babylonbee | The United States Navy announced this morning that the USS Harvey Milk will be officially renamed the USS No Homo.
Christened
the 'Harvey Milk' four years ago in honor of the infamous gay sexual
predator, the ship's name change reflects a broader effort by military
leadership to clarify that the Navy isn't actually that gay.
"Despite
the uniforms, the Navy isn't just nancy boys and fairies," said
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth. "The names of our ships ought to
reflect that non-gayness. It's hard enough for them already, wearing
their fruity little sailor outfits, without also having their ships
named after gay child molesters. Therefore, we have officially renamed
the ship the 'No Homo' out of love and care for our Navy brothers. No
homo."
Gay rights activists have condemned the decision, stating
it is a blatant denial of the truth as the ship is obviously very gay.
"Who do you think you're fooling? The ship is a literally called an
'oiler', its whole job is oiling up other ships, and it's docked in San
Fran. It's a total flamer," said local activist Mikai Danielson.
"Methinks Secretary Hegseth doth protest too much."
At publishing time, Secretary Hegseth had issued an order for everyone to stop calling Navy guys "seamen."
kunstler | Would it surprise you to learn that
children well beneath the age of puberty are not inclined to think about
sex at all? In a well-ordered society that recognizes children as
different from adults, they don’t. And if something sexual comes to
their attention, they are generally perplexed by it. Unless they’re born
into an era when adults are busy erasing boundaries, guard-rails, and
cultural inhibitions, in which case I must imagine that young children
exposed to, say, pornography in a chaotic household find it
traumatically sinister. So, why the gleeful celebration about
sexualizing children now?
I’ll tell you why: because we are living in a very badly-ordered society these days, a society in which anything goes and nothing matters,
which is a poor principle for civilization. It’s the same principle
that has people shitting all over the sidewalks of San Francisco,
looting Walgreens stores in broad daylight, pushing ineffective and
unsafe vaccines (and lying about it), and arresting people for thought
crimes. It’s a degenerate society. Morally bankrupt. Wicked.
You might ask, how did it get that way?
The concise answer is that a broken business model for daily life and a
collapsing economy have so disordered millions of minds that values are
seen as having no value. The scaffold for truth, beauty, honor,
dignity, courage, prudence, generosity, etc., folded some time ago, in
slow-motion, so we didn’t notice.
The keepers of our culture have
replaced it with a tacky system of ritual virtue-signaling fakery that
they don’t really believe in, that persists simply because the moral
vacuum it stands for provokes such unbearable anxiety. The main lesson
of the recent Durham Report — missed by even the most punctilious
observers — is that our country does not want to fix itself, indeed the
whole broken apparatus of fixing it is in the hands of the people who
broke it.
This epic negligence leaves the doors
wide open for the broad range of lower-order criminal mischief we’re
seeing expressed all around us. Now I will venture into shadowland.
There is a rumor floating around the Internet that this seemingly
coordinated campaign to sexualize children and initiate them into
marginal behaviors was started to soften up the public for forthcoming
shocking revelations contained in the much-whispered-about Jeffrey
Epstein archive of videos that show eminent international figures caught
in compromising sexual situations that include sexual acts with
children.
I wouldn’t commit to saying there’s
anything to that, but there have been an awful lot of signs and portents
pointing in that direction, and so I also wouldn’t dismiss it
altogether. There can be little doubt that the videos exist, or did
exist — we know that Epstein’s various mansions were rigged to the eaves
with cameras, and that he was an “asset” of more than one nation’s
intel service trafficking in blackmail — and I’d expect that there are
at least a few copies of the videos out there, just like there are many copies of Hunter Biden’s laptop hard-drive out there.
There’s something definitely
programmatic about the way the drag queens were rolled out into the
kiddie korners the past year. It doesn’t feel organic, shall we say, but
rather directed, like a sinister grand opera. And the effort
to enlist and initiate schoolchildren into a psychodrama of hyperbolic
sexual confusion looks absolutely orchestrated.
What we might be seeing is the
convergence of a world-beating political scandal with an economy-killing
financial crisis that will destroy the entire post-WW2 armature of
money and credit. That event would usher in a period of appalling
turbulence in our everyday life, severing supply chains, killing
businesses, and disturbing every imaginable social arrangement as well
as public order. If that comes to pass, and it’s looking likely, then
that will be the last we hear about personal pronouns and trans
influencers for a thousand years.
thenation |As public outrage has grown over the
toxic fallout from last week’s fiery derailment of a Norfolk Southern
freight train in East Palestine, Ohio, the urgent questions behind this
disaster echo the past year’s confrontations over working conditions in
the lightly regulated rail industry. Indeed, the catastrophe in
Ohio—together with another hazardous derailment
in Houston, Tex., just a week later—drives home the steep costs in
health and well-being that we all incur when we fail to heed rail
workers’ calls for more regulation and adequate staffing mandates.
As rail workers sought to win basic guarantees of staffing support
and sick leave from rail carriers long accustomed to selling labor short
and winning major regulatory concessions from federal agencies, they
stressed how the unsustainable demands placed on their working lives
would result in disasters just like the one in East Palestine. The
northeast Ohio village of about 5,000 people is 40 miles northwest of
Pittsburgh and 20 miles south of Youngstown; already those metropolitan
areas are under alert for the air and water contamination originating
from the Palestine derailment. And in Palestine proper, many residents
are already reporting troubling health symptoms and dying area wildlife
as they weigh the risks of remaining exposed to the toxic fumes and
chemical leaks from the derailed tanker cars carrying hazardous
materials.
In the immediate aftermath of the derailment, rail officials ordered
that the vinyl chloride hauled by five of the Norfolk Southern cars in
the 150-car train be burned off to prevent a still greater explosion—but
that action sent hydrogen chloride and phosgene, two dangerous gasses,
spuming into the air. EPA investigators have since identified other
hazardous chemicals the train had been hauling, including ethylene
glycol monobutyl ether, ethylhexyl acrylate, isobutylene, and butyl
acrylate. And the EPA has released a report saying that chemicals from the derailment have leached into the soil and water in the aftermath of the accident.
“We’ve been trying to share our concerns around this for a while
now,” Ross Grooters, current rail employee and cochair of Railroad
Workers United said. “It wasn’t a matter of if this was going to happen.
It was a ‘when and where,’ and unfortunately, there’s a high likelihood
that this will happen again, somewhere, if the root causes of the
issues aren’t addressed.”
Rank-and-file workers organizing with Railroad Workers United
(RWU) have waged high-profile pressure campaigns to improve rail safety
and retain staffing. Jason Doering, an RWU organizer and a legislative
representative of SMART Nevada, says that focusing industry and
regulatory attention on the threat of derailments has been a continual
challenge. Rail workers with Fight for Two Person Crews
have been waging an allied campaign to lobby state and federal
lawmakers to create and enforce standards for safer train staffing: a
mandatory minimum of two person crews on freight trains. Last year, the
Federal Railroad Administration proposed to reinstate a two-person crew rule
and opened a public hearing in December 2022. During the public comment
period for the rule change, more than 13,000 comments were logged in
favor of it.
With the country’s attention now fixed on the disaster in East
Palestine, reformers say that the time to act is now. “This is an
opportunity for us to really identify safety risks in the industry,”
said Greg Regan, president of the Transportation Trades Department of
the AFL-CIO (TTD). He noted that the TTD has been working on improving
rail safety for workers and the communities in the path of freight
traffic. “I think it’s something that you’ll hear from a lot of rail
workers and people who’ve been seeing sort of the changes in the
industry, the deterioration of the drastic reductions in workforce and
the focus on speed over safety.”
NYPost | The mayor of El Paso declared a state of emergency Saturday ahead of
Wednesday’s deadline to lift a COVID-era policy that is expected to
result in more than 6,000 migrants crossing the border a day into an
already overwhelmed city where hundreds are already sleeping on the
streets.
“Our asylum seekers are not safe,” said El Paso Mayor Oscar Leeser at
a specially called press conference to announce the emergency measures.
“We have hundreds and hundreds on the street and that’s not the way we
treat our people.”
Temperatures have dipped into the 20s in the city, he said, and
migrants who have been released into the city are sleeping on downtown
streets.
“I want to make sure that people are treated with dignity,” Leeser
said, adding that he made the decision to call a state of emergency
after a conference call with federal, state and municipal officials. The
city government is working with local non-profits that are helping
newly arrived migrants travel to other parts of the country where many
have family.
“We all talked about what was best for our community,” he said,
adding that more than 1,500 migrants have been crossing the border daily
into the city ahead of the Dec. 21 lifting of Title 42, a Trump-era policy that saw migrants sent back into Mexico.
The sober press conference was in sharp contrast to the one called on Thursday. Leeser
walked off with the microphone to avoid answering questions after he
was challenged about not calling a state of emergency to cope with the
migrant influx. At the time, he said that the federal government had
promised the beleaguered city $6 million to help it cope with the
crisis.
“We were able to get the funding without having to [declare an emergency],” Leeser claimed Thursday.
On Saturday, Leeser did not rule out using a nearby military base to house some of the migrants, and that the city was cooperating with state and federal authorities to address the situation.
notesfromdisgraceland |The abject hovers at the boundary of
what is assimilable, thinkable, but is itself unassimilable which means
that we have to contemplate its otherness in its proximity to us but
without it being able to be incorporated. It is the other that comes
from within (so it is part of ourselves) that we have to reject and
expel in order to protect our boundaries[3].
The abject is a great mobilizing mechanism. While the state of being abject is threatening to the self and others, the operation of abjecting involves rituals of purity that bring about social stability. Abjection seeks to stabilize, while the abject inherently disrupts[4].
When the mass of the excluded increases to
a size impossible to ignore, they trigger rituals of abjection, which
work themselves into identity politics.The repulsion and efforts to distance from the excluded — the abjection – which reinforces the self-awareness of the social standing of regular folks, are in conflict with the attraction by the powers the abject population enjoys and exudes. They are the power bottoms
in this relationship as they define the location, robustness and
porousness of the boundaries of the enclosure. Fascination with the abject’s power pulls the viewers in, while they remain at arm’s length because of the threats the abject exert.
This
makes the excluded a tool that drives the wedge between different
social groups and prepares the population for political usage of the abject as leverage.
Objectifying minorities has been
institutionalized in America since its inception — from slavery and Jim
Crow to ghetto and hyperghetto, prisons, wars, opioids, and other tools
of soft and hard marginalization. However, with the rise of the white
underclass in the second half of the 20th century, American ideology has become highly nuanced around the questions of exclusion.
To a large extent, the Right wing has
stuck to its white supremacists roots of yesteryear (either in a
closeted form or explicitly) while centrists, both Left and Right, have
shown greater initiative in modernizing the process. However, when it
came to exclusion of the white underclass, the problem proved to be more
difficult. Complicated by globalization, technology, the decline of
American manufacturing, weaning off conventional energy sources and the
general decay of demand for labor, low-skill jobs have been disappearing
irreversibly, and the ranks of white underclass grew unstoppably
together with their discontent.
Social outcasts and minorities are
relatively easy to objectivize. Permanently excluded – criminals, drug
addicts, homeless – they have already been cast out. The residual, white
precariat, which has always been perceived as a building block of this
country’s social fiber, remains still on the inside, but unable to get
reintegrated within the context of modern developments.
In a white dominated/ruled society the marginalization of the excluded
white subproletariat has been a political hard sell. They grew in size
and have acquired a sense of entitlement minorities never could. Their
sudden political awareness, no matter how fragile, has become an
expression of pleasurable transgressive desires. As a new center of
social subjectivity, they draw their power from this position, which
serves as an inspiration for their own identity politics.
The emergence of 21st century Right-wing populism represents the biggest innovation on that terrain. Right-wingers now recognize the abject
as a source of political leverage and, instead of exclusion, their
program revolves around subjectivizing them. Voluntarily casting oneself
as abject — identification with the white subproletariat – has
become a quest for authenticity, aimed at acquiring a stigma in order
to become a credible voice of the marginalized. This is the core of the
modern populist abject gambit.
Twitter is designed in a way to mislead and distort objective reality.
This headline based on one Bloomberg opinion piece was trending on Twitter for literally *weeks*, leading many people to believe that the vaccine mandates were perfectly constitutional.
IJR | The Biden administration is urging companies to get their employees
vaccinated against COVID-19 despite pending court cases challenging the
rule.
During a Monday press briefing, White House principal deputy press
secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters, “We think people should not
wait.”
She continued, “We say do not wait to take actions that will keep
your workplace safe. It is important and critical to do, and waiting to
get more people vaccinated will lead to more outbreaks and sickness.”
Jean-Pierre argued the way to get past the pandemic is “to get people vaccinated.”
She also explained the administration believes “there is precedent
here,” adding, “The Department of Labor has a responsibility to keep
workers safe and the legal authority to do so.”
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit temporarily halted the mandate over the weekend, as IJR reported.
“Because the petitions give cause to believe there are grave
statutory and constitutional issues with the Mandate, the Mandate is
hereby STAYED pending further action by this court,” the ruling states.
The Biden administration has until Monday at 5 p.m. to respond to the petitioners’ motion for a permanent injunction.
A group of plaintiffs, including Republican Louisiana Attorney
General Jeff Landry, filed a lawsuit challenging the rule Friday.
“In a major win for the liberty of job creators and their employees,
the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit just halted the
Biden Administration’s attempt to force vaccines on businesses with 100
or more workers,” Landry said in a response to the ruling.
NYTimes | A
federal appeals panel on Saturday temporarily blocked a new coronavirus
vaccine mandate for large businesses, in a sign that the Biden
administration may face an uphill battle in its biggest effort yet to
combat the virus among the American work force.
The
stay, issued by a three-judge panel from the U.S. Court of Appeals for
the Fifth Circuit in Louisiana, doesn’t have an immediate impact. The
first major deadline in the new rule is Dec. 5, when companies with at
least 100 employees must require unvaccinated employees to wear masks
indoors. Businesses have until Jan. 4 to mandate Covid vaccinations or start weekly testing of their workers.
But
Saturday’s move provided momentum for a wide coalition of opponents of
the rule, who have argued that it is unconstitutional. A group of
businesses, religious groups, advocacy organizations and several states,
including Louisiana and Texas, had filed a petition on Friday with the
court, arguing that the administration had overstepped its authority.
It
was unclear whether the stay would be a procedural blip for the Biden
administration or the first step in the unwinding of the mandate.
At
the core of the legal challenge is the question of whether OSHA
exceeded its authority in issuing the rule and whether such a mandate
would need to be passed by Congress. A similar issue was in play when a
Texas court in late 2016 halted an Obama-era Labor Department rule
that would have made millions more Americans eligible for overtime pay.
The Trump administration, which took office the next year, said it
would not defend the overtime rule.
The
suit against the mandate stated that President Biden “set the
legislative policy” of substantially increasing the number of Americans
covered by vaccination requirements, and “then set binding rules
enforced with the threat of large fines.”
“That
is a quintessential legislative act — and one wholly unrelated to the
purpose of OSHA itself, which is protecting workplace safety,” the suit
said. “Nowhere in OSHA’s enabling legislation does Congress confer upon
it the power to end pandemics.”
A separate lawsuit against the new rule was also filed on Friday in the Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit in St. Louis by 11 Republican-led states, among them Texas, Mississippi, South Carolina and Utah.
tinkzorg | In recent days, the phrase ”Let’s go
Brandon!” has taken on a life of its own. At one point, four out of ten
songs on the Spotify top 10 list were called ”Let’s go Brandon”. People
are saying it as a form of greeting, or wearing it on t-shirts. For
some, this is just a funny gag. For others, it is a source of
significant and growing dread; dread about what is happening politically
in the United States, and what the future now looks to have in store
for them.
For those of you who don’t know the
context: at a recent NASCAR event in New Jersey, the crowd could be
heard chanting ”Fuck Joe Biden!” after the race. During an interview
with the winner of the race – a man named Brandon Brown – the flustered
reporter, hearing the chant, then says on camera that the crowd must be
very enthused for Brandon, as they’re all chanting ”Let’s go Brandon!”
in his honor. Of course, they crowd is doing no such thing, and she and
everyone else knows it. This little episode, on its own, is hardly very
remarkable or significant. Others slowly pick up on the story and mock
the journalist involved. But at this point, it is merely just another
day of ”fake news”, another day of the liberal media being the liberal
media.
However, like a dangerous respiratory
virus, this little ”Brandon incident” then incubates for a week or two,
before blossoming out into something far more serious, into a true
social event. People start saying ”Let’s go Brandon!” at random, both as
a mockery of the sitting president, but also as a way to mock the now
increasingly toothless media apparatus, who fewer and fewer seem to take
seriously at all. And this is where things become truly interesting: as
at least one pilot then tells his passengers ”Let’s go Brandon!” before
takeoff, liberal America starts to actually freak out. At this point,
think pieces are produced by NPR and others claiming that there’s a new
form of conspiratorial ”code speak” that ”racists” are now using to note
their displeasure with the sitting president. Others demand the
offending pilot be fired, as it is obvious that he
isn’t really saying ”Let’s go Brandon!”, he’s actually saying ”Fuck Joe
Biden!”. The irony here should be quite obvious, as liberals are now
decrying people for playing along with the very same cover story they
invented out of thin air to cover up what is clearly growing
dissatisfaction with president Biden.
Some
have taken this to be just another funny episode of ”internet humor”
leaking into the real world. But this is, to put it frankly, the
delusions of an intellectual class who themselves enjoy being ironic on
the internet, and who then quite myopically assume that everyone else
must think and act the way they do. Middle aged female nurses, as a
rule, do not use 4chan, nor are they versed in, or at all
interested in, the finer points of ironic ”internet humor”. Political
humor, coming from normal, working class people, might superficially
resemble that of irony-poisoned college graduates. But in reality, they
have very little in common.
Moreover, there’s a very large, very
obvious flaw in this explanation of events. Again, the crowds at that
NASCAR race weren’t chanting ”Let’s go Brandon!” they were chanting
”Fuck Joe Biden!”, and by all accounts, they certainly weren’t being
ironic about that. No coded language was intented, no mental
jiu-jitsu performed. Only when the media tried to use its incredibly
hollow and thoroughly unimpressive powers of ”mind control” did people
start with ironic mockery, and that mockery was aimed both at the
president as well as the clear powerlessness of the chattering classes
to control the narrative or get people to believe them. And so, perhaps
unsurprisingly, when airplane passenger hear the phrase ”Let’s go
Brandon!” spoken over the intercom, they don’t necessarily hear just a
joke, but also a reminder that a political conflict they had tried to
suppress is very much still real.
But even with all this said, many a reader
will probably want to ask a simple question: why does any of this
matter? Though I would argue that the sudden explosion of ”Let’s go
Brandon!” in American culture actually means a very great deal, to truly
explain why this joke is so funny to some, and so unnerving to others,
we have to do so by way of a metaphor. To truly understand why many
liberals are so scared of what others consider to still be merely a
harmless joke, we have to talk a bit about a concept known as Kantai Kessen,
the Japanese naval war doctrine during World War II. Do not worry, the
relevance of this concept to today’s America will hopefully become clear
as we go along.
Free To A Good Home
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I know what gooning is same as I know what felching is but I don't care to
remind myself all that often about it. The Internet just keeps exposing the
ni...
Sex Dolls, Robots, and AI companions
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It's not what you think.
YouTube:
In this episode, Dr. Rena Malik, MD is joined by sociologist Dr. Ken Hanson
to explore the surprising realities of s...
If Free Will Is False, Destiny Is True
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Free will is like God: perhaps dead, its absence having something to say
about morality (what Nietzsche meant by “Gott ist tot” was that the
Christian God ...
FREE BOOK: On Nonviolence
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“Michael Barker’s interrogation of nonviolent protest tactics and regime
change is both timely and important. Drawing on cases ranging from American
democr...
Return of the Magi
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Lately, the Holy Spirit is in the air. Emotional energy is swirling out of
the earth.I can feel it bubbling up, effervescing and evaporating around
us, s...
Covid-19 Preys Upon The Elderly And The Obese
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sciencemag | This spring, after days of flulike symptoms and fever, a man
arrived at the emergency room at the University of Vermont Medical Center.
He ...
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(Damn, has it been THAT long? I don't even know which prompts to use to
post this)
SeeNew
Can't get on your site because you've gone 'invite only'?
Man, ...
First Member of Chumph Cartel Goes to Jail
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With the profligate racism of the Chumph Cartel, I don’t imagine any of
them convicted and jailed is going to do too much better than your run of
the mill ...