[See You in Hell is a feature by our guest blogger, Satan — PE]
Did you know that there’s a neighborhood in Manhattan called Hell’s Kitchen? I drop by randomly to say, “Bonjour douchebag, make me a waffle!”
See you in Hell!
See You in Hell’s Kitchen
On the Infanticide Marie Farrar
Marie Farrar: month of birth, April
Died in the Meissen penitentiary
An unwed mother, judged by the law, she will
Show you how all that lives, lives frailly.
You who bear your sons in laundered linen sheets
And call your pregnancies a ‘blessed’ state
Should never damn the outcast and the weak:
Her sin was heavy, but her suffering great.Therefore, I beg, make not your anger manifest
For all that lives needs help from all the rest.
A translation of the entire poem is available here, among other places.
Good Catholics
You cannot be a good Catholic and support expanding a government-approved right to kill innocent human beings.
San Francisco — that’s Nancy Pelosi’s parish! I’m not opposed to abortion myself but I am opposed to politicians like Pelosi and Biden who market themselves as “good Catholics” while maintaining a weird reverence for abortion.
Thomas Jefferson: Without Citing Any Evidence
My fellow Americans –
I noticed during the Trump presidency that the press developed an affectation where they reported everything he said as “Trump said ‘blah blah blah,’ without citing any evidence.” [Emphasis is my own.]
Why Trump was the only human being held to this standard was never clear to me, but I thought of it again this week and perhaps it’s time for a resurrection of “without citing any evidence.”
For example, President Biden’s announcement of a victorious withdrawal from Afghanistan might have been better presented as “President Biden, without citing any evidence, called the American withdrawal from Afghanistan a success.”
Or when the August jobs report was released, showing that the economy added a disappointing 235,000 jobs vs. an estimate of 720,000, to which the president responded “The Biden plan is working,” more meticulous reportage could have been “‘The Biden plan is working,’ said the president, without citing any evidence.”
And, for that matter, without even saying what “the Biden plan” is. Possibly the Biden plan is to hit the brakes on the economy in which case it is working.
We were the people who were not in the papers. We lived in the blank white spaces at the edges of print. It gave us more freedom. We lived in the gaps between the stories. — Henry David Thoreau
Thomas Jefferson: Afghanistan Withdrawal a “Victory”?
My fellow Americans –
President Biden has declared our withdrawal from Afghanistan a success. With all due respect, has this man lost his fucking mind? Imagine King George in 1783 declaring the British withdrawal from America a success.
Afghanistan was our longest war — 20 years — but it’s not like we were fighting World War II over there. There had not been a US combat fatality in a year and a half until Biden got 13 soldiers blown up, left at least hundreds of Americans stranded with no way out of the country, created a humanitarian crisis affecting tens of millions of people, has our allies around the world pissing themselves, has turned America into a global laughingstock, and his response is that what happened was inevitable, despite his previous promises that it was not inevitable.
As one president to another, I say to Mr. Biden that when you are receiving fallen soldiers, you do it with dignity and respect. You don’t stand at ease, stuff your hands in your pockets, and look at your watch like there’s someplace else you’d rather be.
Everyone saw this, but the stories being told by the families of the fallen who met with Biden are even more damning. They describe him as snippy and dismissive.
In case you missed the Biden victory speech, I can summarize it for you:
We needed to get out of Afghanistan. How dare Trump make a deal to get out of Afghanistan. Any withdrawal was inevitably going to be messy, which is why it was Trump’s fault. The stranded Americans ignored “multiple warnings and offers to help them leave.” It’s like these idiots didn’t know the government would collapse in a week.
I eagerly await reports of the next Biden “victory.” I just thank god I’m already dead.
How to Get Permanently Banned From Twitter
Alex Berenson, conservative commentator, one-time New York Times reporter, and vaccine dissenter has been permanently banned from Twitter for, according to a Twitter spokesperson, “repeated violations of our COVID-19 misinformation rules.”
According to Berenson, the tweet that got him banned was this:
It doesn’t stop infection. Or transmission. Don’t think of it as a vaccine. Think of it — at best — as a therapeutic with a limited window of efficacy and terrible side effect profile that must be dosed IN ADVANCE OF ILLNESS. And we want to mandate it? Insanity.
It is hard to sift information from misinformation on COVID and any number of other topics but I do NOT trust the meatheads at Twitter to take on that role in my life.
Looking at the above tweet, what is the misinformation? My understanding is that the vaccine is intended to be effective against hospitalization and death, but not necessarily against infection. It definitely does not prevent transmission. Even the CDC agrees on that point. (See this NPR article for more on vaccine effectiveness, or lack thereof, against infection and transmission.)
We’re already talking about booster shots, which implies “a limited window of efficacy.” “Dosed in advance” is true, right?
The side effect profile I don’t know enough about to characterize, but up until a few days ago when the Pfizer vaccine was approved by the FDA, all of the COVID vaccines were, and the others still are, experimental treatments for emergency use.
I made a decision to get vaccinated myself but if someone were to say “Drug trials normally take years in order to assess the long-term effects, whereas the long-term effects of COVID vaccines are necessarily unknowable at this time,” I couldn’t say they were wrong.
Everybody Knows
Everybody knows that the dice are loaded
Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed
Everybody knows the war is over
Everybody knows the good guys lost
Everybody knows the fight was fixed
The poor stay poor, the rich get rich
That’s how it goes
Everybody knows
Woke White Boy: Antifa vs. Anti-Vaxxers
You can have any kind of left-wing demonstration — women’s marches, Gay Pride parades, Black Lives Matter, pro-choice, political rallies — and you never have violent right-wing nutjobs turn up to disrupt them. I don’t know why.
But when we hear about right-wing demonstrations like the anti-vaccine Freedom Rally in Santa Monica this weekend, that means it’s time to break out the black togs, bats and bike locks to give those fuckers a nice warm Antifa welcome.
[Editor’s note: Isn’t violent suppression of opposing views the actual definition of fascism?]
I don’t fucking know. I just know these fuckers better get vaccinated and maybe a good beating is just the incentive they need.
[Editor’s note: Shouldn’t there be more fellow feeling for a group that doesn’t want the government to tell them what to do?]
No! It’s not the government telling them what to do, it’s Antifa telling them what to do. We told them that we can’t feel safe if they don’t get vaccinated and they won’t do it. I mean, how fucking selfish can you get?
— WWB
If I could go back to my younger self, especially in the most difficult times, I would just say, don’t worry. Just do what you feel in your heart and everything will be all right. — Emmylou Harris
How Long Does it Take to Get Hired?
From LinkedIn News:
How long does it take to get hired? That depends on the field of work you’re in, according to a new analysis by LinkedIn’s Economic Graph team looking at confirmed hires on the platform from June 2020 to March 2021.
The data shows that technical positions take the longest time to fill (the median turnaround in engineering is 49 days). By contrast, everything moves faster in non-technical fields, such as sales (38 days) and customer service (34 days).
I’m a software engineer. I did a phone interview with Company A, two managers on the call, we did a tech screen and the gist of it was, “Great job, we’ll set you up for the next interview a week from tomorrow.”
Meanwhile Company B did one Zoom call and was ready to make an offer the next day.
Top candidates are not going to stay on the market for a month and a half while you go through your leisurely, laborious hiring process. Who do you think you’re going to hire with a 2-month waiting period? I can get eight job offers just in the time you’re screwing around between interviews. When I’ve hired people, I can tell within one 30-60 minute conversation whether or not I want to hire them.
- Do not make candidates talk to anyone who is not able to make a hiring decision.
- Do not make candidates talk to HR people.
- Do not make candidates interview with your boss, your boss’s boss, etc. Part of my job as a manager is to be a sheepdog, guarding my flock from predators like my boss and my boss’s boss.
Thus spoke The Programmer.
See You in Hell, Educators
[See You in Hell is a feature by our guest blogger, Satan — PE]
Greetings mortals!
Even though an alarmingly high percentage of Americans think the sun orbits the earth, can’t find the Pacific Ocean on a map, half the residents of Detroit can’t read, rather than teach basic literacy, science or geography, K-12 public school teachers in the U.S. will be teaching “expanding” gender identities and “evolving” sexual orientations.
This instruction will be informed by the National Sex Ed Standards: Core Content and Skills, K-12 (Second Edition)
I included a link to it because you will not believe me when I tell you what’s in it.
For example:
BY THE END OF THE 5TH GRADE, STUDENTS SHOULD BE ABLE TO:
- Distinguish between sex assigned at birth and gender identity and explain how they may or may not differ.
- Define and explain differences between cisgender, transgender, gender nonbinary, gender expansive, and gender identity.
- Explain that gender expression and gender identity exist along a spectrum.
A spectrum — like light!
Oh I love it! Folks, there are 72 glorious pages of this stuff.
Americans are the fattest, dumbest people on the planet and they’re teaching 5th graders to explain “gender expansive”!
A teacher came through the gates here recently as I was perusing these wonderful new Sex Ed standards.
“I would never teach that bullshit,” she said, when she saw what I was reading.
“Really?!” I was taken aback. “Don’t you have to teach it if it’s written into the standards?”
“I didn’t have to do anything once I closed the classroom door. And of course we always have the option of quitting. What I taught my students was the habit of deciding difficult questions in favor of the evidence, or of leaving questions undecided when the evidence is inconclusive, which I’d call intellectual integrity. On divisive issues like race or gender, it’s not a teacher’s job to indoctrinate other people’s children. Let the parents talk to the kids about these issues but I sure as hell was not going to do it. Pardon the derogatory reference.”
“Well madam, I believe there’s been a logistical error and you are in the wrong place.”
As for the rest of you . . .
See you in Hell, educators!
The Great Virtue of a Free Market System
The great virtue of a free market system is that it does not care what color people are; it does not care what their religion is; it only cares whether they can produce something you want to buy. It is the most effective system we have discovered to enable people who hate one another to deal with one another and help one another.
Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced. — James Baldwin
Make voyages. Attempt them. There’s nothing else. — Tennessee Williams
Nobody made a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could do only a little. –Edmund Burke
Aside
What is the difference between the actual problem posed by my situation and my perception of and feelings about my situation?
Experienced Leaders
“I’m an experienced leader! I don’t need a goddamn arrow telling me which way to proceed!”
The Kaepernick Encounter
I was pumping gas at a local station when I noticed another guy pumping gas wearing a Colin Kaepernick jersey. It may add something to the story to know the race of the guy in the jersey so I’ll tell you that he was a black guy.
“You got a problem with the jersey?” the guy asked me.
I was actually just trying to get a clear look at the name on the jersey so I could read it, but the guy was apparently on a hair trigger to begin with.
“Not with the jersey or you wearing the jersey, but Nike probably paid someone in Vietnam a dollar a day to stitch that jersey while Kaepernick himself gets paid millions to complain about inequality. You see the disconnect? Let him stitch his own jerseys, I mean what the hell else is he doing? He’s not playing football.
“Did that answer your question?”
Is Christmas a Joyous Day? (A Movie Review)
SPOILERS AHEAD!
The central character in this movie is a Buddhist monk who has achieved immortality, he looks about 50 but he no longer ages.
There is, however, a prophecy that a girl born in the same town that he was born in, but 100 years later, will kill him. [SPOILERS START HERE] So for the last 14 years, he has had his disciples locate and murder every girl born in that city in the year 1999. In most cases, the bodies were disposed of so the cases were treated as missing persons, or in some cases, as accidents.
(As I write this, it does seem like the police should have been able to connect the dots a little sooner.)
When you see it in a movie like this, it seems grotesque and inhuman that a religious leader would order a mass murder of children in order to preserve his own legacy.
But the parallel is to the Massacre of the Innocents accompanying the birth of Jesus, in which King Herod ordered the murder of every male infant two years old and under in the vicinity of Bethlehem.
“Is Christmas a joyous day?” one character asks another, referring to the fact that we celebrate the birth of Jesus, while sweeping under the rug the resulting mass murder of infants, presided over by an approving Christian God.
(I don’t think it suffices to say that an omniscient, omnipotent being could not have known about or prevented the slaughter.)
Rating: 
Svaha: The Sixth Finger
Pastor Park works to expose suspicious religious groups. He's hired to look into the cult group Deer Mount. Meanwhile, Police Captain Hwang investigates a murder case and the main suspect is a member of the Deer Mount cult.Director: Jang Jae-hyun
Cast: Lee Jung-jae, Park Jeong-min, Lee Jae-in
IMDb rating: 6.3 (5978 votes)