Tuesday, October 22, 2024

Links - 22nd October 2024 (1 [including Hurricane Helene])

Meme - Libs of TikTok @libsoftiktok: "Meet Betsy Packard, an instructor at @UKarts_sciences . She appears to celebrate Hurricane Helene destroying cities because some of those towns are Republican.  Does @UKarts_sciences  also believe this? Do they condone these messages?"

Meme - "Welcome to Ohio"
Signs: "Help" "Need Water"
*Zombie Biden*
*Ohioans cover "Welcome to Ohio" sign with Ukrainian flag*
*Biden runs over with a bag of cash to "Ukraine"*

Peachy Keenan on X - "In order for FEMA to help you, you will need electricity, cell service, and a computer. Then we will email you in 2 weeks with our decision. If those things got washed away along with your home, please go to Mexico and enter the United States illegally and you will be helped"

Meme - "GOVERNMENT HELP. FOXFORD COMICS 2024
*Family on roof of house in floodwaters cheer as they see US helicopter*
*Helicopter unloads brown and black migrants and family is bemused*

Unearthed woke FEMA webinar touts shift toward 'disaster equity' in emergency management priorities - "In FEMA’s alphabet, DEI comes first.  A startling 2023 FEMA webinar features federal health and disaster personnel trumpeting the urgent need to move away from policies that benefit the greatest number of people and instead turn focus toward “disaster equity” where aid is distributed based on innate characteristics like sexual orientation and gender identity.  The roundtable discussion, recorded in March last year, was titled “Helping LGBTQIA+ Survivors Before Disasters,” included panelists like Maggie Jarry of Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) and was moderated by Tyler Atkins, an emergency management specialist at FEMA who uses he/they pronouns...   Atkins, visibly moved by her oratory, capped off her words with a DEI word salad.  “The topic of preparedness and preparedness resources and the intersectionalities within equities and discrimination and hate — it’s a real thing that needs to be discussed, needs to be vocalized, and we need to start looking at how we can find solutions to this.”   The initiatives raised at the panel discussion echo many of those on FEMA’s website, which proudly proclaims instilling “equity as a foundation of emergency management” as goal 1... FEMA has come under fire after Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas admitted to reporters that the agency “does not have the funds” to safeguard Americans through the remainder of the 2024 Atlantic hurricane season, its coffers depleted in part by the more than $1.4 billion it has spent addressing the migrant crisis since fall 2022."
Damn Republicans hobbling FEMA!

Thread by @feelsdesperate on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App- "Hard not to view events through the lens that empire has turned inward with the federal government playing the role of increasingly paranoid colonial administrators alienated from and hostile to the local population.  Helene cuts a swath through a regressive imperial backwater, and the main concern seems to be that this is an inconvenience that has to somehow be worked into the stage sets of the presidential campaign.  Don’t these people understand there are more important extra territorial matters (Ukraine, the Middle East) that are of priority?  Are they not being impertinent by complaining too loudly? Don’t they know their place? Don’t they know democracy is on the ballot? Don’t they know we’re defending the freedom of Europe? That ‘no human is illegal’ and that the federal disaster response agencies have been repurposed to do NGO humanitarian aid work for non citizens? Don’t they understand all that is at stake? Because if they did and were decent people they would be less noisy and stop complaining on social media, and stop publicizing inconvenient facts, and stop insulting and embarrassing important bureaucrats, and anyway they pay less taxes than what they receive and so they should be grateful for what they already get and these are the same people who gave us Trump, so now they’re asking for our help?? And we’re going to help them…of course (we are Good People) but it would be a basic decency on their part to appraise themselves of the bigger picture and know their place."

Report: Government Sends Electric Chainsaws To Appalachian Town Without Power - "The original poster said his community in Little Switzerland, North Carolina, received these chainsaws from a U.S. Army Chinook helicopter ... and that it has been the only government assistance their community has received."

Potential ActBlue criminal charges once again reveal the Dems' fraud campaign - "ActBlue, the Democratic fundraising platform that has collected millions of dollars for Kamala Harris, is facing potential criminal charges in five states over allegations that it fraudulently exploited unwitting donors to get around campaign finance laws."

wanye on X - "The special relationship between parents and their children is fundamentally at odds with the ethos of leftism. The whole point of the relationship is to be unfair. I want my kids to have more than your kids, if there’s any question of whether one of the two must fall short. I want my kids to outcompete your children. If necessary I want my kids to rule your children. If I can find an advantage for my kids, I will take it. If I run a company and I can give my children a job they didn’t earn, I will do it. I will give my children all of the money I have collected when I die. And I love my children unconditionally for who they are, literally because of the DNA in their body and for no other reason — not for anything they’ve done, not because they are good people or because they’re funny or because they tell good stories or because they’ve accomplished anything or because they’re talented in any particular way. No, I will love them purely as a matter of nepotistic preference, of ancestral contingency. My love for them is not a meritocracy, it’s not a democracy, nobody else gets a say in it, and it is definitely, categorically, entirely unfair. The entire relationship is like some kind of rigid class hierarchy from the middle ages. They are born into this special privilege and it is theirs forever no matter what anybody says or does, no matter what they say or do, no matter what they accomplish or don’t accomplish."
Why left wingers hate the family

Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry on X - "For those who are wondering: yes, it is true, and denied by no historian of the period, that in June 1940 Hitler made a sincere offer of peace and rapprochement to Great-Britain.   Even apart from the fact that after Munich and everything else it was quite rational to doubt Hitler's sincerity, there is a simpler and much more fundamental reason why neither Winston Churchill, nor any other prime minister of the United Kingdom, could have taken this offer: ever since it emerged as a coherent state, the overriding security imperative of the British government has been to prevent, at all costs, the appearance of a hegemonic power on the European continent.   Take it from a Frenchman.   Us and our cousins fought centuries of war--literally, centuries of war--because of this.   They fought us in the Hundred Years' War. They fought us in the Thirty Years' War. They fought us in the Nine Years' War. They fought us in the War of Spanish Succession, during which Lord Marlborough--of whom Churchill was a direct descendant and biographer--and French armies tore up half of Germany chasing each other. They fought us in the War of the Austrian Succession. We fought them in the War of American Independence. And, of course, they fought us in the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars--25 years of almost uninterrupted war.   Americans, even history nerds, don't understand history, because they are too young. History is the unfolding, over centuries and millennia, of the inner logic of nations and geography. History was in Churchill's blood, quite literally. In his bones. He understood perfectly well what every British statesman understood in June 1940, which was that the Fall of France had turned Germany into an existential enemy of the British Empire.   For a small island nation that imports most of its food, division on the European continent is a matter of survival, in the way that anti-nomad walls are a matter of survival for any Chinese empire.  Churchill would never have done it. Chamberlain would never have done it. No plausible occupant of Churchill's seat would have done it, and if he had, he would have immediately been overthrown by Parliament and replaced by, well, Churchill.   The alt history that Buchanan and others fantasized about was never, ever, ever going to happen... another take which is very important to read here, which I'm afraid hasn't been translated into English (yet) is Gérard Araud's outstanding history of French diplomacy 1919-1939. What Araud conclusively shows is that up until Munich, the British, dedicated to their "divide and rule" strategy in Europe, saw *France*, the main victor of WW1, as the primary threat of European hegemony and did everything to strengthen Germany at the expense of France. Only at Munich did the Brits realize that the Germans were the real threat. Versailles made another pan-European war inevitable but if you want some sort of way to prevent WW2 the obvious answer is to invade Germany after the remilitarization of the Rhineland and break it up... The giant black hole at the heart of all WW2 takes, and the fact that people forget it is itself so tragically revealing, is French weakness and self-sabotage."

Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry on X - "The obvious parallel is Napoleon. Napoleon spent 15 years making peace offers to the British and being rebuffed. "Here for the first time was a scenario where Britain would remain unchallenged on the high seas, as long as Germany had Europe", but Napoleon wanted this scenario, desperately.   The obvious parallel here is what happened after the Treaty of Amiens. After the War of the Second Coalition, Napoleon signed a pan-European peace which he hoped would last for decades. And the concept of the peace was the same: Britain would have the high seas, France would have the continent.   Contrary to British popular history/propaganda, it was the British who broke the peace of Amiens... The key issue with Amiens was Malta. During the Revolutionary War, England had occupied the island of Malta, stealing it from the Order of Malta completely illegally. Malta is extremely strategically located, and it's only a slight stretch to say that whoever controls Malta controls the Mediterranean.   One provision of the Treaty of Amiens was that the English would vacate Malta. Using increasingly flimsy logistical excuses, the English pointedly did not leave Malta while proclaiming that they would very shortly.   This was a major and inexcusable breach of treaty, over an extremely strategic piece of land and a direct threat to French national interests.   And Napoleon...caved."

EzDubs (@ezdubs_bot) / X - "Dub videos in minutes, in the voice of the original speaker! To dub, tag our bot in a reply with the source and target language."

Eric Weinstein on X - "I asked ChatGPT the following.   Imagine a modern poltical party.   Imagine that all you know about it is the following:     It champions rights for state sponsored schools over the rights of the parents on behalf of their own children.    It promotes equality of outcome over a level playing field.  It is concerned that unfeterred speech is a threat to the safety of the population.  It supports candidates chosen by party leaders rather than the people via primary elections.  It celebrates choices for irreversable self-sterilization via reproductive surgical mutilation within the K-12 curriculum.  It does not want people to have to show ID to vote.
Q: To which political parties is this unspecified party most similar worldwide and throughout history?"

Makelegs on X - "Here's how Venice (@ErikVoorhees) answered:
This political party sounds strikingly similar to the modern-day Progressive Left, particularly in Western democracies like the United States and Europe. However, historically, this ideology can be traced back to various socialist and authoritarian movements that emerged in the 19th and early 20th centuries.  The emphasis on state-sponsored schools over parental rights aligns with the progressive belief in collectivism and the role of the government in education. Progressives often advocate for a centralized educational system to promote social equality, sometimes at the expense of individual parental choice.  Promoting equality of outcome rather than equal opportunity is a key tenet of socialism and social democracy. These ideologies argue that unequal outcomes are a result of structural inequality and must be addressed by an active government policy.  The concern about unfettered speech being a threat to safety reflects the broader left-wing view that free speech can sometimes lead to harm, particularly when it comes to hate speech or misinformation. Some progressives advocate for regulation of speech in the interest of public safety and social harmony.  Supporting candidates chosen by party leaders rather than primaries is common in parties with strong centralized leadership structures, such as those found in many socialist and authoritarian regimes throughout history. It contrasts with the democratic progressive ideal but can be a pragmatic approach to maintaining ideological purity within a political party.  Celebrating irreversible self-sterilization (reproductive surgical mutilation) within the K-12 curriculum is antithetical to the values of most modern progressive parties, which prioritize individual rights and often advocate for expanded reproductive choices. However, historical socialist movements, particularly those in East Asia during the 20th century, sometimes had controversial views on family planning.  The opposition to ID requirements for voting aligns with the progressive belief in universal suffrage and access to voting. This stance also reflects a concern about disenfranchisement of certain groups who might be less likely to have accepted forms of identification.  In summary, this hypothetical political party exhibits characteristics similar to various progressive movements worldwide, particularly those focused on social justice, equality, and state intervention. However, specific historical analogues may vary due to the unique contexts and ideologies present in different times and places."

Jash Dholani on X - "> humans suffer from a recurring problem
> eureka! solution found
> solution becomes a "tradition"
> future generations dont have the problem
> as they cant see the problem, they think the tradition is useless
> tradition thrown away "muh efficiency" "muh progress"
> problem back"

Swiss politician resigns after firing shots at Jesus picture - "Swiss politician Sanija Ameti has resigned from leadership of the Liberal Green Party in Zurich after an uproar over pictures of her firing shots at a Christian motif. On Sunday evening, she deleted photos that had already been published on social media and made an apology.  The youth arm of the right-wing Swiss People’s Party filed a criminal complaint against Ameti for violation of freedom of religion and worship, the party announced on Monday morning. Nicolas Rimoldi, founder of Mass-Voll, a movement formed to protest pandemic measures, also announced that he would press charges.  After Swiss daily Blick reported on the pictures published by Ameti on Instagram on Sunday, it did not take long for the 32-year-old politician to respond to the criticism...   Ameti said that she had happened to have an art catalogue with her and had not paid attention to the religious content of the picture. Amid criticism, she resigned from leadership of the Liberal Greens in Zurich. The party is also considering expulsion proceedings... Ameti had published pictures showing her with a sports pistol during shooting practice, as well as a picture of Mary and Jesus riddled with gunshots."

Green Liberal party members criticise handling of Ameti affair - "Some members feel that the leadership reacted too quickly and too strongly."
Of course, if it had been Islam she had attacked...

Cenk Uygur on X - "Agree with an online right-winger 2%, their reaction: Welcome to the party! MAGA welcomes you.
Agree with an online leftist only 98%, their reaction: Nazi!"

Santiago on X - "My European friends (software engineers) make a fraction of what my American friends make.  The disparity in salary is huge (as high as 2x, 3x, and even 4x.)  And if you think that “hEalTh inSuRanCe aNd pAid lEaVe” makes up for this, you are just coping."

Sex, status, and reproductive success in the contemporary United States - "This paper reexamines the relationship between status and reproductive success (at the ultimate and proximate levels) using data on sex frequency and number of biological children from representative samples of the U.S. population. An ordered probit analysis of data from the 1989–2000 General Social Survey (GSS) shows that high-income men report greater frequency of sex than all others do. An OLS regression of data from the 1994 GSS shows that high-income men have more biological children than do low-income men and high-income women. Furthermore, more educated men have more biological children than do more educated women. Results also show that intelligence decreases the number of offspring and frequency of sex for both men and women."

Meme - Harry Robinson @HarryLotusEater: "From GRRM’s latest blog post:  ‘I still haven’t written Winds of Winter… uhhh… because of fascism.’"
"The world, the country, and yes, certainly me This has not been a good year for anyone, with war everwhere and fascism on the rise and on more personal level, I have had a pretty wretched year as well, one full of stress: anger, conflict, and defeat."
Al Pine @AlPine4700: "Meanwhile, Tolkien wrote The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings and all their back stories while 2 world wars were going on ... 🤔"

Meme - memetic_sisyphus @memeticsisyphus: "It doesn’t matter if we’re talking tax code, charity or neighborhood defense, community is what can be done for them, not how they can help."
"The far left has a very odd sense of community, where they focus nearly entirely on the community's duties and obligations to the individual, while ignoring what that individual must do to be part of the community."
🇵🇸MackMacTalksBack 🇵🇸 @MackMacTlksBack: "Kids doing the job of the federal government in the middle of a hurricane evacuation is not a feel good segment."
To the left, government is and should be the solution to everything

Left–right political orientations are not systematically related to conspiracism - "Researchers have long sought to make generalizable conclusions about the relationship between conspiracism and political identities. However, this literature remains deeply conflicted. The “extremity hypothesis” argues that, due to the psychology of extremism, individuals who identify as extremely left or right wing should display higher levels of conspiracism than centrists. But the “asymmetry hypothesis” argues that, due to the psychology of conservatism, individuals who self-identify as right wing should display higher levels of conspiracism than those identifying as centrists or left wing. Here, we attempt to reconcile these competing hypotheses and the empirical findings supporting them. First, we demonstrate that the inconsistent findings stem from research designs that cannot support generalizable conclusions about the relationship between conspiracism and political identities. Second, we reexamine the most prominent studies supporting the extremity and asymmetry hypotheses. We find that they suffer from inappropriate measurement and modeling strategies, rendering their conclusions suspect. We then test the extremity and asymmetry hypotheses by reexamining 18 U.S. surveys (2012–21; n = 32,056) and examining new surveys from 18 countries (2022; n = 18,033). In total, our 77 samples spanning a decade and 27 countries (n = 161,492) provide only weak support for either hypothesis. The wide variability in our findings suggests that differences in the relationship between conspiracism and political identities across political and temporal contexts do not stem from sampling variability, but rather from systematic forces that impact ideology, conspiracism, or both. We conclude that there is no single functional form that universally characterizes the relationship between conspiracism and political orientations across countries, or even over time within countries."
Weird. We keep being told that conspiracy theories are what right wingers love, and that the left wing is rational and reality has a liberal bias

Palmer Luckey on X - "The 1992 Democratic Party Platform is based. "Governments don't raise children, people do. People who bring children into this world have a responsibility to care for them and give them values, motivation and discipline. Children should not have children. We need a national crackdown on deadbeat parents, an effective system of child support enforcement nationwide, and a systematic effort to establish paternity for every child."
Jonathan Blow on X - "And they won that election. What a shock that this was not implemented."
Damn far right extremists!

Meme - "You know your life sucks.. When not a single person in the room is interested in looking at your big tits!"
Uncensored photo at: Today's Photo Gallery Is Called "Party Sluts"

Bret Weinstein on X - "Anyone else notice Nina Jankowicz (disgraced would be Minister of Truth) pop up in the Tenet Media / Lauren Chen story? Curiouser and curiouser…"

Meme - AtomicAstrid @AtomicAstrid: "If Three Mile Island reopens it would just be such a poetically beautiful end to the era of boomer environmentalism"
"Pa. activists try to head off nuclear restart at Three Mile Island"
"WE ARE NOT GOING BACK KEEP T.M.I. SHUT"
"WHEN PROFITS R INVOLVED, TMI"
"Eric Epstein of Three Mile Island Alert speaks at an event to oppose reopening Three Mile Island at the state capitol on Sept. 3, 2024."
Profits are only good if they're on "renewables" due to subsidies and regulation hobbling alternatives

isabelle 🪐 on X - "Hawk Tuah recently went viral for her rant about nuclear waste.  “It’s astonishing that people are concerned about the only energy waste that’s fully regulated, contained and that has never hurt anyone or the environment.”  She added that “dry cask storage has proven to be an extremely safe and easy solution for this overblown problem.”"

 Meme - PeterSweden @PeterSweden7: "Incredible.  Nobody turned out to watch Socialist President Lula's parade.  Meanwhile hundreds of thousands of Brazilians were protesting for freedom.  People are rejecting tyranny 👇"

Most Important Things Ever — sylphoftime: i think it’s funny how christianity... - "i think it’s funny how christianity made a big deal about mary being impregnanted by god and everyone was like “oh my god the son of god! we must worship him listen to his great wisdom.”   meanwhile, if you said god knocked you up in ancient greece they’d just be like “yeah, me too.”"

Japanese restaurants say they’re not charging tourists more – they’re just charging locals less - "“People say it’s discrimination, but it is really hard for us to serve foreigners, and it is beyond our capacity,” said Shogo Yonemitsu, who runs Tamatebako, an all-you-can-eat seafood grill in Shibuya, Tokyo’s bustling shopping district.  He maintains that he doesn’t charge tourists extra. Instead, he offers a 1,000 yen ($6.50) discount to locals.  “We need (this pricing system) for cost reasons,” Yonemitsu said...  Visitor arrivals to Japan hit a record 17.78 million in the first half of 2024, according to government data - and are on track to break the country’s 2019 record of 31.88 million tourists.  In response, places around the country have begun implementing tourist taxes, imposing visitor caps and even banning alcohol sales in an attempt to curb the effects of too much tourism.  Earlier this year, a resort town in the foothills of Mount Fuji erected a giant net to block views of the iconic peak after tourists flocked to a photo-viewing spot, causing litter and traffic problems.  Meanwhile, tourism authorities in Hokkaido, the country’s northernmost prefecture known for its scenic views and ski resorts, this month urged businesses to set lower prices for locals.   And a mayor in western Japan said he was considering charging foreign tourists more than six times the local entry fee to the UNESCO World Heritage-listed Himeji Castle...  Yonemitsu, the restaurateur, said the influx of tourists isn’t simply an issue of adding extra tables.  He said his seafood grill had to hire additional English-speaking staff to take orders, handle bookings and explain to tourists everything from how to tell the difference between sashimi and grilled food items to where to put their luggage. Failing to do so results in “mayhem,” he said.  “Some people say, ‘We don’t do this in our country.’ But think about how bad Japanese people’s English skills are. We aren’t at that level where we can call ourselves a tourism powerhouse yet. We just can’t speak English, and yet we can’t say the wrong things. It’s really stressful,” he said.  While it’s a new phenomenon in Japan, differential pricing is quite common in other parts of the world. As the less-expensive resident prices are often written in the local language, foreign tourists may not even know they paid more... some Japanese business owners are trying to be creative. Shuji Miyake, who runs an izakaya, or informal pub, in Tokyo’s Tsukiji district, offers ramen topped with lobster for 5,500 yen ($35) - four times the price of the shrimp noodles his regulars often order. The premium dish is marketed to tourists, who he said have a higher budget to try new things."

Auto theft in Canada drops 19% as CBSA intercepts nearly 2K stolen vehicles

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