Category: Current Events

Very Funny Deep Fake

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This is not a real video made by Tom Cruise.  It’s a computer simulation.  But it’s funny.  I think it captures the essence of Tom Cruise’s over the top desire for authenticity.  Hopefully he’d get a kick out of this gentle mockery.  If not then he’s just another Hollywood loser.

Bakhmut Has Been Erased

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The Russians have pushed the Ukrainian troops out of the last of the high rise buildings in the west of Bakhmut.  Currently the Ukrainians are contesting areas north and south of the city.  There are estimates that the Ukrainian forces west of Bakhmut number between 10,000 and 30,000.  There is speculation that instead of the Ukrainian counter-offensive occurring in the south it might instead occur around Bakhmut.

The video footage I’ve seen of the city as it currently exists is shocking.  If Bakhmut had received a one megaton nuclear detonation at the center of the city it would not look any more devastated than it currently does.  Except for the skeletons of a few high rise buildings at the western edge, it’s been reduced to pulverized rubble.

What’s going on there is madness.  This is civil war.

Target Took a Billion Dollar Hit Because of Shoplifting and Other Crime

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In the post George Floyd environment retailers are suffering enormous shoplifting losses in blue run cities.  Not surprisingly, these companies are closing down their stores in the worst hit areas including San Francisco, Portland and Chicago.

Hopefully Target and the others aren’t going to complain that they aren’t getting what they asked for when they backed the Democrats and the BLM movement.  After all law and order is just a dog whistle for racism.  Those brave shoplifters and stickup men are helping to strike a blow for black reparations one felony at a time.

Another Company Had a Feminist Scold Speaking for Them. Oops.

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German gun maker Heckler and Koch must have had a woman on their marketing team typing away on Twitter when she decided to put in her two cents about Miller Lite’s war on bikini models.  Eventually someone with a brain caught onto what was going on and deleted the offending tweets.  And then they put up the tweet at the bottom of this post to distance themselves from the statement.  It will be interesting to see how this progresses.

And the reactions

 

Friends to the Rescue

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Ah, freedom.  There’s nothing like it.  The air smells fresher the food tastes better.  Even the damn birds sounded happier.  I walked out of a meeting this morning with the prospect of doing whatever the hell I want to do for next four days.  Finally.

Recently I talked about how the blue cities are on a trajectory to become like Detroit.  Coincidentally I read an article in a rag called Financial Times that claimed that the cities were currently suffering from a similar problem to what happened to Detroit.

“For decades, the beautiful Detroit downtown buildings of the late 19th and early 20th century stood nearly empty, thanks to a combination of racism, the loss of US auto-industry predominance, rising crime and violence, and white flight to the outer rings of the city.”

I love how the primary reason cited is racism.  Rising crime and violence is third.  So, the solution to the problem in the article is to turn the empty commercial space in New York and Chicago into residential and small business commercial space.

It’s like the woman who wrote this article is from Mars.   Hundreds of thousands of people have left New York and large numbers have left the other blighted cities since the George Floyd riots.  But she wants to fill up the empty glass and steel skyscrapers that fill downtown and midtown Manhattan, some of the most expensive commercial real estate in the world, with coffee shops and struggling actors?  Apparently, the author of this article watched too many episodes of “Friends” and thinks there are millions of Joey Tribbianis lining up to move back into the city.

And probably only actors and drug dealers are currently crazy enough to want to move into Manhattan.  Everyone else is either stuck there or getting out.  So, what gives?

Well, this is a finance magazine.  It’s currently predicted that the next financial sector that will succumb to the stagflation economy will be the commercial real estate market.  It’s natural that these finance types are hypothesizing how to prevent all of that value from evaporating when the bottom drops out of the urban commercial real estate market.

Of course, it wouldn’t occur to them to discover that the last time these cities were blighted by crime and violence the solution was voting for a law-and-order mayor and letting him restore order and prosperity to New York City.  That was Rudy Giuliani back in the 1990s.  I guess that’s too far back in ancient history for these geniuses.  Or maybe it’s just not allowed to think about anything like that.

The mindset of the writer of this piece is interesting.  She wants us to think that turning commercial real estate into rental apartments is a winning idea because a part of downtown Detroit has followed that idea and has “recovered somewhat.”  But downtown Detroit is no success story and it is a sad remnant of this former city of almost two million people.  Not since the Sack of Rome by the Visigoths has a more thorough job been done destroying a city.

But I think we could be seeing what the outcome will be for these cities.  Ruling out the rule of law and order we are left with creating a rump New York or Chicago in the center of the downtown where a small remnant of the city can exist, subsidized by billionaires and guarded by private security guards.  But Tribbiani better watch which way he walks when he leaves the Central Perk or it could be his last cup of bad coffee.

17MAY2023 – Stupid Progressive Overreach Headline for Today

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New York City will now track how much meat its citizens buy at the grocery store.  They can’t even keep their citizens safe from assault on the subway from schizophrenic street people but they’ll track your meat intake.  Anarcho-tyranny at its very stupidest and most maddening.

 

 

The End is in Sight

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Tuesday is the end of my ten-day ordeal.  A Chinese water torture of sorts.  Tomorrow will feel like being beaten for twelve hours with a bag full of oranges but knowing that only a single day stands between me and freedom makes me anxious to get it started.  I anticipate catastrophic failure, mob violence and accusations of mopery and dopery.  But it’s as if I can see the daylight shining through the hole punched through the Earth by the screaming asteroid of doom.  So, I am almost giddy with anticipation.  Bring it on, bring it on, bring it on.

I read most of the news today and other than that Miller Beer manifesto for sucking all the joy out of men drinking beer, I didn’t see anything all that exciting.  There were all the lefty rags admonishing Trump and DeSantis, “Let’s you and him fight!”  And there was that idiot Durham with his 300-page report confirming that the FBI started the Russia-gate investigation without any evidence and yet without any criminal or professional consequences for the conspirators.  There were all the economic warnings of the impending financial meltdown.  There was Biden claiming he was going to prevent the millions of immigrants that he invited to the border from coming in, somehow.  There was the ridiculous budget battle between McCarthy and Biden.

And all sorts of other apocalyptic headlines.  But none of them were ready for prime time quite yet.  I’m curious to see if McCarthy scares Biden into creating a budget.  That would be a major accomplishment.  But we’ll have to wait.

The rest of it is just stuffing to separate the beginning and end of these news sites.  It’s something to keep these journalists off the crack pipe.  Or is it fentanyl now?

I was getting Camera Girl some cold medicine at Wally-mart and I went past the $5 bin of DVDs.  And I spotted a copy of John Wick 1.  Now I saw it when it came out and kinda, sorta enjoyed it.  I mean, it’s so cartoonish that I enjoyed it as a cartoon.  And when the second one came out, I rented it.  And it was too cartoonish to enjoy.  The volume of bullets flying and the sheer numbers of people being shot is dizzying.  It almost gives you motion sickness.  I missed the third one.  And now there’s a fourth one coming out.  So, seeing that copy in the remainder bin of venerable old John Wick 1 made me feel nostalgic for the comfortable 5X speed that I remember from that classic.  After my ordeal is over tomorrow, I’m going to find two hours or whatever it was and watch Keanu Reeves do whatever it is that he does in motion pictures.  Sure, it’s stupid and sure it’s not acting but so what?  Where is there acting anymore?  Certainly not on tv.

Of late Camera Girl has been watching some of the innumerable and interchangeable cop and fireman series that are sprinkled across prime-time network tv.  Once in a while she’ll have one on while I’m in the room and recently I’ve discovered what these shows have become in the last ten years or so.  They’re soap operas.  The most important component of the plot is the girl cops or fire girls or NCIS girls emoting about their feeling to their male counterparts or talking to the other girls about which boy they’re in love with.  Honestly, this is what the women of America think a police precinct or firehouse or SWAT team is all about.  It’s completely unwatchable and I have chastised Camera Girl for her horrible taste in entertainment but being a girl herself she can’t see the problem.  So, I’ve asked her to find some time when I’m out of the house or in a coma to watch this sort of dreck.

So Wednesday I’ll resurface and try to have something somewhat clever to say.  But for now, it’s horror and anticipation that holds me in sway.  Enjoy your Tuesday.  We who are about to die salute you.

Miller Watched Budweiser’s Faceplant and Said, “Hold My Beer”

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I guess Miller doesn’t need normal men drinking their beer.  They saw the Bud Light debacle as a blueprint for their path forward in the American beer market.  From now on women and gay men will be their audience.  Hey, maybe they know what they’re doing.  But guys, let’s help them out and give all our business to the first beer company who says they like us as customers and don’t want to insult us.