10/30/21

Halloween blend: almost spooky edition

10/30/21

Happy Thursday Halloween!

It feels like a scarier, more foreboding Halloween than last year. Enjoy!

---

One of the best Dilbert's in a while:

click for whole cartoon
--

Harvard Now Offering Advanced Degrees In Unconstitutional Law:
Some experts were quick to point out that Harvard has technically taught Unconstitutional Law for decades, but this latest move makes it official.

 --


White House Orders Daring Mission Into Afghanistan To Mark Stranded Americans' Passports As 'Non-Binary'

--

Picard Suspended From Twitter For Saying He Sees Only Four Lights
 
---

You may have read about some "Youngkin supporters" with tiki torches (presumably an effort to resemble the tiki torch-carrying extremists at the Charlottesville Unite the Right rally in 2017). 

Anyways, they were plants (shocking!): Lincoln Project takes credit for tiki torch stunt McAuliffe campaign passed off as genuine Youngkin supporters:
“Today’s demonstration was our way of reminding Virginians what happened in Charlottesville four years ago, the Republican Party’s embrace of those values, and Glenn Youngkin’s failure to condemn it," the Lincoln Project, a political action committee made up of ex-Republicans, said in a statement. 


Before the source of the stunt was known, former Democratic Gov. Terry McAuliffe’s campaign portrayed the group as genuine supporters of his Republican opponent. 


The five people pictured outside Youngkin’s campaign bus holding tiki torches in the rain wore khaki pants, white button-up shirts, sunglasses, and baseball caps.

--

The Bee is quick to follow up: Youngkin Keeps Lincoln Project Away By Holding Rally Within 500 Feet Of A School

Ouch.

---

Frustration is at an all-time high’: Behind Biden’s falling poll numbers. The headline is right but the article is a Democrat sympathy crying circle along the lines of "Biden is not polling well because he's just too moderate! He needs to move further left!" Riiight. Now you know why Democrats are always shocked when Republicans win.

---

Biden preparing to hand out treats this year:

The Wall Street Journal first reported on Thursday that the Biden administration is in talks to offer separated migrant parents and children around $450,000 per person. That would mean that if a parent and a child were separated at the border, together they would be eligible for a combined payment of $900,000.


The talks are part of negotiations between the Justice Department and lawyers representing the separated families in a number of tort cases that have claimed the families experienced harm when they were forcibly separated.

---

In defense of dumb TVs (old but good):

Decreasing prices and decreasing margins on TVs combined with long replacement cycles have driven companies to take advantage of built-in smarts to enable a new revenue source: user data and advertising. As of Q2 2020, Vizio and HiSense are the only major brands making TVs that ship without advertising enabled in their UIs. Sony, Samsung, LG, and others have ads enabled by default, most of which can’t be disabled. All of the above brands have built capability to aggregate data on what content is being viewed, and again, not all of them have the option to disable that. TVs smart enough to help you are also smart enough to harm you.

---

A senior NJ Transit worker, who was absolutely adamant that he/she must not be identified because they could get in serious trouble for talking to the media, later told me that employees who ordinarily work in that maintenance facility were instructed by their higher-ups to stay home that day. No chance that they’d be allowed to attend this event, it was decreed, even though the event was taking place in their literal workplace — a public facility to boot. The justification? Who knows. Probably some half-baked combination of COVID, terrorism, and whatever other hyped-up existential danger is said to be lurking in the background on any given week. They won’t explain their reasoning if you ask; just as with all manner of completely arbitrary policies deriving from COVID which still remain in effect, people in positions of authority typically can’t be bothered to even offer a rationale for this or that leftover measure — content instead to blithely acclimate to the “new normal” rather than buck the bureaucratic inertia.

Just this afternoon I spoke to my local city council member here in Jersey City, who’s up for re-election next week, and she claimed to me that the primary reason for requiring children as young as two to wear facemasks when playing outside at recess — something I continue to see around town disturbingly often — is “psychological.” Or in other words, children that age need to be taught that wearing a mask for hours on end, each and every school day, is the “right” thing to do. It was a candid admission in a sense, to acknowledge that children’s health is not really the thing guiding this policy calculation
We need to increase the cost of this strategy. Read the whole thing.

---

One of the few newish and good things still on Netflix is the Witcher. Here's the trailer for the 2nd season:


---

Last but not least,

The list of major Biden administration failures



Blog Archive



Categories



Shameless Promotion


ᕦ(ò_óˇ)ᕤ


 

DailyMud. Copyright 2010-2017 Some Rights Reserved.
Creative Commons License