Tag: Stupid people

Why Indeed?

Celebrities, Travels

The question is asked:

Why DO US megastars Brad Pitt, Tom Cruise and George Clooney prefer the UK to California?

The answer is actually quite simple, and it’s one of the reasons why I love going there too.

The pat answers, of course, are manifold — especially in the case of the above reptiles — and the first, obviously, is that anywhere in Yurp (including Britishland) is preferable to the shithole that California has become, especially when the said reptiles are also filthy rich and can buy things like “cottages” on the Thames River or castles in Devon;  and being all part of the same mutual admiration society, they can also count on their buddies to put them up for a day or week.

Then they can play the part of the “locals”, and go to quaint little pubs and tearooms and drink “pints” and drink PG Tips tea, go to Wimbledon and thus hobnob with all their precious little Hollywood buddies also visiting “for the occasion”.

And if the weather turns shitty (as it sometimes does in Britishland), they can simply jump into a first-class seat on an airliner and head off to, oh, Cannes, Como or Malibu.

The thing is, it’s very easy to fall in love with the U.K. under those circumstances.  All that British stuff and the matchless beauty of the countryside is like one big theme park, and it is just how it’s described:  charming, quaint and pretty.

And I haven’t even touched on the history, the kind one experiences when finding out that people have been worshipping in a little stone church since the 12th century, or stumbling across some broken clay pots from the Bronze Age in a field somewhere, or seeing the outline of a Roman road winding across an impossibly-green meadow where now a flock of snow-white sheep are grazing contentedly, safe from predators like lions, bears or even wolves.

It’s a gentle country, so unlike the harshness of the U.S. — and especially so when one is living in a wealthy cocoon like Clooney or Depp.  And it’s really easy to love a place when you’re not forced to live there as a native:  by family tradition, work or heritage.

If I sound familiar with the topic, it’s because I feel exactly the same way, having spent weeks and months living in Britishland, whether in Wiltshire at Mr. Free Market’s country house or The Englishman’s farm or in the latter’s cottage in an impossibly-beautiful Cornish seaside village.  After the first couple of weeks I was last there, I found myself browsing the real estate listings, wondering just how I could perhaps buy a little cottage in Devizes or Burton-on-Trent or Norton St. Philip or… or… or…

And if I had the wealth of the Cooneys, Depps, Cruises or their ilk, I would have done exactly what they have done.

Here’s the problem, though.  As I discovered, at some point you get sick of living in a foreign country, even one as pleasant as Britishland.  At some point, you get sick of the high prices (Brits are ripped off more than tourists in Manhattan, and it happens all the time);  sick of the tiny little roads that are so picturesque, and such a huge pain in the ass to use when you need to get somewhere in a hurry;  sick of the class- and wealth envy that you see every day on TV and hear in conversations in those quaint little pubs that serve delicious bitter ale, at £6 ($7.70) a pint.

You get sick of the stupid TV — oh, don’t get fooled by Downton Abbey or Midsomer Murders:  those are the very few jewels scattered around in the dreck and swill of Strictly Come Dancing, Love Island, TOWIE, the empty-headed morning TV hosts, and Piers Morgan.

And you get sick of how primitive the place is — a place which has simultaneously the best newspapers in the world and the worst Internet service (unless you live in London).   A place where you can wait a week for an electrician to come and fix your plug outlets, or where train service can be interrupted for days on end by chilly weather (!), not to mention the frequent strikes of the pampered working class.  Where a lowly bureaucrat can stop you putting up a privacy fence on your property, or after you’ve put it up, tell you to take it down because it’s six inches too high.

You’ll get sick of the petty crime that abounds everywhere — even in those postcard-pretty villages — and the indifference of the police to the problem.

And yes, you get sick of the weather, eventually.  Even those who prefer cooler temperatures and overcast skies will get sick of the ceaseless drizzle, the chill that seeps into your bones, and the inability of your clothes to ever dry out properly.  Like Seattle, only twenty degrees colder.  Why else would Britain boast the largest per-capita percentage of expats who move to Spain, Portugal, France and gawd help us Australia, in ever-increasing numbers?

None of this matters to our celebrity part-time Brits, because their careers take them off to film sets in California or Colorado where they can become, once again, Americans.

I still miss the place, terribly. I just don’t want to live there.

Melting Snowflakes

Seen On Campus, Snowflakes

This one made me giggle like a little girl:

Academic researchers condemned students’ irreverent and offensive responses to an LGBTQ survey, claiming the pushback indicates “fascist ideologues” are “living ‘inside the house’ of engineering and computer science.”

In an article for the Bulletin of Applied Transgender Studies, academics from Oregon State University wrote about their shock at receiving sarcasm and mockery in response to their research into undergraduate LGBTQ students studying in STEM fields. 

The team claimed 50 of 349 responses to their questionnaire on the topic contained “slurs, hate speech, or direct targeting of the research team.” Labeling them “malicious respondents,” they adapted their project to examine how the joke responses “relate to engineering culture by framing them within larger social contexts — namely, the rise of online fascism.”

Oh, diddums.  So the “researchers” asked a bunch of engineering students some stupid questions, and a few of the responders responded with ridicule, the little scamps.

The result?

The research team declared that the mockery they received “had a profound impact on morale and mental health,” particularly for one transgender researcher who was “already in therapy for anxiety and depression regarding online anti-trans rhetoric.” The paper claimed that “managing the study’s data collection caused significant personal distress, and time had to be taken off the project to heal from traumatic harm” of having to read students’ responses in the survey.

Sorry, I can’t carry on because tears.

Of scornful laughter.  Fucking snowflake weenies.

Oh, and the response to their survey’s conclusions?  Rejection.  Read it all for the full flavor.

Delicate Flowers

Snowflakes, Two-Minute Hate

Oh FFS:

Why we should ban perfume in public places
For most people, being in close proximity to someone smelling of honeysuckle and patchouli may be sublime. For those, like me, who suffer with ‘fragrance aversion’ — a strong physical reaction to the ingredients in modern perfumes — it is torture.

STFU.  “Fragrance aversion”?  Seriously?

Sorry, but I happen to love the scent of a woman — New Wife uses Michael Kors Wonderlust, Connie used Giorgio Armani’s Orangerie, my mother wore Estée Lauder’s White Linen and I still have a crush on an old girlfriend who used to wear Revlon Intimate — all with devastating effect on my senses.  And the very fact that I still remember those specific scents after all these years should demonstrate my deep affection thereof.

Nothing smells as good as a woman wearing perfume.

Now granted, the thing can be taken too far.  I once rode in an elevator with, it should be said, an older woman who must have used Chanel as a bath additive, but even as overpowering as it was, at least it was a pleasant smell.

You see, I too suffer from an aversion.  I fucking detest delicate people:  people who get the vapors from (as above) scents, people who start hyper-ventilating at the thought of using public transport, people who can’t eat processed meat, people who fall apart when someone says the word “nigger”, and people who are afraid of guns because “guns are dangerous”.

I can live with peanut allergies, because people can die from that — why, I wonder sometimes, was this never a thing when I was a child? — and similar things that are genuinely harmful.

But a fragrance “aversion”?  Why did the stupid bint in the above article not just open the car window when her traveling companion reeked of (rough guess) Axe body spray?  But oh no, she had to get out of the car because she was nauseated.  What bullshit.

I’m not an inconsiderate person — okay, I try not to be inconsiderate, most of the time.

But I’m getting heartily sick of having to tip-toe through life because of people’s “aversions”.  It’s just a physical manifestation of the “offended” mindset.  And as a wise man once said:

So fucking what, indeed.

Oops

Drive Time, Eco-Crap

So much for electric cars, then:

Is the electric car really as green as it appears?

Executive summary:  no.  Not even close.  Here’s the true cost of manufacture (even granting ad arguendo that CO2 is all that bad for us):

And here’s the pesky particulate pollution comparison (see article for explanation):

So, as we all knew, the risible NetZero goal is a waste of fucking time (the true executive summary).

But, as  Sage Commenter Butch  put it yesterday:

“The objective is not to get us all into ‘cleaner’ EVs. The objective is to deprive us of personal transportation and freedom of movement.”

What he said.

And now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ll go back to drooling over Kim’s Lotto Dream Car, the 2002 BMW Z8 with manual transmission — which on a good day gets 15mpg from its 5-liter V8 gasoline-powered internal combustion engine:

…and that only if you don’t floor the gas pedal.  [exit, drooling]

Easier Option

Eco-Crap, Education, Watermelons

Well, you could choose to go through all this hassle:

The world’s richest known lithium deposit lies deep in the woods of western Maine, in a yawning, sparkling mouth of white and brown rocks that looks like a landslide carved into the side of Plumbago Mountain

But like just about everywhere in the U.S. where new mines have been proposed, there is strong opposition here. Maine has some of the strictest mining and water quality standards in the country, and prohibits digging for metals in open pits larger than three acres. There have not been any active metal mines in the state for decades, and no company has applied for a permit since a particularly strict law passed in 2017. As more companies begin prospecting in Maine and searching for sizable nickel, copper, and silver deposits, towns are beginning to pass their own bans on industrial mining.

“Our gold rush mentality regarding oil has fueled the climate crisis,” says State Rep. Margaret O’Neil, who presented a bill last session that would have halted lithium mining for five years while the state worked out rules (the legislation ultimately failed). “As we facilitate our transition away from fossil fuels, we must examine the risks of lithium mining and consider whether the benefits of mining here in Maine justify the harms.”

Advocates for mining in the U.S. argue that, since the country outsources most of its mining to places with less strict environmental and labor regulations, those harms are currently being born by foreign residents, while putting U.S. manufacturers in the precarious position of depending on faraway sources for the minerals they need.

Geologists say there’s also likely a lot more lithium in spodumene deposits across New England. Communities that haven’t had working mines in years may soon find themselves a key source for lithium and other minerals needed for car batteries, solar panels, and many of the objects people will need more of to transition themselves off polluting fossil fuels.

There are good reasons for U.S. communities to have healthy skepticism about mining projects; there is no shortage of examples of a company coming into a community, mining until doing so becomes too expensive, then leaving a polluted site for someone else to clean up. There are more than 50,000 abandoned mines in the western United States alone, 80% of which still need to be remediated.

But of course, there’s no story without there being rayyyycism, and the Injuns:

Environmental concerns aren’t the only problem with mining, Morrill says. The history of mining in the U.S. is linked to colonialism; Christopher Columbus was looking for gold when he stumbled across North America, and as Europeans expanded into the continent, they took land from Indigenous people to mine for gold, silver, and other metals.

Today, mining in the U.S. often encroaches on Indigenous land. Under mining laws in the U.S. that date to 1872, anyone can stake a claim on federal public lands and apply for permits to start mining if they find “valuable” mineral deposits there. Most lithium, cobalt, and nickel mines are within 35 miles of a Native American reservation, Morrill says, largely because in the aftermath of the 1849 gold rush, the U.S. military removed tribes to reservations not far from mineral deposits in the West. In one particularly controversial project, the mining company Rio Tinto wants to build a copper mine on Oak Flat, Ariz., a desert area adjacent to an Apache reservation that Indigenous groups have used for centuries to conduct cultural ceremonies.

…and on and on it goes.  (Read it all until you begin to glaze over;  we’ve had these arguments so often that everyone knows what’s going on.)

OR:

We could just continue to use oil to power our cars and trucks, figuring that the gross pollution difference between batteries and electric cars (production and consumption) and using internal combustion engines is pretty much a wash.

But then that wouldn’t be an insane choice made by gibbering eco-lunatics now, would it?

Uneven Surfaces

Eco-Crap, Watermelons

I see that the Climate Loonies have been playing their little games again, this time in Germany:

Climate activists blocked flights at two German airports for several hours Thursday in protest against the most polluting form of transportation, and to demand tougher government action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

The group Last Generation said several of its members entered the grounds of Hamburg Airport around 6 a.m. (0400 GMT) and glued themselves to the runway on the first day of the school vacation in the north German city.

Dozens of flights were canceled and 10 arrivals had to be diverted to other airports, Germany’s dpa news agency reported.

Well, you can’t have airliners taking off over these human speedbumps, of course, so I propose some remedial action, toot sweet:

Or, if that tears up the surface of the runways too much, there’s always this option:

That’s called “crowd control with a schmear”.

Even better, we could use those as practice runs for bigger protests.

Just Stop Oil are planning their most annoying action yet as the eco-zealots said they will ‘paralyze London’ with slow-marching columns 10 times bigger than anyting they have previously done.

The climate activists are set to travel to London from all over the UK to disrupt the capital during rush-hour on Monday.

I’m thinking that crushed bone would make an excellent pothole filler.