Tag: Asked and unanswered
-
Not sure, sure
An interesting thought from Rushfield of the Ankler. = = = = = START RUSHFIELD: Among the many downsides of a presiding meritocratic elite is the takeover of the arts by a very narrow strata of individuals with a common pool of interests and obsessions. In literature, what that has meant is that portrayals of…
-
Why the divide?
Writing this for my own purposes, trying to figure out WHY historians suddenly started looking at medieval times. WHEN is clear, around 1995. Googlebooks has abundant books after 2000, almost zero before. Sherri Olson’s first book was published in 1996. She does historiography along with history, discussing the timeline of people studying medieval times. She…
-
What does he think he’s doing?
The guy who runs the Spokane News facebook page has a good thing going. Facebook lists 270k followers, which is the whole adult population of the Spokane metro. I check the site several times a day, more often when power outages and windstorms are around. He posts police reports on crashes, overdoses and fires, and…
-
One obvious, one mystery
For some reason** I just now noticed two firm social patterns in the 1950s. The first is universal and easily explained. The second is highly particular and unexplained. = = = = = 1. Males always called males by last name. Females called everyone by first name. This applied between teachers and students, and among…
-
Trying to figure this out
The good bureaucrats in the Biden admin who worked to restore the New Deal restrictions on Men Of Monopoly are now seeing their work smashed and deleted. This didn’t have to happen. It didn’t happen the first time, so the alternative is POSSIBLE. The original New Deal was NOT smashed by the next few presidents.…
-
More dust to wait for
Via DailyMail, with the usual caution about DailyMail’s usual wild exaggerations. Trump, working with ENVIRONMENTAL ACTIVIST RFK, has ordered several agencies to stop their Twitter and other public output for a while. We don’t know yet what this means. He undoubtedly remembers how the agencies spent most of their PR time bashing Trump. I noticed…
-
No good explanation yet
The Due Dissidence Dudes take a close look at the sudden shift in corporate favor. In 2016 all corporations instantly hated Trump. When Trump encouraged a protest in January 2021, all corporations treated one protest as a universe-ending event, and sternly rejected everything remotely associated with the “right”. Now all corporations are flocking to suck…
-
The Saudi divorce
Thinking about the universal blocking principle. Patents block innovation, investment blocks business, outsourcing blocks useful work. I forgot to include war in the list. Our wars since 1990 have been blocking wars. Before Wilson we fought to ACQUIRE resources in Latin America and Asia because we had a PRODUCTIVE economy, not a BLOCKING economy. WW1…
-
Not clear yet
Caught a hint of this on substack. Omidyar, who runs The Intercept, is clearly a trickster of some kind. Maybe part of Deepstate, maybe not. He has been infiltrating the government for a while, placing his own people in key roles. Lina Khan of FTC is one of Omidyar’s alumni. Google quickly found verification from…
-
Stoller gets one
Matt Stoller sometimes bears down hard on companies that are just natural monopolies like Google. Gaining most of the customers by providing the best service is honest competition, not predation. This time he’s found a nasty mob-style predator. The feds and some states are suing a software company called RealPage that coordinates rentals among the…
-
What was he thinking?
King Charles commissioned his first official portrait. GAK! The “painter” showed a head floating on a sea of pixelated redness. There’s nothing unusual about an “artist” throwing shit. That’s what “artists” do for a living. Force peasants to eat shit and receive billions from rich assholes. The fact that Charles approved of this monstrosity is…
-
WPA salesmen?
I’ve been focusing on WPA and related work since 2008. This year, for no particular reason, I’ve been focusing on sales and advertising after completely ignoring the subject for 72 years. Got curious about the connection. WPA definitely employed white-collar workers who had been discarded along with the skilled laborers when Wall Street bombed America…
-
Y no piano girl?
Saw a random picture of an old piano, captioned ‘Jazz piano in Lewisham Station’. I wonder why pianos weren’t more common in public places? Restaurants always had jukeboxes or radios. Nightclubs had pianos only for professional performers who were part of the scheduled entertainment. In that era MANY people could play the piano competently, and…
-
What is that car?
Somebody posted this pic of Sylvia Plath. I’m not interested in Plath. The car is unfamiliar and interesting. Reminds me of a Renault equivalent of Karmann-Ghia, but it’s not an Alpine. Later: Here’s the closest equivalent to a 4CV Ghia. A semi-custom coupe by Chapron. But it’s not the same car.
Polistra's Mill 