PN:
Joe’s Comment – Elon Musk has a way with words.
His ability to condense the facts and present them succinctly must come from a deep well of understanding. The game is rigged. Everyone knows. Few can change the outcome.
I’ve grown to appreciate his sense of humor and intuitive comprehension.
A prankster, a troller, an innovator, a risk taker, a consummate believer in truth, and a sense of humility, a wicked humor, and an agile mind. More people like Mr. Musk would be a very good thing –
Utopia
Joe and I wonder how long we have.
Haunting hints of “1984“, and “Brazil“.
1984 was written in 1949, the half-life of WWII barely counted.
Brazil was written in 1985, relying heavily on 1984 while advancing the absurdities inherent in the loss of personal autonomy.
“Idiocracy” was written in 2006. Joe and I feel it is an attempt to tell again what happens inevitably with a humorous/ridiculous story and hopeful epilogue.
Meanwhile, back at the kielbasa ranch, Kiev burns while Biden drools….
The fate of the frog in gradually heated water:
Ayn Rand saw it this way –
Lord Acton saw it too. His observation –
Bill Whittle
Joe and I have been a fan of Mr. Whittle for nigh on 20 years.
Our earliest inclusion in our Sunday Rant is from December, 2010.
He is a Constitutionalist.
In the following video he talks about how the ideology of the Progressive Left (whomever that might be) has come up against the grim reality of Life on Earth:
We enjoy Mr. Whittle.
In the realm of poetry, condensed expression is often a bonus: just add thought for a hearty, meaningful intellectual experience.
Ms. Ayn Rand was very very good at “political poetry”.
Her condensed version of the above video goes as follows –
She explains further –
Intellectual Froglegs
Joe Dan Gorman is back.
As good as ever.
FU presents “Shoulder to the Wheel”:
Elon Musk
Joe and I think Mr. Musk is a harbinger of hope in our chaotic tyrannical culture.
In the following TED interview (Vancouver, April 2022) with Chris Anderson, the head of TED, Mr. Anderson is somewhat breathless in shock and awe.
Joe and I found some of his questions pedantic, other questions revealing.
The questions we liked most were aimed at “understanding” Mr. Musk’s brain.
Only in your dreams, Chris:
COVID Tide
The Left Reflects
An op-ed from “The GrayZone” by Christian Parenti (a dyed-in-the-wool Lefty) criticizing the Left for getting COVID totally wrong but not correcting their behavior. Indeed, the Left embraced their hysteria.
The article at the link (above) is very thorough, very complete, very detailed, and fully referenced. You will need an hour to read it completely.
The introductory paragraph follows Ms. E. Thrasher’s rule for writing (tell them what you are going to tell them, then tell them, then tell them what you told them).
“It is hard to destroy your own cause and feel righteous while doing so, yet the American left has done it. After more than two centuries at the vanguard of the struggle for freedom, the American left, broadly defined, executed a volte face and embraced anti-working-class policies marketed as purely technical public health measures.”
Athletes Collapsing
Matt Le Tissier offers his opinion on the alarming number of athletes who have had an adverse reaction to the “vaccination” – More than 769 athletes have collapsed on the field during a game from March 2021 to March 2022 – staggering increase over previous years.
His comments on world governance, UK government, and the Big Pharma, Big Medicine, Big Money, Big Media machinery are not complimentary.
Joe and I admire Mr. Le Tissier’s strength of conviction, and his thorough understanding of the issues.
This interview is from February 2022. Somewhat prescient!:
Rex Murphy, Outraged (Again)
Infrequently Joe and I include an entire op-ed or presentation of a literary nature.
Videos on Ub2b or Rumble lend themselves to embedding and are ipso facto “linked” to the source material – Joe and I never download or “convert” video even though to not do so may lead to the “broken link” syndrome web bloggers dread.
In this case, Mr. Murphy is commenting on how far from sane the American political system has departed. The newest member of the Supremes (Supreme Court of the United States) did not attain her exalted position due to brilliant jurisprudence or alignment with Constitutional vs Living interpretation of the foundation documents of the good old U.S. of A.
No indeed.
Her “Scarlet Letter” will be she has above average melanin (i.e. she’s Black), and she has indoor plumbing (she’s a woman). Nothing wrong with either of these sets or categories – descriptors at most, for average Mud Peckers like us.
Ironic that she would not offer an opinion on what a woman is. Her life experience as a woman could not help her – she insisted she was not “qualified” to offer an opinion of womanry, or womanhood, or “I am woman” (hear me roar).
Jesus wept.
Joe laughed.
Here’s the entire op-ed from Mr. Rex Murphy –
“The nomination of the latest U.S. Supreme Court judge is over and successful, but it will be some time before any reasonable person will be able to digest the most sublime moment of the hearings which preceded the elevation. That was when the first black female ever to be nominated was asked if she—the pronoun should be noted—could define a “woman.” Forgive a literary reference but the moment summoned to mind Francis Bacon’s famous opening of his essay “On Truth,” one of the greatest sentences ever to escape from a quill:
“What is truth? said jesting Pilate, and would not stay for an answer.”
In the case of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, it was not so much a refusal to stay as an astonishing confession of being unqualified to offer a reply. “No, I can’t,” was the then-nominee’s declaration, tagged by an explanatory balloon that she’s “not a biologist.”
All her years of—to call up the current cant tautology—“lived experience” with her status as a woman were evidently not sufficient for her to even venture an opinion. On a point which even a 2-year old, of either sex, is demonstrably clear, and hence the fluency with mom and dad in that age group, a fully adult person seeking elevation to a post that calls for the highest intellectual skills declared herself uncertain and at sea. It is as if she were asked to define a “chair” and declined due to not being a carpenter.
It was a moment deeply interesting in itself, but far more exhilarating as a parable—a parable exposing the strange moment so much of western society finds itself in, when the most basic understanding of the most basic and incontrovertible facts is either being denied, suppressed, or, by the Pharisees of puritan wokery, hailed as sexist, racist, or some other of the many fashionable “ist-isms” of our demented time.
May we agree that “What is a woman?” is not a subtle or trick question, that it does not call for strenuous or profound mental capacity when posed. And given the consideration that from the time that “personkind” (I owe Justin Trudeau for the novelty term) descended from the trees and learned to walk the African plains, it has presented no challenge to the understanding—and has had a universally recognized and ready answer—that the knowledge that one sex is different from the other has been as familiar as the distinction between night and day.
And yet, here in the high moments of the most advanced civilization since that descent from the trees, in a scientifically hyper-advanced society gifted with great institutions of learning and information resources beyond the dreams of even a generation ago, an expression of doubt on “what is a woman”—instead of arousing the deepest puzzlement and perhaps even scorn at such ignorance—now passes for a badge of progressivism, even of a kind of moral enlightenment.
Of course the good judge knows what a woman is. Outside the strange politics of the moment there’d be no hesitation, no denial.
She would certainly be clear were she to be denied entrance to some club or society because she is a woman, or if in her earlier career she had been denied promotion because she’s a woman, or if she had been sexually harassed by a male counterpart. Complaints would have been filed, lawsuits called into being, to assert her “right as a woman” to equitable treatment. There would have been no transparent and cowardly demurral then of “I don’t know. I’m not a biologist.” There would instead have been a righteous and powerful statement that “as a woman” I will not stand for this. It would have been all “I am woman, hear me roar.” The clamorous indignation of the #MeToo sorority would have been sounded to back her up. Male feminists would have leaped from whatever sensitive woodwork they hang out in to support her.
But here we are, in the age of the Large Hadron Collider, in a day when we send satellites to the moons of distant planets, and an egregiously educated woman declines to say she knows what a woman is.
Further, we are in a time when a professor of an executive in some company asserts the universal truth that men are men and women are women, that person is ostracized, driven off campus, fired from the New York Times for saying simply what everyone, and I mean everyone, knows is the case. We are in an age when a male swimmer simply says—merely declares on his own say-so—that “he” is a “she” and nine-tenths of the news media and every woke evangelist takes that declaration as a new truth, not to be contested, and submits to the farce of him entering swim races and propelling himself to the podium with the gold, while that other set of women—women who have been women since they were born—look on in gloom and hopefully anger.
Even in the days of darkest superstitions, even in the long night of human ignorance, humans in their very earliest moments understood that Reality—it needs the capital—was never subject to the simple declaration of an individual. You are not the “Queen of Romania” because you say you are. To say, is not to be.
DNA is not the subject of a passing mood. Chromosomes are not subjectively determined. You may surgically alter your body, but you cannot deny its nature, nor can or should you by self-declaration invite yourself into the sex you plainly are not.
How easily the West wanders into this strange and fantastical world. How a wild politics, which shuns reality and punishes and attacks those who support it, has taken hold of so many sad minds is truly an enigma. But it is much worse. To be willingly blind to reality is to voluntarily embrace the irrational. That such an embrace has gained such force at such heights as admission to the Supreme Court of the United States should be the greatest anxiety of our time.”
Stated as only Rex Murphy could state it.
The most memorable phrase that condenses the entire piece into one sentence is – “To say, is not to be.”
Amen, Mr. Murphy.
Live long and prosper.
The entire op-ed was copied from The Epoch Times.
Joe says our commentary would not be complete without including a word or two from one of our iconic heroines (Joe knows the difference…..) –
Miscellaneous Music
Candy Dulfer
The best version of “Lily Was Here” we have heard:
JJ Cale
Call Me the Breeze live is as good as it gets:
Joe’s Garage
GT40 Handbuild
An amazing video.
4,000 hours of labour to build the entire car.
The builder, “Benjamin Workshop“, has hours of detailed building steps and procedures recorded.
As the saying goes, “a better man than I am, Gungadin”:
Auto Funnies
POLITICS, POLITICIANS, WACKJOBBERY, HUMOROUS, STUPID
SUNDAY SERMON
This week’s sermon is about land management.
The development of efficient and sustainable use of agricultural land partnering with ruminant animals will provide a solution to the base problem facing humanity – the existential crisis is insufficient animal source food.
Experimentation, testing, trials, and research have led to a “green” (whatever that might mean today) system of environmental land management less intrusive and destructive than crop agriculture, while providing better human nutrition.
Joe and I have been fans of “dusters” (cowboy movies) since consciousness.
No need to cheer less; the future is steaks and grasslands!
An excellent presentation from Dr. Peter Ballerstedt’s Ub2b channel:
WEATHER (OR NOT)
This week in Vernon BC might be the change Joe is searching to find.
Early in the week the nighttime temperature was still dropping below zero Celsius.
By mid week, the overnight stayed above zero!!!
Is it possible we are done with our Winter hangover?
Joe is anxious to turn on the outside water to the hose bibs.
We are both not so anxious to fire up the riding mower and the weed wacker for the annual dandelion “wack-a-mole”, weed slaughter, and dog poo flailing.
All the trees are greening.
The daffydildos are three weeks young, and starting to lose their perky perkiness.
We spent most of today, Sunday, outside in a tee shirt.
Actual warmth in the sun.
The shade and shadow on the north side of the building was another matter, but we didn’t linger there overly.
Less than two months left in Spring.
We are ready for warm or better weather.
Joe (chilly) Mekanic
p.s. Ramirez sees clearly –
