Map of the world of 1984.
The interesting thing about 1984 is that the only things we know about the world are things that Winston himself knows. Living under the face-stomping boot of Ingsoc, he knows only what his government tells him. The government tells him "we have always been at war with" whoever it is this week, and he has no other information to the contrary except what's stored in his own lying brain. (Hint: anyone who pipes up, "Last week, it was [other one] we've always been at war with!" gets a free trip to Room 101 courtesy of the Ministry of Love.)
The article I linked to postulates, "Airstrip One is not an outpost of a greater empire, but the sole territory under the command of Ingsoc, which fabricates eternal global war to keep its people permanently mobilised, scrutinised and on rations." I think that's the case, myself, and had that idea long before I needed to reference a map of 1984's world to make a point about the so-called debate over anthropogenic global warming.
And this is kind of a parallel case, in fact. The history of climatology looks like the flight path of a 737MAX with a bad angle-of-attack sensor. Going back over a century, you can look at the archives to find "Ice age coming!" and then "It's gonna get hot!" and then "Ice age inevitable!" and then "HOLY CRAP SOMEONE INVENT AIR CONDITIONING" and then "NO WE'RE GONNA NEED ALL THE FIRE" and then "SOOO DAMN HOT" and then "ICE AGE" and then "THE CONCRETE WILL MELT" and-and-and. Only in the most recent iteration, the people selling the schtick are trying to erase the evidence that there was ever any other theory put forth, or any evidence that those theories were correct.
Just like Winston Smith worked for the Ministry of Truth, and memory holed information that the State had decided was inconvenient or contrary to their preferred narrative, this William Connolley carefully worked to make sure that Wikipedia contained no facts contrary to the global warming party line.
And this is the best they can do.
Michael Mann faked results to get the "hockey stick" graph, and when it was uncovered, he didn't lose his job or even have to retract the paper. The government agencies which track the climate data routinely adjust it, monotonically, so that global warming appears. They've adjusted the historical data so much that 1998--the hottest year on record--is no longer such, but merely on the high side of average. And people like William Connolley routinely eradicate or alter information that contradicts their preferred narrative.
And those of us who are skeptical of anthropogenic climate change--because of these shananegans--they accuse us of denying science.
It would be infuriating if it wasn't so typical. These people are leftists, and they want to take control of the economy, and they don't care how they do it so long as they get it.
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Obama administration memory-holed a bunch of Obama speeches that were about immigration enforcement.
I was going to add a comment to that, but realized that sentence stands by itself quite nicely.
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This is a bit of a read but it explains why some cultures are superior to others.
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A cogent digest of the libel lawsuit against Oberlin College. Heh. Still smiling about that one.
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The funny thing about this is that if you remove Chicago, Detroit, and a couple of other cities, the US becomes something like the fourth safest country in the world:
What to these cities have in common? Democrat-run shitholes, all of them.
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So, the left is saying that Donald Trump will lose the 2020 election, but they're bemoaning the fact that Trump will effectively pick the Democrat nominee.
It's one thing or the other. You can't be powerful enough to decide for your enemy who you will face in the next election while--at the same time--being easily bumped out of office.
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And you can't refuse, either. So, New York City goes and declares a famous bookstore to be a landmark, thus enmeshing its owners in a tangled web of regulations that will probably force them out of business.
I know that we are not suppose to assume malice, that simple incompetence is much more likely--but considering that bookstores are outposts of learning, and leftists like the sitting major of NYC do best when people are ignorant? Well.
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Why, you lazy assholes! Get off your asses and go out there and start consuming! *sigh*
Millennials don't earn as much money as prior demographic groups did, not in terms of dollars or in terms of actual wealth. It's just that simple; the argument can be made--by carefully picking which statistics to cite--that they are no worse off, but it's not true. If you are in your twenties today, your total lifetime earning potential simply is not as high as it was for people who were in their twenties in the 1970s.
There are many reasons, but the biggest one is simply that taxation, deficit spending, and government mismanagement have squandered nearly all the wealth generated by the technological advances of the last thirty years.
We live in plenty; there is no question of that: the poor in America are many times richer than the poor in other countries. If you compare what is available today to what was available in 1979--goods and services we take for granted now did not exist then, not at any price.
But the ability to build a career, that has been strangled by a jungle of regulation and taxation. Where a person could once start a business in his garage, now he must get permits and licenses and have inspections and spend hours per day filling out government forms and reports. God help him if he hires too many employees, because the paperwork rises exponentially.
A local government cracking down on a kid for having an unlicensed lemonade stand--that, but multiplied a thousandfold. There are all these costs (hidden and outright) which government imposes, at local, stae, and federal levels, and they throttle the life out of nearly everyone who tries to navigate that labyrinth.
It results in a job market where even if you do everything right, you can find yourself abruptly laid off--and because employee loyalty is not rewarded, employees are no longer loyal.
The cost of getting the piece of sheepskin with your name on it has skyrocketed, but because that sheepskin is merely a qualification and everyone has one, you can't use it to get paid better. If you do the right thing and pay off your student debt first, you have no money for anything else.
And, of course, our government lets illegal aliens stroll across the border and does nothing to those who employ them, thus depressing wages.
Meanwhile, the government makes domestic manufacturing prohibitively expensive (with environmental regulation, and everything else) so the jobs that would pay reasonably well and allow people to make careers go overseas.
Crushing the millennials between low wages and high debt results in--yes--a generation which does not have any fucking money. Big surprise.
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Here we have a major step in the right direction. It helps to stem the tide of illegals--it closes one door. There are still hundreds of others open, but this helps.
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This is fucking hilarious in a schadenfreudealistic way. I feel no sympathy for DC bureaucrats--none at all.
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Second City Cop talks about the piece of shit that got killed in Memphis after he shot a guy in Mississippi and took his car. Okay, this guy:
named offender in a Mississippi shooting flees to TennesseeAnd this is someone the "community" chooses to riot over.
makes a video saying how he's not going down without a fight
is tracked down by US Marshals - not Memphis PD
rams numerous law enforcement vehicles
exits car with a gun
is sent to meet his maker - Satan we're assuming
A culture which idolizes thuggery and brutality to the exclusion of everything else is utterly worthless.
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"Once a year the gay community gathers together to remind us exactly why we don't want them around our children."
Sort-of related: What a pair of dicks.
I do want to state here for the record that the mere existence of mass-produced penis costumes makes me hang my head in shame.
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It's Saturday, and it stopped raining, but the clouds to the west look ominous.
Well, maybe a couple days this week I can get up early and cut some grass before work. Do it in chunks.
*sigh*