PS
Oh - - -this little text of mine ran in the Zürich Weltwoche and brought me some well needed bucks - - and on top of that, I got invited to read it at the Zürich Theatre the "Pfauen". - The one and only time in life I had the feeling that there were literary fans with an openly sexual attitude at a reading of mine. - Very well dressed and mannered and charming but a bit stiff young women from the Zürich upper crust - - - I enjoyed it - and then waved good-bye.

The reading was a bit tough for a well known Zürich writer and psychoanalyst, who read also but did faszinate - - - nobody - - .
My little text is quite fun and - absurd too, but real-worldly-absurd. In the end, I quote Joni Mitchell -- -if I remember right - - - while walking towards the Swiss-German border at night. The most fun part of the text is a ride, a local kid gave me in his self-tuned Opel Manta - I still smile, when I think of that night-ride from - roughly Mannenbach to Ermatingen - Wolfsberg (Wolfe-Mountain - the intellectual habitat of the bigest Swiss bank: UBS beautifully situated above the lake google -  Seminar- und Konferenzzentrum | UBS Schweiz) - - - there I went to report on a reading of an absolutely socially tone-deaf but well known Austrian sociologist -  one of the few leading women-professors in this field then - but a complete and utter empty nut! - I did pen this down in my article in some papers - and that did result in some grim faces walking towards me in the following weeks - - -
The wasps do come now for paper - the installation of their nest they have completely given up on!

PS: Good evening, Dieter,

Good to hear you're winning! Paper fortress, eh? Are the wasps gathering up the paper to use as building material?

Off topic, but look what I found...
https://i.ibb.co/nwc7Y0W/Grenzen-Sprengen.jpg

This too...
https://archive.li/lNQbc

Cheers!

☮

PS
Ihx. Adam for the math link from Le Bron James!
This was a leftover from th past week: To look this one up and secure the link - problem solved - fine!

My wasp fight seems to be successful - - Isolde agreed this evening - - the wasps do cut out pieces of my paper-fortress I put up around their nest and - - -fly away .w.i.t.h. those pieces now. - The just turned their activities 180 degrees around - - -somebody should show this brillant example of mother nature's take on the attack-system to President Biden. I wonder what he'd make of this one? - Go: Bssss-bssss-bssss?! - uhhh - I dunno!
I woldn't risk to tell!
This math thing is part of the regressive left's resistance to deal with - one more Marxian thought: The material exchange with reality - - - = : Productivity! - Ancecessity in marx' times for everybody witht he exception of the clergy and the nobility...

PS: Greetings, Dieter,

Thanks for the insightful comment. Makes sense that old people would be more positive about their past experiences. It would be interesting to read these sorts of sentiments in more contemporary works.

I hadn't heard of Sailer's Hurricane Katrina thesis, so I looked it up...
https://vdare.com/articles/racial-reality-and-the-new-orleans-nightmare

Maff is rayciss!

https://fadeawayworld.net/not-one-8th-grade-student-from-lebron-james-i-promise-school-has-passed-a-math-test-since-2020

https://foxbaltimore.com/news/project-baltimore/state-test-results-23-baltimore-schools-have-zero-students-proficient-in-math-jovani-patterson-maryland-comprehensive-assessment-program-maryland-governor-wes-moore

https://foxbaltimore.com/news/project-baltimore/baltimore-city-schools-spending-per-student-2022-enrollment-performance-kirwan-new-york-boston-washington

American kids having trouble with math is not really a new phenomenon. This article is from 1999...

https://nypost.com/1999/11/06/78-fail-new-8th-grade-math-test-thousands-of-city-kids-may-never-graduate/

After we were talking about bees the other day, I found a hornets nest in the eaves on the upstairs deck...

https://i.ibb.co/MsfPgpx/Hornets-Nest.jpg

We usually would have left it alone, but it was a little too close to where we hang live and they can be a little aggressive, so, unfortunately, they had to go.

Happy Sunday, Dieter!

☮

PS

These are very old folks Adam. I mean - -- old folks tend to be very positive about their (!) past.

I would love to read stuff that hints in this direction from 19th century novels / essays / journals.

What they say approves a) the sociological fact, that blacks that move to the north were on average worse off than those who stayed in the south. b) - the experience of blacks in the uS military. They're doing (again: on average) better than thos 100 IQ blacks outside of it and c) all that fits in nicely with Steve Sailer's thesis, that blacks (on average)suffer more from the non-directive liberalism at schools than - asians for example do. His Hurricane-Katrina-thesis, he gets attacked day in day out - - - but which might have something to it. New pedagogical survey I read last week: Was it in the Baltimore school-district, where no (!) 8th grader took a math-exam - - - - in the last three years. The basic socio-psychological insight is: People hunger for structure... - liberalizing their life-world does not necessarily make them happier. Capitalism needs that and thus is (tendentially) liberal. Karl Marx famously remarked, that - - - capitalism did away with all things traditional - they made it go up in smoke and vapor - - - -destroyed it - - -(Marx/Engels one of the dramatic passages in the Communist Manifesto).

PS: Greetings, everyone,

Freedom is all right, but de niggers was better off befo’ surrender…
– Tempe Herndon Durham

http://xroads.virginia.edu/~Hyper/WPA/durham1.html

During the depression, some folks got the idea to go down to the South and record the narrative of the last living slaves, and George P. Rawick compiled these narratives into a 19-volume collection called The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography. These are excerpted from that work.

Patsy Mitchner, age 84 when interviewed on July 2, 1937:

Before two years had passed after the surrender, there was two out of every three slaves who wished they was back with their marsters. The marsters’ kindness to the nigger after the war is the cause of the nigger having things today. There was a lot of love between marster and slave, and there is few of us that don’t love the white folks today.

Slavery was better for us than things is now, in some cases. Niggers then didn’t have no responsibility; just work, obey, and eat.

LBetty Cofer, age 81:

The rest of the family was all fine folks and good to me, but I loved Miss Ella better ’n anyone or anything else in the world. She was the best friend I ever had. If I ever wanted for anything, I just asked her and she give it to me or got it for me somehow.

I done lived to see three generations of my white folks come and go and they’re the finest folks on earth.

Adeline Johnson, age 93:

That was a happy time, with happy days.

I’ll be satisfied to see my Savior that my old marster worshiped and my husband preach about. I wants to be in heaven with all my white folks, just to wait on them and love them, and serve them, sorta like I did in slavery time. That will be enough heaven for Adeline.

Mary Anderson, age 86:

I think slavery was a mighty good thing for Mother, Father, me and the other members of the family, and I cannot say anything but good for my old marster and missus, but I can only speak for those whose conditions I have known during slavery and since. For myself and them, I will say again, slavery was a mighty good thing.

Simuel Riddick, age 95:

My white folks were fine people.

I haven’t anything to say against slavery. My old folks put my clothes on me when I was a boy. They gave me shoes and stockings and put them on me when I was a little boy. I loved them, and I can’t go against them in anything. There were things I did not like about slavery on some plantations, whupping and selling parents and children from each other, but I haven’t much to say. I was treated good.

Sylvia Cannon, age 85:

Things sure better long time ago then they be now. I know it. Colored people never had no debt to pay in slavery time. Never hear tell about no colored people been put in jail before freedom. Had more to eat and more to wear then, and had good clothes all the time ’cause white folks furnish everything, everything. Had plenty peas, rice, hog meat, rabbit, fish, and such as that.

So maybe that ambiguous passage in a Florida textbook is right? Maybe "slavery" was a good thing for the 𝐁𝐥𝐚𝐜𝐤𝐬! who actually experienced it?

☮

PS: I agree with both Alarmist and Mr. Blanc here.

PS: I get your point, Mr. Hail. Something gets blown up out of some very minor detail, and nobody cares about what the detail was after a while. It's now a battle of he said, she said, and when you're the RACIST, well...

I haven't heard much about that kerfuffle (at least about Kamela/Tim Scott jumping on board), but I do remember that DeSantis and the Florida government (GOP, I guess) defended themselves - "There's plenty we teach about slavery! Check out these books." See, they don't want to get TOO honest. If they did, they'd explain how black slavery is not that damn much of a part of American history. It's the loss of perspective for the kids, as they get taught about slavery, whatever is said about it, 50% of the history lessons. The Cold War might get 10 minutes. That's how the lies get told, through distorted priorities of the subject matter.

PS: Dieter, that's what I say. No matter what, just staring into space awaiting Tucker to finish his rant/question and then answering in that manner doesn't make him seem too bright. One thing Trump knows how to do is to answer an adversarial question - one that Tucker was quite right about wrt Pence, don't get me wrong - with just enough on-the-topic matter to not be seen ignoring it, but in a way that leads to what HE wants to talk about. I guess that's what all "good" politicians, good at politics anyway, do.

I did not know anything about his answer on the election certification in New England. However, you're quite right about the inability to deny what's been already said, unless you're a blatant lying leftist. We all know, but they don't admit anything, and they don't back off their lies.

Regarding this, though, if you go back about 75 years, to the time of Joe McCarthy, there was a controversy over a number (of State Dept. Communists) that he gave in a speech in Wheeling, W. Virginia. It wasn't the number itself, as there were 2 numbers, and he used the higher one, but the question was on whether he used the number correctly. This was a speech in front of a decent-sized audience, ON THE RADIO, but there was no evidence with which the Senator could prove he was right and the press was wrong even a few weeks later or so. There WAS a recording, in fact, but it... disappeared.

I wrote about this here:

https://www.peakstupidity.com/index.php?post=2502

"Senator Joe McCarthy - Blacklisted by History, by M. Stanton Evans"

Just looking under the Books topic key, I see I haven't written many reviews lately at all. I've read some books though. More on "The Rockford Files" coming though. It's more my style, haha.

PS: "Look for opportunities to imagine Robert De Niro in Taxi Driver - the “You talkin’ to me?” scene. Concentrate on that. Okay, now you are ready to channel that style."

Haha! I'd vote for Travis Bickle anyday. Plus, once he got that sleeve-slide mechanism working, he wouldn't even need the Secret Service.

PS

Mike Pence makes Dan Quayle seem both colorful and intelligent.

PS So the guy is either lazy or not very bright (inclusive or). That was probably to be assumed from the get-go, but now it has been demonstrated.

PS

-- Tim Scott join Kamala and co. in pointing finger at DeSantis for anti-Black racism --

It seems like most political controversies are artificial controversies. This applies to social-media-driven controversies and to agenda-setting Big News ones. Once you realize how this happens, it becomes hard to ignore. Some controversies are real, but most seem artificial. Quite many are borne out of simple misunderstandings, but the Frankenstein info-dispensing and info-consumption process that happens is unable to end these misunderstandings easily.

The latest, roaring onto the scene this wee and still ongoing as of Friday July 28, is that Tim Scott has condemned Ron DeSantis for anti-Black racism. This one started abruptly last weekend (by Sunday July 23), when all the talking-point consumers received the message: We're going to claim fascism flourishes in Florida because a new textbook has an ambiguous passage about slaves acquiring skills during slavery that they were able to use after gaining freedom. This is twisted to mean "Slavery was a positive good, and should be praised."

This latest controversy is so stupid that it makes you want to find the closest voting-booth that is holding a referendum on whether to end democracy and vote "Yeah, end democracy; we're just too stupid."

But a lot of people immediately became morally outraged without looking too close into it; morally outraged in a way they would NEVER get at the latest anti-white racism.

Some hay was made over the latest melodramatic stupidity from "Kamala" on this topic, who was dispatched to rabble-rouse, a usual Wokeness-coalition thing that happens in U.S. politics. Kamala was so histrionic it was practically a call for Ron DeSantis and his textbook cronies to be lynched.

PS
When giving public statements - not least as a politician - - you should have in mind what the listeners might make of your words. - - So. Whatever the motivation, - SafeNow - to say what Mike Pence said to Tucker Carlson: It was a big mistake.
The same with his barn-explanation in front of a small group of people in New England in which he said things about his role as Vice President in the 2020 election certification process, that were not what is written down in the law.

You could do that fourty years ago, with no video-proofs circulating worldwide - a few minutes after the event - and in infinity.

PS
Joan Didion observed that Americans tend to embrace “the con style.” That was true then, and I think it’s come to be markedly true now. Biden, Trump, Fauci, Governor Cuomo’s 82%(!) approval rating, and on and on. Maybe a Pence advisor had very recently told Pence he seriously needs to adopt some of the above formulation. Thus, the explanation could be as simple as that. Mike, advisor SafeNow would have said, Look for opportunities to imagine Robert De Niro in Taxi Driver - the “You talkin’ to me?” scene. Concentrate on that. Okay, now you are ready to channel that style.

PS: There may not be a need for comments here, as many readers would have already read the thread under the previous post.

Therefore, I'll take this opportunity to respond to Mr. Ganderson, from under the 1st post on my impressions of Hartford, CT (and other American cities). Sorry for the 4-day late reply.

I somehow thought your son was home for the summer, but maybe that was Christmas. Or, are more than one of them over there? Time flies! Anyway, thanks for using the olde English place names, Canton and Formosa!