Labor Day Weekend Wrap-Up

LOCAL AND REGIONAL

* We have not yet been officially told the precise variety of “terrorism” he was supposedly engaged in, albeit he wasn’t engaged in real bad actors, he was feeding his power into dummy loads.  Why aren’t we being told?  Probably because officials don’t want us to know.  And what don’t they want us to know?  Easy.  BLM.

* And they wonder why witnesses don’t want to testify.

This is such a clusterfuck that it’s even making Tony Messenger mad.  Except the only reason he’s fuming is because it will punch holes in rape shield.  Not that he cares about the more crucial reasons.

* O’Sha.

* WRPT.  Except, it failed.

* Someone order pig in a blanket?

* August 30 is the holy day in the lore of St. Louis civil rights history.  I only bring it up this year because of the last paragraph in this article.  Today’s BLM is just repeating the template of the civil rights movement of two generations ago, in that it’s a career hustle for young black activists and budding politicians.  Bill Clay, then just a city alderman, won Congress five years later, and stayed there in 2000, to be succeeded by his son, who is still there to this day.  Likewise, Deray McKesson, who has already gotten two sinecures from his BLM activism, is well on his way to a lifetime of public service.

* September 5 is yet another holy day.  And in this case, the pun in somewhat intended.  Symbolic of how the opposition was unable to fight back effectively is that the hall they initially organized in was on a street later renamed for Martin Luther King.

* Two examples of shit that started on the north side and somehow made their way down to a specific part of the Marine Villa neighborhood on the south side.

* Don’t buy any of the listed reasons.  The real reason is to harass the manufacturers.

* The meter on the hypothetical new stadium kept rolling up even after we got the formal announcement of bye bye Rams.

* Can’t find it on their website, but this week’s paper edition of the RFT has a long form about all the crimes that MTC drivers pull off while they’re on the job.  In spite of all the MTC propaganda that their drivers are checked, licensed, and are much safer and less risky than Uber drivers who can just come in off the street.

* When they try to pull inside jobs, it almost always comes out in very short order, pun intended.  It’s because it doesn’t take much pressure to crack ’em open, or they can’t help but brag.

IMMIGRATION

* What vetting process?  Using what?  Syria’s NCIC?

* We all know the real reason why they were zip-lipped.

* Seems to be a mea culpa, but not really.  She’s not sorry about throwing the doors open, she’s only sorry about not nuancing the consequences well enough.

* However, in this, she is telling the truth.  Which isn’t saying much for her.

* Be like Biz Markie and sing it this way:  He’s…got blood on his hands…but he says he’s just a refugee…he says he’s just a refugee…

NATIONAL

* I’ve heard of productivity and sales quotas, but this is ridiculous.

* Irony Alert.  Read deep down in the paragraph count to see who the prosecutor was.  And this is ironic, considering the stunt he would pull in the next decade.

* Correct.  And what is the common denominator?

* Then don’t go to them.

* The Dynamo of Bell Curve City, keeps on going, and going, and going.

* Gasp.  Don’t tell us our Baraq is justifying corporate tax avoidance.

* Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

* This needed to be done?  Definitely.  But all I’m wondering is where is the great Federal judiciary and the great Department of Justice.  Not a peep from them.  Even though we’re told both are supposed to be on the eternally vigilant lookout for police abuse of power.

* Just like every other time.

* The surrounding community in that part of The Bronx is outraged that the local cabal of armed robbers would jack a nine-year old.  The locus of their outrage isn’t armed robbery, it’s the single-digit age of the victim in one particular case.  Which means the robbers should have enough morality and decency to restrain their armed robberies to victims who are at least 18 years old, and everything will be okay.

Try the “no honor among thieves” doctrine, will ya?

* Except, “could” and “will” are two vastly different things, especially in the realm of voter turnout.

* There’s so much evidence that Head Start doesn’t work, at least in light of its purported mission, that if any of it mattered, then Head Start would have been repealed and defunded by now.  That it has not and won’t be for the foreseeable future, in contrast with the evidence that it doesn’t work, only proves that the purported mission was never the real purpose of HS, that it was just a sweet sounding rationale that we all told ourselves because we didn’t want to admit the real reason we were and are still doing HS.  And the real reason is free babysitting for young black women and jobs for middle aged and older black women.

A decade before HS was implemented, we did the same thing:  We convinced ourselves that building freeways through, around and between major cities would make the military’s job easier if the Soviet Union ever invaded us or dropped a nuclear bomb on us.  How, I don’t know, but back in those days, and still to an extent today, “national defense” is the elbow grease used to push a fat piece of legislation through a thin opening.

Also, I notice that NR is letting Jason Richwine write articles for it.

* Even in Anchorage, Alaska.

* There is a lesson hiding here, if you’re astute enough to read between lines.

The lesson is that Martin Luther King wasn’t that important to the civil rights movement.  That it could have and would have happened without him.  The civil rights bills of the 1960s were matched by very similar legislation in many other white countries in the late 1950s to early 1970s time period, and those countries did not have a Martin Luther King.

INTERNATIONAL

* Easy button:  People create systems for their benefit and in accordance with their folkways.  The unnoticed irony here is that if Scandinavians wind up doing pretty well under any system, then it means that the system doesn’t matter.  And that’s close to my worldview:  That if a given people have high enough group intelligence, a respect for learning and knowledge and the people within their tribe who are the best at it, engage in group evolutionary strategy, and have either direct or proxy access to sufficient natural and other resources and real estate, then the people will be successful, and at that point, they’ll be successful no matter what kind of economic paradigm they choose for themselves.  In fact, if they have all these elements, the only way a system will hurt them is if they pick an exceptionally stupid one, and the only way a system will help them is if they pick an exceptionally good one.  Anything in between is almost macht nichts.  This is why I dismiss the self-righteous ideological cultist preening of both libertarians and socialists.

* I’m trying to wrap my mind around the reasoning of how this will reduce terrorism.  It says that Italian 18-year olds can, among other options, use this to get into admissions-fee museums and cultural attractions for free.  I remember last year when the museum attendance gap was a thing for about a week, and the admissions fees were cited as an example of disparate impact.  Okay, but as any St. Louisan knows, the big four in Forest Park, the Zoo (which McPaper just bestowed a very high honor upon), the Science Center, the Art Museum, and the Missouri Historical Society, are all free to get into, all the time, even though a few special attraction sub-exhibits therein sometimes charge admission.  The Muny’s back seats are free.  Even Shaw’s Garden, which is not part of the ZMD, and therefore, doesn’t have universally free admission, has a free day once a week.

* Wonder why they’re so happy.

* Speaking of being happy, seems like “close social connections” really do matter.  Now, let’s scale this up from identical twins to whole countries.

MISC STUFF

* The irony alert of all irony alerts.

* It definitely was a double eclipse, though you’ll notice that the moon eclipsing the sun seemed to be way larger than the Earth eclipsing the sun.  That proves that the SDO is parked at the Earth-Moon L2.  And I would call what the Moon did to the sun an occultation rather than an eclipse, though eclipse does describe what the Earth did to the Sun.  Occultations, eclipses and transits are all the same thing, the only difference is the apparent but not actual size of the two objects from the vantage point.  An occultation is a bigger object moving in front of a smaller object, an eclipse is where the two objects are about the same size, and a transit is where the foreground object is smaller than the background one.  When the moon covers up a star, that’s an occultation, because from our vantage point, the moon takes up way more visual arc than a star, even though the star being occulted is actually way bigger than Earth’s moon.  Because both Sun and Moon subtend about one-half of a degree of arc, the Moon moving in front of the Sun is an eclipse.  And when Venus or Mercury seem to scoot across the disk of the Sun, that’s a transit.

* I’m going to be audacious and say that this is an example of evolution, but this evolution happened not before humans domesticated and bred dogs, but after, during and because.  I can easily see people who take note of a fact that this male dog seems to have some sense of understanding of human language, this female dog is the same way, and put them in a room and wait for nature to take course.  Lather rinse repeat over many dog generations, which, remember, are way shorter than human ones.

* He wanted to defect to a microbrewery. He ain’t gonna pull no wagon for no international megacorporate beer.

* This is why I say that the old media, far from being on its death bed, is more powerful than ever.  Because much of the so-called new media are nothing more than overglorified feed readers for the old media.

* Mr. Play It Safe was afraid to fly
He packed his suitcase and kissed his kids good-bye
He waited his whole damn life to take that flight
And as the plane crashed down he thought
“Well, isn’t this nice.”
And isn’t it ironic, don’t you think.

Straight out of the Alanis Morrisette song.

* I know why he did it, because if he let her control it, she’d tell the bot to convert every last dime of his fortune into women’s shoes.

* IoT, meet BSOD.

Nathan Lineback once joked about it.