Wobble-shop Benjo: ****-wool raked up out the half-rats Skilamalink fly-rink O' Baldric Eggling.

This thread will function as a kind of omnium gatherum for the melange of dissenting observations and opinions I have about MMA, MMA bouts and fighters, things I find humorous, and essentially any other thing. Why? Because sewage warrants proper curation as much as anything else. Arguably more.

Toshers and specklebellies welcome. No mutton-shunters, namby-pambys or needy-mizzlers. Pull up a stool and smother the parrot.

* Edited at 11.01.2021, 6:47 PM ET *

Meet Edward Durr, giant slayer.

Durr, a truck driver for the furniture store Raymour & Flanigan, was declared the victor Thursday in a race against one of the most powerful people in New Jersey: State Senate President Steve Sweeney, a top officer in the international Ironworkers union whose influence rivals that of governors.

Durr, who considers himself a “constitutional conservative,” said he also sensed a backlash to the influence wielded by South Jersey Democrats, whose cohesion under power broker George Norcross had made them virtually unbeatable — until now.

“Just the constant nepotism, corruption, ‘if you take care of me, I’ll take care of you deals,’” Durr said. “You don’t have evidence, you can’t get anyone arrested or prove anything, but there’s always ‘when there’s smoke there’s fire’ kind of statements.”

https://www.politico.com/news/2021/11/04/ed-durr-defeats-steve-sweeney-519502

Ah yes finally The Postmodern Carnival of Insanity Thread is back. Truly legendary. I have unsubscribed from the misc thread. This is the **** that was missing here on tapology. 

* Edited at 11.04.2021, 3:45 PM ET *

A man has reportedly died in Brazil after jumping into a lake to escape bees, only to drown and be eaten by piranhas. The 30-year-old was fishing with friends when he jumped into a farm lake in the municipality of Brasilandia de Minas on Sunday, according to the local Fire Department. A firefighter who performed the rescue said the carnivorous fish has disfigured the man's face and other parts of his body.
His body was found four metres from the shore. It's not yet known if the attack came before or after the man's death. The man's friends also jumped into the water, but swam to safety.
https://www.9news.com.au/national/brazil-news-man-eaten-by-piranhas-after-jumping-into-lake-to-escape-bees/be2c4793-b194-450f-9958-75bbd49e26fe

* Edited at 11.04.2021, 4:17 PM ET *

https://twitter.com/prisonplanet/status/1456249157472096259?s=21 


Paul joseph watson should come out the closet tho

Here's what befuddles me the most:

Zim has gone to the trouble of plucking and shaping their eyebrows. They have applied skin-tone appropriate lipstick, eye shadow and mascara. They have made themselves resplendent in the haute coutere  of a mid-40's Lesbian book store owner--which consists and what I believe is a pair of mid-century cherry Bakelite earrings weighing roughly 9 pounds each, and an off-white chiffon suit jacket sewn by a 12-year-old one-armed Haitian circa 1986, modified so that the sleeves and power shoulders have been removed.

And yet, despite this carefully crafted, premeditated and well-intentioned endeavour toward femininity they have decided the ultimate flourish should be to leave their morbidly bewhiskered pigeon chest blusteringly unshorn---indeed, rambling spuriously over the cusp of a variety of wife-beater that is almost exclusively found blemished in cheese-steak drippings and worn by sooty-knuckled auto mechanics who routinely beat their children with empty bottles of Tullamore Dew. 

How avant-garde. 

* Edited at 11.05.2021, 3:34 AM ET *

I love Kenny vs Spenny, the octopus episode ******* kills me

It's amazing.

For the uninitiated, skip to 7:10 of this video. I can't even begin to describe what this did to me when I first watched it. It has to rank as one of the funniest things I've ever seen.

* Edited at 11.05.2021, 7:30 AM ET *

Never heard of this in my life. Its great

A few comments:

If this thread is simply a place to post weird things about completely random topics, it generally should not be a problem.  However, if it becomes a place to begin emphasizing political commentary, or to drop subtle racial or sexuality prejudice, the thread will be gone.


Paper straws suck. And this is coming from someone who believes we need to do a LOT more to protect the environment. I believe it is pretty obvious this planet will be a hellhole very soon unless all the powerful nations of the world start doing a lot more to keep it clean and healthy.  But "doing a lot more" needs to make sense and the whole plastic vs paper straw thing makes no sense. There's a lot better things to worry about than straws.

LMAO nice trap Greg I was this close to a rich people don't care about Global Bs abandoned "Climate Change" ambiguous.
Indirectly until people stop burning tons of fuel IE flight space travel minor changes won't matter. "Jeff b, Elon m Joe B"

@josh well just out of curiosity on how you think about things. What if the government put a 40% tax on space tourism, and all that cash by law had to go towards whatever you think it should go to. So if Bezos / Blue Origin charge $10 million for a space ride to some rich people, $4 million of that gets collected and goes towards cleaning pollution or whatever you think is appropriate.  Is that a "good" tax or no, eff that?

Actually I did not know about that..was mostly just blowing smoke as it were.

No there is no such thing was just wondering if you think that would be a good idea or a bad idea

Oh well definitely hahaha a good idea indeed.   

@Greg my two cents, and yes it is doomy.

First up, I think it's probably already too late to reverse critical climate change and it's going to be more of an issue of how we manage it than how we solve it. The thing is, we don't yet have the requisite technology to do much about it. We don't have a way to sequester atmospheric warming particulates (of which CO2 is only one, and one of the fairly milder ones getting around) and the technologies we have which produce energy more cleanly can only be created by utilising energy and materials which are extremely deleterious to the environment--both to produce and to get. A lot of touted 'green' energy is actually totally bogus. Just the existing carbon alone currently in the atmosphere is staying there for anywhere between 300-1000 years.I do not think we'll even be here in 1000 years.

'Graphene batteries will save the world'! Um, well no. Graphene requires graphite, and virtually all the graphite in existence is garnered as bi-product of the coal industry.

'solar energy will save the world'. It's just OK. And the amount of REETS, glass, and oil that goes into making inverters and panels is unbelievable. They have a life span of about 20 years.

However that's kind of just the tip of the iceberg when you consider that the according to the first law of thermodynamics, energy output can never exceed input. And all energy moves from a form that is useable to a form that is unusable. Entropy. Whatever  we come up with, we will never escape that.

And finally, we're simply so far away from an eco-economy it doesn't bear thinking about, even in the West--and we've already had our fun with the big green rock. Try telling the Chinese and Indians they can't develop their societies any further due to climate change, mostly because we in the west set the clock running via getting out of the gate first through industrialisation. For us to take action that would have a meaningful effect we'd have to stop consuming basically everything which would cause total economic collapse, because we have no other model of economics apart from the one we have, which involves people continually buying and spending.

Personally, my analogy for the human condition is a 20-something year-old Hippy at a climate rally wearing silver-semi precious stone jewellery, created through mountain top mining, recording everything on the second smart phone they have bought that year, which they will dispose of the following year and contains tellurium which is an unbelievably rare REET and extremely costly to get in both ecological and energetic terms, so that they can upload  the event onto a brand-new mac when they get back home for brownie points. Most of what is 'green' is simply pretence, and the people engaging in it are often just doing it as another form of virtue signalling. Truthfully, if they had to actually live by their convictions, they flat out couldn't do it. They're not even willing to give up minor comforts to be inconvened  let alone capable of living in hermitude eating weeds and fish by an Alaskan lake or whatever.


So that's what I think about that.

As for the Rich not paying their share, there's a lot of politicised misinformation on both sides. Yes, Amazon and TESLA do pay Taxes. A lot of them. No, Elon Musk doesn't, actually....'have' 316 billion dollars. That's an equity valuation based on an assumed market value derived from a stock price. That money isn't sitting in his bank. Nobody has that much money sitting in a bank. And he cannot simply just translate his shares into money even if he wanted to, because the capital against event would reduce them to a fraction of their value, and more importantly doing so has the very real potential to annihilate his business. If Elon dumped his shares tomorrow, the market would have a baby and there'd be a massive selloff. It would ruin the company. I guarantee it. And on that note, market value isn't real value. For TESLA to be actually worth its price of over 1.2 k per share it would  have to basically utterly dominate the car manufacturing market and have trillions of dollars in revenue. It doesn't.

Alexandra Occasio-Cortez drives a TESLA.
She also wears gowns to Galas inscribed with the words 'Tax the rich'.
Hmmmmm.......

I actually often lose money holding something for too long trying to beat Capital gains, because the second I cash out or try to convert that security into a different form, I lose 50% of its value immediately. 50%.

The last time I checked (which hasn't been for some time admittedly) the top 10% paid around 70% of all Federal income Taxes.

I'm no so much worried about Tax dodgyness  by big business, but more about labour arrangements and their impact on small business. I would rather companies pay less tax, but pay their workers more.

* Edited at 11.05.2021, 7:04 PM ET *

How anyone can be making money from this venture given the sale price.

* Edited at 11.05.2021, 6:57 PM ET *

Container ships are very large.

I get that it probably works out cheaper for the company producing it to get it packed in another country due to cheaper labour over there but it's baffling how the world got to such a state where sending items thousands of miles away to another country as part of the production process saves money for them in the first place. 

@Greg it's true, they're basically floating cities. I remember a few years back there was a cyclone off the coast of Australia. I was watching the news and they called in on the captain of a freighter in the midst of it, obviously fishing to get some terrifying report from him about the conditions at sea. Anyway, when they got through to him and started questioning him he was completely blasé about the whole thing and basically told them he didn't give a **** because the freighter he was on was so large he scarcely even noticed. It was pretty funny.

But still, think about that chain of commerce. Some farmer had to grow those pears, which took water, fuel, and other farming related costs. Then he had to pay people to pick them. Then somebody had to pay to truck them out of the farm. Then somebody had to be paid to unload them all. Then they had to be processed for export. There'd have to have been export fees. and people had to be paid to load them on the ship. Then they had to chugged halfway around the world, unloaded again, trucked around again, and then processed. That cost money, as did the packaging itself. Then they had to be trucked out again, loaded again, shipped halfway around the world again, whereupon arriving they were unloaded again, and trucked to a warehouse. Import fees happened along the way. At a warehouse somewhere, they are again loaded onto trucks, and freighted to stores, where people had to be paid to unbox them and store them on shelves. And then they're sold for what--2$ a tub if that?

It obviously scales out somehow, but how it does I can't begin to fathom. How much is that Argentinian farmer getting per pear? It would surely have to a decimal point on a cent.