Social media platforms are all petty little left-wing dictatorships featuring censorship systems administered by deviants and neurotics.
There are bitter jokes going around all the time about Facebook’s “Community Standards” enforcers resembling the cast of Portlandia.
The Blaze reports on a classic case illustrating just who is in charge around here. This particular example pertains to Twitch, “a video live streaming service operated by Twitch Interactive, a subsidiary of Amazon. Introduced in June 2011 as a spin-off of the general-interest streaming platform Justin.tv, the site primarily focuses on video game live streaming, including broadcasts of esports competition.”
[There is] a new member of the Twitch moderation team: a transgender who identifies as a deer and who openly threatened to ban Twitch users with less “diverse” opinions.
“I have power, they can’t take it away from me,” bragged Steph Loehr, also known as FerociouslySteph. “And honestly there are some people that should be afraid of me, and they are because I represent moderation and diversity and I’m gonna come for harmful people. If you’re a really sh**ty person – I’m gonna stand up against you. Period. And Twitch is endorsing me to do that.” …
Loehr [has] explain[ed] how she likes to “prance around and eat grass,” as well as having a “deergasm.”
Godfrey Elfwick (authors’ names come out wrong in Outline) says he is a Trans-Black woman. (Actually, he is a sharp-tongued satirist writing for the British Spectator.)
On Wednesday, California became the first state government in the US to adopt a law to study and develop proposals for reparations to descendants of enslaved people and those impacted by slavery. This is positive news and I am hoping it will set an example to encourage other states to follow suit.
As a transblack individual and an immigrant to the United States, it’s pure coincidence that I’ve recently (since yesterday) been mulling over the idea of moving to California. I believe that I qualify for reparations from the white man who has kept me down and prevented me from achieving my full potential. Only the other week I applied for a position at Microsoft and was told (by a white man, probably, it was on the phone but his voice sounded pale) that I would need a degree in Computer Science to even be considered for any job other than that of a receptionist or cleaner. Now, if that’s not racism I do not know what is. It is sexism too. How is someone like me expected to obtain such a qualification when the cards are stacked so high against me? This has been proven time and time again. The moment I tell someone I am a Black woman (their ignorance and bigotry only allows them to view me as a white male), their demeanor swiftly changes and the atmosphere becomes tainted with the unmistakable stench of hostility, followed by hysterical shouting and racial slurs. Because I’m not just going to stand there while some honky crackerjack stares down their ridiculously pointy nose at me. Not once have I been given a second interview. Discrimination.
In my opinion, it’s high time the subject of reparation was taken to a federal level. I mean, if forcing white people to contribute more taxes to atone for the possible sins of their ancestors won’t end racism once and for all, I honestly do not know what will.
The Sarcophagus of the Spouses (Italian: Sarcofago degli Sposi) is considered one of the great masterpieces of Etruscan art. It is a late sixth-century BC Etruscan anthropoid sarcophagus from Caere, and is in the National Etruscan Museum of Villa Giulia, Rome. It is 1.14 m high by 1.9 m wide, and is made of terracotta which was once brightly painted. It depicts a married couple reclining at a banquet together in the afterlife, and was found in 19th-century excavations at the necropolis of Cerveteri (ancient Caere). The portrayal of a married couple sharing a banqueting couch is distinctly an Etruscan style; in contrast, Greek vases depicting banquet scenes reflect the custom that only men attended dinner parties.
These are the people your typical New Yorker subscribers imagine themselves to be.
Just looking at them, you regret missing the food, wine, and conversations at their weekend parties.
The Mathematical Association of America released a statement Friday claiming both that mathematicians should engage in “uncomfortable conversations†about race, and that policies of from the Trump administration, like the lack of a mask mandate in the United States, are somehow an affront to mathematics. The group concludes with a call for a “pursuit of justice†within math. …
“It is time for all members of our profession to acknowledge that mathematics is created by humans and therefore inherently carries human biases. Until this occurs, our community and our students cannot reach full potential,” wrote the group. “Reaching this potential in mathematics relies upon the academy and higher education engaging in critical, challenging, sometimes uncomfortable conversations about the detrimental effects of race and racism on our community. The time is now to move mathematics and education forward in pursuit of justice.”
SACRAMENTO, CA—A new California law requires businesses to provide separate restrooms for people who think they are Napoleon Bonaparte.
“Not providing a separate restroom for individuals who believe they are actually the 19th-century French emperor is hateful and wrong,” said Governor Gavin Newsom as he signed the bill into law Wednesday, flanked by several people dressed as Napoleon Bonaparte. “We will no longer allow these individuals to be discriminated against.”
The restrooms will have doorways that are just over 5’7″ tall. 19th-century French classical music will be playing. When the person finishes using the restroom, a victorious military parade will be thrown in their honor as they march out of the restroom and back into the business.
“We must affirm these people’s beliefs that they are actually Napoleon,” said Newsom. “To do anything but reinforce the delusion they’ve built up around themselves is a hate crime.”
After some years of enjoying the festive social life of Virginia Hunt Country, Karen and I are finding the absence of society here at our farm in the Central Pennsylvania boondocks a little dull. Moreover, with old age comes arthritis and one feels the winter cold in the knees.
Despite my Northeastern Pennsylvania Coal Region origins, I have old-fashioned tastes and apparently a natural rapport with Virginia. When I arrived at Yale, a number of my classmates misspelled “David Zincavage” as “Davidson Cavidge,” having leapt to the conclusion based on the formality of my dress and manners that I was of Virginia gentry background.
A return to Old Virginia is tempting, but Occupied Virginia inside, and now sprawling over the beltway, loaded as it is with functionaries and bureaucrats all battening on the Federal purse, combined with the welfare class of the Commonwealth’s handful of large cities, recently successfully outvoted the natives and returned Virginia to a revolutionary Reconstruction regime run by Scallywags, Carpetbaggers, and African-American demagogues and mountebanks. I’m not sure my blood pressure would stand a closer proximity to Virginia politics. So we’ve been looking for an affordable very old, very large house (we have an enormous library) further South, hopefully in proximity to an organized fox hunt.
I came, last night, upon a really beautiful North Carolina house (in Milton) which is unfortunately too small, but which has really beautiful architectural detail apparently by a local free black cabinetmaker-woodworker. I think his newel post is a delightful piece of imaginative design. If you lived there, you’d smile every time you saw it.
Thomas Day (1801-1861) was a free black furniture craftsman and cabinetmaker in Milton, Caswell County, North Carolina. Born a free black man in Dinwiddie County, Virginia, Day moved to Milton in 1817 and became a highly successful businessman, boasting the largest and most productive workshop in the state during the 1850s. Day catered to high-class white clientele and was respected among his white peers for his craftsmanship and work ethic. Day came from a free and relatively well-off family and was privately educated. Today, Day’s pieces are highly sought after and sell for high prices; his work has been heavily studied and displayed in museums such as the North Carolina Museum of History. Day is heralded in modern society as an incredibly skilled craftsman and savvy businessman. …
With his furniture designs so popular and highly sought-after, it was no surprise that Day began to provide architectural work to homes in his region as well. In this architectural work, Day employed many of the same design motifs as in his furniture, playing again off his own interpretation of the Grecian/Greek Revival Style. For large plantation homes in the North Carolina and Virginia areas, Day provided mantle pieces, stair brackets and newel posts, and door frames among other architectural work. His work focused on symmetry, and he often incorporated similar or complementary designs in the newel posts and stair brackets to create a balance of design and to emphasize his furniture designs, since many homes he did architectural work for also boasted multiple furniture works by Day. As with his furniture designs, it appears that Day’s initial architectural designs stemmed from popular architectural pattern books; to these, Day would again add his personal design motifs to create unique products.
In his work on door frames, scholars agree that Day created both sidelights and transoms for interior doors in many homes he worked on. These architectural elements are characterized by the repetitive use of rectangular patterns. Day also often created newel posts for staircases, which he commonly designed utilizing s-curves and elongated scroll shapes, which represented Day’s interpretation of the traditional newel post; Day’s posts were both larger and longer than the classic Greek Revival Style posts, and are emphasized by the simplistic stair banisters that accompany them. As with his furniture, Day took the popular design of the newel post and added his own stylistic flair through his scroll curves. In crafting these newel posts, Day employed four different types of newels: s-shaped, traditional, a fusion of the two, or completely unique designs; today, twenty-five s-shaped newel posts have been attributed to Day. Day crafted stair brackets to match and complement these newel posts, again employing curvatures and wave motifs that, combined with the newel posts, suggested a tranquil fluidity.
Unveiled in 1934, the BMW R7 was a motorcycle ahead of its time both conceptually and practically. Despite the futuristic appeal of its sleek design, the R7’s high manufacturing costs kept it from ever seeing mass production. It wasn’t until 2005, when the original prototype was uncovered and showcased at Pebble Beach that the world truly came to appreciate this innovative design. Valued at over $1 million, this original R7 is the stuff of collectors’ and motorcycle enthusiasts’ dreams.
Among those to appreciate the BMW R7 was team at NMOTO. Taking inspiration from the past, NMOTO then launched the Nostalgia Project, an ambitious and successful attempt to join old designs with current technology. By utilizing modern materials and traditional manufacturing methods, NMOTO was able to create a lighter and more powerful final product.
The full name of this replica vintage bike is BMW R7 85th Anniversary Commemoration Limited Edition. It’s built by custom bike designer Alex Niznik of NMoto – a custom workshop based in Florida, USA. The base model is a 1934 BMW R7 and this exclusive model is a limited edition of just ten units. The price tag sits at $250,000 as of Apr 13, 2020.
Alison Flood, of the Guardian, interviews a very knowledgeable book dealer and authority.
Edward Brooke-Hitching grew up in a rare book shop, with a rare book dealer for a father. As the author of histories of maps The Phantom Atlas, The Golden Atlas and The Sky Atlas, he has always been “really fascinated by books that are down the back alleys of historyâ€. Ten years ago, he embarked on a project to come up with the “ultimate libraryâ€. No first editions of Jane Austen here, though: Brooke-Hitching’s The Madman’s Library collects the most eccentric and extraordinary books from around the world.
“I was asking, if you could put together the ultimate library, ignoring the value or the academic significance of the books, what would be on that shelf if you had a time machine and unlimited budget?†he says.
Following up anecdotes, talking to booksellers and librarians and trawling through auction catalogues, he came across stories like that of the 605-page Qur’an written in the blood of Saddam Hussein. “If that was on a shelf, what could possibly sit next to it?†he asks. “I mentioned it to a bookseller and they told me about a diary that they’d had, from the 19th century, written by a shipwrecked captain who only had old newspaper and penguins to hand. So Fate of the Blenden Hall was written entirely in penguin blood.â€
There’s the American civil war soldier who inscribed his journal of the conflict on to the violin he carried. There’s the memoir of a Massachussetts highwayman, James Allen, which he “requested be bound in his own skin after his death, and presented to his one victim who had fought back as a token of his admirationâ€. Or the diary of the Norwegian resistance fighter Petter Moen, pricked with a pin into squares of toilet paper and left in a ventilation shaft; although Moen was killed in 1944, one of his fellow prisoners returned to Oslo after it was liberated from the Nazis and found the diary. Or the entirely fabricated book An Historical and Geographical Description of Formosa: its author George Psalmanazar, a blond-haired, blue-eyed, pale-skinned man with a thick French accent, arrived in London in about 1702 and declared himself to be the first Formosan, or Taiwanese, person to set foot on the European continent. (“Obviously no one had been there and nobody knew what Taiwanese people looked like, and he became the toast of high society,†says Brooke-Hitching.)
