Tag: Stupid people

Wrong Way Round

Grammar Nazism

In reading an otherwise-interesting article about the looming collapse in commercial real estate, I hit a speed bump at top speed:

Yes, yes, yes I know that it’s the accepted accountancy practice to put the most recent number at the left of a chart, but it simply supports my thesis that non-grammarians (e.g. cops and accountants) should never be allowed to dictate literacy practices.

To wit:  we go from A to B, from top to bottom, from bad to worse and similar fashion in any number of reading customs and idioms… because in the Western alphabet — in which this article was written — we read from left to right (and not to right from left).  We are not Japanese, or Arabs, or Israelis, who are perfectly free to read diagonally across a page if they so wish, using their chicken-scratch pictograms, hieroglyphs or alphabets, but the language of commerce and industry is English.

Except when it comes to accountants.

So when I read the above chart — and I must remind Readers that reading charts was my métier for well over three decades — I couldn’t see what the fuss was about, until I realized that the fucking thing was written backwards.

I never understood nor cared for this accounting practice, which in non-accounting trend data makes the very next chart in the article perfectly comprehensible:

…simply by virtue of the fact that it follows the accepted timeline format whereby the first data point falls to the left, and the latest data point falls to the right of the trend.

Why accountants have to be different simply beats me.

Once I got past that, the article was extremely interesting:

One major hurdle for CRE (Commercial Real Estate — Kim) space is that “more than 50% of the $2.9 trillion in commercial mortgages will need to be renegotiated in the next 24 months when new lending rates are likely to be up by 350 to 450 basis points,” Lisa Shalett, chief investment officer for Morgan Stanley Wealth Management, wrote in a note to clients.  Shalett expects a “peak-to-trough CRE price decline of as much as 40%, worse than in the Great Financial Crisis.”

But, says BoA, we don’t have to worry:

Bank of America analysts expect challenges in the CRE space but noted, “They are manageable and do not represent a systemic risk to the US economy.”

…unless, of course, you’re a small bank, whose CRE investment exposure (from memory, anywhere from 10-15% of total assets) is typically much higher than that of GlobalMegaBankCorp (5% or less).

Fun times we live in, what?  And not helped by stupid grammar.

When Panic Costs Money

Eco-Crap, Journalist Scum, Watermelons, Weather

The Greatest Living Englishman has turned his ire towards the BBC, and at climate fearmongers in general:

Amazon Prime star has slammed weather forecasters for spreading what he has described as “green propaganda” in his latest column.

The presenter, 63, went on to explain that due to inaccurate weather reports, he and many other farmers and been forced to “take a massive financial hit” for “absolutely no reason”.

Jeremy recalled how earlier this week, weather presenters had claimed “an apocalyptic storm would arrive in Britain on Tuesday night”.

The Former Top Gear host went on to explain how, due to predictions of weeks of “torrential rain and gales”, he had felt forced to harvest his crops even though they weren’t ready because the moisture content was too high.

“Yes, I’d have to pay £10 a ton to dry the grain after it was harvested but better to take that hit than have the whole lot ruined by the storm,” he wrote in his column for the Sun. 

“We worked tirelessly until 11pm and when I finally crawled into bed, utterly exhausted, I noticed that all of my neighbouring farmers were still out here, doing the same thing.”

Here’s what he was talking about:

But:

The ex-BBC star went on to express his outrage when he had expected to see “Armageddon” the next morning only to be greeted by “blue skies and a gentle breeze”.

“So the farmers had brought in their harvest early and taken a massive financial hit that they can’t afford… for absolutely no reason,” Jeremy fumed.

So he lashed out.

“They feel compelled, when it’s warm, to paint their maps dark red and talk about ‘extreme heat’. And similarly, to keep Greta and the snowflake army happy, they need to say when it’s a bit chilly, that we will all soon be buried under a 20-foot snow drift,” he complained.

“They see their weather forecasts now as political weapons. Baseball bats which can be used to beat the oil companies into submission. And they’ll mangle statistics if that’s what’s necessary.”

He then went on to beg weather forecasters to share “the truth” with farmers and to save their “propaganda forecasts” for people who need to “turn the heating down”.

“They think that the constant wrongness doesn’t matter, because a wonky weather forecast only affects people planning barbecues,” he stated. “But to farmers, it bloody well does matter.”

Frankly, if I were a British farmer, I’d subscribe to an actual meteorogical service and learn to interpret the data for myself.

And refuse to pay the BBC license fee, like millions of other Brits are doing.

Off My List

Entertainment, Two-Minute Hate

I’ve moaned about this nonsense before:

Since hitting UK cinemas last month, the atomic bomb thriller Oppenheimer — which stars Cillian Murphy in the titular role — has been given a slew of five star ratings while critics branded it Nolan’s ‘best and most revealing work’.

However:

BBC News star Jane Hill revealed she walked out of Christopher Nolan’s film halfway through after spotting a major flaw that left her ‘disappointed’.

I was thinking “historical inaccuracy” or “gratuitous sex/violence”, but no:

It appears Jane was certainly not in agreement as she shared that she was frustrated at not being able to hear the film’s dialogue properly due to the loud soundtrack — and was even more astounded to learn that the issue occurs in almost ‘all’ of Nolan’s films.

She told her followers: ‘Saw Oppenheimer. Well, managed half of it. Disappointed that music & effects often drowned out the actors, I missed whole chunks of dialogue. 

Well, that takes the movie off my “to watch” list.

Till fairly recently, I thought that this degraded sound in movies was simply the result of my age- and tinnitus-ridden hearing, but now I know the truth.  It seems that the new trend in cinema verité  is now to muddy up the dialogue either by having the actors mutter their lines — and sometimes in thick, incomprehensible accents withal — or else to submerge the speech with over-loud sound effects and / or “background” music.  Or in the case of this weasel Nolan, both.

Sorry, but there’s not much verité  when you can’t hear it being spoken.

I know, the answer is to wait for the movies to appear on a streaming service, and then tap the “subtitles” button.

Nah I’m not going to do that.  If I’m going to have to use subtitles, then I’ll just watch furrin stuff like gloomy Scandi detective shows or Belgian whodunnits, which quite frankly are often better than their “English” competition anyway.

The Son&Heir suggested that I get a sound bar for my TV so that I can turn up the “mids” (mid-range audio) and compensate, but I’m not going to do that either.

This little trend is like an artist covering his painting with sheets of thick gauze so you have to strain your eyes to see what’s on the canvas.  I wouldn’t bother looking at those, and I’m not going to watch these shitty movies either.

A pox on all of them.

Related:  Oppenheimer  director Nolan tells us all to fuck off.

Outrage

Religion

So this prime pair:

…needed some painting done in their little love nest, but when they asked one house painter to do the job, they got this reply:

Needless to say, the fegelehs  are “outraged”.  And so am I.

While it is absolutely within anyone’s right to turn down work — for any reason — this little painter needs to get a good swift smack:  not for refusing to work for homosexuals, but for using her religion publicly as an excuse not to do so. Sheesh, could she not just have said, “Sorry, but my work schedule is really full right now, so I can’t do the job”?  Of course not:  she had to use this situation to loudly proclaim her faith — the kind of thing that gives all religious adherents a bad name.  And I know that lying is typically taboo, but FFS there’s a reason they’re called “white lies”:  a falsehood that is used out of politeness or manners to avoid causing offense.

(I typically refer to people like this as “asshole Christians”, although I should also point out that when I once read about a Muslim chick refusing to work in a supermarket’s meat department because it would mean touching pork products, I referred to her in similar terms.)

Now, of course, some other asshole in government (is there another kind?) is going to get all puffed up and outraged too, and as day follows night, regulation and/or law is going to follow — which outrages me — and laws like this will be used to bludgeon people like bakers who refuse, for the same reasons as Painter Polly, to make cakes for soon-to-be-married lesbos.

And all civility is lost, and the lawyers get rich.

As for our two nesting gayboys:  it’s not like the world of interior decorating is devoid of people of similar inclination to yours.  Just find one — it will not be difficult — and stop making a production about it.

Everyone involved in this sad little tale needs to be smacked about the head with a Cluebat®.

There He Goes Again

Eco-Crap, Watermelons, Weather

…Steve Milloy, that is, using actual data (!) to prove — as he’s being doing pretty much ever since I can remember — that the Eco-Loons are a bunch of lying assholes:

Not a single extreme weather event can be:

1. Factually shown to be unprecedented; or

2. Scientifically shown to be linked to emissions.

This, in the middle of a heatwave both here and in Europe that is nowhere close to what’s happened in the recent past, let alone in the long-ago pre-SUV era when, as he points out, Greenland was once completely ice-free, and had been for centuries.  And even now, as people have been buying more and more large SUVs and trucks:

“No global warming in almost 9 years despite 500 billion tons of emissions.”

You fool, Milloy:  it’s not global warming, it’s Global Cooling Climate Warming Change©.

Maybe at some point some kind of collective — wait, “common”? — sense will kick in, and we’ll stop listening to the climate alarmists and implementing their insane policies.

Just not while we’re being governed by addled fools like Joe Biden and his cabal of watermelons.

Oh Dear

Bureaucracy, Eco-Crap, Lies and Untruths, Watermelons

We’re always being told how bad Eeeevil Oil is for us, for the environment and of course for the pore likkel beasties in the fields.

First off, we have to stop using oil-powered vehicles and start using Duracell-powered cars and trucks (lol) instead.  Except that it turns out that electric cars are worse for the environment than gasoline-powered ones (see here for the !SCIENCE!).

So if Teslas and Priuses are doubleplusungood after all, then we need to start using “sustainable” eco-fuels like corn-based ethanol because sustainable.  (Even Formula 1 is moving towards using ethanol-only fuel in the next couple of years, the idiots.)

Sounds good, right?  Errrr, nazzo fast, Guido.  Add this little snippet to the “Solution Is Worse Than The Problem” category:

The US biofuel program is probably killing endangered species and harming the environment in a way that negates its benefits, but the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is largely ignoring those problems, a new federal lawsuit charges.

The suit alleges the EPA failed to consider impacts on endangered species, as is required by law, when it set new rules that will expand biofuel use nationwide during the next three years, said Brett Hartl, government affairs director with the Center for Biological Diversity (CBD), which brought the litigation.

Not that we need any further proof that the EPA is to the environment as cancer cells are to the human body, but I digress.

The Clean Air Act requires the EPA to set minimum levels of biofuel usage for the transportation sector. The new rule approved by the agency calls for about 15bn gallons (57bn liters) of conventional corn ethanol for each of the next three years, plus an increase from 5.9bn gallons to 7.3bn gallons of advanced biofuels during the same time period. 

About 40% of all corn grown in the US is used for ethanol production, and nearly half is used as animal feed.

While the fuels are designed to decarbonize the transportation sector, their production eliminates wetlands and prairie land that act as carbon sinks, Hartl noted. The EPA in 2018 estimated that up to 7m acres (2.8m hectares) of land had been converted to grow corn for ethanol fuel. 

Ethanol production also pollutes water. Regulations around pesticides and fertilizers used in corn grown for ethanol fuel are much looser, which means much higher levels of dangerous chemicals run into surface and groundwaters. The pollution probably plays a significant role in dead zones in the Gulf of Mexico after pesticides flow down the Mississippi River, Hartl said. 

Read the rest to see how the EPA is ducking and diving to avoid doing anything that might actually, you know, alleviate the problem.

One by one, every single alternative proposed by the Greens (and their lickspittles in academia and the media) is proving to be a complete fiasco:  wind- and solar power generation instead of nuclear, electric vehicles (EV) instead of internal combustion engines, and now biofuels instead of gasoline.

But Oh No! we have to preserve the Gaia Cult — even if it kills us (and Gaia).

Fucking bastards.