The outfits didn’t seem to hamper them as much as one might think:
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Open thread 10/16/21 — 84 Comments
When I see old pics and video like this, I often try to estimate when the people in the video were born. OCD kicking in. 1906 and college girls. Perhaps some as young as 16 back then? Born circa 1890. That man they were putting snow on. About 40 years old? Born circa 1866, right after civil war.
Then I often think, if they lived to a hundred, how old were they when I was born in 1970 and how were they in age compared to my grandparents? Yes, I know, OCD.
The one great grandparent that I knew , would have been in these girls general age group.
When I knew him he was already old. But he was young once.
Like one of my relatives said, “ When you meet someone that is already old, you easily think of them as always being old, till you see pictures of them in their youth. “ ( Paraphrase)
One of my best friends knows how to handle a team of horses. I have ridden with him o’er many a hill and dale, sometimes in a sled in the winter. He’s now teaching his son-in-law how to do it. Note that the sled that tips and spills the young beauties into the snow is being pulled by a team of four. That is no mean feat. Note especially that even as the driver falls out of the sled, he does not let go of the reins.
There’s a valuable lesson in there.
jon baker, I can remember my maternal grandfather, who was born in 1874, and I knew my paternal grandparents quite well. They were born in 1881 and 1890.
Nowadays we take it for granted that a large proportion of the U.S. population is college-educated (I’ll leave it to other readers to comment on the quality of a contemporary college “education”)– according to the Bureau of the Census, 34% of the American adult population in 2020 had a bachelor’s degree or higher. We are also accustomed to statistics indicating that women now constitute a majority of college students– and have since the late 1970s.
The students in the 1906 sleigh ride video, however, were a very small segment of both the general American population and a minority among college students. In 1900, only 5% of American males between the ages of 18 and 21 were in college– 256,000. Most did not graduate, however, because a bachelor’s degree was not yet needed to find a decent job; many male college students left after two years of study because they could acquire a license to teach school after two years of course work.
Women were only a third of college students in the United States in 1900– 85,338, according to the 1900 census. Of these, 5,237 received bachelor’s degrees– which means that women, like men, often left college before completing their degree.
Male or female, college students in 1900 came from economically well-off families. While tuition and other costs were low by 2021 standards (Brown University in 1906 charged $105 for tuition, $48 for “incidental fees,” $60 for room, $150 for board, and $30 for books and laboratory fees; totaling $393 per year), the cost was still too high for most American families.
IOW, the college girls in the video were an extremely lucky group of young Americans, and not just because they could take a wintertime sleigh ride.
They might have been attending a women’s college.
And so long as the skirts aren’t tight, they provide a surprising freedom of movement. One of the girls who was upset gave the camera a quick look at boots and leggings underneath.
Late last night there were some comments on the old Bill Whittle posts going away.
Here is a way to get them back for online reading.
It has been said that criminal mobs operate similarly to autocratic governments except on a smaller scale, the reverse is also true.
It has been said that criminal mobs operate similarly to autocratic governments except on a smaller scale, the reverse is also true.
–geoffb
Don’t forget. We live on the Planet of the Apes.
Lower your expectations. Act accordingly.
Contrary to modern feminist myth, corsets were NOT painful, restrictive, damaging garments. Or at least not for everyone except the super-fashionable rich. The steel-boned fashion corsets of today are nothing like anyone would have worn 120 years ago; what they wore is more like what we would call “shapewear”.
Bernadette Banner, a Youtuber and “dress historian”, is absolutely a feminist but makes and wears Edwardian-era clothing full time. She’s got a bunch of videos about corsets, this one is just an example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rExJskBZcW0
I’m having a power outage and can’t post. Not sure when it will be fixed.
Speaking of mobs…
The NY Times tells me that “The Sopranos” is now one of the hottest shows to binge among the young, attributed to cynicism about America:
____________________________________
The show’s depiction of contemporary America as relentlessly banal and hollow is plainly at the core of the current interest in the show, which coincides with an era of crisis across just about every major institution in American life. “The Sopranos” has a persistent focus on the spiritual and moral vacuum at the center of this country, and is oddly prescient about its coming troubles: the opioid epidemic, the crisis of meritocracy, teenage depression and suicide, fights over the meaning of American history. Even the flight of the ducks who had taken up residence in Tony’s swimming pool — not to mention all the lingering shots on the swaying flora of North Jersey — reads differently now, in an era of unprecedented environmental degradation and ruin.
This sense of decline is present from the show’s very beginnings. In his first therapy session with Dr. Melfi, Tony tries to explain why he thinks he has panic attacks, why he suffers from stress. “The morning of the day I got sick, I’d been thinking: It’s good to be in something from the ground floor,” he says. “I came too late for that, I know. But lately, I’m getting the feeling that I came in at the end. The best is over.” Melfi tells him that many Americans feel that way.
huxley — So, the Times gets the crisis part correct. But aren’t they missing out on the ongoing collapse? The one they’ve engineered?.
Naval gazers can by myopic geezers, too.
Average age 19-20 ? By WWII they were the nation’s grandmothers. Indeed, they were the baby boomer generation’s grandmothers.
I knew two of my my great-grandparents- my father’s maternal grandmother, and my mother’s maternal grandmother. Both were born in the late 19th century, and would have been close to the age of the young women in this film.
huxley,
Only callow and indoctrinated youth could imagine that the Sopranos were ever reflective of any but a miniscule subset of Americans.
An entire generation of poor, poor, pitiful mes.
Most of whom voted for Biden.
My maternal grandmother was born in 1888, and so belonged to the generation of the college girls in the film. She didn’t go to college but instead went to a normal school, which was a teacher training institution that prepared high school-age young people to become elementary school teachers. The normal schools in Pennsylvania became state teachers’ colleges by the time Nana’s youngest son, my Uncle Bob, went to Bloomsburg to study just before WWII (he ended up in the Army as a military censor during the war because he was a college graduate). The state teachers’ colleges were in turn upgraded to state universities in the 1980s.
Nana saw a lot of changes over the course of her life. She knew both of her grandfathers, who were veterans of one of the German-speaking Pennsylvania regiments in the Army of the Potomac during the Civil War. She was 32 when she was first able to vote in a presidential election. And she lived not only to see her six grandchildren go to college but also to watch astronauts walking on the moon on live television. I am glad, though, that she isn’t alive now to witness the current Washington s—show.
My grandfather was born in 1893 and died in 1990 when I was 21. A regret of mine is that I was too young and to interested in my own thing to really talk to him about all the changes in his lifetime. He grew up in a farmhouse with no electricity or indoor plumbing and died in a big house over looking the ocean.
My grandmother was a few years younger than these college girls and she went to a teacher’s college as she called it.
We would ask her where she went to school and she would say the ‘University of Mary’ and some wiseguy would say ‘I didn’t know Mary had a college’. She was the first member of her family to go to college.
huxley ~ My wife and I watched a lot of the Sopranos until one evening she told me to turn the TV off, then she went on to say there is something wrong when you learn to like people in the story and appreciate their problems yet they are bad, evil, immoral people. I kind of liked all the silly stuff going on however she gets emotionally involved with the characters on TV or in books.
At the same time because I am old I identified with the Mad Men people with their drinking, smoking and treating people rather badly because we did that in the old days, not saying it was right but we were jerks at times.
huxley —
“in an era of unprecedented environmental degradation and ruin.”
Jeez, I know it’s the NYT, but really, what color is the sky on their planet?
Bryan Lovely,
It never ceases to amaze me how some of these ‘news’ pieces slip in these kind of totally bizarre statements into articles that have nothing to do with the topic.
This phenomenon was perfected in the age of Trump where almost every article had to have an apocalyptic reference to Trump even if it was about flowers or baseball.
Griffin —
I think it’s become so reflexive they hardly notice they’re doing it. Back in 2007 my then-wife and I wandered into an open house in our Seattle neighborhood where we were renting. “Hi!” said the real estate agent. “Hi, how are you?” we said. “Oh, just fine, now if only the President would die!”
[record scratch] … Err, what? The fact that someone would say that to total strangers to whom presumably she would like to make a sale shows just how bubbled these sorts of people are. And that was referring to Bush, not Trump.
TJ, Geoffrey Britain:
I like to try and understand things, before I leap to political judgment.
I find it interesting that young people are watching “The Sopranos.” I’m not convinced that the NY Times is right either to rush to its leftist judgment, which flows from its leftist narrative.
The young might be watching “The Sopranos” because they have more time for videos on account of Covid plus “The Sopranos” is a brilliantly written show which they haven’t seen before.
It may appear that the show glorifies mob life, but if one pays attention the show is quite explicit how horrible these people are. We do watch Tony’s family and crew undergo good vs evil struggles and mostly they fail.
huxley,
There is also the new Sopranos origin movie that has received a ton of attention and has probably drawn people to the series. All these streaming outlets are so dodgy with their viewership numbers that make it hard to tell how many people are watching anything so the media often resorts to twitter buzz to gauge things and of course that is not the real world.
“JUST IN – China tested a nuclear capable hypersonic gliding vehicle that traveled around the globe through low orbit in space before cruising to the target. US intelligence and military officials stunned.”
Much Cope-ium in the thread about how Chinky totally must have stolen all the tech.
Wakey wakey.
My mother was born in 1898 and lived to 103. My kids used to fly back to Chicago as teens to spend a week with her and hear her stories. Her father was born in 1849 so he was old enough to have been drummer boy in the Civil War. He was 50 when she was born and she was 40 when I was born so our generations were compressed.
I have taken some of my kids on a sleigh ride like that one. It was in Leavenworth Washington and the horses were used in lumbering summer.
“The Sopranos” works on multiple levels.
My favorite scene from the final episode wasn’t the Onion Rings in the Restaurant, but the one where the ever-lost AJ, Tony’s son, is sitting with his girlfriend in his expensive SUV stopped in the woods and listening to Bob Dylan’s “It’s Alright, Ma” (1965) — perhaps Dylan’s most bitter song about the hypocrisy of modern American life.
So AJ and Rhiannon are mesmerized by Dylan’s lyrics and remark how prophetic the song is. Then they start making out and the car catches fire. It seems AJ ignored a warning about the catalytic converter, didn’t shut off the car, and the converter ignited the leaves under the car. The couple get out, but the car is destroyed.
Jordan Peterson argues that the problem with social justice concerns is that it’s a cheap way to feel better about oneself. It’s easy to strike a pose. It’s hard to do the work to make one’s life and the lives of others better.
It may appear that the show glorifies mob life,
“The Godfather” movies did more to glorify mob life, I believe. I must say I did not watch “The Sopranos” as I rarely watch TV.
There is also the new Sopranos origin movie that has received a ton of attention and has probably drawn people to the series
Griffin:
No doubt. However, according to the article, renewed interest in “The Sopranos” has been on the boil for a few years.
___________________________________________
“We always had our audience that grew up with us,” Imperioli [actor who played Christopher, Tony’s nephew] played said. “They watched it when it first aired. They had, you know, pasta and pizza parties on Sunday night, and they grew older with us.” The die-hards within this group were the sorts of guys you might have met at the Silver Legacy in Reno: guys who love mob movies and think mobsters are cool, guys who know the manager at the casino. But then something changed. Around 2019, Imperioli joined Instagram and discovered “all these fan sites and meme sites” dedicated to the show, and all these young people who’d made their avatar image a picture of Christopher in a neck brace. He also noticed that people in their 20s and 30s were coming up to him asking for selfies. Just over that last week in August, he told me, he saw three people with “Sopranos” tattoos.
Zaphod:
Per our recent conversation about buying a new desktop, I decided to splurge and pulled the trigger on an Intel “Ghost Canyon” NUC.
I have a small study and I like miniaturized stuff, so I’ve been watching the mini PCs. I bought a cheap one to run a screen in the living room.
Early this year I looked at the “Ghost Canyon” NUC but then it was pure bare bones — no RAM, no disk, no OS — for ~$1800 or so. Absurd.
However, there are now units packaged with 32 GB, 2.0 TB and Windows 10 Pro for $1600. That’s more than I intended, but quite doable.
I usually buy the sweet price spot a few generations behind. So it will be fun to treat myself to a more state-of-the-art machine.
If graphics cards ever come down, I might even get a decent one and see what current gaming is like.
Bryan Lovely @ 5:38pm,
I can’t even count the number of times I’ve experienced what you wrote about; a perfectly mundane situation where someone I barely know makes an extreme statement about politics. Like you, I’ve had it happen from people hoping to get money from me, or sell me a product. Mention of murder is not unusual. Even extermination of people who may have voted for a politician. I could maybe understand if there were some big, national scandal that had evidence, like Watergate, but when it’s a politician 30% – 70% of one’s countrymen may have voted for, why risk losing business from making outrageous statements? Why make outrageous statements at all in front of people one does not know?
(I hope neo is safe and her power is restored soon!)
Why make outrageous statements at all in front of people one does not know?
Rufus T. Firefly:
A chance to bond or flush out the Evil Ones! Win-win.
The modern bicycle was introduced in the late 1800s, so it seems likely that many of these girls had bicycling experience. I’ve seen some rather strong contemporary statements about the positive psychological and health benefits of biking to women, such as this one:
“Better than other results is this: that the bicycle has broken the barrier of pernicious differential between the sexes and rent the bonds of fashion, and is daily impressing Spartan strength and grace, and more than Spartan intelligence, on the mothers of coming generations. So, weighed by its effect on body and mind as well as on material progress, this device must be classed as one of the world’s great inventions.”
(WJ McGee, Atlantic Monthly, quoted by David Hounshell in his book From the American System to Mass Production)
@Huxley:
Good choice! That’s plenty of machine. I haven’t kept up with video card situation this year, but you might get lucky with second hand market because there’s probably less demand for the chopped-down form factor cards that can fit in that case.
Does the box come with blank insert can be swapped in to make the skull go away?
32GB was smart. I foolishly bought 64GB for my new Windows laptop last year. Never been able to hog that much memory as far as I can tell. 2TB, however… there’s just something very satisfying about looking at 30% full drive and knowing you’ve got space to spare… and thinking back to that puny 20MB hard drive I had on my first PC back in 1988.
Those gals…. I’d guess their grandparents were born in or around mid to late 1835 1845. The women of that generation grew up into a society bereft of 800,000 young men. The equivalent today would be about nine million more young women than young men.
It has been said that in Paris after 1918, no single woman went outdoors without being dressed and made up to the max. Competition was tough after a million young men were killed and a huge proportion crippled or mutilated.
I wonder what resulting social structures lasted until 1906.
@David Foster:
Yup. The Bicycle made one hell of splash.
First Bicycle Boom kicked off in the 1890s with the advent of the Standard Bicycle. Before that they were seriously expensive status symbols (Tricycles for the older and less daring) and the Ordinary (Penny Farthing) for wealthy young bucks.
One of humanity’s great mysteries is just how long it took for this to be invented:
No roller chains, no wire spoke wheels (*), no ball bearings.
There’s nothing in it that couldn’t have been crafted by a Greek or a Roman. Because such a thing having only two wheels so obviously was ridiculous and inconceivable, well it wasn’t conceived of.
* Not as inconceivable as a steerable two-wheeled machine being able to be balenced in motion, but also a mental leap.
There’s a very good book on Bicycle Science published by MIT Press.
Some good stuff here on Sir Edward Elgar and his blinged out bike. No Lycra.
You’re looking at the ladies who later brought you Prohibition and who thought John Dewey excreted rose-scented bath bombs. They were Radicals. They couldn’t yet (thankfully) vote in person for the execrable Wilson, but they nagged their husbands to do so.
See… it’s not just just *insert sinister klezmer muzak* TheJoos 😀 Even I say that.
The 18th amendment ushering in Prohibition was ratified January 1919.
The 19th amendment granting women the right to vote was ratified August 1920.
So let’s not blame prohibition on the ladies.
Since we’re reminiscing about the old timers in our lives, we had an elderly neighbor who had been a cop before and after Prohibition was introduced. He said that the decrease in wife/child beatings was dramatic. He was all for Prohibition.
Here’s a little more info: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.vox.com/platform/amp/the-highlight/2019/6/5/18518005/prohibition-alcohol-public-health-crime-benefits
Zaphod —
A “dandy horse” is an adult-sized version of what we parents call a “scoot bike” nowadays, for our kids before they graduate into regular pedal bikes. (I never got that “dad” experience of running with my daughter on her bike and letting go, because she was so good at balancing on her scoot bike that she mastered the pedal bike between the time it was delivered and the time I got home from work — and no training wheels!)
If you watch the movie “Frozen”, which is set in a fantasy early-19th century that lacks gunpowder, young Anna careens around the castle on a dandy horse.
@Eva Marie:
Possibly in the universe you inhabit, women don’t have a significant degree of influence over the opinions and actions of the menfolk.
In the universe I inhabit, 78-80% of discretionary spending is controlled by females. Have you looked at much advertising or clickbait lately?.
Whilst I don’t condone baseless drunken wife beating, the phenomenal sales success of Fifty Shades of Grey suggests that something is missing from the lives of women today. 🙂
It’s arguable, I’ll admit that one aspect of Prohibition was native stock female disgust for the Irish and various other Eastern and Southern Europeans… but especially the Irish who were above average in a not very Lake Wobegone way in drunkenness and pugnaciousness. Would have been simpler to have never let them into the country and not had a Prohibition.
There’s an interesting museum in Vermont, the American Precision Museum, dedicated to the history of the American machine tool industry. One of the exhibits shows the Columbia chainless bicycle from the 1890s and the bevel gear cutting machine used in its manufacturing. An advantage of this type was that women could ride them without danger of getting their long skirts caught in a chain. A disadvantage was the price…$125 in 1890 dollars!…has to be something like $2000 in today’s money.
Does the box come with blank insert can be swapped in to make the skull go away?
Zaphod:
No. People have complained, but to no avail yet.
Clearly Intel is playing to the cool gaming crowd, though I’m not sure why. Sans graphics card and with beefier memory and disk, it’s fine as a business machine or workstation. I’m not the only non-gamer who appreciates a small footprint.
I’m hoping that Intel’s engineering and margins are sufficient to produce an excellent machine at a good price.
I’m also happy not to build another machine. If you build a computer every four or five years, you don’t get good at it — you just remember that you managed it before. I always worried that I would do something wrong or the kit was defective, then where would I be?
@BryanLovely:
I’m like some kind of Reactionary Maiden Aunt who knows that Frozen contains Bad Ideas and therefore refuses to watch it! 😀
Yes… it’s a big thing now the balance bike phenomenon — and a good one too. It’s a far, far better way to train kids to use a bike than trainer wheels. All kids need to learn is the counter-intuitive thing: to steer *into* the direction of instantaneous unbalance (This ‘magic’ is why these devices were inconceivable for millennia). Once they’ve got that honed to an instinct, adding pedals to the mix is a triviality.
I second Firefly’s hope that Neo’s okay. Five hours and counting now without power.
Chainless Drives and weird and wonderful gearing systems are still around (high end trekking bikes)… but for the rest of us, they’re like Brazil: always coming Tomorrow.
Another interesting thing happened in history of bicycle development is the English obsession with hub gears — they’re elegant and seem most logical cf. the French thing with Derailleurs. Starting out bog ignorant on the drawing board back in the day, Derailleurs must have seemed kind of kludgy and inelegant. In fact it’s kind of hard to believe that just shoving the chain off one ring on to another would even work. But it does. Actually boy does it work for modern ones.. and with less weight and friction. Derailleurs didn’t really get much traction in the UK until well after WWII.
The ideal ‘tidy’ solution is often not the best.
@Huxley:
These are flagship machines designed to get IG likes.. I guess that’s why the gamer decal thing. I doubt many serious gamers would be using one of these: for the money could build something with better thermals in a bigger case (obviously).
Agreed that these specced out NUCs make great high end business machines. Feeling a bit jealous now, but there’s new MacBook Pros coming Monday so keeping powder dry.
@Eva Marie:
Hate to go all Al Azhar and quoting Hadiths on you, but the article from Politico (Jaysus Wept) by a one-track minded academic hack isn’t going to get the Distaff off the Hook.
Cretin doesn’t get that Botswana is a fully-owned and managed subsidiary/colony of Anglo-American Corporation (De Beers) disguised as a sovereign state… with some dusky figureheads in grass skirts at the top of the notional org chart — that’s why the place has good governance. Fool thinks it’s a democracy! It’s a democracy the way Singapore is a democracy. It helps to get the diamonds out. Prohibition for Africans is something I can get behind though… they’re dangerous enough sober.
So why would I believe anything else such a moron would write?
Forget Tinkerbell… We want Neo back!
Still, just as well to have a trial run with the power out before winter kicks in. Live and learn.
Come to think of it, this is a golden opportunity to troll and shytepoast :D.. But discretion is the better part of valor. I’m going back to bed for a while.
Cretin doesn’t get that Botswana is a fully-owned and managed subsidiary/colony of Anglo-American Corporation (De Beers) disguised as a sovereign state…
He doesn’t get it because it isn’t true.
Don’t confuse him with facts, Eva.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen neo out of action this long.
FWIW, here’s a power outage map for the Northeast. I suppose one of those green dots marks neo’s location.
Last night while organizing an old box of DVDs I found a copy of “True Lies,” a 90s action/rom-com flick with Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jamie Lee Curtis. It was written and directed by James Cameron. It made money and got good reviews. I enjoyed it.
My point is that I can’t find “True Lies” streaming and DVDs are unusually expensive, so I was glad my old copy turned up.
The hang-up, I suspect, is that the film is about Muslim terrorists out to nuke four American cities. The main villain is a Middle Eastern man with pop-eyes, a high forehead and wavy hair radiating out of his head as though he had been freshly electrocuted. “I am a dangerous fanatic!” his appearance seems to say.
Well, we can’t have fanatical villains unless they are Russians or Rednecks, so put “True Lies” on a high, expensive shelf.
If I read the outage map right, that’s pretty widespread. What gives?
huxley —
Hm. Sounds like a movie I need to get on physical media, to go next to “Blazing Saddles”, “Zulu”, etc.
“The Anti-Saloon League of America was one of the most prominent prohibition organizations in the United States of America in the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries.”
Leading the ASLA were: Ernest Cherrington, Wayne Wheeler, Purley Baker, Howard Hyde Russell, William Johnson, Francis Scott McBride.
All men and you can read more about them here: https://www.westervillelibrary.org/leaders
More good wishes for neo
RTF originally:
“I hope neo is safe and her power is restored soon!”
Just looked up “True Lies” at Amazon. $28 including shipping for Blu-ray, $13 including shipping for DVD. A bit more than I’d expect for an old title but not bad.
Problem is they are region 2 so you need a multi region player. Which I have.
My paternal grandfather was born in 1870 and worked his way through high school, where he learned calculus. He later taught himself Greek so he could read the scriptures in the original. He would have regarded those girls as frivolous 🙂 On my mother’s side, my grandmother would have been 19, so about the same as those girls. But she grew up in a dugout in northern Texas and would have had little in common with them.
“I can’t even count the number of times I’ve experienced what you wrote about; a perfectly mundane situation where someone I barely know makes an extreme statement about politics.”
The first time time I remember this tipping into WTF??? territory was during GWB’s admin. A pundit was going on about the ‘brutality’ of a minor gov’t building under construction, saying one couldn’t expect better from GWB. Considering the glacial pace of gov’t contracts, I figure the design was set in the Carter admin, but, hey, why waste an opportunity to badmouth an R?
Drat! I missed the edit window on my previous post. David Thompson refers to this as ‘The Blurting’:
I’ve had this happen to me at a children’s charity fundraiser…
sonny wayz: I like reading mysteries – pure escapism from daily life. Not anymore. There’s not a single modern author who doesn’t insert a dig at Republicans, conservatives, or conservative view points – with the exception of Dean Koontz.
I was so thankful that JK Rowling – who wrote the last Harry Potter books during Bush hatred – didn’t include any political references.
Just looked up “True Lies” at Amazon. $28 including shipping for Blu-ray, $13 including shipping for DVD. A bit more than I’d expect for an old title but not bad.
geoffb:
I don’t consider $28 for region 2 Blu-ray a ringing endorsement for “True Lies” availability. The Amazon page I look at shows a new DVD for $35. Note all the links on that page with no pricing information because “True Lies” is no longer available.
Brought to all you Deplorable Whypeepo Out There with hugs and love by Jess Weiss (Production) & Jaim Saban (Distribution) and not at all by Helga Thule & Cletus McCoy.
So is this Chinese nuclear hypersonic gliding thingie going to be a problem for the US or are you just trying to annoy us?
@huxley:
Unless USMil has some big surprises hidden away, they seem to have lost ground to both Russia and China in hypersonic missiles.
If so, you better hope that the ghosts of Ben Rich and Kelly Johnson are working nights at the Skunkworks to catch up.
The big deal with hypersonics apart from being fast is that they are steerable all the way and can come at you from any point of the compass from same launch site. Unlike ballistic trajectory ICBMS which have to deal with orbital mechanics until re-entry. All that early warning kit in Alaska set up for Over the Pole Incomings will be obsoleted, likewise countermeasures designed to take out warheads in ballistic re-entry phase.
Good idea to be a bit fretful.
Once the targeting is improved, don’t even need nuke warheads to be a game changer.
“Social media are the opium of the 21st century, and the young tech wizards who infest Silicon Valley are the moral successors of the young Etonians who forced India to grow the drug and forced China to buy it.
The tech elite displays an arrogance that puts to shame Rudyard Kipling’s idea of a “white man’s burden.” It believes that it can change human nature by melding man and machine through artificial intelligence, and that its success in spellbinding young Americans through entertainment portends a new sort of humanity brought about by social engineering.
Many of its doyens believe that human consciousness can be downloaded onto computer chips, achieving a sort of silicon-based immortality. Its arrogance and pretensions exceed those of Alexander and Caesar. It has contempt for the homely values of family and nation that knit the lives of ordinary Americans.
That is why China is likely to emerge as the dominant force in the world during the 21st century. *****It isn’t that the Chinese are smarter or more innovative. America’s virtual empire has become a sinkhole for the country’s enterprise and talent, and its spectacular profitability derives from activity that enervates and corrupts the American character.*****”
I keep pointing out to the Cope-ium Addicts that it’s not that the Chinese are so wonderful (they’re just demonstrating basic competence) — it’s that we have sunk so far.
Re Spengler via Zaphod: Well, is it (tech totalitarianism) mere bread and circuses hubris? Or is does it have any redeeming value beyond the the flash and trash of immediacy?
@TJ:
Nothing wrong with Tech Totalitarianism if Our People are in charge, Old Chap.
Who Whom?
The rest is just rainbows and unicorns and candyfloss. It’s not going away, so best make the best of it.
Ironic really.. back in the days of yore, the Internet was going to spawn an anarchical free paradise. Turns out that when you spin the dialectical difference engine’s wheels enough times, you can’t help but grind out the same answer: Tyranny. So better make it a constructive Tyranny and not a debased degenerate one.
Does this make you want to spring Ted Kaczynski from the Supermax? You ought to dig up his manifesto and read it. Far-sighted fellow.
AwwZaph, I did read Kaczinky’s manifesto. And I’m sure I’m not going to liberate him from Florence, CO.
But bringing him back from the gulag, as you have, reminds me to reacquaint myself with it. Because the bizarre eco-sophist tyranny is what I recall. And I’ve forgotten and dismissed is the other side of his obsession, synopticon tyranny of hi tech, if I recall rightly. Gobsmackingly prescient.
Going deeper into you entertainment find, among the IMDB reviews, here’s the best I can find in the way of synopsis for “American Insurrection” 2021.
Low budget dystopian future of the US after gun toting anti-immigrant and gay hating, etc Right takes over.
The Great New Persecution is underway. And the persecuted and the hunted are struggling to make their way to free Canada.
We watch a small group coping.
NOW FOR PLOT SPOILERS. BY omp-612-558529:
“This is what the woke Leftists REALLY think of Conservatives and anyone who doesn’t agree with their agenda.
“In a nutshell, the movie is set after the imaginary January 6 ‘insurrection’ made up of ‘90% white avid gun rights activists”… that have formed a group called The Volunteers, made up of stereotypical ‘Southern folks’ and – as is stated in the synopsis – have indeed ‘barcoded minorities and anyone who is not cisgender.’
“Oh, and they wear a uniform. Guess what color? Orange. Yep, specifically ‘Trump Orange.’ I’m sure you can find it at Home Depot by now. The president wears an orange tie as well. The symbolism couldn’t be more obvious. And there is a one-person ‘re-education camp’ (shackled in a barn) that one of them is trying to…well, re-educate.
“Anyway, you can just imagine the rest, but it is EXACTLY what you think it is, but worse.”
I expect this to be a big week-long topic du jour of political conversation, any day, soon.
The best we can hope for is that those still imprisoned for wrong think may get a better hearing for some. That is, the independents may get some disturbing facts about Jan 6th and the Biden gulag.
@TJ:
I guess what I’m getting at with ‘Uncle Ted’ (as he’s fondly referred to these days in parts of the Silicon Valley Averse Dissident Right) is that there’s much to be said for reading non-woke outside-the-box critiques of Western Civ: Marx, Ellul, Uncle Ted, and… *scary music* YouTube Putin Press Conferences and just about anything the Chinese say, just to pick some at random.
Without going all Human Klein Bottle and making tenuous specious references to Goedel’s Incompleteness Theorem, it’s (as the Woke say) ‘Problematic’ to try to critique the political system one is living within from the *Inside*. We can see some of the problems from our vantage point, but aliens and outsiders can see others which we cannot see. Sift and winnow to taste. Too many Conservatives have a knee-jerk conditioned response to any criticism by the various Boogeymen they’ve been raised to hate and fear. Therefore they remain inside their own mental prisons and keep making the same mistakes over and over again.
Movie is getting some talking points traction on Gab. I’ll be interested to see how well it does on Parler and other controlled opposition platforms.
Normie has to be made to see just how much the other side hates him and wants him dead. That’s still going to be a long and hard row to hoe. Normie, being what he is is very, very slow on the uptake.
“But bringing him back from the gulag, as you have, reminds me to reacquaint myself with it. Because the bizarre eco-sophist tyranny is what I recall. And I’ve forgotten and dismissed is the other side of his obsession, synopticon tyranny of hi tech, if I recall rightly. Gobsmackingly prescient.”
Like I said.. there’s gold in there with the dross. And likewise with many other Very Bad People We Have Been Taught to Ignore and Hate.
I was reminded of the reference to Buttigieg as ‘Mayor Pete’ and was reminded once again of how strange it is that politicians often are referred to, or call themselves, by nicknames and such, and I don’t mean in a pejorative way at all – even their default name designations. “Chuck” instead of Charles; “Mike” instead of Michael; “Joe” instead of Joseph; and so on. Is it a way to try and be folksy or what?
Anyway, what do you call a guy with no arms and no legs lying in a bog?
Eva Marie: What you said! I am an avid reader, or use to be. Dean Koontz is all we have left. If he weren’t such a successful writer, for many years running, he’d have trouble getting published now. Just like all forms of entertainment, modern novels are peppered with left-wing propaganda. Stephen King is one of the worst. Beware “Sleeping Beauties” – it’s male hating trash.
Aunt, yes. Maiden, doubtful.
Mean Girls of 1906
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When I see old pics and video like this, I often try to estimate when the people in the video were born. OCD kicking in. 1906 and college girls. Perhaps some as young as 16 back then? Born circa 1890. That man they were putting snow on. About 40 years old? Born circa 1866, right after civil war.
Then I often think, if they lived to a hundred, how old were they when I was born in 1970 and how were they in age compared to my grandparents? Yes, I know, OCD.
The one great grandparent that I knew , would have been in these girls general age group.
When I knew him he was already old. But he was young once.
Like one of my relatives said, “ When you meet someone that is already old, you easily think of them as always being old, till you see pictures of them in their youth. “ ( Paraphrase)
One of my best friends knows how to handle a team of horses. I have ridden with him o’er many a hill and dale, sometimes in a sled in the winter. He’s now teaching his son-in-law how to do it. Note that the sled that tips and spills the young beauties into the snow is being pulled by a team of four. That is no mean feat. Note especially that even as the driver falls out of the sled, he does not let go of the reins.
There’s a valuable lesson in there.
jon baker, I can remember my maternal grandfather, who was born in 1874, and I knew my paternal grandparents quite well. They were born in 1881 and 1890.
Nowadays we take it for granted that a large proportion of the U.S. population is college-educated (I’ll leave it to other readers to comment on the quality of a contemporary college “education”)– according to the Bureau of the Census, 34% of the American adult population in 2020 had a bachelor’s degree or higher. We are also accustomed to statistics indicating that women now constitute a majority of college students– and have since the late 1970s.
The students in the 1906 sleigh ride video, however, were a very small segment of both the general American population and a minority among college students. In 1900, only 5% of American males between the ages of 18 and 21 were in college– 256,000. Most did not graduate, however, because a bachelor’s degree was not yet needed to find a decent job; many male college students left after two years of study because they could acquire a license to teach school after two years of course work.
Women were only a third of college students in the United States in 1900– 85,338, according to the 1900 census. Of these, 5,237 received bachelor’s degrees– which means that women, like men, often left college before completing their degree.
Male or female, college students in 1900 came from economically well-off families. While tuition and other costs were low by 2021 standards (Brown University in 1906 charged $105 for tuition, $48 for “incidental fees,” $60 for room, $150 for board, and $30 for books and laboratory fees; totaling $393 per year), the cost was still too high for most American families.
IOW, the college girls in the video were an extremely lucky group of young Americans, and not just because they could take a wintertime sleigh ride.
They might have been attending a women’s college.
And so long as the skirts aren’t tight, they provide a surprising freedom of movement. One of the girls who was upset gave the camera a quick look at boots and leggings underneath.
Late last night there were some comments on the old Bill Whittle posts going away.
Here is a way to get them back for online reading.
Bill Whittle essays URLs to put into the Wayback Machine.
https://web.archive.org/
First is complete URL, others just the changed part.
Honor – http://www.ejectejecteject.com/archives/000012.html
Freedom – 000013
Empire – 000017
War – 000027
Courage – 000033
Confidence – 000035
History – 000039
Victory – 000046
Magic – 000051
Trinity part 1 – 000056
Trinity part 2 – 000057
Responsibility – 000062
Power – 000066
Strength part 1 – 000099
Strength part 2 – 000100
Deterrence part 1 – 000108
Deterrence part 2 – 000107
Sanctuary part 1 – 000125
Sanctuary part 2 – 000126
Tribes – 000129
How fascism works in practice.
https://twitter.com/DaddyWarpig/status/1448778331256594432
It has been said that criminal mobs operate similarly to autocratic governments except on a smaller scale, the reverse is also true.
It has been said that criminal mobs operate similarly to autocratic governments except on a smaller scale, the reverse is also true.
–geoffb
Don’t forget. We live on the Planet of the Apes.
Lower your expectations. Act accordingly.
Contrary to modern feminist myth, corsets were NOT painful, restrictive, damaging garments. Or at least not for everyone except the super-fashionable rich. The steel-boned fashion corsets of today are nothing like anyone would have worn 120 years ago; what they wore is more like what we would call “shapewear”.
Bernadette Banner, a Youtuber and “dress historian”, is absolutely a feminist but makes and wears Edwardian-era clothing full time. She’s got a bunch of videos about corsets, this one is just an example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rExJskBZcW0
I’m having a power outage and can’t post. Not sure when it will be fixed.
Speaking of mobs…
The NY Times tells me that “The Sopranos” is now one of the hottest shows to binge among the young, attributed to cynicism about America:
____________________________________
The show’s depiction of contemporary America as relentlessly banal and hollow is plainly at the core of the current interest in the show, which coincides with an era of crisis across just about every major institution in American life. “The Sopranos” has a persistent focus on the spiritual and moral vacuum at the center of this country, and is oddly prescient about its coming troubles: the opioid epidemic, the crisis of meritocracy, teenage depression and suicide, fights over the meaning of American history. Even the flight of the ducks who had taken up residence in Tony’s swimming pool — not to mention all the lingering shots on the swaying flora of North Jersey — reads differently now, in an era of unprecedented environmental degradation and ruin.
This sense of decline is present from the show’s very beginnings. In his first therapy session with Dr. Melfi, Tony tries to explain why he thinks he has panic attacks, why he suffers from stress. “The morning of the day I got sick, I’d been thinking: It’s good to be in something from the ground floor,” he says. “I came too late for that, I know. But lately, I’m getting the feeling that I came in at the end. The best is over.” Melfi tells him that many Americans feel that way.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/29/magazine/sopranos.html
huxley — So, the Times gets the crisis part correct. But aren’t they missing out on the ongoing collapse? The one they’ve engineered?.
Naval gazers can by myopic geezers, too.
Average age 19-20 ? By WWII they were the nation’s grandmothers. Indeed, they were the baby boomer generation’s grandmothers.
I knew two of my my great-grandparents- my father’s maternal grandmother, and my mother’s maternal grandmother. Both were born in the late 19th century, and would have been close to the age of the young women in this film.
huxley,
Only callow and indoctrinated youth could imagine that the Sopranos were ever reflective of any but a miniscule subset of Americans.
An entire generation of poor, poor, pitiful mes.
Most of whom voted for Biden.
My maternal grandmother was born in 1888, and so belonged to the generation of the college girls in the film. She didn’t go to college but instead went to a normal school, which was a teacher training institution that prepared high school-age young people to become elementary school teachers. The normal schools in Pennsylvania became state teachers’ colleges by the time Nana’s youngest son, my Uncle Bob, went to Bloomsburg to study just before WWII (he ended up in the Army as a military censor during the war because he was a college graduate). The state teachers’ colleges were in turn upgraded to state universities in the 1980s.
Nana saw a lot of changes over the course of her life. She knew both of her grandfathers, who were veterans of one of the German-speaking Pennsylvania regiments in the Army of the Potomac during the Civil War. She was 32 when she was first able to vote in a presidential election. And she lived not only to see her six grandchildren go to college but also to watch astronauts walking on the moon on live television. I am glad, though, that she isn’t alive now to witness the current Washington s—show.
My grandfather was born in 1893 and died in 1990 when I was 21. A regret of mine is that I was too young and to interested in my own thing to really talk to him about all the changes in his lifetime. He grew up in a farmhouse with no electricity or indoor plumbing and died in a big house over looking the ocean.
My grandmother was a few years younger than these college girls and she went to a teacher’s college as she called it.
We would ask her where she went to school and she would say the ‘University of Mary’ and some wiseguy would say ‘I didn’t know Mary had a college’. She was the first member of her family to go to college.
huxley ~ My wife and I watched a lot of the Sopranos until one evening she told me to turn the TV off, then she went on to say there is something wrong when you learn to like people in the story and appreciate their problems yet they are bad, evil, immoral people. I kind of liked all the silly stuff going on however she gets emotionally involved with the characters on TV or in books.
At the same time because I am old I identified with the Mad Men people with their drinking, smoking and treating people rather badly because we did that in the old days, not saying it was right but we were jerks at times.
huxley —
“in an era of unprecedented environmental degradation and ruin.”
Jeez, I know it’s the NYT, but really, what color is the sky on their planet?
Bryan Lovely,
It never ceases to amaze me how some of these ‘news’ pieces slip in these kind of totally bizarre statements into articles that have nothing to do with the topic.
This phenomenon was perfected in the age of Trump where almost every article had to have an apocalyptic reference to Trump even if it was about flowers or baseball.
Griffin —
I think it’s become so reflexive they hardly notice they’re doing it. Back in 2007 my then-wife and I wandered into an open house in our Seattle neighborhood where we were renting. “Hi!” said the real estate agent. “Hi, how are you?” we said. “Oh, just fine, now if only the President would die!”
[record scratch] … Err, what? The fact that someone would say that to total strangers to whom presumably she would like to make a sale shows just how bubbled these sorts of people are. And that was referring to Bush, not Trump.
TJ, Geoffrey Britain:
I like to try and understand things, before I leap to political judgment.
I find it interesting that young people are watching “The Sopranos.” I’m not convinced that the NY Times is right either to rush to its leftist judgment, which flows from its leftist narrative.
The young might be watching “The Sopranos” because they have more time for videos on account of Covid plus “The Sopranos” is a brilliantly written show which they haven’t seen before.
It may appear that the show glorifies mob life, but if one pays attention the show is quite explicit how horrible these people are. We do watch Tony’s family and crew undergo good vs evil struggles and mostly they fail.
huxley,
There is also the new Sopranos origin movie that has received a ton of attention and has probably drawn people to the series. All these streaming outlets are so dodgy with their viewership numbers that make it hard to tell how many people are watching anything so the media often resorts to twitter buzz to gauge things and of course that is not the real world.
“JUST IN – China tested a nuclear capable hypersonic gliding vehicle that traveled around the globe through low orbit in space before cruising to the target. US intelligence and military officials stunned.”
https://gab.com/disclosetv/posts/107113027629158700
Much Cope-ium in the thread about how Chinky totally must have stolen all the tech.
Wakey wakey.
My mother was born in 1898 and lived to 103. My kids used to fly back to Chicago as teens to spend a week with her and hear her stories. Her father was born in 1849 so he was old enough to have been drummer boy in the Civil War. He was 50 when she was born and she was 40 when I was born so our generations were compressed.
I have taken some of my kids on a sleigh ride like that one. It was in Leavenworth Washington and the horses were used in lumbering summer.
“The Sopranos” works on multiple levels.
My favorite scene from the final episode wasn’t the Onion Rings in the Restaurant, but the one where the ever-lost AJ, Tony’s son, is sitting with his girlfriend in his expensive SUV stopped in the woods and listening to Bob Dylan’s “It’s Alright, Ma” (1965) — perhaps Dylan’s most bitter song about the hypocrisy of modern American life.
So AJ and Rhiannon are mesmerized by Dylan’s lyrics and remark how prophetic the song is. Then they start making out and the car catches fire. It seems AJ ignored a warning about the catalytic converter, didn’t shut off the car, and the converter ignited the leaves under the car. The couple get out, but the car is destroyed.
Jordan Peterson argues that the problem with social justice concerns is that it’s a cheap way to feel better about oneself. It’s easy to strike a pose. It’s hard to do the work to make one’s life and the lives of others better.
It may appear that the show glorifies mob life,
“The Godfather” movies did more to glorify mob life, I believe. I must say I did not watch “The Sopranos” as I rarely watch TV.
There is also the new Sopranos origin movie that has received a ton of attention and has probably drawn people to the series
Griffin:
No doubt. However, according to the article, renewed interest in “The Sopranos” has been on the boil for a few years.
___________________________________________
“We always had our audience that grew up with us,” Imperioli [actor who played Christopher, Tony’s nephew] played said. “They watched it when it first aired. They had, you know, pasta and pizza parties on Sunday night, and they grew older with us.” The die-hards within this group were the sorts of guys you might have met at the Silver Legacy in Reno: guys who love mob movies and think mobsters are cool, guys who know the manager at the casino. But then something changed. Around 2019, Imperioli joined Instagram and discovered “all these fan sites and meme sites” dedicated to the show, and all these young people who’d made their avatar image a picture of Christopher in a neck brace. He also noticed that people in their 20s and 30s were coming up to him asking for selfies. Just over that last week in August, he told me, he saw three people with “Sopranos” tattoos.
Zaphod:
Per our recent conversation about buying a new desktop, I decided to splurge and pulled the trigger on an Intel “Ghost Canyon” NUC.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B091D6DNPY/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o05_s00
I have a small study and I like miniaturized stuff, so I’ve been watching the mini PCs. I bought a cheap one to run a screen in the living room.
Early this year I looked at the “Ghost Canyon” NUC but then it was pure bare bones — no RAM, no disk, no OS — for ~$1800 or so. Absurd.
However, there are now units packaged with 32 GB, 2.0 TB and Windows 10 Pro for $1600. That’s more than I intended, but quite doable.
I usually buy the sweet price spot a few generations behind. So it will be fun to treat myself to a more state-of-the-art machine.
If graphics cards ever come down, I might even get a decent one and see what current gaming is like.
Bryan Lovely @ 5:38pm,
I can’t even count the number of times I’ve experienced what you wrote about; a perfectly mundane situation where someone I barely know makes an extreme statement about politics. Like you, I’ve had it happen from people hoping to get money from me, or sell me a product. Mention of murder is not unusual. Even extermination of people who may have voted for a politician. I could maybe understand if there were some big, national scandal that had evidence, like Watergate, but when it’s a politician 30% – 70% of one’s countrymen may have voted for, why risk losing business from making outrageous statements? Why make outrageous statements at all in front of people one does not know?
(I hope neo is safe and her power is restored soon!)
Why make outrageous statements at all in front of people one does not know?
Rufus T. Firefly:
A chance to bond or flush out the Evil Ones! Win-win.
The modern bicycle was introduced in the late 1800s, so it seems likely that many of these girls had bicycling experience. I’ve seen some rather strong contemporary statements about the positive psychological and health benefits of biking to women, such as this one:
“Better than other results is this: that the bicycle has broken the barrier of pernicious differential between the sexes and rent the bonds of fashion, and is daily impressing Spartan strength and grace, and more than Spartan intelligence, on the mothers of coming generations. So, weighed by its effect on body and mind as well as on material progress, this device must be classed as one of the world’s great inventions.”
(WJ McGee, Atlantic Monthly, quoted by David Hounshell in his book From the American System to Mass Production)
@Huxley:
Good choice! That’s plenty of machine. I haven’t kept up with video card situation this year, but you might get lucky with second hand market because there’s probably less demand for the chopped-down form factor cards that can fit in that case.
Does the box come with blank insert can be swapped in to make the skull go away?
32GB was smart. I foolishly bought 64GB for my new Windows laptop last year. Never been able to hog that much memory as far as I can tell. 2TB, however… there’s just something very satisfying about looking at 30% full drive and knowing you’ve got space to spare… and thinking back to that puny 20MB hard drive I had on my first PC back in 1988.
Those gals…. I’d guess their grandparents were born in or around mid to late 1835 1845. The women of that generation grew up into a society bereft of 800,000 young men. The equivalent today would be about nine million more young women than young men.
It has been said that in Paris after 1918, no single woman went outdoors without being dressed and made up to the max. Competition was tough after a million young men were killed and a huge proportion crippled or mutilated.
I wonder what resulting social structures lasted until 1906.
@David Foster:
Yup. The Bicycle made one hell of splash.
First Bicycle Boom kicked off in the 1890s with the advent of the Standard Bicycle. Before that they were seriously expensive status symbols (Tricycles for the older and less daring) and the Ordinary (Penny Farthing) for wealthy young bucks.
One of humanity’s great mysteries is just how long it took for this to be invented:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dandy_horse
No roller chains, no wire spoke wheels (*), no ball bearings.
There’s nothing in it that couldn’t have been crafted by a Greek or a Roman. Because such a thing having only two wheels so obviously was ridiculous and inconceivable, well it wasn’t conceived of.
* Not as inconceivable as a steerable two-wheeled machine being able to be balenced in motion, but also a mental leap.
There’s a very good book on Bicycle Science published by MIT Press.
Some good stuff here on Sir Edward Elgar and his blinged out bike. No Lycra.
https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/the-firs/features/elgar-and-his-bicycles
@Richard Aubrey:
You’re looking at the ladies who later brought you Prohibition and who thought John Dewey excreted rose-scented bath bombs. They were Radicals. They couldn’t yet (thankfully) vote in person for the execrable Wilson, but they nagged their husbands to do so.
See… it’s not just just *insert sinister klezmer muzak* TheJoos 😀 Even I say that.
My sentiments, exactly:
https://raconteurreport.blogspot.com/2021/10/on-shoulders-of-giants.html
The 18th amendment ushering in Prohibition was ratified January 1919.
The 19th amendment granting women the right to vote was ratified August 1920.
So let’s not blame prohibition on the ladies.
Since we’re reminiscing about the old timers in our lives, we had an elderly neighbor who had been a cop before and after Prohibition was introduced. He said that the decrease in wife/child beatings was dramatic. He was all for Prohibition.
Here’s a little more info: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.vox.com/platform/amp/the-highlight/2019/6/5/18518005/prohibition-alcohol-public-health-crime-benefits
Zaphod —
A “dandy horse” is an adult-sized version of what we parents call a “scoot bike” nowadays, for our kids before they graduate into regular pedal bikes. (I never got that “dad” experience of running with my daughter on her bike and letting go, because she was so good at balancing on her scoot bike that she mastered the pedal bike between the time it was delivered and the time I got home from work — and no training wheels!)
If you watch the movie “Frozen”, which is set in a fantasy early-19th century that lacks gunpowder, young Anna careens around the castle on a dandy horse.
@Eva Marie:
Possibly in the universe you inhabit, women don’t have a significant degree of influence over the opinions and actions of the menfolk.
In the universe I inhabit, 78-80% of discretionary spending is controlled by females. Have you looked at much advertising or clickbait lately?.
Whilst I don’t condone baseless drunken wife beating, the phenomenal sales success of Fifty Shades of Grey suggests that something is missing from the lives of women today. 🙂
It’s arguable, I’ll admit that one aspect of Prohibition was native stock female disgust for the Irish and various other Eastern and Southern Europeans… but especially the Irish who were above average in a not very Lake Wobegone way in drunkenness and pugnaciousness. Would have been simpler to have never let them into the country and not had a Prohibition.
There’s an interesting museum in Vermont, the American Precision Museum, dedicated to the history of the American machine tool industry. One of the exhibits shows the Columbia chainless bicycle from the 1890s and the bevel gear cutting machine used in its manufacturing. An advantage of this type was that women could ride them without danger of getting their long skirts caught in a chain. A disadvantage was the price…$125 in 1890 dollars!…has to be something like $2000 in today’s money.
https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/55781.html
Does the box come with blank insert can be swapped in to make the skull go away?
Zaphod:
No. People have complained, but to no avail yet.
Clearly Intel is playing to the cool gaming crowd, though I’m not sure why. Sans graphics card and with beefier memory and disk, it’s fine as a business machine or workstation. I’m not the only non-gamer who appreciates a small footprint.
I’m hoping that Intel’s engineering and margins are sufficient to produce an excellent machine at a good price.
I’m also happy not to build another machine. If you build a computer every four or five years, you don’t get good at it — you just remember that you managed it before. I always worried that I would do something wrong or the kit was defective, then where would I be?
@BryanLovely:
I’m like some kind of Reactionary Maiden Aunt who knows that Frozen contains Bad Ideas and therefore refuses to watch it! 😀
Yes… it’s a big thing now the balance bike phenomenon — and a good one too. It’s a far, far better way to train kids to use a bike than trainer wheels. All kids need to learn is the counter-intuitive thing: to steer *into* the direction of instantaneous unbalance (This ‘magic’ is why these devices were inconceivable for millennia). Once they’ve got that honed to an instinct, adding pedals to the mix is a triviality.
I second Firefly’s hope that Neo’s okay. Five hours and counting now without power.
Here’s another article on the proponents of Prohibition:
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2019/01/13/prohibition-women-blame-history-223972/
@David Foster:
Chainless Drives and weird and wonderful gearing systems are still around (high end trekking bikes)… but for the rest of us, they’re like Brazil: always coming Tomorrow.
Another interesting thing happened in history of bicycle development is the English obsession with hub gears — they’re elegant and seem most logical cf. the French thing with Derailleurs. Starting out bog ignorant on the drawing board back in the day, Derailleurs must have seemed kind of kludgy and inelegant. In fact it’s kind of hard to believe that just shoving the chain off one ring on to another would even work. But it does. Actually boy does it work for modern ones.. and with less weight and friction. Derailleurs didn’t really get much traction in the UK until well after WWII.
The ideal ‘tidy’ solution is often not the best.
@Huxley:
These are flagship machines designed to get IG likes.. I guess that’s why the gamer decal thing. I doubt many serious gamers would be using one of these: for the money could build something with better thermals in a bigger case (obviously).
Agreed that these specced out NUCs make great high end business machines. Feeling a bit jealous now, but there’s new MacBook Pros coming Monday so keeping powder dry.
@Eva Marie:
Hate to go all Al Azhar and quoting Hadiths on you, but the article from Politico (Jaysus Wept) by a one-track minded academic hack isn’t going to get the Distaff off the Hook.
This is a man who posted this in Twitter:
https://www.reddit.com/r/SlowHistory/comments/pw1jy5/mark_lawrence_schrad_on_twitter_this_is_botswana/
Cretin doesn’t get that Botswana is a fully-owned and managed subsidiary/colony of Anglo-American Corporation (De Beers) disguised as a sovereign state… with some dusky figureheads in grass skirts at the top of the notional org chart — that’s why the place has good governance. Fool thinks it’s a democracy! It’s a democracy the way Singapore is a democracy. It helps to get the diamonds out. Prohibition for Africans is something I can get behind though… they’re dangerous enough sober.
So why would I believe anything else such a moron would write?
Forget Tinkerbell… We want Neo back!
Still, just as well to have a trial run with the power out before winter kicks in. Live and learn.
Come to think of it, this is a golden opportunity to troll and shytepoast :D.. But discretion is the better part of valor. I’m going back to bed for a while.
Here’s an article about one of the primary proponents of Prohibition – William Jennings Bryan
https://www.nebraskastudies.org/en/1900-1924/prohibition-of-alcohol/bryan-supports-prohibition/
Cretin doesn’t get that Botswana is a fully-owned and managed subsidiary/colony of Anglo-American Corporation (De Beers) disguised as a sovereign state…
He doesn’t get it because it isn’t true.
Don’t confuse him with facts, Eva.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen neo out of action this long.
FWIW, here’s a power outage map for the Northeast. I suppose one of those green dots marks neo’s location.
https://wtop.com/east-coast-power-outage-map/
Fingers crossed.
Last night while organizing an old box of DVDs I found a copy of “True Lies,” a 90s action/rom-com flick with Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jamie Lee Curtis. It was written and directed by James Cameron. It made money and got good reviews. I enjoyed it.
My point is that I can’t find “True Lies” streaming and DVDs are unusually expensive, so I was glad my old copy turned up.
The hang-up, I suspect, is that the film is about Muslim terrorists out to nuke four American cities. The main villain is a Middle Eastern man with pop-eyes, a high forehead and wavy hair radiating out of his head as though he had been freshly electrocuted. “I am a dangerous fanatic!” his appearance seems to say.
Well, we can’t have fanatical villains unless they are Russians or Rednecks, so put “True Lies” on a high, expensive shelf.
If I read the outage map right, that’s pretty widespread. What gives?
huxley —
Hm. Sounds like a movie I need to get on physical media, to go next to “Blazing Saddles”, “Zulu”, etc.
huxley–
I’m pretty sure Neo is in Massachusetts. Here’s the most recent map of power outages in MA: https://outagemap.ma.nationalgridus.com/
“The Anti-Saloon League of America was one of the most prominent prohibition organizations in the United States of America in the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries.”
Leading the ASLA were: Ernest Cherrington, Wayne Wheeler, Purley Baker, Howard Hyde Russell, William Johnson, Francis Scott McBride.
All men and you can read more about them here:
https://www.westervillelibrary.org/leaders
More good wishes for neo
RTF originally:
“I hope neo is safe and her power is restored soon!”
Just looked up “True Lies” at Amazon. $28 including shipping for Blu-ray, $13 including shipping for DVD. A bit more than I’d expect for an old title but not bad.
Problem is they are region 2 so you need a multi region player. Which I have.
My paternal grandfather was born in 1870 and worked his way through high school, where he learned calculus. He later taught himself Greek so he could read the scriptures in the original. He would have regarded those girls as frivolous 🙂 On my mother’s side, my grandmother would have been 19, so about the same as those girls. But she grew up in a dugout in northern Texas and would have had little in common with them.
Here’s a very interesting article about prohibition: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/09652149736558
@Rufus T. Firefly, Bryan Lovely
“I can’t even count the number of times I’ve experienced what you wrote about; a perfectly mundane situation where someone I barely know makes an extreme statement about politics.”
The first time time I remember this tipping into WTF??? territory was during GWB’s admin. A pundit was going on about the ‘brutality’ of a minor gov’t building under construction, saying one couldn’t expect better from GWB. Considering the glacial pace of gov’t contracts, I figure the design was set in the Carter admin, but, hey, why waste an opportunity to badmouth an R?
Drat! I missed the edit window on my previous post. David Thompson refers to this as ‘The Blurting’:
https://davidthompson.typepad.com/davidthompson/2019/09/the-blurting.html
I’ve had this happen to me at a children’s charity fundraiser…
sonny wayz: I like reading mysteries – pure escapism from daily life. Not anymore. There’s not a single modern author who doesn’t insert a dig at Republicans, conservatives, or conservative view points – with the exception of Dean Koontz.
I was so thankful that JK Rowling – who wrote the last Harry Potter books during Bush hatred – didn’t include any political references.
Just looked up “True Lies” at Amazon. $28 including shipping for Blu-ray, $13 including shipping for DVD. A bit more than I’d expect for an old title but not bad.
geoffb:
I don’t consider $28 for region 2 Blu-ray a ringing endorsement for “True Lies” availability. The Amazon page I look at shows a new DVD for $35. Note all the links on that page with no pricing information because “True Lies” is no longer available.
https://www.amazon.com/s?k=true+lies+dvd&
Nice piece by Bill Whittle
https://rumble.com/vntgqh-culture-glue-how-broadcast-tv-bound-us-together-in-a-way-cable-and-youtube-.html
OBloodyHell:
Did Bill Whittle migrate willingly to Rumble or was he forced?
_____________________________
–Richard and Linda Thompson, “Did She Jump Or Was She Pushed?”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5WWVBnBMnqc
neo must have covered this one somewhere along the line…
American Insurrection
“Set in a dystopian America where all people who aren’t straight, white, Christian and cis gender are kept track of by the government with bar codes.”
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt11737466/
Brought to all you Deplorable Whypeepo Out There with hugs and love by Jess Weiss (Production) & Jaim Saban (Distribution) and not at all by Helga Thule & Cletus McCoy.
Talk about solipsistic fever dreams…
One can but pray for Deliverance.
https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/087/984/655/original/a0d2240b3bda5bb7.jpeg
Zaphod:
So is this Chinese nuclear hypersonic gliding thingie going to be a problem for the US or are you just trying to annoy us?
@huxley:
Unless USMil has some big surprises hidden away, they seem to have lost ground to both Russia and China in hypersonic missiles.
If so, you better hope that the ghosts of Ben Rich and Kelly Johnson are working nights at the Skunkworks to catch up.
The big deal with hypersonics apart from being fast is that they are steerable all the way and can come at you from any point of the compass from same launch site. Unlike ballistic trajectory ICBMS which have to deal with orbital mechanics until re-entry. All that early warning kit in Alaska set up for Over the Pole Incomings will be obsoleted, likewise countermeasures designed to take out warheads in ballistic re-entry phase.
Good idea to be a bit fretful.
Once the targeting is improved, don’t even need nuke warheads to be a game changer.
@Huxley:
New Spengler article:
https://asiatimes.com/2021/10/us-elites-imperial-corruption-compares-to-opium-war/
“Social media are the opium of the 21st century, and the young tech wizards who infest Silicon Valley are the moral successors of the young Etonians who forced India to grow the drug and forced China to buy it.
The tech elite displays an arrogance that puts to shame Rudyard Kipling’s idea of a “white man’s burden.” It believes that it can change human nature by melding man and machine through artificial intelligence, and that its success in spellbinding young Americans through entertainment portends a new sort of humanity brought about by social engineering.
Many of its doyens believe that human consciousness can be downloaded onto computer chips, achieving a sort of silicon-based immortality. Its arrogance and pretensions exceed those of Alexander and Caesar. It has contempt for the homely values of family and nation that knit the lives of ordinary Americans.
That is why China is likely to emerge as the dominant force in the world during the 21st century. *****It isn’t that the Chinese are smarter or more innovative. America’s virtual empire has become a sinkhole for the country’s enterprise and talent, and its spectacular profitability derives from activity that enervates and corrupts the American character.*****”
I keep pointing out to the Cope-ium Addicts that it’s not that the Chinese are so wonderful (they’re just demonstrating basic competence) — it’s that we have sunk so far.
Re Spengler via Zaphod: Well, is it (tech totalitarianism) mere bread and circuses hubris? Or is does it have any redeeming value beyond the the flash and trash of immediacy?
@TJ:
Nothing wrong with Tech Totalitarianism if Our People are in charge, Old Chap.
Who Whom?
The rest is just rainbows and unicorns and candyfloss. It’s not going away, so best make the best of it.
Ironic really.. back in the days of yore, the Internet was going to spawn an anarchical free paradise. Turns out that when you spin the dialectical difference engine’s wheels enough times, you can’t help but grind out the same answer: Tyranny. So better make it a constructive Tyranny and not a debased degenerate one.
Does this make you want to spring Ted Kaczynski from the Supermax? You ought to dig up his manifesto and read it. Far-sighted fellow.
AwwZaph, I did read Kaczinky’s manifesto. And I’m sure I’m not going to liberate him from Florence, CO.
But bringing him back from the gulag, as you have, reminds me to reacquaint myself with it. Because the bizarre eco-sophist tyranny is what I recall. And I’ve forgotten and dismissed is the other side of his obsession, synopticon tyranny of hi tech, if I recall rightly. Gobsmackingly prescient.
Going deeper into you entertainment find, among the IMDB reviews, here’s the best I can find in the way of synopsis for “American Insurrection” 2021.
Low budget dystopian future of the US after gun toting anti-immigrant and gay hating, etc Right takes over.
The Great New Persecution is underway. And the persecuted and the hunted are struggling to make their way to free Canada.
We watch a small group coping.
NOW FOR PLOT SPOILERS. BY omp-612-558529:
“This is what the woke Leftists REALLY think of Conservatives and anyone who doesn’t agree with their agenda.
“In a nutshell, the movie is set after the imaginary January 6 ‘insurrection’ made up of ‘90% white avid gun rights activists”… that have formed a group called The Volunteers, made up of stereotypical ‘Southern folks’ and – as is stated in the synopsis – have indeed ‘barcoded minorities and anyone who is not cisgender.’
“Oh, and they wear a uniform. Guess what color? Orange. Yep, specifically ‘Trump Orange.’ I’m sure you can find it at Home Depot by now. The president wears an orange tie as well. The symbolism couldn’t be more obvious. And there is a one-person ‘re-education camp’ (shackled in a barn) that one of them is trying to…well, re-educate.
“Anyway, you can just imagine the rest, but it is EXACTLY what you think it is, but worse.”
I expect this to be a big week-long topic du jour of political conversation, any day, soon.
The best we can hope for is that those still imprisoned for wrong think may get a better hearing for some. That is, the independents may get some disturbing facts about Jan 6th and the Biden gulag.
@TJ:
I guess what I’m getting at with ‘Uncle Ted’ (as he’s fondly referred to these days in parts of the Silicon Valley Averse Dissident Right) is that there’s much to be said for reading non-woke outside-the-box critiques of Western Civ: Marx, Ellul, Uncle Ted, and… *scary music* YouTube Putin Press Conferences and just about anything the Chinese say, just to pick some at random.
Without going all Human Klein Bottle and making tenuous specious references to Goedel’s Incompleteness Theorem, it’s (as the Woke say) ‘Problematic’ to try to critique the political system one is living within from the *Inside*. We can see some of the problems from our vantage point, but aliens and outsiders can see others which we cannot see. Sift and winnow to taste. Too many Conservatives have a knee-jerk conditioned response to any criticism by the various Boogeymen they’ve been raised to hate and fear. Therefore they remain inside their own mental prisons and keep making the same mistakes over and over again.
Movie is getting some talking points traction on Gab. I’ll be interested to see how well it does on Parler and other controlled opposition platforms.
Normie has to be made to see just how much the other side hates him and wants him dead. That’s still going to be a long and hard row to hoe. Normie, being what he is is very, very slow on the uptake.
“But bringing him back from the gulag, as you have, reminds me to reacquaint myself with it. Because the bizarre eco-sophist tyranny is what I recall. And I’ve forgotten and dismissed is the other side of his obsession, synopticon tyranny of hi tech, if I recall rightly. Gobsmackingly prescient.”
Like I said.. there’s gold in there with the dross. And likewise with many other Very Bad People We Have Been Taught to Ignore and Hate.
I was reminded of the reference to Buttigieg as ‘Mayor Pete’ and was reminded once again of how strange it is that politicians often are referred to, or call themselves, by nicknames and such, and I don’t mean in a pejorative way at all – even their default name designations. “Chuck” instead of Charles; “Mike” instead of Michael; “Joe” instead of Joseph; and so on. Is it a way to try and be folksy or what?
Anyway, what do you call a guy with no arms and no legs lying in a bog?
Eva Marie: What you said! I am an avid reader, or use to be. Dean Koontz is all we have left. If he weren’t such a successful writer, for many years running, he’d have trouble getting published now. Just like all forms of entertainment, modern novels are peppered with left-wing propaganda. Stephen King is one of the worst. Beware “Sleeping Beauties” – it’s male hating trash.
Aunt, yes. Maiden, doubtful.
Mean Girls of 1906