Saturday Short Subjects, July 23

I've been gone part of this week and my brain is not really in gear, so I thought that this was a good week for some random short subjects.

QUOTES

Is a man running into a burning building to save four kids' lives part of this patriarchy thing?

Then running back in for a fifth child? THERE'S some toxic masculinity!

Biden's Assistant Secretary for Health Rachel Levine: "We really want to ... affirm and to support and empower these youth, not to limit their participation in activities . . . and even limit their ability to get gender affirmation treatment in their state."

Translation: "empowering youth" to seek "affirmation treatment" means allowing kids to go against parents' wishes and pursue medicines and surgeries that may leave kids infertile and sexually dysfunctional.

The clearest example yet of the state supplanting America's parents.
Abigail Shrier

"It's a scam...The objective isn't to get the farmers to behave in an organic, responsible, ecologically apposite manner. Far from it. It's in order to bankrupt the farmers so that their land can be grabbed."

Russell Brand

Video at the link.

People think solar panels protect the environment but they require 300+ times as much land as conventional energy sources and now the Los Angeles Times has discovered that they could "contaminate groundwater with toxic heavy metals such as lead, selenium and cadmium."

Michael Shelleberger

The Los Angeles Times!

Become a theater critic in your approach to the news. Because I assure you you are watching a performance.

Walter Kirn

Much of the social history of the Western world, over the past three decades, has been a history of replacing what worked with what sounded good.

Thomas Sowell

Airport notes

I don't think airports are as exciting as they once were, back when air travel was an elite experience. But they are still interesting. I went through four of them this week, and each has its own individual characteristics:

FAT:

The Fresno Air Terminal reflects Fresno's inferiority complex. There are periodic pushes to change the FAA's official designation of the airport to something less off-putting than FAT, but the airport has just gone ahead and named itself Fresno Yosemite International Airport. I don't know that the National Park Service is entirely happy with this. There is a giant sequoia tree trunk in the lobby. It does not look particularly sophisticated.

Concerning the FAT designation, perhaps Fresno needs to hire some Grievance Studies demonstrators, who could take some time off from protesting about incorrect pronouns leading to suicide. What about the FAT designations on those boarding passes?

The airport sits hard by the Fresno Air National Guard Base. I really don't know if they are in local fog pockets like the airports in LA, San Fran and Salt Lake are, but it is regularly foggy in the whole city of Fresno. We have been hearing and seeing more military jets lately. Sometimes from this facility, sometimes from others.

I was one of a few selected people who did not have to remove their shoes when going through security at FAT. I don't know if that was because I looked too dense or FAT to be a terrorist, because my shoes didn't look like bombs or because of a Strange New Respect that I was the person designated to rip the door over the wing off the airplane in case of an emergency.

SFO:

We approached the airport over part of the Delta. (Not the part below). The water was full of strange ribbons of color, which may be related to drought. It reminded me of the ribbons of color in the water as the Great Salt Lake meets the Salt Flats.

The sky was clear at the airport (even though it is in a fog pocket), but there was some fog in the hills even in the early afternoon. In July. That's the Bay Area.

The utilitarian look of the runway area was a nice contrast to what I have been reading about San Francisco lately. So was the relatively small part of the airport I saw. It all looked well-managed and sophisticated. Instead of people pooping on the sidewalks in the city, there were people taking their fancy standard poodles, labs and little lap dogs to the Animal Relief Stations near the rest rooms for humans.

There was one discordant note: In the women's rest rooms were signs inside the stall doors advising that if you were being held against your will or being forced to work for very little money, you should call the airport. I didn't see a phone number.

SLC:

The airport in Salt Lake has been totally re-built. It really plays up its status as a hub for Delta. If you are flying on a different airline, your walk to the front of the airport will be very long and will change levels a couple of times. It's sort of confusing. They need better signage.

Maybe Salt Lake should have chosen to partner with an airline which was not in the process of bureaucratic decline. Have you heard the stories?

I was flying United (and related commuter airlines). Don't know if my experiences are typical of recent ones, but all my flights were pretty much on time. I walked a long way in the Salt Lake Airport.

LAX:

I stayed in a small commuter hub of the airport. They sort of hid my gate. They needed better signage. Some of the concessions were sort of hidden, too. Odd.

LA County still requires face coverings in airport terminals and makes loudspeaker announcements about that every few minutes. More than half of the people I saw were wearing them. Some of the people working there were even wearing masks.

NEWS

China, finance

Tanks are being put on the streets in China to protect the banks.

This is because the Henan branch of the Bank of China declaring that people's savings in their branch are now 'investment products' and can't be withdrawn.

War in Ukraine

It's hard to say what to trust about news concerning this war, but this from Stephen Green is crazy:

Russia has a bat-guano excuse for their embarrassing failures early on in their brutal war against Ukraine: Mutant supersoldiers engineered in American-run bio-labs.

It's like something out of The Terminal List. Except true. And more mutant-y.

That's according to two Russian lawmakers, who otherwise do not appear to have dropped any acid, heading up a commission looking into Ukraine's supersoldiers.

Testing of Ukrainian POWs' blood, they claimed, uncovered "a range of diseases" that suggest they were secretly experimented on "for military purposes."

"And we see: the cruelty and barbarity with which the military personnel of Ukraine behave, the crimes that they commit against the civilian population, those monstrous crimes that they commit against prisoners of war, confirm that this system for the control and creation of a cruel murder machine was implemented under the management of the United States," Yarovaya was quoted telling reporters.

Later, Ukrainians who refuse to see themselves as Russian are compared to insects and Nazis.

Who is the Nazi in this particular statement, lady?

Green again:

Let's get something clear: This super soldier stuff is the silliest kind of excuse-mongering by the Russians.

For starters, Ukrainian troops -- bioengineered mutants or otherwise -- did not turn back the Russian Army from Kyiv and Kharkiv in March.

It was actually worse than that for Russia. They tried to take Kyiv and failed all by their little own selves.

Maybe they can buy some robot dog machine guns from China.

The Chinese-made robot in the video “has patches on its surfaces with insignia associated with the Russian military… switching to a ‘semi-automatic’ setting allows the robot to hit targets without moving around too much…” https://t.co/QNhnOmvUXQ

— Lewis Shepherd (@lewisshepherd) July 22, 2022

World Economics

Crap Economics

America, with conservatives' blessing, has become utterly dependent on big corporations. We rely on the global supply chain and its left-wing gatekeepers for everything from food to clothes to medicine. Hell, the United States imports more than $7 billion in fertilizer each year.

Why is there a fertilizer shortage, you ask? Because the United States imports 93 percent of our potash, a key nutrient used in making fertilizer, while Russia and Belarus are responsible for 40 percent of the global potash supply.

Naturally, the folks who decided to make us dependent on fertilizer imports are the same people who decided to blockade Russia over its invasion of Ukraine. That should tell you everything you need to know about our ruling class.

But it gets worse. The same Very Smart People who orchestrated the fertilizer shortage are also working hard to blacklist the cattle industry. Cow farts are tearing a hole in the ozone, they argue, which is why they have to cripple our ranchers with new methane taxes. It's getting so bad in the Netherlands that cattle farmers are in open revolt against the Dutch government.

No cows, no cowshit.

These Very Smart People are poised to upend the global economy. And they don't care. Many of them, like Bill Gates, publicly fantasize about switching the developed world to synthetic beef. They want to drive all those ranchers--about 500 million around the world--out of business. They would gladly force us all to eat their nasty Impossible Whoppers. For them, this isn't an unfortunate side-effect of saving the planet. It's the reason they get out of bed in the morning.

This is evil. More than that, it's unbelievably stupid. By sanctioning Russia, the people who want us all to eat plant-based meat substitutes are also making it harder to grow the plants used to make those plant-based meat substitutes. Bill Gates and his fellow oligarchs are attacking meat farmers and vegetable farmers at the same time.

You can't make this up.

By the way, whenever you mention Bill Gates, people assume you're talking about progressives. Yet conservatives also deserve credit for this catastrophe. They're the ones who are constantly going on about the blessings of capitalism and free trade.

Music and Dance

Tango. Pointy Elbows. RIP Dave in Texas.

Hope you have something fun planned for this weekend.

This is the Thread before the Gardening Thread.

Here's last week's post, with comments: Weekend Musings, July 16: ESG scores and Sri Lanka, Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451 and The Horde's virtual front porch, complete with rocking chairs for conversation.

The actor Robert Clary (the little French guy in Hogan's Heroes) was a prisoner in Buchenwald.

Music: Tiger Rag, Swiss style.

I closed the comments on this thread so you wouldn't ban yourself by trying to comment on a week-old thread. But don't try it anyway.

posted by K.T. at 11:08 AM

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