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Month: May 2024
Random Totty
Those who saw Ricky Gervais’s outstanding Netflix show After Life may have noticed one of the co-stars, a youngin who comes on board the newspaper as a cub reporter. In real life, her name is Mandeep Dhillon, and she’s a hottie.
And yes, the eyes have it.
Rising Tide To Sink All Infidel Boats
From the inimitable Laurence Fox:
Why yes, Laurence, yes they have. And every time people like you stand for election to roll back or prevent the above, they are roundly defeated in the polls.
Clearly, the Islamification of Britain is something most Britons want.
Now go and make your evening prayers, facing towards Mecca of course, and tell your houri sister to cover up her body.
…or be stoned to death.
Reality Check
Prompted by Insty’s article about journalism:
Nobody ever became a journalist in order to become popular. The broad-stroke portrayals in movies and novels taught us, accurately enough, that journalists tend toward the coarse, vulgar, impudent and nosy. For many years, journalists were generally admired for those attributes in the way that the beef butcher is admired for the scars on his hands.
But thanks, in part, to a fall in status, as well as ever-irrational attacks from politicians like Donald Trump, today’s journalists routinely experience ridicule and harassment at public events like rallies and demonstrations. They’re not precisely pariahs in the new environment, but they’re no longer considered heroes in many places. Journalists don’t deserve any special pity, it should be noted. Police officers, teachers and even doctors often suffer more from the slings and arrows of the mob. But for journalists, the fall has been spectacular and seems never-ending.
Oh boo-hoo-hoo. And:
“Every mainstream media narrative of the last five years has been wrong, if you really think about it, or skewed or morphed into something,” Adam Carolla said. “They’ve been wrong. And not wrong around the edges… there’s always wrong around the edges. They’ve been flat-out fucking wrong about all of it.”
“If you were to talk to some of the people who reported it, they would be confused,” Dr. Pinsky added of journalists who cannot be shamed for their egregious errors.
…so I created this:
Feel free to copy and share.
Commonsense, Swedish Style
When even the Swedes come to realize it’s all bullshit:
Sweden is now looking to build more nuclear reactors after its parliament formally abandoned its 100% renewable energy target to meet net-zero by 2045.
On Tuesday the country modified its net zero targets to 100% “fossil-free” which its right-leaning government creates the conditions for the return of nuclear power to the country’s energy mix.
“We need more electricity production, we need clean electricity and we need a stable energy system,” Finance Minister Elisabeth Svantesson said in parliament.
Observers said the decision implicitly acknowledges the low quality of unstable wind and solar, and is part of a general collapse of confidence in the renewable energy agenda pioneered in the Nordic countries and in Germany.
Here’s the wake-up call:
“Living close to Russia focuses the mind, and the Swedish people not only wish to join NATO, but also to ground their economy in an energy source, nuclear, that is physically sound and secure, unlike renewables which are neither.”
I should point out that the vast majority of Sweden’s electricity generation comes from hydro-electric dams already, so calling converting the tiny fraction left into “fossil-free” generation is not only eminently doable, but largely irrelevant.
Also, a reminder from a little further south:
German energy giant RWE has begun dismantling a wind farm to make way for a further expansion of an open-pit lignite coal mine in the western region of North Rhine Westphalia.
I should point out that the above operation was okayed by Germany’s Green Party, surely the most eco-addled political party in Europe.
Guess that Russian gas pipeline closure hurt.
As If I Needed Another
…reason not to install the latest “upgrade” from Windoze: here it is.
Microsoft will soon begin pushing adverts into the Start Menu of Windows 11 with the inclusion of ‘recommended’ apps.
And why not? It’s where users are at their most vulnerable, so to speak: right at the beginning of the process. It’s like starting your car, but before the engine fires, you first have to listen to a 15-second advert for “recommended” tires, Bud Lite or windshield washer fluid. But of course, it’s being pushed as a helpful benefit:
Microsoft says the ads are aimed to enable users to find ‘some of the great apps that are available’.
That’s Microsoft all over: just trying to be helpful, as is someone who will pass you a bucket of lighter fluid instead of water when you’re trying to put out a house fire.
Although the update [KB5036980] is currently optional, it will soon roll out to all Windows devices within the coming weeks.
Of course it will — coercion is one of Microsoft’s major strengths. But:
Luckily, there is an easy way to turn off the pesky adverts with a simple change to your device settings.
Luckily. Until that feature too is disabled in future “updates”, depending on how much blast-back Microsoft gets from customers — not that they’ve ever paid much heed to that in the past, unless the storm of protest was overwhelming.
I have generally made it my personal policy to skip generations of Windows OS — I never used Win 9, for example, going from 8 to 10, and then only because someone I trusted not only chided me but actually forced me to make that change, having to do it himself because I flatly refused to do so. (Thanks, Dan.) And I was only able to have him do that because I was a house guest at the time. Unfortunately, he lives about two states away from me so I won’t be able to do that again this time.
And in any event, I’m going to get this fucking “feature” when I get my replacement PC* later in the year. Let’s hope there really is an “easy way” to turn the thing off, or else the laptop’s durability will be sorely tested as it slams into the opposite wall. (My new apartment doesn’t overlook the pool this time, so the laptop’s waterproofing will not be called upon.)
*In response to my earlier woes, several Readers sent me their older laptops to try to help me out — and thank you, every one — but I was never able to make them work for me, even with considerable input from Daughter, who is a pro at this kind of thing. Sadly, it’s a new one I’ll be getting, or else I’ll just go back to using my older Dell which, although slower than a carthorse on downers, is at least still capable of closing without needing engineering manipulation of the Rubik Cube degree.