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Quote of the Day

On the day of US President Donald Trump's inauguration, two poorly understood forces of the internet collided in a sort of bizarre death lock - a struggle that has manifested in the real world as Nazi-costumed dances in New York, a meticulously planned theft in rural Tennessee and last month, a raid on a British rooftop.

These forces are called 4chan and Shia LaBeouf.

The future, as best I understand it, is basically Philip K. Dick by way of Pornhub.

-- Sonny Bunch commenting on dildo cameras being hijacked by online hackers

It probably won't shock anyone here to know that steps were made in the last half decade that will, in the end, destroy our nuclear deterrent by simple neglect.

Not unlike deciding to put a cat on a vegan diet - it doesn't kill it right away and it looks like you are feeding it - but it is a death sentence.

-- CDR Salamander

• Do not take a bold stand, especially in public. It does not matter if your argument is made honestly and in good faith, or if you are an expert on the matter of policy under discussion.
• Keep a keen sense of which way the political wind is blowing. Don't fight it - drift with it.
• No matter the number of your accomplishments or their objective prestige, you will be humiliated for once having promoted a Wrong Opinion.
• The more effectively and memorably you promoted the Wrong Opinion, the greater your punishment will be.

-- Aaron MacLean on what the whole Jim Webb-Annapolis debacle has taught current midshipmen

Quote of the Day

Finally, our Home Secretary and local dimbulb MP, Amber Rudd, made some off-the-cuff remark on the day after the attack to the effect that Londoners going about their business proved that the terrorists will never win. Standard post-attack fare, right? Only, I have just now worked out what our leaders mean when they say that. They mean, "we don't have to do anything, we don't have to change anything, we don't have to react in any way to what just happened; we'll go on just exactly as before and that will show those old terrorists we're not scared."

But we are scared, fam. If you have a brain in your head, you're scared. And they goddamn good and well better do something about it.

-- Sweasel on the recent sudden jihad syndrome knife attack in Westminster

I'm not sure if the guns are supposed to mimic something graphically here, but I like that there are a lot of them. How long has "guns and '70s clothes" been sure-fire movie formula, anyway? At least since Pulp Fiction. Probably since the '70s. Except in the '70s they were just called "movies."

...I wasn't into Sons of Anarchy so all I really know abut him [Charlie Hunnam] is that he has a confusing accent. It feels like every few years Hollywood tries to turn a good-looking guy into a charismatic guy. Meanwhile, if the example of Chris Pratt teaches us anything, it's that it's easier to turn a charismatic guy into a good-looking guy than vice versa. Then again, it worked with Channing Tatum so who knows?

-- Vince Mancini in This Week in Movie Posters

If you recently Googled the phrase "Taylor Swift virtual reality sex" (or some variation thereof), you may have come across reporting on a "scandal" that embodies just about everything that is wrong with our culture.

Well. "Multicultural" means all the cultures but one.

-- Glenn Reynolds on the Mother Expelled From 'Multicultural Playgroup' Because She's White story

Canada's contribution was out of all proportion to the scanty population of the country at the time, and deserves to be memorialized. To put things in perspective, on D-Day the US covered two beaches, the UK two, and Canada one. By war's end, there were whole divisions of Canadians in Northern Europe (and another in Italy), never mind the Canadians at sea or in the RCAF or RAF (there were even some Canadians who fought in the US forces. There always are). At the outbreak of the war in 1939, though, the Canadian population was just under 11.3 million, less than 10% of the American, and less than 25% of the British. Canada's GDP imbalance with its allies was even stronger.

-- WeaponsMan on the disproportionate contribution of Canada to the WWII war effort

    A new study in press at the Journal of Hand Therapy (yes, a real thing) finds that millennial men may have significantly weaker hands and arms than men the same age did 30 years ago.

Researchers measured the grip strength (how strongly you can squeeze something) and pinch strength (how strongly you can pinch something between two fingers) of 237 healthy full-time students aged 20 to 34 at universities in North Carolina. And especially among males, the reduction in strength compared to 30 years ago was striking.

...But today, older millennial men and women are roughly equal when it comes to grip strength.

"A new scientific study of medieval human bones, excavated from a deserted English village, suggests the corpses they came from were burnt and mutilated. Researchers from the University of Southampton and Historic England believe this was carried out by villagers who believed that it would stop the corpses rising from their graves and menacing the living."

Fifty years ago, I believe that there were more social bridge players than tournament players. Today, it is closer to the reverse.


When I tried to get back into tournament bridge a few years ago, I found that the "barrier to entry" had gotten much higher. Players expect you to know a plethora of new tactics, which in bridge are known as "conventions."


The other point to notice was that the median age of players at the tournament seemed to be about 70. Not many young people are willing to get past the barrier to entry.

...As another example, consider people with an interest in baseball. Fifty years ago, many casual fans knew the batting averages and home run totals of well-known players. Today, there are fewer fans with that knowledge. Instead, there is a relatively small group of fans whose knowledge includes arcane statistics that did not exist when I was growing up.

Also, I think that interest in baseball skews older, in spite of marketing efforts aimed at the young. My sense is that in the ballpark it is mostly people over age 50 who are paying close attention to the action on the field. The younger people are on their cell phones and/or watching the JumboTron.

I believe that religion is becoming narrower, deeper, and older. A smaller fraction of the population is affiliated with a place of worship, but there may be an uptick among those deeply committed, such as Orthodox Jews. Otherwise, many congregations are thinning out as their populations age and die off.

posted by Misanthropic Humanitarian at 10:12 PM

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