Brave New World

Blog Post
Larry-Lambert

 

 

Bullet Points:

** Democrats still embrace the absurdity of empowering transgender females to compete in sports against biological females as if there is no physical disadvantage in the latter doing so. A 2024 United Nations (UN) study revealed that transgender female athletes have won nearly 900 medals in women’s sports. It’s a brave new world. I wish I could say that the 900 number is an April Fool’s joke, but it’s not.

** Live sex shows – stage shows in the Big Easy, dog and pony shows in the Philippines and Tijuana, Hai-Dozo shows in Japan – are they being replaced by Internet porn? Would starring in that sort of live production (maybe with some of her former famous tricks) help Kamala Harris’s chances of being elected governor of California? Or would you skip the show and go for the snack served by the food truck outside?

** There is one aspect of party leadership Democrats seem firm on. President Joe Biden has offered to be the party’s messenger in a move comparable to the Titanic’s captain – had he survived its sinking in 1912 –seeking a new command afterward. Pedo Joe’s offer hasn’t been enthusiastically embraced among the party faithful. We do not know whether this is due to the party not yet having a message to promote or the fear that, if there is one, Biden will be unable to remember it.

** The flood of illegal aliens – some call it a hoard of the great unwashed – has slowed to a trickle along the US Border.  (See left) The goal of deporting all of the illegals who came into the US during the Biden regime is lofty, and I don’t know how it will be accomplished. If they’re arrested and don’t belong in the US, that’s a more straightforward metric. They’ll hide in sanctuary cities until those cities are forced to disgorge them and I think that many will self-deport when they find that they can’t get work, and all the free programs to support them go away.

** National security and intelligence experts say the upheaval in Washington as Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency guts government agencies presents an unprecedented opportunity for Russia, China, and other adversaries to recruit informants. Every former federal worker with knowledge of or access to sensitive information or systems could be a target. When thousands of them leave their jobs simultaneously, that creates many targets and a counterespionage challenge for the United States. “This information is highly valuable, and it shouldn’t be surprising that Russia and China and other organizations — criminal syndicates for instance — would be aggressively recruiting government employees,” said Theresa Payton, a former White House chief information officer under President George W. Bush, who now runs a cybersecurity firm.

** VDH on the California existential crisis.

** Trying to pin down the precise number of lives that have been lost so far in the Russia- Ukraine war, now grinding into its third year, proved to be pretty impossible. I’ve noticed a lot of different numbers floating in reports and estimates. Some are unreliable, shrouded in secrecy, or tangled up in propaganda. We do know that soldiers and civilians alike have paid a steep price on both sides. In short, if we are to trust lower estimates (BBC/Mediazona for Russia), the best idea I could come up with is a total of between 201,685 and 266,685 civilian and soldier deaths. However, if Ukraine’s massive 839,040 figure is closer to reality (many doubt it, assuming it includes wounded, not just lives lost), the total could be closer to 895,000. When it comes to credibility, both sides have reason to fudge. Russia might downplay to avoid panic and loss of morale. Ukraine might inflate enemy losses for morale reasons. The UN’s civilian count is said to be the most trusted, but even they say it’s a floor, not a ceiling. The BBC’s estimate is incomplete. As for Ukraine’s 839,040 claim for Russian troops, Western analysts like those at The Economist pegged Russia at 462,000 to 728,000 casualties by mid-2024.

** Am I the only one here trying to wrap my head around the fact that 1975 was fifty years ago?

** (zerohedge) The recession has been canceled.

** Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty, Radio Free Asia, National Public Radio – does America need state (taxpayer-funded) radio stations/systems?

 

Mail Box

I posted about boating around Catalina Island (Los Angeles County, California) and received this question:

Q – LL, who owns Catalina Island?

A – Here we go.

1846: Mexican Governor Pio Pico granted Thomas Robbins the island as a Mexican land grant.

1848: California, including Catalina Island, became part of the United States after the Mexican-American War and the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo.

1850: Robbins sold the island to José María Covarrubias.

1853: Covarrubias sold the island to Albert Packard of Santa Barbara.

1864: Once considered the wealthiest man in California, James Lick owned the entire island.

1887: George Shatto purchased Catalina Island from the Lick estate and envisioned turning it into a tourist resort.

1891: Lick sold the island to the sons of Phineas Banning.

1894: The Banning brothers established the Santa Catalina Island Company and began developing the island into a resort destination.

1919: William Wrigley Jr. purchased the island and developed Avalon as a resort destination.

1975: Philip Wrigley deeded 42,135 acres of the island from the Santa Catalina Island Company to the Catalina Island Conservancy.

 

USA GDP – Divided in Half

 

Foreign Direct Investments

 

Bail-Out Guns?

Some Messerschmitt Bf 109s had a K98 stored in the rear of the aircraft, like this Messerschmitt BF109G-2/Trop at RAF Cosford.

Photo taken at RAF Cosford, England

 

Identify the Aircraft

1

 

2

28 built

 

3

126 built

 

Parting Shot

Dumb former whore.

When Americans thought she was the worst vice president ever, along came the uber-masculine Tampon Tim—the evil Pillsbury dough boy.

 

End

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58 thoughts on “Brave New World”

  1. Identify the Aircraft:
    1. Kamov Ka-52 Hokum B
    2. Kamov Ka-31 Helix
    3. Mil Mi-28 Havoc

  2. Off topic, and not a spoiler, you knew that Paulie’s belt fed was going to be used sometime at some point in a dramatic way.
    Chekhov’s gun in a modern format.

  3. I’d like to see the GDP graphic compared to the population. All those orange dots look to be big cities. Atlanta, Miami, Palm Beach, Houston, Dallas … you get the picture.

  4. 1975: Talk to somebody under 30 for an hour; it’ll seem like that year was a thousand in the past…
    *
    Radio: Taxpayer funded propaganda outlets were probably worth it when the nation wasn’t broke,
    and the propaganda they dispersed was pro-US. Now, nope.
    *
    I am suspicious of the GDP map, but there are lots of ways to play with statistics.
    *
    Rifles on a plane: If someone were going to give me a fighter plane, I would certainly want it to come
    with the matching rifle and luggage. Not that I could wedge my ass into most of them, anymore. Do
    they make fighter planes in “Gentlemens’ Husky” ?
    – Kle.

    1. PBS & NPR are getting defunded posthaste by Our President…should have been done decades ago as those two woman in front of the Committee proved they are propaganda arms of the Democrat party and America hater. In the past I really enjoyed some of the programs, but that was a few decades ago, now they are state run media that has no purpose because the Demented took over…like schools.

  5. Biden: These types simply cannot help themselves, believing – because of their inflated histories – to be relevant. This latest is his addled deteriorating brain rethinking his “glory days” (were there any, truly?) are the here and now.
    ***
    Watching that “To Catch a Smuggler” series…realizing with the visuals of people coming off flights from countries we know exist but don’t think about much (DR, Venezuela, some Asian places, some islands, etc…) that there are parts of humanity that have little self awareness and…dare I say…really bizarre behaviors. CBP has a tough job when it comes to allowing people in, even for a short time, let alone letting them back in when returning (yeah, they are among us in spades, especially after Mr Irrelevant opened up the place for all comers…now getting fixed in short order to – really strangely – the dismay of The Left, Dems, and a handful of activist judges who demand we kow tow to their “authority”). An eye opener for me seeing it in real time. The visuals alone are unnerving…considering this is 2025…but some cultures refuse to let go of the past(not speaking of cool cultural stuff, just the weirdo things). Maybe that’s just my white bread upbringing speaking.
    ***
    For some reason the opening graphic draws me into the scene…speed, sense, etc…which art should, regardless iffn it’s computer generated or not. Nicely done LL.

  6. Earthquake news and video out of Mynamar/Thailand area looks awful. Last I heard Mike Watson was in Thailand. Hope is ok….

    3. Al. Thank you kindly for your concern. We are OK. All we had here in Lop Buri were a couple of sets of strong tremors. I was at home on the computer when the first set hit and thought “that feels like an earthquake, but we don’t have earthquakes in Thailand”, then the second set hit and I thought “yes, thats definitely an earthquake”. My wife was out driving and shopping and did not feel a thing. When she got home, our eldest daughter rang to ensure we were OK and my wife had no idea what she was talking about.

      Chiang Mai, in the north, was the worst hit city in Thailand. In Bangkok a building under construction collapsed, killing, I think 10, and burying about 100 in the rubble. A couple of cranes, with people on them also collapsed. Other than that there was only superficial structural damage.

      1. And that’s before it went total stupid. Some of the earlier ones were actually funny, some were sick but funny. Now it’s all robots this, robots that, trans crap and how wonderful Canada and its health system is so much better than the USA.

    2. At least you draw the line somewhere MikeC, very courageous of you….otherwise we’d start to get concerned for your emotional fortitude.

  8. watching TV last night (Bosch) when an ad came on:
    I can understand TV actors speaking Spanglish (veracity, y’know), but I can’t understand why the actors in the ad (which had not the slightest thing to do with Mexico) have to speak “english” (small “e”) with a heavy Mexican accent.
    What are the advertisors trying to tell people?

    1. “What are the advertisors trying to tell people?”
      That they’re morons? The idea of some kind of pan-Latinx Culture is idiotic. Put Mexicans and Dominicans and Ricans and Cubans etc into a room and they aren’t going to spontaneously form some sort of magical Brown Brotherhood. They’ll carry on loathing each other as they’ve done for decades if not centuries. In other words, having actors with strong Mex accents is gonna put someone off. Someone brown, that is. Now if the goal is to sell to Mexicans primarily, okay fine. But if they think it’ll generally appeal to Brown People, they’re morons. If the actors are gonna speak English, better that they speak unaccented English.
      —
      I used to know a man who did telephone surveys (through a university, as serious sociology research; not telemarketing). His superpower was to be able to sound Mexican, or Rican, or whatever the respondent was. He had higher cooperation (people actually talk to you) and conversion (second/repeat caller after the person hung up on the initial caller) than any other Spanish speaker. He was continually annoyed by Admin insisting that simply speaking some variant of Spanish was enough. He said it was better to be an obvious gringo struggling with bad high-school Spanish than to sound like someone from an enemy camp.

  9. I agree with Klebert! And that variant of the Helix is an odd one… We finally got a look at one when the Indians got one, and it does have some ‘severe’ limitations with that barn door hanging off the bottom. It is speed restricted with the antenna deployed and rotating, and it cannot process the data, so it must be within link range of the carrier or platform it’s supporting.

    1. So that is what it was, an antenna, I thought it was carrying some weird military corrugated tin to build a hooch or officer’s club someplace…

    2. Why aren’t there a lot more contri-rotating choppers? It would seem to be more compact and you don’t have that long tail rotor boom and the weight associated with it?

        1. Tail rotor goes bad and you have a different kind of very bad day that ends up about the same way.

      2. There aren’t more contra-rotor helos for the same reason there aren’t more
        odd variants of all kinds of aircraft. Aircraft purchasers have a very, very strong
        conservative streak about aircraft appearance. Weird-looking aircraft are heavily
        selected against, and anything except min / tail rotor helos are considered
        weird-looking by the buyers.
        *
        Mesh-rotors have advantages too, and we only ever bought a couple of those.
        Tandem rotor machines were reasonably common for a while, but now we’re just
        down to the one, again.
        *
        Same thing happens with fixed-wing. There are defensible reasons for choosing the
        YF-22 over the -23, but the biggest in practice was the -23 was weird-looking. Also,
        DoD generally hates Northrop for some reason, and almost never buys their stuff
        unless it’s rebranded as a Douglas.
        *
        Back in the early Cold War, we just bought 300 of anything that occasionally flew,
        so we got a lot of weird stuff then, at least for a little while.
        *
        YMMV, but that is my read on aerohistory.
        – Kle.

  10. 110% off-topic
    the very strong effort to dumb down the American male
    The wife wanted me to change the old round 3-prong double receptacle sitting a foot to the left and two feet above the sink; she wanted a new GFCI Decora.
    Why do I have to pull a permit to replace the old receptacle? Why am I strongly advised (almost a mandate) to pay a licensed electrician who wants over $100 when all I’d have to do is
    1. switch off the power to the old unit at the box and test the socket to make sure it’s not live,
    2. unscrew two screws holding the faceplate,
    3. unscrew the two screws holding the socket to the box and pull the socket forward,
    4. unscrew the three screws engaging the wires to the socket,
    5. reassemble in reverse order,
    6. switch the power back on at the box and test the circuit breaker; a job taking all of about 15 minutes tops.

    Why do I have to pull a permit and have an inspector come to examine the licensed electrician’s workmanship?
    Am I that fumble-fingered that I’m unable to use a screwdriver; am I that dumb that I can’t read the instructions that come with the new socket?

        1. You and me…do it live but I wear a pair of nitrile gloves for the just in case. Metal box and the power gets shut off. But as ….can’t believe I’m repeating this…Bill Maher said while railing against California permitting idiocy, “Why do I have to pull permit to fix my roof? It’s my damn roof and I should be able to fix it without some bureaucratic interfering and taking three weeks while it leaks.”
          –
          Have to agree…hate stupid permits on private residential property, just another takings…I’ll stop there for fear I mess up my chi.

          2. Permits? I don’t need no stinking permits! My brother and me have done a lot of remodeling and repairs without the city/county knowing one thing about it. Now if it was to change the footprint of the house then yes we got them, but not for replacing a roof, or rewiring or plumbing and certainly not for HW heaters. I miss rural Alabama, only permit even for a new house is a septic system and the first electric service installed, they didn’t care if you lived in a tar paper shack as long as you had a working septic system and a code breaker panel.

          3. Cederq…answers all my arguments against permits I would have made to Boron in an extended vent…besides delaying project flow and paying for all manner of county idiocy (like funding the department along with mental health stuff for other people) by and thru permit “fees” (aka taxes). It’s my property, as long as I’m not hurting anyone and the septic and power are compliant to [ever expanding lobbyist generated] code, then stay out of my yard and back pocket. But “officials” have this trick they pull: The ability to justify anything for health and safety that ends up costing taxpayers even more (like 18% tax on SSA on stolen wages from age 15 until now…nothing but thieves who get away with their thievery while fleecing the good citizen).

        2. In 2006, we bought 40 acres in Northern Arizona with absolutely nothing on it. That year we had a well drilled and a septic tank installed. Those contractors pulled permits for those two special items because that is the law and the cost was included in the work. No county inspectors ever came out to check, because we are 10 miles off pavement and the state of the roads at that time actively discouraged travel on them.

          After that, I built a well house, brought in a manufactured home (and hooked it to power, electrical, and supply/drain plumbing), built a house addition, built a barn, built a retaining wall, built two greenhouses, and innumerable other improvements with zero permits. Because we have dairy goats and my wife makes various cheese products that she would like to be able to sell without restrictions, we brought in a building that we are now fitting out to be a commercial kitchen. In order to get that approved, I had to pull permits from the county for the usual things. That has been a tremendous pain in the neck, but because I love my wife dearly, I am doing this for her. It’s been going on for over a year now, but it should all be done and approved by July. My smile is sometimes me gritting my teeth for more intrusive involvement by the county.

      2. going to the town office and paying them a fee to get a sticker to place on my front door to let one and all know that I’m doing something to my residence and, for their (one and all’s) safety I think, the town will send out an inspector to assure everyone that the job was done according to Hoyle – uh! CODE (the book may weigh 5 lbs or more)..

          1. Got it.
            I pulled a permit to put an addition on the back of my house. I didn’t want to get caught and find. The inspector said he’d probably have never caught on unless he had to drive by to watch a contractor who was putting in doors or windows on my neighbors and saw me.
            I pulled the permit, got him to give me a lot of variances on insulation and roof support which was good of him and then I never called him back to do an inspection. That way I don’t have to pay increased property taxes on it.

          2. Very sneaky…but see, this is what they do to good people, cause you to feel guilty for a thieving system they demand you comply. Same as with property taxes, more takings that effectively are you renting from the local government…because…don’t pay money to do with what government wants without your say, they can seize your property. How is that American or Constitutional? But the argument is always “because it’s always been done therefore should be done”. Time to DOGE all levels.

          3. Where do you live that you have to pull a permit for an electrical outlet!?
            R.I. is a Kafkaesque bureaucratic totalitarian hell and panopticon surveillance
            State, but you don’t need a permit for that here…
            *
            Also, it’s so vastly corrupt that hardly anyone pulls permits for even things
            that need permits in some legitimate way. You just pay under the table
            and Harry Tuttle sets you up.
            *
            Yeah, I do that stuff live, too. Safer that way. If you (somehow) screw something
            up, you know immediately, and can respond, instead of putting it all back together,
            going down to the basement, coming back upstairs, and then finally seeing that
            the house is now on fire.
            *
            Do they want a permit for changing light bulbs, and turning the tap water on
            and off, too?
            – Kle.

  11. My 80 year old electrician buddy does all of his rework live. That way I know exactly when I “F” it up, and I don’t have to look for the problem after I’ve finished

  12. Maybe in the next four years some form of DOGE will trickle down to the county and city level. For all the money spent on permits and inspectors, can we hope for competency?
    I was among the first to move into this four story 96 apartment building. On the ground floor, an apartment wasn’t connected to the sewer line. Hallway floor had to be jack hammered open.
    Fourth story apartments got wet after the first heavy thunderstorm as 1/4 of the roofing got blown away. What was installed wasn’t what was specified but was signed off by the city inspectors.

  13. Our house was hit by a small tornado in 2015 in rural Texas. My west coast brother insisted we had to have permits to rebuild and that I was required to get hurricane straps because I am in a high wind area. The only permit required in rural Texas is an approved septic system and the well has to be a hundred feet away. We did not have to get any permits. Inspections were up to me and the bank. I chose 2×6 walls and hurricane straps myself for the wind and insulation. I did not use spray foam due to the cost. I chose a steep metal roof to skid the hail. I planned my own fire resistance exterior and landscaping. I chose a sealed propane fire place because I like I fire and the charge $40 a month connect fee for gas. I chose an electric water heater because it is cheaper and we do not use much hot water. I do my electrical work live 1/2 the time. The permits would not improve my house. Permits are just a racket and a power trip for local government and the people who support them and who think they should tell everyone what to do. Tom

  15. Problem is, the GDP counts government activity, like USAID, and government-mandated activity, like rejecting fossil fuels, as economically-valuable productive activity.

  16. Regarding Illegals. It’s really a simple thing. Automatically cancel all electronic banking cards, all fed provided phones, all state/fed backed loans and mortgages, all driver licenses, all leases signed by illegals, forfeiture of all federal benefits paid into the system (like Social Security) and then, to really put the hurt on them, put a 75%, or 100%, tax on all outbound money transfers unless backed up by a RealID/Proof of US Citizenship.
    –
    Any arrests of illegals should include immediate deportation if not involved in any other criminal prosecution.
    –
    Any arrests for more than illegal entry should result in 10 years imprisonment additional to whatever charges they caught. Served consecutively. And that part will be served as soon as the turds are released from local or state prisons. In a federal prison. Above the Arctic Circle or on some out of the way place like Johnston Atoll or even maybe Newark.
    –
    Illegal entry should be a very painful and life-destroying event. And the illegals should pay and pay and pay for their foolishness in thinking they could get away with it.
    –
    To further piss off all the illegal and semi-legal immigrants, no one shall get a commercial drivers license without passing a driving/road rules test in English. And provide a bond to cover any and all legal expenses incurred by said drivers.
    –
    And cancel that stupid birthright citizenship bullscat. That crap was never legal, just allowed by unAmerican Americans.
    –
    Ain’t gonna go on about shooting the bastids. Or setting up toe-poppers, bouncing Betties and other anti-personnel boomish devices on our borders.

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