“Fucking Hamas,” Hunter groused. “I can’t believe those monsters are doing this.”
Cracky murmured calming noises as Hunter used a microplane grater to shape his friend into a pleasing angular shape. It had been a few bad days for Cracky. He was down to the size of a Clementine.
“Anti-Zionism is not the same as anti-semitism,” Finnegan said in a frightened gulp. She had her catchphrases installed at the atomic level.
“No, no, I like Jews just fine. The girls are a bit hairy for my taste, but you can work on that. I mean that Hamas owes me money and the fuckers are using the war as an excuse to not pay me.”
“You’ve done business with Hamas?!?” Finnegan asked, her Penn programming slipping a cog.
“Just some guns, and rocket parts, and they wanted a few hundred GoPros for some reason,” Hunter said. He took a few more passes on Cracky, burnishing his hide to a pleasing gray-white. Hunter turned him around a few times to admire his work as Finnegan gawped aghast, and then he kissed the little rock of crack tenderly.
Finnegan swallowed a few times before she could resume her AWFL facade. “I, uh, don’t know what to say.”
“Say ‘Thank you, Dad,’ say “I’m so happy I don’t have any student loans, Dad.’”
Hunter scraped all the Cracky shavings into a couple of fat lines and hoovered them off the desk with a large-bore McDonald’s straw. Red-eyed and snorfling, he grin crookedly at his daughter.
“How do you stay alive?” she asked.
“Clean living,” Hunter said as a chunky line of blood began to creep down his face.
“Say ‘Thank you, Dad,’ say “I’m so happy I don’t have any student loans, Dad.’”
He can’t even afford a pickup truck.
At least, that’s what he tells his baby mama (s?).
Snorting crack? Sounds like a bit of a waste.
Hunter likes how fizzy the baking soda makes it.
Is that even a thing?
Anything is a thing if you believe.
/looks around for SMOD
The More You Know:
I’ll keep that knowledge in my back pocket for later. Thanks.
This place is so educational
Insufflation — SugarFree word of the Day opportunity missed.
So snorting is for the health nuts.
He’s all about clean living.
Somehow Hunter is the most relatable member of the family.
He’d probably be fun to party with right up to the time your heart explodes. Money, drugs, bad judgement, and he’d even hire a couple prostitutes for you most likely.
He’s the only one that seems to be honest about what he is, what he desires, what he’ll do to create ease and pleasure for himself, a pure sybarite.
Hunter is pure id.
He took a few more passes on Cracky, burnishing his hide to a pleasing gray-white. Hunter turned him around a few times to admire his work as Finnegan gawped aghast, and then he kissed the little rock of crack tenderly.
Ok, I had to find out, but here’s the terrifying part – the ad preceding this was for Free Trump Gold Bars!
A perfect condensation of distilled depravity. Bravo.
On top of all the lunacy we have a president, if y ou want to call him that, that has turned the Whitehouse into a crack house.
Surely one of these vignettes will feature hookers half-clothed, unconscious and strewn about on various bits of furniture.
Hookers? What do you think the interns are for?
Is there a difference?
Interns don’t get paid.
A crack whore is still a whore . . . . ?
Yeah, but they don’t necessarily leave either.
I am kinda slow I guess.
I think it’s horribly naive to think that crack has never been a fixture at the White House before, as well.
I mean, it wasn’t invented until Reagan, and I’m trying to think about which prexy would have been into that. GWB I guess.
Not after he found God!
GWB was on the wagon by time he got into the White House.
I would guess the presidential children first.
it wasn’t invented until Reagan
I think we need the whole history of Cracky’s family. And then we can laugh how Ronnie’s CIA is responsible for Hunter!
Presidents no, the multitude of staffers is the most likely. I am sure all that press about the cocaine had quite a few people sweating and trying to determine how their loyalty will be repaid.
Cocaine has been found in Egyptian mummies tissues. International drug smuggling is as old as whorin’. No, I am not that naive.
I’m going to need a citation on that.
Cocaine is derived from a new world plant.
Columbus found the Arawaks using iron spear heads and arrow heads. He asked where they got them.
Actual quote: “These black dudes show up every year in canoes and trade with us.”
The cocaine part I deduced by asking “What on earth could they be trading for?”
There is a tribe in guinea that has been making iron stuff since the sun rose the first time. The name of the tribe, which I have forgotten is the name the Arawaks used for their iron stuff.
I would be more specific but I have to run. Delivering food to neighbors. Back in a while
That is going to require an even bigger citation, as there has been no evidence of transatlantic trade prior to the Colombian exchange. (Not counting the brief Norse visitation in the north atlantic as they abandoned the are and did not maintain trade contacts)
I had honestly expected one of three scenarios – a: a test found some other mind altering substance used by the Egyptians; b: The test was on an Andean mummy; c: tests did show cocaine on an Egyptian mummy, but it was a contaminant from the 1800s when cocaine wasn’t regulated and mummies were rather brazenly abused.
Here you go:
https://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/researchers-in-museums/2019/04/20/cocaine-mummies-the-search-for-narcotics-in-historic-collections/
Your linked article agreed with me and my off the cuff assessment.
Though, I’d left out the possibility of false positives. Bad oversight that one.
Many GC-MS libraries were specifically made for law enforcement, and as such will give IDs of illicit substances as the “best match.”
The argument is circular. Any evidence of transatlantic contact is dismissed because there was no evidence of transatlantic contact. Cocaine, nicotine, or anything else found don’t count.
Meanwhile, you have ancient Greek being spoken in the Polynesian islands and aboriginal DNA in the rainforest. But ancient people were primitives.
Okay, point to that evidence.
Whenever these get brought up, I see assertions of all sort, but never “This person/team/etc found X and here is where they wrote it up with their methodology”
I’ve seen more than a few crackpot claims, so I’m not going to accept “You dismissed all the evidence” when it hasn’t actually been presented. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. I’m skeptical because I want to believe, but I also don’t want to be suckered in by a charlatan.
That’s not what circular argument means.
The problem is that you’re accepting conclusions that you (probably) have no ability to know are true.
For example:
“Ancient Greek being spoken in the Polynesian islands” this means what exactly? proto-hawaiians reciting the Illiad around campfires? Or some Polynesian languages containing unusual phonemes that also occurred in ancient Greek?
“aboriginal DNA in the rainforest.” Again, what is the basis for this conclusion? Some SNP that’s only ever been discovered in Austrralia?
Here is the problem, UCS. You may want to believe, but the people who conduct the scholarly analysis you seem to want to much do not. They desperately do not and any evidenced is dismissed or ignored.
1. I’ll repeat – ancient fucking Greek in the Polynesian islands. Shouldn’t this be a major story? Shouldn’t this be something that academia is fiercely debating? Instead you get crickets.
2. The Fuenta Magna Bowl and other ancient writings in the Americas. Maybe the Fuenta Magna Bowl is fake, but as far as I can tell, and as far as the online skeptics who dismiss it entirely can tell, there has never been an actually study of it to determine it. It’s assumed fake outright. So maybe some Bolivian journalist managed to cobble together a highly realistic artifact, or he modified somehow an existing one adding prot-Sumerian of all languages to it. Maybe. But it sure would be nice to have a real study of the subject instead of silence and dismissal.
Then you have the curious case of one of the only forms of writing among the Native Americans. The argument to dismiss Mi’kmaq’s connections to Egyptian hieroglyphs is that they were the invention of European missionaries (who never documented this process, and who *could not* have understood ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs themselves) in the 18th century. For some inexplicable reason, the Europeans picked ancient Egyptian symbols and managed to get the meaning of said words correct matching their original usage in ancient Egypt. Hell of a coincidence, that.
3. Speaking of coincidences, there’s a shit ton of circumstantial evidence indicating connections in the ancient world. So much coincidence that is a far bigger leap to assume complete isolation and independent development of these ideas and this knowledge than to assume maybe, just maybe there was some god damn contact. We could go into this all day. We could go into representations of ancient animals that didn’t exist in either place in both the new and old world. Scientific knowledge the ancients shouldn’t have possessed but which is evidenced in abundance in the design of their megalithic architecture.
4. The argument for how people reached the Americans, let alone when is flimsy and keeps getting older. All the damn time. You would have been laughed at in academia if you dared to suggest humans were in the new world 20,000 years ago about a generation ago. Now?
5. The argument about cocaine, tobacco, and other substances is concrete evidence. There is no actual proof of contamination. Is it possible? Yes. But making it the default explanation is not science. If it was proven that there was tobacco usage in ancient Egypt, that’s almost definitive proof of ancient contact. If you want extraordinary evidence, that’s about as extraordinary as you are going to get.
You could have a written source stating exactly how and when ancient Egyptians visited the Americas down to the precise day and it would get dismissed as fake.
Lemme tell you about this thing called “the null hypothesis.”
You know your link proves literally nothing, right? It’s a restatement of the guy’s conclusions without any of the actual evidence used to reach those conclusions. However, the (generic) description of the *types* of evidence he’s using to reach the conclusions is not strong. Just from something that I actually have the expertise to evaluate myself:
Ancient Greek music is so staggeringly non-unique that it would be difficult to find something that has less in common with independently-created cultures worldwide. Identical elements occur in literally every musical system on the planet. Asian, Subcontinental, African, Native American, you name it.
I like these discussions.
Here is the problem, UCS. You may want to believe, but the people who conduct the scholarly analysis you seem to want to much do not. They desperately do not and any evidenced is dismissed or ignored.
Why would they be desperate to dismiss it? I really don’t get this argument. Most archeologists and historians would be *thrilled* to find out that there was regular pre-colonial trade between the Americas and Africa. It would open up all kinds of new areas of exploration and scholarship. And woke academia would cream themselves over it, you know that.
This should be a giant red flag that the author is taking a “close enough for academic work” attitude.
The heart of the argument is linguistic, which I can’t help but notice you glossed over.
“In parallel with the over one thousand ancient greek linguistic roots that are met in the language of Easter Island and, the relative to it, Polynesian languages, we also meet a big number of ancient greek grammatic peculiarities, like noun endings and verbal types.”
Or do you want to tell me how totally not unique ancient Greek is? That isn’t coming from some pseudo-intellectual, but being published by one of Germany’s top universities. Does that make it true? No. But you are asking me to provide a detailed breakdown of an obscure study by a German researcher whose books aren’t even available on Amazon is rather absurd.
The writer himself is a researcher focusing on the languages of Polynesia and Eastern Island.
And you missed the entire point being made which isn’t that this study is definitive, but that it’s the sort of thing that should stir debate in academia.
Did you see the stories that tried to label Graham Hancock a white supremacist after Ancient Apocalypse?
There’s different fields in different countries involved here and a whole interwoven web of politics and reputations on the line. When you spend your time trying to laugh a guy out of the room for suggesting something like there was a cataclysm on a certain date, and then it ends up there actually was a cataclysm at a certain date, you kind of can’t go back on that.
When it comes to Native Americans, there’s a shit ton of politics related to who was actually here first. As is they dismiss evidence of tribes moving and fighting amongst each other to try and establish historical claims to land that don’t really exist. And the way a lot of this would be spun and is spun is that people are trying to ascribe accomplishments and knowledge of natives to some long lost civilization or other groups regardless of whether anyone has argued that or not.
Ancient Egyptologists? You have an entire national identity wrapped up in that history.
There’s also just good old gatekeeping involved. You can see it every smear that these are claims made by “pseudo” this or that’s.
Fatty Bolger: “It would open up all kinds of new areas of exploration and scholarship.”
Ding ding ding, we have a winner. Academic reputations are built on new areas of research or new approaches.
I should note that when it comes to African-American contact pre-Columbus or some of the trans-Pacific theories, I think most academics would allow for occasional, essentially accidental contact. But not for sustained interactions. I think on UCS’s post about age the other week, something came up about Polynesian diffusion. The generally accepted theory right now is that the Polynesian navigators were pretty damned good but the distances were too great for ongoing, sustained interaction.
It’s like the people who argue that “the government” knows extra-terrestrials exist but scientists don’t want to upset their theories. Hell, it would be the event of a lifetime to the first astronomer who offered proof of alien contact.
Addendum: I saw bro’s last post after my post. I agree with his note about people like Hancock: denounce their views, prove them wrong, but don’t throw around character accusations unless you can provide evidence that character flaws directly influenced their interpretation.
Y’all sure get excited about this stuff. Humanoids have been around at least 1M years. Genetically modern humans for what? A quarter of that? People are just people and have always done people stuff. The cartoon notion of Og living in a cave and grunting to communicate is of course absurd.
When I cobbled together a few bits of evidence and deduced this and that from it my reaction was “Yeah, of course. Makes sense.”
I was not surprised or excited at all. I always thought the land-bridge theory from Siberia was silly anyway. People and critters have leaked back and forth forever. Some walked, some came in boats. So what? It isn’t that far from Africa to South America. Follow the paths of hurricanes and it is easy to see how Africans could show up in the Americas. Hell, it has only been a few decades since egrets from Africa got blown over to Brazil. They are all over the place in the new world now.
If humans were in Chile 20K years ago (evidence – leather shoe carbon dated) they have probably been in North America god knows how long ago.
*I have less confidence in carbon dating than most do. It is assumed that solar radiation is a constant. It is not.*
Our desire to have simple, easy to understand narratives to explain stuff is not surprising but probably blinds us to a lot of things that should be obvious.
I don’t think Hunter is giving Cracky the respect that Cracky deserves; nay, has earned. Cracky tolerates a lot of abuse so Hunter can bang legions of hookers.
+1 use of snorfling. In my head, that’s a nod to the great Bloom County. A little music. I preferred the name Deathtongue, but Billy and the Boingers will suffice.
Cracky dies and then is reborn, eternal. His suffering redeems Hunter’s withered soul. Cracky nourishes the body and the mind.
Cracky est nobis
Cracky would make my heart explode out of my chest like an alien.
I am a huge fan of Bloom County, and I had no idea this recording existed.
I have the original book here in my library somewhere, and it came with a little record insert.
Same
This was pretty brilliant I thought
Pastis is a gem.
Agreed
I had it once upon a time as well.
I have the original book but have lost the insert.
JUST RELAX! I CAN’T RELAX! 🎵
Heh, I have that record in an old mementos trunk I have stored somewhere or the other-came with of the comic strip compilations.
I never played my copy. Maybe I’ll get one of those cheap-o record players.
Here’s the other song so you don’t have to.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tpKAghxy07c
A fine tune it is.
Whatever it takes
“There’s a huge amount of work to be done after this election cycle, whether it’s rebuilding the Republican Party – which increasingly looks like, you know, maybe an impossible task – or helping to begin a new party that’s very focused on what the Republican Party used to stand for before this cult of personality. But right now and in this election cycle, I’ll do whatever I have to do to make sure Donald Trump’s not elected,” she told CNN’s Anderson Cooper on “AC360.”
Has this been forwarded to the Secret Service?
I think Liz Cheney represents the least of Trump’s worries right now.
[Liz peeks in and reads this, shrieks and runs to Daddy’s lap crying.]
I can’t imagine the arrogance of Liz Cheney to assume that she has anywhere near the following to start a new political party when she couldn’t even get elected as local dog catcher anymore.
Books to sell and she knows all the left rags like the View will have her of which they did and proclaimed her ‘our Savior’.
And not a single person who watches the View will cast a vote for her. The end.
^This. It is all a grift, like her entire career. She stands for nothing, and provides nothing of value. Seeing her book on a shelf at a house would make me leave, post haste.
Right. She can’t even win a primary coasting on her last name anymore.
A large fraction of the country is buying what Trump is selling. This nitwit thinks if she helps create a new party, all of that anger will dissipate and they will flock to her version of the perpetual war party.
what the Republican Party used to stand for
Preserving everything Democrats did 10 years before?
*chuckle*
Controlled opposition.
I believe someone used the term kayfabe recently. Kabuki theater works too.
I’ve been saving this for a Wednesday:
Can you believe that people are still permitted to say nice things about H.P. Lovecraft? Especially when there are BIPOC artists that used to live in Providence?
When is Joe going to sample the rejuvenating effects of Cracky?
Nobody reads Lovecraft anymore when Harry Potter is available.
Tipping points, dead ahead
Many of the gravest threats to humanity are drawing closer, as carbon pollution heats the planet to ever more dangerous levels, scientists have warned.
Five important natural thresholds already risk being crossed, according to the Global Tipping Points report, and three more may be reached in the 2030s if the world heats 1.5C (2.7F) above pre-industrial temperatures.
Triggering these planetary shifts will not cause temperatures to spiral out of control in the coming centuries but will unleash dangerous and sweeping damage to people and nature that cannot be undone.
I could be wrong, but I’m beginning to suspect the thing these bozos are most terrified of is the realization that people and their activities are utterly inconsequential in the grand planetary scheme of things. They want to be important and special.
“They want to keep everyone in a perpetual state of panic” used to be a conspiracy theory.
“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.” — H.L. Mencken
If we run the same story every day for decades, the plebes will eventually catch on!
“Clean living,” Hunter said as a chunky line of blood began to creep down his face.
Perfect ending.
The tipping point report also looked at what it called “positive tipping points”, such as the plummeting price of renewable energy and the growth in sales of electric vehicles. It found that such shifts do not happen by themselves but need to be enabled by stimulating innovation, shaping markets, regulating business, and educating and mobilising the public.
Whoopsie- clicked too soon.
That part about “such shifts do not happen by themselves but need to be enabled by stimulating innovation, shaping markets, regulating business, and educating and mobilising the public” is why a global socialist dictatorship is imperative and must be established as soon as possible.
I think i snorted crack once. But will never know for sure.
You’ll just have to try it again; compare the experiences.
I swear you people wasting crack like that…smoke it in a glass pipe or GTFO.
https://www.foxnews.com/media/pennsylvania-school-board-president-sworn-into-office-sexually-explicit-book
Pennsylvania school board president sworn into office with sexually explicit book
Karen Smith of the Central Bucks School District placed her hand on ‘Flamer’ which depicts naked teenage boys
One of the books Smith placed her hand on is “Flamer,” written by award-winning author and artist Mike Curato. Released in 2020, Curato’s work is a semi-autobiographical graphic novel set in 1995. It tells the story of a character who is bullied at a Boy Scouts summer camp for “acting in a manner considered stereotypical of gay men.” The graphic novel includes characters discussing pornography, erections, masturbation, penis size, and an illustration that depicts naked teenage boys.
The country’s best and brightest leading our children into the future.
And I think that counts under the current definitions of child pornography.
Now that raises an ethical-legal question.
Since these depictions are strictly artist-created, they require no victims to produce. Should they still be banned for their similarity to victim photography?
I hadn’t intended to start that conversation, but it is legitimate.
As I understand the current legal environment, hand-drawn or computer-generated images of nude teens can fall into the definition of child porn even when it is unrealistic animation.
Ashcroft v. Free Speech Coalition ruled parts of Federal law that banned simulated child pornography unconstitutional.
Later Federal laws partially restored that ban.
Thanks for the clarification.
I have not kept up to date with exact things that are allowed and are prohibited.
As always, the process is the punishment. Anything can get your life ruined in a hurry.
I only know because the topic came up elsewhere, and I was curious. So I put Tor to work browsing Wiki and legal sites.
If you want to make the hypo even more uncomfortable, the “artist”
snaps a picture of a kid in public,
generates a realistic 3D model of the kid based on the picture, and
Uses that 3D model to create various explicit images and videos.
I say they should not, which is in contrast to US law that says simulated images of children is still illegal (from memory the case was about a guy who drew cartoons of children, was a pedophile, and was using the cartoons that he drew as a release to avoid hurting real kids).
Banned? I’d say no. Should they be available in schools or be used to swear in school board members? Also a no from me. Anyone that’d go to the mat like that for stuff like that-well, do I need to finish that thought?
I have mixed feelings over all of this.
Heinlein was full of sex, and I read those books after getting them from the high school library.
Iowa passed a law saying any book that describes sex is forbidden from school libraries. The law comes with criminal penalties. I’m certain this bans Heinlein from high school libraries and is an over reaction.
But the fuckwads running the schools today want to have graphic novels like Flamer available in grade school and potentially part of the curriculum. Those folks can die in a fire.
It exposes an issue that has been brewing for decades. You can’t have “the commons” without commonality (of worldview, culture, etc.). There is no acceptable compromise between a SoCon saying “you have child porn in the library” and a Wokester saying “you’re marginalizing oppressed voices by not allowing children to read about LGBTQ+ experiences.” Two different cultures, two different worldviews, one that, in part, exists in reaction to the other. The only solutions are conquest or destruction of the commons.
Any such commons can only exist as a matter of compromise – no one gets everything they want. Our absolutist activists (on any issue you care to name) cannot abide that.
I’m certain this bans Heinlein from high school libraries and is an over reaction.
Only his explicit works so the juveniles are fine. Get the others from the public library with parental permission or just purchase from
Amazon.
The 40 year old scotus ruling that school boards can’t control what’s in school libraries is utterly insane. Only a retard in a robe or a bioethicist could rationalize that one.
so the juveniles are fine.
I never read any of the juveniles. I read every other Heinlein novel before I was 17.
I believe Starship Troopers is considered to be his final juvenile.
I’ve seen the movie. Never read the book.
I’ve come to appreciate the movie more over the years. If you ignore the departures from the book it’s a decent B/B+ sci-fi flick.
Starship Troopers is not technically a juvenile from my understanding. It started out as one, but the publisher wanted to cut too much of the combat to make it more kid friendly, and Heinlein just shifted it to an “adult” novel instead.
And the firm that published his juvenile’s didn’t want it and he stopped sending them manuscripts after that.
Regarding the Iowa law, some school boards are removing* some books from school libraries like 1984 and Brave New World.
* I’m not going to say banning, ’cause it isn’t.
This binte ran and was elected. Fifty years ago, she would have been running for her life in that part of Bucks County. Goes to show how the Philly suburban counties have gone from red to blue in only a few decades.
WaPo has discovered Glock switches.
A couple of highlights:
Incredibly. Scary.
“We really hate gunz, but it’s more important that cops have gunz than anything else.”
i can haz grant nao?
*hand raising emoji*
Has anyone in DC considered banning murder?
I’d argue that the preliminary clause was there to indicate that “Arms includes military arms” so that the militia might be effective. Anything the army, navy, air force, or other departments of the military might possess is protected for the common citizen.
*1 NYT Gatling gun
If you have to CONVERT it for automatic fire it isn’t the functional equivalent of an automatic weapon you dumb shit liar. Jesus freaking Christ these people are so tiresome.
individuals firing a large number of bullets at a time
LEOs clearly exempted.
Most firearms operate sequentially. Those handful that fire multiple projectiles at once are typically not using bullets, but shot. The sole exception might be a multi-barrelled volley gun.
Has anyone in DC considered banning murder?
For some reason, that law just doesn’t seem to stop people from getting killed. We are most perplexed. /idiots-of-the-law
I have to get some Cracky merchandise in time for the GlibCruise. I love cracky.
large-bore McDonald’s straw
Does MCD’s have large size straws? I thought they were a single regular size.
I could believe that Hunter grabbed a case of boba straws from the White House mess supply…
Well they got rid of the coke spoons.
Huh. I came across one of those logoed stir sticks the other day. Flat, not a spoon. Miss those and similar. Fucking watermelons ruining the world.
McDonald’s straws are wider than the average straw in order to accommodate their thick milkshakes. Here is a scholarly article from a leftist hack on the subject.
https://medium.com/@rbullwinkle/shh-here-are-the-exact-dimensions-of-a-mcdonalds-straw-766cdfd0d2d7
*Salutes Sugar Free
*Returns to the shadows
I see no evidence that they’re wider than any other chains’ straws. They’re certainly thinner than Jamba Juice.
I miss when MCD’s shakes came in the same paper cups as sodas instead of their fake Starbucks plastic crap with whipped cream and other shit.
It’s not up there with them not using beef tallow for their fries anymore but I hear you.
It’s all of the same era. Can add using styrofoam containers to keep burgers warm. Although the new prep (and cook for QPCs) on demand is a great improvement on the Qwave or heat lamps.
Disappointing to see in the ded thred that reason fave Wyden was identified as from KS instead of as the third senator from NY.
large-bore McDonald’s straw
There is a hamburger place I go to sometimes called Freddy’s. I think it’s a midwest chain. I like it because the burgers are just like Steak n Shake burgers. The milkshake straws are about 3/8″ in diameter.
Freddy’s is better. They actually season the damn meat.
For some reason, that law just doesn’t seem to stop people from getting killed. We are most perplexed.
The words are right there on the sacred paper, but the spell has no effect. It’s baffling.
Apropos of nothing, apparently gunbroker won’t allow the use of Tor to browse their site.
Interesting. What next?