Welcome to the Internet

“Could I interest you in everything all of the time?”

The song was only posted on YouTube in June but already has 56 million views.

Pure genius from this guy Bo Burnham.

Also scary. I can’t help thinking that when the histories of the Chinese Xi Snot pandemic are written, The Internet is going be a big part of the picture of hysteria.

Living Loving Maid

Rumour has it that there’s a bit of a shitstorm happening with National at the moment. Perhaps I should have titled this post after the famous ACDC song, Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap, instead of Led Zep?

Oh well. In honour of what’s happening let’s start with causes of death in London, 1632. Readers are invited to apply any of these to Judith Collins – and possibly the National Party.

It would seem that the only difference between a conspiracy theory and the truth is now about six months to a year.

Conspiracy theorists have claimed a COVID-19 vaccine, when available, will be “forced” on everyone – including Kiwis.

The Government has rubbished those claims, made most notably by Jami-Lee Ross and Billy Te Kahika’s Advance NZ. 

Meanwhile in Hollywood some people have completely lost the plot on the Rittenhouse shootings.

For context you need to see the following, which is about actor Mark Ruffalo and his defence of “JoJo”.

This was always the logical outcome, and Antifa/BLM welcomed it and promoted it in 2020. Did they really think they’d be the only ones “punching Nazis”?

I like this American answer to the usual whining from foreign nations about US gun laws.

Also news from the world of “science”. The US is on target for having two million illegal aliens cross their Southern border this year.

K… K… K… Karl Marx and his never-ending story

Way back on October 8 I wrote a post about Biden’s nominee for the position of Office of Comptroller of the Currency, Saule Omarova:

The OCC charters, regulates, and supervises all national banks and federal savings associations as well as federal branches and agencies of foreign banks. The OCC is an independent bureau of the U.S. Department of the Treasury.

I titled that post, Karl Marx’s Economic Analysis and the Theory of Revolution in The Capital, since that was the title of her Masters Thesis at Moscow State University in the late 1980’s. I left it at that. The comments section closes automatically after two weeks to avoid spam.

Probably a good thing, because since then the bloody post has shown up every single day in the stats. I can only assume that around the world people are tapping the title of her thesis into their search engines in the hope of finding the original document, and ending up here at No Minister.

Sorry folks. I looked for it too at the MSU archives but no luck, and Ms Omarova is keeping her copy under lock and key. I don’t know why though as it couldn’t be any more damaging than what is already known about the Commie fanatic.

The Lemon Song

Is it Thursday?

That must mean I missed my usual Wednesday publication of entirely random stuff that turns up on the computer.

Oh well, that just puts me closer to Halloween. I see a few gateways and doorways have been done up around our neighbourhood but I assume they’ll be no Trick-Or-Treating this year. Parents may just take their little tykes around to look at the displays.

Actually the following could well be a real situation rather than satire.

As always the Babylon Bee has suggestions for costumes.

One Halloween costume I’ve never seen is that of a Samurai Warrior.

Admittedly, dressing up in costumes is so much everyday life nowadays.

S

Speaking of costumes the most famous external underpants wearer has had a makeover, with the latest development of Superman in the old world of comic books now being all about his son – and he’s gay because of course he is, and he no longer talks of Truth, Justice and The American Way because that’s just embarrassing nowadays. The Bee again:

This development will, of course, kill off DC Comic Books even further since their market was primarily cisgendered teenage boys. The only unrealistic thing about the following cartoon is that there really is nothing left to burn or save.

Meantime the real Clark Kent’s of our age are hot on the trail of today’s criminals – which is likely you or anybody with a sense of humour.

I’m literally shaking. Meantime in the USA another political “leader” also continues to have his nose tweaked with further developments of a theme that’s sweeping the nation.

That’s hardly a surprise given the problems hitting “President” Biden at the moment, with economic woes now moving ahead of concerns over pandemics. It always amuses me when Democrats get themselves in trouble, then try to defend the indefensible and then do so with arguments that are even worse than the problem they’re trying to cover up. The last time I recall this happening was in 2009 when the economy chose not to boom under Obama, leading to terms like “Funemployment” being created. But even that was better than this.

Yeah, I can smell the nostalgia for Soviet breadlines from here. Basically it’s all part of the plan.

I didn’t track down where the following came from but I’d bet it’s the New Yorker magazine as it’s both their cartoon style and subject matter.

More Insanity for your delight

Well you may not be delighted at the first item, especially if you have kids looking for a house in New Zealand.

I’ve removed the name of the real estate company as I see no reason to give them free advertising after they dropped this through our mailbox the other day.

A 71% increase above the CV. Obviously the house and other structures on the site are worth nothing.

This is not a flash area, even by the moderate standards of Glenn Innes in Auckland, yet this is what’s happening even there. They’re also quite open about land banking and development, as if things like the “brightline test” and no longer being able to deduct expenses as a renter just don’t amount to a speed bump.

That’s because these are companies with teams of lawyers and accountants, and there is no limit to how “money” can be shuffled around to avoid the prescriptive revenge of Leftist governments.

Friends of ours, a Russian immigrant family we met twenty years ago when they landed in NZ at the same time we did, lived in this very street until last year and after years of scrimping and penny pinching, did well enough out of this insanity to be able to buy a section not far away and build a new house. Given the racism from their neighbours that they had to put up with for years they were glad to go.

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The second item is something we all try to avoid, getting tangled up in government bureaucracy – and death.

Many years ago I laughed at one of the crazy stories from the book Catch 22. One of the characters, Doc Daneeka, is gaming extra income by getting flight pay via signing up to fly on standard shakedown flights of bombers that have been repaired. A quick flight around the base and it’s all good, but Daneeka doesn’t even want to do that and the pilots let it slide. Then one of these bomber flights – with his name on the roster – crashes into a nearby mountain in full view of the base. “Poor Doc Daneeka” says one man, even as the Doc, standing beside him, is saying, “but I’m right here”. He ends up living in a ripped up tent on the edge of the base, stealing food wherever he can. Even the amoral capitalist genius of Milo Minderbinder and the evil bureaucratic genius of PFC Wintergreen, cannot resurrect him. It gets to the point that people ignore him when he speaks to them. He also just vanishes from the story eventually, his true fate unknown.

Meet the modern French version of the Doc, Jeanne Pouchain, and marvel at real-life insanity.

‘They said I don’t exist. But I am here’ – one woman’s battle to prove she isn’t dead.

The letter informed her that a lawyer in a court case relating to her cleaning business had told the court that she had died, aged 53, in February 2016. Somehow, this unverified claim – there was no official death certificate, how could there be? – was allowed to go unchecked and unchallenged.

The thing that really gets me is that a relatively minor court could let this happen, but somehow higher courts and supposed authorities can’t seem to reverse the process:

Several courts, including the Cour de Cassation, the highest in the French judicial system, have examined the case and conceded there appeared to be “irregularities”, but deemed it was beyond their competence to bring Pouchain back from the dead. So who can? Pouchain’s local MP’s office tells me they have taken up her case. The MP, Valéria Faure-Muntian, told Pouchain she has spoken to the justice minister, Éric Dupond-Moretti, who is a member of the French bar and will keep a close eye on the case.

Aside from frozen bank accounts and not being able to access the French healthcare system, there’s also ordinary things like not having a passport and a driver’s licence, which crimp your lifestyle to say they least, although when I read this bit …

Then [the gendarme] looked on the central database and he said, ‘I wouldn’t drive if I were you, because you don’t exist. You don’t have a licence.’”

Ok. So what happens if they arrest her for that? Or for anything really? How can you charge a dead person with a crime, convict them and send them to jail? Perhaps she should have tried getting the system to fight itself to a resolution.

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The last concerns the hopeless story creation in Hollywood in the last twenty years, with a seemingly endless line of re-boots, sequels and super-hero movies being made – and starting to sag in box-office returns.

Somebody on social media decided to spark some ideas using merely the photos of two actresses.

The Age of Men is over. The Time of The Orc has come.

This will not be news for people who play Dungeons and Dragons, the now almost fifty year old, role-playing game beloved by generations of nerds.

Dungeons and Dragons goes woke.

Well shit! What hasn’t been going woke recently? From the article a bit of background for non D&D’rs.

The science-fiction fantasy game was created in 1974 by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson. Players pretend to be fantasy characters who are guided through adventures and scenarios by a dungeon master. 

By the early 1980’s, thanks to some insane and talented coders, I was playing a crude version of it with mates on our university’s computer system: the Digital Equipment Manufacturer (DEC) VAX 11/780, a 32-bit “minicomputer” that was far more attractive to learn on than the more common but huge IBM mainframes with their clunking batch-processing oriented architecture. Naturally we had to play the game in the wee small hours of the morning because 128Mb of RAM only goes so far even with a superb time-sharing OS. Typically for the times, nobody thought of commercialising it. After all, what computers could run such a thing from the comfort of your home?

🤣🤣🤣🤣

Anyhoo, I stopped playing it, whether on computers or in the traditional board version, as soon as I graduated. I thought it had been left behind with the world of nerds. It’s therefore been with baffled amusement that I’ve seen the Millennial and Gen Z generations glom on to it in recent years, with huge online viewing of D&D games on things like the live-streaming site, Twitch. (9 million viewers for one game in 2017: eat that TVNZ).

Because we lived in a vastly less inter-connected world, we weren’t aware for some years that D&D had played a significant role in the great 1980’s Satanic Panic bullshit, all because of one dickhead private “dick” hired by a family to find their missing 15-year old boy genius in 1979 – who just happened to be totally into D&D. There were others:

The panic continued into 1982 when Virginian high school student Irving Lee Pulling II killed himself. Patricia A. Pulling, his mother, claimed the game was responsible and founded ‘Bothered About Dungeons & Dragons.’ In 1984, Missouri teenager, Mary C. Towey, was strangled to death by Ronald G. Adcox and Darren Lee Molitor. What connected both cases? They all played D&D.

As you can imagine, by the time I and other nerds heard about this panic some years later it was merely good for uproarious laughter, scorn and ridicule of the moralising idiots pushing all the panic. It’s probably not surprising that sales went from from thousands per year to millions.

Which brings us to the moralising dickheads of today:

‘Throughout the 50-year history of D&D, some of the peoples in the game — orcs and drow being two of the prime examples — have been characterized as monstrous and evil, using descriptions that are painfully reminiscent of how real-world ethnic groups have been and continue to be denigrated,’ the statement reads. ‘That’s just not right, and it’s not something we believe in.

Oh FFS! What a complete and total load of crap. But it also ties in so well with other such developments, such as the drive to pervert the works of that dreaded Catholic Conservative, J.R.R. Tolkien (from which D&D took much inspiration), with a new Lord Of The Rings spinoff that’s going to employ all that hot and saucy Game of Thrones stuff, no doubt with really cool Elvish sex action among other things.

Ok. Let me think about that last a bit more.

Anyway, the problem with trying to pull this with D&D is that the gamers themselves will subvert it just as thoroughly as they did the “Satanic” bullshit.

‘The beauty of D&D is that players can ignore the official storylines, narratives, maps and characters if they find them ridiculous,’ radio host and D&D junkie Larry O’Connor told The Spectator. ‘So this entire exercise is performative to get attention but the actual players will just look the other way and laugh.’

They already are.

Even that isn’t new. Way back in 2003 McSweeney’s Quarterly took a witheringly precise slice at a supposedly “unused audio of a discussion between Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky”:

CHOMSKY: The film opens with Galadriel speaking. “The world has changed,” she tells us, “I can feel it in the water.” She’s actually stealing a line from the non-human Treebeard. He says this to Merry and Pippin in The Two Towers, the novel. Already we can see who is going to be privileged by this narrative and who is not.

ZINN: Of course. “The world has changed.” I would argue that the main thing one learns when one watches this film is that the world hasn’t changed. Not at all.

CHOMSKY: We should examine carefully what’s being established here in the prologue. For one, the point is clearly made that the “master ring,” the so-called “one ring to rule them all,” is actually a rather elaborate justification for preemptive war on Mordor.

ZINN: I think that’s correct. Tolkien makes no attempt to hide the fact that rings are wielded by every other ethnic enclave in Middle Earth. The Dwarves have seven rings, the Elves have three. The race of Man has nine rings, for God’s sake. There are at least 19 rings floating around out there in Middle Earth, and yet Sauron’s ring is supposedly so terrible that no one can be allowed to wield it. Why?

CHOMSKY: Notice too that the “war” being waged here is, evidently, in the land of Mordor itself — at the very base of Mount Doom. These terrible armies of Sauron, these dreadful demonized Orcs, have not proved very successful at conquering the neighboring realms — if that is even what Sauron was seeking to do. It seems fairly far-fetched.

I preferred it when his brain just froze

The Powerline guys have this right when they titled a post, “Our Bizarre President”.

They’re correct. Biden’s latest answers to questions in a press conference exhibits behaviour that can only be described by that word.

FFS, this is just painful. What the hell was working through his few remaining neurons that made him think that this is how a President answers questions. Was he trying to be funny? Was it a signature pickup line for Senators when he was hanging with Ted Kennedy, Chris Dodd and waitresses?

Poor fella thinks he’s in a library again. Call Jill! pic.twitter.com/qgbrViIizm

— Chris Stigall (@ChrisStigall) June 24, 2021

This guy has the nuclear codes. To think that in the 1980’s many of the same people, likely including Biden, were constantly ragging on Reagan’s age and mental fitness, who are now as quiet as mice when watching this pathetic old fossil.

I like Kamala Harris about as much as the average Democrat voter does and there’s no question that a political lifetime in the safe, Deep Blue regions of California has resulted in her being an unusually poor politician. Given her lousy treatment of people being prosecuted by that state’s Department of Justice when she was the Attorney General, plus that god-awful laugh when she’s cornered I think it’s fair to say that she’s an awful person as well.

But sooner or later she has to replace this guy as President – before a crisis hits. There’s only so much that can be run by committee.

Just on those brain freezes, there’s plenty to pick from but this is the latest, courtesy of the G7 meeting with a full ten seconds of blank. But it’s still better than the first clip.

Random Fun III

Another collection of things that don’t justify a post in themselves.

First up, what is it with Senators from Arizona? In this case Democrat Kyrsten Sinema, who has loud clothing choices and is wearing a ring labeled “Fuck Off”.

It’s not entirely a joke either considering that is exactly what’s she’s said (in more polite terms of course) to various Big Ideas from her own party, like a $15/hour minimum wage, votes for some Trump cabinet members, and ending the Senate filibuster on all legislation.

I know there’s stuff she supports that I don’t but I’m beginning to warm to Maverick II.

Second is one of those Big Ideas. There’s a Democrat party activist group that has decided to learn from history and try and avoid another Supreme Court pothole such as the one that happened with Justice Ginsburg hanging on grimly, only to die while a Republican was President.

The “Demand Justice” group has therefore decided to focus on the next oldest Democrat Justice – Stephen Breyer – and as you can see from the van driving around D.C. they’re very blunt about what they want.

Third is an interesting screen capture of some chatroom involving folk from the Middle East discussing the best ways to escape from where they are to head for Germany. You can see the recommended routes marked out, but what amused me was the nations the group thought should be avoided on the trip North, although I’m a little surprised that they think Greece is one path, since none other than the EU Commission President called it “our European shield”.

Fourth is a juicy item for all those folk who can’t argue a point and use links to “Fact Check” sites, like that of Politico’s “Truth-O-Meter”.

On its website, PolitiFact splits its Biden verdicts into “Facts Checks Of Biden” and “Fact Checks About Biden.” Our review of the first 100 days shows 13 fact checks “of Biden,” and 106 fact checks “about Biden.” That’s an eight-to-one disparity.

In other words, they’re much more sensitive about someone “lying” about Biden than they are about Biden lying. 

That’s hardly a surprise. As people’s trust in journalism has declined over the last twenty years, the same journalists started to form “Fact Check” groups where they could write the same stuff and exhibit the same bias that had caused the loss of trust in the first place.

It’s a scam that should have ended long ago, especially when you dig into their “Fact Checks” and find that most are simply arguing a different opinion, not a fact. The reason it has not ended is that Lefty politicians, activists and supporters love the sort of cheap, one-URL-link, argumentum ad verecundiam, gaslighting they get from the likes of Politico.

Following on from the post about New Zealand’s woeful productivity the other day I was reminded of this classic Dilbert question.

Of course there is the situation known as No Money – and irony too.

The North Face: an outstanding company

I don’t think I own any North Face gear, or ever have, though I do think their line of outdoor clothing is stylish.

Apparently the company likes stylish things across the board, especially those which let its customers know that it cares about more than just profits, but the Earth itself:

Innovex is based in Houston and has nearly 100 workers in the Permian Basin.

Each year, the company gets a Christmas gift for its employees. This year, it was supposed to be a North Face jacket with an Innovex logo, a company Innovex has ordered gear from in the past.

The company providing the jackets said The North Face doesn’t want to support the oil and gas industry in the same way they’d reject the porn industry or tobacco industry.

“They told us we did not meet their brand standards,” Innovex CEO Anderson said. “We were separately informed that what that really meant is was that we were an oil and gas company.”
…
[North Face said that it] “thoroughly investigates product requests to ensure they align closely with our goals and commitments surrounding sustainability and environmental protection.”

Take that you disgusting, Global Warming, despoilers of Gaia! Begone from our customer’s ranks! No more will our skiers have to be ashamed at wearing the same clothes as some deplorable oil driller. Virtue and purity hath returned to our world.

Unfortunately for North Face their management turned out to be pretty ignorant about their own products and it didn’t take long for somebody in the fossil fuel industry to strike back – but in an unexpected way:

The Colorado Oil and Gas Association has bestowed its first-ever “Extraordinary Customer Award” on The North Face, saying it appreciates the company for its abundant use of oil and gas.

“To have such a large percent of what they make, probably three-quarters of the mass they ship is actually our product. So, it’s hard to top the all-in nature of The North Face as a consumer of our product,” said Chris Wright, CEO of Liberty Oilfield Services.

Fantastic stuff and now a US state government, Louisiana, has made it official with a resolution passed last week, that recognized The North Face as an “extraordinary customer” of “the Louisiana oil and gas petrochemical industries.”

The resolution highlights the “symbiotic relationship between the Louisiana oil and gas and petrochemical industry and The North Face,” commending the clothing company for “utilizing vital oil and gas resources so important to our state.”

“The North Face continues to offer a comprehensive collection of high-performance outerwear, skiwear, backpacks, duffels, and footwear made with nylon, polyester, and polyurethane, all of which come from petroleum products,” the resolution reads.

Congratulations to The North Face for these well-deserved awards.

In fact I’m so pleased about this that I think I shall go and buy a new ski jacket, and while looking at the products in the store I shall certainly offer voluble and effusive commentary in commending them on their wonderfully high use of fossil fuels.

I’m sure their sales people and customers will also be pleased with my visit.

A visit to the Shire

Why any President would want to pay a visit to a man who had one of the most failed Presidencies ever is a question in itself.

It’s not like Jimmy Carter did much in foreign or domestic policy that is remembered with respect. Whether policy or executive decisions most of what he did either did not work (energy policies for example) or was counter-productive (Iran). About the only thing I can think of that Carter got right was cranking up the development and production of new weapon systems after the USSR invaded Afghanistan in 1979, something that his successor got the blame/praise for.

Moreover, within the Democrat Party itself he never built any sort of group that had influence down the line, as the Clinton’s did. He was dropped like a hot stone after the disastrous 1980 election that set the scene for the age of Reagan in that decade. Carter got the blame for allowing that to happen and was not seen during the presidential run of his VP, Mondale, in 1984, or later Democrat contenders like Dukakis, Clinton and so forth.

But Biden is part of that ancient history, so perhaps it was simply the nostalgia of an old man. However, the way it was played by his spin merchants is…. weird to say the least.

WTF is that? It’s like Gandalf visiting the hobbits. It’s possibly the most insane photo of a Presidential couple that I’ve ever seen. Even if it’s a trick of the lens, why the hell would you not photoshop it a bit to make it look more normal?

Perhaps it’s symbolic: My Presidency will be like Jimmy’s – only bigger!

Speaking of symbolism you’ll notice that Biden is not wearing a mask while he visits this old, frail couple, unlike his infamous Zoom meeting with other world leaders a few weeks ago. However, when it came time to leave…

Symbolism can be important, especially when it involves a national leader, but this is just stupid, especially in the wake of recent CDC recommendations regarding wearing masks, not to mention the fact that much of the American population stopped wearing masks weeks ago, especially outside.

Finally I’ll leave it with this, which I think sums the Biden’s up pretty well.