The planet Jupiter’s distinguishing aspect has been it’s Great Red Spot. Turns out, though, that it is shrinking, and at a rapidly increasing rate.
“Jupiter’s trademark Great Red Spot — a swirling anti-cyclonic storm larger than Earth — has shrunk to its smallest size ever measured.
“According to Amy Simon of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, recent NASA Hubble Space Telescope observations confirm the Great Red Spot now is approximately 10,250 miles across, less than half the size of some historical measurements. Astronomers have followed this downsizing since the 1930s.
“Historic observations as far back as the late 1800s gauged the storm to be as large as 25,500 miles on its long axis. NASA Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 flybys of Jupiter in 1979 measured it to be 14,500 miles across. In 1995, a Hubble photo showed the long axis of the spot at an estimated 13,020 miles across. And in a 2009 photo, it was measured at 11,130 miles across.”
Another “quick takes” on items where there is too little to say to make a complete article, but is still important enough to comment on.
The focus this time: The Miasma of Whiteness is everywhere!!1!
First, a little mood music:
Carrying on…
What better way of pushing the meme that “Whiteness” is a “system” that oppresses people like some invisible miasma than at a White Privilege Conference for teachers! Of course, it a bit #problematic!
“Disaffected participants in the 2016 White Privilege Conference (WPC) have taken to Twitter to complain that the conference was, ironically, too white and was actually filled to the brim with white supremacy.
“Adopting the hashtag #WPCSoWhite, inspired by the recent #OscarsSoWhite campaign, Twitter users claimed the conference that was supposed to battle white privilege instead served to entrench it.”
The Left will always find offense. Everything is always racist. “Privilege” will always be the ready excuse to whine.
Previously, a handy-dandy table of privilege and oppression which laid out a plethora of categories to decide if you are a “non-targeted oppressor” or one of the “targeted oppressed”. Turns out that that table was but one of many “Social Justice” handouts.
Here are all four handouts that were made available.
Leftist dictators like Nicolas Maduro of Venezuela like to bandy about how they are democraticallyelected and that therefor anything they do must be legitimate, and any opposition is illegitimate… until the people turn against them.
Last year, the opposition won an overwhelming victory, capturing a super-majority in the Venezuelan Assembly. Unsurprisingly, Maduro had already packed the Venezuelan Supreme Court and other such bodies like the top commanders in the Venezuelan armed forces with faithful minions.
Now, he is threatening to lead a “revolution” should the Assembly be successful in removing Maduro from power.
“Venezuela’s socialist leader Nicolas Maduro threatened on Thursday to seek a constitutional amendment to slash the opposition-led legislature’s term and vowed to lead a ‘revolution’ should his foes wrest him from the presidency.
“The socialist leader’s strong words deepened the already bitter political standoff in the OPEC member nation since the opposition coalition won control of the National Assembly in a December vote and vowed to seek Maduro’s exit this year.”
No talent hack Azealia Banks called for Sarah Palin to be shaved bald like a NAZI’s French whore, and then gang raped by Black men. Why? A fake interview.
A call to violence by a violent hack? Considering that the veritable Stacy McCain was permanently banned from twitter for the insidiouscrime of disagreeing with feminists, of course Twitter would take action against Banks, right?
Homosexuality went from a mental disease to a civil right that must not only be tolerated, but championed, is because the courts now consider homosexuality to be an unchangeable genetic trait.
What then is the next frontier for sexual orientation civil rights due to genetics?
A recent story, about a man who met his birth mother for the first time since he was given up for adoption, has been making the rounds because the two want to marry and have a baby. And the explanation for their love and sexual attraction is due to… genetics.
“It’s interesting that the public was so outraged, because the couple’s story is far from unique. In fact, a number of family romances have emerged over the last decade – and I can’t see them stopping any time soon. There have been cases of grandparents settling down with grandchildren, fathers and daughters in love, and even twins twinned up.
“What makes all these relationships tick isn’t love, or looks, or destiny, but – more likely – Genetic Sexual Attraction (GSA). It’s the phenomenon no one wants to talk about – because it raises a taboo topic: incest.
“But it’s real – and with advances in fertility options, something we need to get our heads round. Fast.
“GSA describes a powerful sexual attraction that occurs when biological relatives – parent and offspring, siblings or half siblings or first and second cousins – meet for the first time as adults. It was first identified in the 1980s by Barbara Gonyo, who fell madly in love with her son. After they reunited in adulthood, Gonyo struggled for 13 years to break off feelings for him.
“That’s what GSA is: a struggle. When people criticise West, they overestimate her degree of control in the situation. Often GSA sufferers feel powerless – as if their feelings are impossible to change. There have been heartbreaking cases of families broken apart by GSA. It’s an affliction; a curse for all those involved.”
Another “quick takes” on items where there is too little to say to make a complete article, but is still important enough to comment on.
The focus this time: I am become a Leftist, destroyer of worlds.
First, a little mood music:
Carrying on…
A hallmark of the broader Left, from Rousseau to Bernie Sanders, is that they blame all problems on some sort of boogie-man and justify all the horror they impose on people on the need for a witch hunt to deal with the boogie-men:
“[I] t is innate to leftism to always identify some group as the source of all problems in society, some class that makes all mankind choke. For, you see, leftism is nothing but one unending witch hunt.
“Now having made such a claim, it is necessary that I reference facts. Once upon a time there was a certain thinker who thought the thought that would pave the way for all modern liberal double-think, or rather un-thought. His name was Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and he famously quipped that ‘Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.’ Many found this idea appealing; but it begs the question. If man is born free, who has enthralled him? So a 200-year chase commenced to find the witch who had brought such maleficence to mankind.
“…
“This is the fundamental madness of the Left, that, in assuming man could ever be free and equal, must blame something for the fact that no one is free or equal; that thing, whatever it is, must be destroyed, so egalitarian freedom may reign.”
This imagined conspiracy of “Privilege” is aimed squarely at the most vulnerable in society…
The concept of “unearned privilege” is how the Left views the world: A manichean struggle between the Privileged Oppressors and the Non-Privileged Oppressed. “Privilege” however, is not just about race or gender, but about all differences in society that might lead some people to have happy productive lives while others OD on the streets:
“‘Check your privilege’ is a meme that’s gained traction on college campuses and other venues where privileged people tend to gather. Loosely translated, it means ‘Shut up.’
“More specifically, it means that your attitudes, habits, values—and hence any idea you may express—are caused by the unearned privileges you enjoy based on your demographic classification. So, your mission—whether or not you choose to accept it—is to engage in self-criticism instead of conversation.
“Confused? Privilege theorists are here to help. They explain that privileges—whether material, social, or professional—come from being male, healthy, prosperous, safe, white-skinned, heterosexual, non-gender-dysphoric, or any number of things that cause you to experience the world in a different way than somebody who comes from a different category in today’s social matrix.”
The real predictor of success and thus “privilege” is a proper upbringing.
“Herein lies the real root of ‘privilege’—its deepest root, in fact. Having loving family bonds is the foundation for success. The good news is that a society need only have an ethos that recognizes and supports such family bonds to make them accessible to virtually all children.
“Obviously, there’s nothing ‘white’ about valuing family and personal relationships. Likewise for good habits, such as thrift, common courtesy, or diligence. What about attitudes of kindness and generosity? Good attitudes are equal-opportunity decisions. They don’t belong to an ethnic ‘ideology’ that causes inequality. Quite the contrary. Everyone is capable of good habits, and such habits are worth praising and instilling in everyone.”
Ah, but the insane Left say that having good parents results in everyone else being oppressed by one’s “privilege”. And thus it is Social Justice to destroy good families because an equality of poverty and misery is considered a social good.
“The question then becomes: how to get people to willingly give up their family and friendship bonds in the name of social justice? Well, I suppose first you’d have to promote policies that foster the conditions that normalize family disintegration. The groundwork for that has been well-laid.
“According the Centers for Disease Control, the current rate of births to unmarried black women is at a mind-blowing 71.5 percent—three times higher than it was in 1965 when Daniel Patrick Moynihan sounded the alarm over the disintegration of black families. In 1965, the out-of-wedlock birth rate for white women was 3.1 percent. Today it is more than eight times higher than that for white women: 29.3 percent. Instead of heeding Moynihan’s 1965 report, elites maligned it.”
Paging Harrison Bergeron!
Ultimately this is just the social equivalent of the Left’s desire for economic justice and income inequality. As Margaret Thatcher said, they’d rather the poor be poorer, provided the rich were less rich; just as long as the income gap is smaller, they’d rather the poor be poorer.
But, as Cultural Marxism has replaced traditional Marxism, the Left doesn’t just want the poor to be poorer, they wand to destroy all social mores and traditions that lead to happiness and prosperity just because not everyone is partaking of it equally.
They’d rather the failures fail harder, provided the successful were less successful.
Proving that there is no greater bully than an anti-bullying activist, Social Justice Warriors created a repository of online “bullies” called “Social Autopsy“. This repository included details such that is was doxxing the “bullies”, especially those who were underage. Specifically they wanted “people [to] collect and take screenshots of other people’s online activities, link and connect them to their place of work, and attach that person’s personal information (which technically counts as doxxing), so that anyone, anywhere, can search for and access them.”
You read that correctly, they were doxing children.
