I feel I need to give y’all fair warning:
Idiot: the French for “washing machine” is “femme”, so of course it’s feminine. And speaking of femmes:
More swimsuits, I heard you say? Oh, why not.
That’s the latest trend: completely transparent bikinis. More of these next week, unless someone complains.
This is an interesting development:
Australia will ban children from using social media with a minimum age limit as high as 16, prime minister Anthony Albanese said Tuesday, vowing to get kids off their devices and ‘onto the footy fields’.
Federal legislation to keep children off social media will be introduced this year, he said, describing the impact of the sites on young people as a ‘scourge’.
The minimum age for children to log into sites such as Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok has not been decided but is expected to be between 14 and 16 years, Albanese said.
The prime minister said his own preference would be a block on users aged below 16.
Age verification trials are being held over the coming months, the centre-left leader said, though analysts said they doubted it was technically possible to enforce an online age limit.
Loath as I am to give any kind of credit to the OzGov, foul totalitarian nanny bastards that they are, I can’t help but wonder whether a) this can work and b) if it does work, will it benefit teens in any way? Given that teens nowadays appear to have absolutely no problem in accessing porn — even porn sites protected by “age walls” — I’m somewhat skeptical about it all.
It’s probably just the usual “We have to do something!” posturing so common among all politicians.
(Just an aside: Albanese’s “center-left” philosophy is somewhere around that of Bernie Sanders, politically speaking.)
So off we go:
To round things off, so to speak, I understand that bikini pics are quite popular in these parts. Well, you asked for it:
Okay, that’s not really a bikini…
So get out there and spread the knees… I mean news.
…and that means not only an order, but also the smell.
“Kim, WTF are you talking about?”
Some smart guy (Robert Graboyes, at the splendidly-named Bastiat’s Window ) decided that Teh Experts cocked it up (surprise, surprise):
Two recent BW posts (“Polls, Pols, and Poli-Sci” and “Presidential Prodigiousness Potpourri”) lambasted the Bizarro World of presidential rankings from the 2024 Presidential Greatness Project Expert Survey. Some of the more ludicrous findings are summarized/caricatured in the graphic above. Several readers asked me to offer my own rankings. I can’t do a 1-through-45 list, but I can lump them into five tiers: (T#1) highly positive, (T#2) somewhat positive, (T#3) neutral, (T#4) somewhat negative, and (T#5) highly negative.
Go ahead and read it before continuing here.
My only quibbles are that Obama and Biden (the latter a.k.a. Obama The Much Lesser) didn’t end up in Tier 5, the absolute stinkers; and that Calvin Coolidge wasn’t in Tier 1 (although I will cop to being a yuge fan of Coolidge, so I may be biased).
I can’t fault Graboyes’s methodology, however, in that he refused to take into account what the presidents did when not in the Oval office (either before or after), which is good. His example:
Madison’s role in the Federalist Papers and Constitution make him a titan, but his presidency was mediocre.
He did include some non-Presidential material, though:
…Jimmy Carter, who has made himself a national pustule for over four decades.
By the same token, therefore Obama should be likewise excoriated because “national pustule” would be too kind a judgment on his post-Presidential shenanigans.
Feel free to discuss the observations of both Graboyes and mine, in Comments.
But before we do that, let’s have a chuckle or two, starting with a DNC summary:
And speaking of the former “Border Czarina”:
Well, I’d hire her.
And an oldie, but still one of my favorites for “Mother Of The Year”:
And to end on one more political vote:
Also, with everywhere (except Texas) about to drift into Fall, some reminders of the past summer:
And in the rear-view mirror, as you head off to find that dozer:
Some pleb has a go at the British class system — a system regarded with bemusement by most Murkins — and while we have few parallels with the Brits, the one we do regrettably share is the propensity of the well-to-do middle class to be involved in stupid shit like the Green movement and (lately) the Free Palestine demonstrations.
It’s a fairly lengthy viewing, but funny as hell — and from what I’ve seen of the system, fairly accurate.
Most telling, though, is the description of the rigidity of the thing: the “bucket of crabs” analogy is very appropriate.
And we have shared the dolorous effects of the “outsourcing” of manufacturing and the jobs therein to foreign countries; the only difference being that our corporations did it without any help from government.