As sustained and limitless as the human consciousness that presents it:
Category: Rhetoric / Logic
the annoyances
the biggest annoyance, always and forever, is the failure of every level of government in Canada to protect its most vulnerable citizens from COVID
That is a slow-match, slow-burn, never-ending anger. The dead can’t speak and so I must. Forty-six thousand Canadians have died of COVID, (that number is likely under-reported by as much as 50%), hundreds of thousands have become disabled, hundreds of thousands are experiencing loss of breadwinners and grandparents, and all of the responsibility for what should be a collective effort has been pushed onto schoolchildren and people who don’t believe in science. It’s unconscionable, and it’s daily life.
Some ratbastard trudging to work without looking where they were going nearly trod on a baby raccoon in the Seabus Station. Mama raccoon was able to effect a rescue, but no thanks to that asshole. GRRRR whole thing was caught on video, which I’m not sharing.
Family Law is a new show that I should be watching because my friend Sue Sparlin is in it. Unfortunately the lead character, ably played by Jewel Staite, is a narcissistic, petty, bullying, parental and relationship incompetent with a drinking problem. The character is so unpleasant Jeff and I bailed after the first ep. I AM SO ANNOYED. Many good people behind and in front of the camera, but there is so much ‘humour of embarrassment’ that it’s about as much fun as getting sunstroke. Also watching children get repeatedly treated as props and dragged through their parents’ mental health issues is TRIGGERING AF. PLEASE NOTE full kudos for casting a trans woman as a trans woman as the office manager. AND SO GOOD TO SEE GENELLE WILLIAMS again.
Air quality is 50 – better but still not great. Good enough to go walking with Paul today if he has any interest.
Sent twenty dollars to a disabled Canadian via paypal this am. Sometimes people talk about their lives in such a way that you really feel your privilege. I AM SO FORTUNATE. AND I’M ANNOYED WITH TRUDEAU we were all supposed to get a double GST tax credit and now it won’t come until after Christmas and the people who need it most, the disabled, are filling up my twitter feed with tales of starvation and horror, people thinking of applying for medical assistance in dying since they aren’t given enough money on disability to live.
Katie is still too busy to see me – Friday she says.
Hoping to Darwin this fool isn’t my relative. His most recent stunt is to go on twitter and ask why the gummint isn’t doing something about
are you ready
CONTRAILS
jfc
JFC PEOPLE
This is what he posted, with pictures of contrails.
“You’ll notice, that not one single elected politician will say anything in regards to what we are all seeing in the sky these days. It’s absolutely disgusting. Nothing is normal about what’s happening up there yet not one politician will say a word. Right”
My responses: (and this is after I deboned it because I GOT VERY VERY SWEARY)
I was five years old the first time my pOp explained to me what contrails are. I’ve had six decades to watch people freak out about the natural consequence of applying the ass end of a 1500ºC jet to the cold dry air ten kilometres up. Fuck this wilful ignorance.
and as a comment to my twolleague ZenHeathen, My pOp was working for the National Research Council at the time…. let’s just say we don’t *worship* science in my family because science can be suborned to cruel and genocidal purposes. But neither do we pick and choose which established science to call real. eg vaccines.
PUTIN ANNEXES TERRITORY HE DOESN’T CONTROL AND BLAMES NATO. Good going dude.
A quart is called a quart because it’s a quarter of a gallon. It is annoying how many standards of measurement we have to live through. And die through, remember how close the ‘Gimli Glider’ came to being a mass casualty event and all because strangely enough gallons and litres aren’t the same.
I do not read Greek
and yet I find this funny
Can’t explain
Gotta love that take, sorry lol.
7618 words. One kudo this morning. The Supernatural (2005) character Dean Winchester loves pie. There are over a hundred thousand #destiel fics on AO3; one thousand of them are about or include pie; one of them is mine, and it got a kudo. Food makes us all fools. REMEMBER THAT.
Russian forces are committing atrocities in Ukraine. Twitter IS FILLED TO THE BRIM WITH ATROCITY DENIERS THIS MORNING. Some of them are credentialed journalists. I’d weep, but I’m more inclined to send more money to Ukrainian anarchists serving at the front.
Susan Sontag had a few words for the people who claim that it’s the Ukrainians committing the atrocities. You know, in wartime civilians often take the opportunity to settle scores, but it’s by individuals, on individuals. That the Ukrainian army or any of its forces would do this – when they know they don’t HAVE TO? Russia brought 45000 body bags to the front – they weren’t for soldiers, they were to handle massacred civilians.
German PHO’s are asking that all Ukrainian refugees be tested for AIDS and TB. That actually makes sense as long as it doesn’t turn into an excuse to refuse them entry.
Transnistria is denying that Russian troops are building up along its border with Ukraine. Satellites say what?
Poland, which has responded to white Ukrainians with open arms, has publicly stated that they’ll accept US Nukes on their soil. Jaroslaw Kaczynski, deputy prime minister of Poland, said so within the last 24.
Russian troops in Bucha massacred every Ukrainian man between 16 and 60 and then moved out of the town. Bucha, originally about the same size as Grande Prairie at 40000 people, had already seen most men of national service age leave to either train or rejoin units, so essentially they killed every man and boy who was either in a protected profession or too sick, disabled or unfit to serve. (Eugenics much). Total numbers will likely never be known, any more than Putin’s likely to stand trial at the Hague. Yes, some of those men were likely fighting in civvies, but it was either planned by the Russians or indisciplined troops and either way Putin’s gonna wear this.
Some greek to go with the site branding
“As a student of philosophy, he was coarse and heedless in appearance, and his clothing was squalid”
-Philostratus, from the @sentantiq twitter account
and here’s something you don’t see every day on menus (found it yesterday while thinking about dinner):
If you don’t know what Cordyceps Militaris is, GOOD. That means you can ignore the next three sentences if you want to. It’s a fungus that grows on living, and then dead, insects. SHUDDER AND HURL. I am a very white person and I think there are a lot of perfectly edible things I can’t eat because I have culturally enabled squeamishness.
I found a new font called Truefesse yesterday (fesse meaning bum in french) and so I made this (Amelia script, also know as the Live, Love, Laugh font, is the handwriting font):
and here’s a list of Russian media outlets that died this past week per Alexey @ Meduza:
Gary Kasparov in 2014:
from Vivian Gornick’s ‘The Situation and the Story’
from @rechelon’s twitter feed
How things are in Van right now
click the pic and open in a new tab to embiggen
Conrad Black in the NP
The Nazi Post is once again hosting Conrad Black, a man who stopped being a racist in public while he was in jail in the US because he would have been shivved in the shower, and who promptly went back to his racist ways the instant he was released.
This is the first paragraph of his latest pixellated excretion.
Seven months into the Biden regime, the truism that dare not speak its name is now almost too obvious to bear stating. It was a catastrophic error to evict Donald Trump. No one, and certainly not I, would try to whitewash the stylistic infelicities of Donald Trump. He said many things that were toe-curlingly embarrassing coming from the holder of so great an office. But he proved in government as he had in the private sector that he was capable and forceful, and although he had the terrible handicap of personalizing everything and escalating all disagreements, he had a clear conception of domestic and foreign national interests and pursued them very successfully.
I was thinking that Donald Trump did everything possible to show that he was forceful AND incapable, but …. my opinion aside …. can you imagine shilling for Trump like this?
Shrub got the US into Afghanistan, when any sane military person would have said AW HELL NAW! The Afghans, who have hosted the best and worst of Islam (by which I mean Rumi and blowing up other people’s cultural treasures) over their history, have been happy to put empires on the ground, with a combination of local militias, intertribal arrangements, brutal geography, opium, and a really strong opposition to having foreign overlords using Afghanistan as a testing ground for military technology.
The fact that Conrad Black NOWHERE MENTIONS that Donald Trump’s lackeys handed the Taliban an enormous (and candidly treasonous) package of information, including the names and addresses of everyone who ever worked for the US, shows very clearly that this entire article is a narcissistic, aged capitalist wanting another even MORE narcissistic, aged capitalist to run the most dangerous country in the world. Nowhere does Mr. Butter Pat mention that they did this on Trump’s orders once he lost the election, so that the situation in Afghanistan would be IMPOSSIBLE for Joe Biden’s team to manage when the end came… an end Trump’s team precipitated.
Such is the truly fellatial tone of this mangy screed, it’s hard not to wonder what the hell Trump has on Black. But it’s enough that he was powerful, I guess, and Black admires tyrants.
I close this rant with my assessment of this deranged fondness for Trump, as expressed by Dorothy Lamour’s quote, regarding Bing Crosby and Bob Hope: “There’s always a click when two heels meet.”
Ow ow wow
This is Rachel Maddow really enjoying the ruling regarding the referral for sanctions and disbarment for the 9 Trump lawyers who tried to get the Michigan presidential vote overturned and Trump restored to power. This was among the most pleasant news items I have encountered recently and it’s worth watching, for the sheer glorious untrammelled schadenfreude it will unleash in you.
later that day, around 6 pm, I add this link – Capitol Police Sue Trump
F*** around and find out!!!! I am enjoying this part.
This is an advertisement
The thing about white supremacy is that once you start noticing it it’s very very hard to stop.
For something a little more substantive about what now, at least for Americans, an interview by Anand Giridharadas of American civil rights lawyer Sherrilyn Ifill from The Ink.
An accompaniment to ‘the sproing’
@ChickashaJenny – we currently follow each other on twitter but that may change, since I’m curating my list pretty much constantly and sometimes if I think I’ve been too greedy of an Indigenous person’s time I quit following them to stop the damage.
anyway, what the hell is a sproing?
Glad you asked. Sadly, this device is fictional, and part of the UPSUN universe, but oh how I wish it warn’t.
Text of the user guide:
All my relations.
In English, this device is called a sproing.
The sproing was made by sixers for Indigenous peoples to reclaim their stolen heritage from museums, businesses, collections and private homes.
There is technology in it which makes it demand to be used.
It will self-destruct or become inert if not used for its purpose, because it assumes that when it stops reclaiming Indigenous treasures that it is in the hands of colonial powers who wish to understand its secrets. We can’t say how it makes these decisions, just that we’ve seen it demonstrated.
When you’re done with it — may that day come soon — think of where to leave it. If you decide never to use it, you will still have to leave it somewhere.
If it self-destructs it may reach temperatures of 850 degrees C. Think of this object as a person who is a tool who is a bomb.
DO NOT LEAVE IT IN YOUR HOMES. You have been warned. The smoke causes lung and skin damage to human beings, plants and animals. Sitting it on dirt or stones with a metal box over it is best when it’s not being used.
It is wise to ensure that anyone who will be using the sproing speaks to it first. The sproing doesn’t have speech recognition, but it becomes used to certain people and is much less likely to behave strangely if it hears familiar voices. Speak to it before you pick it up.
Since it will open almost any door, it exists in opposition to capitalism and so it’s always dangerous for you to carry. Thieves, cops, the military, journalists, spies and sixer technology cultists all want this object. If you are not the right person to use it, give it to one of your people who is honest and fearless, and let them use it instead.
The sproing will open almost all key-locked doors and the fobbinator half of all doors managed with a key fob. If it doesn’t work, don’t make a second attempt. Second attempts may bring on the self-destruct, as the sproing assumes the person using it is without the necessary self-discipline to use it safely.
Please treat the sproing with honour and leave it in the sun, directly on the ground, during ceremony, to the extent you can. It will run longer if you do.
The sproing is capable of independent movement. It won’t happen often but they have been known to follow people they like for several hundred meters before they lose interest.
No visible record of the sproing – of any kind – should be made, which is why there is no illustration in this document. Songs and ceremonies are OK.
Do not leave it close to bonfires, as there is more than one report of sproings being attracted to large fires. Under no circumstances try to pull it out of the fire; alert everyone and move away with your backs turned, and keep moving. Although it appears to be made of metal, it is non-magnetic and non-ferrous. If you are foolish enough to try to take it through a customs-enforced airport and you are asked what it is, it’s a paperweight.
Operation.
The side marked “S” is the sproing side. Place the “S” as close to the keyhole as possible and push gently. The sproing will ‘kick’ once, and extrude and push the key into the hole. You can still pull it out at this time and whatever is extended will retract.
Push again and the key will ‘halt in place’ or advise you of failure by vibrating four times. If it works, you won’t be able to remove the sproing until the door has been unlocked and locked again. Turn the sproing as if it was a key and open the door. Return to starting position to remove sproing.
Push three times rapidly if the sproing jams after you’ve returned it to the starting position; this triggers forced retraction.
The “F” side is the fobbinator side. Hold as if it was a fob next to the sensor and wait. If it doesn’t work, it will vibrate, hard, four times. Don’t try it again!
Do not use the sproing lightly or without a clear understanding of your responsibilities as you use it. It is normal for the sproing to change colour over time. This will take the appearance of bleaching or darkening from the original gunmetal colour. If you treat the sproing properly, within a short time it will be the colour of the soil of your territories.
Memorize these instructions and burn them.
I referred to a Trumpenista today as a ‘cognitive foundling’ and I’m particular pleased with that locution.
Communion assembly guide
and check it out, not two minutes later I find this gem:
Sarah Kendzior fan post
She called how Trump would win, and then called how Trump would rule, and now she’s calling he’ll steal the election. Here’s a quote from an article from 2013
another quote from her book Hiding In Plain Sight
anyway I subscribe to her Patreon but I never listen to the podcasts because my bp does shitty, shitty things when she talks about Trump
Hey pOp which snail are you?
“Open image in new tab” or your OS equivalent will pop this pic larger. Shown is a three by three grid of charming snails from medieval illuminated manuscripts. Some of them look very medieval and some look quite contemporary, although the one with a boar’s head is a bit much.
And here’s a good article about the philosophy of consciousness. Pull quote:
I think of consciousness as a weakly emergent phenomenon, not dissimilar from, say, the wetness of water (though a lot more complicated)
