[Been contemplating soliciting reader submissions of the most stupid and/or unreasonable thing that prominent leaders/spokespeople for the Republicans and Democrats have done during a given week. Candidates would NOT include some dumb thing someone in the party’s fringe has said or done. I’m talking about nationally recognized people and proposed/passed public policies. An example candidate would be CA’s $20/hr minimum wage law, or Biden’s national security adviser telling the country that Biden’s threat to withhold aid to Israel (if they don’t clear their operational war plans with Washington first) does not represent a change in US policy toward Israel. Such examples would serve to confirm that there is no common ground between our two sides to begin a path to rapprochement. gjr]
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rebanesruminations.com 
173 responses to “Sandbox – 8apr24”
Posted by: scenes | 17 April 2024 at 09:40 AM
I’m just assuming that it goes this way….
You’re probably assuming correctly….or so close to it that it doesn’t matter.
I like the term I ran into, ‘Hapsburg AI’, to describe this.
It’s a term like this that really makes me aware of my inadequacies as an internet smartass.
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“Hapsburg AI” – why not? We already seem to have Hapsburg editorials, journalism, and news reporting.
It just gets faster and even more closed circuit with computers. It will be a sight to behold once it gets fully in gear.
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Really…..people are just picking upon this now about NPR….it’s story hour for proglodytes!
It’s NPR…..she was the only rational choice!
“Giggle….I’m cute, and white, and have had the absolute best in life (seriously….the background story is at the link) while living in my protected bubble….giggle”!
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/new-npr-ceo-gave-ted-talk-asserting-truth-distraction
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Sorry….the detailed background is here not at the link provided earlier.
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/2967375/nprs-queen-of-the-karens/?utm_source=deployer&utm_medium=email&utm_content=&utm_campaign=Beltway+Confidential&utm_term=Please
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Never mind the $23,000,000,000 we shoveled to our cronys in the Homeless Industrial Complex….
….with warm regards Karen Bass and Gavin J. Nepotism!
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/los-angeles-mayor-urges-more-fortunate-residents-help-fund-housing-homeless
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“‘More Fortunate’ Residents”
Seems to me that people who don’t work a lick and yet have billions handed to them are the ‘more fortunate’.
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Now thats funny! –
https://www.breitbart.com/entertainment/2024/04/17/john-leguizamo-whines-that-trump-is-gaining-with-hispanics-admits-inflation-is-bad-right-now/
😉
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Alphabet Inc.’s Google has fired 28 employees after they were involved in protests against Project Nimbus, a $1.2 billion joint contract with Amazon.com Inc. to provide the Israeli government with AI and cloud services.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/google-fires-workers-protesting-1-023834200.html?.tsrc=fin-notif
Too bad the Federal govt doesn’t fire people when they protest against our Constitution. But at least this is a start.
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re: E Fox @3:08AM (3:08AM?)
Kinda late for all the sign wavin’ by Google employees, maybe the wine bar ran out of stock. God knows how deep the intelligence agency hooks are into the surveillance advertising companies. I guess that spying on US citizens is A-OK but heaven help the person who does something mean to Palestinians. Of course, at this point, being an American citizen is simply a flag of convenience for most people.
Meanwhile the FISA 702 fight goes on, but with a preordained conclusion. My take is that anyone interested in politics should check out the sides on that one. It’ll be some sort of Orange Hitler Republicans + the few remaining genuine Democrats vs. The Big Machine. Political party is just kayfabe.
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re Katherine Mayer –
“Our reverence for the truth might be a distraction that’s getting in the way of finding common ground and getting things done.”
Funny that – objective truth is our only common ground.
Scary to think what it is that she would consider ‘common’ ground. I guess it would be that everyone should agree with her.
Getting ‘things’ done – Stalin and Mao are the models.
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scotto: “Getting ‘things’ done – Stalin and Mao are the models.”
To be fair, I’d say there are plenty of non-Marxist models for Thought Police monocultures. It isn’t like a person would get along well in an early American Puritan culture or 1st C. Jewish town and not toe the line. The whole thing confused the Romans enough that they had to destroy the village in order to save it. The New World independent farmer model, which strikes me as a good thing, perhaps isn’t normal.
Maybe the difference is that a new power entered the fray. Instead of nationalism, monotheism, militarism, Marxism, most of which is kind of a male-dominated space, we’re seeing the result of Grrrl Power. A kind of newfangled Turbo-Karen wine mom belief system that is still finding it’s sea legs.
Personally, I’m not certain that you can use the past to predict the future for this one. It’s a combination of biology, crazy, and work-saving technology wrapped up into some New Thing. Maybe the final boss fight will be a war between feminism and our Robot Overlords.
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You don’t usually see this sort of family history in a long time DC pol…..
Bad enough being eaten by cannibals once…..wait…..what?
But I understand why Punchy™ likes him.
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/watch-biden-falsely-claims-wwii-uncle-eaten-cannibals-twice
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I was just poking around the story from last month (and onwards) concerning another Turbo-Karen, one Francesca Gino.
https://poetsandquants.com/2024/03/14/harvard-business-schools-damning-unsealed-report-on-francesca-gino/
https://www.forbes.com/sites/christianmiller/2024/04/15/one-of-worlds-leading-honesty-researchers-accused-of-plagiarism/?sh=4a1969cd4796
and had to laugh at her papers, including:
“Understanding ordinary unethical behavior: why people who value morality act immorally”
“Ethical blind spots: explaining unintentional unethical behavior”
“Dirty deeds unwanted: the use of biased memory processes in the context of ethics”
etc., all with the typical poorly designed experiments, sketchy statistics, and small study groups.
…but it did make me wonder what the whole point of Ivy business schools is. Her linked-in account is 100% teaching gigs interspersed with corporate ‘leadership’ training stints.
Seriously, maybe it doesn’t matter that plagiarism is rife among the ruling class academics. If they have no experience in the subjects taught, whether it’s the mechanics of running a business, finance & accounting, or honest-to-charlie leadership skills, what difference does it really make? Is copying other peoples’ bullshit to create your own bullshit a crime? Great artists steal after all.
Maybe it’s a matter of opportunities. In the land of the grifters, the honest man is poor.
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scenes 7:40 – You never get a complete repeat of the past. Cultures and tech change humans’ abilities for better and more often – worse.
The current Girrrl Power thing is big right now almost exclusively in the affluent western Euro and N America due to it’s being useful for the Blob.
I can guarantee that when The Machine stops and the food riots start, the whiny spoiled girl act will be as useless as tits on a boar.
Some things change but some things don’t.
Power abhors a vacuum.
Power tends to corrupt.
There will always be people who are a combo of ruthless, intelligent, and power-hungry who end up in the right place at the right time to make their dreams come true.
I don’t think of folks like Mao, Pol Pot, Stalin et al so much as Marxists or any ism, but just evil people who were in a position of being able to take advantage of their place and time on our globe to get as much as they could of what it was that made them tick.
Their politics or economic beliefs were just whatever seemed handy at the time to get work from the useful idiots.
When we threw sticks and rocks at each other, it was real simple – “I’m bigger and stronger than anyone around”. As time went on it got more complicated –
you had to tell stories about why you should be in power. “The Thunder God made me king and you’re not – shut up.”
Now the story has to weave in some kind of morality to make the masses feel good about why they have to suffer and die (or help to make others suffer and die) so the boss-man and his friends can live and live damn well. Marxism was a useful version of that story but I think it will need to be replaced by an up-dated version for the next big go-round.
I can only wonder how long the current Blob O’ Power can keep adding to the number of balls in the air it can juggle before we have the next big happy Ka-Boom.
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“Marxism was a useful version of that story but I think it will need to be replaced by an up-dated version for the next big go-round”
It already has been replaced by an up-dated version… eyes are being opened.
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“an up-dated version”
I take it you mean the “equity and inclusion” hokum along with DIE and the current variants.
As you point out – eyes are being opened but you could have said that about Marxism 100 years ago and yet Marxism still made a good run.
I would say it boils down to collectivism vs individual freedom – or free shit vs freedom.
We were told the absolute truth long, long ago that when you opt for security vs freedom you will end up with neither.
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” I take it you mean the “equity and inclusion” hokum along with DIE and the current variants.”
Not really. Read “Cynical Theories” by Pluckrose and Lindsay, but start with “Traditional and Critical Theories” by Max Horkheimer (1937).
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Max H – from Wikipedia:
“Horkheimer stated himself that “the rationally organized society that regulates its own existence” was necessary along with a society that could “satisfy common needs”.
That’s enough. A “society that regulates its own existence” is high minded twaddle.
And just what are society’s “common needs”?
I need freedom and some need free shit. Who gets to decide? You can’t have both.
Max is an over-educated idiot.
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“Max is an over-educated idiot”
This can be said about a great many with terminal degrees, but those who toss that around lightly tend to be grossly undereducated.
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“toss that around lightly”:
Oh, not lightly – most people are just idiots. God gave them a brain but they refuse to use it. Our modern, sanitized, overly organized and made-safe-for-morons society tends to lull folks into a stupor. Critical thinking and analysis of hard facts are no longer necessary for the acquisition of food and shelter. I learned at an early age when I was a certified smart ass that the best way to infuriate people was to simply ask them probing questions about whatever statements they had just made. Since most of them have just repeated something they heard somewhere and had never thought about it, they quickly retreat to a defensive (usually angry) position. It was an asshole attitude, I know but it did lead me to folks who actually used their brains and I learned quite a lot – including to be a lot more humble. Max is of a rarefied group who pore over an endless series of books that do nothing to challenge their beliefs nor broaden their horizons. He is – I’m sure – quite adept at quoting all sorts of famous authors but he knows little of human nature nor the hard facts of real life. Academics are notorious for their life in the ivory tower with little knowledge that water runs downhill and there is no free lunch.
Max is an educated idiot.
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scotto,
This fellow Horkheimer invented Critical Theory, the latest version of Marxism that is ruining America and the world.
Not an idiot, although spectacularly wrong.
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Kinda preferred the other Horkheimer…….
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Horkheimer
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Unlike Jack, Max Horkheimer didn’t prey on young men and boys.
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