Category: Current Events

Quantitative Analysis Interrupted

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mushroom, Sony A7 III with Minolta 200mm f\4 Macro lens

There is a program called Google Analytics.  By virtue of the largest internet surveillance system imaginable it keeps track of every link click on the world wide web.  It must be a truly massive system of mainframes buried under the Rocky Mountains and probably uses up enough electricity to power the Eastern Seaboard.  And by virtue of this horrific gathering of information, I can glean which of my posts and which of my links are most interesting to the general public.  It even tells me whether the links were based on search engine inquiry or direct input or referral from a third-party site.  And all of this information is somewhat interesting.  For instance, some days I get a link on an aggregation site and the majority of my traffic that day will be from this referral link.  In fact, on days like that my overall traffic might be ten times the normal site traffic.  And this is good because some of this new traffic might become regular viewers and show up every day.  So, the Google Analytics (GA) is valuable to more than just the FBI in their never-ending search for Americans who don’t love Big Brother.

But I digress.  So anyway, about a year and half ago Google started announcing that GA3 would be superseded by GA4 on July 1st 2023.  But a year and a half is such along time.  It might as well be never.  And so, sure enough, I ignored this warning for … a year and a half.  And who knew?  Eventually, July 1st 2023 turns out to actually exist.  In fact, it’s 15 hours, 27 minutes, 47.33 seconds away!

As is my way last night at around 1 am, I managed to get the new GA4 link set up on my site dashboard.  Of course, the link isn’t really producing any data but that could take as much as 48 hours according to the helpful scolding I receive from Google whenever I look at the output.  So probably for the next few days (and probably much longer) I won’t have GA4 telling me that anybody is out there.  Of course, the website dashboard has an access log of the clicks but it doesn’t provide a trendline and totals so it’s not as useful or convenient.  What it means is I will be forced to understand yet another new system because of the unstoppable march of PROGRESS.  Ah well.

So, the good news is that you’re all still out there even if Google’s “Eye of Sauron” isn’t hooked up to my local palantir.  The bad news is that I wasted and am still wasting precious time messing around with these absurd systems that inevitably become less useful and less convenient every time they roll out a new edition.  But the upside is that even if the whole system crashes and burns at midnight tonight, it will still be the first day of July and that is cause for celebration in and of itself.  For the last ten days it has been cloudy and raining almost every day.  But yesterday it cleared up, and the forecast for today and tomorrow is sun.  So, I’ll let Silicon Valley’s minions have their way with my analytics and instead concentrate on more promising phenomena like some macro shots of the mushrooms that all that rain has engendered.

SCOTUS Bans Affirmative Action by Colleges. Finally!

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Now let’s ban it throughout American society.

 

Bud Light is the Canary in the Coal Mine

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The transgender attack on sanity may possibly be the straw that breaks the camel’s back.  There are some encouraging signs that people are thoroughly fed up.  What’s happening with Bud Light and Target, but especially Bud Light seems to indicate that people may have finally reached the breaking point and are unwilling to just accept another extension of the madness, this time including perpetrating horrible medical practices on children in the name of trans-health.

The boycott of Bud Light is an ongoing and actually strengthening phenomenon.  30% of the sales of this formerly popular beer have disappeared and don’t appear to be returning.  By siding with the TikTok “influencer” Dylan Mulvaney a so-called trans-woman they alienated a sizable chunk of their customer base and pointed to an effective way for normal people to push back against corporate support for ideologies and causes that threaten children.

Now the question remains whether the action will have an effect on Bud Light’s parent company Anheuser-Busch.  Will it alter their policies or not.  And then there is the larger question, will this action provide a spark that ignites a larger action to push back at the whole LGBTQ agenda.

So far there have been a slew of laws passed in red states against transitioning children and other practices that drag children into the LGBTQ world.  Governor Ron DeSantis has been very prominent in this legislative movement.  And federal judges have moved to block these laws.  Eventually the Supreme Court will have to step in and that will be one of the first places where we will see how effective the revolt against the trans-madness will be.

And Donald Trump has taken a first step to nationalize this movement by vowing to get legislation banning medical procedures; puberty blockers and surgeries; that “transition” minors.  And this being the beginning of the presidential election season it’s possible that the transgender issue might become the focus issue for the whole election.

Or it might not.  And that’s the crux of this essay.  When a society no longer protects its children from madness; when in fact, the medical community itself is the source of the threat to children, then that society is doomed.  If the population of the United States fails to rally successfully against the forces that threaten to harvest its children as fodder for medical experimentation, then there is absolutely no hope of that society surviving.  It will dissolve into an atomized mob of lunatics stumbling along toward the grave.  And it will deserve it.

So, I’m extremely interested in what goes on during 2023-2024.  I’m convinced that if a successful national or at least local resistance to the transgender agenda doesn’t emerge then we are finished as a society.  As I said, if defense of children is no longer a strong enough reflex to rally a people, then that people is as good as dead already.

Alternatively, if there is a successful movement to reject the sexualization of children then I think that something can still be done to save the larger society we live in.  I’ve more or less written off the American project.  I’ve concentrated my efforts on finding work arounds for surviving in a degraded America.  I contend that families that decide to remain in the United States have to take actions to protect their children against the public school system in particular and from the federal government’s influence in general.

But if a larger movement awakens around protecting children from these harmful government influences, then I might be convinced that all hope isn’t lost for this country.  So, this is a test case.  Let’s see if America passes or fails.

Indiana Jones and the Last Straw

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I wonder who got custody of Shia LaBeouf.

Marketing Geniuses At Bud Light Have Been Fired

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Well it’s finally been confirmed:

“The two top Anheuser-Busch marketing executives who were placed on leave amid the company shakeup no longer work for the brand, a source inside Anheuser-Busch confirmed in texts obtained by the Daily Caller on Tuesday.

Group Vice President for Marketing Daniel Blake and Bud Light Marketing Vice President Alissa Heinerscheid are “gone gone,” according to obtained text messages with a current regional head of marketing. The Caller is granting anonymity to the source to discuss legally fraught internal company policy.”

Hopefully she’ll be able to get a job as a hall monitor in some middle school somewhere.  We wish her great success in the future.

Disney Hemorrhaging Money on Woke Films – Everyone Astonished

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So, let’s talk about something less depressing than the train wreck that is Western Civilization.  Let’s laugh at the misfortune of Hollywood.  And specifically let’s mock Disney and their putrid movies.  Look at this article and the underlying video.

“The YouTube box office analyst known as Valliant Renegade laid out his argument in a recent video in which he estimated that many Disney blockbusters actually lost money or barely broke even during their theatrical runs despite the news media spinning them as hits.

They include Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, Thor: Love and Thunder, Ant-man and the Wasp: Quantumania, and Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 3.

Two of the titles were outright bombs — Strange World and Lightyear — while two others are still in theaters, The Little Mermaid and Elemental.”

Now, admittedly, Disney has deep pockets.  They can absorb losses that would bankrupt smaller companies and move forward.  But let’s think for a moment about how they will analyze these problems and what their idea will be to address them.

They will see that these films include heaping doses of progressive girl power, gay themes and anti-white and anti-male bias and they will assume that the problem is too many racist and sexist Americans refusing to celebrate wokeness sufficiently.  After all, what parent wouldn’t want to send his kids to a movie with a gay kid as the main character?  Or why wouldn’t a Buzz Lightyear origin story benefit from a lesbian kiss?  Why would this make parents uncomfortable?

So, their solution to this rejection of woke content will be … doubling down on girl power, gay themes and anti-white and anti-male bias!  Now how could that possibly fail?

So, I’m incredibly happy for Disney.  This winning strategy may be able to do the impossible; namely bankrupt the largest remaining Hollywood studio.  And just to keep things hopping along comes the fifth Indiana Jones movie.  And from everything I’ve heard it’s going to be a humdinger.  Picture if you can an eighty-year-old Harrison Ford shuffling around the set getting hen-pecked and brow beaten by his “god-daughter” as she performs the heroic stunts and he gets lost in the caves and probably soils himself.  Oh yeah, that’s gonna be box office gold.

There is some word on the street that some of this is beginning to dawn on Disney’s front office and there might be a program to step back from the precipice of woke financial suicide.  But that wouldn’t be my favorite outcome.  I really hope they give us some more Captain Marvel and Rey Skywalker and She-Hulk and whatever trans-super-hero they currently have on the drawing board.  This is really good stuff.  It will reinforce to parents just how screwed up the role models that Disney pushes on their kids are.  It will dovetail with the gender dysphoria that seems to have magically exploded among the teen and pre-teen age groups that are Disney’s target audience.

So, yeah, I do hope that other studios start to return to healthier cinematic fare.  It’s high time that some of them figure out that there is an enormous domestic and international audience for healthy role models in the super-hero genre and in other genres too.  But for Disney I hope they never turn back.  If they crash and burn it would be a powerful lesson for the corporate world.  And it comes right at the point where conservative boycotts seem to be picking up steam.

What a wonderful coincidence.

Guest Contributor – ArthurinCali – 26JUN2023 – Not Forever

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As we cannot see what the future holds for America, the historical record is the best we must go by. Numerous empires in the world have risen and fallen to ruin due to internal hubris, and my thought is that ours will be no different. All the signs point to decline, from moral decay in society and financial overstretch, to military misadventures overseas. Looting the treasury phase as Zman points out, is an apt description of what we are currently seeing. TPTB are more concerned with what happens thousands of miles away vs. what can be seen only a few states from our nation’s capital. How long can it continue? Another decade? A few weeks? It is hard to describe just how out of touch the ruling class is with the people they lord over. This alone might be a godsend as when the collapse finally happens (without a nuclear fireball, hopefully) there will still be pockets of sanity and quasi-civilization around the country. My current reading list includes a lot more historical instances of these periods; Weimar Germany, England, and France after ruling class collapse, and of course, the time of Reconstruction after the American Civil War. It will NOT be pleasant, nor easy during these times. Many first-hand accounts attest to this. But, I stay hopeful that a sort of rebirth can occur. We cannot be ruled by idiots forever.

Life Imitates the Babylon Bee

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My state has one upped this gag.  We have bridges that have been declared dangerous for decades but the state mechanism for repairing them is completely impenetrable.  Eventually the state will have to be permanently divided along the lines of all the small streams that traverse it.  Soon regional dialects will develop and eventually mutually unintelligible languages but the bridges will just become place names that adorn maps as we stare across these small bodies of water that will forever divide us.  Damn you Mayor Pete.