Maggie's FarmWe are a commune of inquiring, skeptical, politically centrist, capitalist, anglophile, traditionalist New England Yankee humans, humanoids, and animals with many interests beyond and above politics. Each of us has had a high-school education (or GED), but all had ADD so didn't pay attention very well, especially the dogs. Each one of us does "try my best to be just like I am," and none of us enjoys working for others, including for Maggie, from whom we receive neither a nickel nor a dime. Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for. |
Our Recent Essays Behind the Front Page
Categories
QuicksearchLinks
Blog Administration |
Tuesday, January 2. 2024Tuesday morning links
C&H toon via Briggs Why Did So Many Climbers Die on Mount Everest This Year? Elon Musk is presently the richest man in the world. He may also be the smartest. Toxic positivity at work: Why too much optimism can hurt employee productivity, experts say Inside ‘digusting’ Florida prison where Ghislaine Maxwell is serving 20 years: moldy bread, bug-infested cereal, leaks plugged with feminine pads Sowell: "I don’t need some half-white woman from Martha’s Vineyard telling me about being black,” Tens of Thousands of Career “Civil Service” Administrators in Washington, DC, Apoplectic That Trump Might Fire Them Jack Smith Rings in New Year by Asserting That Trump Threatens the ‘Constitutional Foundations of Our Republic’ Bill Barr: I Oppose Trump—and Any Efforts to Ban Him From the Ballot Wait, There's More: Harvard's Claudine Gay Hit With New Plagiarism Allegations Sheesh More than 302,000 illegal migrants crossed into the US in December setting the record for most entries in HISTORY as Biden grapples with the fallout of his administration's policies Why Eric Adams’ ‘tough’ moves on migrants keep failing to stem the tides We’ve been working on this video for a week now. Trying to explain to the world that Oct 7th was not another day in a conflict.. ‘Death to America, Death to Israel’: Anti-Israel NYC Protesters Cheer for Houthis in Yemen - “Yemen Yemen Make Us Proud.” "No Stomach" In US To Keep Funding Ukraine As 'War Is Over': Ex-Pentagon Official Trackbacks
Trackback specific URI for this entry
No Trackbacks
Comments
Display comments as
(Linear | Threaded)
'Inside ‘digusting’ Florida prison where Ghislaine Maxwell is serving 20 years: moldy bread, bug-infested cereal, leaks plugged with feminine pads'
Boo-hoo. Don't do the crime if you can't do the time. Absolute horror. Biden - or whomever is his current handler - should sign an executive order that only gender neutral pads can be used to plug leaks.
I worked with forensic patients and criminals in my forty year career, and I disagree. Many do indeed deserve for terrible things to happen to them. Yet many don't, and in any event, WE should be deciding what punishment is just, not the other prisoners and not the unelected, often unaccountable, staff.
The powerful person who has done the most in the last fifty years for prison reform and especially justice system reform? Donald Trump. Even he wasn't great, but still a damn sight better than anyone else. Sowell is correct about Lani Guinier. She "denounced the SAT as a “proxy for wealth,” and “normed to white upper-middle-class performance.” This has been consistently shown to be untrue. The SAT got me, a lower-middle-class kid, into a good college. She wants "cooperation, not competition." But her cooperation is defined by "the right people are going to tell you what to do; you'll do it and you'll like it."
When they tell you that it's all about power, they are telling you who they are, and they mean it. re Why Did So Many Climbers Die on Mount Everest This Year?
The Everest climbers are egotistical narcissists that are rolling dice with The Grim Reaper. Indeed, I believe that is part of the attraction of the climb. Why should we care when the dice come up snake-eyes? It's an an avoidable death. Don't climb the mountain. Did you not read through the whole article? The deaths are due to Climate Change! It's colder on the mountain then ever before, although, "Nepali authorities have yet to release temperature data backing up the claims." Climate Change is causing the weather on the mountain to become more chaotic. Generally it is anywhere from -10 to -20F. It has been 30 years since a sherpa got frostbite. This year two sherpas got frostbite. Colder and more snow.
The deaths have everything to do to money making schemes to attract more and more unqualified, thrill seekers to Everest. It's all in the article, if you read the last paragraphs. It's actually well written. Did you know that rangers are stationed at the summit of Denali? I had no idea. Yes, B Hammer I saw that. That little tidbit almost cause me to stop reading.
My comment was related to the theme of the article that the deaths were caused by a solvable problem. Of course the easiest way to "solve" the problem is not to attempt an ascent of Everest in the first place. I'm sure everyone who attempts to summit Everst knows the data about the mortality rate. They pay with their own money and choose to take the risk.
I don't see how that makes them narcissists. In fact, in some ways, the willingness to take such a risk is admirable. This may not be only Claudine Gay's fault. Many college students, especially those who are in way over their head and are only in college because of their skin color, pay people to write their papers. So it is likely that Ms Gay had no clue that there was rampant plagiarism in her thesis. In fact she may have never read it and couldn't tell you what it is about. This is normal!! Almost anyone in Academia will verify this. We are graduating people into professions who aren't smart enough to take your order at McDonalds. Be careful who you choose to be your doctor.
IMHO the clock is ticking on the migrant crisis. The politicians and rich businessmen in their ivory tower may not know it but time is running out to solve this. There are only a few possibilities left: 1. government goes broke trying to fund welfare and migrant free stuff. 2. Government has to substantially raise taxes on the productive to give the unproductive more free stuff. 3. Government has to cut back the free stuff.
Take you pick. Each of these options will cause a riot/revolution. Imagine telling 50 million welfare dependent people that you are cutting benefits. Yeah that will cause some serious rioting. This is a time bomb and not just because of benefits. There is the health crisis that could be biblical. There is the internal terror/war threat from all these foreign agents we allowed in. There is the inevitable economic crisis that may make 1929 look like a Sunday school picnic. More likely all these things are in our future. Do not forget this was not incompetence, Obama and the Democrats did this on purpose so they could acquire more power. The new warfare will destroy modern armies. The technique is simple. The weak force uses unbelievably cheap weapons to bait the superior force into eventual bankruptcy. For example: Hamas makes rockets for about $100 apiece and fires them at Israel. Israel uses a multi-billion dollar defense system at $400,000 each time it fires to shot them down. Between the cost and the complexity of these anti-missile missiles they cannot get enough of them to match 1/1000th of the missiles deployed against them. A single day of massive missile barrages will exhaust the entire supply of anti-missile missiles and replacements are on back order.
OK, that is simple enough to understand, but there is more. Any modern high tech defensive are offensive weapon has the same problem. Bait them with cheap expendable weapons and they will use up all of their existing high tech options defending themselves. THEN you use the big guns. Unable to shot down incoming drones or missiles now you use more powerful devices or even tactical nukes. The high tech army/navy is defenseless against "enough" low tech devices. This same principle can be used against manpower too. The high tech army has well trained capable soldiers. Against a low tech army or third world country they can easily beat them on the battle field. The high tech army might only receive 10% of the low tech armies casualties. So you keep sending in more and more low tech soldiers until the high tech army is no longer capable of fighting due to equipment and soldier losses. Then the low tech nation sends in their reserve better trained soldiers to wipe out the defenses and destroy the target. Our military is the best in the world, or was. It seems to be in a decline especially at the highest levels. Our generals are more interested in skin color and personal pronouns than military tactics. We don't have any more Eisenhower's or Schwarzkopf's anymore. We have Lloyd Austin, Charles Brown or Lt. Gen. DeAnna Burt. We may not be capable anymore of fighting a conventional war especially against two or more different enemies. We may lose most of our high tech weaponry/ships/planes and most of our combat ready forces in the first six months. We would be left with a rag tag military and nuclear weapons as our only options. "Wait, There's More: Harvard's Claudine Gay Hit With New Plagiarism Allegations"
And - poof! - she's gone. Another casualty of the one unfailing law of history: the Law of Unintended Consequences. The repercussions of that 7 October Hamas attack continue to knock the wheels off all the little Woke Wagons. Within a year she will be in another powerful position where she can spread her DEI hate.
GAZA DOUGH:An Arabic blogger - Hoda Jannat, wrote this
https://x.com/hodajannat/status/1738833531067945053?s=46... Translation from Arabic *Suddenly we discovered that Gaza, which is inhabited by 2 million people... has 36 hospitals There are Arab countries with 30 million citizens and do not have this number of hospitals. *Suddenly we discovered that Gaza was getting water, electricity, gas, and fuel for free from Israel. Of course, there is no Arab citizen who does not pay water, electricity and fuel bills. *Suddenly we discovered that Gaza was receiving $30 million a month from Qatar alone $120 million a month from UNRWA $50 million a month from the European Union 30 million dollars a month from America. There are Arab countries drowning in debt and cannot find anyone to help them, even with one million dollars. *Suddenly we discovered that Gaza was not besieged, and all goods were entering it, as were foreigners and people of foreign nationalities. Its residents were traveling to Egypt and from there to the rest of the world, and Fafo is the biggest example *Suddenly we discovered that Gaza was living better than many Arab countries...and its people were living better than many Arab peoples. Suddenly...we discovered that our minds were besieged by a programmed lie...by the Muslim Brotherhood media. |