Home » Open thread 6/13/23

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Open thread 6/13/23 — 33 Comments

  1. To paraphrase, “A smart house divided against itself….” Oh forget it…

  2. After we sold our home we lived in a new 2-BR/2BA apartment for 11 months. We had no choice but to set up the thermostat with an off-site cloud arrangement. I have always set our AC to 78 degrees. After Gov. Newsom made some sort of address regarding energy use during the statewide heat-wave, our thermostat elevated to 80 degrees and was out of our domain for adjustment. This I would place money on….Newsom, Pelosi, et al would enjoy any temperature they desire under any circumstances. In fact, I couldn’t help but notice he had a long-sleeve sweatshirt on when he made the address. Wish the sleeping populace would wake up to the reality of our government overseers.

  3. I couldn’t help but notice [Newson] had a long-sleeve sweatshirt on when he made the address.

    Sharon W:

    During Nixon’s administration I recall Democrats being apoplectic that Nixon would set White House air conditioners so low in the summer that he could enjoy a hot roaring fire in the fireplace like it was winter.

  4. Talk about a real “campaign issue.”

    While Biden and the White House praise and obsess about pronouns and LGBTQ+ issues, there are many hundreds of thousands of direct victims–people being killed, crippled, and destroyed, and indirect victims–their families and their communities–of the China produced Fentanyl that is streaming across the Southern border, which has been left wide open by Biden’s policies.

    Take a look on Youtube for scenes of this destruction–most notably exemplified by the Kensington section of Philadelphia, but no doubt, duplicated in New York city, Detroit, Oakland, and in other major (and minor) cities across this country.

    Fentanyl’s devastating effects now made even worse by the reported addition of the animal tranquilizer Xylazine, which is now being used to cut Fentanyl to make the new street drug “Tranq,” which sometimes leaves it’s users bent over in a U shape, and suffering from open necrotic lesions on their extremities which often necessitate amputations.

    Grave threats to our country and it’s people like this are what a real President–one who actually cared for his country and it’s people–should and would be focused on like a laser, and working day and night to fix.

  5. …the animal tranquilizer Xylazine, which is now being used to cut Fentanyl to make the new street drug “Tranq,” which sometimes leaves it’s users bent over in a U shape, and suffering from open necrotic lesions on their extremities which often necessitate amputations.

    –Snow on Pine

    At my cafe I usually sit in a window seat facing UNM across the street and a distressing number of homeless trudge up and down Central Ave all day like zombies. Very sad.

    Lately I am noticing that several are hunched over badly like they have a spinal condition. I wonder if I’m seeing Xylazine’s effects.

  6. Snow on Pine said, “. . . Biden and the White House praise and obsess about pronouns and LGBTQ+ issues . . .”

    Hey now, a tranny who flashed her (presumably fake) breasts after Brandon’s Pride event is now banned from the WH: “The White House has banned trans influencer Rose Montoya after she flashed her breasts at President Biden’s Pride party — blasting the stunt as ‘inappropriate and disrespectful.’ Montoya, 27, was barred from the executive mansion on Tuesday, as footage went viral of her pulling her shirt and cupping her breasts moments after meeting Biden on the South Lawn at a Pride party Saturday.”
    https://nypost.com/2023/06/13/rose-montoya-now-barred-from-white-house/

    I wonder whether Hunter was there to enjoy the “scenery.”

    More about Montoya here:
    https://nypost.com/2023/06/13/who-is-rose-montoya-the-trans-influencer-that-went-topless-at-the-white-house/

    Among other distinctions, she’s given speeches at Yale and Stanford.

  7. San Francisco continues to go downhill. Some commentators are starting to call it a “doom loop.”

    Owners of the big downtown mall on Market Street are abandoning it to the lenders. It was a prosperous, classy place not long ago.

    30% of downtown commercial real estate is vacant.

    Residential real estate values have dropped 17% from their peaks.

    Sometimes it seems like nutty, stupid stuff can go on forever without affecting much.

    But “slowly, then suddenly” has a way of catching up.

  8. When you think of it, this country has been under chemical assault for decades now; not by toxic gases, but by toxic drugs.

    Fentanyl, in particular, the latest drug, produced by our adversary China, transported through our supposed friendly ally and neighbor Mexico, and into our country via our wide open Southern border.

    A few years ago it was the “opioid crisis,” as millions of doses of things like OxyContin were over prescribed, with what happened to the people of the small communities in the hills and hollers of West Virginia a particularly bad example. *

    In the case of Marijuana—reports of whose harmful effects are increasingly showing up in medical journals–we have no excuses, we are poisoning ourselves by decriminalization/legalization, with a side dish of lightened jail sentences, and wonder why, for instance, that stoned drivers are causing a lot more accidents on our roads.

    Just over the last dozen or so years alone, cumulatively how many millions of individuals here in the U.S. have died, how many families were traumatized and destroyed, how many neighborhoods and cities pushed down the road towards destruction?**

    Millions of deaths, millions of families affected, hundreds of thousands currently addicted, and an untold number of people, families, neighborhoods and cities reeling under the effects—direct and indirect–of these drugs.

    And now comes Fentanyl and Xylazine. ***

    Yet, here we are, with no effective program to stop this slaughter.

    They say the “war on drugs” was a failure, but at least it was an attempt at a solution.

    Today, I see no real attempts at all—see the free needle and Narcan vending machines now being installed in New York city.

    There are a lot of ways to destroy a society from within, and pushing drugs on a populace is a very effective one.

    * See https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/welcome-williamson-w-va-where-there-are-6-500-opioid-n843821

    ** https://www.bizpacreview.com/2023/05/28/shocking-video-of-philadelphia-tranq-zombies-is-a-horrifying-glimpse-of-life-in-dem-controlled-city-136311

    *** See https://www.newsweek.com/xylazine-tranq-zombie-drug-explained-1783286

  9. Here’s a funny Alexa story: We have a Facebook portal that we got during COVID, so we could converse with my mom. It’s got a full-size screen, built in camera and microphone, and uses Alexa’s operating system. It’s freakin’ great for talking with people, because it’s high-fidelity, high-resolution, and the camera automatically tracks and zooms. It’ll follow you around the room. We got it because my mom was starting to struggle with dementia, and of course the whole COVID lockdown thing had her isolated, and this was a good way to break through.

    To use it you say: “Hey Portal – call Joe Blow” And Alexa looks up your Facebook contacts and says, “Call Joe Blow – right?” Then using Messenger, it calls up Joe’s smart phone and you’re talking face-to-face.

    Now: My wife’s aunt has an unusual name – the same as a slang term for a lesbian. Alexa gets offended at the use of potentially offensive language – and bleeps it out ! So when you ask to call her aunt, you then get the Alexa response, automatically censored: “Call Annie {bleep} – right?” It’s the damnedest thing. The Borg can’t bring itself to repeat what you just said, for confirmation. Now you’re faced with a leap of faith: Did Alexa bleep out the right cuss word, or a different one? Do I say ‘Yes’ or ‘No’?

  10. Re cb’s comment about Amazon and shutting off info we send to the cloud.

    Since I am older, I use Amazon Prime to get more everyday living items. It’s easier if it is delivered to my door vs going to the store and getting the heavy or bulky items. I guess I can blame covid for the change in this routine. I also use Kindle Fire to cruise the internet, usually more conservative sites – might need to change that process. At least I don’t have Ring, sweeper, Alexa etc. I never bought into the other “internet of things” concept. Maybe when I am much older and need more home assistance, I’ll sign up for those things.

    But, today was the first day the DuckDuckGo blocked YouTubes videos for this site as well as Instapundit. This was for my laptop, not the Kindle. This morning I could see/access the open thread video, now I have to go “unblock” the video.

    Strange timing… oh well…wait, who is that at my….. 😉

    Have a great evening… now to see what’s happened today.

  11. P.S.–If you happen to look at some of the U.S., Canadian, U.K, and Australian “Border Control” series on Youtube you will see that, in addition to their work at border entry points and airports–where they also find a lot of people trying to smuggle drugs into their various countries in their cars, on their bodies, in their bodies, in major shipments from overseas transported by truck, and in every conceivable thing that these drugs can be concealed in–they also screen incoming mail and packages.

    Moreover, you will notice that in every episode these mail and package screeners find lots of illegal drugs coming from overseas, and concealed in every possible manner–in toys, in electronics–behind the keyboards or screens of laptops are favorites, in supposed food and candies, in statues, concealed in the linings of books, in supposed heavy machinery, dissolved in liquids, even in clothing that has been soaked in narcotics (there is a way for recipient drug dealers to use particular liquids to get the narcotics back out of the clothing).

    It is quite an onslaught by those who unceasingly try, in every way they can, to inject this poison into these countries.

  12. That Philadelphia tranq video looks like something out of the dystopian film “Twelve Monkeys.”

  13. gallchobhair—I don’t know how many people actually have seen the effects of Fentanyl and Zxlazine—up close and personal—on our people, run into some “zombie” addict, bent over double on our streets, so I hope that by clicking on some of the links above these people will get a real appreciation of the hell the addicts are in, and the gravity of this situation.

  14. My latest French trick is to watch English films with French subtitles.

    So right now I’m watching “Legally Blonde” (2001). It’s a silly rom-com fantasy, easy to follow, in which the queen gal hopes to win back the king dude by using her blonde wits to succeed in Harvard Law School. Three female characters are named Elle, Brooke and … Chutney. You get the picture.

    It’s kinda unbearable. Except it’s such a welcome blast of crazy young American confidence that it’s almost heartbreaking in the midst of our current climate.

    “Legally Blonde” made a ton of money — $141 mil box office on an $18 mil budget. It came out the summer before 9-11 changed everything.

    It seems we’ve been lurching unpleasantly one way of another since.

  15. Re: BTO, Alex Kapranos of the aughts band, Franz Ferdinand (cf. Take Me Out), says one of the categories to boost qualification of a good Rock-n-Roll song is “the moronic.” That’s why the stutter works: it’s moronic.

  16. …it’s moronic.

    Desertowl:

    I would add, defiantly moronic.
    ____________________________

    And these children that you spit on
    As they try to change their worlds
    Are immune to your consultations
    They’re quite aware of what they’re going through

    Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes (Turn and face the strange)
    Ch-ch-changes, don’t tell them to grow up and out of it

    –David Bowie, “Changes [Official Lyric Video]”
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4BgF7Y3q-as

    ____________________________

    I was still young enough when I heard that to identify.

  17. Tucker Carlson:
    ___________________________________

    It’s been inevitable since February 16 2016. that’s the day Donald Trump made a blood enemy of the largest and most powerful organization in human history which would be the federal government.

    …we can point to the precise moment that permanent Washington decided to send Donald Trump to prison. here it is it’s from the Republican candidates debate in Greenville South Carolina:

    “we should have never been in Iraq; we have destabilized the Middle East. They lied, okay. They said there were weapons of mass destruction there were none and they knew there were none there were no weapons of mass destruction.”
    ___________________________________

    I agree with Tucker much of the time. But this sounds like a terrible oversimplification.

    Within two years of the Iraq War’s beginning Democrats were thoroughly opposed to the Iraq War and Obama rode that horse all the way to the White House. The Deep State was more than OK with Obama.

    The federal government’s problem with Trump was his populist threat to their power.
    ___________________________________

    They’re not after me. They are after you.

    –Donald Trump

  18. huxley:

    Tucker is good on some things and really bad on others. This time what he says is ludicrously simplistic. It’s also factually incorrect, because Trump had been speaking out against the war in Iraq very very consistently long before Trump was running for president. I wrote about that in an article I wrote about his hatred of George W. Bush, whom he started excoriating for the Iraq War back in 2007. See this.

  19. I wrote about his hatred of George W. Bush, whom he started excoriating for the Iraq War back in 2007.
    ==
    IIRC, it was in 2004 that Trump began to critique Bush. Trump’s judgment at that time was that the result of the disorder would be that the baddest meanest character in Iraq would take control “and he will have weapons of mass destruction”. The prediction proved incorrect.
    ==
    George W. Bush has burned his bridges to the people who voted for him. He is best forgotten.
    ==
    If we have any policy sense, the National Archives will construct a modular presidential records center in Kansas City and the archival material in the presidential libraries will be relocated there, one module per president with a concourse connecting them. The physical plant and the gewgaws remaining in the presidential libraries can be deeded over to the county governments hosting them and taken off the books of the federal government. If the county governments in question want to auction the stuff off on eBay, great. While we’re at it, take away their security details once they’ve been out of office for 12 years. Jacqueline Onassis shlepped around Manhattan for 19 years with no more security than that provided by the doorman of her building and Richard Nixon and his wife spent their last years in a low density suburb in Bergen County, NJ with no security detail at all. We shouldn’t have federal police officers hauling Jimmy Carter’s luggage. Oh, and one other thing: limit interstate contracts for speaking fees to a maximum value determined by a formula which has employee compensation per worker per annum of the country at large as an argument and which has the hiring institution’s FTE workforce as an argument. The speaking fee racket is a scandal and a fine example of the other-people’s-money problem in higher education. And have federal investigators audit publishing companies who lose large sums of money from giving huge advances to politicians for boilerplate. Whose bribes are they laundering?

  20. Our World in Data has been compiling and publishing country datasets on COVID hospitalizations with metrics going back to 15 July 2020. There are three salient pieces: hospital admissions, the hospital census, and the ICU census. Prior to recent weeks, the nadir in regard to these numbers was reached in April 2022 as Omicron receded. As we speak, weekly hospital admissions are 32% below last year’s nadir, the hospital census is 42% below, and the ICU census is 49% below. Worldometers has been compiling case counts and death counts in the United States and abroad. Case counts in the United States have been declining since the 3d week of December, 2022, and there is nothing in current data to indicate that COVID mortality will soon increase. Death counts were in decline from about 14 January to 11 May. Between 11 May and 2 June, death counts fluctuated up and down but averaged about 94 per day. Note during the years running from 2013 to 2019, the mean annual death toll from seasonal flu was about 34,600 per year, or about 95 per day.

  21. Snow on Pine — It is indeed horrifying. I’ve never seen anything quite like it.

  22. One of the arguments used in favor of decriminalizing marijuana–and sometimes other so called “recreational drugs” (my local doctor now has an intake form which asks patients if they use such “recreational drugs”)–is that such use is a “victimless crime” i.e. the idea that “it’s my body and I can do what I want with it.”

    A little actual thought, though, should destroy this argument, since there are always likely to be “ripple effects.”

    What effect does your drug use have on your family members, on your friends and your relationships with them, on whatever romantic partners you might have, on your work, study, or even spiritual life, presuming you have one, what effects (both short and especially long terms effects) on you health and, therefore, on your need for medical treatment, and the burden that might add to local health care providers, and what effects might it have on the community around you?

    Thus, unless you are a hermit and live alone, out in the wilderness, there are always likely to be ripple effects due to your drug use–“no man is an island,” and all that.

  23. During Nixon’s administration I recall Democrats being apoplectic that Nixon would set White House air conditioners so low in the summer that he could enjoy a hot roaring fire in the fireplace like it was winter.
    ==
    I don’t recall the apoplexy, but I do recall a televised tour of the White House with one of his daughters wherein she did say her father liked to have a fire near him when he was working and that it had caused some sort of problem with the HVAC system or the fire alarms. IMO, this odd quirk of Nixon’s is one he should have paid for out of pocket.

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