Idiocracy

[Doc]

In Connecticut, it is illegal to drink out of a lake with a spoon.

It is illegal to ride a bicycle over 65 mph

In Hartford, it is illegal to cross a street by walking on your hands

It is also illegal to educate dogs within the city boundaries of Hartford

It is illegal to dress as a clown to cause alarm

It is illegal to kiss one's spouse on Sunday

Town records are prohibited on the premises of any place which sells alcohol

In Devon, it is illegal to walk backwards after sunset

In New Britain, it is illegal for a fire truck to surpass 25 mph, even during emergencies

Then there is the mythical bouncing pickle law:

There is not a specific law in the state of Connecticut which as is so often reported requires a pickle to be able to bounce in order for it to be called a pickle. However, the emergence of the story, and the times it has been cited in legal actions, can be traced to an incident which occurred in 1948, as reported by the Hartford Courant. A pair of pickle packers, Sidney Sparer and Moses Dexler, were charged with the sale of pickles which were unfit for humans to eat. The state Food and Drug Commissioner, Frederick Holcomb, pointed out ways through which consumers could determine the quality of the pickle of which consumption was desired.

One of the ways, according to Commissioner Holcomb, was to drop the pickle from a height of about a foot or so, and if said pickle was of good quality it would bounce. Mr. Sparer’s pickles did not pass that simple test, and he was fined $500 for foisting poorly prepared pickles on the public. The remaining pickles, which had been marketed under the name Spareway, were destroyed. Besides the bouncing test, the pickles had been examined through laboratory testing, and Holcomb’s use of the bounce test was merely a demonstration, though it came to be believed to be a law after Sparer was convicted.

Which begs the question :

"If a pair of pickle packers packed a peck of pickled peppers how many pickled packers did peter piper pick?"

[NapLajoieonSteroids]

1800s California was a wild place [taken from a twitter chain which would've been too long to post each individual post]:


- be David S. Terry
- move to California in 1849
- become a lawyer
- kidnap a sheriff to make him turn over treasure he stole from a widow under color of law
- get elected to CA Supreme Court
- visit San Francisco to negotiate with insurrectionists, kill one with your bowie knife

- lose reelection
- accuse a US Senator, heretofore a close friend, of engineering your defeat
- kill him in a duel
- get acquitted of murder, later leave state
- become a colonel in the Texas army during the civil war
- return to California 1870
- help draft 1879 CA Constitution

- lose election for state AG, retire from politics
- take up with a millionaire former senator's scorned mistress
- forge a marriage contract to get her a divorce settlement
- lose the case in federal court, appealing all the way to SCOTUS
- millionaire dies, marry his "widow"

- forge a will to help her get an inheritance
- lose in federal court, appeal to circuit
- have your case heard by a SCOTUS justice riding circuit, a friend of the senator you killed three decades earlier
- lose
- your wife tries to pull a pistol on the justice in open court

- pull a bowie knife to defend her from the marshals
- be jailed for contempt, threaten the justice as he sentences you
- while in jail, lose SCOTUS case about the marriage contract
- upon release, track down the justice on a train headed to San Francisco
- slap him in the face

- given your earlier threats, he has a federal marshal as bodyguard
- the marshal shoots you dead as you reach for your bowie knife
- California loves you so much they try to arrest the marshal for murder
- case goes to SCOTUS, the marshal wins
- your widow gets schizophrenia

[noddy]

a proper manly man.

[NapLajoieonSteroids]

a proper manly man.

[NapLajoieonSteroids]

I'm jus' saying that now that we've gone done deconstructed our frontier west, we'd do well to acknowledge how crazy it could be and half of the most crazed ones were political leaders too.

Billy the Kidd was both a wanted man in Arizona and deputized in New Mexico in order to fight in the Lincoln County War which may have, if not psychopathic, crazy written all over it.

This is James Joesph Dolan, the instigator of that war who was just your run-of-the-mill union army veteran, grand army of the republic member, Republican party political boss, racketeer, old west businessman (who happened to be a gunman also); and when he wasn't preoccupied with any of that, he also dabbled in cattle barony; as one does, I suppose.

Here's Billy in one of two known photos:

[Simple Minded]

a proper manly man.

the good ole days..... when men were men, women were men, and sheep were just plain nervous!

[Doc]

a proper manly man.

the good ole days..... when men were men, women were men, and sheep were just plain nervous!

So who needs manly men? "You will own nothing. You will decide nothing for yourself, and you will be happy"

https://gizmodo.com/in-2030-you-wont-ow ... 1847176540
In 2030, You Won't Own Any Gadgets

The scary thing is that only sounds terrible if you have the mental energy to care about principles. Making decisions all the time is difficult, and it’s easier when someone else limits the options you can choose from. It’s not hard to turn a blind eye to a problem if, for the most part, your life is made a little simpler. Isn’t that what every tech company says it’s trying to do? Make your life a little simpler? Life is hard enough already, and living in a home that maintains itself so long as you hand over control—well, by 2030, who’s to say that’s not what we’ll all want?

From the comments:

Fritz O' The Ham
Victoria Song
7/06/21 3:49pm

I find this whole thing to be somewhat ludicrous and at the same time hilarious. No one points out that this “subscription model” is basically the way that things started with telephones (like, the land line ones). You didn’t own your phone, you basically rented it. Same thing with Cable boxes.

The root of the problem isn’t the DMCA, it’s genuflecting Private Equity, and investors. Why? Because “recurring revenue”. You sell software that someone can buy for $100, and then you’re beholden to selling it again and again to more people. Hopefully you can get a bit more money by charging for upgrades. But charge people $5.99 for the rest of eternity, and hold them hostage because they didn’t buy the actual software. Brilliant... It’s ensures a sweet sweet stream of steady revenue, which is exactly what those investors are looking for.

In 2030, unless we do something, it’s likely that you’ll have to pay $10 a month for your heated seats to work (thanks Elon). I can’t wait for the day that someones smart lock won’t let them in their house because they haven’t paid the monitoring fee...

The concerning thing here is that there’s a constant (genuflecting constant) drumbeat of demand for increased revenue. The problem is that without innovation, its not always easy to get customers to pony up for the “new hotness”, but that drumbeat is still there. So what are we gonna do? We’re going to find new ways to charge more money for the same old lavender...

[Simple Minded]

one of the best summaries I've heard lately from one of my heroes!!!


Y66u_zSNolE

[Apollonius]

one of the best summaries I've heard lately from one of my heroes!!!


Y66u_zSNolE

Thanks for posting, SM.

These days I can rarely take listening to a speech that's over 5 or 6 minutes long.

But that was great. And he did the whole thing without notes!

[Simple Minded]

you are welcome Apollonius!

VDH rates up there with Thomas Sowell or Walter Williams as one who has been a brilliant social observer (and historian) for decades. The articles he has been writing about California for 20 years or more are blood chilling. This has been a long time coming, and those who have not noticed are willfully ignorant.

A sixth generation farmer with a PhD!!! I'd enjoy his company both in the classroom or in the vineyard.

His line about Sowell's comment on the SAT test was great! "It was heaven! I was no longer a black person! I became a test score!"

Sadly those days are gone for a generation or more.

Thomas Sowell's book Black Rednecks and White Liberals is one of the best titles of all time!

[Doc]

I have taken to reading "the end of civilization as we know it" fiction lately.

One of my favorites is "Lucifer's Hammer" Meteor hits the world and destroys it. general chaos, starvation, massive death, lack of electricity food and shelter. Plus cannibals. In other words a really uplifting inspirational read. I would love to see VHD give a lecture about that.

We are in the age of "don't ask permission, ask for forgiveness." Which pretty much says it all.

This will not end well.

[Typhoon]

Epitaph.

Stubstack - Stoller | The War in Afghanistan Is What Happens When McKinsey Types Run Everything

I see the discourse on the withdrawal as a super-sized version of this Kassel’s review [of the film "War Machine"]. The ‘Blob,’ that loose network of diplomats, ex-diplomats, generals, lobbyists, defense contractors, fancy lawyers, famous journalists, and insiders see the obvious desire for withdrawal as similar to how Kassel saw the truth-telling of Hastings and the Netflix movie. They are angry and embarrassed that they can’t hide their failures anymore. Their entire sense of self was bound up in the idea of an illusion of an unbeatable all-powerful America, even when they, like General Glen “the Glanimal” McMahon were the only ones who believed it.

And their embarrassment covers up something even more dangerous. None of these tens of thousands of Ivy league encrusted PR savvy highly credentialed prestigious people actually know how to do anything useful. They can write books on leadership, or do powerpoints, or leak stories, but the hard logistics of actually using resources to achieve something important are foreign to them, masked by unlimited budgets and public relations. It is, as someone told me in 2019 about the consumer goods giant Proctor and Gamble, where “very few white-collar workers at P&G really did anything” except take credit for the work of others.

[noddy]

Imagine how scary our life would be if the powers that be (tm) were not populated with sheltered incompetents.

This is the lurking problem google represents, all the data is there but luckily for us modern AI is only barely better than keyword searches and if statements.

[Doc]

Imagine how scary our life would be if the powers that be (tm) were not populated with sheltered incompetents.

This is the lurking problem google represents, all the data is there but luckily for us modern AI is only barely better than keyword searches and if statements.

The data and AI deal with things like the ideal American family has two and a half kids. Statistical outliers need not apply.

Another example: does your doctor play the percentages based on data, or actually look at your medical history? Mostly they look at the data. AKA The "expert systems" in a one size fits all kind of treatment.