Size Matters

 I brought my churchwarden pipe with me to Italy, thinking I could find a tobacco shop that sold some interesting Mediterranean tobaccos. I had a vision of a store a lot like Liberty Tobacco in San Diego where they have 30 or so jars of different tobacco blends. Nope. Nothing like that at all.

In San Diego terms, Florence has a population equal to that of Chula Vista plus El Cajon. It's roughly 380,000 people. San Diego as a whole has a population of about 2,200,000. Liberty Tobacco is unusual. Searching for a comparable store here has made me realize how large a population you need to support a niche establishment like that.

There have been some promising places turning up in my Internet searches, but none of them have been close enough to visit. The ones I have visited have all been massive duds, so going an hour out of our way to visit one more roll of the dice doesn't seem to be worth it.

Oh well. Next time, I'll bring my own in my luggage.

The tobacco shops have all been like this - little hole-in-the-wall places that sell lottery tickets and other odds and ends along with cigarettes and a few cigars.

Bigger Issues

I'm finding it harder and harder to blog about the bigger issues of the day. The situation at the border is panic-inducing when you combine it with the fact that we're running a $2T deficit per year now to go with our $32T debt. Team Faculty Lounge capturing the culture makes it hard to face reality. If you do, you're called a racist and no one can handle that. Because Europeans were better imperialists than Africans and American Indians, we all have to pretend that we're evil and deserve to have our countries invaded and ruined.

The world is changing right before our eyes, but no one is allowed to notice it. You see it on social media and Fox News, but if you're not following the right accounts, you can easily avoid it. I did a search of the AP News website recently and found zero references to the American border crisis, but plenty of hits on the word "border" for other countries. Ukraine, for example.

The AP is about as middle-of-the-road American culture as you can get so it's a good bell weather for the effects of Team Faculty Lounge on our perception of reality.

It's A Good Thing Mathematics Is Racist

... because if it weren't, we'd do some back-of-the-envelope flow calculations and note that our largest city, NYC is past capacity for illegals, but the rate of intake at the border is hitting new records all the time.

The world is changing right before our eyes, but no one is allowed to notice it.

Hunt And Peck Typing

 ... performed by an expert.

This hen wanders around the compound where we're staying in Tuscany. There's a dog that tries to herd her, just out of instinct, but she does what she wants. There are also ten cats and four donkeys wandering about. We've met four of the cats. The donkeys are kept in a very large fenced-in enclosure with plenty of grazing. 

To be honest, I've always been afraid of horses and donkeys. I don't mind riding them, but I don't trust them not to bite me when we're face to face. The four that are here all ran to the fence and made motions that said they wanted petting or perhaps treats. I couldn't tell which, so I just left them alone.

Donkeys and horses aside, I could totally get used to the life of the gentleman farmer.

Tuscan Cats

We've rented a house in Tuscany which is part of a farm compound with ten cats on the premises. This morning, I had a couple of assistants while I teleworked.

Our Constitution Was Made Only For A Moral And Religious People

 ... It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other. - John Adams, 1798.

Of course, he was white, so take that with a grain of salt.

Last night, Philly suffered widespread looting, organized by the Black Lives Matter crew, who are indistinguishable from Team Faculty Lounge. Here's just a taste.

Incredible. They really do believe they can get away with anything. pic.twitter.com/RYY9Bt7tB7

— Ian Miles Cheong (@stillgray) September 27, 2023

I chose that video out of dozens of others because it illustrates the problem of the cops in a society where Team Faculty Lounge has had a decade or more to preach white supremacy to the locals. This isn't looting for economic reasons, this is vengeance for perceived wrongs. Our education system has riled up a whole generation to fight systemic racism fantasies and now you have this - platoons and more of infantry looting stores which are protected by less than a squad. That can't possibly work, particularly when the smaller force has such restrictive rules of engagement.

Further, the looters are illiterate and innumerate, so it's doubtful they can comprehend the consequences of their actions. Finally, they've been taught that capitalism is evil, so they're performing an economic act of moral righteousness in addition to the racial one.

At this point, even the densest progressives on the corporate boards has to see that keeping stores open in blue cities is a bad idea. I don't feel sorry for the retailers at all. This is on them now.

Meanwhile, if we don't perform an exorcism on our universities, we deserve all of this, too.

Italian Girls

 ... are different from San Diego girls in the following ways, at least here in Tuscany.

• No tats
• Not overweight
• No strange hair colors
• Feminine hair styles
• Much higher percentage of dresses and skirts instead of jeans or sweats
• No egregious piercings

They still have that haughty, European air about them, but that makes sense since we're in Europe and all.

Having said that, the coeds at Ole Miss blow them all out of the water.

Anyway, Italian girls make me think of this excellent Rod Stewart song. Enjoy.

Wakanda Forever

On Twitter, one of the best, but also most distressing, accounts is K9 Reaper. He's a South African who is both chronicling the collapse of that once great nation and trying to maintain what little civilization remains. Here's one of his most recent tweets.

SASSA grants still haven't paid out for most applicants - in a country where just over 50% of the population -> 30 million -> on some form of government grant and only 7% of this country are tax payers? 

No water to a city of over 3 million people? Tshwane. 

Crime stats:

• 75 murders a day.
• 80 hijackings a day.
• 4 children murdered daily.
• 4 women raped every hour.

Massive land grabs take place daily.

Our farmers are dying.

Borders that consist of nothing more than chicken wire (literally), and that's the parts that actually have a fence. 

Fire is being used as a weapon to destabilise(sic) the country.

All forms of infrastructure crumbling. 

Copper cable theft is off the charts.. in my area alone, they steal a minimum of around 50m a month. Including the destroying mini subs, switching stations and transformers. 

3 to 4 incidents of civilian based public unrest (riots) daily.

And how do we fight this? With structured community safety initiatives. There is no other way. We will simply do it ourselves. 

Our country is dying, and it needs you. Now.

"Ape, together strong."

The place is in late-stage collapse. Copper cables have been stolen from the power grid to be sold as scrap. The power network has reached the point where it can't be effectively rerouted around the missing connections. Blackouts are common. Between the collapse of the water infrastructure and lack of electricity for the pumping stations, water isn't getting to the cities. His tweet describes the rest.

Here in the US, we have no idea this is happening. We have absolutely no idea that this is the result of African tribes going at it just like they've done for millennia. Instead, we get racial fairy tales.

To describe reality would be to partially rehabilitate European colonialism and imperialism. Because our intelligentsia has been taken over by anti-white neo-Nazis, there's no more chance of that happening than of great white sharks achieving warp drive*.

We're in Italy now. Yesterday, on the flight into Heathrow, one of the worst-run airports in the developed world, wife kitteh watched "Till," the Emmitt Till story. It's about a black dude who was unjustly murdered in segregated Mississippi. You don't need to know the story or see the movie to have a perfect idea of it. Every white person is a hate-filled, screaming bigot. Every black person is well-spoken and suffers in quiet dignity.

It's a true story. It really happened. It also has nothing to do with what is happening today, either here or in South Africa. It's just one racial fairy tale from an endless buffet of racial fairy tales.

We are intellectually and emotionally ill-equipped to deal with the modern world. That's not good for anyone, regardless of race.

Semi-Related Multimedia

I didn't have the stomach to add a topic-related image on this post. I'm sick of the whole subject. It actually makes me nauseous, but I can't stop posting what I think and see. Instead, I'll share this video. Team Faculty Lounge is enforcing the fairy tale fantasy model on us in all kinds of ways. Dig this.

Female toddlers who pull barrettes out of their hair and boys who unsnap their onesies are trying to tell you they are trans. pic.twitter.com/g6xxvPaCp3

— Billboard Chris 🇨🇦🇺🇸 (@BillboardChris) September 21, 2023

 

* - When they do, we're all screwed.

AI Art Shows The Marlboro Man Washed With Dove Soap

 I'm old enough to remember cigarette ads on TV. The Marlboro Man would ride his horse on a cattle drive while he smoked. He was manly and cool and Westerny. We loved Westerns back then.

The tobacco companies lied to us about the health risks of smoking and their marketing teams led that charge. They told us we could keep on smoking, it was fine. We liked to smoke because it made us feel good. So we smoked and died.

Dove soap has a new ad campaign.

Dove’s latest campaign has taken aim at the sexualisation of women and the related beauty standards in gaming.

In collaboration with Women in Games, Unreal Engine and Lola MullenLowe, the campaign hopes to tackle the fact that 74% of girls feel underrepresented in video games.

With aims of ‘making virtual beauty real, the brand’s spot sees a virtual female character strip herself of her sexualised clothing and enter the gaming world as her own genuine self.

Here's an image from their campaign.

Cigarettes are bad for you and that girl is not beautiful. Meanwhile, AI art from Stable Diffusion is generating images of truly beautiful women that look like this.

The more AI art featuring beautiful women that I see, the more divergence I see when I'm out in the Real World™. At our local grocery store, almost all of the young women are overweight, tatted up, frumpy and glum. It's as if there was a competition to take what they were given and make the least of it. The delta between the way they look and the AI art women is massive. Meanwhile, Dove is trying to tell them that nothing is wrong.

Keep smoking, girls. It's all fine. The problem isn't you, it's men.

Meanwhile, male AI art users, driven by their lizard brains to seek out ever more beautiful women, are constantly refining their AI prompts to keep increasing the beauty of the images. The divergence between real women and AI women gets larger and larger all the time. Under the best circumstances, real women can't compete with the AI art. Now our culture, personified by marketing campaigns, urges them to not even try. Instead, men are supposed to change what they like.

I suggest having a smoke while you wait for that to happen.

By the way, here's the video that goes with Dove's new campaign.