Can’t Go With That

Here’s a headline that made me scratch my head:

Are Nephilim Still Ruling the World?

Wait, Nephi-what?  Oh FFS, I wish I hadn’t looked this one up:

Genesis 6:1–4 tells the readers that the Nephilim, which means “fallen ones” when translated into English, were the product of copulation between the divine beings (lit. sons of god) and human women (lit. daughters of Adam).

I know, I know… it’s in the Bible, so it must be true.

So that means that all those Greek “myths” weren’t actually mythical at all?

Zeus and the other Olympians were constantly and permanently knocking up princesses, queens, nymphs, sirens, lesser goddesses, warrior women and just plain fair maidens who bathed in the pool with their handmaidens. And the handmaidens, too, sometimes. Zeus even managed to impregnate mortal women when he was a swan or a bull.

Hercules was the illegitimate child of Zeus and a mortal woman, as were Perseus, Helen of Troy and Minos (among other very, very famous offspring of Zeus). Yep, the Greek God family tree is very, very tangled. The genealogy is near impossible to try to map.

And ancient Greeks who literally believed in their religion also believed that Zeus could produce offspring with human women in the real world; among the many people who did was Alexander the Great’s mother, who claimed that Zeus had fathered her son. Alexander the Great was alleged to have actually believed this himself.

I can see why Alexander might have believed it of himself, but I cannot believe that anyone in this day and age would even be discussing this bullshit.  And yet they are, and I perforce must pass comment on their drooling fantasies.

Talk about yer animal husbandry…

No Right At All

Here’s a story which is guaranteed to get me going, and it’s a topic I’ve discussed before.  Seems as though this Old Phartte popped his clogs at age 91, and decided that because his grandchildren had never bothered to visit him while he was in hospital, that they weren’t worthy of getting any of his loot once he was gone.  So instead of cutting them out of his will, he left them each only a few bucks.

Needless to say, the grandchildren sued the estate, claiming that they were “entitled” to a third, rather than the 0.0001% thereof specified in his will.

Where do these people get the idea that they should be entitled to anything?  FFS, his estate, lest we all forget, is his own property — something that people (and governments, a rant for another time) seem to forget.

So if Grandpappy wants to leave his dough to Someone Not His Foul Grandchildren because they ignored him while he was alive, he’s perfectly within his rights to do so — just as if he were to give a birthday present to one person and not another.

This business of heredity “entitling” someone something is all well and good when it is, ahem, an actual title (e.g. royalty / nobility), but in the cold hard world of law and finance, descendants are entitled to nothing, if the owner of said estate says so.

Anyway, this group of ingrates lost their case, and a damn good thing it is too.  And for the record, they’re as ugly as they are greedy.

Small Wonder

The last time I was in an office supply retail store (Staples, Office Depot etc.) was shortly before I took down my consultant’s shingle and beat a client to death with it.

A frequent customer of such establishments, therefore, I am not.

So when New Wife asked me to swing by one and buy a half-dozen plastic clipboards while she was doing the laundry, I obliged with pleasure.  Here’s the item under discussion:

I know, we could just have bought the things from Satan’s Warehouse Amazon, but they were needed urgently, i.e. the next day, so we would have to buy at full retail.  But the price stuck in my mind, because that meant that the clipboards would price out at just over a couple of bucks each.

So I went over to Staples, who had the product not at all, nay even unto other colors.  “Maybe next week?” was the helpful response from the stock clerk of whom I made the request.

No big deal:  this is America, land of choices sufficient to make you puke.  So pausing only to knee the surly peasant in the groin, I went over to Office Depot, literally across the road.

Okay, they didn’t have any blue ones in stock (school uniform color, in case you’re interested).  But they did have clear ones which, when I checked with Herself, were judged “satisfactory” albeit grudgingly.

But no price in the shelf, so I grabbed a passing flunky by the ear and told him to scan the UPC code with his little scanner thingy, which he did after only a little moaning.

Then he told me the price of the piece of plastic with tin clip up top:

Thirteen (13) U.S. dollars… EACH

…and then it was my turn to do the moaning.

Fucking hell.  If a piece of mass-produced-made-in-China shit can cost in-store what can be purchased online at one-sixth of the price, something is wrong somewhere.  It could be the office supply store’s pricing policy, it could be the cost of shipping, it could be that the price was entered into the store’s price file at 10x the intended (that added decimal place matters, you know), it could be any number of things.

Anyway, New Wife was as appalled as I was, the teachers will just have to settle for something other than a blue plastic clipboard, and I’m sure that Office Depot’s fire insurance policy can replace the store… or not, I don’t care.

Because it will be another decade before I bother to set foot inside one of them again.

Alternatives

Everyone’s always talking about concepts like “plant-based” or “knowledge-based” (A.I.) nowadays.

How about “reality-based”?  Here’s one company who thought they had it all worked out, until reality stepped up and said, “Nazzo fast, Guido” (actually, “Noch langsamer, Fritz” ):

Mercedes-Benz has backtracked on their plan to transition to selling only electric vehicles after 2030, with company officials saying that “market conditions” have not allowed that to happen.

Ah, those pesky “market conditions”, wherein customers tell their supplier companies to take a hike after said corporations make unbelievably stupid decisions (Bud Lite, coff coff).

The background:

The company said it would commit $47 billion to electrifying its fleet, with CEO and board chair Ola Källenius saying, “We are convinced, we can do it with strong profitability, and we believe that focus on electrical is the right way to build a successful future and to enhance the value of Mercedes Benz.”

In other words:  we’ve bought into the whole Green New Deal, hook, line and sinker, and we’ll just force customers to adapt to the New World Order by giving them no option to do otherwise.

And then came Q4 ’23 results.  Oh, and a few other things which might have made potential (and existing) customers reevaluate their options:

The business model change comes after multiple highly-publicized instances of Mercedes-Benz electric vehicles catching on fire and causing massive damage.

Yeah.  Imagine that.

My question is quite simple:  other car companies have also declared their intention to be all-electric by x date (e.g. Jaguar, Volvo).  Does anyone think they’re going to have a change of heart too?

Or will they just do the Lemming Thing and plunge off the reality-based cliff, secure in their own virtuousness?

Mollycoddling

I don’t know where this word came from, but it sure as hell describes this situation:

A book serialised on Mail+ at the weekend, called Bad Therapy, suggests that ‘touchy feeling parenting and therapy’ had effectively damaged Generation Z, those born from 1997 to 2012, who are now in the 20s and teens.

The rush to ‘diagnose and accommodate, not punish or reward’ has led to ‘the loneliest, most anxious, depressed and fearful generation on record’.

The modern emphasis on protecting and safeguarding has led us to our current predicament, where even the wrong use of pronouns makes some people ‘feel unsafe’.

This may sound harsh, but this generation snowflake really does need to get a grip. Their future mental wellbeing depends on it.

Never mind “mental wellbeing”;  their entire future requires that Generation Snowflake needs to grow balls (figuratively speaking, of course), develop a thicker skin and stop thinking that the world depends on their mental wellbeing.

I would humbly suggest that the reintroduction of corporal punishment in schools would be a good first step, but no doubt some will disagree with me — which is part of the problem, right there.

Prime Example

Following on from the above post, here’s a classic example of mollycoddling:

Why Anya Taylor-Joy’s corset photo is so dangerous to impressionable young girls

On Sunday, to celebrate the premiere of her film Dune: Part Two in New York, the 27-year-old posted a shot of herself wearing the undergarments needed to pull off the dramatic Maison Margiela haute couture gown she wore on the red carpet – namely a corset straight out of the Victorian era, that was cinched so tightly it will have eating disorder counsellors clearing their diaries for the foreseeable.

Here’s the offending pic:

But here’s the silly part:

One [commenter] accuses the actress of ‘normalising starvation’; they tell her plainly that ‘this is not a healthy look for women at all’; and another has written a desperate plea: ‘You are going to kill people with this sort of beauty promotion. Please delete. Please.’

I find it hard to comprehend why Anya would have posted this picture – or at least not taken it down once her followers had made her aware of the potential damage it could be doing.

And sadly the only thing I could come up with was the need for publicity – the need to garner more attention around her red-carpet appearance for Dune.

As a grown-up actress, looked up to by so many young women, she needs to recognise that supposedly fashionable Instagram shots like this can turn into tomorrow’s anorexia inspiration.

Frankly, if “impressionable young girls” feel the need to starve themselves to death after seeing that pic, they need to be expunged from the gene pool anyway.  But here’s another pic of the offender:

Next thing, we’re going to be calling for the abolition of pics such as this because “shots like this can turn into tomorrow’s rape inspiration” among impressionable teenage boys or Third World immigrants [some overlap].

Here’s a suggestion for people calling for this kind of action:

Fuck off.  Just Fuck. Right. Off.

We don’t need to be “protected” from this stuff;  we need to realize — as about 90% of all sentient beings realize — this this is fantasy.  The corset was a movie costume, not a “how to dress” guide.  That some morons will take it the wrong way is unfortunate, but not problematic for anyone other than their own stupid selves.

I’m reminded of the Popes who ordered that Michelangelo’s priceless artworks be defaced by having fig leaves painted over the depicted women’s pudenda.  Same people, same thought process.

What the hell:  why not inspire some lustful thoughts, or maybe an insatiable urge to go and shop at Victoria’s Secret…