Recently*, I had to sort through someone’s files who had left the company. Mostly just normal stuff that I deleted if personal or archived in case it was needed later. But there was a mysterious file with an obscure name that I had to open to determine if it was relevant.

And what it turned out to be was a document with a letter to a home seller. It was a groveling embarrassment of self-debasement. I know this sort of thing is commonly done now in the housing market, but it was the first time I’d seen this demonstration of obsequiousness in person. I should have just closed the document when I realized what it was, but I just could not stop reading it.

I am not going to quote it directly so that it does not identify anyone specifically, but I will give you the spirit of the mincing missive.

“We just adored your gorgeous home that we viewed the other day. And we cannot express enough how much we’d love to have our family living in your unbelievably beautiful house, absorbing your unbounded good taste and decorating acumen. We’d take incredibly good care of your house and let nothing befoul it as we admire every day your immense refinement and savvy in creating such a comfortable and delightful place to dwell.”

That’s just a brief slice. It got worse. The letter all but offered up their children for indentured servitude as it devolved into utter prostrate unctuous bootlicking. It wanted to believe it was satire but it obviously was not. The above is not exaggerated. It is exactly what this letter sounded like, just using different words.

I have only a few rules in life: Buy low, sell high. Don’t ever become leashed. And the main rule I follow, the one that being a whipping boy in North Florida for years taught me well, is that I do not grovel. Not ever. It doesn’t help and it only cheapens you and makes you as depraved as your attackers.

So seeing someone, of all things, grovel to buy a fucking house seems more than a little absurd and contemptible to me. Why would you do that to yourself, to your family? I do not understand people.

*Long enough ago that this won’t identity anyone specifically.

What Actually Happened.

Incidents like this make it clear that cancel culture is really mostly about competition for scarce jobs. It only incidentally connects with sex because that’s what people are most terrified about these days. If they were terrified, I don’t know, of pets being abused, then the accusations would be that this or that person abuses their cat.

In markets where jobs competition is the most fierce and vicious is where aspects of cancel culture show up most frequently. Not really surprising at all.

Fight the COVID Delta Variant, but Don’t Let It Stop the Reopening.

I agree completely. We are not in the same situation as we were before, and infinite lockdown and eternal prison countries are just not sustainable or sane.

The other key difference is that there’s no “just around the bend” anymore. We can’t say new restrictions now are just a matter of weeks or a couple months until we get a new, key tool to fight the virus. We continue to vaccinate, but COVID is now endemic and will likely remain so indefinitely.

I just want to quote the whole fucking article because it talks about things that lockdown lifers pretend don’t exist or their previous favorite lie, “Zoom is just as good as in person!”

The concerning data about declining life expectancy reflects not just COVID deaths themselves but deaths related to the social dislocation due to COVID: more fatal drug overdoses, more deaths due to liver disease (often associated with heavy alcohol use), and more homicides. Experts are concerned that disruptions to non-COVID medical care could increase deaths from other diseases in the years to come.

Even mask mandates aren’t a trivial imposition. There are reasons people don’t go around wearing masks under ordinary circumstances. Masks can be uncomfortable (especially if you do a job where you’ve been required to wear one all day) and they interfere with non-verbal aspects of communication. Being deprived of seeing other people’s faces is just one aspect of the loss of human connection in the last year.

I supported all the restrictions (and more) when the virus and threat was new, when we didn’t know anything and we were feeling our way in the dark. But now, none of that is true.

None of this is to say that all the restrictions were wrong: Many of them, at many times, have passed cost-benefit analysis, because COVID is such a scourge. But the cavalier manner in which their proponents have often discussed them — if I hear “this isn’t hard” one more time, I’m going to scream — has demonstrated a lack of empathy, and a lack of understanding of why the bar for reimposing them now that a vaccine is widely available should be so high.

I saw some assclown saying “this isn’t hard” about Covid restrictions on Twitter yesterday.

The is going to make the (largely liberal) lockdown lifer losers cry very big tears, but the author of the Business Insider column is right. The world can’t live like we did for a year or more, nor should we have to.

The goalposts keep being moved, harming millions in the process against a virus that is not going anywhere no matter what we do. We have safe and effective vaccines now; time to start fucking acting like it.

If I am wrong and SARS-CoV-2 does continue to evolve to be more transmissible and more deadly, eventually all the anti-vaxxers will be dead or so debilitated they might as well be.

Sometimes, the universe serves up some bleak justice. It just might this time, too.

In Rogue One, Rebel spirit and corporate control collided to make Disney’s best Star Wars.

I haven’t seen every Star Wars film, but I did like Rogue One quite a lot. It had spirit and the stakes seemed real. I also enjoyed how it leaned into the 1970s aesthetic, giving it the air of something that was a 1970s retelling (with better sfx) of something that had happened somewhere once upon a time.

Rather than spending time with the prospective Jedi knights of the Skywalker clan, Rogue One would tell a war story about the expendable soldiers who died to make Luke’s triumph possible in the first place. That fucking rules. That’s hard to mess up.

It was not a perfect movie, but it’s just so alive and breathing, unlike most of the Star Wars franchise. Felicity Jones, who is truly excellent in the film, creates a person who seems real and damaged and righteous in Jyn Erso, which is of course also unusual for the series. Another contrast: situations and environments feel dirty and grubby and dangerous in this movie in a way they do not in other franchise entries. That’s because the movie was shot on location, mostly, and not on soundstages and many of the effects are practical rather than CGI.

When AT-AT walkers stomp into the frame during the climactic battle of Rogue One, they finally make sense as weapons. They are theatrical monsters, forces of intimidation, things that should not be.

Yeah, that’s it exactly. And that was a great scene, and one of the few in any relatively-recent movie that made me say “whoa.” It’s the same reason countries roll main battle tanks through cities. The AT-ATs make perfect sense used that way, as terror weapons. (By the by, main battle tanks are poor as actual weapons when used in urban areas. They are quite easy to trap and destroy there.)

And, of course (huge spoiler alert!) how often is it that in a big Hollywood movie every single main character dies at the end?

Recommended. I will probably watch it again, which is rare for me.

“Space exploration never did anything for anyone!” a million liberals scream, as a hundred times a day they use technology and products directly or indirectly funded, researched and/or improved by Space Race-related innovation and spin-offs thereof.

Great cover, and Caroline has also seen the inside of a gym. Look at those arms and shoulders! That level of muscular development for a woman in particular takes a whole lot of work. Good for her.

I watched it twice. Zolotic is a Floridian! Great reaction she has after she wins.

Supposedly, these Olympics outfits are “fighting against the sexualization of women” but they are skintight and seem in some ways more revealing than just seeing someone’s bare flesh.

I know it’s liberals driving this, but it’s such an odd idea to me that skin always equals sex or sexualization. Athletes have amazing bodies. What’s wrong with seeing them?

I just don’t understand modern prudishness at all really I guess.