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The single most useful tool against Antifa’s free speech violence has been old anti-KKK laws against wearing masks in public.
Unfortunately but not surprisingly, when everybody (including me) came out in favor of wearing masks, massive looting broke out across America.
An interesting question is whether the recent advances in facial recognition software work with masks or not. Before masks, they’d made huge advances in reducing false positives. Judging by these pictures of the candidates, I’d say that “probably,” especially if you have a lot of wrinkles.
On the other hand, n0t many looters are 1/3rd as old as our candidates.
On the gripping hand, few cities besides utopian San Diego seem very interested in identifying looters.
On the other other other hand, you ought to wear a mask whenever you go out in order to avoid being filmed as part of a black “actress/stunt woman’s” stunt to get the whole world to hate you. Anonymity is the Average White Person’s safest refuge these days
The virus seems to be mutating or at least morphing. Wonder who will be hit hardest next? I do hope it’s not rioters and looters. Disparate Impact you know.
If you are under 60, with a BMI under 27-28 (most Americans disregard BMI sadly, and believe their fat is muscle), and don’t have serious preconditions you don’t have anything to worry about.
I doubt it, especially if you wear a ball cap, stick on a couple of band-aids, and use a sharpie. This is a GOOD thing, Steve.. With the anarcho-tyranny we are living under, it’s going to be very important to remain anonymous when defending ourselves.
There’s great power in numbers. In the meantime, yeah, mask up if you have to deal with these antifa Commies and/or BLM thugs out in the streets – it may have helped the Proud Boys avoid years in prison.
Are you referring to one of the colourful and somewhat gayish gangs that inhabit Walter Hill's urban fantasy The Warriors (1979)?Replies: @Achmed E. Newman
Steve said:Anti-mask laws COULD HAVE BEEN a useful tool against Antifa had it been used. But even before the CoronaCultists like Steve made mask-wearing acceptable or even mandatory, anarcho-tyrannical governments weren't enforcing anti-masking laws against Antifa. There are plenty of laws that could be used against Antifa. They weren't used and won't be. If not for the corona mask requirements, anti-masking laws would have been used only against regular white people as is the case with other laws.
Not sure where the state of art facial recognition is,
But the face lock feature on iPhones doesn’t seem to work when wearing a mask
I wouldn’t bet on the software working well with those masks. Neural Networks can get easily confused if they get input not rained for. I imagine you could also paint that face mask in a dazzle pattern to get the software even more confused
https://www.survivopedia.com/6-ways-to-defeat-facial-recognition/
That’s one way of being more jewish. OTOH, Antifa flags shown in public may still elicit healthy responses:
You are a Pournelle fan, Steve?
OT: From the mental breakdown brigade that brought us “KKKlansmen spotted in corridors, under beds, in my kitchen etc.” and who need to be acquainted with Pournelle Methods to Remove Protestors from Premises:
‘KKK number behind white power gesture’ spotted by Portland protester was actually poster celebrating basketball star
Oh, yeAH.Replies: @Steve Sailer
What should we change next?Replies: @El Dato, @Mr. Anon
https://www.unz.com/isteve/sailer-in-takis-in-memoriam-jerry-pournelle/
https://www.unz.com/?s=Pournelle&Action=Search&authors=steve-sailer&ptype=all
Doesn’t that church know how to be Christian? Blessed are the laptop-bearing toenail-painters, for that shall inherit the earth.
https://www.survivopedia.com/6-ways-to-defeat-facial-recognition/That's one way of being more jewish. OTOH, Antifa flags shown in public may still elicit healthy responses:
https://twitter.com/mrdic/status/1281651031139549186You are a Pournelle fan, Steve?
OT: From the mental breakdown brigade that brought us "KKKlansmen spotted in corridors, under beds, in my kitchen etc." and who need to be acquainted with Pournelle Methods to Remove Protestors from Premises:
'KKK number behind white power gesture' spotted by Portland protester was actually poster celebrating basketball starhttps://twitter.com/USAO_OR/status/1282145748360949760Replies: @Steve Sailer, @Kyle, @Pop Warner, @MEH 0910
You are a Pournelle fan, Steve?
Oh, yeAH.
Oh, yeAH.Replies: @Steve Sailer
"Juno"
Normally I wait until movies I've reviewed are out of the theaters before I post my full review of them on-line, but, with the Academy Awards on Sunday night, I figure I'll put up the whole "Juno" review below for anybody interested in the Best Picture race.
And here are my reviews of the other Best Picture nominees:
No Country for Old Men
There Will Be Blood
Atonement
Michael Clayton
I'm rooting for "No Country," but it's a matter of the glass being 2/3rds full (Javier Bardem's and, especially, Josh Brolin's roles) and 1/3rd empty: Tommy Lee Jones's old sheriff. I sometimes wonder if Jones, a liberal, intentionally sabotaged author Cormac McCarthy's reactionary soliloquies by mumbling them incomprehensibly. Jones's poor performance in "No Country" contrasts sharply with his excellent one in "In the Valley of Elah." But if they took out Jones's mumbling, then it would be an exciting 100 minute long updating of "The Terminator," which was a pop culture landmark, but not the kind of film they give Oscars to.
In contrast to "No Country," I came out of "There Will Be Blood" feeling the glass was half empty.
Others in contention for major awards:
Eastern Promises - Best Actor
La Vie en Rose - Best Actress
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly- Best Director, etc.
In the Valley of Elah - Best Actor
Gone Baby Gone - Best Supporting Actress
The Assassination of Jesse James -- Best Supporting Actor
Sicko - Best Documentary
Once - Best Song
Here's my "Juno" review from The American Conservative:
Last fall, I received a half-dozen invitations to screenings of a "quirky" comedy about a "whip-smart" pregnant teen hipsterette who plans to give her baby up for adoption by an affluent couple. With my finger planted firmly nowhere near the pulse of popular opinion, I tossed each one out, thinking: "To listen to teens with attitude, for this I need to leave the house?"
So, in the wake of "Juno's" Academy Award nominations for Best Picture, Director (Jason Reitman of "Thank You for Smoking"), Actress (petite 20-year-old Ellen Page), and Original Screenwriter ("Diablo Cody," which is the pole name of 29-year-old self-promoter Brook Busey, whose confessional blog became popular when she started working as a stripper), I ended up paying to see it.
Juno, a cute tomboy who dresses in flannel shirts like Nirvana's Kurt Cobain and has a snarky pop culture reference ready for every situation, turned out to be just as insufferable as I had expected. If she's so whip-smart, why'd she get so pregnant after one evening with a bright but baffled cross-country runner (the subversively blond and bland Michael Cera from "Superbad") with whom she says she's just friends?
Fortunately, my wife, who admired "Juno" greatly, patiently explained to me the film's considerable subtleties until even my clueless male brain could begin to grasp them.
First, though, let's dispose of the controversy over the purported politics of "Juno." Is Juno betraying feminism by choosing adoption over abortion? Sure. Yet, there's no mystery why Hollywood heroines (as in the recent "Knocked Up" and "Waitress") almost never have abortions: because babies are adorable and abortions are hideous. Nobody -- including, and perhaps especially, pro-choice ideologues -- wants to think visually about abortion.
What is interesting is how Cody's semi-autobiographical screenplay undermines teen movie status clichés about attractive but moronic jocks and cheerleaders lording it over the brilliant, funny, but socially oppressed rebel outcasts (who presumably get their eventual revenge by moving downtown and writing screenplays about high school).
This conventional dichotomy between the successful versus the cool is embodied in the infertile couple whom Juno finds to adopt her baby. Jennifer Garner (Alias) plays the yuppie wife who maintains a spotless McMansion in a gated community while also working long hours in a corporate career. Jason Bateman (Arrested Development) is her slacker husband, a grunge guitarist turned advertising jingle composer who sees in Juno a kindred spirit with whom he can debate whether the greatest year in rock music history was 1977 (Sex Pistols and Clash) or 1993 (Liz Phair's Exile in Guyville).
Indeed, Juno's personality appears modeled on Phair's complex combination of masculine power-chording indie cred, feminine inner self, and shocking statements calibrated to draw notice. That's only natural because the screenwriter was 16 and living in Chicago's suburbs when Phair's second album "Whip-Smart" came out. Phair was everything Cody must have wanted to be: famous, hip, talented, sexy, and living downtown in Wicker Park, the "Guyville" where all the cool guys in Chicago punk bands hung out.
As Garner's adoptive mother-to-be obsesses over which shade of medium yellow to paint the nursery, her husband starts to feel like an exile in girlville. Talking to a maverick like Juno makes him wonder whether he should move back downtown and get a loft.
Yet, the one thing today's youth hates more than being uncool is parents divorcing. When it comes to raising her baby, Juno realizes, being a soulless corporate drone is a good thing. Kids these days want parents to be boring. The shock helps Juno begin to understand herself better.
As "Juno" reveals, the run-of-the-mill teen nonconformist is, as the screenwriter finally realized about herself in college, "a noisy, dramatic attention whore." Cody is too recognition-starved to stick to the party line about how the alterna-kids are free spirits. Instead, she's made herself a celebrity by spilling the beans about punkette girls like herself and Juno. Why do they tell guys that their three favorite bands are (to quote Juno) "Iggy Pop & the Stooges, Patti Smith, and the Runaways?" Because, to over-generalize, pretending to obsess over old pop culture minutiae makes smart boys notice them and it gives shy boys something to talk about with them.
So, why did Juno get pregnant? The same reason: for attention. At her middle class school, high IQ pregnant girls giving their babies up for adoption are as interesting to the masses as ivory-billed woodpeckers.
Rated PG-13 for mature thematic material, sexual content and language.Replies: @Kyle, @obwandiyag, @Neoconned, @Reg Cæsar, @Lot, @Paco Wové
https://isteve.blogspot.com/2008/02/juno_23.html
“Juno”
Normally I wait until movies I’ve reviewed are out of the theaters before I post my full review of them on-line, but, with the Academy Awards on Sunday night, I figure I’ll put up the whole “Juno” review below for anybody interested in the Best Picture race.
And here are my reviews of the other Best Picture nominees:
No Country for Old Men
There Will Be Blood
Atonement
Michael Clayton
I’m rooting for “No Country,” but it’s a matter of the glass being 2/3rds full (Javier Bardem’s and, especially, Josh Brolin’s roles) and 1/3rd empty: Tommy Lee Jones’s old sheriff. I sometimes wonder if Jones, a liberal, intentionally sabotaged author Cormac McCarthy’s reactionary soliloquies by mumbling them incomprehensibly. Jones’s poor performance in “No Country” contrasts sharply with his excellent one in “In the Valley of Elah.” But if they took out Jones’s mumbling, then it would be an exciting 100 minute long updating of “The Terminator,” which was a pop culture landmark, but not the kind of film they give Oscars to.
In contrast to “No Country,” I came out of “There Will Be Blood” feeling the glass was half empty.
Others in contention for major awards:
Eastern Promises – Best Actor
La Vie en Rose – Best Actress
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly- Best Director, etc.
In the Valley of Elah – Best Actor
Gone Baby Gone – Best Supporting Actress
The Assassination of Jesse James — Best Supporting Actor
Sicko – Best Documentary
Once – Best Song
Here’s my “Juno” review from The American Conservative:
Last fall, I received a half-dozen invitations to screenings of a “quirky” comedy about a “whip-smart” pregnant teen hipsterette who plans to give her baby up for adoption by an affluent couple. With my finger planted firmly nowhere near the pulse of popular opinion, I tossed each one out, thinking: “To listen to teens with attitude, for this I need to leave the house?”
So, in the wake of “Juno’s” Academy Award nominations for Best Picture, Director (Jason Reitman of “Thank You for Smoking”), Actress (petite 20-year-old Ellen Page), and Original Screenwriter (“Diablo Cody,” which is the pole name of 29-year-old self-promoter Brook Busey, whose confessional blog became popular when she started working as a stripper), I ended up paying to see it.
Juno, a cute tomboy who dresses in flannel shirts like Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain and has a snarky pop culture reference ready for every situation, turned out to be just as insufferable as I had expected. If she’s so whip-smart, why’d she get so pregnant after one evening with a bright but baffled cross-country runner (the subversively blond and bland Michael Cera from “Superbad”) with whom she says she’s just friends?
Fortunately, my wife, who admired “Juno” greatly, patiently explained to me the film’s considerable subtleties until even my clueless male brain could begin to grasp them.
First, though, let’s dispose of the controversy over the purported politics of “Juno.” Is Juno betraying feminism by choosing adoption over abortion? Sure. Yet, there’s no mystery why Hollywood heroines (as in the recent “Knocked Up” and “Waitress”) almost never have abortions: because babies are adorable and abortions are hideous. Nobody — including, and perhaps especially, pro-choice ideologues — wants to think visually about abortion.
What is interesting is how Cody’s semi-autobiographical screenplay undermines teen movie status clichés about attractive but moronic jocks and cheerleaders lording it over the brilliant, funny, but socially oppressed rebel outcasts (who presumably get their eventual revenge by moving downtown and writing screenplays about high school).
This conventional dichotomy between the successful versus the cool is embodied in the infertile couple whom Juno finds to adopt her baby. Jennifer Garner (Alias) plays the yuppie wife who maintains a spotless McMansion in a gated community while also working long hours in a corporate career. Jason Bateman (Arrested Development) is her slacker husband, a grunge guitarist turned advertising jingle composer who sees in Juno a kindred spirit with whom he can debate whether the greatest year in rock music history was 1977 (Sex Pistols and Clash) or 1993 (Liz Phair’s Exile in Guyville).
Indeed, Juno’s personality appears modeled on Phair’s complex combination of masculine power-chording indie cred, feminine inner self, and shocking statements calibrated to draw notice. That’s only natural because the screenwriter was 16 and living in Chicago’s suburbs when Phair’s second album “Whip-Smart” came out. Phair was everything Cody must have wanted to be: famous, hip, talented, sexy, and living downtown in Wicker Park, the “Guyville” where all the cool guys in Chicago punk bands hung out.
As Garner’s adoptive mother-to-be obsesses over which shade of medium yellow to paint the nursery, her husband starts to feel like an exile in girlville. Talking to a maverick like Juno makes him wonder whether he should move back downtown and get a loft.
Yet, the one thing today’s youth hates more than being uncool is parents divorcing. When it comes to raising her baby, Juno realizes, being a soulless corporate drone is a good thing. Kids these days want parents to be boring. The shock helps Juno begin to understand herself better.
As “Juno” reveals, the run-of-the-mill teen nonconformist is, as the screenwriter finally realized about herself in college, “a noisy, dramatic attention whore.” Cody is too recognition-starved to stick to the party line about how the alterna-kids are free spirits. Instead, she’s made herself a celebrity by spilling the beans about punkette girls like herself and Juno. Why do they tell guys that their three favorite bands are (to quote Juno) “Iggy Pop & the Stooges, Patti Smith, and the Runaways?” Because, to over-generalize, pretending to obsess over old pop culture minutiae makes smart boys notice them and it gives shy boys something to talk about with them.
So, why did Juno get pregnant? The same reason: for attention. At her middle class school, high IQ pregnant girls giving their babies up for adoption are as interesting to the masses as ivory-billed woodpeckers.
Rated PG-13 for mature thematic material, sexual content and language.
And 2007 truly was the worst yr of my life.
Juno like any Judd Apatow movie had everything that was wrong with the 2000s....plus all that cringe bad stuff
Did Diablo Cody Really Spend A Year Stripping?The first I heard of her was in a piece in City Pages in which she reviewed a visiting troupe of black male strippers called the Chocolate Factory. (Can't find a link.) I assumed she herself was black, what with the ridiculous name. Turned out she was a semi-serious white chick from Illinois, basically Liz Phair on paper rather than wax.She's married with three children now, Mrs Brook Maurio.Perhaps "Diablo" herself was a "composite", like Polly Perkins and Tipsy McStagger.https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Dows1BmmA7g&t=30s
Juno was amusing light comedy and well made, 3 stars, but not worth a second view.
Having been warped by decades of birdwatching, I can't tell if that's supposed to mean "the most fascinating thing imaginable" or "the most boring thing in the world".
While a bit off ( this) topic I came upon this morsel while researching Covid outbreaks this morning.
https://keprtv.com/news/local/umatilla-county-politician-speaks-out-after-police-say-he-wrote-racist-letter-to-himself
https://www.lewrockwell.com/lrc-blog/the-principality-behind-the-plandemic/
Which certainly explains how high the stakes are for the Face Diaper wearing crowd. I was the first one to level the charge of cowardice at the Covidiots back in March, and if anything my observation understated the reality of just how much cringing servility and lickspittle obeisance Americans were capable of. Factoring in the uniform responses of so-called Christian Churches, especially the heresy of the Catholic Church, and I think obedience to a Satanic cult is a fair charge. Seems to me that losing your soul is a pretty high price to pay for wearing a Face Diaper.
As far as facial recognition is concerned, it is highly unlikely that any facial recognition software would function with a mask on. The software works by taking a geometric “map” of your face that is ultimately dependent on bone structure. Blurring the nose and, most especially, chin, ruins that map. The software also measures eye width, size, and distance, so heavy shading of you eye sockets also spoofs the software.
Gait recognition analysis can also identify a person with extreme accuracy – after all, your dog does it every time someone comes to the door. It is also easy to spoof – just put something in your footwear to force you to change your gait.
In any case, I wouldn’t worry too much about being identified in public. The Police have pretty much stopped doing their job, and can hardly be blamed for that. ( I imagine a lot of them are proceeding directly to” Right Wing Paramilitary”, do not pass Go, do not collect 200$, but that is another subject.)
"Juno"
Normally I wait until movies I've reviewed are out of the theaters before I post my full review of them on-line, but, with the Academy Awards on Sunday night, I figure I'll put up the whole "Juno" review below for anybody interested in the Best Picture race.
And here are my reviews of the other Best Picture nominees:
No Country for Old Men
There Will Be Blood
Atonement
Michael Clayton
I'm rooting for "No Country," but it's a matter of the glass being 2/3rds full (Javier Bardem's and, especially, Josh Brolin's roles) and 1/3rd empty: Tommy Lee Jones's old sheriff. I sometimes wonder if Jones, a liberal, intentionally sabotaged author Cormac McCarthy's reactionary soliloquies by mumbling them incomprehensibly. Jones's poor performance in "No Country" contrasts sharply with his excellent one in "In the Valley of Elah." But if they took out Jones's mumbling, then it would be an exciting 100 minute long updating of "The Terminator," which was a pop culture landmark, but not the kind of film they give Oscars to.
In contrast to "No Country," I came out of "There Will Be Blood" feeling the glass was half empty.
Others in contention for major awards:
Eastern Promises - Best Actor
La Vie en Rose - Best Actress
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly- Best Director, etc.
In the Valley of Elah - Best Actor
Gone Baby Gone - Best Supporting Actress
The Assassination of Jesse James -- Best Supporting Actor
Sicko - Best Documentary
Once - Best Song
Here's my "Juno" review from The American Conservative:
Last fall, I received a half-dozen invitations to screenings of a "quirky" comedy about a "whip-smart" pregnant teen hipsterette who plans to give her baby up for adoption by an affluent couple. With my finger planted firmly nowhere near the pulse of popular opinion, I tossed each one out, thinking: "To listen to teens with attitude, for this I need to leave the house?"
So, in the wake of "Juno's" Academy Award nominations for Best Picture, Director (Jason Reitman of "Thank You for Smoking"), Actress (petite 20-year-old Ellen Page), and Original Screenwriter ("Diablo Cody," which is the pole name of 29-year-old self-promoter Brook Busey, whose confessional blog became popular when she started working as a stripper), I ended up paying to see it.
Juno, a cute tomboy who dresses in flannel shirts like Nirvana's Kurt Cobain and has a snarky pop culture reference ready for every situation, turned out to be just as insufferable as I had expected. If she's so whip-smart, why'd she get so pregnant after one evening with a bright but baffled cross-country runner (the subversively blond and bland Michael Cera from "Superbad") with whom she says she's just friends?
Fortunately, my wife, who admired "Juno" greatly, patiently explained to me the film's considerable subtleties until even my clueless male brain could begin to grasp them.
First, though, let's dispose of the controversy over the purported politics of "Juno." Is Juno betraying feminism by choosing adoption over abortion? Sure. Yet, there's no mystery why Hollywood heroines (as in the recent "Knocked Up" and "Waitress") almost never have abortions: because babies are adorable and abortions are hideous. Nobody -- including, and perhaps especially, pro-choice ideologues -- wants to think visually about abortion.
What is interesting is how Cody's semi-autobiographical screenplay undermines teen movie status clichés about attractive but moronic jocks and cheerleaders lording it over the brilliant, funny, but socially oppressed rebel outcasts (who presumably get their eventual revenge by moving downtown and writing screenplays about high school).
This conventional dichotomy between the successful versus the cool is embodied in the infertile couple whom Juno finds to adopt her baby. Jennifer Garner (Alias) plays the yuppie wife who maintains a spotless McMansion in a gated community while also working long hours in a corporate career. Jason Bateman (Arrested Development) is her slacker husband, a grunge guitarist turned advertising jingle composer who sees in Juno a kindred spirit with whom he can debate whether the greatest year in rock music history was 1977 (Sex Pistols and Clash) or 1993 (Liz Phair's Exile in Guyville).
Indeed, Juno's personality appears modeled on Phair's complex combination of masculine power-chording indie cred, feminine inner self, and shocking statements calibrated to draw notice. That's only natural because the screenwriter was 16 and living in Chicago's suburbs when Phair's second album "Whip-Smart" came out. Phair was everything Cody must have wanted to be: famous, hip, talented, sexy, and living downtown in Wicker Park, the "Guyville" where all the cool guys in Chicago punk bands hung out.
As Garner's adoptive mother-to-be obsesses over which shade of medium yellow to paint the nursery, her husband starts to feel like an exile in girlville. Talking to a maverick like Juno makes him wonder whether he should move back downtown and get a loft.
Yet, the one thing today's youth hates more than being uncool is parents divorcing. When it comes to raising her baby, Juno realizes, being a soulless corporate drone is a good thing. Kids these days want parents to be boring. The shock helps Juno begin to understand herself better.
As "Juno" reveals, the run-of-the-mill teen nonconformist is, as the screenwriter finally realized about herself in college, "a noisy, dramatic attention whore." Cody is too recognition-starved to stick to the party line about how the alterna-kids are free spirits. Instead, she's made herself a celebrity by spilling the beans about punkette girls like herself and Juno. Why do they tell guys that their three favorite bands are (to quote Juno) "Iggy Pop & the Stooges, Patti Smith, and the Runaways?" Because, to over-generalize, pretending to obsess over old pop culture minutiae makes smart boys notice them and it gives shy boys something to talk about with them.
So, why did Juno get pregnant? The same reason: for attention. At her middle class school, high IQ pregnant girls giving their babies up for adoption are as interesting to the masses as ivory-billed woodpeckers.
Rated PG-13 for mature thematic material, sexual content and language.Replies: @Kyle, @obwandiyag, @Neoconned, @Reg Cæsar, @Lot, @Paco Wové
1969 Is objectively the best year in rock & roll. Abbey road, the rooftop concert, Zeppelin 2, many more awesome things that I can’t think of at the moment. Between 1977 and 1993 I’d definitely pick 1993. Only because Weezer released the blue album and Wu Tang released 36 chambers. Both of them are in my Mount Rushmore of pop music albums next to abbey road and the white album.
https://www.survivopedia.com/6-ways-to-defeat-facial-recognition/That's one way of being more jewish. OTOH, Antifa flags shown in public may still elicit healthy responses:
https://twitter.com/mrdic/status/1281651031139549186You are a Pournelle fan, Steve?
OT: From the mental breakdown brigade that brought us "KKKlansmen spotted in corridors, under beds, in my kitchen etc." and who need to be acquainted with Pournelle Methods to Remove Protestors from Premises:
'KKK number behind white power gesture' spotted by Portland protester was actually poster celebrating basketball starhttps://twitter.com/USAO_OR/status/1282145748360949760Replies: @Steve Sailer, @Kyle, @Pop Warner, @MEH 0910
We’ve already broken down what this hand gesture means. It’s either an OK sign, or it’s the sign you flash after you make a 3 point shot. In this case it’s the latter. I don’t understand how anybody who’s spent time living in amercia could think otherwise.
> Patriarchy is so limp-wristed that they can only post an OK-sign poster from the window of an anonymous office on second floor in response as opposed to firing MG-43 into the crowd to make clear who's boss.Crazies believe both of the above are true.
About the stunt played by that black actress/agent provocateur:
“Marshall-Brown, by the way, is the daughter of a foreign service officer.”
Which goes to show that intelligence agencies are behind BLM and antifas.
Won’t matter. Gait analysis is getting better results on individual identification and facial recognition, and it costs less.
Put a penny in one of your shoes while wearing a mask.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6075757/
In any case, individual-level gait analysis (i.e., getting two separate pieces of video and being able to say "this is the same person" by gait analysis alone) is still completely pie-in-the-sky, and will wither on the vine as people become more aware of the problem and the ease of countermeasures.
Steve, this is the next big thing if you want to get ahead of it: The whole AI and ML and facial recognition field is on the cusp of a huge woke eruption. Tip: Follow a few AI/ML researcher accounts on Twitter. They are woke already, and they see that the current environment may allow them to take over and bring “equity” to their fields. There have already been several “WE DEMAND” and “We the undersigned” letters to employers, universities, and as open letters.
The published research is already starting to get weird: stuff being published that’s not about the field itself, but about how the field is bigoted, and calls to ban publication of inconvenient findings. It’s hard to tell the degree to which Twitter represents reality, but there are a lot of black AI/ML researchers (which makes me go, Huh?, since it’s math, so you know these are not the top cornflakes in the bowl), plus the assorted group of non-black POCs, and white savior allies.
It will be interesting to watch what happens to the industry. They cannot stop all research, so I wonder what will happen. Will there be a lot of small under-the-radar startups? Will it go overseas? Open-sourced “bit-face” software for private citizens to use and voluntarily aggregate? In a way I sometimes think, Thank god for China. You hate ’em, but it’s a good thing that they are there, as yet unwoke and unblacked, and more or less open to scientific and technological progress that doesn’t threaten the CCP.
In general I see a market for new tech companies that only sell to DOD and cops, only hire veterans and Mormons with security clearances, and set up shop in highrises in Utah or the like, so as to be maximally cancel-resistant.
Sailer already wrote about the subject, but not much. Algorithms and machine learning and neural networks and deep learning and image processing, analysis and recognition appear not to be things that interest him much. He came of age during the "winter", so it's understandable. Russell and Norvig hadn't even written their book yet. Those topics are also often boring to non-math-obsessed non-autistic folks like him once one gets into details.
Americans will wear face diapers for the rest of their lives. All schools will implement the abusive CDC guidelines requiring face diapers for all students all day and punishments inflicted if students come within six feet of each other or venture outside their plexiglas hamster enclosures. The purpose of this is so that children feel that face diapers are normal – it is easy to abuse children, that is why so many people abuse them.
President-elect Joe Diaper has promised federal face diaper mandates for the rest of our lives.
Women love the face diaper and love harassing people who refuse to diaper up.
Welcome to your new normal.
So, yes, software must be designed to identify Diaper-Americans because cowardly faggots – like Sailer and Ron Unz – refused to say no, fuck no to the face diaper.
Amen brother. God save us from the Cult of Covid and the government it occupies.
“The virus seems to be mutating or at least morphing”
The common cold does that; hence no vaccine for the common cold.
A fake vaccine will debut soon. It will be mandatory. It will be less than 10% effective. This feckless result will be used to justify continued mandatory face diapers.
Mandatory fake vax is very lucrative. Americans will get jabbed at least once a year with the fake vax. It won’t work, thus you must diaper up at all times.
Ad infinitum.
Welcome to your New Normal, faggots.
It is an extremely dark time for the incredibly good-looking. We are the new second class citizens.Replies: @Lot
Various factors need to be balanced, hospital beds and staff, fatalities, possible chronic covid conditions, economic activity and businesses, citizen mental health, and so on. Masks are just one tool in the mix to consider. If not wearing masks is really important to citizens, that's fine, but it would need to be risk balanced by having greater restrictions on business activity and citizen mobility. In that light masks seem like a minor annoyance.Replies: @anon
I’m very close to pulling an Ariana Grande or Olivia Culpo
VERY CLOSE
Spray Tan + Mask + New Hair Color = Winning!
Liz and ’93 were great, but 1994 has an even stronger claim to the rock title.
Journey - Don't Stop Believing
Rush - Moving Pictures
Queen - Greatest Hits
Albums by: Elvis Costello, The Rolling Stones, Billy Squier, Foreigner and,
A debut album: Beauty and the Beat.Replies: @The Wild Geese Howard, @Hhsiii, @Reg Cæsar
I am pretty sure Stray Cats did their first album in 1981 as well.
I think the Chinese Communist Party are way ahead on this, identifying mask wearers; difficult but apparently they can do this. And let’s face it identifying one Chinaman from another is difficult enough in the best of circumstances.
Having high res cameras and enough processing power helps, also side info like gait analysis and height.
But hey that wasn’t really what you were talking about. The best thing for a pretty fly White guy to do is buy one of those tiny round hats, stick it on in case of need, perfect protection against antifa and police both.
But unfortunately not protection against black people. It provokes violence from them.
Masks may provide protection from being identified for some SJW attack. But we need more comfortable masks for this whole charade.
Aren’t we supposed to half way to 5,000,000 dead Americans by now? There doesn’t seem to be slightest bit of self-reflection by those who pushed this lockdown. This will affect how much they are listened to in the future.
I figure 250,000 have been last to heart problems and another 250,000 to cancer during this “pandemic”. And pretty much the covid is like a bad flu season.
I feel like some HBD writers got played by some Ashkenazis (who had some other agenda or just plan neurosis). HBDers and remnants of the Old Yankee stock (stop calling them WASPs) are easily wrapped around a Jewish finger.
HBDers and Old Yankees have no loyalty to other White people. So they just go by who can do them them the most good at the moment. Jews have high IQs, so, well sorry White proles.
Harriet Tubesteak.
It seems like these days that tattoo recognition is a better way of identifying people, since everybody under 30 is heavily tattooed.
No, the reason the films always show adoption over abortion, and why the adoption is always presented as a painless or even good choice for the real mom, is because TPTB are trying to make themselves look and feel better over their own creepy adoption fetish.
If there really are millions of women and girls who really feel permanently neutral/negative about their own babies, then a huge chunk of the anti-abortion movement (that abortion is always devastating) falls to pieces. And the fact that they don’t care about these women once they’ve acted as incubators says a lot.
As it is, giving up a baby is an agonizing thing, and it’s cruel for fundies/gays/liberal activists to make women and girls do it so they can preen/make up for wasting their fertile years/have the biblically mandated huge “families” without going to the effort of actually making them/feel ‘just as good” as the neighbors.
Does facial recognition work on masked men? Short answer: yes. And helpful China is exporting their technology around the world.
Now that I think about it, I posted this article in May.
If you include everyone in town the solution you are 100% accurate but the result is useless.
My bet is on overclaim for shitty software.Replies: @Anon7, @Jim Don Bob
Congratulations, you’ve reached a new level of unreality and self-deception!
‘if you’re black, are not in jail and wear business clothes the world is your oyster.’
Brilliant, Sav. Can confirm. Worked in a school recently & can say not a single one of them would’ve been given the job, or avoided the sack on merit!
The stunt/link at the end of the post is very interesting. Will Black activists detect white churches as their next object? There could be got a lot of fun out of that.
There are good reasons why the United States are never as segregated as on Sunday morning – churches are most for the elderly who do not look for novelties, but for security by staying among their own kind. But they need to understand that inner-worldly security within their church can at best be a mirror and an anticipation of eternal security in Christ’s dwellings.
In the end, Christian churches will find out that there is nothing they didn’t already experience before – provocation, humiliation, harassment, nothing new under the sun.
https://www.survivopedia.com/6-ways-to-defeat-facial-recognition/That's one way of being more jewish. OTOH, Antifa flags shown in public may still elicit healthy responses:
https://twitter.com/mrdic/status/1281651031139549186You are a Pournelle fan, Steve?
OT: From the mental breakdown brigade that brought us "KKKlansmen spotted in corridors, under beds, in my kitchen etc." and who need to be acquainted with Pournelle Methods to Remove Protestors from Premises:
'KKK number behind white power gesture' spotted by Portland protester was actually poster celebrating basketball starhttps://twitter.com/USAO_OR/status/1282145748360949760Replies: @Steve Sailer, @Kyle, @Pop Warner, @MEH 0910
I always take these things as whitepills. That 4chan was able to turn an innocuous hand symbol into a Hate Gesture shows how much power they have over language. If they meme something idiots in government and antiwhite NGOs eat it up immediately. Leftists have to use massive media organizations and the academic industrial complex to force changes in language but they still don’t have the power some anonymous anime enthusiasts have.
What should we change next?
https://i.postimg.cc/sfvTrMxR/noose-sign.jpg
AFAIK, facial recognition software works by measuring the relative proportions of your face, especially around the eyes (brows to cheekbones), so dark glasses and a beard may hinder more than a facemask. Still, the recognition process is incremental, so the more of your face that is exposed × the more time it is exposed × the more cameras it is exposed to × the acuity and resolution of those cameras × the depth and accuracy of the database the camera info compares to = how fast you get doxxed.
Our side needs anonymity. We will need anonymity to persuade people to attend the peaceful street demonstrations that should be being organized right now in support of good public policies.
Cities have other ways to deter looting. They can start by ordering the police to prevent it.
“Who was that masked man?”
“You all look alike, Kemosabe.”
Let’s just say there is probably a market in inflatable OK sign balloons.
Also:
> Protesting in front of the court building because it’s the most evident signal of systemic racism and über-pervasive oppressive patriarchy
> Patriarchy is so limp-wristed that they can only post an OK-sign poster from the window of an anonymous office on second floor in response as opposed to firing MG-43 into the crowd to make clear who’s boss.
Crazies believe both of the above are true.
“95% percent accuracy” doesn’t mean much though.
If you include everyone in town the solution you are 100% accurate but the result is useless.
My bet is on overclaim for shitty software.
https://www.survivopedia.com/6-ways-to-defeat-facial-recognition/That's one way of being more jewish. OTOH, Antifa flags shown in public may still elicit healthy responses:
https://twitter.com/mrdic/status/1281651031139549186You are a Pournelle fan, Steve?
OT: From the mental breakdown brigade that brought us "KKKlansmen spotted in corridors, under beds, in my kitchen etc." and who need to be acquainted with Pournelle Methods to Remove Protestors from Premises:
'KKK number behind white power gesture' spotted by Portland protester was actually poster celebrating basketball starhttps://twitter.com/USAO_OR/status/1282145748360949760Replies: @Steve Sailer, @Kyle, @Pop Warner, @MEH 0910
https://www.unz.com/isteve/rip-jerry-pournelle-1933-2017/
https://www.unz.com/isteve/sailer-in-takis-in-memoriam-jerry-pournelle/
https://www.unz.com/?s=Pournelle&Action=Search&authors=steve-sailer&ptype=all
Having high res cameras and enough processing power helps, also side info like gait analysis and height.
But hey that wasn't really what you were talking about. The best thing for a pretty fly White guy to do is buy one of those tiny round hats, stick it on in case of need, perfect protection against antifa and police both.Replies: @Harry Baldwin
buy one of those tiny round hats, stick it on in case of need, perfect protection against antifa and police both
But unfortunately not protection against black people. It provokes violence from them.
Just in case any of you were in the market for an “anti-racist dictionary”, i.e., glossary:
An anti-racist’s dictionary: 16 words on race, gender, and diversity you should know
This is from a publication with the suspicious name of Business Insider. So this is what counts as “inside” these days.
For those who like to extrapolate trends, in 2020 we were due to have 72 states:
Google his "Translations from the Wokish."
That's Politically Correct aka Corrupt
Look at the endless mess, without the chance to react. The real "Black" Americans and Europeans will pay the price for this farcical charade
Mass Incarceration is the agenda and "BML" provides the justification as usual
"Terror" for war on toddlers
"Protest" for invasion
Over and over again bcz the (white) majority can't put 1 and 1 together
1981 had:
Journey – Don’t Stop Believing
Rush – Moving Pictures
Queen – Greatest Hits
Albums by: Elvis Costello, The Rolling Stones, Billy Squier, Foreigner and,
A debut album: Beauty and the Beat.
However, I see them very much as products of the '70s, or even the '60s in the Stones' case.
The albums that dropped in '94 were very much a product of their time. There were also a few notably strong sophomore efforts, which are a rarity in any era.
Squeeze East Side Story
Clash Sandinista
X Wild Gift
Prince Controversy
U2 Boy
dBs Stands for Decibels
Tom Tom Club
Rick James Street Songs
These were all in Village Voice year end poll.
OT: Stanford drops 11 varsity sports. Says Covid is to blame for decision. (Do these things cost much money? Doesn’t Stanford have massive amounts of money?)
Forbes says it’s actually about declining revenue from what little they got from broadcast rights.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/karenweaver/2020/07/09/stanford-dropping-11-sports-is-less-about-covid-19-and-more-about-declining-pac-12-network-revenues/
The Atlantic says it’s actually to reduce the number of rich white gentile frat boys. (And that this is a good thing according to the Indian nerd who wrote the piece)
And Spotted Toad and other commentators say it’s actually about the succession of the Boomer Ashkenazi Jews from the elite and Jews from enrollment who felt like going to a university with lacrosse meant they were just as good as the WASPs. Chinese and Indians don’t play sports or care about the accoutrements of blue blood America, they want the trappings of the Jewish American elite.
https://twitter.com/Jackie_Author/status/1282331992508571649
https://www.bostonglobe.com/2020/06/29/metro/harvard-will-drop-policy-targeting-all-male-final-clubs
"Marshall-Brown, by the way, is the daughter of a foreign service officer."
Which goes to show that intelligence agencies are behind BLM and antifas.Replies: @Ray P, @S. Anonyia
In the nineteen sixties, at least CIA/ONI created some rad rock bands.
Addendum:
I am pretty sure Stray Cats did their first album in 1981 as well.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.yahoo.com/amphtml/entertainment/turns-juggalo-makeup-blocks-facial-161130031.html
Facial recognition technology apparently isnt that good…..
It’s morphing to be less deadly. The new infection spikes are not leading to corresponding death spikes.
If you are under 60, with a BMI under 27-28 (most Americans disregard BMI sadly, and believe their fat is muscle), and don’t have serious preconditions you don’t have anything to worry about.
"Marshall-Brown, by the way, is the daughter of a foreign service officer."
Which goes to show that intelligence agencies are behind BLM and antifas.Replies: @Ray P, @S. Anonyia
Right. A homemade color revolution.
I don’t even have to change my hair color or tan that much, and I can (and have) pull off the ethnically ambiguous look. I’m mostly Irish and Scandinavian but a lot of people including me on one side of my family have a pseudo-Central Asian/Turkic appearance (like Bjork or Justin Long) that I can take advantage of.
There's great power in numbers. In the meantime, yeah, mask up if you have to deal with these antifa Commies and/or BLM thugs out in the streets - it may have helped the Proud Boys avoid years in prison.Replies: @SunBakedSuburb, @Old Prude, @Federalist
“Proud Boys”
Are you referring to one of the colourful and somewhat gayish gangs that inhabit Walter Hill’s urban fantasy The Warriors (1979)?
Back on the old Gong Show, a regular guest was a comedian who wore a paper bag over his head and called himself “The Unknown Comic.”
With his dark aviator glasses and black mask, Joe Biden looks like The Unknown Candidate. As long as he was simply the Not-Trump, he was polling well, but once he reveals his policy proposals expect those poll numbers to drop.
The babblefest will continue.
“face diapers”
It is an extremely dark time for the incredibly good-looking. We are the new second class citizens.
https://untappedcities-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/Naked-Cowboy-Face-mask-Coronavirus-Times-Square-NYC.jpgReplies: @Reg Cæsar
I figure the “vaccine” will be loaded with toxins that serve to weaken people’s immune systems so they are more vulnerable to future virus releases.
I also believe the vaccine will have a “Mark of the Beast” aspect involving a substance, possibly passive or even active nanomachines that allow you to be tracked everywhere, like a kind of permanent RFID tag.
I bet they’ve already designed and patented the RF/microwave based scanners that can easily be incorporated in a doorframe.
So, if you don’t get the vaccine you can plan on living as a dirt-eating prole for the rest of your life.
An anti-racist's dictionary: 16 words on race, gender, and diversity you should know
This is from a publication with the suspicious name of Business Insider. So this is what counts as "inside" these days.
For those who like to extrapolate trends, in 2020 we were due to have 72 states:
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EU3Qw61VAAIwQoD.jpgReplies: @The Wild Geese Howard, @Neoconned, @The Alarmist, @Anon, @Sya Beerens
Heh, you should see the Maoist crap Marketwatch is pushing these days.
How about fat-ass recognition?
https://twitter.com/RealSaleemJuma/status/1282228023719153664
With his dark aviator glasses and black mask, Joe Biden looks like The Unknown Candidate. As long as he was simply the Not-Trump, he was polling well, but once he reveals his policy proposals expect those poll numbers to drop.Replies: @Almost Missouri
Pretty sure the plan is for Biden to continue to ramble incoherently. In the Coalition of the Fringes, a coherent policy proposal is anathema: someone will be offended. Incoherent rambling or just plain silence is a feature not a bug. Everyone can project their own expectations onto the candidate. Obama did this by gassing on in vague generalities and playing a lot of golf. Biden does this by not finishing sentences or paragraphs and hiding in his basement. There is absolutely no upside to Dems for speaking anything meaningful or even understandable.
The babblefest will continue.
The published research is already starting to get weird: stuff being published that's not about the field itself, but about how the field is bigoted, and calls to ban publication of inconvenient findings. It's hard to tell the degree to which Twitter represents reality, but there are a lot of black AI/ML researchers (which makes me go, Huh?, since it's math, so you know these are not the top cornflakes in the bowl), plus the assorted group of non-black POCs, and white savior allies.
It will be interesting to watch what happens to the industry. They cannot stop all research, so I wonder what will happen. Will there be a lot of small under-the-radar startups? Will it go overseas? Open-sourced "bit-face" software for private citizens to use and voluntarily aggregate? In a way I sometimes think, Thank god for China. You hate 'em, but it's a good thing that they are there, as yet unwoke and unblacked, and more or less open to scientific and technological progress that doesn't threaten the CCP.
In general I see a market for new tech companies that only sell to DOD and cops, only hire veterans and Mormons with security clearances, and set up shop in highrises in Utah or the like, so as to be maximally cancel-resistant.Replies: @gabriel alberton, @Anon
Why you wonder? You already thanked god for the answer.
Sailer already wrote about the subject, but not much. Algorithms and machine learning and neural networks and deep learning and image processing, analysis and recognition appear not to be things that interest him much. He came of age during the “winter”, so it’s understandable. Russell and Norvig hadn’t even written their book yet. Those topics are also often boring to non-math-obsessed non-autistic folks like him once one gets into details.
I don’t think it matters when it comes to looters. A friend of mine still living in Manhattan told me this interesting bit of info.
A group of 5 cops was right at the corner of a high end store being looted. They just stood there doing nothing as the looters did their deed. Cops went over to check the dmg after the looters are gone with their booty.
That is the state of our country.
"Juno"
Normally I wait until movies I've reviewed are out of the theaters before I post my full review of them on-line, but, with the Academy Awards on Sunday night, I figure I'll put up the whole "Juno" review below for anybody interested in the Best Picture race.
And here are my reviews of the other Best Picture nominees:
No Country for Old Men
There Will Be Blood
Atonement
Michael Clayton
I'm rooting for "No Country," but it's a matter of the glass being 2/3rds full (Javier Bardem's and, especially, Josh Brolin's roles) and 1/3rd empty: Tommy Lee Jones's old sheriff. I sometimes wonder if Jones, a liberal, intentionally sabotaged author Cormac McCarthy's reactionary soliloquies by mumbling them incomprehensibly. Jones's poor performance in "No Country" contrasts sharply with his excellent one in "In the Valley of Elah." But if they took out Jones's mumbling, then it would be an exciting 100 minute long updating of "The Terminator," which was a pop culture landmark, but not the kind of film they give Oscars to.
In contrast to "No Country," I came out of "There Will Be Blood" feeling the glass was half empty.
Others in contention for major awards:
Eastern Promises - Best Actor
La Vie en Rose - Best Actress
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly- Best Director, etc.
In the Valley of Elah - Best Actor
Gone Baby Gone - Best Supporting Actress
The Assassination of Jesse James -- Best Supporting Actor
Sicko - Best Documentary
Once - Best Song
Here's my "Juno" review from The American Conservative:
Last fall, I received a half-dozen invitations to screenings of a "quirky" comedy about a "whip-smart" pregnant teen hipsterette who plans to give her baby up for adoption by an affluent couple. With my finger planted firmly nowhere near the pulse of popular opinion, I tossed each one out, thinking: "To listen to teens with attitude, for this I need to leave the house?"
So, in the wake of "Juno's" Academy Award nominations for Best Picture, Director (Jason Reitman of "Thank You for Smoking"), Actress (petite 20-year-old Ellen Page), and Original Screenwriter ("Diablo Cody," which is the pole name of 29-year-old self-promoter Brook Busey, whose confessional blog became popular when she started working as a stripper), I ended up paying to see it.
Juno, a cute tomboy who dresses in flannel shirts like Nirvana's Kurt Cobain and has a snarky pop culture reference ready for every situation, turned out to be just as insufferable as I had expected. If she's so whip-smart, why'd she get so pregnant after one evening with a bright but baffled cross-country runner (the subversively blond and bland Michael Cera from "Superbad") with whom she says she's just friends?
Fortunately, my wife, who admired "Juno" greatly, patiently explained to me the film's considerable subtleties until even my clueless male brain could begin to grasp them.
First, though, let's dispose of the controversy over the purported politics of "Juno." Is Juno betraying feminism by choosing adoption over abortion? Sure. Yet, there's no mystery why Hollywood heroines (as in the recent "Knocked Up" and "Waitress") almost never have abortions: because babies are adorable and abortions are hideous. Nobody -- including, and perhaps especially, pro-choice ideologues -- wants to think visually about abortion.
What is interesting is how Cody's semi-autobiographical screenplay undermines teen movie status clichés about attractive but moronic jocks and cheerleaders lording it over the brilliant, funny, but socially oppressed rebel outcasts (who presumably get their eventual revenge by moving downtown and writing screenplays about high school).
This conventional dichotomy between the successful versus the cool is embodied in the infertile couple whom Juno finds to adopt her baby. Jennifer Garner (Alias) plays the yuppie wife who maintains a spotless McMansion in a gated community while also working long hours in a corporate career. Jason Bateman (Arrested Development) is her slacker husband, a grunge guitarist turned advertising jingle composer who sees in Juno a kindred spirit with whom he can debate whether the greatest year in rock music history was 1977 (Sex Pistols and Clash) or 1993 (Liz Phair's Exile in Guyville).
Indeed, Juno's personality appears modeled on Phair's complex combination of masculine power-chording indie cred, feminine inner self, and shocking statements calibrated to draw notice. That's only natural because the screenwriter was 16 and living in Chicago's suburbs when Phair's second album "Whip-Smart" came out. Phair was everything Cody must have wanted to be: famous, hip, talented, sexy, and living downtown in Wicker Park, the "Guyville" where all the cool guys in Chicago punk bands hung out.
As Garner's adoptive mother-to-be obsesses over which shade of medium yellow to paint the nursery, her husband starts to feel like an exile in girlville. Talking to a maverick like Juno makes him wonder whether he should move back downtown and get a loft.
Yet, the one thing today's youth hates more than being uncool is parents divorcing. When it comes to raising her baby, Juno realizes, being a soulless corporate drone is a good thing. Kids these days want parents to be boring. The shock helps Juno begin to understand herself better.
As "Juno" reveals, the run-of-the-mill teen nonconformist is, as the screenwriter finally realized about herself in college, "a noisy, dramatic attention whore." Cody is too recognition-starved to stick to the party line about how the alterna-kids are free spirits. Instead, she's made herself a celebrity by spilling the beans about punkette girls like herself and Juno. Why do they tell guys that their three favorite bands are (to quote Juno) "Iggy Pop & the Stooges, Patti Smith, and the Runaways?" Because, to over-generalize, pretending to obsess over old pop culture minutiae makes smart boys notice them and it gives shy boys something to talk about with them.
So, why did Juno get pregnant? The same reason: for attention. At her middle class school, high IQ pregnant girls giving their babies up for adoption are as interesting to the masses as ivory-billed woodpeckers.
Rated PG-13 for mature thematic material, sexual content and language.Replies: @Kyle, @obwandiyag, @Neoconned, @Reg Cæsar, @Lot, @Paco Wové
All those movies suck the hairy boner big time. Especially Cormac McCarthy who writes prose so purple you’d think he was an interior decorator.
Juno is nothing but screenwriters thinking up “funny” things to put into the mouth of their cattlelike actors. Hey, look at me, I’m the son of a rich guy and so they gave me a screenwriter job, and looky here, I just thought up a hundred things in a committee that pass for witty and put them in the mouth of little teenagers who in real life sound more like Leave it to Beaver.
The original Terminator was a bunch of shit. II and III were better, at least bearable.
The best movies are Drunk Parents and something else I can’t think of right now.
Movies are all–all–all pathetic wish fulfillment pandering manipulation. You learn to suck by watching them.
What should we change next?Replies: @El Dato, @Mr. Anon
As posted earlier
The published research is already starting to get weird: stuff being published that's not about the field itself, but about how the field is bigoted, and calls to ban publication of inconvenient findings. It's hard to tell the degree to which Twitter represents reality, but there are a lot of black AI/ML researchers (which makes me go, Huh?, since it's math, so you know these are not the top cornflakes in the bowl), plus the assorted group of non-black POCs, and white savior allies.
It will be interesting to watch what happens to the industry. They cannot stop all research, so I wonder what will happen. Will there be a lot of small under-the-radar startups? Will it go overseas? Open-sourced "bit-face" software for private citizens to use and voluntarily aggregate? In a way I sometimes think, Thank god for China. You hate 'em, but it's a good thing that they are there, as yet unwoke and unblacked, and more or less open to scientific and technological progress that doesn't threaten the CCP.
In general I see a market for new tech companies that only sell to DOD and cops, only hire veterans and Mormons with security clearances, and set up shop in highrises in Utah or the like, so as to be maximally cancel-resistant.Replies: @gabriel alberton, @Anon
“but there are a lot of black AI/ML researchers (which makes me go, Huh?, since it’s math, so you know these are not the top cornflakes in the bowl)”
Prior to AI researchers becoming extremely wealthy, there actually were some good black AI researchers who just did good / real research (and there are still some). Then when huge amounts of money started pouring in, you started to see activists who don’t really do any research but just promote ideology. I think these sorts of people are attracted to subfields where they see a lot of easy money. To be fair, a job at google brain can be *very easy* since the standard algorithms already work quite well and pays quite well (think 300k at the very lowest), so I can see why they’re attracted.
“It will be interesting to watch what happens to the industry. They cannot stop all research, so I wonder what will happen. ”
I think they’ll have a push towards having ways of post-processing and pre-processing algorithms so that they get the desired results. It’s not just about woke ideology but also about the benefits of big corporations.
In my view, the idea that we shouldn’t blindly trust algorithms is correct, but the problem is that they want to replace this with a purely ideological system, rather than a rational/scientific system. For example, any *difference* in outcomes is routinely labeled as a bias, without any evidence or reasoning.
—-
Related to the main topic of the post, I’ve talked to some applied Chinese researchers, and they say that you can make face recognition work reasonably well on masked people, but the system needs to be specifically designed/trained for it.
An anti-racist's dictionary: 16 words on race, gender, and diversity you should know
This is from a publication with the suspicious name of Business Insider. So this is what counts as "inside" these days.
For those who like to extrapolate trends, in 2020 we were due to have 72 states:
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EU3Qw61VAAIwQoD.jpgReplies: @The Wild Geese Howard, @Neoconned, @The Alarmist, @Anon, @Sya Beerens
This obsession with vocabulary and words is a very effeminate female thing. Men tend not to get offended by words unless other men literally are trying to emasculate them….
Don’t worry. Everything will start turning around after Trump loses in November. Just wait and see.
"Juno"
Normally I wait until movies I've reviewed are out of the theaters before I post my full review of them on-line, but, with the Academy Awards on Sunday night, I figure I'll put up the whole "Juno" review below for anybody interested in the Best Picture race.
And here are my reviews of the other Best Picture nominees:
No Country for Old Men
There Will Be Blood
Atonement
Michael Clayton
I'm rooting for "No Country," but it's a matter of the glass being 2/3rds full (Javier Bardem's and, especially, Josh Brolin's roles) and 1/3rd empty: Tommy Lee Jones's old sheriff. I sometimes wonder if Jones, a liberal, intentionally sabotaged author Cormac McCarthy's reactionary soliloquies by mumbling them incomprehensibly. Jones's poor performance in "No Country" contrasts sharply with his excellent one in "In the Valley of Elah." But if they took out Jones's mumbling, then it would be an exciting 100 minute long updating of "The Terminator," which was a pop culture landmark, but not the kind of film they give Oscars to.
In contrast to "No Country," I came out of "There Will Be Blood" feeling the glass was half empty.
Others in contention for major awards:
Eastern Promises - Best Actor
La Vie en Rose - Best Actress
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly- Best Director, etc.
In the Valley of Elah - Best Actor
Gone Baby Gone - Best Supporting Actress
The Assassination of Jesse James -- Best Supporting Actor
Sicko - Best Documentary
Once - Best Song
Here's my "Juno" review from The American Conservative:
Last fall, I received a half-dozen invitations to screenings of a "quirky" comedy about a "whip-smart" pregnant teen hipsterette who plans to give her baby up for adoption by an affluent couple. With my finger planted firmly nowhere near the pulse of popular opinion, I tossed each one out, thinking: "To listen to teens with attitude, for this I need to leave the house?"
So, in the wake of "Juno's" Academy Award nominations for Best Picture, Director (Jason Reitman of "Thank You for Smoking"), Actress (petite 20-year-old Ellen Page), and Original Screenwriter ("Diablo Cody," which is the pole name of 29-year-old self-promoter Brook Busey, whose confessional blog became popular when she started working as a stripper), I ended up paying to see it.
Juno, a cute tomboy who dresses in flannel shirts like Nirvana's Kurt Cobain and has a snarky pop culture reference ready for every situation, turned out to be just as insufferable as I had expected. If she's so whip-smart, why'd she get so pregnant after one evening with a bright but baffled cross-country runner (the subversively blond and bland Michael Cera from "Superbad") with whom she says she's just friends?
Fortunately, my wife, who admired "Juno" greatly, patiently explained to me the film's considerable subtleties until even my clueless male brain could begin to grasp them.
First, though, let's dispose of the controversy over the purported politics of "Juno." Is Juno betraying feminism by choosing adoption over abortion? Sure. Yet, there's no mystery why Hollywood heroines (as in the recent "Knocked Up" and "Waitress") almost never have abortions: because babies are adorable and abortions are hideous. Nobody -- including, and perhaps especially, pro-choice ideologues -- wants to think visually about abortion.
What is interesting is how Cody's semi-autobiographical screenplay undermines teen movie status clichés about attractive but moronic jocks and cheerleaders lording it over the brilliant, funny, but socially oppressed rebel outcasts (who presumably get their eventual revenge by moving downtown and writing screenplays about high school).
This conventional dichotomy between the successful versus the cool is embodied in the infertile couple whom Juno finds to adopt her baby. Jennifer Garner (Alias) plays the yuppie wife who maintains a spotless McMansion in a gated community while also working long hours in a corporate career. Jason Bateman (Arrested Development) is her slacker husband, a grunge guitarist turned advertising jingle composer who sees in Juno a kindred spirit with whom he can debate whether the greatest year in rock music history was 1977 (Sex Pistols and Clash) or 1993 (Liz Phair's Exile in Guyville).
Indeed, Juno's personality appears modeled on Phair's complex combination of masculine power-chording indie cred, feminine inner self, and shocking statements calibrated to draw notice. That's only natural because the screenwriter was 16 and living in Chicago's suburbs when Phair's second album "Whip-Smart" came out. Phair was everything Cody must have wanted to be: famous, hip, talented, sexy, and living downtown in Wicker Park, the "Guyville" where all the cool guys in Chicago punk bands hung out.
As Garner's adoptive mother-to-be obsesses over which shade of medium yellow to paint the nursery, her husband starts to feel like an exile in girlville. Talking to a maverick like Juno makes him wonder whether he should move back downtown and get a loft.
Yet, the one thing today's youth hates more than being uncool is parents divorcing. When it comes to raising her baby, Juno realizes, being a soulless corporate drone is a good thing. Kids these days want parents to be boring. The shock helps Juno begin to understand herself better.
As "Juno" reveals, the run-of-the-mill teen nonconformist is, as the screenwriter finally realized about herself in college, "a noisy, dramatic attention whore." Cody is too recognition-starved to stick to the party line about how the alterna-kids are free spirits. Instead, she's made herself a celebrity by spilling the beans about punkette girls like herself and Juno. Why do they tell guys that their three favorite bands are (to quote Juno) "Iggy Pop & the Stooges, Patti Smith, and the Runaways?" Because, to over-generalize, pretending to obsess over old pop culture minutiae makes smart boys notice them and it gives shy boys something to talk about with them.
So, why did Juno get pregnant? The same reason: for attention. At her middle class school, high IQ pregnant girls giving their babies up for adoption are as interesting to the masses as ivory-billed woodpeckers.
Rated PG-13 for mature thematic material, sexual content and language.Replies: @Kyle, @obwandiyag, @Neoconned, @Reg Cæsar, @Lot, @Paco Wové
I hated Juno.
And 2007 truly was the worst yr of my life.
Juno like any Judd Apatow movie had everything that was wrong with the 2000s….plus all that cringe bad stuff
It’s all pretty simple. If your face is covered in a way that would prevent your mother from recognizing you, AI may not be able to. If your mother could recognize you, AI can too. I think if you isolated the faces in the photos of Trump and Biden above, they would be harder to recognize, but not impossible.
This happened within easy walking distance from me; I have strolled past that church hundreds of times.
My wife and I have already held a meeting to discuss amendments to John Derbyshire’s “The Talk, Non-black Version”. In addition to Derb’s excellent advice regarding proximity to blacks, we have agreed on a policy of not engaging in conversation or argument with blacks holding up smartphones. Silently proceed with whatever business we are engaged with or calmly walk away.
I usually carry pepper spray around the neighborhood, concealed or open guns both being verboten here, but I have considered carrying around a little bottle of flat black spray paint; I would have loved to walk up to the provoking “actress” and spray a nice thick opaque layer over her camera lense.
Masks will defeat facial recognition for the foreseeable future. I don’t see how you can make a postitive ID, certainly not up to legal standards, by looking at only 2/3 of a face.
That’s where the chip comes in. We have to be able to ID you at all times (unless your an illegal alien – then you’re free to roam the land with no more need to identify yourself than an 18th century frontiersman had), and we can’t do that with machine vision, so you’re going to have to be implanted with
The Mark of the Beasta Digital Health Passport.By the way, some people have noticed that the word “Mask” is only one letter off the word “Mark”.
I find it interesting that governors are issuing edicts (requiring mask wearing) that order the citizenry to violate anti-masking laws. Can executive orders order people to personally violate the law?
RIP Johnny Cochran.
What should we change next?Replies: @El Dato, @Mr. Anon
Every single phrase that nice white ladies (both liberal and conservative) use should be memed into an obviously racist dogwhistle.
Ugly Women love the face mask, and they love giant sunglasses. I hate the face mask and I hate wearing sunglasses. It takes away my advantage of having such a beautiful face.
Employers would gladly pay to know who among their potential hires was rioting or causing havoc. The last thing they want is to hire someone who hates authority, likes to sabotage things, likes to vandalize things, likes doxing people, and create fake hate crimes.
A couple of observations. While the implicit promise is to turn off the riots and such, once Biden wins, that is not possible. Defunding the police is real, and is happening in: Minneapolis, Milwaukee, Seattle, Portland, has already effectively happened in San Francisco (no crimes are prosecuted by Soros backed Red Diaper Chesa Boudin, son of Weatherman jihadis and new DA). And now, Los Angeles (done deal) and New York (same). Look for Philly, Boston, Chicago, etc all to defund the police.
Violent escape from New York / Taxi Driver crime once it spirals cannot be reined in. No police force reinstated will start arresting criminals. Because 90% of violent criminals are black. The other 10% are Latino.
The riots and violence will just accelerate. Little noticed has been CA Gov. Gavin Newsom releasing another 8,000 violent felons out of Corcoran and other places, where they were serving lengthy sentences for murder and rape. Out of Corona Virus fears. Expect a wave of home invader rapes/murders like that of the Night Stalker, Golden State Killer, etc.
In order for that to be turned around, President Biden/Harris/Abrams etc. would have to arrest all the parolees, put them in a remote federal prison, and never release them, and have a federal force arresting violent criminals, again who are mostly Black and the remainder Latino, and put them in some remote prison. That is not even remotely politically possible and there is no money to implement that anyway.
For ordinary people, government is abusive: it takes their money and encourages violent criminal attacks on them. It prohibits Christian worship but encourages tearing down statues of their heroes.
Secondly, this is not China. In China, a relatively high IQ cohort rules as the relatively high IQ Emperor tells them. They have a long tradition of this type of rule, it is nothing new. It is what makes their nation so fragile, as the high IQ cohort is socially isolated, with blinders, and subject to the idiocies of our ruling class. But they are all Han Chinese. Rest assured Xi Xinping does not make war on the Han Chinese majority upon which he needs tax revenue and labor to build his empire into a mighty industrial military machine with either hostile or secessionists forces on its periphery: the Central Asian Muslims, India, Japan, Taiwan, etc.
We will have the worst of face and gait recognition. Cheap cameras poorly maintained through lack of skilled and motivated by patriotism manpower. We will have bored subcontinentals writing the code while scheming to make more money by padding invoices and the like, with minimal effort expended. While many cameras will fail due to maintenance or produce bad images due to the lens never ever being cleaned.
Meanwhile the vast majority of cops are going to be fired and cities and suburbs turned into gang territory with extortion legalized for racial justice. As we have what Paul Kersey dubs a minority occupation government. With almost no official with any real power looking like the vast majority of the productive class which is made to grovel and kneel before LeBron. So to speak.
Its a guaranteed recipe for rebellion as soon as the US military suffers a defeat against China. Which is highly likely given the Wolf Warrior diplomacy of Xi. Who seems determined to pick fights given the internal weakness of China — an export economy with little domestic consumption and its customers running out of money to pay for things.
Could China stop buying treasuries if export sales are down? I would not do this first. Keep lending the capitalists money that they use to buy the rope to hang themselves. Pretty soon the US won’t have much manufacturing left to ship over. I’m sure they have copies of every patent and released application, and maybe the unreleased ones, and if America has no manufacturing left, and there is still R&D here, those researchers need to eat, and might move to Asia, where there is no cultural revolution, if not to China. If China stopped buying debt, doesn’t the US house of cards just collapse?
Low internal demand sounds like a problem that is not one for a manufacturing power house. How many pairs of America’s socks does China make a year? A billion? 5 billion? I am sure that the Chinese have feet that can get cold, too. So with low current demand overseas, couldn’t China sell some socks to each other? Include thousands of other consumer goods, and the Chinese people get a nice payoff for handling COVID so well.
I wonder if China keeps the game going because they’re milking the US for the last bit of manufacturing, our biomedical research that we share so freely, and as a bolthole for rich Chinese should things turn south there. Any others? It seems to me that things are more likely to turn out badly here than there. Maybe they just aren’t out of the box thinkers, and can’t see a Chinese century without the Pax Americana? Maybe they think the death throws of the American Empire could see thousands of ICBMs launched their way?
Whiskey, sometimes you seem sensible. That scares me.
Meanwhile, USA Today and (((allies))) are derping hard:
Even RT (who traditionally finds a lot of Nazi) writes
Reading Wikipedia must be hard and intellectually exhausting: Reichsadler. The Trump Eagle would actually be the un-stylized eagle of the Party. Very unusual.
https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/MKgAAOSw95te~ZsD/s-l640.jpg
Stupid USA Today is too stupid to realize it's a BALD EAGLE, indigenous to the Americas, and has nothing to do "imperial" or "Nazi."
I dunno … for years people have had difficulty figuring out who these folks were, so how can a machine do any better?
Forget masks … apparently glasses are enough!
An anti-racist's dictionary: 16 words on race, gender, and diversity you should know
This is from a publication with the suspicious name of Business Insider. So this is what counts as "inside" these days.
For those who like to extrapolate trends, in 2020 we were due to have 72 states:
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EU3Qw61VAAIwQoD.jpgReplies: @The Wild Geese Howard, @Neoconned, @The Alarmist, @Anon, @Sya Beerens
I thought we were already up to 57 states with Obama, so where do we quickly find the other 15? I guess we could annex Mexico and Central America and just make reality official.
"Juno"
Normally I wait until movies I've reviewed are out of the theaters before I post my full review of them on-line, but, with the Academy Awards on Sunday night, I figure I'll put up the whole "Juno" review below for anybody interested in the Best Picture race.
And here are my reviews of the other Best Picture nominees:
No Country for Old Men
There Will Be Blood
Atonement
Michael Clayton
I'm rooting for "No Country," but it's a matter of the glass being 2/3rds full (Javier Bardem's and, especially, Josh Brolin's roles) and 1/3rd empty: Tommy Lee Jones's old sheriff. I sometimes wonder if Jones, a liberal, intentionally sabotaged author Cormac McCarthy's reactionary soliloquies by mumbling them incomprehensibly. Jones's poor performance in "No Country" contrasts sharply with his excellent one in "In the Valley of Elah." But if they took out Jones's mumbling, then it would be an exciting 100 minute long updating of "The Terminator," which was a pop culture landmark, but not the kind of film they give Oscars to.
In contrast to "No Country," I came out of "There Will Be Blood" feeling the glass was half empty.
Others in contention for major awards:
Eastern Promises - Best Actor
La Vie en Rose - Best Actress
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly- Best Director, etc.
In the Valley of Elah - Best Actor
Gone Baby Gone - Best Supporting Actress
The Assassination of Jesse James -- Best Supporting Actor
Sicko - Best Documentary
Once - Best Song
Here's my "Juno" review from The American Conservative:
Last fall, I received a half-dozen invitations to screenings of a "quirky" comedy about a "whip-smart" pregnant teen hipsterette who plans to give her baby up for adoption by an affluent couple. With my finger planted firmly nowhere near the pulse of popular opinion, I tossed each one out, thinking: "To listen to teens with attitude, for this I need to leave the house?"
So, in the wake of "Juno's" Academy Award nominations for Best Picture, Director (Jason Reitman of "Thank You for Smoking"), Actress (petite 20-year-old Ellen Page), and Original Screenwriter ("Diablo Cody," which is the pole name of 29-year-old self-promoter Brook Busey, whose confessional blog became popular when she started working as a stripper), I ended up paying to see it.
Juno, a cute tomboy who dresses in flannel shirts like Nirvana's Kurt Cobain and has a snarky pop culture reference ready for every situation, turned out to be just as insufferable as I had expected. If she's so whip-smart, why'd she get so pregnant after one evening with a bright but baffled cross-country runner (the subversively blond and bland Michael Cera from "Superbad") with whom she says she's just friends?
Fortunately, my wife, who admired "Juno" greatly, patiently explained to me the film's considerable subtleties until even my clueless male brain could begin to grasp them.
First, though, let's dispose of the controversy over the purported politics of "Juno." Is Juno betraying feminism by choosing adoption over abortion? Sure. Yet, there's no mystery why Hollywood heroines (as in the recent "Knocked Up" and "Waitress") almost never have abortions: because babies are adorable and abortions are hideous. Nobody -- including, and perhaps especially, pro-choice ideologues -- wants to think visually about abortion.
What is interesting is how Cody's semi-autobiographical screenplay undermines teen movie status clichés about attractive but moronic jocks and cheerleaders lording it over the brilliant, funny, but socially oppressed rebel outcasts (who presumably get their eventual revenge by moving downtown and writing screenplays about high school).
This conventional dichotomy between the successful versus the cool is embodied in the infertile couple whom Juno finds to adopt her baby. Jennifer Garner (Alias) plays the yuppie wife who maintains a spotless McMansion in a gated community while also working long hours in a corporate career. Jason Bateman (Arrested Development) is her slacker husband, a grunge guitarist turned advertising jingle composer who sees in Juno a kindred spirit with whom he can debate whether the greatest year in rock music history was 1977 (Sex Pistols and Clash) or 1993 (Liz Phair's Exile in Guyville).
Indeed, Juno's personality appears modeled on Phair's complex combination of masculine power-chording indie cred, feminine inner self, and shocking statements calibrated to draw notice. That's only natural because the screenwriter was 16 and living in Chicago's suburbs when Phair's second album "Whip-Smart" came out. Phair was everything Cody must have wanted to be: famous, hip, talented, sexy, and living downtown in Wicker Park, the "Guyville" where all the cool guys in Chicago punk bands hung out.
As Garner's adoptive mother-to-be obsesses over which shade of medium yellow to paint the nursery, her husband starts to feel like an exile in girlville. Talking to a maverick like Juno makes him wonder whether he should move back downtown and get a loft.
Yet, the one thing today's youth hates more than being uncool is parents divorcing. When it comes to raising her baby, Juno realizes, being a soulless corporate drone is a good thing. Kids these days want parents to be boring. The shock helps Juno begin to understand herself better.
As "Juno" reveals, the run-of-the-mill teen nonconformist is, as the screenwriter finally realized about herself in college, "a noisy, dramatic attention whore." Cody is too recognition-starved to stick to the party line about how the alterna-kids are free spirits. Instead, she's made herself a celebrity by spilling the beans about punkette girls like herself and Juno. Why do they tell guys that their three favorite bands are (to quote Juno) "Iggy Pop & the Stooges, Patti Smith, and the Runaways?" Because, to over-generalize, pretending to obsess over old pop culture minutiae makes smart boys notice them and it gives shy boys something to talk about with them.
So, why did Juno get pregnant? The same reason: for attention. At her middle class school, high IQ pregnant girls giving their babies up for adoption are as interesting to the masses as ivory-billed woodpeckers.
Rated PG-13 for mature thematic material, sexual content and language.Replies: @Kyle, @obwandiyag, @Neoconned, @Reg Cæsar, @Lot, @Paco Wové
Apparently, Miss Cody’s autobiography itself is semi-autobiographical:
Did Diablo Cody Really Spend A Year Stripping?
The first I heard of her was in a piece in City Pages in which she reviewed a visiting troupe of black male strippers called the Chocolate Factory. (Can’t find a link.) I assumed she herself was black, what with the ridiculous name. Turned out she was a semi-serious white chick from Illinois, basically Liz Phair on paper rather than wax.
She’s married with three children now, Mrs Brook Maurio.
Perhaps “Diablo” herself was a “composite”, like Polly Perkins and Tipsy McStagger.
Meanwhile, a rather large, and passionate mob surrounds a police precinct in Queens.
Hopefully, they’ll be paying a visit to CNN headquarters very soon…
Why should working class white cops risk their lives protecting virtue-signaling yuppies from black mobs and antifa crazies? If the urban elites just love their blacks and radicals, don't let the cops stand between them.
Defund and donut the police.
Do you know the context of this? Is it actually happening today, July 13?
I’m not convinced that is true. The HR lady just has take a liking to Noodle Arm Beau.
You probably go to Disneyland to enjoy yourself.
A group of 5 cops was right at the corner of a high end store being looted. They just stood there doing nothing as the looters did their deed. Cops went over to check the dmg after the looters are gone with their booty.
That is the state of our country.Replies: @Sya Beerens, @Harry Baldwin
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/305425839_’Realising_the_troubled_family’_’crafting_the_neoliberal_state’
https://twitter.com/USATODAY/status/1282281837159751680
Even RT (who traditionally finds a lot of Nazi) writeshttps://twitter.com/jewishaction/status/1278340461682442241
Reading Wikipedia must be hard and intellectually exhausting: Reichsadler. The Trump Eagle would actually be the un-stylized eagle of the Party. Very unusual.Replies: @Mr. Anon, @Joe Stalin, @Gordo, @Joe Stalin
What does “Bend the Arc” even mean? It’s the stupidest name for a left-wing agitprop operation since “Rainbow PUSH”.
The woke people I know actually like authority. They just don’t like white people or “oppression”. But their definitions of oppression all come from mindlessly imbibing and parroting what they are told. They bow down to teachers and academics and in some contexts social superiors or certain politicians. I doubt there is very much anti-corporate activity at the companies where these people work.
It is an extremely dark time for the incredibly good-looking. We are the new second class citizens.Replies: @Lot
Keeping swole and toned has never been more important brother.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jc2YVbzOHSU
"Juno"
Normally I wait until movies I've reviewed are out of the theaters before I post my full review of them on-line, but, with the Academy Awards on Sunday night, I figure I'll put up the whole "Juno" review below for anybody interested in the Best Picture race.
And here are my reviews of the other Best Picture nominees:
No Country for Old Men
There Will Be Blood
Atonement
Michael Clayton
I'm rooting for "No Country," but it's a matter of the glass being 2/3rds full (Javier Bardem's and, especially, Josh Brolin's roles) and 1/3rd empty: Tommy Lee Jones's old sheriff. I sometimes wonder if Jones, a liberal, intentionally sabotaged author Cormac McCarthy's reactionary soliloquies by mumbling them incomprehensibly. Jones's poor performance in "No Country" contrasts sharply with his excellent one in "In the Valley of Elah." But if they took out Jones's mumbling, then it would be an exciting 100 minute long updating of "The Terminator," which was a pop culture landmark, but not the kind of film they give Oscars to.
In contrast to "No Country," I came out of "There Will Be Blood" feeling the glass was half empty.
Others in contention for major awards:
Eastern Promises - Best Actor
La Vie en Rose - Best Actress
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly- Best Director, etc.
In the Valley of Elah - Best Actor
Gone Baby Gone - Best Supporting Actress
The Assassination of Jesse James -- Best Supporting Actor
Sicko - Best Documentary
Once - Best Song
Here's my "Juno" review from The American Conservative:
Last fall, I received a half-dozen invitations to screenings of a "quirky" comedy about a "whip-smart" pregnant teen hipsterette who plans to give her baby up for adoption by an affluent couple. With my finger planted firmly nowhere near the pulse of popular opinion, I tossed each one out, thinking: "To listen to teens with attitude, for this I need to leave the house?"
So, in the wake of "Juno's" Academy Award nominations for Best Picture, Director (Jason Reitman of "Thank You for Smoking"), Actress (petite 20-year-old Ellen Page), and Original Screenwriter ("Diablo Cody," which is the pole name of 29-year-old self-promoter Brook Busey, whose confessional blog became popular when she started working as a stripper), I ended up paying to see it.
Juno, a cute tomboy who dresses in flannel shirts like Nirvana's Kurt Cobain and has a snarky pop culture reference ready for every situation, turned out to be just as insufferable as I had expected. If she's so whip-smart, why'd she get so pregnant after one evening with a bright but baffled cross-country runner (the subversively blond and bland Michael Cera from "Superbad") with whom she says she's just friends?
Fortunately, my wife, who admired "Juno" greatly, patiently explained to me the film's considerable subtleties until even my clueless male brain could begin to grasp them.
First, though, let's dispose of the controversy over the purported politics of "Juno." Is Juno betraying feminism by choosing adoption over abortion? Sure. Yet, there's no mystery why Hollywood heroines (as in the recent "Knocked Up" and "Waitress") almost never have abortions: because babies are adorable and abortions are hideous. Nobody -- including, and perhaps especially, pro-choice ideologues -- wants to think visually about abortion.
What is interesting is how Cody's semi-autobiographical screenplay undermines teen movie status clichés about attractive but moronic jocks and cheerleaders lording it over the brilliant, funny, but socially oppressed rebel outcasts (who presumably get their eventual revenge by moving downtown and writing screenplays about high school).
This conventional dichotomy between the successful versus the cool is embodied in the infertile couple whom Juno finds to adopt her baby. Jennifer Garner (Alias) plays the yuppie wife who maintains a spotless McMansion in a gated community while also working long hours in a corporate career. Jason Bateman (Arrested Development) is her slacker husband, a grunge guitarist turned advertising jingle composer who sees in Juno a kindred spirit with whom he can debate whether the greatest year in rock music history was 1977 (Sex Pistols and Clash) or 1993 (Liz Phair's Exile in Guyville).
Indeed, Juno's personality appears modeled on Phair's complex combination of masculine power-chording indie cred, feminine inner self, and shocking statements calibrated to draw notice. That's only natural because the screenwriter was 16 and living in Chicago's suburbs when Phair's second album "Whip-Smart" came out. Phair was everything Cody must have wanted to be: famous, hip, talented, sexy, and living downtown in Wicker Park, the "Guyville" where all the cool guys in Chicago punk bands hung out.
As Garner's adoptive mother-to-be obsesses over which shade of medium yellow to paint the nursery, her husband starts to feel like an exile in girlville. Talking to a maverick like Juno makes him wonder whether he should move back downtown and get a loft.
Yet, the one thing today's youth hates more than being uncool is parents divorcing. When it comes to raising her baby, Juno realizes, being a soulless corporate drone is a good thing. Kids these days want parents to be boring. The shock helps Juno begin to understand herself better.
As "Juno" reveals, the run-of-the-mill teen nonconformist is, as the screenwriter finally realized about herself in college, "a noisy, dramatic attention whore." Cody is too recognition-starved to stick to the party line about how the alterna-kids are free spirits. Instead, she's made herself a celebrity by spilling the beans about punkette girls like herself and Juno. Why do they tell guys that their three favorite bands are (to quote Juno) "Iggy Pop & the Stooges, Patti Smith, and the Runaways?" Because, to over-generalize, pretending to obsess over old pop culture minutiae makes smart boys notice them and it gives shy boys something to talk about with them.
So, why did Juno get pregnant? The same reason: for attention. At her middle class school, high IQ pregnant girls giving their babies up for adoption are as interesting to the masses as ivory-billed woodpeckers.
Rated PG-13 for mature thematic material, sexual content and language.Replies: @Kyle, @obwandiyag, @Neoconned, @Reg Cæsar, @Lot, @Paco Wové
What a great year for movies. Blood, Clayton, and No Country were all superb. Haven’t seen them a second time but I wouldn’t mind doing so.
Juno was amusing light comedy and well made, 3 stars, but not worth a second view.
Violent escape from New York / Taxi Driver crime once it spirals cannot be reined in. No police force reinstated will start arresting criminals. Because 90% of violent criminals are black. The other 10% are Latino.
The riots and violence will just accelerate. Little noticed has been CA Gov. Gavin Newsom releasing another 8,000 violent felons out of Corcoran and other places, where they were serving lengthy sentences for murder and rape. Out of Corona Virus fears. Expect a wave of home invader rapes/murders like that of the Night Stalker, Golden State Killer, etc.
In order for that to be turned around, President Biden/Harris/Abrams etc. would have to arrest all the parolees, put them in a remote federal prison, and never release them, and have a federal force arresting violent criminals, again who are mostly Black and the remainder Latino, and put them in some remote prison. That is not even remotely politically possible and there is no money to implement that anyway.
For ordinary people, government is abusive: it takes their money and encourages violent criminal attacks on them. It prohibits Christian worship but encourages tearing down statues of their heroes.
Secondly, this is not China. In China, a relatively high IQ cohort rules as the relatively high IQ Emperor tells them. They have a long tradition of this type of rule, it is nothing new. It is what makes their nation so fragile, as the high IQ cohort is socially isolated, with blinders, and subject to the idiocies of our ruling class. But they are all Han Chinese. Rest assured Xi Xinping does not make war on the Han Chinese majority upon which he needs tax revenue and labor to build his empire into a mighty industrial military machine with either hostile or secessionists forces on its periphery: the Central Asian Muslims, India, Japan, Taiwan, etc.
We will have the worst of face and gait recognition. Cheap cameras poorly maintained through lack of skilled and motivated by patriotism manpower. We will have bored subcontinentals writing the code while scheming to make more money by padding invoices and the like, with minimal effort expended. While many cameras will fail due to maintenance or produce bad images due to the lens never ever being cleaned.
Meanwhile the vast majority of cops are going to be fired and cities and suburbs turned into gang territory with extortion legalized for racial justice. As we have what Paul Kersey dubs a minority occupation government. With almost no official with any real power looking like the vast majority of the productive class which is made to grovel and kneel before LeBron. So to speak.
Its a guaranteed recipe for rebellion as soon as the US military suffers a defeat against China. Which is highly likely given the Wolf Warrior diplomacy of Xi. Who seems determined to pick fights given the internal weakness of China -- an export economy with little domestic consumption and its customers running out of money to pay for things.Replies: @tyrone, @BB753, @Rob
I guess we know now why Soros targeted district attorneys …..so his foot soldiers wouldn’t face prosecution and to crack down on real Americans defending their property…….this all must have been planned years ago ……I wonder what’s being planned right now .
Though the winner was a Republican but became an independent a few months after the election.
Will he live long enough for a hat trick? He's a month shy of 90. Who's really calling the shots in his organization? His sons?
It's like the Houses of Medici and Borgia vying to control the Papacy. But without the high art.
The debate about whether western societies can ban islamic women from covering their face in public has now been officially settled.
How long do you think it will be before we have to wear masks with individual bar codes on them?
Is wearing a mask going to give you social anonymity? Yes and no. Can you prove that you weren’t that masked racist white person in the photo?
Facial recognition has an enormous problem with false positives. In a country with 340+ million people (true count, not just legal ‘citizens’), if you ignore context and location, you can easily get hundreds of false positives. Add in masks, and now the government could potentially have an excuse to arrest almost anyone that they want to at any time (‘the face-o-matic 3000 says there is an 88% overlap with the masked person seen robbing a convenience store in Texas and your masked face seen outside an art museum in Boston’).
If you include everyone in town the solution you are 100% accurate but the result is useless.
My bet is on overclaim for shitty software.Replies: @Anon7, @Jim Don Bob
Right, but it gets more accurate when it uses a series of pictures, especially pictures from different angles. You might not recognize a friend from a single photo taken from a bad angle, or that is partially blocked, but if you saw a set of pictures, you’d recognize him. Same with computers. They can always add in gait analysis, etc.
The biggest impact of computer-based recognition is that they can see you everywhere you go, who you’re with, what you’re doing, how long you’re there, everything. In 1984, Winston Smith says that even though the telescreens are everywhere, nobody knows how often Big Brother (a government agent, a live person) is actually watching. They can’t watch every screen all the time, can they?
But with computer-based recognition, it’s just server time. They can watch everyone everywhere all the time. Were you ever in a mall at the same time as a person of interest? In the food court? In the past five years? Ten years?
The Chinese are working on their social score software, which can include who you associate with. If you’re seen with people the Chinese government doesn’t like, your score will go down. You won’t be able to buy plane tickets, or have a nice apartment, etc.
https://twitter.com/USATODAY/status/1282281837159751680
Even RT (who traditionally finds a lot of Nazi) writeshttps://twitter.com/jewishaction/status/1278340461682442241
Reading Wikipedia must be hard and intellectually exhausting: Reichsadler. The Trump Eagle would actually be the un-stylized eagle of the Party. Very unusual.Replies: @Mr. Anon, @Joe Stalin, @Gordo, @Joe Stalin
WE RISE AS ONE: A JEWISH CAMPAIGN TO DEFEAT WHITE NATIONALISM
https://www.facebook.com/watch/?ref=external&v=630215451127289
ACLU History: The Scopes 'Monkey Trial'John Scopes is the white Emmett Till. Keep bringing the guy up, but ignore his lawbreaking.
If you include everyone in town the solution you are 100% accurate but the result is useless.
My bet is on overclaim for shitty software.Replies: @Anon7, @Jim Don Bob
Never discount that, but FR is a very difficult computer problem even without masks. It requires a lot of CPU power, big databases that need to be spun through quickly, cataloging problems, and the fact that people age, get tanned, go bald, get fat, etc.
I am fairly paranoid about the intentions of government, but this is not a problem. Yet.
Not really, it's not the 1980's anymore. The Chinese have been using facial recog systems in parts of the country for some years, it's pretty much all over there now. Combine it with gait recog and it gets pretty accurate.
It requires a lot of CPU power,
More likely to be GPU's these days.
big databases that need to be spun through quickly, cataloging problems, and the fact that people age, get tanned, go bald, get fat, etc.
Here is some open source information.
https://infogalactic.com/info/Facial_recognition_system
Defund the police or donut the police. Police, just retire or retreat into donut shops.
Why should working class white cops risk their lives protecting virtue-signaling yuppies from black mobs and antifa crazies? If the urban elites just love their blacks and radicals, don’t let the cops stand between them.
Defund and donut the police.
” yes, software must be designed to identify Diaper-Americans because cowardly faggots – like Sailer and Ron Unz – refused to say no, fuck no to the face diaper.”
Amen brother. God save us from the Cult of Covid and the government it occupies.
Forbes says it's actually about declining revenue from what little they got from broadcast rights.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/karenweaver/2020/07/09/stanford-dropping-11-sports-is-less-about-covid-19-and-more-about-declining-pac-12-network-revenues/
The Atlantic says it's actually to reduce the number of rich white gentile frat boys. (And that this is a good thing according to the Indian nerd who wrote the piece)
https://twitter.com/TheAtlantic/status/1281990059747684353
And Spotted Toad and other commentators say it's actually about the succession of the Boomer Ashkenazi Jews from the elite and Jews from enrollment who felt like going to a university with lacrosse meant they were just as good as the WASPs. Chinese and Indians don't play sports or care about the accoutrements of blue blood America, they want the trappings of the Jewish American elite.
https://twitter.com/Jackie_Author/status/1282331992508571649Replies: @Jim Don Bob, @Jenner Ickham Errican
These sports are being cancelled because they are funded by the football program which probably won’t happen until Spring 2021, if at all.
Journey - Don't Stop Believing
Rush - Moving Pictures
Queen - Greatest Hits
Albums by: Elvis Costello, The Rolling Stones, Billy Squier, Foreigner and,
A debut album: Beauty and the Beat.Replies: @The Wild Geese Howard, @Hhsiii, @Reg Cæsar
All the acts you named were very successful and famous, no doubt.
However, I see them very much as products of the ’70s, or even the ’60s in the Stones’ case.
The albums that dropped in ’94 were very much a product of their time. There were also a few notably strong sophomore efforts, which are a rarity in any era.
Happy to say the Soros/BLM candidate lost in San Diego by a wide margin. And an open seat in a bad year for the local GOP, where a normal democrat might have won. I got a ton of glossy mailers funded by Soros, probably illegal given the local campaign finance laws that are hard to enforce against dark money groups.
Though the winner was a Republican but became an independent a few months after the election.
A group of 5 cops was right at the corner of a high end store being looted. They just stood there doing nothing as the looters did their deed. Cops went over to check the dmg after the looters are gone with their booty.
That is the state of our country.Replies: @Sya Beerens, @Harry Baldwin
The NYPD understands that Mayor De Blasio is on the side of the looters, so why bother?
Yeah, look up Dave McGowan, Weird Scenes Inside The Canyon: Laurel Canyon, Covert Ops & The Dark Heart Of The Hippie Dream.
Violent escape from New York / Taxi Driver crime once it spirals cannot be reined in. No police force reinstated will start arresting criminals. Because 90% of violent criminals are black. The other 10% are Latino.
The riots and violence will just accelerate. Little noticed has been CA Gov. Gavin Newsom releasing another 8,000 violent felons out of Corcoran and other places, where they were serving lengthy sentences for murder and rape. Out of Corona Virus fears. Expect a wave of home invader rapes/murders like that of the Night Stalker, Golden State Killer, etc.
In order for that to be turned around, President Biden/Harris/Abrams etc. would have to arrest all the parolees, put them in a remote federal prison, and never release them, and have a federal force arresting violent criminals, again who are mostly Black and the remainder Latino, and put them in some remote prison. That is not even remotely politically possible and there is no money to implement that anyway.
For ordinary people, government is abusive: it takes their money and encourages violent criminal attacks on them. It prohibits Christian worship but encourages tearing down statues of their heroes.
Secondly, this is not China. In China, a relatively high IQ cohort rules as the relatively high IQ Emperor tells them. They have a long tradition of this type of rule, it is nothing new. It is what makes their nation so fragile, as the high IQ cohort is socially isolated, with blinders, and subject to the idiocies of our ruling class. But they are all Han Chinese. Rest assured Xi Xinping does not make war on the Han Chinese majority upon which he needs tax revenue and labor to build his empire into a mighty industrial military machine with either hostile or secessionists forces on its periphery: the Central Asian Muslims, India, Japan, Taiwan, etc.
We will have the worst of face and gait recognition. Cheap cameras poorly maintained through lack of skilled and motivated by patriotism manpower. We will have bored subcontinentals writing the code while scheming to make more money by padding invoices and the like, with minimal effort expended. While many cameras will fail due to maintenance or produce bad images due to the lens never ever being cleaned.
Meanwhile the vast majority of cops are going to be fired and cities and suburbs turned into gang territory with extortion legalized for racial justice. As we have what Paul Kersey dubs a minority occupation government. With almost no official with any real power looking like the vast majority of the productive class which is made to grovel and kneel before LeBron. So to speak.
Its a guaranteed recipe for rebellion as soon as the US military suffers a defeat against China. Which is highly likely given the Wolf Warrior diplomacy of Xi. Who seems determined to pick fights given the internal weakness of China -- an export economy with little domestic consumption and its customers running out of money to pay for things.Replies: @tyrone, @BB753, @Rob
Slow down, Whiskey! You were making some sense until you mentioned war with China. It’s not gonna happen. Not with Xi anyway. Easy..
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-07-11/la-me-alex-marshall-brown-st-pauls-lutheran-church-north-hollywood
So why did this Nubian decide to paint her toenails on the church lawn (which, church or not, IS private property) when there is an enormous PUBLIC park right across the street, featuring acres of tree shaded rolling grass?
I think her posture and expression provide a clue.
Some of that almost sounds like you’re serious.
So why did this Nubian decide to paint her toenails on the church lawn (which, church or not, IS private property) when there is an enormous PUBLIC park right across the street, featuring acres of tree shaded rolling grass?
I think her posture and expression provide a clue.
https://ca-times.brightspotcdn.com/dims4/default/bea89ab/2147483647/strip/true/crop/6720x4480+0+0/resize/840x560!/quality/90/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fcalifornia-times-brightspot.s3.amazonaws.com%2F89%2F4c%2Fe8ca7ad44186abe2015d4214b18e%2Fla-photos-1staff-572266-me-0710-north-hollywood-lelyveld-01-cmc.jpgReplies: @Steve Sailer
She’s an “actress/stuntwoman” so maybe this was a stunt?
But now with the sophistication of smartphones and social media, we have a new, more subtle predatory black practice I call “Bait Whitey”.
Or....was it....an act?
Negroes seem have a congenitally innate drive to be where they are unwanted?
I cannot get my head around that. I can think of no place I’d rather avoid than that where I’m unwanted.
Well, there is a long-standing phenomenon where groups of predatory blacks (I refer to a group of young blacks as a “murder of blacks”) look for a vulnerable White person to pummel. It’s called “Beat Whitey”.
But now with the sophistication of smartphones and social media, we have a new, more subtle predatory black practice I call “Bait Whitey”.
I can never keep Wu Tang and Wang Chung straight in my mind.
Aren't we supposed to half way to 5,000,000 dead Americans by now? There doesn't seem to be slightest bit of self-reflection by those who pushed this lockdown. This will affect how much they are listened to in the future.
I figure 250,000 have been last to heart problems and another 250,000 to cancer during this "pandemic". And pretty much the covid is like a bad flu season.
I feel like some HBD writers got played by some Ashkenazis (who had some other agenda or just plan neurosis). HBDers and remnants of the Old Yankee stock (stop calling them WASPs) are easily wrapped around a Jewish finger.
HBDers and Old Yankees have no loyalty to other White people. So they just go by who can do them them the most good at the moment. Jews have high IQs, so, well sorry White proles.Replies: @Reg Cæsar, @HA, @botazefa
How about “traitors to His Majesty”? “Deniers of the seven sacraments”? “Pestilential heretics”?
She’s an “actress/stuntwoman” so maybe this was a stunt?
Or….was it….an act?
The largest employers are all woke now because they will not be able to weed out the malcontents because of fear of discrimination lawsuits, so they will have to take the opposite approach. No matter how shitty, they will be forced to hire minorities in relation to their share of the population which means absorbing the most unemployable parts of the population including convicts and IQ 80 bums.
For the self employed going forward, small will be better than large, brown better than black, no arrests better than arrests, etc. Even things like tats and piercing will be frowned upon. The risk of hiring trouble makers will make the little details like attitude and manners more important than ever. Hire for potential and train, don’t hire over credentialed paper pushers.
The reverse will also occur. White employees who are discriminated against by large or woke companies will seek out smaller privately owned companies with ‘white’ employers opening up a real talent pool. They will be glad to be part of a real team that actually wants them and does real things instead of just being corporate baggage in the HR department that the companies are forced to carry as window dressing and magic talismans to ward off the PC police. You can begin to see a real solidarity between whites in a way that up till now as been taken for granted.
https://untappedcities-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/Naked-Cowboy-Face-mask-Coronavirus-Times-Square-NYC.jpgReplies: @Reg Cæsar
Naked Cowboy has quite the BMI:
Draw, douchebag.
Before that, he targeted secretaries of state, who oversee elections in most states. His guy won in Minnesota, and his guy’s party quickly won two recounts.
Will he live long enough for a hat trick? He’s a month shy of 90. Who’s really calling the shots in his organization? His sons?
It’s like the Houses of Medici and Borgia vying to control the Papacy. But without the high art.
Forbes says it's actually about declining revenue from what little they got from broadcast rights.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/karenweaver/2020/07/09/stanford-dropping-11-sports-is-less-about-covid-19-and-more-about-declining-pac-12-network-revenues/
The Atlantic says it's actually to reduce the number of rich white gentile frat boys. (And that this is a good thing according to the Indian nerd who wrote the piece)
https://twitter.com/TheAtlantic/status/1281990059747684353
And Spotted Toad and other commentators say it's actually about the succession of the Boomer Ashkenazi Jews from the elite and Jews from enrollment who felt like going to a university with lacrosse meant they were just as good as the WASPs. Chinese and Indians don't play sports or care about the accoutrements of blue blood America, they want the trappings of the Jewish American elite.
https://twitter.com/Jackie_Author/status/1282331992508571649Replies: @Jim Don Bob, @Jenner Ickham Errican
Saahil Desai in The Atlantic in 2018:
Reminds me of another Indian nerd, Harvard College dean Rakesh Khurana, who (starting in 2016) tried to ban final clubs and frats. Harvard dropped the initiative this past June after the case against them advanced in the courts:
https://www.bostonglobe.com/2020/06/29/metro/harvard-will-drop-policy-targeting-all-male-final-clubs
An anti-racist's dictionary: 16 words on race, gender, and diversity you should know
This is from a publication with the suspicious name of Business Insider. So this is what counts as "inside" these days.
For those who like to extrapolate trends, in 2020 we were due to have 72 states:
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EU3Qw61VAAIwQoD.jpgReplies: @The Wild Geese Howard, @Neoconned, @The Alarmist, @Anon, @Sya Beerens
James Lindsey of Sokel Squared fame has the definitive glossary of this sort of vocabulary, including quotes from original academic source material — just enough to show you how banal these writings are.
Google his “Translations from the Wokish.”
Biden’s just getting ready for the next decline of civilization. The post-apocalyptic world will be no problem for him.
Are you referring to one of the colourful and somewhat gayish gangs that inhabit Walter Hill's urban fantasy The Warriors (1979)?Replies: @Achmed E. Newman
I’ve not seen that movie with the somewhat gayish gangs. I can’t tell if you are being facetious, SBS, so I’ll just refer you to Gavin McGinnis on duckduckgo. (He writes for Takimag too.)
Journey - Don't Stop Believing
Rush - Moving Pictures
Queen - Greatest Hits
Albums by: Elvis Costello, The Rolling Stones, Billy Squier, Foreigner and,
A debut album: Beauty and the Beat.Replies: @The Wild Geese Howard, @Hhsiii, @Reg Cæsar
English Beat Wha’ppen
Squeeze East Side Story
Clash Sandinista
X Wild Gift
Prince Controversy
U2 Boy
dBs Stands for Decibels
Tom Tom Club
Rick James Street Songs
These were all in Village Voice year end poll.
https://twitter.com/USATODAY/status/1282281837159751680
Even RT (who traditionally finds a lot of Nazi) writeshttps://twitter.com/jewishaction/status/1278340461682442241
Reading Wikipedia must be hard and intellectually exhausting: Reichsadler. The Trump Eagle would actually be the un-stylized eagle of the Party. Very unusual.Replies: @Mr. Anon, @Joe Stalin, @Gordo, @Joe Stalin
Are these people really so retarded? If so surely we could make use of this in some way.
Never discount that, but FR is a very difficult computer problem even without masks.
Not really, it’s not the 1980’s anymore. The Chinese have been using facial recog systems in parts of the country for some years, it’s pretty much all over there now. Combine it with gait recog and it gets pretty accurate.
It requires a lot of CPU power,
More likely to be GPU’s these days.
big databases that need to be spun through quickly, cataloging problems, and the fact that people age, get tanned, go bald, get fat, etc.
Here is some open source information.
https://infogalactic.com/info/Facial_recognition_system
There’s walk/gait patter recognition, which makes the whole mask thing moot, unless the perp is doing an Inspector Clouseau act with a fake club foot and an inflatable parrot on his shoulder.
Also, a chap once said over drinks like two years ago that his company is already selling facial recognition cameras that only need the eyes, from 20 meters with a good street camera.
Question is: a) does the US have this tech yet, and b) is there political will to use it?
There's great power in numbers. In the meantime, yeah, mask up if you have to deal with these antifa Commies and/or BLM thugs out in the streets - it may have helped the Proud Boys avoid years in prison.Replies: @SunBakedSuburb, @Old Prude, @Federalist
Interesting. I was out late last night on my electric bike pulling “JUSTICE NOW” yard signs out of people’s lawns for my burn pile. I made certain to have on my dusk mask and Acadia National Park ball cap in case I was captured on a trail cam.
... SJW bitches with cameras... etc.
Oh. Thank you for the nice work, O.P.!
https://ae01.alicdn.com/kf/H855186b2285d478785dd0d84122e3b59q/Gravity-Falls-Dipper-Cap-Hat-Mabel-Dipper-Caps-Hat-Dipper-Cosplay-Cool-Spring-Summer-Cosplay-Baseball.jpg_960x960.jpg
I ask because I visited M- some time ago and the place seemed fairly sane.
Put a penny in one of your shoes while wearing a mask.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6075757/Replies: @Kratoklastes
A ball of used sticky-tape, a it of folded cardboard packaging, or a tightly-wound wire cable-tie will do the job too (we don’t have 1¢ coins anymore: 5¢ is the lowest and I am a tightarse).
In any case, individual-level gait analysis (i.e., getting two separate pieces of video and being able to say “this is the same person” by gait analysis alone) is still completely pie-in-the-sky, and will wither on the vine as people become more aware of the problem and the ease of countermeasures.
Mask and sunglasses. Or just sunglasses.
In reality, face recognition is pretty poor – pace the advertising bumph from people selling the ‘systems’ to governments.
Charlatans have the advantage of being able to claim commercial/IP secrets – which means that the performance characteristics can’t be openly reviewed, and the people they’re selling to can’t look under the hood and do comprehensive testing.
inb4 “well they won’t get the sale then“. Nonsense – all that’s required is a good presentation deck and a half-decent side payment. We’re talking about procurement processes that spent a trillion dollars (current and future) on the F35.
I’m not sure what your point is. It sucks that coronavirus happened, but it did.
Various factors need to be balanced, hospital beds and staff, fatalities, possible chronic covid conditions, economic activity and businesses, citizen mental health, and so on. Masks are just one tool in the mix to consider. If not wearing masks is really important to citizens, that’s fine, but it would need to be risk balanced by having greater restrictions on business activity and citizen mobility. In that light masks seem like a minor annoyance.
Je Suis Omar Triggerd's point is...
https://media.tenor.com/images/1187f47f2c2bea75aefec9655c709328/tenor.gif
Can’t be too careful, you know, skin cancer, cataracts, volcanic ash, other particulates… COVID germies…
… SJW bitches with cameras… etc.
Oh. Thank you for the nice work, O.P.!
There's great power in numbers. In the meantime, yeah, mask up if you have to deal with these antifa Commies and/or BLM thugs out in the streets - it may have helped the Proud Boys avoid years in prison.Replies: @SunBakedSuburb, @Old Prude, @Federalist
Exactly.
Steve said:
Anti-mask laws COULD HAVE BEEN a useful tool against Antifa had it been used. But even before the CoronaCultists like Steve made mask-wearing acceptable or even mandatory, anarcho-tyrannical governments weren’t enforcing anti-masking laws against Antifa. There are plenty of laws that could be used against Antifa. They weren’t used and won’t be. If not for the corona mask requirements, anti-masking laws would have been used only against regular white people as is the case with other laws.
I have an idea for a device to defeat these cameras. I’m gonna share it with you people for free – I’m not even going to try to patent it. You could take an ordinary pair of eyeglasses and replace the lenses with ones that are tinted in a dark color, like the tinted windows on a car. If you don’t normally wear prescription glasses, the lenses could be ground without any magnifying power and you wouldn’t even need to go to an optician – you could just buy them off a rack at the drugstore. Not only would this defeat the cameras but they would also cut down on glare on a sunny day. I propose to call this type of glasses, “facial recognition eye camera defeating spectacles”. Whaddaya think, guys? I think that these things could be really big sellers. Maybe the name could be shortened somehow, some reference to their ability to block sun glare to throw the authorities off track as to their real purpose so they don’t make them illegal…
https://i.etsystatic.com/6850136/r/il/e424bc/2442598421/il_794xN.2442598421_882r.jpg
https://www.orau.org/ptp/collection/atomictoys/xraysp1.jpgReplies: @Jack D
Journey - Don't Stop Believing
Rush - Moving Pictures
Queen - Greatest Hits
Albums by: Elvis Costello, The Rolling Stones, Billy Squier, Foreigner and,
A debut album: Beauty and the Beat.Replies: @The Wild Geese Howard, @Hhsiii, @Reg Cæsar
This is the most downloaded song of the 20th century. Movie and TV placements give it more lives than a cat. That’s the fault of people born in the middle ’60s who heard it in high school and today control such decisions.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/journeys-dont-stop-believin-turns-30/
https://pitchfork.com/thepitch/883-the-magic-bullet-behind-the-worlds-most-popular-songs/
An annoying drone about a loser from Windsor, Ontario forced through the singer’s nose like an air-raid siren. It calls to mind those third-grade under-the-desk drills eight miles from Pearl Harbor, where they took them very seriously.
Biden’s count no doubt included territories and “commonwealths”, probably from counting his quarter collection on a slow day (is there another kind?) at One Observatory Circle. They were planning to make those states. A Kinsley gaffe.
Break up all the states over ten or twenty million. It’s way overdue, anyway.
Better yet, wear Dipper’s from Gravity Falls:
Another pressing question if mask use continues to spread: How many false positives and false negatives are produced when trying to decide if someone you see is attractive or not. The eyes are crucial and those you can see — but you have to take the nose and mouth on faith. Like buying a pig in a poke. Will AI be able to accurately extrapolate or will humans who are looking for some action do better at filling in the blanks?
https://twitter.com/USATODAY/status/1282281837159751680
Even RT (who traditionally finds a lot of Nazi) writeshttps://twitter.com/jewishaction/status/1278340461682442241
Reading Wikipedia must be hard and intellectually exhausting: Reichsadler. The Trump Eagle would actually be the un-stylized eagle of the Party. Very unusual.Replies: @Mr. Anon, @Joe Stalin, @Gordo, @Joe Stalin
The Trump campaign shirt:
Stupid USA Today is too stupid to realize it’s a BALD EAGLE, indigenous to the Americas, and has nothing to do “imperial” or “Nazi.”
An anti-racist's dictionary: 16 words on race, gender, and diversity you should know
This is from a publication with the suspicious name of Business Insider. So this is what counts as "inside" these days.
For those who like to extrapolate trends, in 2020 we were due to have 72 states:
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EU3Qw61VAAIwQoD.jpgReplies: @The Wild Geese Howard, @Neoconned, @The Alarmist, @Anon, @Sya Beerens
The real “racists” are the dictators behind these humiliating and toxic campaigns. I’m Moroccan-Dutch and I/everyone else don’t need assistance from a bunch of “White” supremacist. Colonialism is real and racism is a symptom neither has anything to do with civilians
That’s Politically Correct aka Corrupt
Look at the endless mess, without the chance to react. The real “Black” Americans and Europeans will pay the price for this farcical charade
Mass Incarceration is the agenda and “BML” provides the justification as usual
“Terror” for war on toddlers
“Protest” for invasion
Over and over again bcz the (white) majority can’t put 1 and 1 together
Various factors need to be balanced, hospital beds and staff, fatalities, possible chronic covid conditions, economic activity and businesses, citizen mental health, and so on. Masks are just one tool in the mix to consider. If not wearing masks is really important to citizens, that's fine, but it would need to be risk balanced by having greater restrictions on business activity and citizen mobility. In that light masks seem like a minor annoyance.Replies: @anon
I’m not sure what your point is.
Je Suis Omar Triggerd’s point is…
Aren't we supposed to half way to 5,000,000 dead Americans by now? There doesn't seem to be slightest bit of self-reflection by those who pushed this lockdown. This will affect how much they are listened to in the future.
I figure 250,000 have been last to heart problems and another 250,000 to cancer during this "pandemic". And pretty much the covid is like a bad flu season.
I feel like some HBD writers got played by some Ashkenazis (who had some other agenda or just plan neurosis). HBDers and remnants of the Old Yankee stock (stop calling them WASPs) are easily wrapped around a Jewish finger.
HBDers and Old Yankees have no loyalty to other White people. So they just go by who can do them them the most good at the moment. Jews have high IQs, so, well sorry White proles.Replies: @Reg Cæsar, @HA, @botazefa
“Aren’t we supposed to half way to 5,000,000 dead Americans by now? “
Where is this 5-million dead forecast you keep talking about? There were indeed forecasts that the virus could kill up to 2.2 million worldwide if no precautions were taken, but that got considerable pushback (at the time, anyway)
Regardless, all that chatter about masks and lockdowns indicates that precautions were indeed taken. At least, they were being taken at one time. Now, not so much. And lo and behold, the state of Texas, which was seeing about 35 deaths a day from the virus during the early peak is now seeing a death rate more than twice that, with the governor saying this week’s number is not going to be good. Oh, well..
One of the early estimates from the intelligence community said that the virus could kill up to 500K (i.e. off by a factor of 10 from this fictitious 5million you keep yapping about). Despite the precautions, such as they were, the US is 1/3 there so it’s hard to argue that that early estimate was wrong.
In other words, those early forecasts — even the high ones that assumed no precautions — were, despite their wide error bars, a lot better than the forecasts from the naysayers (e.g. Epstein, who predicted 500-5K deaths, and Wittkowski, claimed only 10K would die, but then later said he meant to say 100K
In particular, they were a lot better than your own forecast, which was that even 5,000 dead was much too high.
So before you hector others for their “lack of self-reflection”, take a good hard look in the mirror.
The death rates in Sweden and Japan, neither of which had a general mandatory "lockdown" are lower than any number of countries that had draconian lockdowns - lower than Michigan, Massachusetts, New York, and New Jersey, all of which had draconian lockdowns.
This pandemic is on track to be about as bad as the Asian Flu of 1957/58
https://swprs.files.wordpress.com/2020/06/covid-19-comparison-e1592927192181.png?w=1000&h=Replies: @HA
It’s not a soccer kick as in Bend It Like Beckham, it’s an old quote from an abolitionist about the arc of history bending toward justice. Used ad nauseum now by modern progressives.
https://i.etsystatic.com/6850136/r/il/e424bc/2442598421/il_794xN.2442598421_882r.jpg
https://www.orau.org/ptp/collection/atomictoys/xraysp1.jpgReplies: @Jack D
Apparently the Eskimos have been wearing these for 4,000 years. Of all the North American Indians, the Eskimos appear to be the most clever because living in an extreme climate requires you to do a considerable amount of invention and planning if you are going to survive. The clothing that they wore was so much better adapted for that climate than Western clothing that most European Arctic explorers ended up adopting it (as well as the dog sled and other Eskimo adaptations for a cold climate).
"Juno"
Normally I wait until movies I've reviewed are out of the theaters before I post my full review of them on-line, but, with the Academy Awards on Sunday night, I figure I'll put up the whole "Juno" review below for anybody interested in the Best Picture race.
And here are my reviews of the other Best Picture nominees:
No Country for Old Men
There Will Be Blood
Atonement
Michael Clayton
I'm rooting for "No Country," but it's a matter of the glass being 2/3rds full (Javier Bardem's and, especially, Josh Brolin's roles) and 1/3rd empty: Tommy Lee Jones's old sheriff. I sometimes wonder if Jones, a liberal, intentionally sabotaged author Cormac McCarthy's reactionary soliloquies by mumbling them incomprehensibly. Jones's poor performance in "No Country" contrasts sharply with his excellent one in "In the Valley of Elah." But if they took out Jones's mumbling, then it would be an exciting 100 minute long updating of "The Terminator," which was a pop culture landmark, but not the kind of film they give Oscars to.
In contrast to "No Country," I came out of "There Will Be Blood" feeling the glass was half empty.
Others in contention for major awards:
Eastern Promises - Best Actor
La Vie en Rose - Best Actress
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly- Best Director, etc.
In the Valley of Elah - Best Actor
Gone Baby Gone - Best Supporting Actress
The Assassination of Jesse James -- Best Supporting Actor
Sicko - Best Documentary
Once - Best Song
Here's my "Juno" review from The American Conservative:
Last fall, I received a half-dozen invitations to screenings of a "quirky" comedy about a "whip-smart" pregnant teen hipsterette who plans to give her baby up for adoption by an affluent couple. With my finger planted firmly nowhere near the pulse of popular opinion, I tossed each one out, thinking: "To listen to teens with attitude, for this I need to leave the house?"
So, in the wake of "Juno's" Academy Award nominations for Best Picture, Director (Jason Reitman of "Thank You for Smoking"), Actress (petite 20-year-old Ellen Page), and Original Screenwriter ("Diablo Cody," which is the pole name of 29-year-old self-promoter Brook Busey, whose confessional blog became popular when she started working as a stripper), I ended up paying to see it.
Juno, a cute tomboy who dresses in flannel shirts like Nirvana's Kurt Cobain and has a snarky pop culture reference ready for every situation, turned out to be just as insufferable as I had expected. If she's so whip-smart, why'd she get so pregnant after one evening with a bright but baffled cross-country runner (the subversively blond and bland Michael Cera from "Superbad") with whom she says she's just friends?
Fortunately, my wife, who admired "Juno" greatly, patiently explained to me the film's considerable subtleties until even my clueless male brain could begin to grasp them.
First, though, let's dispose of the controversy over the purported politics of "Juno." Is Juno betraying feminism by choosing adoption over abortion? Sure. Yet, there's no mystery why Hollywood heroines (as in the recent "Knocked Up" and "Waitress") almost never have abortions: because babies are adorable and abortions are hideous. Nobody -- including, and perhaps especially, pro-choice ideologues -- wants to think visually about abortion.
What is interesting is how Cody's semi-autobiographical screenplay undermines teen movie status clichés about attractive but moronic jocks and cheerleaders lording it over the brilliant, funny, but socially oppressed rebel outcasts (who presumably get their eventual revenge by moving downtown and writing screenplays about high school).
This conventional dichotomy between the successful versus the cool is embodied in the infertile couple whom Juno finds to adopt her baby. Jennifer Garner (Alias) plays the yuppie wife who maintains a spotless McMansion in a gated community while also working long hours in a corporate career. Jason Bateman (Arrested Development) is her slacker husband, a grunge guitarist turned advertising jingle composer who sees in Juno a kindred spirit with whom he can debate whether the greatest year in rock music history was 1977 (Sex Pistols and Clash) or 1993 (Liz Phair's Exile in Guyville).
Indeed, Juno's personality appears modeled on Phair's complex combination of masculine power-chording indie cred, feminine inner self, and shocking statements calibrated to draw notice. That's only natural because the screenwriter was 16 and living in Chicago's suburbs when Phair's second album "Whip-Smart" came out. Phair was everything Cody must have wanted to be: famous, hip, talented, sexy, and living downtown in Wicker Park, the "Guyville" where all the cool guys in Chicago punk bands hung out.
As Garner's adoptive mother-to-be obsesses over which shade of medium yellow to paint the nursery, her husband starts to feel like an exile in girlville. Talking to a maverick like Juno makes him wonder whether he should move back downtown and get a loft.
Yet, the one thing today's youth hates more than being uncool is parents divorcing. When it comes to raising her baby, Juno realizes, being a soulless corporate drone is a good thing. Kids these days want parents to be boring. The shock helps Juno begin to understand herself better.
As "Juno" reveals, the run-of-the-mill teen nonconformist is, as the screenwriter finally realized about herself in college, "a noisy, dramatic attention whore." Cody is too recognition-starved to stick to the party line about how the alterna-kids are free spirits. Instead, she's made herself a celebrity by spilling the beans about punkette girls like herself and Juno. Why do they tell guys that their three favorite bands are (to quote Juno) "Iggy Pop & the Stooges, Patti Smith, and the Runaways?" Because, to over-generalize, pretending to obsess over old pop culture minutiae makes smart boys notice them and it gives shy boys something to talk about with them.
So, why did Juno get pregnant? The same reason: for attention. At her middle class school, high IQ pregnant girls giving their babies up for adoption are as interesting to the masses as ivory-billed woodpeckers.
Rated PG-13 for mature thematic material, sexual content and language.Replies: @Kyle, @obwandiyag, @Neoconned, @Reg Cæsar, @Lot, @Paco Wové
“as interesting to the masses as ivory-billed woodpeckers.”
Having been warped by decades of birdwatching, I can’t tell if that’s supposed to mean “the most fascinating thing imaginable” or “the most boring thing in the world”.
No, it was 2.2 million in America alone. It states that in the very link that you posted.
The death rates in Sweden and Japan, neither of which had a general mandatory “lockdown” are lower than any number of countries that had draconian lockdowns – lower than Michigan, Massachusetts, New York, and New Jersey, all of which had draconian lockdowns.
This pandemic is on track to be about as bad as the Asian Flu of 1957/58
Aren't we supposed to half way to 5,000,000 dead Americans by now? There doesn't seem to be slightest bit of self-reflection by those who pushed this lockdown. This will affect how much they are listened to in the future.
I figure 250,000 have been last to heart problems and another 250,000 to cancer during this "pandemic". And pretty much the covid is like a bad flu season.
I feel like some HBD writers got played by some Ashkenazis (who had some other agenda or just plan neurosis). HBDers and remnants of the Old Yankee stock (stop calling them WASPs) are easily wrapped around a Jewish finger.
HBDers and Old Yankees have no loyalty to other White people. So they just go by who can do them them the most good at the moment. Jews have high IQs, so, well sorry White proles.Replies: @Reg Cæsar, @HA, @botazefa
Sorry, RT, but Ashkenazis look like white people to me. HBDers would be hard pressed to disagree. As would anyone with eyes.
Going after Jews strikes me as the sour grapes mentality of victimhood. I’m sure your ideas about it are more complex. I’m mot trying to troll. Just being honest.
If the BLM parades result in whites hating whites, perhaps we’ve already lost.
Now, you say they look like White people to you. Okay, but almost every Jew I see is loud in saying he doesn't identify with other Whites, but sees himself as Jewish and non-White. Bari Weiss for example.
I am mainly mocking the tendency to think that IQ is all that matters in some HBD circles and that we should just do what the Really Smart people say.
As far as Whites hating Whites, that was true centuries ago. What on earth was the civil war about? Or a bunch of other silly wars we've fought.Replies: @botazefa
That's where the chip comes in. We have to be able to ID you at all times (unless your an illegal alien - then you're free to roam the land with no more need to identify yourself than an 18th century frontiersman had), and we can't do that with machine vision, so you're going to have to be implanted with
The Mark of the Beasta Digital Health Passport.By the way, some people have noticed that the word "Mask" is only one letter off the word "Mark".
I find it interesting that governors are issuing edicts (requiring mask wearing) that order the citizenry to violate anti-masking laws. Can executive orders order people to personally violate the law?Replies: @botazefa
I envision Johnny Cochran pontificating “if the mask doesn’t fit, you must acquit.”
RIP Johnny Cochran.
They are chanting “USA, USA, USA”
Do you know the context of this? Is it actually happening today, July 13?
We’re back to this again?
ACLU History: The Scopes ‘Monkey Trial’
John Scopes is the white Emmett Till. Keep bringing the guy up, but ignore his lawbreaking.
Citation?
Mallory and Irvine, the first to have a go at Everest, wore tweed and cotton duck. Incredible that tbey made it as high as they did. There would have been no reason at all for Europeans to develop clothing suitable for the high Arctic. I can remember scents, tastes, and sounds- but I cant remember the sensation of bone chilling cold. Its a new experience every time.
The death rates in Sweden and Japan, neither of which had a general mandatory "lockdown" are lower than any number of countries that had draconian lockdowns - lower than Michigan, Massachusetts, New York, and New Jersey, all of which had draconian lockdowns.
This pandemic is on track to be about as bad as the Asian Flu of 1957/58
https://swprs.files.wordpress.com/2020/06/covid-19-comparison-e1592927192181.png?w=1000&h=Replies: @HA
Yes, the 2.2 million (and all other predictions I mentioned) were in reference to the US.
As for lockdowns, the point remains that measures, drastic and otherwise, were taken, and that reduced the death toll, but that doesn’t mean the assume-no-precaution forecasts were wrong. If I predict that you will smack your head if you run into the wall in front of you, and you decide to swerve aside at the last moment and instead suffer only a glancing blow, that doesn’t mean the original calculations were incorrect or that the laws of mechanics have been proven to be a Bill-Gates-funded farce.
And as for the Asian flu, “About 70,000 to 116,000 people died in the United States”. So, within about half a year, this thing has already exceeded that death toll, and it’s not done yet, given that the second wave hasn’t even begun. (I mean, we can stop pretending, as naysayers almost as idiotic as RichardTaylor would have had us believe at one point, that summer heat/humidity will stop this thing in its tracks.)
Modest, sensible (non-drastic) measures, as in Sweden and Japan, yielded the same or lower death-rates as did the drastic measures taken in lots of other places. That tends to indicate that the drastic measures were useless. The death toll in this country could have been dramatically reduced by not sending infected patients back into nursing homes, but – to be fair – who could have foreseen that?
There are more people in the U.S. now than in 1957/58. The population of the US then was only about 53% of the current population. Scaled for population those numbers would be 132,000 to 219,000. I might expect more than that given that the demographics of the country are different now than then too, and the disease seems to affect Blacks and Mestizos more than Whites. There are far more Latinos now than then, and more Blacks living in urban areas.
The second wave, though real, also seems to consist of a lot of media hype. The case count and hospitalization count appear to be inflated, just as the death count is. I know the establishment is straining to make everything seem awful, even to the extent of inventing whole new symptoms and chronic after-effects of the disease. After you’ve blown up the whole economy, you’ve got a lot riding on not disrupting the narrative.
What do you mean by this?
What clothing was that?
Violent escape from New York / Taxi Driver crime once it spirals cannot be reined in. No police force reinstated will start arresting criminals. Because 90% of violent criminals are black. The other 10% are Latino.
The riots and violence will just accelerate. Little noticed has been CA Gov. Gavin Newsom releasing another 8,000 violent felons out of Corcoran and other places, where they were serving lengthy sentences for murder and rape. Out of Corona Virus fears. Expect a wave of home invader rapes/murders like that of the Night Stalker, Golden State Killer, etc.
In order for that to be turned around, President Biden/Harris/Abrams etc. would have to arrest all the parolees, put them in a remote federal prison, and never release them, and have a federal force arresting violent criminals, again who are mostly Black and the remainder Latino, and put them in some remote prison. That is not even remotely politically possible and there is no money to implement that anyway.
For ordinary people, government is abusive: it takes their money and encourages violent criminal attacks on them. It prohibits Christian worship but encourages tearing down statues of their heroes.
Secondly, this is not China. In China, a relatively high IQ cohort rules as the relatively high IQ Emperor tells them. They have a long tradition of this type of rule, it is nothing new. It is what makes their nation so fragile, as the high IQ cohort is socially isolated, with blinders, and subject to the idiocies of our ruling class. But they are all Han Chinese. Rest assured Xi Xinping does not make war on the Han Chinese majority upon which he needs tax revenue and labor to build his empire into a mighty industrial military machine with either hostile or secessionists forces on its periphery: the Central Asian Muslims, India, Japan, Taiwan, etc.
We will have the worst of face and gait recognition. Cheap cameras poorly maintained through lack of skilled and motivated by patriotism manpower. We will have bored subcontinentals writing the code while scheming to make more money by padding invoices and the like, with minimal effort expended. While many cameras will fail due to maintenance or produce bad images due to the lens never ever being cleaned.
Meanwhile the vast majority of cops are going to be fired and cities and suburbs turned into gang territory with extortion legalized for racial justice. As we have what Paul Kersey dubs a minority occupation government. With almost no official with any real power looking like the vast majority of the productive class which is made to grovel and kneel before LeBron. So to speak.
Its a guaranteed recipe for rebellion as soon as the US military suffers a defeat against China. Which is highly likely given the Wolf Warrior diplomacy of Xi. Who seems determined to pick fights given the internal weakness of China -- an export economy with little domestic consumption and its customers running out of money to pay for things.Replies: @tyrone, @BB753, @Rob
It seems to me that the “internal weakness of China — an export economy with little domestic consumption and its customers running out of money to pay for things.” Is not so much a weakness. China manufactures goods that it sells to foriegners for dollars that buy our debt and real estate, maybe stocks and corporate bonds (seems that dollars coming back from China could be doing quite a lot to keep the market pumped up with poor fundamentals and long term outlook. Anyone know? Some goes towards paying for imports like oil, that they really need. Maybe some dollars pay for intellectual property, maybe not.
Could China stop buying treasuries if export sales are down? I would not do this first. Keep lending the capitalists money that they use to buy the rope to hang themselves. Pretty soon the US won’t have much manufacturing left to ship over. I’m sure they have copies of every patent and released application, and maybe the unreleased ones, and if America has no manufacturing left, and there is still R&D here, those researchers need to eat, and might move to Asia, where there is no cultural revolution, if not to China. If China stopped buying debt, doesn’t the US house of cards just collapse?
Low internal demand sounds like a problem that is not one for a manufacturing power house. How many pairs of America’s socks does China make a year? A billion? 5 billion? I am sure that the Chinese have feet that can get cold, too. So with low current demand overseas, couldn’t China sell some socks to each other? Include thousands of other consumer goods, and the Chinese people get a nice payoff for handling COVID so well.
I wonder if China keeps the game going because they’re milking the US for the last bit of manufacturing, our biomedical research that we share so freely, and as a bolthole for rich Chinese should things turn south there. Any others? It seems to me that things are more likely to turn out badly here than there. Maybe they just aren’t out of the box thinkers, and can’t see a Chinese century without the Pax Americana? Maybe they think the death throws of the American Empire could see thousands of ICBMs launched their way?
Whiskey, sometimes you seem sensible. That scares me.
I don’t mean to go after Jews. Yes, I think the obsessiveness over Jews goes way too far on all sides. Including among Jews.
Now, you say they look like White people to you. Okay, but almost every Jew I see is loud in saying he doesn’t identify with other Whites, but sees himself as Jewish and non-White. Bari Weiss for example.
I am mainly mocking the tendency to think that IQ is all that matters in some HBD circles and that we should just do what the Really Smart people say.
As far as Whites hating Whites, that was true centuries ago. What on earth was the civil war about? Or a bunch of other silly wars we’ve fought.
And for reminding me the Civil War was between whites.
Which brings us to our current predicament. The most shrill voices arguing about white racism seem to be white people. Same as the Civil War I suppose.
“Modest, sensible (non-drastic) measures, as in Sweden and Japan, yielded the same or lower death-rates as did the drastic measures taken in lots of other places.”
Sweden lost considerably more people than nearby Nordics, so no, you are incorrect about that. And Japanese don’t throw tantrums befitting a six-year-old when it comes to basic measures like wearing masks — and everyone who reads the comments here regularly knows precisely the kind of behavior I’m referring to — so that “non-drastic” Japanese measures are a whole other animal than even so-called drastic measures are in a nation teeming with said six-year-olds. Regardless, arguing over how severe the measures need to be is a separate matter, and has nothing to do with how idiotic it was for the earlier commenter to compare forecasts that were made on the assumption that no precautions would be taken to what actually came about when we, as a collective human species, really, chose to take a different course (with relatively few and ever more isolated exceptions, given that even Swedish authorities admit they’d do it more like everyone else if they had to do it again.)
Indeed, even with respect to your (once again incorrect) effort to equate COVID with the Asian flu, the implicit transition from “it’s just the flu, bro”, to “it’s on track to be as bad as the worst flu in the last half-century once massive and unprecedented preventative measures have been enacted so as to reduce the death toll from what it was originally predicted to be” is definitely a sign of progress, and really, a tacit admission of defeat by the just-a-flu bros (though of course I expect it will remain tacit). Yeah, it’s a little late in coming, and still needs work, but it’s an improvement nonetheless.
You bunch of hysterical nervous-nellies cheered on the immolation of the World's economy and the possible ushering in of a police-state for nothing. For nothing.Replies: @HA
https://www.unz.com/isteve/arguably-wrong-potential-american-deaths-range-from-5k-to-5-million/?highlight=arguably
That was based on the model from Arguably Wrong. He later updated it to a potential of 10 million.
https://arguablywrong.home.blog/2020/03/27/updated-epidemiological-modeling/
As to my “prediction” that deaths would be in the thousands or something like a bad flu season overall, well okay. My “model” wasn’t being used to push a hysteria, now was it, it was just a comment about the main prediction being very rash. If you now wish to assign the same weight to that original model as to a line made by a commenter, well okay.
Unfortunately, that model was pushed as some gold standard of insight, by Greg Cochran and others. While Steve never bashed dissenters, others most certainly did, especially Cochran and LionoftheWhatever.
“That was based on the model from Arguably Wrong.”
In other words, some blogger? That’s who you went with? (Though, seriously, kudos to you for finally coughing up a link.) And according to his write-up, he assumed that “2% of those critical cases die with ICU care, 5% with general hospital care, and 50% with no care”, and the death totals assume the virus is given a full year of free rein.
Maybe that’s ridiculous, maybe it isn’t (as one of the comments on the blog note, his assumptions are somewhat out of line with what was known about the Diamond Pricess at the time) but at least he lays out his assumptions, describes his model, and goes from there. In other words, I could go somewhere with that. Also, you seem to have forgotten this section (from the above link):
So, all in all, I don’t find that unreasonable given the overall range, though 5million is definitely an outlier in comparison with the other figures I mentioned. Also, I don’t think some blogger’s SIR model drove public policy all that much one way or another. Epstein, on the other hand whose forecast was about as bad as your similarly-scaled version was (his initial forecast of 500 dead was quickly upgraded to 5,000 once he corrected a math error) had considerable clout all the way into the White House for the two or three weeks it took reality to catch up and blow through even the revised forecast, so it would be wrong to say that your side of the argument was lacking in influence. Do you really think, given that we’re currently at >100,000 dead, that anyone is regretting not having gone with Epstein’s forecast?
And if “well okay” is the best “slightest bit of self-reflection” you yourself can muster for your own failed forecasting ventures, wouldn’t yourown innumeracy might be a more appropriate target prior to your rush to take down some blogger.
No, you are wrong. The death rate in Sweden is less than that of several European nations. It is about the same as that of Pennsylvania, less than that of Michigan, New Jersey, and New York, way less than Massachusetts, way-way-less than New York City. Look it up. Or you can just go on spewing bullshit, which seems to be your preference.
Again, you might actually know what your talking about instead of just making stuff up. Japan had NO general, compulsory lockdown. Many businesses stayed open. Many schools stayed open.
I’m not talking about his (so you say) idiocy (I don’t think it is). I am talking about your actual idiocy.
And authorities in other countries admit that they’d do it like Sweden if they had it to do over.
And those measures were mostly useless. Even Andrew Cuomo admitted that fully 2/3 of COVID admits had been people who were hunkering down “staying safe at home”.
You bunch of hysterical nervous-nellies cheered on the immolation of the World’s economy and the possible ushering in of a police-state for nothing. For nothing.
Then you should be criticizing this blog and Cochran for using “some blogger”. I was criticizing the idea of going with this blogger’s model in the first place!
As I stated at the time, when a hysteria like this starts, a few voices of dissent can throw cold water on it. Sadly, the whole HBD world was cheerleading for it.
Given that hospitals claim people who die with the virus therefore died of the virus, who knows about those numbers. Mainly, old, sick people were vulnerable (as always). Precautions are called for. But not this lockdown that cost trillions and ruined lives. In addition, we will never know how many lives are lost due to this lockdown.
So, yeah, when you have a bit of a public platform, a real one, and you push something that turns out to be wildly overstated, and you had people screaming at the time to please stop and cool down the rhetoric, yeah I’d still say self-reflection in called for.
I remember when the poms brought in facial recognition software years ago, they said that it relied on fixed points on the face such as the spacing between the eyes. That measurement can’t really be altered, as it stays the same on a face. But obviously those two cronies could have their heads in paper bags and the moment they open their mouths you would know who they are. There’s no disguising stupidity.
Now, you say they look like White people to you. Okay, but almost every Jew I see is loud in saying he doesn't identify with other Whites, but sees himself as Jewish and non-White. Bari Weiss for example.
I am mainly mocking the tendency to think that IQ is all that matters in some HBD circles and that we should just do what the Really Smart people say.
As far as Whites hating Whites, that was true centuries ago. What on earth was the civil war about? Or a bunch of other silly wars we've fought.Replies: @botazefa
Thanks for clarifying.
And for reminding me the Civil War was between whites.
Which brings us to our current predicament. The most shrill voices arguing about white racism seem to be white people. Same as the Civil War I suppose.
You bunch of hysterical nervous-nellies cheered on the immolation of the World's economy and the possible ushering in of a police-state for nothing. For nothing.Replies: @HA
“No, you are wrong. The death rate in Sweden is less than that of several European nations.”
It’s not lower than the nearby Nordic countries, the best comparison cases, so yet again, no dice. As for the rest (e.g., pretending that “mostly useless” equates to “completely useless”), you can shovel all you want, but you’re just digging yourself in deeper. The fact remains that you’ve already admitted failure the very moment you admit that a virus for which massive precautions were taken still managed to take out as many people as the worst flu in the last half-century. And what’s more, when those “mostly useless” precautions were lifted, the death rates began to rise yet again, despite the fact that it was humid summer when this thing was supposed to no longer be able to transmit, despite being “almost at herd immunity” the way the Sweden bros kept promising, and despite whatever other pipe dreams the naysayers kept intoning about, as if that would somehow make them true.
One failure after another. You’re clearly not honest enough to admit that openly, but for those who are not as blind or dense, the fact remains. Even Sweden, the much-ballyhooed “champion of Western man” as one of the deniers here so wishfully put it, has stopped pretending they made the right choice. So yeah, you go ahead and keep trying to convince me — as if you could even convince yourself at this point — that you were right all along. It’s not going to work.
“Then you should be criticizing this blog and Cochran for using ‘some blogger’.”
As opposed to listening to you, the one whose forecast was even worse. No, I should be criticizing you. Which is exactly what I’m doing. You want to rail against the threat of engineer-rulers? Try coming up with forecasts that are less boneheaded than theirs. And you couldn’t even do that. Even with a range as ridiculously wide as 5K to 5million, you still managed to be on the wrong side of it. How stupid does one have to be do to something as stupid as that? Oh yeah — now I remember: you have to RichardTaylor stupid, that’s how.
And what’s more, you then come back time after time — after a failure as boneheaded as that — claiming that it’s those bloggers who got it wrong who need to admit their failure. How Dunning-Kruger stupid is that? Oh yeah — it’s RichardTaylor stupid, that’s how.
And as if all that weren’t enough, to repeatedly claim that the “Ashkenazi” are behind this? As if the one pundit and self-styled expert whose forecast was about as boneheaded yours — and who got a warm reception at the White House — didn’t happen to be a man named EPSTEIN? And yet, according to you, it’s the Ashkenazis who are to blame for what people like “Cochran” and “Ferguson” are doing? I mean, how trashy-stupid is that to try and deflect your stupidity on the “Ashkenazi”? Oh, yeah — it’s RichardTaylor stupid.
Maybe you better just stick with trying to defend/rehabilitate the Confederacy. It’s not that I’d ever reccommend anyone to try and do that, It’s just that — given your unique skill-set it’s a cause you were tailor-made for and in some sense destined to pursue.
Well, I phrased it inartfully for sure, but what I meant is that the experience of exposure to extremely cold temperatures is harder to internalize for me than many other physical sensations. I know it’s unpleasant and frightening, but it seems almost shockingly new to me every time I experience it. These days, I mostly try to avoid it.
That’s a specious claim. Especially without knowing more detail about the demographics of who died. The point is that the measures taken (lockdown regime) were uncorrelated with death rates.
You’re equating “mostly useless” with “entirely justified”.
I’m not writing to convince you. I have given up on fools like you and Alexander Turok. You are welcome to hide in your closets for the duration. But people like you should not make policy for the rest of us.
Interesting observation. I get what you mean. The first bitter cold of winter does seem uniquely novel in a way that other stimuli do not. By the end of the winter one grows somewhat accustomed to it. But that first exposure is always a shock, every time. It must be a primal thing. For primitive man – cold was one of the greatest threats.
Where I live, the reason for the first shock is that the temperature one day is in the 20s after weeks of being 40+ and you think, Damn, it’s cold. But then you get used to it. I remember one February day when it got to 40 after 3 weeks of <10 degree weather and how warm I though it felt.
The twenties are cold for sure, but I was referring more to temperatures in the low single digits, both positive and negative. I was hunting in Northern Quebec once in temperatures around -5° F. I took my gloves off to dress a caribou and my hands were instantly, terrifyingly numb. I was scared to use my knife because I was certain I’d do myself harm. Even sitting here now, I can remember the astonishment, but the way that deep, killing, cold felt is lost to me.
I was in favor of masks when Fauci was against them. My posting history can prove it. Where were you, goofball?
Is the SJW nonsense really that pervasive where you are?
I ask because I visited M- some time ago and the place seemed fairly sane.