Saturday evening links

by | Mar 2, 2024 | Daily Links | 117 comments

 

Not a wine aerator.

So after a 40 year hiatus, Spud got a potato bug up his butt and bought a saxophone. I picked up a used Selmer at a great price. Playing a couple of scales sounded better that anything I put out on my student instrument. Unfortunately, all the suckage that is about to come out of that horn is solely on my shoulders.

 

Links?

 

“Eco-friendly”.

 

Nothing to see here.

 

No doubt this will come off without a hitch. Fuck Biden.

 

It’s hard to fight an enemy that considers it’s entire male population to be cannon fodder.

 

“No twerking. No drinking. No smoking.” Yeah, this has already been done. It’s called a Mormon high school dance.

 

Yay… Still beats the crap out of soccer.

 

Pretty slow news weekend, so I’ll leave it at that.

I came from the concert side of sax playing. I could only hope to play like this someday.

About The Author

Spudalicious

Spudalicious

Survey says I’m a Paleolibertarian bitches. That means I eat “L”ibertarians for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Soave tastes a little fruity. Wait a minute, that doesn’t sound quite right…

117 Comments

  1. The Late P Brooks

    There is a wooden walkway which spans a gradient change from the driveway to my front door. I call it the drawbridge, despite the sad fact it can neither be raised nor lowered. Anyway, I went out and shoveled the snow off it a little while ago. The snow is so heavy and wet you could pack a snowball hard enough to break somebody’s jaw.

    • Spudalicious

      Yeah, it took a week to alleviate my irrigation water concerns.

    • Aloysious

      A fine choice.

  2. The Late P Brooks

    This is the clear trade-off with which the US and other western democracies must grapple if they are to achieve their climate goals. We must recognize that essentially every “solution” that has been advanced by the climate alarmist community and the globalist elites pushing their agenda requires the implementation of authoritarian policies designed to scale back stakeholder rights, pick winners and losers in the marketplace, and force reluctant consumers to pay the price.

    These kinds of forced solutions are in fact incompatible with the maintenance of a free society that protects the rights of all stakeholders. That reality is the central conundrum of this forced, heavily subsidized energy transition – which is not, in fact, a transition at all – and it is the reason why so many local governments are rejecting these proposed industrial sites. The climate alarmists understand this, which is why their rhetoric has grown more shrill and heated over time.

    People are beginning to scrutinize the preposterous “cost/benefit” claims made by the ecofanatics. This is the best way to put the brakes on this lunacy.

    • juris imprudent

      Cost/benefit? WE’RE SAVING THE PLANET YOU HATEFILLED KULAK!!!

    • rhywun

      I dunno.

      Americans have been pretty goddamn chill with every other obvious grift over the decades. So what if this one is the most monstrously evil one of all time? They might still get away with it.

      • Chafed

        Arguably, the difference is a very large part of the population is feeling it in their wallets. People who would typically ignore what’s happening can’t help but notice how it affects them.

      • The Last American Hero

        The banning of gas stoves and the debacle of ev’s in Chicago trying to recharge got people’s attention.

      • Chafed

        That too.

  3. Yusef drives a Kia

    When I drove cross country last year I saw thousands of the gigantic windmills across the land.
    Talk about forever waste, fiberglass and Kevlar don’t recycle well,
    Idiots

    • LCDR_Fish

      Can we shred the kevlar for future use – as insulation if nothing else? I know it needs to be woven pretty tightly for bulletproof material…

    • pan fried wylie

      What are mountains of li-ion batteries and semiconductor grade silicon, chopped liver?

      Has anybody bothered to compare the energy input to refine the silicon for a solar panel VS its lifetime maximum theoretical (being generous here) output?

      • rhywun

        Energy dissidents have. They don’t get much attention.

    • Tonio

      Speak for yourself, young lady. I’m perky, rested, and ready!

      • KK, Plump & Unfiltered

        I’ll bet you’re perky!!

      • Animal

        I was perky for three days once in 1979. Couldn’t maintain it.

      • rhywun

        I hope you saw a doctor for that.

      • Animal

        Penicillin is great stuff.

      • Ownbestenemy

        *raises eyebrows*

  4. The Late P Brooks

    Doktor Cheerleader

    As she prepared for her first speech of this week’s campaign swing, the first lady specifically wanted to tap into the feelings many Democrats had when Trump beat Hillary Clinton in the 2016 race to remind voters about what’s at stake in November’s election, a source familiar with her thinking said.

    “We can’t wake up on November 6 like we did in 2016 terrified of the future ahead of us, thinking, ‘My God, what just happened? What are we gonna do now?’’” she said. “We must reelect Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.”

    Sure you can.

  5. Aloysious

    Saxuality.

    Live version.

    I was tempted to go with Too Many Zooz, but I wanted to go with a real live woman.

  6. rhywun

    The Israelis “have more or less accepted” the proposal, which includes the six-week cease-fire as well as the release by Hamas of hostages considered vulnerable

    Can Israel be stupid enough to fall for this shit again??

    “You started a war against us and we’re going to give you six weeks to shore up your defenses with the help of the West’s billions in return for some unknown number of hostages (leaving you to keep dribbling out a few more every time you need some PTO”.

    • Chafed

      If it’s true, then Biden put a gun to their head. What stuns me is this deal is for less than all the hostages. What’s the moral calculus that says it’s acceptable?

    • Aloysious

      Great Hounds and Cerberus.

      I’m not sure Swiss will be able to withstand such unchained punnery.

  7. rhywun

    Yeah, this has already been done.

    Christians in the Mist? “Look at those kooky Christians aren’t they kooky.”

    I’ve been addicted to “Bar Rescue” lately – these kids could put Taffer out of business.

  8. rhywun

    Yay… Still beats the crap out of soccer.

    Sweet – I had no idea. Will check out.

    They aren’t giving us much true footy anymore but this will do for today.

    • rhywun

      Of course, college basketball comes first.

  9. KK, Plump & Unfiltered

    Crew Dragon launch scrub 🙁

  10. Stinky Wizzleteats

    The ceasefire is a good thing actually. The civilians in Gaza are starving and humanitarian corridors are a time tested feature in war. Like it or not, how the world perceives the righteousness or lack thereof of Israel’s cause will weigh heavily on their long-term survival.

    • rhywun

      I keep hearing that a cease-fire was already in effect when Hamas broke it in October. Hamas doesn’t seem particularly bound by them.

      • Stinky Wizzleteats

        True, they aren’t. I’d prefer our allies to adhere to higher standards though and the power imbalance is so skewed that the Israelis can afford to do this.

      • Grumbletarian

        IDGAF about the ‘power imbalance’. Hamas wanted war, they’re getting it good and hard. Damn shame there are Palestinians getting hurt. Maybe they should rise up against Hamas as well.

      • Stinky Wizzleteats

        Easier said than done as far as overthrowing the government goes but Israel would have been better served in the long run by their tried and true mowing the grass tactics along with some targeted assasinations. The thing that’s kept them afloat for so long as far as public support goes is a general recognition that they have a moral right to do what they do as conferred on them by the past. Fairly or unfairly, they’ve lost that.

      • Chafed

        Interesting no part of your analysis involves the release of all the hostages Hamas kidnapped.

      • Ted S.

        Whom do we get to blame after the next set of Hamas kidnappings?

        Granted, the media will try to blame Netanyahu….

    • cyto

      This was precisely the point of attacking Israel and murdering a bunch of kids at a festival. Hoping to inspire a reaction that they could play the victim to.

      I just don’t understand why the ordinary Palestinian goes along. They could have had a bigger free state of Palestine 3 decades ago by just saying yes.

      • Gustave Lytton

        Better dead than red. They’d rather live in squalor, nursing grudges from 1948, and imagining they’ll get it all back.

    • Gustave Lytton

      how the world perceives the righteousness or lack thereof of Israel’s cause

      The world has largely already made up their minds and it’s not in Israel’s favor. There’s no Israeli response that’s mild enough and no Palestinian act that’s too extreme.

      • slumbrew

        ^^^ this guy gets it ^^^

      • Chafed

        100%

      • Stinky Wizzleteats

        Killing upwards of 20K, most of them noncombatants, isn’t mild in anyone’s book except maybe Ghengis Khan’s. If that’s the standard the Israelis are aiming for they’re doomed.

      • Brochettaward

        I’m just here to upvote Gustave’s point.

        World opinion of Israel doesn’t mean dick. The only power whose support they need is America’s, and they’ve got it.

      • Brochettaward

        I also wanted to kindly tell Stinky Wizzleteats to kind of fuck off. I don’t know how Israel is supposed to fight a war. What’s the acceptable amount of dead Palestinians, Stinky? You can’t answer that.

        Israel fights with two hands tied behind its back already. It could wipe Palestine off the map entirely. They are fighting an enemy that intermixes and obscures combatant and non-combatant as a matter of course. And there’s armchair general Stinky to tell us how that some number pulled out of his ass is too much.

      • Ted S.

        For now, at least. We’ve seen how the Young Left is braying for the destruction of the Jews.

      • Spudalicious

        “Killing upwards of 20K, most of them noncombatants, isn’t mild in anyone’s book except maybe Ghengis Khan’s.”

        The death toll in Gaza is coming from a Hamas controlled entity. I’m surprised that anybody here is giving it credence.

  11. R C Dean

    “It’s hard to fight an enemy that considers its entire male population to be cannon fodder.”

    Very Russian. During WWII, you could delete “male” from that sentence

  12. R C Dean

    “No twerking, etc.”

    Every high school dance until, I dunno, ten years ago? Fifteen at the most?

    • rhywun

      I like it. The market is probably crying out for this sort of thing but being uncool is almost worse than taking a business risk.

    • Fourscore

      “Need to keep some space in between, Young Man”

      Chaperone, Sock Hop, Girl’s Gym, Small Town School, circa ’50s

  13. pan fried wylie

    “Alienware AW3225QF is a great but pricey pick if you want OLED without the decision paralysis”

    sry for dedthread, but, oy vey. A meager $1200, for improved contrast VS otherwise comparable LCD screens at half the price. And don’t worry about burn-in, they fixed that with a three year warranty, you fucking OLED Skeptics!

    I just picked up an MSI G274QPF for $260 from Costco (including instacart fees). I get a totally convincing reflection effect off street signs in Forza5, more vibrant color than my preceding Viewsonic panel, 165hz/variable, hits all the use-targets. The HDR probably isnt the best, but coming from SDR, it’s good enough.

    I’m not saying the alienware is a terrible product for the price, but BEST PC GAMING MONITOR OF THE YEAR (as of Feb) it is not. And hey, maybe OLED mfgers could work out a builtin screensaver already, that would go way further towards my confidence in an OLED than a longer warranty (which shouldnt inspire any confidence IMO).

    And hey, how about no more Year’s Best declarations before July. Also, fried chicken.

  14. DEG

    I’ve had every beer in the featured picture except for the Tre Fontane.

    Aussies are bringing rugby to the states. No pads? No helmets? No problem.

    Any women’s rugby?

    • rhywun

      bringing rugby to the states

      I wonder if the article mentions that the U.S. already has a professional men’s rugby league.

      • LCDR_Fish

        Rugby “League” vs Rugby Union?

        I know there are 2 variants in NZ – don’t recall which one is more popular worldwide.

      • rhywun

        I was hoping nobody would go there. I don’t know which one is which here, I don’t know what is the difference, and I’ve decided I’m OK with that.

        IIRC Australia has leagues for both, so they might know.

  15. cavalier973

    ”It’s called a Mormon High School Dance.”

    Or, you know, “Church”

  16. cavalier973

    International mediators have been working for weeks to broker a deal to pause the fighting before the Muslim holy month of Ramadan begins around March 10.

    No presents under the Ramadan trees this year.

    U.S. military planes began the first airdrops of thousands of meals into Gaza, and the militaries of Jordan and Egypt said they also conducted airdrops.

    “Hey, Yousef; you wanna Hershey bar?”

    Aid groups say airdrops should be only a last resort and instead urge the opening of other crossings into Gaza and the removal of obstacles at the few that are open.

    “No fair! Hamas can’t sneak terrorists into Gaza by air drop!”

    • slumbrew

      Gaza shares a border with Egypt. Open away…

      • cavalier973

        Are the Egyptians making with the NIMBY attitude?

      • Chafed

        All the new walls they constructed say yes.

      • dbleagle

        Very much so. Egypt doesn’t care much for the Palis in general and hates HAMAS. They try to keep that border locked tight.

    • cavalier973

      Roughly one in six children under 2 in the north suffer from acute malnutrition and wasting, “the worst level of child malnutrition anywhere in the world,” Carl Skau, deputy executive director of the World Food Program, said this week. “If nothing changes, a famine is imminent in northern Gaza.”

      As a parent, myself, I can imagine how terrifying this would be.

      • Chafed

        Absolutely. I’m also trying to figure out how they are creating these statistics. I’m guessing these figures come from Hamas.

    • cavalier973

      Acknowledging the extreme need for food, U.S. President Joe Biden said the U.S. would look for other ways of delivery “including possibly a marine corridor.”

      I guess US Marines are going to break through the Israeli Army’s defensive lines.

    • Brochettaward

      I just can’t say how much I detest the notion of providing military support to one side, and foreign “aid” to the other.

      You besiege a population to cause pain. Yes, that includes on the civilians. That’s fucking war.

      There is nothing humane whatsoever about the notion of modern war that drags on endlessly with no clear winners where the superior power is constantly tut-tutted for going too far in using its power while inhumane barbarians who don’t care in the slightest exploit the weakness to keep their cause going.

      And then a bunch of morons talk about how this or that war was “unwinnable.” No, asshole, you set arbitrary and nonsensical rules for how the war could be fought that made winning impossible.

      • dbleagle

        I feel no more sorry for Gazans than I do for Germans and Japanese during WWII or the people of GA, SC and NC during our Civil War. HAMAS chose to fight among them so the “civilians” get the pain as well. ISR places little stock in HAMAS provided death counts and the IDF announced they have killed 15K militants. It’s a start.

      • Chafed

        Completely agree

      • Brochettaward

        I’m just tired of the pussy footing around when it comes to war. If you are going to fight a war, then just fucking fight it. No one actually benefits from pussy footing around.

        Is it going to be more painful in the short term? Yes. Long term, though, Palestine needs a great deal of pain inflicted upon it and it needs to be forced to rebuild on its own. This is like the welfare spigot in minority communities to me. We’re enabling behavior in Palestine that is harmful to everyone.

        Israel should be allowed to blockade that shithole country and level it to the ground if they have to. And no foreign aid should be allowed in. It’s a siege. No one in history has ever besieged their enemy while allowing in foreign aid because that’s fucking retarded. It doesn’t make one Genghis Khan to point this out. War is not pretty. It sucks. It sucks bad and trying to mitigate that fact and then showering the Palestinians with aid afterwards just allows them to keep on keeping on with the same old tired bullshit.

        If the Palestinians had to rebuild on their own, and actually form a functioning economy that didn’t rely on foreign aid, do you really think for a second its leadership would march the people off to war with Israel on a regular basis?

        I’ve seen Palestine’s culture described as a death cult. It’s not a death cult, though. They’re just your typical fucking welfare queens who happen to be the neighbors of the vehemently hated Jewish country. It’s leadership can point to the boogieman of Israel to keep its own retarded population under the boot while skimming off the top of the massive foreign aid that flows into the country because people hate the Jews.

        It’s like any other shithole country in Africa, basically, except Jews.

      • Ted S.

        UNRWA has deliberately been keeping them in subsistence refugee levels to keep them agitated and wanting to genocide the Jews.

        The so-called “right of return” is as idiot as suggesting the Sudeten Germans have a right of return following the Beneš Decrees.

    • cyto

      Sleepy Joe lost to “undecided” in several locations. I think we know what would happen.

    • cyto

      Also… why do you think they fought so hard to keep Kennedy (and anyone else) from challenging Biden?

    • Tres Cool

      You have “rugby boots” ?

      Is that like UCS’s ______ gloves ?

      • Chafed

        Same idea but less elegant.

  17. cyto

    Kids are at a church sleepover, so I looked for a grown up movie to watch with the wife.

    Found a John Kusak and Samuel L. Jackson film called Cell on Prime. Never heard of it.

    But Kusak is usually good. So is Jackson.

    So I put it on.

    Cool premise. Not a rom-com or suspense thriller like I suspected. A weird twist on the zombie movie. Wife checked out as soon as that was clear.

    Not great. Not terrible. Pretty middle of the road.

    But….

    Had a “twist” that was so not a twist at the end. Telegraphed it a mile away. I suppose you could say it was fair… since they set it all up. But still… I knew what was gonna happen long before it did… and then they did the slow reveal, which made it even more “yeah, that was too obvious”.

    Still…. if you are under 30 and techno-zombie apocalypse sounds interesting, you will probably enjoy. After you see it 30 times, it becomes more meh.

    Also… only a few years pre-covid, but the movie was a huge throwback compared to today. No woke. One character is gay, but it only comes up as a mention of backstory… “then my man left”. That’s it.

    No superpower women who kick ass against a dozen army Rangers twice their size. No emasculated hero. No in-your-face ham-handed messaging.

    Just a movie with flawed characters trying to survive together.

    By today’s cinema measuring stick, I suppose it is pretty good.

    • Tres Cool

      As far as Cusack movies go, when he’s an adult, I like Grosse Point Blank.

      To me the rest are the 80s brat-pack that I grew up with.

      • The Hyperbole

        Cusack is America’s greatest living actor, GPB as you mentioned, Con Air, Identity, Never Grow Old, The Raven, The Ice Harvest, the list is damn near endless.

      • cyto

        Also, he doesn’t want to sell anything bought or processed, or buy anything sold or processed, or process anything sold, bought, or processed, or repair anything sold, …

      • The Hyperbole

        Name a better actor. Hanks, Pitt, Freeman, Leo? they’re all hacks compared to the Q-man.

      • The Last American Hero

        Bale.

        Case closed.

      • Aloysious

        The Raven is fantastic. I own a copy.

      • rhywun

        I like Identity and Room 1406. I have no opinion on his acting skills other than a sense of competency.

    • The Hyperbole

      Stephen King, you get ‘twist’ that are telegraphed, it’s all he knows.

      • cyto

        To be fair, I did not see the child orgy coming.

      • The Hyperbole

        Point taken, I should say he also knows how to end a story without actually ending it. The first few times he tricks you into thinking that monster is defeated only in the last paragraph to hint that the monster is only pining for the fjords and not dead dead is kinda cool, seven hundred stories later it’s a bit played out.

      • cyto

        Yeah, I have read a significant chunk of his library. Writers do tend to get predictable.

        The worst for me was one of my go-to writers when I was travelling. I needed an airplane read and one of my developers recommended LE Modessit. Dude wrote the same novel twice a year for decades.

        Once he got in such a rut that he wrote variations of “he offered a twisted smile” every two or three pages through half the book. “A smile twisted across his face” over and over.

        Clearly his editor quit actually reading the books after a while.

      • rhywun

        This. I read the book when it came out; it didn’t leave me wanting to watch a movie based on it – nor to read the book again.

  18. cyto

    The article on green energy being rejected mentions wind turbines leaving dead bats strewn about, among other things.

    I find this hard to believe. I don’t know anything directly, just that bats can dodge BBs and pellets from air rifles in mid flight in the dark. I would assume they can dodge a giant propeller blade.

    • The Hyperbole

      The humming from the giant blades spinning fucks up their sonar and they can’t help but be ginsu’ed, or so I’ve been told. Same with the whales, it’s the vibrations, it fucks with their internal GPS’s and makes them beach themselves.

  19. LCDR_Fish

    BTW…don’t want to spam, but if anyone is looking to get into 40k…I just listed a complete starter army with all the intro manuals on ebay. Some assembly required.

    • cavalier973

      You moving to another game, or just getting rid of excess stuff?

  20. rhywun

    Nothing to see here.

    I played https://squaredle.com 03/02:
    53/53 words (+3 bonus words)
    🎯 In the top 32% by accuracy
    🔥 Solve streak: 2

  21. UnCivilServant

    I finished painting the damn jetbikes. I have two weeks to paint the generic space elf militia (11 models), but I’m taking a break to paint an Avatar of Khaine.

    Turns out, if I churn through all the space elves I’ve got, I have a full army without buying anything else. The only bit of dread in that is that seven more of the models are jetbikes. 🙁

    • Stinky Wizzleteats

      Space elf militia, eh? This some kind of fetish thing?

    • UnCivilServant

      Is it morning already? I mean pork is in the oven slow roasting, and I’m waiting for the basecoat to dry on the model I’m working on.

      • Sean

        Mmmm…roast pork.

    • Gender Traitor

      I’m up! I’m up! Chai latte is heating on the stove, then I can restart my Sunday morning choral music show on the satellite radio. (It starts at 5:00 a.m. now, for cryin’out loud!)

      Good morning Sean, U, and Stinky!

    • Suthenboy

      For a critter able to conceive of very noble ideals and sophisticated, abstract insights we sure appear to be a howling, screeching pack of shit-flinging monkeys.
      People…so flawed yet ya’ gotta love ’em.

      Oh wait, no you don’t.

    • Gender Traitor

      Using plural pronouns to refer to a known individual drives me crazy./pedant