Will the government be forever, rolling out a new and better plague for us every time that the poll numbers dip below 20% approval? You be the judge.

 

VAX me, Boost me, the BS continues

Just a few days before the end of the semester, Cornell University is shutting down its campus and moving final exams online because of a recent surge in COVID-19 cases among its overwhelmingly vaccinated student population.

In a message released Tuesday, Cornell President Martha E. Pollack told the campus community that the university’s surveillance testing “has continued to identify the rapid spread of COVID-19” among students.

According to the Ivy League school’s website, 97 percent of the overall population on the Ithaca, New York campus has been fully vaccinated. That includes 100 percent of professional faculty, 93 percent of other employees, and 99 percent of undergraduate students. As of Dec. 12, there are 469 active student cases, including 214 newly confirmed positives.

 

Under Interesting Reads, I offer this review of 1984 by Isaac Asimov. It’s worth your time.

And if you find that you don’t have the time to read it, I’ll jump to the bottom for you, “To summarise, then: George Orwell in 1984 was, in my opinion, engaging in a private feud with Stalinism, rather than attempting to forecast the future. He did not have the science-fictional knack of foreseeing a plausible future and, in actual fact, in almost all cases, the world of 1984 bears no relation to the real world of the 1980s.”

“The world may go communist, if not by 1984, then by some not very much later date; or it may see civilization destroyed. If this happens, however, it will happen in a fashion quite different from that depicted in 1984 and if we try to prevent either eventuality by imagining that 1984 is accurate, then we will be defending ourselves against assaults from the wrong direction and we will lose.”

 

DEFUND the POLICE

Every time I hear some liberal turd talking about eliminating their police department in the name of “equity” or whatever new woke word, I start making popcorn.  All of the racially sensitive commercials on TV and productions on Netflix don’t change the reality on the ground. Reports that the semi-elites are arming themselves to defend from the mob, huddling behind that metal gate that separates them from the great unwashed – is entertainment to me.

The “aggressive shopping” (was looting) could be stopped in a single day. Kill the looters. If there was a rabid dog outside your house, with police de-funded and no animal control, you’d do the same, wouldn’t you? None of these looters are stupid. The woke offer them free wares and the inner city people take them and fence them on e-bay.

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27 COMMENTS

  1. The lib understanding of human nature is so far off the mark you have to wonder at times what their home world sky color was.
    When they get caught up in their own unintended consequences…it’s popcorn time, indeed.

    • How many businesses will offer themselves up for destruction to agents of the inner city? How do their stockholders feel about it?

  2. Can I assume that you’re recommending Asimov’s review because the section you highlighted can be interpreted to mean that the (ostensible) communist left is not the only enemy of liberty? That’s true, but my take from the body of the review is that Asimov feels the need to take down Orwell (thereby making Asimov as the reviewer seem “smarter than the great Orwell”), criticizing him for “bad science fiction” when he was not in fact a science fiction writer. It’s like that smug jackass Garry Trudeau’s framing everyone’s work as “reporting” after they gave him a Pulitzer Prize. (Yes, Trudeau did this in the forward to a Calvin & Hobbes book, of all things.)

    In full disclosure, I have serious problems with Asimov. As a teenager I found Asimov largely unreadable, his books filled with (to me) uninteresting, indeed even abhorrent characters without the qualities (or vices) that make us human. The Foundation trilogy was particularly dreadful. Hari Seldon’s vision of Foundation is ALL about controlling the masses, the sheep, for their own good, forever. Blogger and Youtuber “Morgoth” makes the points better than I can — if you can decipher the Northooomburlund accent.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TxTz4pIXTFY

    As an adult, the more I learned about Asimov and the Futurians the more abhorrent I found them. (FWIW I’m not a fan of Arthur C. Clarke either.)

    Now that I’ve bitched about two often revered Science Fiction figures, you may wonder, is there anyone I do approve of? Sure. Among Asimov and Clarke’s contemporaries, Poul Anderson was trained as a physicist, but he was hardly the stilted, awkward technocrat; there was great humanity in his characters (especially the earlier stuff). Lois McMaster Bujold occasionally touches on deep and vital truths on the human condition. H. Beam Piper’s protagonists and heroes are nearly all men and women I’d love to have a drink with. I could go on, but this is long enough.

    • Tried reading Asimov’s commentary on the Bible once. I was surprised it made it into print, but I guess he was trading on his reputation.
      Bujold – I’ve repeated the line that “we choose our mate in a time of life involving maximum ignorance and confusion”. It gets good reactions.

    • I’m not recommending Asimov’s interpretation, I just noted that it’s worth the read. I was never a big fan of Foundation, Foundation and Empire, etc. He’s widely lauded. I still maintain that it’s worth the read because it’s rare that you see Orwell challenged. In truth, most futurists are dismal failures in their capacity to predict much. Orwell pulled back the curtain on one possible future and we’re seeing a lot of that play out.

      • Now, I like(d) a lot of Asimov’s stuff. But his self-loving, ego-driven bullshit got too thick for me.

        And the Foundation series? Hmmm…. Let’s see, society is failing so some people set up two competing safeholds, one being a technocracy, the other being a bunch of, well, political workers and mental health workers with the goal of keeping technology surviving in the fallen future and trying to figure out how not to ever have a fallen future caused by small-minded stupid people joining into mobs.

        There. Three friggin boring books all surmised into one paragraph. Not a bad idea, kind of noble actually.

        Just… damn, Asimov is friggin boring. He could make a hot XXX movie sound like a nature documentary of the death of a snail.

        Didn’t help that he was basically a functional socialist, a classic secular New York Jew (yes, I said the magic phrase to get me yelled at by everyone as a bigot, no, I don’t hate religious Jews, I hate secular Jews, you know, the ones that shout “Death to Israel” and love them some palestinian terrorists, those ones.)

        Well, enough said about that.

  4. I can’t forecast the future beyond my father’s Belly Flapping Principal. His point, “People start changing when their belly starts flapping”.

  6. “The “aggressive shopping” (was looting) could be stopped in a single day. Kill the looters.”

    Carry on, RHSM.

    That aside, sure, Orwell was having a go at Stalinism and at its mindset. What’s Asimov trying to say? Don’t be overly literal with ’84? Well, the socialist, ahem, Old Etonian was/is literally in the x ring when it comes to leftist thought. So.

    • Orwell got a dose of the practical application of communism in Catalonia. They were looking to put his head on a pike at one point, and did in fact rub out some of his friends. Presumably that focused his attention marvelously.

      • Practical communism is an ugly revelation into the dark places of the human soul. As Orwell put it, the object of torture is torture.

  8. unpossible! for we all know the vax stops covid in its trax. …i thought looting was “undocumented shopping”?

  9. Covid: The bio-control-weapon all the narcissistic cult leaders wished they could have come up with and employed.

    The Vax: The safety mechanism the elites have devised to further their control over the new religion cult membership.

    Drink up me hearties…

  10. Asimov blew that prediction, didn’t he?

    Orwell called it perfectly, because he looked at what happened in Europe with the socialist takeover of all the nations there (even Great Britain.) And he realized that no matter how many times socialism (never done correctly, apparently) was knocked on its ass, it kept coming back bigger and better.

    Asimov liked socialism, as long as it didn’t affect his bank account. Just like all good rich socialists, like Warren and Sanders.

    Sigh. So smart but he never could figure out how humans, including himself, worked.

    And in real life, what a friggin turd. Right up there with other greats like Marion Zimmer Bradley for just being a sick f-ing person in real life. God, he’s the type of walking twitwaffle that, in the SCA, while fighting, I’d just automatically whack the living crap out of, even if he/she/it was on my own side, just because my body recognizes a threat and reacts way too often before common sense took over.

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