Archive for October 2019
RBG, still alive
Last week, RBG appeared before a live audience at UC Berkely.
Do you remember a few months ago, a bunch of morons, some of whom leave dumb comments on my blog, were insisting that there was some vast conspiracy to hide that she was actually dead?
Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi
I am not that excited about the killing of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, which is consistent with me not being that excited about the killing of Osama bin Laden many years ago. I didn’t give Obama any praise for that, and I don’t give Trump any praise now. (On the other hand, I wouldn’t laud al-Baghdadi as an “austere religious leader” like the Washington Post did.)
Today the NY Times has an analysis (that’s really more of an op-ed posing as an objective analysis, like the fake-news NY Times often does) which says:
The death of the Islamic State’s leader in a daring nighttime raid vindicated the value of three traditional American strengths: robust alliances, faith in intelligence agencies and the projection of military power around the world.
But President Trump has regularly derided the first two. And even as he claimed a significant national security victory on Sunday, the outcome of the raid did little to quell doubts about the wisdom of his push to reduce the United States military presence in Syria at a time when terrorist threats continue to develop in the region.
Although I disagree with calling an op-ed an analysis, I can’t help but feel that we’ve heard a lot of bullshit from Trump and his supporters during the last few weeks. Trump said we had to remove troops from Syria because it was time to stop fighting “endless wars,” but apparently the troops are still there and we just won a victory in the endless war, a victory that Trump is all too happy to brag about. It looks more and more like the “withdrawal” fiasco was about Trump being too chicken to stand up to Erdogan, and then Trump retconning the betrayal of our Kurdish allies as a strategy to withdraw from “endless wars.” Of course the retcon is bullshit because no troops are being withdrawn from the Middle East, they are just being moved around, either to Syrian oil fields (where it sounds like they will be in harm’s way) or to Saudi Arabia.
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To Trump’s credit, unlike Obama who worried about the proper way to bury Osama bin Laden, Trump mocked and insulted Baghdadi, sending the right message to his followers.
Review, Jollibee’s chicken sandwich
This fried chicken sandwich is huge, and not like any other fast-food chicken sandwich I’ve ever had. Definitely head-and-shoulders above everything else. Although it does give off the impression that it’s extremely processed and not very natural.
The french fries were pretty ordinary. My advice is to skip the fries and just get the chicken sandwich which by itself surely has more than enough calories to ruin your diet.
Shooting at party in Texas
https://www.cnn.com/2019/10/27/us/texas-am-commerce-shooting/index.html
Appears to be NAM violence.
Black person with a handgun shoots at his enemy who is also black. Not clear why he shot a bunch of other people in addition, unless maybe he shot multiple times to to make sure his enemy was really dead, and he had really bad aim. Because it was at a crowded party, any shot that went awry would inevitably hit someone else.
Unlike in beta-male rage shootings, the shooter got away, since his goal wasn’t to go down in a blaze of glory, it was just to settle a score. And because the shooter used a handgun, and not an assault rifle favored by white beta-male ragers, the ratio of wounded to killed is much higher because handgun rounds have much less kinetic energy. A round from an AR-15 (the most popular rifle used by white beta-male ragers) might have more than ten times the kinetic energy of a round from a cheapo pistol.
More gun shots the next day at a vigil for the slain suggests that it could be part of an ongoing gang war of some type. Or the shots at the vigil could just be totally unrelated NAM violence.
Witnesses at the party are refusing to cooperate with the police. Because black people have been taught by the mainstream media to treat police as the enemy.
These shootings are a reminder of the benefit of following John Derbyshire’s rule 10(a): “Avoid concentrations of blacks not all known to you personally,” as well as 10(d), “Do not attend events likely to draw a lot of blacks.”
The Bangles live in Pittsburgh (1986)
If you’re a Bangles fan, this concert footage is amazing. (If you only know Manic Monday and Walk Like an Egyptian, then you can just skip to the 49-minute mark.)
Watching this makes me so sad that the Bangles gave a concert in walking distance from where I was living (in the fall of 1985 or winter or spring of 1986, not sure) and I didn’t take advantage of the opportunity to see them. I guess I wasn’t actually a Bangles fan until twenty, thirty years later.
I don’t need to point out that they have great 80s hair, but I’ll point it out anyway.
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I also noticed that the girls in the band are quite skinny, which is not especially unusual, then or now, for glamorous celebrity types.
I also noticed that Susanna Hoffs is always looking sideways, and while it’s sexy in short doses, it actually gets kind of weird looking if the camera lingers on her for a longer time. Her irises alternate between being at the extreme left or extreme right of her eye sockets.
I bet money on Donald Trump losing
In response to my assertion that Trump is going to lose the election, some commenters responded “but but but prediction markets say he has a 41% chance of winning.”
OK, if I really believe it I should put some money down on it.
I also learned that once you buy one “no,” you can buy other “nos” for no additional investment, so I added a bunch of other people who have zero chance of being the next president. And I bought one share of Pete Buttigieg by mistake. Blacks don’t like him, but he’s collecting more money than anyone else and the establishment could rally around him as a more moderate alternative to crazy left-wing Warren. There’s maybe an 8% chance of that happening.
Ann Coulter interview
Link to Ann Coulter interview at Frontline on PBS.
I agree with nearly everything she says.
The main theme of the interview is that she blasts Trump for hiring people who didn’t agree with the anti-immigration agenda.
She’s mad at Trump for humiliating Jeff Sessions who was the only guy on his cabinet who supported his anti-immigration agenda.
She says, “Trump is the most disloyal person I’ve ever seen. … He has absolutely no loyalty to anyone but himself.”
She says, “I don’t think I could debase myself enough to start claiming he’s playing 3D chess. No, he’s not playing 3D chess. He’s lazy, narcissistic.”
I was somewhat surprised that she’s not a fan of Stephen Miller. She believes that he has been blocking the hiring of other people who could get stuff done on immigration because he wants to be the number one immigration guy in the administration. She seems to know more about this than I do, so maybe she’s right.
She really hates Jared and Ivanka, and I feel that this is misplaced. Yeah, at heart they don’t agree with a lot of Trump’s agenda, but Trump chose to surround himself with people who don’t agree with his agenda, and it’s not because Ivanka was whispering stuff in his ear intentionally trying to ruin his administration. Don’t blame Trump’s character flaws on his daughter and son-in-law.
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Also, I agree with her on this: “I don’t think any progress can be made on anything in America until the media is destroyed and replaced by something with integrity.”
I say that as long as the mainstream media is a mouthpiece for extreme-liberal propaganda, winning elections is just winning a few battles while losing the war. of course it’s better to win some battles than to lose all of them, and winning the battle for the Supreme Court is pretty important, but conservatives have no battle plan at all for destroying and replacing the mainstream media, which means that conservatism is doomed.
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Here’s something where I disagree with Coulter. She says, “His immigration policy paper [on his campaign website] was magnificent. Did he write it? No, but he read it, I assume.”
I agree that it was a great paper, but I assume that he did NOT read the stuff that was posted on his website. In multiple debates, he appeared to not understand his own policy papers.
I wrote this in March 2016 after watching a debate:
We’ve suspected for a while that Trump doesn’t really know what’s in his position papers on his website, and he outsources them to TrueCon types who ignore what he says in his campaign speeches. It has finally been proven today. The diatribe in his immigration plan against H-1B visas is apparently not something he’s actually going to do if he becomes president.
It seems to me that Trump’s actual beef with immigration is that our laws are being violated. Trump believes in law and order.
But today we see that Trump actually buys into the standard big-corporation lies on immigration.
* There aren’t enough qualified Americans
* We lose “talented” people if they graduate college and then aren’t allowed to stay here and work
* We need foreigners to do jobs Americans won’t doWhen asked about his hotels’ use of H-2B visas, he could have said “I’m a businessman, I take advantage of the laws to make as much money as possible. But when I’m president, we are going to reform the H-2B program to create more jobs for Americans.” Instead, he just agrees with the standard corporate position that these are jobs Americans won’t do.
Review of Amino app
You probably never heard of Amino. I didn’t until recently when I accidentally came across an article about it. In one sentence, Amino can best be described as Reddit for children.
Just like Reddit, people can create their own communities, which are then managed and censored (or not) by the person who created it and his or her delegates. Also, like Reddit, people post anonymously.
Unlike Reddit, the Amino website has limited functionality and you have to use the app to get the full experience. (Instagram is also like that.) Amino gives users more options for creating hideously ugly posts, but kids seem to like that, and indeed that’s what really defines it as a kid’s app and not something that would appeal to many adults.
The most popular two topics are anime and kpop (that is Korean pop music, mostly featuring effeminate-looking young men). The LGBT+ board is also very popular. Yeah, there’s a huge LGBTQ presence on Amino. What’s not popular on Amino are topics that cool popular kids would be into, like sports (for boys) or cheerleading (for girls). Even Fortnite (massively popular videogame among young people) isn’t especially popular on Amino. “College Advice,” which you think would be a valuable and popular topic for young people, has only a meager 12,196 members compared to 860,284 members for “LGBT+.”
So it’s obviously only being used by kids with certain overlapping geeky interests, with a very significant percentage of kids who are into those things not being heterosexual. Although the feeling I get is that girls in these interest groups feel pressured to call themselves “bisexual” or “pansexual” even if it’s not what they really are. And I have no idea what the boys are thinking, because I can’t imagine ever wanting to be thought of as being a homo.
Ted Cruz 2020
I was able to obtain 247 shares of Ted Cruz winning the Republican nomination for only one cent per share!
I don’t know why anyone would sell it to me for that price. Even if you think it’s a guaranteed* way to make a penny, you’d be tying up the money for nearly a year and you’d lose out on not getting any interest on it. A much safer way to make a small (but more than twice as large as 1%/year) amount of money on a large investment is to invest in a short-term-maturity bond ETF like NEAR, MINT, or ICSH.
*It’s definitely not guaranteed. Ted Cruz was second place in 2016 behind Trump. The House is currently holding impeachment proceedings against Trump. Even if that fails, someone Trump’s age statistically has more than a 1% chance of dying or having a major health problem before the Republican nominating convention.
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UPDATE: I was informed by a commenter that I may misunderstand how Predict it treats “no” purchases. Allegedly, purchasing multiple “nos” don’t all reduce your account’s purchasing power because the system understands that only one “no” bet can be lost.
Lion of the Blogosphere 