We 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.
There are now only two kinds of people extant in the US. Let's call them Goofus and Gallant.
Goofus is currently vandalizing cemeteries and demanding that policemen carry ice cream cones instead of batons. Goofus doesn't know how he got that way, but he's constitutionally incapable of voluntarily cooperating with Western Civilization in any way, at least if he's told not to by his peers. He has no idea where his peers get their ideas. He thinks everyone but his peers are sheeple and deserve any ignominy he can heap on them. He'll lie, cheat, or steal at the drop of the hat, but he won't call it that. He'll use any form of justification necessary to go along with his friends. The sophistry might come first, or after the fact, but he's striking a blow for freedom all day, every day, by illegally downloading movies or burning a nunnery or anything in between. It's his opponents who are lawbreakers, even though they're not breaking any laws. They're not cool, and that's that.
Gallant, on the other hand, is constitutionally incapable of openly breaking any law. Gallant is wearing a surgical mask while driving alone in his car because dems the rules. No matter how stupid the rules are, he'll queue up to follow them. He's angry all the time about the laws, because they're in complete opposition to how he wants the world to be ordered. But the rule of law is at the top of his totem pole, and that's that. Every once in a while a Gallant hairdresser opens up her shop during a Goofus shitshow lockdown, and is exalted for her bravery, but one toe in the pool is not swimming.
Gallant thinks Goofus is off the hook right now, because cities are being burned to the ground, but Goofus really isn't. Goofus is performing in a very calibrated political Kabuki play, planned for him by people unseen. If you really took all the Goofuses off the hook, you'd see an army of Lavrentia Berias right quick. They're timid by nature but they're the people who run death camps if they get the chance.
Goofus accuses Gallant of being off the hook all the time, but of course that's silly. Gallant might be a combat veteran or a biker or a lumberjack or something similar. If he was off the hook you'd get Carthage, not placards waved outside the state capitol. Gallant is armed to the teeth, but he never shoots anybody because there's rules against that. He mutters about it under his breath constantly, but the total tonnage of nonsense he'll endure before losing his cool is nearly infinite. Nearly. It would take more than some defaced statue dedicated to a general who lost to get him to stop sorting his recyclables, never mind take to the barricades. Conservative presidents keep putting Gallants on the Supreme Court who say dems the rules so we have to follow them, no matter how nutty the rules are, for instance.
No one's going to ring a bell and tell Gallant the rules don't matter any more so let it rip on Goofus. No one is going to ring a bell and tell Goofus to make a frontal assault on Gallant, which would look like a synchronized swimmer turned welterweight punching Mike Tyson at the weigh in. Goofus thinks he has the upper hand right now because no one's stopping him, but he's being humored, nothing more. His minders are using him to get the upper hand. That's a different thing entirely. They'll get as far as they can with this nonsense, but eventually things will strike a new Overton equilibrium. Gallant will put up with kneeling to see his football game, and maybe notice a decided lack of stars and bars on race cars next year. He'll try to follow the new, very weird rules as best he can. Goofus will go back to handing out flyers from card tables in the park while normal people avert their eyes and scurry past.
Let's examine today's news items through the Goofus and Gallant prism:
On Monday, Walmart said it will open its online marketplace, which reaches 120 million monthly visitors, to Shopify's more than 1 million business clients. That means Walmart shoppers will be able to find goods from some Shopify merchants.
Goofus would rather die than shop at Walmart. Goofus loves the proletariat. It's people he can't stand, and people shop at Walmart. Gallant's wife shops on Etsy and at Costco because have you seen the way the proletariat dresses?
After publication of this story, Google backtracked Tuesday, clarifying that The Federalist had been warned about policy violations but still had time to address them. It now has three days to remove the violations before a ban goes into effect.
This is what Goofus' handlers are up to. Zero Hedge is low hanging fruit. Gallant works at the Federalist and is busy doing whatever Google tells them to. How else could they afford season tickets to the kneeling sessions at the Washington Indigenous Downtrodden People football games?
The robot is meant to be a flexible platform: Boston Dynamics has spent many years refining the hardware and software that give the robot incredible mobility, but attachments will help qualify Spot for specific jobs. A software development kit allows operators to further customize how the robot behaves and senses its world, incorporating computer vision models, for instance, to detect certain landmarks around a job site.
Goofus will continue binge-watching Westworld and wait for a robot girlfriend. Gallant has a Belgian Malinois that cost half that.
The feature, which will start rolling out on Wednesday, allows users to turn off political, electoral and social issue adverts from candidates and other organisations that have the "Paid for" political disclaimer. The company said it plans to make the feature available to all US users over the next few weeks and will offer it in other countries this autumn.
Everyone who works at Facebook is a Goofus and will gleefully charge Gallant for Trump ads that never get shown to anyone.
Martin Landray, Professor of Medicine and Epidemiology at the Nuffield Department of Population Health, University of Oxford, one of the Chief Investigators, said, ‘Since the appearance of COVID-19 six months ago, the search has been on for treatments that can improve survival, particularly in the sickest patients. These preliminary results from the RECOVERY trial are very clear – dexamethasone reduces the risk of death among patients with severe respiratory complications.
Goofus doesn't care as long as it's not quinine. Gallant doesn't care because he keeps his parents away from nursing homes run by Andrew Cuomo.
The foundry’s director of metallurgy, Elaine Thomas, 66, of Auburn, Washington, was charged criminally with one count of major fraud against the United States. Thomas, who worked in various capacities at the lab for 40 years, was due to make an initial appearance in federal court June 30. Her attorney, John Carpenter, declined to comment.
Goofus hopes the subs sink anyway. Gallant wants his money back. Submariners would like to take Elaine for a shakedown cruise. Strapped to the hull.
Biologist Kathy Niakan and her team at the Francis Crick Institute wanted to better understand the role of a particular gene in the earliest stages of human development. So, using CRISPR, they deleted that gene in human embryos that had been donated for research. When they analyzed the edited embryos and compared them to ones that hadn’t been edited, they found something troubling: Around half of the edited embryos contained major unintended edits.
As long as human embryos are destroyed, Goofus is happy. Gallant's ex-wife donated the embryos.
A few weeks ago I stumbled across a Youtube live stream that was clearly faked. It claimed Elon Musk was giving away 5000 BTC (roughly $47 million as of June 16, 2020). I flagged it as a Bitcoin scam and I assume the feed went down once a moderator saw the flag. Then the weird part happened. Youtube’s algorithm, knowing my interest in blockchain technology and my brush with a “giveaway” now recommends subsequent scams as they go live.
Goofus works at Google and is too busy policing Zero Hedge to police YouTube scams. All of Gallant's money is tied up in ammo bought at Cabela's with cash so he's safe.
In the study, the team found that replacing half of the blood plasma of old mice with a mixture of saline and albumin — where the albumin simply replaces protein that was lost when the original blood plasma was removed — has the same or stronger rejuvenation effects on the brain, liver and muscle than pairing with young mice or young blood exchange.
Goofus is thirty-three years old and dresses like a toddler. Old age never enters his mind, except to vote for Bernie so he can collect Social Security before he graduates college. Gallant loses so much blood at his construction job that this treatment would be superfluous.
The European Commission has opened formal antitrust investigations to assess whether Apple's rules for app developers on the distribution of apps via the App Store violate EU competition rules. The investigations concern in particular the mandatory use of Apple's own proprietary in-app purchase system and restrictions on the ability of developers to inform iPhone and iPad users of alternative cheaper purchasing possibilities outside of apps.
Goofus adores Apple and the EU in equal measure, so his head might explode. Gallant has heard of Europe, but isn't quite sure if it's a real place or not, so he doesn't care one way or the other.
The knowledge that all of human history, earth history, critters, human creations and thoughts, etc will all be instantly erased is a big thought, ain't it?
Well, it's Tuesday. There's no "fresh week" feeling to Tuesday. You don't unwrap a Tuesday. The package is already broken open, and inexpertly taped back up, like most of the tools at Harbor Freight. In geologic terms, it's really not any closer to Friday than Monday was, so you can't even lie to yourself about being one day closer to the weekend with any gusto. Tuesday just is. Let's get on with it.
During the restoration, [Curtis] found residue and crystals stuck under one of the knobs of the Control Voltage Processing Module. Was it flux, conformal coating, or something else? [Eliot] hit the board with contact cleaner and wiped it down. Within 45 minutes, he was feeling a strange tingling. It was the beginning of a nine-hour LSD trip.
My car mechanic took LSD once. He said he had an auto body experience.
Researchers at the University of Oxford have begun enrolling subjects in a phase 2/3 clinical trial of AstraZeneca-partnered COVID-19 vaccine AZD1222. The next stage of the program, which follows a 1,000-subject phase 1, is set to enroll 10,260 people in the U.K. to generate results to support the first shipments to customers in September.
And just like all flu vaccines, there will be cardboard signs outside of every pharmacy and supermarket offering free flu shots, which no one will get.
Six former employees of eBay, Inc. have been charged with leading a cyberstalking campaign targeting the editor and publisher of a newsletter that eBay executives viewed as critical of the company. The alleged harassment included sending the couple anonymous, threatening messages, disturbing deliveries – including a box of live cockroaches, a funeral wreath and a bloody pig mask – and conducting covert surveillance of the victims.
It sounds like everyone involved works part time at Hardbodies
All this from my point of view. Perhaps you are right and I am all wrong. Your work is an extraordinary experiment and I would go out of my way to save it from destructive or restrictive interruption. It has its believers and its following. Let them rejoice in it. To me it is a dead end.
Once upon a time and a very good time it was H.G. Wells was coming down along the road and this Wells that was down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby Joyce and told him he was a jerk.
The EAT-Lancet report, published in 2019, was the result of the deliberation and collaboration of 37 experts. Unsurprisingly, 31 out of the 37 espoused vegetarian views before joining the project. The leader of this project, Walter Willet, has an extensive list of conflicts of interest, such as his personal vegetarian diet, having spent his entire career publishing epidemiology surrounding the benefits of plant-based diets, and is a member of at least 7 groups/enterprises that promote high grain/plant diets. Additionally, ‘in the last few years of Willett’s directorship of the Harvard T.S. Chan School of Public Health, the school received between $455,000 and $1,500,000 from companies or groups interested in promoting vegetarian products or the vegetarian diet generally.
Want to go vegan? Cut out the middleman and become a Seventh-Day Adventist
Indian government sources said no shots were fired but a physical fight broke out between the two sides with soldiers using batons and throwing stones, which resulted in the casualties.
Both sides have nuclear weapons, but they're bashing each other's heads in with sticks and stones. A parable for our times.
To test just how bad the problem is, Szathmari re-registered old domain names for several law firms that had merged, set up an email server, and without hacking anything, he says he received a steady stream of confidential information, including bank correspondence, invoices from other law firms, sensitive legal documents from clients, and updates from LinkedIn.
Domain names are like herpes. If you don't want to have it forever, don't get it in the first place.
According to a new study in The Astrophysical Journal, there could be dozens of intelligent alien civilizations hiding in our galaxy, all capable of communicating. “There should be at least a few dozen active civilizations in our Galaxy under the assumption that it takes 5 billion years for intelligent life to form on other planets, as on Earth,” Christopher Conselice, Professor of Astrophysics at the University of Nottingham and lead author of the study, said in a statement.
And according to new research I just finished, Blake Lively could be trying to phone me right now.
Skateboarder Tony Hawk charges $1,000 for a Zoom call, and football player Brett Favre charges $5,000. Cameo says up to four additional friends or family can join the call, and people have up to 24 hours before the call to cancel. If the celebrity doesn’t show up, they’ll get a refund. Fifty stars have signed on to the feature for launch.
That's funny. I would pay five bucks to avoid a Zoom call with Tony Hawk or Brett Favre.
We’re all currently busy not sitting in the stands. Everything sport-like is closed down. I heartily approve, but not as a temporary measure. They’re thinking of having the NFL play in empty stadiums so you can watch it on TV and sneeze at home. But your couch is just the stands. We should refuse to go back to the stands, period.
Everyone already refuses to sit in the stands at their kids' Little League games. They're all on the field having fistfights with the umpires and the other parents.
Have a milquetoast, non-denominational, vibe-less, nondescript, average Tuesday everyone. It's the best you can hope for.
The larger French Revolution era extended all the way until the end of the Franco-Prussian War. This current situation, as I'd written about the other day, is much like the French Revolution.
The general approach of this crowd isn't too dissimilar to the Spanish Inquisition, either. If you're not in, you're out, and you're going to have to be punished. They claim their 'goal' is peace and freedom. They prefer to see people suffer. They have marketed themselves to their constituency well, shifting everyone's eyes away from historical precedent.
Hello all. Roger de Hauteville here, sitting in for Bird Dog. He's gone for his yearly sojourn to get a flea bath and his nails clipped. If he plays his cards right, maybe he'll even get a belly rub from Mrs. Bird Dog.
While it's true I'm "sitting in," there will be, thankfully, no sit-ins on my watch. I'm Sicilian, remember? Haven't you seen the Godfather movies? We don't do sit ins. We don't riot. We don't hold placards and march in a circle. We say nothing about our affairs to strangers, and precious little about them even to our friends. If any action is required, we visit you in the night, and whisper your transgressions in your ear. These remonstrations beat demonstrations every time. Act accordingly.
The Paper, citing Yangtse Evening Post, said she was able to receive relevant information beforehand that tells her if the flight was going to be delayed or cancelled. Thereafter, she would purchase the tickets to the flights that are likely to be delayed or cancelled, before checking if there is any extreme weather along the route the flight is going to take that day.
Wow. $589,000. That's almost enough money to take two extra bags on her next flight.
Those numbers underscore the appeal of ACH payments: they are often significantly cheaper than other methods. For example, a $5,000 transaction made with ACH could cost the originator anywhere from $0.25 - $5, whereas the same transaction would cost $90 if it were made with a credit card.
Remember Betteridge's Law of Headlines. If a headline ends in a question mark, the answer is always "No."
Teleconferencing company Zoom acknowledged it shut down the accounts of several activists and online commemorations of the Tiananmen Square massacre at China's request. The revelation followed media reports, citing Hong Kong and U.S.-based activists, who found their accounts suspended.
The current administration uses the wrong casus belli to address the problem with uniformly left wing online platforms. Don't break them up because they're monopolies. Jail Zoom execs because they're unregistered lobbyists. Don't break up Google. Jail them because it's fraud to call yourself a search engine while selling the top spots to advertisers. Twitter is a political action group that forgot to register. Jail time. See? Problem solved.
Our languages are incredibly diverse and it is highly unlikely to find a word or a handful of words that sound the same in all languages. Except that there is a word that is shared by all human languages, according to research. Surprise, surprise..the word is ‘huh’. Weird, huh! Well, it turns out that this is probably a universal word.
One notices that the word "probably" appears in the first paragraph, but not in the headline. Can't go admitting the truth right away, or people won't read it.
Today, stars fill the night sky. But when the universe was in its infancy, it contained no stars at all. And an international team of scientists is closer than ever to detecting, measuring and studying a signal from this era that has been traveling through the cosmos ever since that starless era ended some 13 billion years ago.
She was passionate about providing access and information to everyone, not just computer scientists. She also envisioned a world in which computers made people smarter and learned to think on their own.
Someone searching for “Game of Thrones torrent” was not going to find The Pirate Bay in the top results. Similarly, filters were set up for music-related queries as well.
As a result, pirate sites saw their search traffic decline drastically. This meant a drop in new visitors to these sites. However, people could still find these pirate sites by searching for their name. We use the past tense here because that has changed for many sites as well.
Kids these days. You're pirates! Look up the word in the dictionary. Banks don't have drive-up windows reserved for bank robbers. Have a little gumption. It's no fun stealing movies if they make it too easy, anyway.
Items found include fragments of ceramic vessels, including bowls and amphorae. There are human and animal bones in the pits, as well as coal. No finds of metal objects have been made at this stage.
I saw Thracian Pit Sanctuary open up for REO Speedwagon at the Providence Civic Center once. Great show.
The Crew Dragon astronauts said the ride on the Falcon 9 rocket was smoother than the space shuttle for the first couple of minutes. The space shuttle launched with two solid rocket boosters, which provided more than two-thirds of the shuttle’s total thrust at liftoff.
They didn't like parking overnight on the moon to recharge the batteries, but other than that, it was fine.
The researchers, who carried out their work in the Particles and Catalysis Research Laboratory led by Scientia Professor Rose Amal, show that by making zinc oxide at very high temperatures using a technique called flame spray pyrolysis (FSP), they can create nanoparticles which act as the catalyst for turning carbon dioxide into ‘syngas’ – a mix of hydrogen and carbon monoxide used in the manufacture of industrial products. The researchers say this method is cheaper and more scalable to the requirements of heavy industry than what is available today.
Waste carbon dioxide. Useful material. Farmers scratch their heads and say, "Huh?"
18:1 The LORD appeared to Abraham by the oaks of Mamre, as he sat at the entrance of his tent in the heat of the day.
18:2 He looked up and saw three men standing near him. When he saw them, he ran from the tent entrance to meet them, and bowed down to the ground.
18:3 He said, "My lord, if I find favor with you, do not pass by your servant.
18:4 Let a little water be brought, and wash your feet, and rest yourselves under the tree.
18:5 Let me bring a little bread, that you may refresh yourselves, and after that you may pass on--since you have come to your servant." So they said, "Do as you have said."
18:6 And Abraham hastened into the tent to Sarah, and said, "Make ready quickly three measures of choice flour, knead it, and make cakes."
18:7 Abraham ran to the herd, and took a calf, tender and good, and gave it to the servant, who hastened to prepare it.
18:8 Then he took curds and milk and the calf that he had prepared, and set it before them; and he stood by them under the tree while they ate.
18:9 They said to him, "Where is your wife Sarah?" And he said, "There, in the tent."
18:10 Then one said, "I will surely return to you in due season, and your wife Sarah shall have a son." And Sarah was listening at the tent entrance behind him.
18:11 Now Abraham and Sarah were old, advanced in age; it had ceased to be with Sarah after the manner of women.
18:12 So Sarah laughed to herself, saying, "After I have grown old, and my husband is old, shall I have pleasure?"
18:13 The LORD said to Abraham, "Why did Sarah laugh, and say, 'Shall I indeed bear a child, now that I am old?'
18:14 Is anything too wonderful for the LORD? At the set time I will return to you, in due season, and Sarah shall have a son."
18:15 But Sarah denied, saying, "I did not laugh"; for she was afraid. He said, "Oh yes, you did laugh."
21:1 The LORD dealt with Sarah as he had said, and the LORD did for Sarah as he had promised.
21:2 Sarah conceived and bore Abraham a son in his old age, at the time of which God had spoken to him.
21:3 Abraham gave the name Isaac to his son whom Sarah bore him.
21:4 And Abraham circumcised his son Isaac when he was eight days old, as God had commanded him.
21:5 Abraham was a hundred years old when his son Isaac was born to him.
21:6 Now Sarah said, "God has brought laughter for me; everyone who hears will laugh with me."
21:7 And she said, "Who would ever have said to Abraham that Sarah would nurse children? Yet I have borne him a son in his old age."
No bugs, sea breeze, 57 degrees F at night, biking, boating, kayaking, hiking trails, running, day-fresh seafood, ocean beach, harbor beach, bay beach, and big ponds. Lots of fun family restaurants. The protection of the vast National Seashore.
If you squint, you can see Portugal on the horizon.
Apparently, Seattle is now epicenter of the revolution which we have all waited breathlessly for. The NYTimes has headlines saying it's "Free Food, Free Speech and Free of Police", which I suppose is a start. We are expecting great things from these people. 'New ideas' we've never seen before. Lovely. Maybe the food is 'free', though nothing is ever free, and we certainly know the speech is only free if you agree with them. But I'm fairly certain the area is free of police. For now.
Remember a few years ago at Malheur, and those supposed 'right-wing extremist' loony birds were roundly misrepresented by the press? Yeah, me either. Didn't happen. The Feds didn't kill anyone there, either.
I'm sure this Seattle experiment will go really well. Just like Christiana did originally (cough, cough).
By the way, can I just also mention how proud I am of my alma mater's devotion to presenting fact-based opinions and respecting free speech? We're leading the way! Future donations on my part will not be part of the plan. I can show my point of view by withholding money.
Decluttering: