Rain Gryphon

From InfoDefense English:

By the way, almost all participants of this madness - the Prime Minister of Canada, the Speaker of Parliament, the entire Parliament - apologized for the standing ovation to the Ukrainian Waffen-SS fighter. You know who didn't apologize? The Zelensky couple and Canadian Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland, the granddaughter of the same Ukrainian Nazi!

I'm enjoying this far more than I should.

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My pharmacy is starting to piss me off. I'm on a computer that only I use, and I checked that box. I also checked the "stay signed in" box. Regardless, I have to sign in every time anyway.

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One of our local ne'er-do-wells: Mister Dolt. Srsly.

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My bottle of water is marked "for hydration". Gone are the days of multi-purpose water, it seems.

I never really thought that I would live to see the day when the Canadian parliament would give a standing ovation to a Nazi. That "First Ukrainian National Division" was also designated "14th Waffen SS Grenadiers 'Galicia'".

Hitler is down in Hell, laughing his ass off.

Forza!

If, like me, you appreciate a first-class shitshow extraordinaire, then you're probably already following the news from Haiti. If you're not, then the latest proposal is to send a thousand Kenyan policemen to deal with the situation. Reportedly, when the "Evaluation Mission" from Kenya went a few weeks back to check out the situation, they were afraid to leave the airport.

A few days after, the talk changed from "confronting the gangs", to protecting fixed locations, such as that very airport. Realistically, they're doing the only practical thing that they can by guarding fixed locations. It's window dressing, and will do little to nothing to solve Haiti's gang problem. That would require military force, and rather more than a thousand men, I fear.

The various NGOs have been busy undermining the Kenyans as well, setting unrealistic expectations, and babbling on about how there must be trials with due process, and respect for everyone's dignity (not a word one hears often in association with Haiti), and rehabilitation for the "child soldiers" so they can grow up all happy and well-adjusted. Even *if* the Kenyan police arrested the gang members, what are they gonna do with them? Haiti's prisons are at 330% capacity or so, with people basically on permanent remand waiting years for a trial. The practical choices, apart from giving them a lecture and turning them loose, seem to be: summary execution; hand them over to the Bwa Kale guys to be set on fire / chopped up with machetes (my personal favourite); or stuff 'em into the jails and let them die there from disease and starvation. Nothing else seems plausible.

An interesting thing, to me at least, is that I don't think the NGOs take their own rhetoric seriously. All of the talk about working a complete transformation of Haiti seems to be aimed largely at first world audiences. This, I have to think, is said in the cause of raising money. While the NGOs largely intend well, their supporters aren't likely to pungle up for a project to slightly reduce a limited group of people's misery. Thus the high-flown rhetoric.

The problem, of course, is that everybody, including the putative beneficiaries, now has internet access. The Third World by and large lacks the sophistication and cynicism to truly understand what these promises mean. That, IMHO, is the cause of the current Haitian whining about little the massively expensive interventions in recent years have accomplished.

What an absolute mess. I am deeply unimpressed with the new F1 management.

So, when I look up "dreamwidth rain_gryphon" with DuckDuckGo, the first result returned is my post "At the Sign of the Pooping Duck".

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A month or so ago, the mainstream media line on Haiti was that gangs were so popular, they had waiting lists to join. In the past few days, it's shifted to the idea that people are being forced to join gangs against their will. Was either one ever true? Is there any way to tell? And in the end, does it really matter?

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Holy Shit!! TikTok guy is getting absolutely savaged in the House hearings!

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Is it just me, or is Gmail becoming absolutely useless for spam filtration?

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Hyaluronic acid (sometimes known to biochemists as 'goo') seems to be the trendy biopolymer this year. That's well and good, but none of the ads pronounce the name correctly. They all say "High-LuRONic acid". I suspect that this is being done a'purpose. It annoys me.

Bonus fact: Much cosmetic grade hyaluronic acid is extracted from streptococcus. Imagine big ol' stinky vats of streptococcus being lysed so that the goo can be extracted.

Several of my distant friends have asked about the Ohio train wreck, and whether it's affecting me. It isn't - I'm about five hours west of there, the prevailing winds are from the northwest at this time of year, and I'm up the watershed from all of the contaminated rivers. I've been to the town before, and hate to see this happen. It was a nice place, and I had some excellent fish n' chips at a small drive-through there.

What's truly appalling to me is the federal government's lackadaisical response. Those cars were filled with vinyl chloride. When they were pressure-released and burned at atmospheric pressure and orange heat to prevent the cars from exploding*, they undoubtedly converted a large proportion of the vinyl chloride to polychlorinated dibenzo-dioxins, along with related products, which then spread across the countryside as fallout.

They found (from memory) something like 60k fish dead, and people are reporting headaches, rashes, and the like, and the government seems to think this is okay.


*A poor decision, although one can't really blame the firefighters. They're trained to think in terms of knocking down fires, and preventing explosions. That limited focus has served us ill here, as the chemical reaction products, rather than the force of an explosion, were always the worst risk in a case like this. I'd class the damage from an explosion as trivial, compared to what actually happened. This is probably a mass-casualty event, but it'll take awhile for people to die.

Once again, and long overdue, America has a true heavy-lifter!

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I am delighted beyond words to live in a country which has so vanishingly few problems that congress can devote their time to fretting over Taylor Swift tickets.

It is I, Cornholio!