that’s the major health hazard, so why not. (Well, not me, but I’m paranoid about mind-altering anything.)
Pot is way more dangerous than tobacco on various fronts. Sorry.
Did I say otherwise? and much worse with today’s ultra-strong cultivars… have seen it turn an ambitious if scattered guy into a homeless loser.
Also, I remember seeing data from way back (late 1970s) where all else being equal, the pot smoker’s lungs take way more damage due to the density of the smoke. (More crap stuck in lungs = greater risk.) One doc put it that the only reason pot smokers haven’t all died of cancer is because they’re two joints a day, not two packs a day.
Is there any scientific evidence for this? Because I haven’t seen any. And anecdotally I know quite a few people who have used pot for many years to no obvious ill effect.
Yes, there is quite a bit of scientific evidence– usually turns into a nuclear screaming match, you can find the roughly bi-annual slugfest in the archives. Usually starts with someone insisting that nobody has been allowed to research the effects of pot unless they were already looking to find something bad, and goes down hill from there.
@steve heller:
I had cause to look up some similar stats, and found if anything he’s overly optimistic; totally changed my mind on legalization (tho I still think if you want to fry your brain in private, that’s not my business, but the trouble is the effects don’t stay private). Frex, crime and automobile accidents went up by something like 30% in Colorado almost immediately post legalization. And I’m starting to think the “theft worth $950 or less is not a crime” and “defund the police” movements in some blue cities are partly to disguise the effects of legalized drug use… you don’t get those drug-user crime stats if they can’t be arrested.
is France still issuing the patch to Medical workers for protection from WuFlu? (too lazy to look)
Huh, I hadn’t heard of that.
It appears to be accurate– and note, the immediate response was to make it nearly impossible to get nicotine products.
https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04608201
I recall that too
I heard it not long before my sis came down with the Xi Lung Rot and she smokes, though it didn’t seem to help her much, she was a “High Fever 2 weeks dog sick” case though I forget what her doc had her on, I recall it was one the least promising of the treatments, and she ignored my Zinc, D, and anything else that showed promise because Orangeman or something
So naturally when vaping appeared which would carry the benefits of tobacco without most of the problems the powers that be absolutely lost their shit.
loss of Tax revenue
My understanding is that lip cancer is also a problem for people who chew.
Hence MLB’s prohibition on chew. Some younger players have talked about old timers we don’t see in public any more, because they needed cancerous chunks of their face and neck removed, such as the whole lower jaw.
Chew/snuff is REALLY nasty. All sorts of mouth related cancers, some very unpleasant. Yeah Tobacco is NOT a real winner on the health front.
The doctor telling my grandfather he was showing early signs of developing some form of mouth cancer–and then showing him pictures of what it looked like after they had to remove the infected bits (like, say, the entire lower jaw) is what finally got him to give up chewing tobacco…
It’s magic. Smoke from Canabis … good. Smoke fromTobacco. …. Bad.
used to have a cousin who quit smoking both right and left handed cigarettes when he got lung shot (accidental) and the tube drained out the gunk, and a PA or whatnot pointed out that the worse looking gunk was the weed
Lung Cancer got him last year (and his younger brother some years back)
And it also does the same to your health as cigarettes. But you have to remember that the left is made up of stoners. As Marijuana makes you stupid, OF COURSE the left supports it. They need stupid people
*waggles hand*
Pot has the additional issue of needing to be hotter, with associated burns.
The tobacco banners also want to ban vaping, while allowing pot smoking.
Because someone looking mildly silly with water vapor is a horrible harm.
Which is somewhat ironic given that – from what I’ve heard – most of the vapes that have been causing problems are “blends” that have THC mixed in (along with, frequently, other stuff).
more details in linked NEJM paper and the other linked article.
They don’t want you to notice that.
That’s also why I’ve been mentioning avoiding hacked vapes– I’ve heard *rumors* of ones that were just end-user hacked for easier refilling, but the actual harm I know of were adjusted for pot– plus “sensitive rechargeable electronic near face after home redesign” just sounds like a TERRIBLE idea.
It turned out that the vitamin E oil used to dissolve the THC (it’s not water soluble) in the vape cartridges was the most serious issue in the illegal cartridges. It really messes up lung function when inhaled.
whats really tunny to me is the pro-legalization folks that somehow think that federal legalization would make it illegal for the tobacco companies to get involved with the production and sale, and that it would be all ‘small growers’
should we introduce them to the concept of Cigarette Boats?
The Tobacco companies SHOULD have sued the States and the Feds. Because they were SAVING the states money, not costing them. Logically, most everyone goes through a VERY EXPENSIVE ‘End of Life’ phase, where they are in a hospital while they’re dying. Regardless if you smoke or not, damn near everyone goes through it, and it’s EXPENSIVE.
BUT!!!! Tobacco smokers get there TEN to FIFTEEN years EARLY!!! So all of those healthcare costs for those ten of fifteen years GO AWAY!! So smoking SAVES MONEY!! Saves LOTS of Money!!!
And then of course there’s all of those taxes on cigarettes. Honestly, I can NOT believe that the government did away with a product on which they were making BANK.
& how much of cigarette cost is tax? I don’t know for sure as trying to follow a tax revenue route is harder than following a cat through thick brush, but I did buy Camels in the Russian Far East at around 14 cents a pack when they were selling here in Alaska for over 2 bucks a pack. I’m quite sure R. J. Reynolds was not giving them away, so I suspect the difference twix 14 cents there and 200 plus cents here in the US ended up in our government’s coffers.
Arizona isn’t the worst State for tobacco taxes, about the middle of the pack. (Ah, just looked it up – #36. https://balancingeverything.com/cigarette-prices-by-state/)
Of course, everyone in the populous (and not so populous) areas pretty much has a Reservation within a 30 minute drive. The store where I buy mine (Native American brand) – $3.95 a pack. Would be $2.94 without the Federal tax, which you still pay on Reservations. I haven’t seen them off of the Reservation, so don’t have a comparison – but the table in the reference says the average is $7.63 a pack, which includes $2.40 in taxes.
Years ago, when there was a ballot proposition to massively raise the tax, I had a discussion with the BIL. He was all for it – make people pay for their unhealthy habits and discourage them from continuing with them. I just pointed at his beer belly and asked him if he was ready for a $15 bottle of Bud? End of discussion.
(He was a rather loud Socialist at the time. Snapped back into semi-sanity when he got his EE degree – and ended up on the other side of the negotiating table with the unions.)
Yeah, bought the wife her Marlboro menthols in Jordan for the eq. of $10.00/carton. And back in the states I was paying $15.00/carton on the res in NY.
As usual, “Yes Minister” got there first. “Smokers are national benefactors!” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WJIMffhpZRw
Heh. I’ve GOT to watch that show someday.
Smoke in significant quantities irritates my lungs.
But that is all types of smoke from all sources.
Vaping doesn’t bother me at all, which is one of the reasons the whole “ban vaping because it might make smokers not reviled” movement irritates me so much.
Yup Smoke in even limmited amounts would/will set off my Asthma. When I started working at DEC smoking in ones office was permitted. There was one guy 2 cubicals down from me that you could stand up in my cubicle and SEE the smoke rising as he puffed. 2-3 pack a day habit, full ashtrays everywhere including on top of his piles of print outs. Nashua Fire Marshal came in looked at his office and said ” I’m going to inspect the rest of these buildings and when I return this office will NOT have printouts and full ash trays, If I EVER return to find this office in this state again I will pull the fire permit for this building”. On that day I was able to breathe again 🙂 .
I remember when everything from the department store had to be washed before you could use it, because of the reeking cig smoke residue. Some clothing never really got over the smell. I don’t miss that at all… of course in that case it’s actually damaging merchandise, a cost to the merchant and to other consumers.
I was one of the first to charge extra to fix a smoke-residue-filled PC, tho have since seen that as a line item on other bills. It costs extra time and cleaning materials before I can even work on the durn thing, so I’m charging for my time and effort. And I’ve seen more than one overheated to death by the buildup. (Quite similar to residue from coal smoke, but stickier and stinkier.)
The ET shop aboard ship was a really yucky yellowish puke-green color. It used to be light blue…
And was again when we repainted it.
Of course spraying paint mixed with paint thinner in a small enclosed space brought with it a whole OTHER set of problems.
While recovering from the paint fumes, Jimmy and I looked at each other and said, “There are people stupid enough to do that ON PURPOSE?”
I’m reminded again, all of the really great drug songs are about the side effects and near death experiences.
Anyone heard “Courtesy Call” by Sixx: AM?
Hadn’t until now. Can’t say I care for it much.
I prefer this:
We’d go out to eat at a restaurant, then have to strip, put all the clothes in the outside hamper, shower, and wash our hair. No, the litle “no smoking” signs didn’t keep the smoke at the other side of the restaurant.
As long as we were quick I didn’t get the usual rash from exposure.
The smokers also seemed completely unaware that they stank like rotting winos, or that their smoke contaminated anything it touched. “I’ll just crack the window to let the smoke out!” Apparently, most of them actually *believed* that.
“But it’s my right to smoke!”
“You acknowledge my right to hose you down with pepper spray?”
“What?! That’s not the same thing at all!”
“No, people don’t walk around trailing a fug of pepper spray wherever they go.”
Guh. That’s what I had to do when we had a unit do at a local restaurant in Spain, back in the day, Wash every single shred of clothing that I had on, no matter how late (and in Spain at a restaurant, 9 PM is just getting the evening warmed up), hang my coat outside to air, shower and wash my hair — twice. Non-smoker, never been tempted, not allergic – but I cannot stand the smell of old cigarette smoke. I was actually glad to get back to the States, where smoking in public was severely limited.
My favorite was the Vienna airport sometime in the summer of 2001. The ‘smoking’ section was in the middle of the waiting area with overhead ceiling fans that ensured the smoke got absolutely everywhere. Talk about passive aggressive…
“Anyone smoking will be assumed to be on fire and will be handled accordingly.”
— sign seen next to an emergency fire hose cabinet
I don’t have asthma. But suffered from regular migraines for decades. Still get migraines but less frequent now. Guarantied to set one off? Second hand smoke. I grew up with a smoker (mom said dad smoked a lot more at work than he did at home, but he did smoked in the car, with us all in there). I had smokers around when I worked for the USFS, they smoked in the rigs back then.
When smoking became a thing to “be aware of”, when restaurants had “smoking area” non-smoking area, like that helped. We were playing duplicate bridge as a couple. I was just starting out. Hubby would get frustrated with me because as the night went, my bridge playing went downhill, rather than learning from my mistakes and applying them throughout the night, I couldn’t. Reason? Second hand smoke. The “non-smoking” rounds were suppose to suddenly clear out the smoke from the “smoking” rounds. Okay, better if actual new smoke not around, but … Really? Oh. The headaches, non-debilitating, as long as I didn’t have to think, didn’t help.
Another trigger for migraines is strong *scents. Not illegal, yet to bath in cologne or perfume. What is sad was when I was off work and volunteering with son’s class. Mostly listening to kids read. I had to stop volunteering. There were kids I could not get within 6 feet of, because of secondhand smoke scent.
^ Not critically bad. A college roommate developed the problem so bad she cannot use anything scented like shampoo, or soap, or be around anyone who does. Most, scents in soaps, etc., I can tolerate to use myself, and others who use them don’t set me off. Cannot personally wear perfume at all. Ironically the one soap line I cannot tolerate to be around, both detergent and soap is Snowy. Supposedly non-allergenic, and no scent.
My sister is allergic to secondhand smoke, but what really sets it off is pot smoke. She can go into a room where someone got high a week ago and suddenly her head puffs up like a basketball.
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I wouldn’t know the difference.
The smells are distinct. Pot smells like incense.
Or dead skunk.
There’s been times where the only way I can tell if it’s road kill skunk or pot is if my husband reacts to it– that’s how we found out that what was giving him allergies wasn’t “Seattle mold issues,” it was pot.
THIS.
I have reliable information that the AlenCorp air filters can get that out of a residential space, if one needs ones air cleared of it.
Not as good as, say, the local police department hauling off the downstairs neighbors and the complex gutting everything porious out of the apartment, but good enough to mitigate the issue.
Pot smells like a burning rope. A nasty old rope like you might find in a 100 year old abandoned barn.
It’s called “skunk weed” for a reason.
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Then I react the same as cigarette and pipe smoke, and leavings. Immediate and not fun migraines.
I knew the plants put off a whiff of skunk when they are close to harvest. Didn’t know the dried product did too (though makes sense). Mom’s neighbor used to be a grow house. The individuals involved have moved on and so have the plants and faint smell. Good/Bad news situation. At least while those involved were there, the outside was taken care of. Now, just a different type of fire trap, which endangers mom’s house. Neighbor’s house needs to be sold and torn down, just started over.
Interestingly enough, I can smell it before it can be seen, but I don’t react as badly to wildfire burns (western forest, eastern sage brush, although Pines are worst. Note Snowbrush is just bad, burned or not.) The smoke while it is burning, if different, low grade migraine and eyes burning, but the residual results, not as bad, unless we have to hang around. In retrospect (20/20 hindsight don’t ya know) Forestry probably wasn’t the best first career choice; one ends up dealing with Fire. Probably should stop saying “Stupid St Helen. Stupid Owl.” Which triggered the career change to software. Should probably be saying “Thank you” instead.
Reminds me of a conversation I had with one of my cousins, after he waxed poetic about how “really” pot didn’t smell bad at all, that was a myth or only the really cheap stuff…to be roundly informed that my goodness, yes, it did smell that bad. Even by my very hard-core pot using uncle.
Ended up deciding that regular users and those exposed to the smell nearly constantly developed the same blind spot that constant smokers do, where they can’t smell tobacco smoke.
There are, of course, regular smokers who can smell tobacco, and folks who don’t really smell it at all unless it’s right up their nose.
Same here. I can survive second hand tobacco smoke, but pot? Nyet.
Husband’s work thought that he was either exaggerating or it was mentally triggered when he told them that he gets hay-fever from being exposed to pot.
So when they got a truck that had been used to smuggle pot– the dogs said so, nobody human could tell– they had him be the one who went in as the Second Body, and didn’t tell the guy who lead him. (I was kinda impressed they thought that far ahead when attempting to punk someone, honestly.)
Five minutes later, he’s got hayfever symptoms.
They believe him, now…. 😀
Dan and I have the same issue. Another reason to leave Colorado
I didn’t know what that smell was when I went to college. There were nights as a freshman where I would get this peculiar headache: point source rather than distributed, right behind my forehead, just to right of center. Felt like a hot nail in there. Found out later the neighbors…imbibed. Later I developed the same detection capability for cigarette smoke, but it didn’t hurt as much (MIL was a smoker).
My roomate was allergic and our neighbors would occasionally smoke so much we’d get billows of pot smoke through the AC vent. Time to go outside until it dissipated.
I spent part of a Yes concert holding my breath to try and avoid inhaling, and didn’t even get dizzy. So far as I know, second hand pot gives me the sniffles.
For me, other people using perfumes depends. (There was one time, many years ago, when I had to use the bus on a daily basis. There was one woman that, I swear, could NOT tell the difference between the Raid can and her body spray.)
Thankfully my wife and I are both similar regarding scents. We have to use unscented soap and detergent, and neither of us uses perfume/cologne. My mother, who was also sensitive to scents, was not happy when she bought me a cologne (one of the few she could tolerate, and one she liked that she bought for my dad) that I absolutely could not use.
I really want to make a list of the perfumes I react badly to so that I can figure out what’s common between them, but the only answer I get when I ask is “Oh sorry, is it too strong?”
Well, yes, yes it is. The only person who should be able to smell you perfume is the man whispering sweet nothings in your ear, but that’s not the point.
Elevators. Sometimes … I swear. How weird is it to wear a mask (required) then have to put your hand over that, because someone’s scent is overwhelming …
It is has been forever since I’ve had to share space with a smoker, or a room where someone has smoked. First AND Last time I screwed up and didn’t get a reservation at the hotel I’d stay tat on a work trip. They didn’t have a non-smoking room. It had been “thoroughly cleaned”. Um, no? I was up at 5 AM, slept maybe an hour. Ended up shorting my stay. Never made that mistake again. Only time came close was when we were assigned a room in a non-smoking hotel. Someone had smoked too close to the rooms. Complained and got a new room. Had too. Had no choice. They took one look at me as I made the request (“I’m sorry. But …”) and moved us. It’d only been 10 or 15 minutes. Long enough to go to the vehicle, get what we needed for overnight, open room, walk in, walk out, and return to front desk.
What is really weird is I know, while I have sensitivity, my reactions are minor compared to some.
A new Rant from RazorFist:
Pfizer needs to replace the revenue they’ve lost since the expiration of the Viagra patents. Gottleib, the ex CDC head who’s on TV all the bloody time, is on their board. As a matter of fact, big pharma is even better than big defense or big banks at providing post government service no-show jobs. Hmmm.
The system is utterly corrupt. I think we underestimate just how corrupt it is.
Some of us called out the death of “rule of law” a while ago.
Laws for thee but not for me.
Rule by lies instead of law.
That viagra claim appears to be BS. I’ve seen it repeated numerous times, but it’s certainly not Pfizer’s only product. So went looking, and found:
“PFIZER has one hundred and eighty-nine approved drugs. There are thirty US patents protecting PFIZER drugs. There is one tentative approval on PFIZER drugs.”
source: https://www.drugpatentwatch.com/p/applicant/Pfizer
See also:
www DOT pfizer DOT com/products-list
So… 85% of their drug products are NOT protected by patent, and can be manufactured as generics. In fact judging by what I’ve seen with other companies’ patent-expired products (including one that is a flagship product), probably =most= of their profit comes from doing just that, to be sold under a variety of brand names and no-names. Recovery of investment happens under patent, but long-term sales mostly happen after it expires… it’s not like they suddenly are no longer allowed to make and sell it, and inertia keeps that market in their camp for some time afterward. Remember any company that wants to make a given product has to get FDA approval, which right now takes several years, and often is not worth the cost, especially if FDA decides not to grandfather something that’s been GRAS for a hundred years. (Or why Combiotic is no longer available, despite 80 years as a generic.)
One drug that I’m watching was developed into a new dosing form about ten years ago (it’s an old drug, and long since generic, just a new and simpler delivery format with fewer side effects — those all being from the old delivery method), was approved to submit dosing test info 2 years ago, and is just now FINALLY in the final approval stages before it can go to market… expected to be approved perhaps within two years. THAT is how slow FDA approval is, even for established generics.
i think you completely fail to understand what they were getting for Viagra.
I’m a shareholder at Pfizer. No, it’s not BS. Pfizer has a revenue shortfall and not much in the pipeline. The vaccine would be very good for them, Not as important as it is to Moderna, for which see, but still very important.
Equities are about the flow and not the stocks. Grow or die.
Didn’t offhand see anything more recent, this is from 2009 but at the time Viagra was about 4% of their revenue, and was not their largest seller:
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/pfizer-q1-worse-than-it-looks-even-viagra-is-flagging/
to put it bluntly, you’re still ignoring the huge margin they were making on it. HUGE margin..
Like it’s less on their higher-revenue products??
Penalty flag. Revenue is not profit.
Another industry – supermarkets. Kroger Stores, $132.5 billion in 2020. Gross margin (profit before taxes) was 23.3% on all sales, excluding fuel. Not bad; nearly $31 billion in gross profit.
Gross margin on food sales – 1.3%. About $434 million. Almost all of their profit margin is in high markup products.
$15-$28 *per pill* depending on the point we’re talkign about… (as in before or after the little yellow pill came out)
So how does that compare to their other products? that’s what I’m asking. And lower margin/higher volume is the same money.
If you get 4% of your revenue with .4% of your cost, that’s a lot of profit.
Look under Upjohn. Pfizer dumped its off patent drugs into a subsidiary.
You’ll go a long time before you find any reporting on Viagra economics because Pfizer reporting sucks. What you will find is almost ritual explanations about how the generic has cut their profits. The one thing a I could find was their cutting the price per pill in half.
Something like this:
“Fourth-quarter 2017 IH operational revenue growth was negatively impacted by lower revenues for Viagra in the U.S. primarily due to generic competition that began in December 2017 and for Enbrel in most developed Europe markets due to continued biosimilar competition.”
Companies don’t call out minor shifts, this is a material item.
If you really want to know, your source is EDGAR, the SEC report site. The symbol is PFE. search for Viagra, they’ll give you every mention of it in the financial reports, that’s where I got the quote above.
Happy hunting
they lucked into Viagra as it was not intended for its main use. I understand it works decent for its original use, too.
Right originally viagra was intended as a combination BP and angina pill. Passed safety test easily. In efficacy it was found to be meh for the intended purpose there were several better combinations. But then when they wanted to end the study many of the participants (mostly 50-70 year old males) wouldn’t return the remaining trial issue they had and then the Doctors figured out the effect on smooth muscle/N02 generation which made very in demand.
That’s what I heard, too — wasn’t much use for its intended purpose, but had some interesting side effects that might allow Pfizer to eke out a little profit after all. 😀
Like Rogaine™. It wasn’t supposed to be marketed for hair growth, but that’s what it caused, and so . . .
Yup Rogaine was originally a BP med that seemed to cause odd hair growth as a side effect when taken internally, Topically it worked REALLY well. Another oddball is Latisse used for enhacing/regrowing eyelashes. It’s a Glaucoma med Xalatan/Latanaprost used to lower eye pressures. My ophthalmologist (a lovely Asian lady with a strong resemblance to Lucy Liu) always marveled at my eyelashes and envied them when I was on Xalatan. They were rather ludicrous for a 40/50 something bald guy shaped like a potato 🙂 .
I take Astelin (azelastine) nasal spray for chronic non-alleric rhinitis (basically, I have hypersensitive nasal nerves that react to ordinary irritants like I’ve been pepper-sprayed and turn on the waterworks). It’s a non-drowsy antihistamine, which is utterly wasted on me since I’m not actually allergic to anything, but it has the fortunate side effect of damping down the nasal overreactions.
Also, it’s nice that I get by with half the normal dose, so it takes 180 days to use up my 90-day supply, but I can refill it every 90 days so I’ve got quite a supply-chain-shock reserve built up by now.
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I have that side effect too. Longer thicker eye lashes. No needed to pay for cosmetics (not that I have, ever, too lazy). I don’t have the severe problem having to actually trim them to shorten, but definitely longer, and thicker, with the highlight of an white hair or two (also a side effect). The latter? Eh, surprised aren’t more given what my brows and head hair have done. Problem is they tend to brush my masks when I blink … Yes, I have glaucoma.
It is also used to stave off “Altitude Sickness” which was a secondary research to the angina. It works fairly well for that, too.
Huh, guess its more smooth muscle/NO2 issues of some sort. Biology is just frickin weird.
Bipolar sis was once injured during an operation and had some nerve damage and the prescription was one of the meds for her
then diagnosed depression (Xanax, maybe?) and they had to switch her off what the psych had her on until the nerves healed up enough. Doc- “I’m not trying to say you are depressed, so please don’t get mad at me, but you need Drug A” sis- “Well I am depressed and I already take Drug B”. Doc – “Oh, then you’ll need to switch if the psych says it is okay, Drug A works great for nerve damage”
The only known treatment for the negative symptoms of schizophrenia was developed as an antibiotic.
some side effects are not bad
A bit off topic, but speaking of genies and bottles. Keep an eye on China. Things are accelerating. They’ve arrested several bankers — at the big state banks, that’s important, over the last few days and are stripping assets from the big tech companies. There are reports, and pictures, of what amounts to bank runs as people start to realize they’re not going to get their money back. China is very brittle, very brittle. Nothing may happen, but if it does it’ll be epic.
It’s also becoming clear where the contagion is likely to run. Mostly in China, for now that could change, and mostly in raw materials. Where it gets really interesting is that much of this is denominated in dollars but isn’t in the western banking system. It’s not clear that China has the dollar resources to bail the whole sector out. 75% write-downs are the current estimate. On the other hand, I’ve been learning about what stable coins are and I’m just flabbergasted. Anyone playing with that needs to have a look at what they’re doing.
This is all a great, oozing mass of corruption. If not for the amount of damage ordinary people would take, I’d wish for its total collapse. Though maybe that’s the price that has to be paid.
Hmm…
A country the size of China approaching that abyss is a very bad thing. China’s been excusing a lot of it’s international financial chicanery with claims that it needs to engage in such behavior to keep its population content. Well, the population isn’t going to be content with this. The question is how far Xi Jinping is expecting to need to go in order to salvage this situation and save his skin.
If the Chinese economy tanks, and they call the loans for the U.S. to cover them, then what? U.S defaults? That would domino across the entire globe.
Exactly the other way around. China will buy more US debt and any private capital that can flee will, almost all to the US, it’s already started.— that’s what’s behind the purchase of all those houses. As bad as we have it, we’re in the best shape. In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. The US dollar is what backs the remimbi.
So far this is a China problem and may be limited to small/medium savers If they get stroppy, the CCP will simply kill them like they always do. So far, it hasn’t hit the big state enterprises or anyone who is a threat to Pooh bear. On the other hand, it’s spreading and what’s considered to be the best run of the developers (soho) is plummeting after a deal with blackstone fell through. That seems to be political and I’m interpreting it as evidence of weakness.
How the crypto thing will play out is the unknown. I have no idea how all that works but there seems to be something in it that would make ole Charlie Ponzi proud going on, or not, as I said I don’t understand it and everything out there seems to be either
Organ printer go brrrr.
So out of curiosity, what sort of affect would the financial issues that the government is about to inflict upon us have on a country that’s purchased lots of US debt? IIRC, you’re of the opinion that inflation isn’t going to be the real issue, but rather other economic problems instead.
I believe that the price inflation is transitory because they haven’t actually printed very much money yet — bank reserves are not money and inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon. We’re seeing rising prices through a combination of base effects — last year prices were depressed — and lingering effects of lockdowns on the supply chain. The base effects are about done, the supply shortages should work themselves out.
The Evidence is in bonds. The long bond peaked in March, coincident with China issues, and has been declining while the 10 year TIPS breakeven, which measures inflation expectations xx sort of — remains flat at levels fairly consistent with its history. It is a bit higher than it had been but lower than, say, 2013 and before. When they talk about the smart money, they’re talking about bond guys and the bind guys know what the money supply is, not central bankers.
I do believe that the bubble we are in will cause economic problems when it pops and world population declines will cause a reduction in demand and, thus, a decline in prices. Call it deflation if you will, I got pilloried for that usage but that’s common usage “in the trade.” I also believe the US is the one eyed man among the blind.
What would cause inflation would be the Fed being able to monetize it’s balance sheet. That’s what “central bank crypto” is all about. They could then put money directly into pockets instead of going through banks that worry about being repaid or borrowers who don’t see the returns that would justify borrowing. At the limit, we’d see loss of faith in the currency and, thus, hyperinflation.
The two trillion, even they can’t seem to agree on three, in graft the government is about to inflict on us will likely cause inflation in the short run and deflation in the longer run. The additional taxes will reduce investment, and thus lead to reduced economic activity in the longer term. It will also require substantial debt, which leads to your question.
Inflation is bad for all debt holders since it reduces their real return. With 10 year interest rates at 1.32% and short rates at essentially zero, any inflation at all will wipe them out. For China, it is doubly damaging. The biggest thing to keep in mind is that China is essentially a dollar based economy. The remimbi is essentially domestic scrip. US inflation would, all things equal which they never are, reduce the value of the dollar and, thus strengthen the remimbi. Since China is an exporting country that manipulates its currency to maintain its advantage against the dollar, this would be horrific for them. If the inflation were truly large, the peg would likely break. At the same time, China imports all its raw materials, which are priced in dollars. They would be paying more, particularly for food and food inflation is the one societal thing the CCP truly fears. They live much closer to the bone than we do.
John Connally, who was Nixon’s treasury secretary when Nixon started the current sh-t show told his colleagues “The dollar is our currency, but your problem.” As long as the dollar is the world’s reserve currency the dollar is China’s problem. The problem is, from their perspective, is that there’s nothing to replace it. Arguably, and this will likely shock people, there isn’t enough of it, but that would require a discussion about how the banking system actually works and that too long for a blog reply.
Hope that answers you. I’m afraid I don’t need a lot of encouragement to rabbit on about this and I do chatter when I’m frightened, like now,
No, that gave me enough info.
No problem here, keep it coming. This is very helpful.
Now they’re floating the baloon of price control.
If they had only one neck….
If it’s Dems pushing it, remind them that price controls were something that President Nixon imposed.
😛
It is the Junta pushing it.
I think I found your T-shirt…..
amazon.com/Middle-Finger-Fu-ck-Kamala-Harris/dp/B08MZZCTCT/ref=sr_1_13?dchild=1&keywords=fuck+joe+biden&qid=1631617778&sr=8-13
Evil will oft doth evil mar. They’re already losing the unions, they may very well founder on the disparate impact of the vax order, and it’s becoming clear that they’re losing the banks. Just about all the analysts are ringing alarms about the effects of their “governance”. All they have left is the fruits and nuts and the teacher’s union.
And all they NEED is fraud.
Up to a point. I think the disparate impact thing will hurt them especially when you consider where the fraud occurs.
And fraud will see them hanged.
Without CW2? I doubt it.
https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/victoria-taft/2021/09/13/here-we-go-irregularities-reported-in-newsom-recall-election-n1478269
Hon, it won’t be CWII. It will be a massacre.
And it looks like Newsom frauded his way out of being ejected into the outer darkness:
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/california-gov-gavin-newsom-stays-in-power-as-recall-fails/ar-AAOpAHX
On the plus side, the replacement =would= have been Larry Elder.
Sooprise, Sooprise, Sooprise.
Reality doesn’t care if you call it “black-pill”.
Umm yeah, maybe but Cali is 2/3 dem. It’s easy to call fraud, harder to think why Cali might be 2/3 dem and what to do about it. The old Brooklyn Dodger’s fans had two sayings, wait till next year, and we wuz robbed. next year never came, and they never got robbed, they just sucked, so is it in Cali. So is it in NJ where the execrable Murphy will be re-elected easily, so in NY. The Republican Party doesn’t exist here and until it does there is no hope of turning the coasts away from the dems.
In other news, Maga and BLM anti-vax protestors seem to find common ground, as they should. The big knock on Trump is that he’s a populist, as if that’s a bad thing. Don’t confuse BLM the organization set up by a bunch of commie academics and pumped by media and the tech lords, with BLM the ordinary black person saying WTF. The simple fact is that working class people have more in common with each other than they do with the tech lords, and the Republican Party for that matter. Divide et impera and all that.
Perhaps we could resurrect a Tea Party but keep the grifters out and invite working black and Hispanic people in. Wouldn’t that be bonny?
BTW, it can be done. Reagan did it, and Trump, and yes there there is fraud, did it. The question is how to do more of it.
There is no argument about fraud. The news stories proved already,. If you want to prove he would have won anyway, burden of proof is on you.
Umm OK. California is 2/3 democrat. The margin in the recall is about the same as it is in every other election held there. No fraud is necessary.
As I said, we need to stop the fraud excuse, fraud like the poor will always be with us. We have to do the hard work of figuring out how to take the country back without destroying it. To do that we have to give up the comfort of we wuz robbed.
I’m tired of the despair, and despair is what it is.
I think the biggest problem with debating the impact of fraud in the elections are that one is both structured to be un-auditable, and has already had demonstrated fraud mechanisms show.
Apparently many of the mail in ballots were see-through with a moderate light source. That’s not the only issue. Not sure of a legal way to fix any of those issues though, and, as you said, it’s equally likely that a majority of Californians want it that way.
Glad I don’t live there anymore.
@BGE What makes you think those 2/3rds who vote Democrat actually DO vote Democrat?
I think rather that fraud is so normalized that everyone just assumes CA must be hard blue… remember this is one of the first havens of full-time mail-in ballots. Funny how mail-in ballots coincided with the whole state taking a hard turn to the left, when it had been more or less meandering leftward, but sometimes heeling rightward when the left got out of hand.
I recall a statewide election (this woulda been back around 2008, when I was still living there) when the state legiscritters had an approval rating of 11% (yes, eleven) yet 100% of incumbents were re-elected (I checked the entire list). I also recall the King of Lancaster (nominally GOP, more like crony capitalist, I doubt most locals could TELL you his nominal party because he behaves like a democrat) being re-elected every time since forever with as few as TWO percent of the registered voters casting a ballot. I also recall that absent a dirty campaign that split the GOP vote (and was later discovered to have some questionable funding from the left), CA would have had the very sensible GOP Richard Riordan for governor instead of that lunatic democrat Gray Davis.
So I wonder what the REAL turnout is statewide, and how many of those stay-at-home voters “voted” without ever touching their ballots. And of course now we’re getting reports of people being turned away because they “already voted” (funny how that only happens to registered GOPs) so as one put it, it’ll be real interesting to check the Sec of State’s site and see how I voted (since you can do that).
What’s needed now is a campaign to get everyone who voted to eject Newsom to check their ballot status… of course, if the fraud is REALLY good, it’ll show you your actual vote but tally the desired vote…, but I doubt Dems have thought that far with the website programming.
I also consider the stat that GOPs usually vote in person, but Dems usually vote by mail, and wonder if Dems actually vote in person at the same rate but there are just that many fewer of ’em, before they count mail-in fraud, which seems to be the universal denominator here.
Trouble is so long as Dems control the tallying process, we can’t really prove anything.
Rezlac, your point has been obvious for years. CA is fraud central. Note the date.
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2016/11/03/voter-fraud-california-man-finds-dozens-ballots-stacked-outside-home.html
Funny stuff happened in the Recall Election. This is not under dispute by anyone who’s been following the news (and I’m talking about California MSM, and not conservative online sources). At the very least, there’s the guy who was found with lots and lots of pre-filled ballots in his car a few weeks ago. That’s a sign of intent to commit fraud, and someone else almost certainly put him up to it. There’s also the odd business with the people (and there appear to have been quite a few of them) who arrived at their voting locations to cast their vote, but were informed that they’d already voted.
In short, the question isn’t whether there was funny business. The question is how pervasive the funny business was, how much of it was an honest screw-up as opposed to intentional, and how big of a difference the lack of that funny business might have made in the outcome.
And CA, CO, etc. are set up so they will NEVER be investigated honestly…. just like in that link I put up from 2016.
Hopefully clue by fours are landing.
You have this exactly backwards. Knowing it is fraud means we know we aren’t isolated weirdos who should just go off and die in a corner.
Knowing it is fraud also makes questions of legitimate authority easier: they have none, only reason to follow anything the enemy has to say is because the inflicted punishment would interfere with something else you need to get done.
Sigh. Fraud is an excuse. There has always been fraud. Whatchya gonna do bout it? Seriously, Even if there was massive fraud it would be irrelevant since Cali, and NY, and NJ, the coasts generally are dems. How did that happen? What, if anything, can be done?
Yes. And until recently it was easy for people to think “there is no fraud, we are just losing”. Which leads to the sort of attitude our alleged representatives (the few who aren’t pure slime) have of “compromise then retreat to hold off losses for a while longer before ultimate defeat”.
THIS
Fraud. Vote by mail. Etc. And this was NEXT LEVEL fraud.
*Are* they all Dems? What evidence is there other than voting patterns?
THIS.
It’s not just CA and such. I SAW 50% fraudulent votes on a red city in 2008
And unlimited untraceable donations despite obvious ability to prove it. 2008 and 2012.
@snelson134 Not only unlimited untraceable donations on Newsom’s side, but funny thing, all the candidates but Newsom were constrained by hard limits. (Last number I saw was $76M reported for Save Newsom, and about $35M for Larry Elder.)
As more evidence that California is not as blue as it seems, and that real voters cast fewer real ballots than we’d like to think… until mail-in voting, stupid ballot propositions almost never passed. Since then, it’s become much easier.
To All In Thread 🙂 Here is a Handy Chart:
Added green verticals to show percentage who “voted absentee” (ie. by mail) for that year. Data from:
www DOT sos.ca DOT gov/elections/historical-absentee
Base image found on
wilderwealthywise DOT com/trump-the-last-president/
where you can compare Texas, whose stats are probably about what CA’s would look like absent all the fraud.
China has been doing military over flights of Taiwan for the past week or so.
Things are going to happen, and they are going to be ugly.
Can you say Gringo Ploy? I knew you could.
What the people need is a short, victorious war to take their minds of their problems.
This is why we have sundown Joe.
Had not heard it called that before, but likely. There’s also ended threats to the regime’s legitimacy too.
When in doubt, blame the gringo. The more they hate foreigners the less space they have to hate the regime.
Things are really, really bad in China. The best they can hope for is a big dose of repression. Great article online on Forbes discussing how the financial fallout will likely play. Big banks win, CCP win, local authorities lose, tech entrepreneurs lose, property speculators, lose, small savers lose, foreigners lose. The writer talks about how the Chinese public seems to not react to the repression but is reacting to financial losses. I suppose it’s because this was the money that was going to fund their retirement and an overseas education for their (one) child.
the biggest liability seems to be unfinished, prepaid, apartments. Some estimates put these at $1 Trillion US. Hence ponzi. while this seems to be nuts, it’s actually not unreasonable given the rest of the numbers involved. Evergrande has admitted $300B, for comparison the S&L bailout was about $120B.
China is right on the edge of famine, the WuFlu keeps breaking out and they’re reacting about as well as sundown Joe, and they have 25% of GDP directly in property and this doesn’t really count the steel, concrete, and the rest involved in that construction.
China needs an enemy, now.
Everything you’ve seen from the seizures in the tech sector, to the shared prosperity BS, to the rhetoric around Taiwan, to the fraud that is sundown Joe is battlefield preparation for the unwinding of the Chinese property bubble.
Sounds like the call to action here is: if you need anything, anything, not sourced 100% to the US, buy it now or be SOL later.
I really hope I’m wrong. I hope they all muddle through but I don’t see anything that remotely resembles a good outcome here. They could have dealt with this five years ago, or two years ago but didn’t so here we are but twice as big.
The great, all knowing, all powerful, all wise CCP seems to be remarkably bad at the whole ruling thing. crazy talk I know, but it’s almost as though they’re really quite stupid. All they understand is repression.
I’ve bet over the years against China and for India because India is a chaotic mess. Yes, it has its problems, think bureaucracy and corruption, but the Indian chaos is a sign of increasingly free people trucking and bartering while Chinese order a sign of unfree people and ultimate stagnation and decline.
The CCP won’t let the needed changes take effect. I’ve been meaning to do a write-up of a book on the subject, and send it in. But long story short, the CCP is an oligarchy filled with a lot of corrupt individuals, most of whom are more interested in short term profits than long-term gains.
Eh, it’s typical high-up commie attitude: NONE of them are actually in this game because they are True Believers. (Those all got executed long ago.) They’re in it to make a buck for themselves, and to hell with anyone else. So…basically typical gov corruption, just writ larger than it is, say, here. (Though it’s getting to the point here where they’re not even trying to hide it anymore. I want someone to explain to me how TWO senators (and both even from California, imagine that!) known to have been in close–and even intimate–contact with Chinese spies are still in office. And holding important foreign relations committee chairs.)
It’s not about true believers. It’s about having one bird now or three later. Most of them will consistently chase after the one, and not the three later.
And the kids mostly hate the CCP, which the CCP has decided is best fought by being mean to kids and their parents and their interests.
Other than “I feel bad, so I am going to purge everyone,” I have no idea what Xi is thinking.
I’d rather be first in hell than second in heaven or some such
“Discipline! Ve must haff discipline!” In a Chinese accent, of course.
Like ours then
What I learned during the years of doing business in China is just how prevalent degenerate gambling is there
I suspect the endemic alcoholism in the former USSR was present for the same reason (and in fact, they deliberately made sure alcohol was cheap…)
The making and selling of vodka in Russia has been in state control for several hundred years. It’s how the state makes money and keeps the populace in control.
But long story short, the CCP is an oligarchy filled with a lot of corrupt individuals, most of whom are more interested in short term profits than long-term gains.
So, like Wall Street then?
Hey now! If you’re going to go after a street for corruption then K street in DC has us beat.
Who is the corrupt one, the buyer or the seller?
SO, China = Congress.
Nope. At least sometimes China can be trusted 🙂 .
ROFL Treg!
It is worse than that because Chyna has passed the point where they can hold off their bird addiction long enough to wait for those three birds. They are locked into a downwards spiral, their only choices being which path is less steep this week.
There are always three birds in the future. They might be sickly, famished creatures, but they still exist.
Maybe I should get that new laptop…
Now would be a good time. It will only go higher.
*grumbling*
I literally have *one part* left for my new PC, for which I’m waiting for the official announcement of the next gen and subsequent price drop any week now.
Condensed cream of recent China Observer program: CCP decided to call in the land lease (don’t recall how they phrase it) under factories owned by Samsung Heavy Industries, who build cargo ships. This is leading to their exit from China, and much screaming from the workers who are now SOL, other good-paying jobs that can support their debt payments (apartment, car) not being readily available. Other Samsung divisions have already moved to Vietnam and Bangladesh. Apparently there’s quite the ongoing manufacturing exodus from China, we just aren’t hearing much about it because they’re mostly Japanese and Korean companies. They’ve lost somewhere around 35k jobs already.
And shortly after the 2008 crisis, I saw an analysis that China’s real estate was in about six times deeper. (Now doubtless much worse.)
Yeah, tofu economy, might not totally crash if the CCP kept their central-planning mitts off it, but if they keep going as they are….
Breaking news on Evergrande: Instapundit posts that ZeroHedge reports on a Straits Times article reporting on social media posts (whew), that in the wake of Evergrande’s default, retail-level investors have not only stormed the company headquarters but have actually taken management hostage.
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/enraged-evergrande-investors-go-full-pitchfork-hold-management-hostage-company-offices
There was film of the Chinese police invading the main headquarters. Everyone is assuming the CCP will bail it all out, thus controlling the contagion, like WuFlu. It’s been interesting finding out who the real psychopaths on Wall St are. George Soros! has been the sole voice opposing China on the basis of the slavery, who knows, his bets might be that way or, perhaps, his rather twisted view has aligned with the angels. There are a few smaller fish who’ve been opposed for a long time but that’s it.
Evergrande bonds are frozen. All the usual suspects are involved. Foreign holders are led by HSBC, naturally, and The Royal Bank of Canada. Blackrock is big among American firms along with Goldman Sachs. There are some government pension funds and sovereign wealth funds also. How much of that is firm money vs client money is the question. The other question is around crypto. The more I find out about that, the more alarmed I get, but sufficient to the day.
There are two big questions. is it in the CCP’s interest to bail out the firm and do they have the ability to do so? “Everyone” assumes the answer to both is yes, but I’m not so sure.
I suspect whatever happens will happen over the weekend, it usually does. Monday should be an interesting day.
Again, I don’t understand crypto either, maybe Pixy does.
I will say that talking to the correct programmers and electrical engineers is probably necessary for someone from a finance/economics background to understand crypto. Those fields have some mathematical models for how their stuff behaves, including some theory that relates to probability and randomness.
It seems to me that with crypto like applications, you are relying on a few early experts for a lot of the base line assumptions of how the things work. Crypto currency in particular had someone anonymous, and I haven’t even read, or studied to be able to read, the papers in question. If you have one guy explaining the mathematical abstraction, how to implement the mathematical abstraction, and what the algorithmic vulnerabilities are, there are some fundamental issues with trusting the guy. Really smart and dishonest could know qualities of the abstraction that they conceal, thereby permitting themselves an unknown attack avenue later on. Really smart, and a poor teacher*, can figure out something that they don’t actually manage to explain to everyone else, resulting in a bunch of poor implementation. Smart but not really smart, or just unlucky or in a hurry, can discover new things, but overlook some subtle part of the new whole. Then there are later discoveries or changes, which the original assumptions did not account for. And, especially when there is a lot of evidence of corrupt speech control in academia, when a lot of money flows to a new mathematical application, there may be a successful conspiracy to hide some aspect of the math. So, this seems risky, and I’m not sure finance and economics has the math for predicting the risk from the uncertainties of a new mathematical discovery.
Engineering fields have a technique for mitigating such risks, but it is basically having a big pool of crusty old fellows working on specific applications, so there is a lot of institutional inertia. And, I’m a skeptic of whether this has fully mitigated the risks from the machine learning fad. There are a lot of people getting engineering graduate degrees that are based on heavily working with machine learning techniques, and some of these are going to wind up moving to engineering practice utterly confident in the reliability of machine learning.
From theory, consider that cryptocurrency has been both an academic fad, and an investment fad. Pragmatically, consider that Chia was actually getting money spent on it. So, Crypto, from first principles, may be a bubble. And the PRC has been cracking down on crypto farming.
*The Disc Embedding Theorem came out a couple days ago, I learned about it earlier this week. From Pixy linking to a Quanta article.
Considering Soros doesn’t complain about the slavery in Africa at all, I expect it’s mostly that slavery in China is negatively impacting some interest of his, such as Muslims taking over and destroying the civilized world (since he’s heroically backed and funded the mass migrations into Europe, and has a stated goal of bringing down Western civilization). It’s apparently been forgotten that the Uyghurs *initially* got the CCP’s attention because some had decided to behave like Muslims and were attacking their infidel neighbors, hence the CCP’s ton-of-bricks response.
I didn’t know Evergrande existed until last week (then ran away screaming), but did know about the bogus investments made by American pension plans (California state pension fund is about half invested in China). Gotta wonder about the volume of payoffs and kickbacks; they can’t ALL be that stupid….
All, no … Most, oh yes they can and often are that stupid. Pension funds, especially CALPERS exist to be fleeced. To be fair to them, the returns required to keep the fraud in play simply don’t exist. How to Gamble if you Must by Dubins and the great Jimmie Savage is your guild. A good example, how you bet if you owe money to the mob and large men are about to break you into parts is different to how you might bet as a continuing concern. It’s a Dover mathematics book and you can pick a copy up for $10-15.
Understanding this concept and ergodicity will help you understand why economics doesn’t work.
Savage is one of the more interesting statisticians. He did a lot of work for Bell Labs and possessed the world’s dirtiest coffee cup. For much of its early history, gamblers were among AT&T’s largest customer,
Which is why having people manage their own money is by far the better solution. Some of them might make mistakes, but they won’t all make the SAME stupid mistakes. That’s what government is for.
Just so. Risk management is one of the best arguments against socialism. The only risk management technique that actually works is diversification.
Pension situation has been ugly for a long time, especially public pensions. They’re almost all massively underfunded.
I look at the bright lights of casinos and consider that there’s probably a reason they can afford to pay a bigger electric bill than the rest of us…. I dislike even minor forms of ‘gambling’ like eBay auctions (betting no one else will find the listing before time runs out).
However, there’s another way to bet if you owe money to the mob, and that is to know the right people… a friend who was, ah, raised in the lifestyle tells this story about a mutual acquaintance, who had a serious gambling problem, insufficient income, and significant debt. Friend happened to be at his business facility when the Las Vegas mob’s enforcers showed up, and they asked friend to leave so they could, uh, do their business, which at the time meant breaking both the acquaintance’s legs (at his age more than serious, and he knew it). Friend took the enforcers aside and told them, “Call your boss and tell him Toots Shor’s youngest daughter is here.” The younger enforcer just looked baffled, but the older one knew exactly what she meant… he called his boss, and very shortly the enforcers bowed themselves out, and never hassled the acquaintance again (and I’m quite sure he never had the money to pay off the debt).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toots_Shor
That’s how it works, I grew up with the mob. At one point I dates one’s daughter. That was surreal and not at all like the TV show. Most of their “lending” is to degenerate gamblers, it’s a sad thing.
I did a fair bit of gambling, still do I suppose but now we call it investing. Back in the day I played a lot of poker and vingt et un and occasionally bet on the ponies. I took it very seriously, and it really wasn’t gambling. Got banned by a casino for getting caught counting cards. Counting cards is dead easy, the problem is not getting caught because it’s the pattern of the bets not the card counting that matters and the card counter’s pattern is well known. I can still handicap a horse and like to go out and watch them run, but I don’t really bet any more. Too much work. I hate Texas Hold’em and that seems to be what they play now.
The Chinese are often degenerate gamblers, it’s their national curse. I saw an awful lot of it when I was still a “China hand” Terrible things happen to families.
A war with Taiwan might be short. But I don’t think it would be victorious.
Not yet, anyway.
I do hope Taiwan has some “gifts” from India and Israel.
Don’t worry. They know what they may have to do.
I don’t. The loss of life in mainland China would potentially be horrific, and using such devices would risk turning world opinion against the Republic of China. Plus, Beijing (or possibly what’s left of it) would feel compelled to respond in kind. And I genuinely don’t think that the RoC needs such “gifts” right now to hold off a Chinese invasion force, even if the US plays blind, deaf, and dumb throughout the entire affair.
They would be much better used to stop the invasion fleet ten miles from Taiwan.
I’d bet just knowing the offers were there would do it
Evergrande is toast, they have just retained Houlihan Lokey and Admiralty to “assess Capital Structure”. Houlihan Lokey do insolvency, that’s their main business. Admiralty does asset sales. Both legitimate firms.
buckle up.
The gap between Evergrande formally denying they would be restructuring and their announcing the hiring of a restructuring firm was about 60 minutes. A new record.
Wow. That was quick.
China, note not Evergrande, announced that Evergrande will not make its interest payments due on 9/20. That’s a default. The announcement came on the anniversary of the Lehman Default. Winnie the Pooh is said to be obsessed with numerology, funny how the emperors in China are so obsessed with magic. make of that what you will.
Take a moment to think of the janitors, cleaners, gardeners, and laborers who haven’t been paid and won’t be paid. They live very close to the bone there. They had little, now they have nothing. Think also of the middle class people who have had their life’s savings destroyed. It’s hard to see the hopes of a family wrecked.
Over the next few days we’ll find out who’s been swimming naked. The wildcard is crypto if I’m understanding what they’re on about. I don’t understand crypto at all, but I do understand commercial paper, and commercial paper is what underlies stabledoins.
BTW. China has just wiped out the Casino business in Macau. Largest money laundering site on Earth that is. It’s almost as though China needs cash to meet obligations or that Winnie the Pooh is trying to be 1937 Stalin.
“Largest money laundering site on Earth that is.”
And much more dangerous is that the Chinese working there get to see how much money those rich capitalists have to throw away.
Gambling seems to be the Chinese curse much as drink is to the Irish. I’m reading this as a continuation of Xi’s no fun of any kind policy to build strong fighters and workers for the Rodina, much like Stalin in 1937. On the other hand, they are in dire need of ready cash, and there is Macau with piles of it, conveniently owned by foreigners.
Xi seems to be obsessed with the fall of the USSR. He’s already got the demographic decline but he seems to be trying to stop the rest of it and restore China as the Middle Kingdom. I keep waiting for him to arrive in cloth of gold robes and write in vermillion ink and all the rest of the son of heaven BS. I suspect we’ll see some purging and then a good dose of Chinese isolationism since the world isn’t good enough for them. Eunuchs will come close behind, which might be a solution to their massive shortage of young women.
Chinese history is really weird. Chinese tribute consisted of giving gifts to foreigners since nothing the foreigners could give was good enough.
I’ve just noticed, and started raving about, this Woodward/Milley thing.
Second/third hand, on short sleep and after a busy day, all I know is that it smells like there is an agenda, and it involves playing somebody. Seems weird.
Milley seems plausible as paid off by the Chinese.
What if I am overthinking it? What if, there has been a lot of PRC bribery, blackmail, and secondhand coercion of various by people they have directly suborned?
What if CNN breaking the silence on PRC disinformation, what if Woodward breaking this, is an artifact of the loss of value of whatever it was that was being held over folks?
Like perhaps Evergrande.
I know nothing except that I should shut up, and go get a late lunch, a shower, and a nap.
Woodward has a history of making sh*t up, but usually only when it hurts Republicans.
The “White House official” who says other officers are ready to testify, I trust as much as all those White House sources reporting “chaos in the Trump administration”.
Hard to know who to believe. Milley hasn’t denied it. And there’s that letter from Pelosi that keys into the Woodward allegation. But she’s not known to be terribly truthful either.
And then what’s the motivation for letting this stuff out right now? Is Milley being set up to take the fall for the Kabul Bugout? Why? Blinken is the obvious patsy, but I suppose he’s more connected to Biden.
Sigh. Kremlinology was so much easier to parse.
Also, and I know it’s not a popular opinion here, I don’t think any of the high players in this little drama are literally Chinese puppets. It’s much likely far more indirect: “Hey, I know we said we’d bring you on to $K_STREET_FIRM after you retire, but we’re getting some pushback from our donors [who just happen to have Chinese names, shh], so maybe knock off the controversial stuff for a while, okay?”
Maybe they’ll run out of petty cash to spread around to western thinktanks, media, universities, etc. if they have a financial panic. One can hope.
Disagreement is fine.
Makes the analytical product better, and it isn’t like we are literally trying people here, and would need a consensus of twelve to convict.
There are a bunch of patterns, and what exactly is going on is really hard to say. Lot of the persons and organizations of interest appear to be much too crazy for rational analysis.
Thinking more carefully, I think I went hard for ‘PRC may have done it’ when I was convinced that HRC and BHO were out of the game. These days we can be sure that Obama is still playing, and there is some sign that HRC is.
Though, the California faction of Democrats is specifically suspicious. I think they may have been the element that primed me to suspect wider issues.
Against, it is pretty clear that these people are heavily driven by ego, so taking marching orders from the PRC might be a poor fit for MO.
They march for whoever pays the piper. Ego won’t buy nights out at fancy restaurants or $20,000 freezers.
After eating, I realized I had overlooked the ‘NCO, disgruntled over Afghanistan’ angle.
Richard Grenell, who has been loyal to Trump, apparently said that the story is nonsense.
On the other hand, Insty had a link up yesterday (which I didn’t follow) saying that a number of officers present at the meeting were ready and willing to testify to Congress that it happened.
I’m not sure what to make of it.
funny how the emperors in China are so obsessed with magic. make of that what you will.
Would it be wrong to hope he goes back to the ancients and drinks a concoction of mercury to give him immortal life? Like, soon?
I wonder if he’s already done the monkey brain thing. Magic and the desire to live forever seem to be an occupational hazard with autocrats. China, yeah, but a lot of the tech lords, especially google, have it too. They’re all very creepy.
Re: understanding crypto. Pixy Misa is a programmer, works a lot on cryptocurrency, and seems to be pretty skeptical of it, and disenchanted with it. It is possible that you two would find it informative if you talked to each other. ai dot mee dot nu
Thank you, I’m not so much skeptical about crypto, I don’t know enough to be skeptical. I’m pretty sure though that I do understand Stable Coins and exactly what is required to keep a fixed price. that’s what money market accounts do. The difference seems to be that money market accounts have rules and regulations, reporting, a certain transparency whilst Stable coins don’t.
I’ll send you down another economics rabbit hole if you like. It’s called Treynor’s model. You can only guarantee a fixed price if you’re willing to accept whatever inventory is offered, At the limit, infinite and there are no infinities in economics,
The other side is that to redeem at par at any time you need to be very highly collateralized. This really requires you be tied into the repo markets, which the stable coins don’t seem to be. I would also point out that the gap between cash and cash equivalent can be huge and it usually widens at the worst possible time.
Funny that these libertarian crypto things seem to be backed by US Treasuries and “prime” commercial paper, almost like the banks but more expensive and hugely riskier. Litttle recourse and no insurance. I hope there’s a lot of criminals with their money in the system so the firms have some skin I. The game.
>> “Funny that these libertarian crypto things seem to be backed by US Treasuries”
Casey Muratori – a programmer whose Twitter I read – made the point not long ago that crypto isn’t really a way out from under government because you ultimately need government enforcement for it to work as currency. Otherwise you have no legal recourse if someone cheats you.
Have noticed the accelerating takedowns of major business figures. They’re also closing the fist around popular youth culture. From what I’ve heard it’s all about enforcing, uh, patriotism, which probably does not bode well for the rest of the world; then again, it’s a tofu country and likely to implode before it can cause too much trouble.
At least part of it is about influencing young minds. It’s been noted that a number of targeted companies (along with the restrictions on video games) get a lot of use by minors. And reportedly the PRC curricula now has classes on Xi Jinping Thought.
Xi appears to see himself as the new Mao.
They also have a very precarious position on food. Imports are down because of the US gulf coast port shutdowns due to the hurricanes last month.
The RFRA was intended to let 1/1024th Indians take peyote and black folks with dreadlocks smoke pot without the cops harassing them.
Icky white middle class Christians were never supposed to use it!
Yar. But that act was racially, ethnically, and religiously discriminatory.
Oh, and by the way, according to the Seattle Times, some 90+ state troopers, firefighters, and other government employees have sued Gauleiter Inslee over the state vaccine mandate.
Cops and firemen booed Biden in NYC.
😁
OOOH!!! I remember when the Police and Fire Unions (Especially NYC) were so democrat they bled blue. If this wasn’t going to be so ugly it could be fun…
They haven’t been democrat since Tammany fell. The old working class in NY hasn’t been democrat either. Have to be careful, but the democrat party in NY is the rich, the …, and the fraud.
I’ve heard that even Boston is starting to change. That would shock me since they seem to keep voting for Kennedy spawn.
I’ve read that there’s a similar suit against Despicable Kate Brown in Oregon. She has the state courts sewn up, but a sufficiently motivated group could probably make a federal civil rights suit. The 9th circus isn’t as bad as before since POTUS Trump got some rational judges in place.
The 9th Circuit is better than it used to be. But somehow *every* last anti-gun control suit that gets an en banc hearing in that Circuit gets shot down, even though the fact that the panelists for an en banc hearing are supposed to be chosen randomly in this circuit (because it’s so large) would suggest that at least an occasional anti-gun control case should get through.
Clever how they manage to pull that off. I wouldn’t have a lot of faith for them going constitutional on vaxx mandates, but with DKB appointing a huge number of Oregon judges and a controlling majority in the state supreme court, it’s a better bet. Sigh.
“William Roper: “So, now you give the Devil the benefit of law!”
Sir Thomas More: “Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?”
William Roper: “Yes, I’d cut down every law in England to do that!”
Sir Thomas More: “Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned ’round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man’s laws, not God’s! And if you cut them down, and you’re just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake!”
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/7515521-william-roper-so-now-you-give-the-devil-the-benefit
This. There has to be ONE law system, or it all breaks down into violence.
…You know, like Islam has one set of laws for believers and another for unbelievers type violence.
Yepers.
Gee, kinda like the greens and the progressive socialists.
No wonder they all get along so great together.
Never give a saint a power you would deny to the devil
My first thought about the title was “The genie at the bottom of the bottle of Jim Beam lied to me” and I wondered what this would be about.
I’m generally not a fan of this sort of thing, but I’m changing my mind.
I would note that the provision for private suits in Texas allows citizens to sue when the abortionist (and/or facilitator of same) violates the legal “heartbeat” statute. In other words, almost the opposite of the reasoning for lawfare – going after people for providing an illegal service.
ROFL. BLM invaded the Met Gala. I do hope both sides suffered. I also hope those barbarians didn’t damage the Met.
I bet the Met Gala people are all delighted with having their privilege pointed out to them.
Okay…….sorry, I just have to get this shit off my chest. I am 77 yrs. old. The “Baby Boomer” generation has brought us to this point….”Feelings, feelings, feelings”……”BULLSHIT”! America is falling, folks. It’s falling fast as the speed of light………some State courts are fighting but to no avail. A country can never “feel” FREE or LIVE FREE until the people start putting their damn personal feelings away and grow a brain that can learn, recognize POLICIES from a government that holds the country together and proposes prosperity, equality, and independence of life for their “legal citizens”……….The Boomers have made one shit of a mess……….Sadly, it will be too late when they finally get old, wake up, and say “Um, what the hell happened?”
Nah. FDR wasn’t a boomer. His idea hat he would “guide” the country to progress had already poisoned the system when you were born.
The boomers were the RESULT not the cause.
And don’t worry too much. I’m.. um…. young enough to be your daughter. I intend to have this turned around before I die. oh, not by myself, I mean I could die tomorrow, but with an assist from the plotter…. there’s a chance.
I was going to point out that the Boomers’ “problem” is they weren’t raised– and I KNOW from trying to figure out a bunch of family drama related to religion that it was a REALLY LONG LIST of people who fell down on their duties or did them lazy. Usually exercised authority without bothering to do due diligence.
People keep on keepin’ on, and a lot of people work to fix the problems– sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t, sometimes it just gives people who can SENSE “there is something wrong” a way to DO something.
And that’s why it’s a global phenomenon, including in countries that sat out WWII
“You don’t have the experience to properly raise your kids, trust the experts.”
Experts: {are lazy and the theories are wrong anyways}
Yep
For 200,000 years children have been born and raised by unskilled labor. The oldest child was born and raised by inexperienced unskilled labor.
Funny how the more ‘experts’ have stuck their noses into the process, the worse results we’ve been getting. And how the very worst results have been in the most ‘enlightened’ and ‘progressive’ big cities.
One might begin to suspect the ‘experts’ don’t know their ass from a hole in the ground.
Akshully, when we try to estimate the reality, and not the form, and consider older cohorts, it may be opposite.
As in, a large body of knowledge and skilled workers training skilled workers, largely discarded because it wasn’t in a textbook, wasn’t ‘professional’, and didn’t fit the prejudice towards credentials.
This is basically similar to what appears to have happened with the shift of so much of the male work force away from agriculture.
If a man is not going to work in agriculture by default, then a young man might actually have to search for, or choose, older men to osmosis skills and judgement from. Of course, parents can arrange apprenticeships, etc. Apprenticeships have problems dealing with churn in types of employment.
The answer arrived at was ‘academia can predict types of employment, and necessary skills’ and ‘mass production style education can provide the necessary skills’. Or at least, that is how we summarize the answer in theory, the practice was much less screwed up. Reality was messier than theory, and there was a lot of individual on individual work that addressed a lot of the issues caused by trying to conform to so centralized a theory.
What has really helped me was the understanding that a lot of people these days find themselves needing to do a lot of things, and switch between occupations with a certain amount of forethought, hard work, and attention to how effective and satisfying things are.
I think approaches like Holly’s and like Foxfier’s are probably least wrong, of everything being done today.
Not exactly correct.
People had their family around them. The tradition of “mom going to help daughter with the new baby” is traditional for good reason– even when some families were more a horrible warning than anything else.
But generally, yes.
You get attention for a theory by appealing to fads, which requires being extreme– which is going to select for extreme results, both good and bad. Self-selecting is going to tend towards extremely good results. (because folks who have Very Bad Reactions to it tend to leave)
*Snort* The college government book I’ve been reading (long story) erases Gen X. We have the Greatest Generation, Boomers, and then . . . Millennials. And maybe some of that group are Gen Z, and the group starts “those who were born before 1995.” Er, ah, um . . . No.
I can see that happening, especially since “Millennial” got hijacked to mean “Boomers pushing their parenting failures off as a societal failing.”
It pretty much HAS to end up being abused to cover as much room as “boomer,” and then some.
A little shocked they have Gen Z, honestly, that means boomer-grandkids and that means the boomers are OLD.
The Powers That Be have been disappointed by Gen X for as long as I can remember.
Slightly too old to be a boomer, yet you could be used as a textbook example of boomer writing “style” (hey, a child’s crayon scrawl is technically a style….) and throwing a massive bitchfest about how everything is everyone else’s fault.
He’s not throwing a bitchfest.
AND he’s dead center on Boomer. my brother, ten years older than I, was a YOUNG boomer.
This habit of calling anyone over 50 a boomer is going to get you young sprouts a kick in the arse sooner than later.
77 years puts him somewhere around 1944…. Maybe if his dad came home early for some reason?
I only use “Boomer” or “Millenial” for people who’s effort in living down to the stereotypes is worthy of recognition. Also they are identical in every way which matters; the only ways to distinguish them being relative ages and preferred targets for their whining.
–
Or never went overseas either theater.
Not being disparaging. Neither of my grandparents, my FIL, nor at least one great-uncle, went to either war theater. One grandfather (Polio) and the great-uncle (childhood farm accident) both had childhood physical disabilities that kept them out of units deployed to Europe or Pacific. Although great-uncle’s unit was getting ready to deploy as the war ended, until then working the Trans-Canada-Alaska highway. Grandpa spent it as a civil engineer in the states, building airports for the war effort. Other grandfather and FIL were pulled off deployments by employer’s for war efforts. One by Colorado mines, he was a mechanic, the other by one of the aircraft builders, he was a flight engineer. (Dad was 9 at the end of the war …)
Eh, not unreasonable. My eldest sister was born in August of 1944. Our father saw combat in France and Germany (where he was wounded).
I have his Army papers. His draft class came up for induction in late 1942. He got a very short deferment to finish his last two months of college (like many schools, his had an “expedited” process that graduated him a full term earlier than he would have been).
Having a very wet college diploma, he was shipped off to OCS right after boot. Then assigned as a new-minted LT to tank destroyer testing at Fort Hood. (Made perfect Army sense, that, with his major degree in biology and a minor in chemistry…). Married my mother while posted there.
He was shipped to England in either March or April of 1944. (The records and family remembrances do not agree on this.) I don’t think that he ever saw Omaha Beach, though – the history of the company that he commanded shows that they weren’t on the Continent until September.
My grandfather spent the war in Mobile AL welding and pipefitting Liberty Ships. If he was at home back in El Dorado AR, it was as a welder and pipefitter at the Lion Oil (now Murphy Oil) refinery there.
My aunt joined the WAVES and spent the entire war in Chicago.
Eldest_Brother was born in April 1945. Dad worked as a draftsman in a steel company that largely handled construction sections. With all the building going on, I think Dad got a deferment until later in the war. Not sure of when he was drafted, but after he broke his collar bone in what the DI thought was a “perfect” parachute landing fall, he spent time in hospital. Not sure why he got penicillin, but he got a bad reaction to it, for which they gave him *more* penicillin. He survived their care, and for his troubles was shifted from Chemical Warfare to be a draftsman in the headquarters company. He ended in Okinawa with the 8th Air Force (they shifted in summer ’45). He said he did sink a barrel from the troopship when they were training on the M2 machine gun. Ticked off the NCO running the exercise…
I suspect that if Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not nuked, he would have found himself back in Chem Warfare. He never had any regrets about the bombing.
In music tastes, Eldest_Brother is more Henry Mancini than the Doors, with Elder_Brother (born 1948) closer to me (born 1952). Family circumstances overrode any generational differences in behavior, though it’s noteworthy that Elder_Brother is considerably less focused on planning for the future than Eldest or me.
Where I was growing up, my class represented peak Baby Boom, in that previous and subsequent classes were somewhat smaller in size. Both of the elementary schools I attended have been repurposed, with one in Michigan an adult education center and the other one now a privatized after school study/day care center.
FWIW, I was a latchkey kid shortly after we left Michigan in 1960. The previous house didn’t sell for a year and money was excruciatingly tight, so Mom was working temp secretarial jobs. After a few years, things settled down, but Mom kept part-time work, both for a local church and once or twice a week for a surgeon’s practice. After Dad died my freshman year in college, Mom went full time, first for a large professional organization, then for a medical consulting firm. Once her pension and Social Security was vested, she was at retirement age and proceeded to do so.
I have grandpa’s deployment “wallet”, a very thin piece of leather with two pockets, one with the picture of “his girls”, grandma and their two daughters, ages 6 and 3. The mine supervisor put up a lot of fuss to get him pulled from deployment, the mine needed mechanics that bad. I think my one of hubby’s nieces has FIL’s version (older sister ended up with it). FIL was given a choice-ish, he had his pilot wings, but as an aircraft and rocket project engineer, he was all but deployed back to his job. Hubby’s oldest sibling was born just before the war, the next two after, hubby is your age. I was born in ’56. Great-Uncle Tom, grandma’s older brother deployed to Europe, and came home. Grandpa’s twin, and only brother, died when they were in their early twenties, before the war. Maternal grandparent brothers were older than them by quite a bit, putting them in their late 30’s to early 40’s at the start of the war. Given they were Montana ranchers and farmers they probably could have out soldered those teens and twenty somethings, but were on the delayed draft on the “too old for now” program.
One grandfather was too old, the other one was in the Oil Bidness and there was no, zero, zilch way they’d let him sign up. Oilfield exploration and discovery, too, just when we were really breaking open a lot of new fields in the CONUS. So my parents are almost pre-Boomers, ish.
He’s not. He’s blaming himslf and his generation. And he shouldn’t. They’re the result not the cause.
LawDog 2024!
Imagine you are fighting a war.
Are you gonna yell bloody murder because the Secesh, or the Mohammadens, or the Spanish Armada, or the Red Guard, or what have you, are deceived, sabotaged, betrayed by infiltrators or bombed to bits? Are you going to beat up your soldiers for fighting a bit dirty to win?
Hah.
Are you going to inveigh against the perfidious Wossname for dirty fighting that kills your men and wins battles against you?
Ya sure. You betcha.
Pace, Mr. Lawdog* his essay only applies to friends, neighbours, and countrymen who are all in this together. That ship has sailed.
(*My whole family loves his books. LDF was one of the last ones my dad read)
Comes to mind the apparent fact pattern of the three times per capita increase in lawyers, allegedly due to expanding representation, combined with the letter from law school heads of Janaury 6, 2021.
Comes to mind if there is no justification in representation, which the law school letter disavows, then excessive law school graduations are a form of pollution.
Comes to mind that consent decrees can be used to dismantle the universities in a state, separating the various professional schools from each others, and from humanities and social sciences education and research.
Old vaccine discussion.
My takeaway here is that vaccine nutjobbery is partly a result of opposition leaders making judgements based on experiences and impressions from many decades ago.
Well Bob, I can make a judgment concerning vaccines based on experiences from 2 decades ago when the military foisted the Anthrax vaccine on members deploying to the Middle East. Too many of them came back with permanent neurological damage from it. Oh, and add the Tuskegee Syphilis Study from 1932 through 1972, where black men were lied to about receiving free medical care from the government. Anyone who trusts what the government tells them has just proved that they’re not competent to make their own decisions.
Now I have a means of fixing that problem of government mistrust. It requires the immediate execution of the government official when caught in a lie.
Tuskegee is a good example, which I wasn’t thinking of.
They remember when that cover up worked.
When they were young, many people didn’t have the information access to question the studies, data, and methodology behind pushes for smallpox or polio vaccinations.
So their senses of ‘lies which work’ are badly miscalibrated.
There’s a show out about Tuskegee syphilis study, featuring a lot of the descendants.
Somehow they managed to spin it into, “Yeah, the Tuskegee study was bad and all the medical professionals lied, but the mRNA thing is good and the medical professionals would never, ever lie to you about it!”
This time for sure, Rocky….
I voted in the Herr Fuhrer Newsome Recall Election, for all the good it will do. They were using electronic voting machines, but said they weren’t Don’t-Minion and were DEFINITELY NOT connected to the internet. O’course, that’s what they said last year too and we found out they were lying.
All that remains is to see how blatant the fraud is, and whether anybody will pay attention.
Then I went grocery shopping, and at least 90% of the sheeple were wearing masks. WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH THOSE IDIOTS? HAVE THEY LOST ALL CAPACITY FOR RATIONAL THOUGHT?
Are we the last sane folks in the U.S.?
Point of order: I’m not sane.
It’s the same basic blind spot as the ‘guy with a knife, threatening me to get in the car’ problem. Most people are capable of learning the realization that cooperating is a very bad idea. But, if you don’t foresee the possibility, and prepare, the event is going to be stressful enough that they stupidity of the moment may result in cooperating.
Here, they realize that Newsom isn’t going to be stopped from hurting them, so they conclude that being less of a target will save them.
There’s an argument that you can define sane with a combination of frequency and being at least debate-ably functional.
So, you could further argue that being in Omelas-without-compulsive-knowledge/awareness, and determinedly remaining unaware, could be defined as sane behavior, because of the rareness of societies run by people crazy enough to go after /everyone/. I mean, is painting a target on yourself functional?
Me, I know this argument is bullsh!t. I’m not rested enough to be entirely clear on why, but the argument I have just made is nonsense.
I will say that we are very stressed, and we interpret some of the signs of different behavior as being isolation. It is remotely possible that the distinct behavior of others is not a sign that they are purely alienated from you, but instead merely evidence that they do not have the same flavor of dysfunctional ‘coping’ mechanisms that you do.
It may be that we here have simply managed to hit upon the coping mechanisms that are well suited to handling these circumstances in the longer term. Denial only carries things so far, before it is much more destructive than it helps with, etc.
Probably so. My boss is 100% bought into the COVIDominium. She thinks it’s because the anti-covid vaccine people are selfish ignoramuses. Of course that supports the hospital position that 100% mandates vaccines for all employees, and masks in all public locations of the hospital. Most hospitals don’t have a choice; their rules come from the HHS, FDA, CDC, and CMS. Disagreement or violation means the loss of tens to hundreds of millions of dollars in government reimbursements, as well as threat of losing certification and the ability to practice medicine. I tried explaining to her that it’s mostly because the government has forfeited their authority as reliable truthful sources; but she only partially accepts that. She’s not capable of breaking out of the paradigm at this time. Certainly none of the other C-levels or managers in the healthcare company are able to break out.
One way to stop this nonsense would be to institute “loser pays” rules on civil lawsuits, with ferocious enforcement.
That would lead us to a different class of abuses. No small party would dare file a suit they were not certain of winning. The giant corporations could spend millions on lawyers, ‘win’ by dragging the case out until all the plaintiffs’ resources are used up and then stick them with the bill. Like MicroShaft did to Stacker.
Have loser pays plus pain and suffering for harassment lawsuits.
Need a decent level of evidence to show bad faith in filing, but it would clear a lot of the stuff where the process is the point.
Why should I trust that lawyers will not collude to screw me over?
Shots fired across the bow of Awful Crap Being Taught In School:
video:
from one or another of the news feeds:
===
Mayor Craig Shubert stepped into the discussion between School Board members and parents of students at Hudson High School.
The Mayor demanded every member of the School Board resign their position or face child pornography charges over an assignment given to students.
His message was very short and very direct:
“Members of the board, my name is Craig Shubert. I’m the mayor of this city. It has come to my attention that your educators are distributing essentially what is child pornography in the classroom. I’ve spoken to a judge this evening and she’s already confirmed that. So I’m going to give you a simple choice: either choose to resign from this board of education or you will be charged. Thank you.”
The writing prompts including sexual content like, “write a sex scene you wouldn’t show your mom,” and “rewrite the sex scene from above into one that you’d let your mom read.” It is not clear whether the assignment rises to the level of a crime, though Shubert relayed that a judge believed it did.
After Shubert’s stern message, parents attending the school board meeting cheered loudly.
===
For folks wondering how this could qualify as child pr0n-
the demand for sex scenes is not the only sexual one in the book, and even asking for minors to engage in sexual situations can, indeed, cross the child sex exploitation laws. Sexting usually involves that, for those not stupid enough to send pictures.
The laws for the state:
https://codes.ohio.gov/ohio-revised-code/section-2945.63
Define it thus:
(1) “Child pornography” means any obscene material involving a juvenile, any sexually oriented matter involving a juvenile, or any material that is harmful to juveniles.
So, yes, HAVING KIDS WRITE PR0N IN CLASS WOULD QUALIFY, I don’t care if it’s a “college level book” and I don’t care if they had it on the shelf for years without event. Considering the last year and change, I’d guess that it only came to light NOW because parents found out that no, they can’t just automatically trust their schools.
Yeah, I’ve already seen the ONLY TWO PROMPTS and COLLEGE BOOK and SEX IS NATURAL claims floating around about how it’s really just an innocuous mistake and all overblown and….. gee, isn’t there something in the law about not providing pr0n to a minor??
Occurs to me that this same tactic could be used against a whole swath of this crap. Make Pr0n Scary Again, at least if you’re drawing a salary off the school system.
We ought to be executing the carrying out mass executions of these folks, both for what they have abetted in harming children, and for what they have abetted with the political acts. Charging or firing the ones who can be charged is a reasonable compromise with the other needs.
Look, we’ve in theory tightened up the laws with things like SESTA, which gave the feds a coercive handle on internet service providers who, surprise surprise, opted to go along with deep state sponsored censorship.
If laws only exist to punish those who offend the regime, there is no reason for them.
Let them be enforced evenly against all, and if they are bad laws remove them.
Radio host in Omaha got a copy, was flipping through it, read off (on the air) “Well, there’s some question of if it’s a fair shake for the book…. Um… here’s another one. Describe your favorite part of the male body, using only verbs.”
He’s obviously struggling to be professional, clears his throat, and comments in a perfectly serious voice: “Well, only verbs, that would be a short story-”
The co-host loses it. She recovers, also tries to be professional, draws on years of English classes: “Ah, yes, verbs are action words-” realizes what she said, and they BOTH lose it….
I had some teachers who took very obvious pleasure in having girls read, er, questionable material out loud. This WOULD put a stop to a lot of the grooming/humiliation tactics/norming of abuse. (::Glares at Hollywood and their “coaching” to “get over” such “hang ups.”)
I think the school system is long, LONG overdue for a thorough cleansing. You know how they always note that pedophiles WILL find a way to work around children? Well… ::looks pointedly at public schools::
One of the things that helped us “sell” reluctant family members on homeschooling the princess was that the Seattle blob had a “thing” the year before she would’ve hit school.
They couldn’t fire a convicted pedophile who had been assaulting students, gone to jail, and been released.
After three days of the school being completely surrounded by parents, so the guy didn’t even come in, he quit.
A year or two later, similar rumbles in the family met up with that horrible thing where they had a know pedophile assigned to the school, secretly, because he wasn’t 21 yet.
And they knew that wouldn’t fly, which is why they didn’t tell anyone they couldn’t trust to keep it secret. He assaulted a girl (special needs) by cornering her in the bathroom, and she went and got help, THEN the police went “wait, he’s WHERE?!?”
Yeah. We had a few Creatures of that nature in our local (teeny) school, and it took a LOT before the school district finally got around to firing them. That alone is reason to destroy the unions and salt the earth where they once stood.
Conversely, when one of my high school teachers had an affair with a student (one of the older girls already, ah, fully developed; this woulda been in 1971 or ’72) — as soon as it was discovered, he was out of there so fast =everyone’s= heads spun.
As to the unions, there are also a bunch of admin and lobbyist types who need to be hanged, drawn, and quartered.
One school, a “transgirl” assaulted a kindergartener in the girl’s room, and the school responded with an investigation so wrongheaded that DeVos’s Department of Education found it a violation of Title IX in itself.
I suspect at least 90% of those ‘trans’ weirdos are just common perverts seeking access to the girls bathrooms and locker rooms.
And the ‘activists’ support the pervs. What was that line? ‘Believe all women’? Where did that go?
I have literally seen tweets from activists whose solution for a man flashing a nine-year-old girl in the women’s locker is to say that her parents should have taught her it’s rude to stare at other people’s genitals, and, on finding out that he’s a sex offender, double down on it — literally saying “double down.”
The way they rolled out the pro trans activism ensured that nobody would be filtering out perverts using the flag of trans to get their jollies.
No, they aren’t.
I do not know what the numbers and proportions are, and am not sure whether or not they matter.
This is another area where we have personal knowledge, statistical knowledge, and mass media proxy ‘knowledge’, and it may all be invalid.
Personal knowledge is for situation, and may not be a good proxy for the whole, yet we argue a lot about the whole.
Right and left media both have incentive to skew the anecdotes they are relaying. Right has a bunch of scammers, who may want to prep us for the fund raisers, as well as left collaborators, who would want us to go to sleep. Left is partly trying to manipulate reality, and partly may be wanting to use divide and rule on us.
“This WOULD put a stop to a lot of the grooming/humiliation tactics/norming of abuse”
Since there are far more examples of teachers abusing students than Catholic priests, that’s exactly what is probably taking place.
There seem to be far more teachers than there are Catholic priests.
I’ve found numbers in the new OEWS, which is probably gimmicked, but maybe isn’t entirely fraudulent.
There seem to be 60-80 ‘religious workers’, including clergy. If a third Catholic, that would be maybe 20 thousand Catholic priests.
1.5 million post-secondary instructors, and 8.5 million primary and secondary.
the percentage of pedophiles is muh higher amont teachers, but you know? Leftists hate celibacy, so there must be something wrong with priests.
After looking at those numbers, and even considering that they are counting Brothers and Sisters working at private religious schools as teachers, it makes much more sense for a pedophile to pick the public school career path over anything to do with a Christian religion.
I had never thought about it from that perspective, never looked at the data to notice the question.
Larger bureaucracies are easier to hide in. Combine that with the fact that the smaller bureaucracies are at least theoretically opposed to abuse, and more skeptical of the sort of drug habit likely to cause brain damage that can result in pedophilia…
Education degrees are not so hard to get that seminary and becoming ordained would be easier.
Maybe it is true that certain changes or policies had a corrupting effect on the seminaries.
But the state of modern mainstream tertiary educations appears to be orders of magnitude more of a disaster. Okay, yeah, some of that is bleeding over into the seminaries, but I find it hard to believe that those are as bad as the public tertiary schools.
Yeah. I suspect the Catholic Church issue was a fairly small percentage of problem priests–and the real issue was that some places just kept shuffling them around?
I have never encountered someone who was abused by a priest (although I have known many Catholics). I *have* encountered MULTIPLE people who had teachers do/attempt/whatever inappropriate things with them. Including one of my own brothers. No, it never went any where–the problem was she was a brand new teacher teaching high school English, and so was barely four years older than her senior students, and she developed a crush. Okay, fair enough–but the problem was that she was being VERY open about it, and had he indicated any interest in return…hello, inappropriate teacher-student interactions. I am 150% certain that the issue is far worse in public schools (in particular, because there they have the unions protecting them) than it EVER was in…well, pretty much any church, not just the Catholic church.
I have a friend from college whose ex (or if not yet ex, hopefully VERY SOON to be ex) was busted for exchanging inappropriate texts/pictures with a sixteen year old girl. Sure, she wasn’t actually *his* student, but…yeah. What’s to stop him from going after his own students, or going younger? (He did in fact teach younger middle school kids).
The attitude when I was a kid, particularly when it was female-teacher/male-student, trended towards “Oooh, lucky boy” and of course there have always been those hot for teacher memes. But that attitude, I am sure, has not helped one bit…
Yeah. I suspect the Catholic Church issue was a fairly small percentage of problem priests–and the real issue was that some places just kept shuffling them around?
While it’s gob-smackingly stupid as far as *I* can see, and I CAN’T see how the [redacted] it BECAME common practice, most of those cases come from a time when it was believed that pedophilia could be treated fairly quickly and if it repeatedly failed, just assign someone away from kids.
This is also where many of the long-term problem teachers came from, but it’s less likely to get the statue of limitation waived for school teachers, and the level of evidence required before they’re declared guilty in public opinion is higher. (There have been repeated issues with including accusations of assault occurring after a priest was dead.)
That stupid “it can be treated, it’s natural not abusively predatory, and don’t tell anybody” thing let some abusers set up enabling networks. (The ‘lavender mafia’ being probably the most famous example, but I seem to remember some folks here have pointed out adoption networks that had at the very least very strong hints of systematic abuse enablement.)
Yeah. I’m darned sure that large chunks of the foster/adoption system (specifically on the gov-run side of things) is being used to traffic kids.
I just can’t wrap my head around the fact that there seem to be SO MANY pedophiles out there. Okay, possibly it’s in part the ‘noise’ issue (ie, it gets trumpeted loudly everywhere when a guy is caught doing something horrible to an infant, rather like mass shootings), and also probably in part because, as I said above, pedophiles deliberately look for positions/situations that will put them into proximity to kids (which alone ought to be VERY clear signals that this is predatory behavior not just some kind of “illness” that can be treated) and so they definitely appear to cluster in areas, but even so… I mean, how does someone even GET to that point? Where they are so wrapped up in these urges that they would do that to another human being, especially a child?! That’s what I really have a hard time grokking.
I mean…I read about a group out there founded by a young man who realized, in his teens, that he was sexually attracted to much younger children. But–and I think this is the point–he was horrified, knew something was VERY wrong and started a support group for others like him, but ONLY those who had never acted on those urges are allowed into the group. The person acts on those urges, they’re done. I don’t know how successful they are, but I do appreciate that this guy KNEW there was no easy fix, and that to act on those urges even once was to become a predator.
I read somewhere that a person’s sexual attractions and kinks (if any) are pretty much set by the time they’re 16. (I can certainly attest that the things that float my boat are the same as they were then.)
Some small percentage find their attractions set to “kids” — by accident or by prior child abuse or psychopathy or whatever — and then they’re kinda stuck, and it takes a whole lot of willpower not to act on what your drives are telling you to act on.
(Explanation, not excuse. Pedophiles need to be severely punished regardless of the why of it.)
I suspect part of it is trying to shift attention.
We already know that the male parent in most very young teenage pregnancies is not another teenager. The “if there’s grass on the field, then play” stuff didn’t come out of nowhere. (If you don’t know, don’t look it up, short version it’s pedophile nonsense.)
It’s a lot easier to hide predatory behavior if you can declare it’s totally different than that OTHER predatory behavior. IE, roofies are horrible, but swapping vodka for everclear is totally OK.
I know several people who were abused by a priest. I went to an “elite” Catholic Boys school and certain priests and brothers were known to be “handy”. By and large, we thought it was consensual. Of course, adults having sex with 16 year olds looks very different when you’re 16 than it does when you’re 59. We used to make jokes about it.
Sorry, that’s the way I saw it when I was 16 and didn’t understand why my father, who had been a Catholic schoolboy too, never let me be alone with certain priests.
Too much talk about pedolphiles, who are rare, and not enough about ephebophiles who aren’t rare at all. Had McCarrick (e.g.,) not touched the one prepubescent he’d be in good standing today, as it was they had a wonderful excuse to be seen to punish a high ranking priest without dealing with the rampant lack of chastity among the clergy as well as dealing with the simple fact that teenage boys having sex with adult males seems to be a common coming out narrative among gay men, Sex with underaged children is sex with underaged children doesn’t mater whether you’re gay or straight, clergy or laity.
To be fair, though, most folks use “pedophile” as a blanket term to cover teens as well as children, and aren’t aware of the term ephebophile (I am aware of it, but can never remember the term, heh). By their lights “pedophile” is a perfectly accurate term–for someone sexually abusing someone NOT an adult, for which they should be *severely* punished. (Frankly, I’m in favor of execution.)
And on the Catholic front–I mean, I grew up in the middle of Baptist country, and am not myself a Catholic, so I expect that if I’d been around more Catholics and/or lived somewhere not *quite* so heavily Protestant, I’d have met more people with stories of abusive priests. As it was, however, I encountered more stories of abusive school teachers (and once instance of a 15 year old claiming to have a 45 year old boyfriend–bragging about it–which if true her parents damn well should have been calling the cops.)
Catholic here, grew up in several Catholic areas, *and* was in the parishes where they put Trouble Priests.
Also have met, or know via family, none.
IIRC, BGE has previously mentioned he grew up in one of the Lavender Mafia hotbeds and his mother was friends with a famous abuser, she passed on before it was revealed.
Ah, that does make sense.
Just so. My mother was friends with former Cardinal Archbishop McCarrick who is probably the highest profile priest taken down by this. I sat down with the list of credibly charged priests in the Archdiocese of NY and went: know him, know him, yep knew that, oh that’s surprising …. Again, I went to the RC schools was involved in CYO, and grew up in a family where the Church was our social life so I simply knew a lot of priests, brothers, deacons etc.,
I suspect the proportion of pedophiles among priests is no higher than other professions that provide access to children, I also suspect that the number of unchaste, gay priests is quite high. the church is still running behind on this because the lavender mafia is still here. The current pope does not fill me with joy because he owes his election to them.
The one priest I kept my boys away from is one of Frankie’s “100 handpicked priests.”
You do the math.
The church like this country is being taken down from inside.
IIRC, the abuse rate (normalized by pop) is something like schoolteachers, then scoutmaster/youth leader types, then priests
Note, not just a higher number, but a higher *percentage.*
For the “only two prompts” thing– one, there were more questionable prompts than that READ ON THE NEWS, and two, let’s go look at the top review on Amazon:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R1GCJWTF1FZNP8/ref=cm_cr_dp_d_rvw_ttl?ie=UTF8&ASIN=1452105448
There are several more sexual prompts, as well as merely questionable stuff like describing a beer you are drinking and imagining yourself as a serial killer.
The reviewer is 100% correct– there’s stuff that will make you go ‘yuck,’ but it’s useful for older writers.
And they DO have a 2014 book out that’s specifically aimed to be acceptable for teens; only two years newer than the book in question.
I’d have refused to write any such thing even in college, on personal moral and religious beliefs. Hell, I’d refuse to do so NOW, for the same reasons. I don’t care if the student/employee is a juvenile or an adult, no one in a position of authority over another has any right to demand their student/employee/whatever write a sex scene or something like unto that. That falls under ‘sexual harassment.’
Ding-ding-ding, we have a winner.
Related: I think Anti-Intellectualism is not a bad thing. You could argue that the Pseudo-Intellectuals are the bad ones, but if you aren’t personally into the ‘Life of the Mind’ stuff, the distinction between those and the Intellectuals may not be entirely obvious. So, from the outside, it may be better to disregard Intellectuals than it would be to bow to the Pseudo-Intellectuals demanding respect and subservience.
Communists and predators infesting this stuff explain what is going on, but they are malicious explanations. You can also explain it by discarding the malicious explanations, and that remaining explanation is Pseudo-Intellectuals, or Intellectualism. Key items are the academic disciplines of Psychology and Education.
Psychology is a funny field, for all that I am quite a bit nicer to it than I am to Sociology, Education, or cultural anthropology, etc. Like these others, it is deeply challenged by the fact that measuring humans is difficult. Humans are also complicated, have a lot of variation, are expensive, and are not really disposable. Psychology has a large body of theory. Even if it were not heavily packed with nonsense theories and garbage data, a psychology body of theory is going to have a lot of stuff that doesn’t work for everything, and a lot of stuff it would be very easy to misapply. Because ‘complicated’, and ‘varied’. So, then, obviously the answer is to focus on measurements, and real world observation? Haha, no. In psychology, a great deal of your ‘observation’ is spending a lot of time talking to crazy people. If you are not extremely grounded, enough of that will see you saying “Bob, you are correct. We should have always been skinning the pot smokers alive”.
There are two broader issues tied to psychology, and pseudo-intellectuals. One is ‘scholars’ and scholars in other fields looking at psychology, and trusting psychological research, without really being aware of exactly how careful one should be in trusting evidence from research. The other issue is the question of who will talk to psychological researchers, who isn’t desperately in need of help. You do research as part of getting a graduate degree in psychology, and a lot of those studies will be using undergraduate psychology students. Issue is, going back to the fifties, psychology students may have been selecting themselves for a tendency to buy into the wilder assertions of the field. As you get more extreme results relayed badly through ‘journalists’, and pop psychology texts, you have more available for weird highschool students with issues to glom onto. Maybe they diligently get into that stuff, and make themselves unhappier.
Once you get a bunch of Education majors blindly trusting Psychology, and pushing those results on students, you have a bunch of feedbacks set up that may skew a bunch of things. Education pushes theory X on students, perhaps outright targeting strange kids with problems. Some of those are persuaded that theory X is true of them. Well, if it is true and important, where would you go to learn more? Go get a degree in psychology. If the psychological researchers investigating ‘theory x’ with that cohort aren’t careful, they will not filter out the impact of such contamination of their sample space. More, stronger results, for theory x. Even without malicious actors stirring the pot, you don’t need very many generations to go from “can’t tell if theory x is true, but a few studies of the many say yes” to “theory X is super true, must change everything to address”.
Pseudo intellectuals in Education are not going to care about whether theories borrowed from other fields are sound or not, or current or not, so long as it is nothing that those they are trying to count coup against have heard of or are inclined to accept at face value without evidence. They aren’t going to worry about it being sexual harassment or abusive, so long as there are no ‘experts’ saying that it is sexual harassment or abusive. “I’ve had classes that you have not, you will respect my authority!” They don’t care if you deliberately did not take those classes, for lack of interest, for being pretty sure that the fundamental theory is not sound, or for sensing that the instructors are much too crazy to trust.
Pedophiles are a problem. Communists are a problem. But it is the ‘expert’ blind idiot ‘Education Professionals’ themselves who make it necessary to go through the bureaucracy with a fine toothed comb for anyone who can’t handle pushback about what they are doing, and why they think that they can do it. That the unions and federal bureaucracy makes this impossible in public school is reason never to send one’s kids to public school.
go through the bureaucracy with a fine toothed comb
I read that as “fine toothed BOMB” and I was going to say I like the cut of your jib and wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
I don’t necessarily disagree. ATM, up past bedtime, Gihren Zabi’s Operation British would be less work, and I’m not sure it would be too much collateral damage for my taste.
Over on MHN, John Van Stry pointed out how fast it went ugly in Yugoslavia. Then Kirk ‘well, actually’ with a bunch of interesting factoids he picked up from Yugoslavian immigrants in the 1970s.
Issue one with his argument, Democrat forcing of tolerance of BLM is somewhat similar to US State department coercion of regime tolerance for that Muslim guy Kirk called a lunatic.
Issue two, the effin’ schools are somewhat similar to the Bosnian Muslim history and perhaps habit of kidnapping and trafficking Christians.
Kirk “didn’t want hostages to fortune”, so probably has very little contact with modern primary and secondary education. Some other things point to a lack of interest in contact with current day tertiary education.
I once heard a guy mention that his daughters, who would have been in a large town/small city in a red state, thought he was racist.
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Can’t imagine there’d be much market for pot smoker hides, no matter how much you tan ’em. 😛
Excellent point.
Well, unless your =job= is “pr0n scriptwriter” ….
I’ve got an even better idea: After you get rid of the entire school board,
GRRRRR… WPDE!
I’ve got an even better idea: After you get rid of the entire school board, DON’T REPLACE THE BASTARDS!!! School boards are nothing but overpaid bureaucratic deadwood. Private and charter schools do much better without them.
Here all the school board seems to do is boring stuff like turn tax money into a new school building. Far as I could tell from reading a bunch of meeting minutes, they don’t have anything to do with the actual running of the schools.
But yeah, topheavy admins everywhere need to go away and not come back. Saw a chart a while back that school admin numbers have increased something like 3000% (not a typo) faster than teacher positions… all those degrees in Useless Studies and Autodidactic Pr0n need to work somewhere…
c4c