What did cats ever do with themselves, before cardboard boxes were invented? It is said the first cardboard boxes were ordered by the Babylonian king, Num Ber Pleez, especially for his cats, whose name is not recorded. Several viziers had lost their posts (and their heads), trying to find or invent some toy to keep the cats amused.
Note how the one cat in the video has the human trained to spin and slide the box on command. We know who’s in charge in that household.
If knowledge is power, there sure is a lot of power lying around out there, waiting for someone to pick it up and use it.
Modern cars are full of computers, and those computers transmit all sorts of data back to the car’s manufacturer: not only data on the car’s performance… but on yours (https://www.rollcall.com/news/policy/cars-data-privacy). Data on your weight, what restaurants you go to, what music you listen to, and your choice of destinations.
And if you connect your smartphone (beware anything that’s sold to you as “smart”!) to your car, watch out! You’ll be sending the manufacturer a lot of personal information expressed in your phone calls and whatever else a smartphone does. I don’t have one.
Although European Union courts have ruled that the information thus collected belongs to you, the car’s owner, here in the U.S. we don’t yet have any laws as to how this information may be used, or by whom–just a set of voluntary guidelines adopted by the industry five years ago.
Who’s to stop the manufacturer from selling your information to whoever wants to pay for it? From turning it over to, say, the IRS or some other government agency? Nobody, actually. What we have here is your car watching you, listening in on you, and reporting all of it back to the manufacturer. And where it goes from there–who knows?
And another thing nobody knows–how to put this genie back into the bottle.
Today I bit the bullet and tried to read a piece from the Bolshevik rag, The Nation, entitled “Why I am a Liberal.” After all, said the teaser, liberals have always led the struggle for freedom and liberty everywhere in the world. But then they wanted me to disable my ad blocker before I could read the whole thing, and it just didn’t seem worth doing.
Besides, I’ve already heard a number of answers to this perplexing question.
“I am a liberal because I don’t have the common sense that God gave an inchworm.”
“I am a liberal because I think all that stuff they’re doing in Venezuela is really, really cool and I want to see them do it here!”
“I am a liberal because my parents didn’t love me.”
“I am a liberal because a whole lot of smart people are liberals and I want to be like them.”
“I am a liberal because I want free stuff from the government.”
“I am a liberal because people who aren’t liberals are, like, totally stupid and we need a very big government to control them.”
“I am a liberal because Mayor De Blasio or somebody said we need the government to order our view of reality. Or something like that.”
“I am a liberal because Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is and I think she’s really hot.”
“I am a liberal because we need for people to be sorted into identity groups and ranked according to their respective degrees of victimhood. And I hope that sounded smart!”
“I am a liberal because all my professors in college told me I’d better be or I wouldn’t get good grades.”
“I am a liberal because I want to run the country and tell everybody what they can or can’t say, think, and do.”
As you can see, there are many compelling reasons to be a liberal–the list could go on til Doomsday, if I let it. I said “compelling,” not “good.” There’s just no accounting for what compels people.
The lead story on the radio nooze this morning was some celebrity Hollywood doofus and her husband could actually go to jail for doling out up to half a million bucks in bribes, to get their two dumb kids into a “prestige” university. What for, who knows?–so they can “learn” that “white people own time”? But the point is, these rich and famous people cheated.
I’ve been thinking about a much smaller cheating scandal–the cheat performed by the Henderson middle school in Texas, to win the U.S. Chess Federation’s national scholastic chess championship (https://leeduigon.com/2019/04/08/teaching-kids-to-cheat-at-chess/).
Most of the cheating in high-level chess is hi-tech, but any team can, like Henderson, resort to “sandbagging” (https://www.chess.com/blog/SamCopeland/how-to-cheat-at-chess). Your team enters a bunch of low-level tournaments and throws all its games to weak opponents, to drive your rating down in time for the big important tournament that you really want to win. Your new crummy ratings insure easy match-ups and lots of cheap wins on your way to the title.
But the Henderson team got caught, and will be stripped of the championship.
Some questions remain to be answered.
Did the parents know their kids were cheating? Or suspect it, and say nothing?
When the USCF declared that the whole business was orchestrated by the coach, did the school fire him? Did school officials ever suspect there was cheating, but chose to look the other way?
If this had happened at the junior high school I went to in 1962, a) the coach would have been fired immediately, because the community would have angrily demanded it; and b) the principal would’ve been on the intercom toot-sweet, announcing that the chess team, having brought disgrace upon the school, was as of that moment disbanded.
How deep does this go? Cheat to get your kid into college. Cheat to win at chess. Then brag about it? Pretend the achievement was real, and brag about it?
America doesn’t need less Christianity in its schools.
It needs much, much more.
(I have asked my colleagues at Chessgames.com, all of whom have more chess tournament experience than I do, to weigh in on this. I’ll pass on their opinions, if they offer them.)
It would be less disrespectful to us, the defenseless taxpayers of New Jersey, if they raked all our money into a pile and set it on fire. But instead they use it to fund Rutgers.
My old alma mater, the state university, covered itself with yet more academic glory a few days ago. A Rutgers professor of Women’s and Gender Studies and Africana Studies–you already know where this is going, don’t you?–in an interview on NPR, where else, declared that “white people own time” (https://www.thecollegefix.com/rutgers-professor-even-the-concept-of-time-is-racist/).
According to this racist nitwit, “white people” invented the whole idea of time, so that makes time Racist, I guess if you peek at your wristwatch to see if this broadcast will be over soon, that makes you a White Supremacist Slave-Holder or something. “But we,” she added, meaning “we proud African people,” blah-blah, “treat time as though it is timeless.”
What a load of crap.
Does this have anything to do with why recent college graduates have so much trouble showing up for work on time? That is, if they work at all.
It distresses me that money that I work for goes to pay this jidrool’s salary, not to mention spectacular benefits that real people who don’t work for the state of New Jersey can only dream about… and pay for.
Defund the colleges now. Before it’s too late.
Remember when all the whoopee crowd was shunning North Carolina because the state wouldn’t let grown men creep into the bathroom after little girls? And Bruce Springsteen the dingbat said he wouldn’t perform in North Carolina because of that, the very idea…
So Frank Turek asked a very good question. Can Bruce Springsteen refuse to perform at a “gay wedding”? Not that he ever would–but could he?
Of course he can. He’s Bruce Springsteen. That kind of tyranny–forcing you to take part in a same-sex parody of holy matrimony–is only to be forced upon us peasants.
But first you’d have to find a celebrity who wasn’t a moral imbecile.
It doesn’t get more high church than this–the British royal family at Westminster Cathedral, and the choir singing Crown Him with Many Crowns. Man’s royalty pays homage to the divine royalty of Jesus Christ, the King of kings.
This video is entitled “Guilty Dogs and Cats,” but you will notice only one of these offenders is a cat. Obviously the Feline Anti-Defamation League (pronounced “faddle”) has been successful in their work.
There are no iguanas in the film at all.
But lots and lots of dogs.
(Teaching your hamster how to escape from his cage is probably not the best idea anyone has ever had. This video is here solely for your entertainment. And mine.)
All right, I’ve written and submitted my Newswithviews column, having decided to write about the new “Internet safety czar” they plan to appoint in the UK, who will keep Her Majesty’s subjects safe from all viewpoints not approved by Parliament. I would be disappointed in any hamster who came up with an idea like this.
I want to thank all of you who suggested topics for me. Cassandra had one that I found particularly intriguing: to write about how “people today no longer are concerned whether something is right or wrong, factual or a lie. They are only concerned whether or not they want to believe it.” I have a feeling I’ll be writing about that soon.
Meanwhile, I think it does relate to the story I reported yesterday, of the middle school chess team cheating to win a national scholastic chess championship. The news story was a tad short on details. Like, how deep does this immorality run? Did the parents know their kids were cheating? Did they know their coach was teaching them to cheat? Will the school fire the coach? (They should.) Will the school disband the chess team? (They should.)
Thanks, everybody. You’ve got my wheels turning. This topic does require more thought.
If it’s so dangerous, why are you there?
Ball State Looniversity in Muncie, Indiana, is offering students the chance to duck out of 15 credit hours’ worth of “traditional course requirements” and get equal credit for immersing themselves in some jidroolery called “Rape Culture in the Age of #MeToo” (https://www.campusreform.org/?ID=12080).
Hot dog. “Students will collect stories of rape culture on campus” and use them to put together a podcast.
Question!
If there really is a “campus rape culture” at Ball State–and it does look like the looniversity is admitting that there is–then why do any parents send their daughters there? Do they want them to be raped? Or could it be that they know the whole thing is just a sham? They certainly show no sign of believing that it’s true.
The wonderful thing about imaginary problems, the thing that makes them so useful to leftists of all kinds, is that, because they are imaginary, they can never be solved and they never go away. Hey, if you want something to cry about, try living in Venezuela for a while. Or any other of the world’s notorious hell-holes.
But no–so much nicer to stick around America and whine about “rape culture” without having to worry about really getting raped.
College! Making America dumber by the day.
Please, please, please cut off the funding!