Rolling Stone describes a new on-line marketing service which is bound to be controversial with the ladies.

Relationships, the saying goes, are hard. Many couples find their sex drives are mismatched over time, a problem that sex therapists often suggest fixing by working on communication. The Spinner, launched in April of this year, offers a different route to marital bliss — the online service encourages dissatisfied husbands to skip all that messy relationship effort and instead try to manipulate their wives on a subconscious level, in a way only possible in the age of the Internet.

For the bargain price of $29, husbands are sent an innocuous link that they, in turn, send via email or text message to their “target.” It can be accessed on a computer or mobile device and looks like any other hyperlink to an article, joke or video. Once she clicks on this link, a small piece of code is dropped on and then through browser cookies, she will be fed a slow drip of content chosen for her with the express motive of encouraging her to initiate sex.

RTWT

Ht: David Solin.

Brett Stevens discusses the fundamental differences of outlook dividing America.

Two different groups inhabit Western society, politically, and each wants a different civilization than the other. One desires a bureaucratic egalitarian society, and the other, a hierarchical organic one.

As explained by a historian, these divisions became apparent during the Civil War and persist to this day. …

… the actual division is more fundamental: those who follow an organic way of life versus those who want a life designed around human, and not natural or metaphysical, values. The former group likes independence, the latter group wants enforced equality.

When you live in a cosmopolitan cities in which factories are the primary source of income, egalitarianism becomes addictive. None of you have any culture; you have no role other than your jobs. Thus, you make jobs your primary form of identity, and replace culture with a novelty-based stream of entertainment and distractions.

To live in the South, you had to appreciate nature, and see the wisdom of God in the bends of the trees and the flight of the bees. You had to believe that each person was born to a unique role which fit their abilities, and that working together unequally, you could raise a civilization which was greater than the sum of its parts.

In the North, bourgeois sentiment reigned. You had to believe that each person was accountable to nothing except himself, that his work would give his life meaning, and that the mechanical schedule of the city could replace customs, culture, calendar, and heritage. You lived only for yourself, as one equal part of a vast machine.

The term “progress” originally meant the slow swallowing-up of the villages and heartlands of Europe and America by the mechanized city and its need for humans as a fungible quantity, all equal and motivated only by money, so that industry could depend on them to act in predictable ways.

The South took one look at the North said said “no way.” They wanted a life based more in enjoyment of the beauties of life than in converting life into a product, and the cultivation of a vast audience of cultureless people to purchase these products.

In this way, the South represented the ten percent in The Dad Theory. If you recall, The Dad Theory was an idea advanced by my father which states that ninety percent of humanity are narcissistic animals concerned only with self-gratification, where ten percent are aware of something more and inclined to work toward goodness and beauty.

This ten percent are the natural leaders of humankind. When they are in power, society advances and the workers, who really have no idea what to do with themselves when not working, are placed in a subservient role where their lack of impulse control cannot be a problem.

Organic people of this nature distinguish themselves by having a sense of purpose in life. They mature, look around, and find some way to make things better, not just in the sense of efficiency or productivity, but quality. They make life more graceful, elegant, joyful, balanced, harmonious, beautiful, and wise.

The crowd — those who cluster in the cities around factories and government offices — lack an ability to have purpose and can only react. When they need money, they go to a job; when they see something they like, they buy it or steal it. They are driven solely by appetites, which is why former societies called them serfs or plebs.

Their elites, driven to support the population in which they find themselves, adapted a philosophy to defend this way of life known as “egalitarianism,” or the notion that everyone is equal in worth and therefore deserves a seat at the table. This contrasts the organic notion of hierarchy, or moving the best people above the rest of the herd.

RTWT

HT: Vanderleun.

An unknown commenter wrote:

. .But the charges against Cohen, like those on which Paul Manafort was also convicted on Tuesday, have nothing to do with Russian meddling or with collusion between the Kremlin and Trump’s campaign. The Mueller investigation is still what its critics have always claimed: an attempt to bring down the duly elected president of the United States by any (legal) means possible.”

“The most significant lesson of the Trump era in American politics is that no one actually cares about so-called ‘norms’ or ethics or hoary phrases like ‘separation of powers.’ The same people who feign outrage when the president directs his attorney general to consider investigating the conduct of Obama-era officials would have no problem with Attorney General Kamala Harris prosecuting Trump under any imaginable pretext. The elaborate machinery of our judicial system — prosecutors, indictments, hearings, judges, verdicts — is simply an extension of the ruling party’s authority. It cannot be directed against the head of that party, as we were shown during the Clinton administration.”

Mark J. Fitzgibbons identifies 17 million reasons.

President Trump’s disgraced former personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, copped a plea deal on Tuesday in the U.S. District Court in Manhattan that includes his making a criminal campaign contribution in the form of hush money to Stormy Daniels.

Mark Levin and former chairman of the Federal Election Commission Brad Smith discussed this “non-crime” on The Mark Levin Show Tuesday night. Levin correctly points out that Cohen pleaded guilty to “a non-existent crime.”

Brad Smith later tweeted, “No matter how you cut it, paying blackmail to an alleged mistress is not an obligation that exists because you are a candidate, and hence not a campaign expenditure.”…

If in fact legal settlements of personal matters are illegal campaign contributions, then the list of guilty politicians certainly is long. And, as we learned in 2017 about the sexual harassment settlements paid by Congress using a slush fund from taxpayer dollars, the leaders in the House of Representatives of both political parties are implicated by the $17 million in payments over a period of 20 years and at least 268 settlements.

The Deep State is indeed acting like the Star Chamber, getting people to confess to nonexistent crimes to help ensnare others for political reasons.

Before

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After

These photos from Task and Purpose went viral.

For blogging purposes, and due to a surplus of idle curiosity, I subscribe to daily email notifications from a boxcar-load of web-sites and publications.

Thrilllist is one of these, churning out features mainly on food and travel. “Best Hamburger (or Pizza) in Each of Fifty States” would be a typical article.

This morning, however, I came upon Joshua Kahn’s Best Comic Books and Graphic Novels of 2018 (So Far).

I’d forgotten that the Atlantic’s professional Aggrieved Black Man Ta-Nehisi Coates varied his production of complaints that White America ruined his life and demands for reparations for Antebellum Slavery with dabbling in writing comic books.

I’d even forgotten that it was none other than TNC who is responsible for Marvel’s current Black Panther comics and the recent movie offering Afrocentric ego-flattering on a scale that makes the claims in Black Athena (Black Africans built the pyramids and created Western Civilization) sound like moderation. Well, TNC is marching on. In the Black Panther number reviewed here, Wakanda’s got an Intergalactic Empire.

In Ta-Nehisi Coates’ improved version of the world, a Sub-Saharan African society, uncolonized and uninfluenced by European contact, is not living in the Stone Age, but has surpassed Europe and America in technology and moved on to the stars. Traditional American racial animosity indulged in unflattering stereotypes of African-Americans often focusing on a supposed penchant for hubris and overwheening arrogance. I find it impossible to look at Black Panther in the TNC redaction without being reminded of that stereotype.

It is not enough, however, for young minds to be filled with visions of Sub-Saharan African superiority and super achievement. There is also what seems to be a parable of some kind titled: “My Boyfriend is a Bear”.

Dating is hard. It just sort of happens in college, and as you traverse your 20s, you evolve into a deflated husk barely coping with the trappings of adulthood. It’s a tiresome montage and Pamela Ribon’s debut novel dissects how those routines tend to push us to find love in unlikely places. As much as MBIAB is about 28-year-old Nora dating a literal 500-pound American black bear, it goes to lengths to discuss the ups and downs of relationships and the honesty and intimacy that accompanies each side. With Cat Farris’ expressive art style, it taps into various tinier moments — involving Farmer’s Markets, mating season, and how “it’s so much fun” that bears are open to watching anything on TV — and it never weirds itself out. Instead, it uses each unpredictable frame to help connect you to one of the greatest love stories ever told.

Obviously civilization as we know it is doomed.

The Miami Herald reports scholarly speculation on the results of python cross-breeding in the Florida Everglades.

What started out as a straightforward genetic study of Florida’s invasive python population has turned up a surprising plot twist: a small number of crossbred Burmese and Indian pythons with the potential to become a kind of Everglades super snake.

For the study, published Sunday in the journal Ecology and Evolution, U.S. Geological Survey researchers examined the tail tissue of 400 snakes captured in South Florida, from the Big Cypress Swamp to the Everglades. While the vast majority appeared to be closely related Burmese pythons — imagine a family reunion packed with first and second cousins — 13 had genetic markers from Indian pythons, a different species that unlike the swamp-loving Burmese snake prefers high, dry ground.

The number is clearly small, but it raises the risk that over time some Everglades snakes could become better suited to a more varied landscape. Scientists call it hybrid vigor.

Python hunter Dusty Crum carries a python caught as part of South Florida Water Management District licensed hunting program in May. The state has been paying a select group of hunters to kill the invasive snakes on state lands since March 2017.

“If the Indian pythons have a wider range, perhaps these Everglades snakes now have that capability,” said lead author and USGS geneticist Margaret Hunter. “It’s quite interesting and quite surprising, but we don’t know the extent it’s in the population.”

RTWT

photo: Viktor Macha.

There was a lack of blogging the last two days, as I have been going through the ordeal of installing programs and moving stuff to a new personal computer.

I can remember seeing Jim Dunnigan, my boss at SPI, obsessing out playing with a new TRS-80 way back in 1977.

It’s been 41 long, hard years, folks, and these things are still not an appliance at all. Trying to put a non-Google, Yahoo, or Microsoft email into Outlook is a task on the scale of killing the biggest monster in the last dungeon. You die a lot before you get it.