The Fendi company has come out with a mens' high heel. Check it out. So for just $1450, you too can break your ankles while looking like a total doofus even before you stand up.
(as ladies subjected to stilettos say "hee hee" or "about darned time...")
The old proverb comes to mind; "A fool and his money are soon parted."
It is getting popular, it seems for companies to announce that in a certain amount of time, they will achieve "net zero carbon emissions." Let's get a notion of what this means; everybody exhales carbon dioxide, and every building and factory in the world is built with materials that require the use of carbon fuels to get to market. Every company in the world uses electricity, and hence for a company to achieve "net zero", one must go much further than to simply get one's electricity from solar or wind (impossible at peak demand hours, mind you) while getting LEED certification for their buildings.
No, you've got to somehow compensate for the carbon emitted to build your buildings, make the windmills and solar panels, and the like, and the key idea for that is called "carbon credits". On one hand, some "carbon credits" are issued to people who fund things like electric cars and windmills, but....the problem with that is that even if these reduce carbon emissions, it still takes carbon emissions to make them. You can't make steel without using coal, to put it mildly.
That leaves a second level of carbon credits, which more or less amounts to paying people who live in the rainforest not to use a part of the land they inhabit. Now at best, the land that is so "sequestered" is simply land they weren't going to use anyways, so the net result is zero. At worst, however, it's land they were, or were planning to, use for supporting themselves, and a key principle arises.
Nobody signs on to let their children starve.
So when one plot of land is "sequestered", they simply go to another, generally one where it's not as advantageous to plant. In other words, they're going to clear cut more land than they would have cleared to begin with, making the "carbon credit" actually carbon emission positive.
Ouch. So how does one fix this? One investigates how one may actually sequester carbon in the soil, in buildings, and elsewhere. There are plans to inject carbon dioxide into the ground, but....that's incredibly dangerous if it should escape. Lower tech options are better.
One big way to do this is to consider how "Mother Nature" might help us. What would happen if cornfields were returned to pasture and alfalfa, where broadleafs like alfalfa have root systems that are up to 30' deep? What would happen if we stopped using corn for fuel to allow this--and some of those fields were returned to forest?
Along the same lines, if carbon emissions are really a huge issue, we need to consider not just how to "eliminate" them, but how to reduce them. Maybe stop paying people to divorce their spouses through child support, alimony, and welfare programs. Maybe consider prohibiting governments from making buildings from heat-porous masonry. Lots of good ideas come to mind--none of them involving carbon credits or solar panels.
The murders and rapes perpetrated by Hamas on October 7 are in many ways horrific even to those who remember the Holocaust, and the question is "how do you find people willing to do this?" One apparent answer may be potent amphetamines.
And that raises the question of whether one can test for use of these, say for those who might have perpetrated such atrocities. Answer; maybe. You can test for amphetamines in hair up to 90 days. Word is still out about whether one can differentiate the drug alleged here from other amphetamines in hair samples, and how strongly its use correlates with the October 7 and other attacks.
But that said, I do think hair samples from people in Gaza, especially young males, would be appropriate.
Senator Fetterman, on the Colbert show, apparently argued that the nation's best and brightest were not being sent to Washington. True, Senator, but you of all people probably shouldn't be making that argument, as the voters of Pennsylvania will hopefully catch on at some point, leaving you to do a job more suited to your abilities, say one involving a blue vest.
Students protesting Israel's retaliation against Hamas terrorists hide their identities. Pro tip, kids; if you have to hide your face to avoid censure for a position you're taking, think twice about what side you're on. Pro tip #2; the Hamas side's argument really works better in the original German, and it's no accident that Mein Kampf is a popular book in the Gaza Strip.
Senator Bernie Sanders is arguing that Israel's invasion of the Gaza Strip is a violation of international law because they are cutting off food, water, and electricity to the area. I guess by that logic, Operation Overlord (the invasion of Normandy) was a war crime against Nazi Germany. Sorry, Bernie, not buyin' it, and you of all people ought to know the difference here.
"Control" is the hallmark of an abuser, and the government wants to tell us what appliances, cars, homes, schools, and a lot more we can have or use.
Just sayin'.
On the light side, don't tell me I never said anything nice about homeless people.
And in other alphabet community news, it turns out (surprise to me at least) that hormones administered to transgender patients--testosterone for FTM and estrogen for MTF--greatly increase the risk of heart disease. I anticipated that testosterone would increase heart disease risk among those born female, but had thought that estrogen protected its bearer from the same. Evidently, though, each biological sex has its own set point and design, and disrupting that design has deleterious effects. Go figure.
A meta-analysis of 166 studies of the emotional and psychological impact of "shouting and screaming" comes to the conclusion that "childhood verbal abuse" can be as bad as sexual or physical abuse, and argues for a separate classification for "CVA" as exemplified by "criticism, name-calling, ridiculing, scolding, and picking on" children.
Now as I look at the list, what I see is, by and large, the same thing I've seen with regards to studies of physical discipline of children; truly abusive behaviors are mixed with non-abusive, non-injurious behaviors, and the results are mixed, as if a spanking is the same thing as being punched or kicked senseless.
And as a parent, knowing that "folly is bound up in the heart of a child", and knowing how Proverbs is in some ways a book length criticism/scolding of these habits, I have to wonder exactly what the "researchers" think parents can do. Unless one is fortunate enough to be the Virgin Mary, one's children will always have sin bound up in their hearts, and thus no sane parent would abstain totally from criticism and scolding.
For that matter, I remember my mother's response when I took a road trip without enough sleep; she called me a "fool", and she was right. Was she wrong to remind me in vivid language that the consequences of tired driving can be lethal to myself and others?
The more I see, the more I think that mental health in our country (world?) is being led by people with complete tunnel vision, who cannot view the secondary consequences of actions. Almost any parent will be able to tell you about kids who did not get negative feedback from their parents--and the destruction that followed.
The recent attack on the Ukrainian town of Hroza, about twenty miles west of the front lines, with an Iskander ballistic missile (range about 500km/300 miles), suggests to me that either the Russian missiles are incapable of hitting targets accurately, or some Russian general decided to waste a precious and expensive SRBM on a civilian target only 20 miles from the front lines--indicating that Russia no longer has adequate longer range artillery for hitting mid-range targets.
Hitting a target that seems almost all civilian--Hroza is a town of 300 people that is not even on a major roadway or rail line--is not a good look for Russia. Doing so with a missile that costs an estimated three million dollars suggests that Russia is desperate to make some impact, and does not have the proper weapons for the job.
It's not a gimme that Ukraine will win, but it does appear clear that Russia is running out of key items, and a gentle "nudge" like some ATACMS and F-16s will push their war off the cliff.
Update: Russian spokesmen are claiming now that Russia does not target civilian targets. I guess all those bombed out apartment buildings, grain storage units, hospitals, schools, and the like were figments of my imagination, then? One has to wonder precisely how one destroys one's soul to be able to spout off such bulls**t with a straight face. Putin delenda est!
...from those great examples of how to live your life; influences of course. Apparently, along with the general aging of the population, there is now a shortage of laxatives because, apparently, a number of influencers (defined as "people who look good in spandex but don't know from Shinola") are endorsing laxatives as a great way to lose weight and, perhaps, look good in spandex yourself.
So more or less, people are fighting "bloat" by not drinking water, and then fighting constipation by using laxatives, and we wonder why so many "influencers" and people influenced by them are so sick. It would be a blessed thing if Wilford Brimley ("Quaker Oats; it's the right thing to do") somehow got a following. He probably didn't look good in spandex, but unlike a lot of influencers, he lived to age 85.
A new Russian history textbook claims that the re-unification of Germany in 1989 was the "colonization" and "annexation" of Russian territory.
In other words, Russia's aims don't stop with the Donbass, Crimea, Belarus, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Moldova, and Poland. They want a return to the Warsaw Pact and....dare I say it?...Communism.
The nastiest, most lethal political system in history is staging a comeback. Let's not screw this one up.
