The Crazy Years

Anatolian Shepherd
https://www.reddit.com/r/dogswithjobs/comments/loubue/anatolian_shepherdkangal_protecting_his_herd_from/

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Cellphone video captured a confrontation involving a Mall of America security guard telling a man wearing a “Jesus Saves” T-shirt that his shirt is “offending” shoppers at the famously large mall in Bloomington, Minnesota — and the guard ordered the man to remove the shirt or leave the mall.

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Indeed. And yet the Brits worship the NHS. Utter madness.

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But, it’s free! The 2020/21 budget for the U.K. Department for Health and Social Care which operates the National Health Service (NHS) was £192 billion. The U.K. population in 2021 was around 67.3 million. So that means the NHS cost every man, woman, child, and babe in arms in the country £2853 that year (or, about US$ 3500).

See, it’s free!

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And there are frequent comments on how much the NHS is underfunded, how it’s budget is being cut, and how it impacts services.

But, it’s free!

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Or is this how they feel about it:

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Germany, which decided in 2011 to completely eliminate nuclear power from its electricity generation capability, shut down three of its remaining six nuclear power plants at the end of 2021, with the other three due to close at the end of 2022. Due to natural gas supply shortages and price increases following the Russian invasion of Ukraine, all three of the remaining nuclear plants are currently scheduled to remain in operation until at least April 2023.

So, what is replacing the nuclear plants as base load generation capacity during this unusually cold winter? Wind?—No, most of that is coming from the Bundestag, not spinning bird choppers. Solar?—In Germany, in the winter?—Don’t make me laugh. The largest fraction of base load power is coming from what Germans call “brown coal”, or lignite, or high-grade dirt, the dirtiest form of fossil fuel, producing less heat per tonne of CO₂ and sulfur of any kind of coal.

Well, you have to get that stuff somewhere, and one of those somewheres is the Garzweiler open pit mine which currently occupies 48 km² in western Germany and has, so far, displaced more than 30,000 people and devoured almost 50 villages, with 12 more on the chopping block as the mine expands, as NPR reports in “A Coal-Mining ‘Monster’ Is Threatening To Swallow A Small Town In Germany”.

This is, of course, being opposed by “environmental activists” who prefer having people die in the cold and darkness to providing the energy which permits them, among other things, to fly around the world scolding others on their profligate lifestyles.

Yesterday, young celebrity scold Greta Thunberg was “arrested” during a protest at the site of the Garzweiler 2 mine expansion by “riot police” in helmets with facemasks. Here is how the Graunaid and many other legacy media outlets reported the event on video.

Here is video shot immediately before Greta is forcefully led toward the paddy wagon by two stalwart defenders of Deutsche Ordnung. The Grauniad did not see fit to include this in its reportage.

Lights—camera—action!

After the “arrest” for the cameras, Reuters reports “Greta Thunberg released after brief detention at German mine protest, police say”.

Climate campaigner Greta Thunberg was detained alongside other activists on Tuesday during protests against the demolition of a village to make way for a coal mine expansion but was released after an identity check, according to police.

Ihre Papiere bitte!

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As much as we might dislike strip-mining, it’s not that environmentally horrible if you take the long view (I don’t know how to insert animations here).

As they extract the coal, they refill the terrain with earth excavated nearby - finally replacing the topsoil and restoring the fields. View the video, it’s worth it.

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“Everyone at the World Economic Forum annual meeting — including journalists and participants — has to take a PCR test upon arrival. If you don’t take a test, the chip in your ID badge is deactivated. If you test positive for Covid the badge is also deactivated.”
https://twitter.com/AndrewLawton/status/1614618891212267521

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Ah they are testing their Vax Passes before forcing them on the global population through their government stooges. It’s cleaver in a Bond-villain/Satanic way.

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Meta’s Oversight Board announced a new policy Wednesday that will allow transgender and non-binary people to display their naked breasts on Facebook and Instagram but will continue to forbid such posts by cis-gender women.

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https://twitter.com/mattpheus/status/1615452818025897998?s=46&t=Wh8wI4stW0xqkSz3-Q0UqA

Facebook aka Meta is a gigantic sized Twitter. Maybe 10 percent of the employees actually needed to keep the site up.

I have never used Faceplant. Has it changed much since just a few people got it up and running? All those people and what did FB deliver? Purchased a bunch of potential competitors and rearranged the FB menu is my guess.

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This comes days after Microsoft announced 10,000 jobs would be lost, and weeks after Amazon announced 18,000 job cuts.

That’s three divisions of volunteers to fight in Ukraine.

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The U.S. State Department is banning the Times New Roman font in favour of Calibri, a sans-serif font designed for and released by Microsoft in Office 2007. Its designer describes it as having “a warm and soft character.”

The Washington Post reports, “A font feud brews after State Dept. picks Calibri over Times New Roman”:

The U.S. State Department is going sans serif: It has directed staff at home and overseas to phase out the Times New Roman font and adopt Calibri in official communications and memos, in a bid to help employees who are visually impaired or have other difficulties reading.

In a cable sent Tuesday and obtained by The Washington Post, Secretary of State Antony Blinken directed the department to use a larger sans-serif font in high-level internal documents, and gave the department’s domestic and overseas offices until Feb. 6 to “adopt Calibri as the standard font for all requested papers.”

“The Times (New Roman) are a-Changin,” read the subject line.

The old and the new.

Fast Company, in “The State Department is ditching Times New Roman for Calibri”, describes what it calls a “delightfully nerdy debate”:

Charles Nix, who is a creative type director at Monotype, agrees. “What the reader is accustomed to will influence their willingness to engage with the content. If I’m used to seeing books set in serif type and I’m confronted with a 400-page novel set in a sans-serif font, I may struggle to engage with the narrative. And if I’m suddenly seeing my Twitter feed in a serif font, rather than the familiar sans, I’ll balk.”

The challenge is that there is no such thing as a universally accessible font. There have been heated debates over whether certain fonts are more legible for people with dyslexia, or if the research is bunk. Other fonts are supposedly more accessible to people 65 and older. Some fonts (like Calibri) were designed to be more legible on a screen but they are not necessarily more legible on printed materials.

Perhaps Calibri’s “a warm and soft character” is more in keeping with the “soft power” with which diplomats are so enamoured, and 14 point type size as the default is more appropriate to the kindergarten-style reasoning of their proclamations.

Who’s next? Perhaps the Pentagon will mandate Nosifer to stir the fighting spirit of their forces and strike fear into their adversaries.

nosifer_2023-01-20

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On 2023-01-19, U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen sent a letter [PDF] to House Speaker Kevin McCarthy formally notifying him that the U.S. had exceeded the statutory debt limit of US$ 31.381 trillion and that the Treasury Department was beginning to implement “extraordinary measures” to avoid exceeding the limit and defaulting upon the debt.

This lifted up the “debt limit crisis” wet cardboard to reveal the “trillion dollar coin” brainstorm that originally surfaced during the 2011 debt ceiling showdown. The Daily Wire sums up the situation in “Calls To Mint Trillion-Dollar Coin Resurface As Government Faces Debt Crunch”, noting:

Nathan Tankus, a leading proponent of the idea, asserted in an article for the Financial Times that the core objection to the move is the concern that policymakers at the Federal Reserve will not accept its validity. “The coin, having already been issued, would be legal tender, and the Fed would have no basis for refusing it,” he countered. “Even so, I don’t think the Fed would force the Treasury to seek alternatives. So the Biden administration should call the Fed’s bluff.”

Washington Post reporter Jeff Stein asked Tankus and Rohan Grey their reactions to a possible scenario following this course of action.

stein_a_2023-01-22

First, Stein’s question:


And the trillion dollar coin guru deep-thinking response:

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God these people are insufferable.

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Now we know what went wrong with the flight cancellations:

The agency, which declined to identify the contractor, said its personnel were working to correctly synchronize two databases—a main one and a backup—used for the alert system when the files were unintentionally deleted.

An outage with a federal pilot-alert system cascaded into a nationwide logjam at U.S. airports Wednesday, snarling thousands of flights and temporarily stranding travelers across the country.

Notams provide pilots with information and alerts about potential hazards or restrictions in the air or on the ground at airports. Dispatchers working from airlines’ operations centers review them for important information that could affect flights. Pilots are required to review the alerts before taking off.

The responsible parties shall remain anonymous and unaccountable, and more public spending will solve the problem.

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Lion Hirth:

It’s remarkable how Germany, regarding itself a global climate action champion, and Texas, where you better don’t mention climate change as a politician, have seen their wind and solar share growing almost equally quickly during the past decade.

Texas:
slika

Germany:
slika

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