78 thoughts on “Jingle Memes, Jingle Memes….

    1. Yes, PRC is a bit of a toxic environment that I am not sure I would wish on anyone.

      There are a lot of hurting people who were born under the thumb of that regime, they deserve a less evil regime.

      On the other hand, the first question I have, is which of the persons who laughs at that joke it would be funniest to ‘rebuke’ for not being transpositive enough. I legitimately don’t know whom.

      Anyway, Vermine Supreme, or Vermina Supreme, was our first female president after TRump and Biden were disqualified from the 2021-2024 slot in 2020 because of irregularities. Such an example to women and to girls.

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  1. ‘Some people are incompatible’, and ‘nature’ feels to me like a risky or ambigious statement.

    Biological nature, no, untrue.

    Individual choice, cultural tendency, and ‘that will not end as nicely as some people desire’? Can be true, but theorist forecasts of several kinds are junk against what actually winds up happening.

    Brandon Johnson? UN? That’s not giving away sovereignity. That is provoking a special military operation to restore order to turtle bay, and maybe to the rest of the major UN supporting states in our sphere of influence.

    Having the UN HQ at turtle bay means that historic greater USA is the entire world. This is maybe the perfect diplomatic premise to get the other nations to withdraw from the UN, and or move their crap somewhere else.

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  2. Re: Crockett and Newsom and the Peter Principle.

    I don’t really think that those two are examples of the Peter Principle, which says that people will be promoted until they reach their level of incompetence. That would imply that they would make good mayors or state legislators, it’s just when they reached the point of being a Representative and a Governor that the problem arose.

    No, I think they’re proof of the Dilbert Principle, that incompetents will be promoted indefinitely, because giving a troublesome subordinate a promotion to a different department is the easiest way of getting them out your hair without a lawsuit.

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    1. nah bro

      The Party/Inner Party found greater utility in having those positions filled by folks in the incompetent/evil part of the alignment chart.

      Competence might eventually question whether the drum circle for tinkerbell is the most productive priority, which would be a disappointment to those senior persons in The Party who need to continue being able to force the drumming for the sake of their own self-esteem.

      Good instead of evil might raise serious objection to the pointless sacrificial rituals that again are an ego or inflicting pain thing for various senior figures in The Party.

      Certain pathologies, such as narc and cluster B, seem to have a wiring towards getting reactions from people being directly fed into feeling alive or sated.

      Some people specifically are wired this way where causing pain and discomfort is concerned. (boundary violation, etc.) They might self select into communism if they have any theory obsessive tendency. Communism does not really have predictions that such a person’s personal intuition would suggest from experience are false.

      (A more normal person, who does not presume that the drum-circle-for-tinkerbell dictates reality, and who is not a sadist might instead think it is possible for there to be situations where another person wins, and one also does not lose.)

      Especially if communist Democrats are losing and ghost dancing, one might expect that some of them would value very strongly the most party loyal of the evil incompetents, for symbolic reasons. Additionally, 2020 primary on, someone in the Democratic party has been very careful to drop oppo and stuff to ensure that the women who are allowed to be competitive are not the most competent.

      It’s just DIE run amok, with mean girl in-fighting.

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    2. Logically, they were elevated within The Party because they are competent at something else, something The Party values.

      That thing is empirically not anything of any value to their elected positions.

      What that thing is is left as an exercise for the reader.

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    3. Oddly enough, in my time with the Feds it tended to be transfer to another office rather than promotion. One guy got sent to grad school. But you should be afraid you really screwed up,when they send you to run the Combined Federal Campaign.

      Liked by 1 person

  3. Every year male deer shed their antlers. Typically finishing the job by rubbing them against tress. I bet that no deer were harmed in the making of that tree.

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  4. More later (I’m trying to psych myself into Christmas shopping) but I really, really like the, “Merry Hanukkah/Happy Christmas meme. So does my beloved.

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  5. The Leftroids claim that European and American civilization was built by black slaves, and that Africa is a shithole of savagery because of ‘colonization’. Even though it’s been a shithole since long before any European ever set foot there. So, they’re saying that black people can only build a civilization if they’re enslaved and told exactly what to do?

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    1. Africa has ALWAYS been a shithole of savagery. That’s probably the primary motivation for the smart people to get the heck out of it. Don’t get me wrong, Africa has a lot of opportunities and riches, but you have to fight for your life to get them.

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      1. They have a lot of problems too. Sowell can make Africa sound tragic by talking geography and climate.

        Very few navigable rivers. Very few ports. Large regions where beasts of burden are rendered impossible by disease.

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    2. The Ethiopians had solid civilization from Roman times through to the 20th century. Modern Ethiopians take pride in never having been anyone’s colony, which given the European colonial surge was a real accomplishment. The Cold War messed up a lot of Africa and Ethiopia was no exception, and they still have challenges, especially outside the urban areas and double-especially with neighboring regions outside their borders, but there’s a lot worse places.

      Africa is really big and really complicated.

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    3. The Ethiopians had solid civilization from Roman times through to the 20th century. Modern Ethiopians take pride in never having been anyone’s colony, which given the European colonial surge was a real accomplishment. The Cold War messed up a lot of Africa and Ethiopia was no exception, and they still have challenges, especially outside the urban areas and double-especially with neighboring regions outside their borders, but there’s a lot worse places.

      Africa is really big and really complicated.

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  6. More later (I’m trying to psych myself into Christmas shopping) but I really, really like the, “Merry Hanukkah/Happy Christmas meme. So does my beloved.

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  7. “As if the antlers just fell out painlessly”.

    Well. Someone didn’t watch nature documentaries as child.

    Apparently my tolerance is at a nadir today. Maybe I’ll have more after the solstice.

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    1. I laughed at the fences that did not touch both floor and ceiling without gaps and being anchered. “Yes. That’ll work just fine. NOT!”

      Liked by 2 people

    1. On that scale, the ‘assault fork’ is a took.

      “Fool of a Took!” he growled. “This is a serious journey, not a hobbit walking-party. Throw yourself in next time, and then you will be no further nuisance.”

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    2. On the same line, long ago I pointed out to father that a typical electronics tube was a diode, with one output.

      Some of these are triodes with two outputs, so I proposed that these should be called ‘threebs’.

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  8. The male Christmas Eve shopping trip is a bitmof a joke in the family. When we went to Florida, we’d have a Christmas Eve pilgrimage to the nearby mall, despite the truly hideous traffic going and coming.

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    1. Funny thing happened this last Saturday afternoon. The Beltline traffic slog wasn’t at Beltline and Delta either direction for a change (that’ll be Wednesday as all last minute shoppers head to Valley River Mall and (south) Coburg road Oakway Mall (Trader Joes)). Beltline slog was north Coburg road, heading to Costco. We got lucky (in the area our second stop, needed to be in the area) and found parking quickly. A lot of vehicles circling, parking stalking. Sigh. Still need to go to Fred Meyers (Kroger) for final dinner shopping (hint/whine “don’t wanna”).

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      1. Still need to go to Fred Meyers (Kroger) for final dinner shopping (hint/whine “don’t wanna”).

        Here in the DFW area, our Krogers offer delivery. My wife loves it.

        Liked by 1 person

        1. Not free. But yes, Fred Meyer offers to shop for you, either you drive in and pickup, or delivery. I know nieces all use it. One for awhile because she couldn’t drive. Currently I won’t. 1) Not that far. Costco is a PIA driving there because Beltline traffic, even though not that far (~5 miles). Usually lucky when it comes to parking. 2) Freds is a whole 2 miles away, and that is generous. Sure I have to either drive River Road for a block or two, or cut through neighborhoods (that I grew up in) to cross River Road. Whatever. 3) Do not want someone picking out the fresh items be they be fruit/veggies, bread, or deli/meat. Just my 5¢.

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      2. Our drive up was super-smooth, and yes, at 4:45 there was no traffic to be seen at the Delta Highway exits from Beltline.

        On the other hand, the lights at Autzen Stadium were visible from the freeway, and BOY is my internal geography of Eugene messed up, because I thought it was in another direction entirely.

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        1. 🤣

          I was raised here, been back now for 40 years, and there are sections that I have to think about.

          Beltline? Does it run E/W or N/S? Answer? Yes. Depends on what section you are on. FWIW when I mention Beltline, it is the E/W section. FWIW hwy 99 is the same.

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  9. Shutterfly Christmas cards: It’s the Ghost of Christmas Two-Front-Teeth!

    The fight betwee Bishop Arius and Bishop Nickolas was kayfabe!

    So many stupid things are required by law and regulation that yes, warning labels about not-required stupidity are now necessary.

    Back during the kerfluffle about endangered spotted owls, a pair was found nesting in a lumber yard. Does that mean we can rename them “Lumber-yard owls”?

    “Licensing” is part of the more general program of nullifying the presumption of innocence. Step 3 is “Show me your balloon license – I don’t have to prove you’re a criminal balloon-thief; you have to show that you’re not one.”

    The EU and the UK governments are envious

    Advances in the availability and effectiveness of firearms are associated with advances in the legal and social status of women and minorities. How can a black woman desire rolling these advances back?

    Our current cold civil war cannot end until one side or the other is is defenestrated from the Overton Window. And once that happens, impeachment of judges on the losing side will become trivial.

    There was a time when racists very much cared about blacks being married, which is why they insisted that slave marriages not be legally recognized.

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  10. Christmas music at work is a real problem. After 7 years working retail I can only handle about a day or so of Christmas music (and for a decade or so, I usually skipped even that)

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    1. A couple of decades back, I wrote a bad Christmas song about bad Christmas songs. However, the stuff I like to play is entirely different from what you find on the radio, so at least I didn’t have that issue. I’m also lucky in that the retail job that I had where I was most likely to be able to make out the music not only had a 6-CD changer for the overhead play, it had a music section manager that swapped them out regularly (which could be several times a week, if he wanted), so there wasn’t an overload of That One Damned CD.

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  11. I want at least one neighbor to be Yukon Cornelius. He’s my favorite character, though Charlie in the Box in a close second. And I laughed off and on throughout, this was a particularly great set (for me, who *never* gets jokes).

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  12. RE: Digital Yuan Currency –

    Yup, the expiration date is real. I just looked it up. China’s suffering a *huge* economic slowdown right now due to exports to the US drying up. They started sending their exports to the EU instead, but had to slash prices in order to undercut the EU markets, which are much lower. So their profits were reduced. And then the EU got pissed off that the Chinese were undercutting all of *their* local manufacturers, and has apparently started taking steps to deal with that. So the Chinese goods are getting pushed out of the EU, as well.

    That means that in order to prop up the economy, the government needs its citizens to spend money. But a lot of them don’t have money, because they work for factories that haven’t paid them in a long time since they’re not turning much of a profit these days…

    You get the idea.

    1.) As the meme notes, this is a scary idea. Hopefully no one else decides to adopt it.

    2.) I don’t think it will work like Beijing hopes it will. People aren’t saving because they can’t get their money back out of the banks. People aren’t spending because they’re not getting paid and/or their wages have been slashed. People aren’t investing because the only thing to invest in is real estate, and that’s crashing. So it’s not clear whether this expiration date on the digital money will actually do anything useful from Beijing’s point of view.

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    1. Actually, it might do exactly what the people in charge want: create a mess so big average Chinese people are distracted from dethroning them from power.

      After all, the upper Party members won’t have any trouble with their money.

      It’s the knock-on effects that will be unpredictable and dangerous for all of us.

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      1. No, the *entire* economy is collapsing. People have to *have* money in order to be distracted by it, and there are too many people who don’t. An expiration date on your money doesn’t matter if you’re not earning enough money to save it.

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      2. So one of the details established some years ago in some internet essay is that communist regimes in terminal failure mode cease to have lying patterns that are rationally predictable. Nobody knows the true.

        The whole situation situation is wild and funky.

        We basically have three categories of wasted economic potential of humans in populations. PRC is near maximum waste. EU is moderate waste. USA is lower waste, but actually the waste level is still pretty significant.

        This is less obvious because synthetic fertilizer, etc, mean we can feed a lot of people, and waste a lot of what they are doing.

        THe PRC regime definitely wants to keep people too busy to think. They have for some time, as well as some of their AI and surveilance bluffs.

        But, economic estimation is a hard problem. It is not clear to me what on earth I actually know about any nation’s economy. Yes, maybe current pain and direction of change in US economy, but I would have little way of knowing beyond that.

        There have been indications for a while of opportunity wrt PRC weakness, but market can remain irrational longer, duh duh duh, and there is a lot of ruin in a nation.

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      3. Some upper Party members have been suffering terrible accidents lately. A lot of heart attacks and a few jumps out of windows.

        Not anything like what the upper echelons of the military have been suffering, mostly among Xi supporters. Or the deaths among pretty-boy actors with unfortunate horoscopes.

        Liked by 1 person

    2. If Drakensis fics are a good proxy, then the cumulative fluff for BattleTech now somewhere includes the detail that the Clan currency has expiration.

      This is more interesting if this was an old detail, and less interesting if it is a new detail.

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    3. Yuan can spend regardless of the expiration date if Yuan doesn’t have any Yuan to expire. If the government provides free Yuan then the Yuan still doesn’t have time to expire because Yuan is not going save. Yuan is going to spend for basics.

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  13. What I don’t understand is how this programmable digital currency is news. I think they first announced it two years ago? At least, that’s around when I first heard about it.

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    1. Yeah I have an actual question there – is it illegal to buy stuff like gold or silver in the Middle Kingdom? Or other durable commodities? What prevents the subjects of the Party from just converting their expiring currency to something that does not expire?

      This seems unusually dumb.

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      1. As I understand, only the government can own precious metals as currency. I don’t know whether they have gotten yet to the point of outlawing jewelery and gilt, but it’s certainly not encouraged.

        Liked by 1 person

        1. A lot of Chinese owned gold, but a couple years ago it turned out that the gold vaults in these Chinese companies usually did not contain real gold. Whether they ever owned gold and the gold was replaced with scam bricks, or whether the gold was always scam bricks and thin air, is not known.

          Jewelry is allowed, but again some may be fake.

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      2. This (PRC since around 1990) has basically been a master course in currency value not being a strict match to a pre-austrian assumed theory.

        PRC actors have been converting wealth to things like US real estate, but maybe failing to realize that even though those currencies are more stable than what they have, there are still ways that they might not be stable.

        (I forget if the term is renbi, yuan, or what.)

        anyway, whole thing is wild

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  14. In case readers don’t know. The antlers fall off every year.

    Colorado Parks and Wildlife:

    Shed Antler Regulations
    Shed antler and horn collection on all public lands west of I-25 is prohibited from January 1 through April 30, annually.

    Liked by 2 people

    1. Shed Antler collection is prohibited in national parks and monuments anytime of the year. People do but not even suppose to be picked up to look at and put back down. The antlers are part of the ecosystem and there are critters that rely on them directly and indirectly from the eventual dissolving breakdown.

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