vxbush 4/18/2022 6:07:52 AM

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From Saturday's broadside: 

Michigan kindergartener brings Jose Cuervo margaritas to snack time, made students 'woozy'

Wow. Clearly I went to the wrong kindergarten. ////

Seriously--parental failure. 

lucius septimius 4/18/2022 7:14:01 AM

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Reply to vxbush in 1:

Jukebox

doppelganglander 4/18/2022 8:25:02 AM

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Reply to vxbush in 1:
You don't drink, so you probably haven't noticed that half the beer case in most stores is now filled with fruity seltzer drinks and canned, premixed cocktails. The packaging is colorful and a child could easily mistake it for fruit punch or soda. I'm old enough to remember the outcry against wine coolers in the 80s because they were allegedly aimed at teens.

vxbush 4/18/2022 8:39:05 AM

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In #3 doppelganglander said: You don't drink, so you probably haven't noticed that half the beer case in most stores is now filled with fruity seltzer drinks and canned, premixed cocktails. The packaging is colorful and a child could easily mistake it for fruit punch or soda. I'm old enough to remember the outcry against wine coolers in the 80s because they were allegedly aimed at teens.

Yeah, I have no reason to go down the alcohol aisle, so I wasn't aware of this. I guess they have to make customers somehow, but this doesn't seem like a good solution. 

buzzsawmonkey 4/18/2022 9:09:29 AM

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vxbush 4/18/2022 9:12:03 AM

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In #5 buzzsawmonkey said: So...how does everyone like the new euphemism---"the unhoused"---for what were formerly "the homeless?"

It seems that we need euphemisms for our euphemisms. See: hobo. 

JCM 4/18/2022 9:14:13 AM

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Reply to buzzsawmonkey in 5:

Misdirection, misinformation, intentionally so.

By making the problem "housing" and also the other thing you will hear "housing is right", the lay the path for massive government intervention in housing markets, make inroads into control of private property.

It's a disgusting perversion not to help anyone, but to expand government and reduce individual rights.

buzzsawmonkey 4/18/2022 9:23:20 AM

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In #6 vxbush said: It seems that we need euphemisms for our euphemisms. See: hobo. 

Or, "bum."

buzzsawmonkey 4/18/2022 9:26:34 AM

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Reply to JCM in 7:

I remember, years ago, Leftist journos saying that "the problem with the homeless is lack of homes."  This, of course, ignored the large population of drug-and-alcohol abusers, and the overlapping population of the mentally-ill, and the overlapping population of out-and-out bums, which those who were "homeless" merely because they were temporarily down on their luck and the government had driven the cheap SRO hotels and flophouses out of business.

JCM 4/18/2022 9:31:43 AM

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Reply to buzzsawmonkey in 9:

Over 90% of the homeless are either mentally ill, drug addicted or both.

It is not compassionate to let them live like that. It strips the individuals of any diginty to allow them to destroy themselves. Based on the figures I've seen for Seattle and LA. It would be cheaper to get them the treatment and service they need. We're are still suffering from the over reaction in the 60s and 70s to the horrid conditions in State run involuntary commitment programs.

But also we now have the Industrial Homeless Complex. People who's rice bowls are from programs for the homeless, therefore they have a vested interest in NOT solving problems but getting more money.

vxbush 4/18/2022 9:35:56 AM

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In #10 JCM said: But also we now have the Industrial Homeless Complex. People who's rice bowls are from programs for the homeless, therefore they have a vested interest in NOT solving problems but getting more money.

As with racist attacks, the need for victims homeless is greater than the supply. 

buzzsawmonkey 4/18/2022 9:39:11 AM

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Reply to JCM in 10:

You've probably seen me say here, many times, that dealing with "outpatient/deinstitutionalized homeless" as is being done today is:

a) a full-employment program for the holders of otherwise-useless "social-service" degrees;

b) the creation of two dependent populations that can be farmed for votes; the "caregivers" and their "clients";

c) a gift to the real-estate developers that want to snatch up urban real estate cheap for expensive and extensive redevelopment;

d) a living testament to the insanity of "defunding the police" and replacing them with "social workers," given that "social workers" have been ministering to "the homeless" for 40 years and all we have seen is the problem metastasizing.

JCM 4/18/2022 9:40:13 AM

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Reply to vxbush in 11:

Leds me back to the leftist/socialist core ideology and evil that is intrinsic in it.

The only worth an individual has is in utility to The State.

The drug and mentally addled individuals have their utility to The State in self destruction.

They used, cruelly, to advance the socialist agenda.

Occasional Reader 4/18/2022 11:18:08 AM

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vxbush 4/18/2022 11:18:49 AM

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In #13 JCM said: Leds me back to the leftist/socialist core ideology and evil that is intrinsic in it. The only worth an individual has is in utility to The State.

I tend to see this in how institutions treat the disabled; if you cannot work even at a minimal level doing piecemeal work, you have no value. This is part of the reason why I don't have my son in such an institution, because he hates that type of work. 

Kosh's Shadow 4/18/2022 11:32:27 AM

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The Foundation=NGO complex

How foundations (e.g. Open Society Foundation, etc) control groupthink on the Left.

The center-left donor network uses its financial clout, exercised through its swarms of NGO bureaucrats, to impose common orthodoxy and common messaging on their grantees. The methods by which they enforce this discipline can be described as chain-ganging and shoe-horning.

Chain-ganging (a term I have borrowed from international relations theory) in this context means implicitly or explicitly banning any grantee from publicly criticizing the positions of any other grantee. At a conference sponsored by the Ford Foundation that I attended more than a decade ago, an African American community activist complained to me privately: “Immigration is hurting the people in the neighborhoods we work in. The employers prefer illegal immigrants to young Black workers. But if we say anything about it, Ford will cut off our money.”

Shoe-horning is what I call the progressive donor practice of requiring all grantees to assert their fealty to environmentalist orthodoxy and support for race and gender quotas, even if those topics have nothing to do with the subject of the grant. It is not necessary for the donors to make this explicit; their grantees understand without being told, like the favor-seeking knights of Henry II: “Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?” In the last few years, even the most technocratic center-left policy programs—advocating slightly higher earned income tax credits or whatever—have often rewritten their mission statements to refer to “climate justice” and “diversity” and routinely sprinkle grantspeak like “the racial reckoning” and “the climate emergency” throughout their policy briefs in the hope of pleasing program officers at big progressive foundations. 

buzzsawmonkey 4/18/2022 11:34:13 AM

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In #14 Occasional Reader said: You’ve just got to love a place like Miami where they sell Veuve Clicqout at Walgreens.

Just by the way, drugstores (and hardware/paint stores) were frequent fronts for bootleggers back in the days of Prohibition, since it was possible for drugstores to dispense alcohol "by prescription," and hardware/paint stores were a good cover since they routinely sold legitimate solvents---hence the slang references to prohibition alcohol as "paint."  There are a number of films, and books, in which such references/allusions appear.

Kosh's Shadow 4/18/2022 11:34:38 AM

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Reply to vxbush in 15:

I realize this is a quite different case, but bringing it up.

One thing about the Lab - one employee in the group is in a motorized wheelchair. He can barely move his hands enough to control the chair. Uses an onscreen keyboard that can tell where he is looking to type.

I doubt he'd get employed in industry. But he does fine work.

buzzsawmonkey 4/18/2022 11:54:21 AM

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Reply to buzzsawmonkey in 17:

Just for starters:

1) When Cagney starts getting into bootlegging in the film "The Roaring Twenties," one of the distribution centers he goes into is a paint store.

2) Brian Donlevy, in "The Great McGinty," goes to an establishment in the ground floor of a brownstone which has a sign out front saying "Interior Decoration," that is clearly a speakeasy, to collect protection money from its proprietor.  

Both these films were made post-Repeal, but were referencing the Prohibition era with well-known references.  Dashiell Hammett's novel "Red Harvest, written during Prohibition, has an early scene where the Continental Op is getting drunk in a speakeasy with the local union leader who, when their conversation is concluded, asks the Op, "Had enough of this paint?"

3) The play "Holiday," most well-known in the Katharine Hepburn/Cary Grant version, is a Prohibition-era play.  Towards the end of it, Hepburn shows up at the apartment of Grant's friends, and the friends talk about "running out to the drugstore for champagne."

Occasional Reader 4/18/2022 2:08:36 PM

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JCM 4/18/2022 3:17:36 PM

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Global Waming

Global Cooling

Must be the anthropogenic methane in the atmosphere.

Astronomers capture surprising changes in Neptune's temperatures

Kosh's Shadow 4/18/2022 4:18:23 PM

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Reply to JCM in 21:

There should be a science fiction cartoon series Nep Toons.

Kosh's Shadow 4/18/2022 4:40:44 PM

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Something missing in my home office..

Oh, the previous work computer and monitor

Moved another computer there; mu Linux system. Had to fix it. It is an old (6 or more year old) system with a new hard drive, but has had problems after system updates. Had to reinstall Linux