Society's ChildS


Bug

On the infestation of small-souled bugmen

zuckerberg and bugmen
© MediumMark Zuckerberg and Bugmen
Not to be confused with the gigantic insect — the alienated man — of Kafka's Metamorphosis, the small-souled bugman is very much a 'well-adjusted', fully integrated neuron in today's neoliberalist techno-corporate hive mind.

A consequence of a perilously overpopulated, brutally capitalistic, shamelessly hedonistic, morally decaying society, the humble bugman has come to define an age of technological dystopia in which everyone has everything — their gadgets, their fast foods, their fashion accessories — but somehow everyone also has nothing — no community, no natural spirit, no substance of mind. He is a zombified consumer, an emasculated wage slave, a vessel emptied of meaning and refilled with plastic, pixels and silicone.

He is what a sterile corporate wasteland spews out. Millions of him, almost exact replicas who are relentlessly told they are unique by clever marketers, and who believe it. He is a personality defined by brands, a blue-checkmarked Twitter user. Bugmen are what we get when a culture is infantilized, watered down and stripped of the very intellectual, philosophical and honourable fibre that once made it great. Totally dependent on the compromised support of his nanny state and high-tech devices, the bugman has been reduced to the status of a domestic animal. A 200-pound child.

Briefcase

Ben & Jerry's sues parent company, says West Bank sales undermine its 'social integrity'

B&J mural
© Youssef Bu WatfaPalestinian artists paint a mural in Gaza City to honor Ben & Jerry's decision to boycott Israeli settlements
Ben & Jerry's has filed a lawsuit against its parent company Unilever in an effort to block the sale of its Israeli business. It is the latest move in the company's year-long effort to end sales in the occupied West Bank.

In July 2021 the ice cream manufacturer announced that it would stop selling its product in illegal Israeli settlements.
"We have a longstanding partnership with our licensee, who manufactures Ben & Jerry's ice cream in Israel and distributes it in the region. We have been working to change this, and so we have informed our licensee that we will not renew the license agreement when it expires at the end of next year."
However, last month Unilever sold its Israeli business to Avi Zinger, the owner American Quality Products. The ice cream will now continue to be sold throughout illegally occupied territories. Israeli lawmakers and pro-Israel groups celebrated the announcement as a victory against BDS and proof that Ben & Jerry's had been pressured to back down. Even Zinger himself embraced the narrative. He said:
"There is no place for discrimination in the commercial sale of ice cream. BDS lost. I now have the right to sell Ben & Jerry's using its Hebrew and Arabic name... forever. This is a victory for those who seek cooperation and coexistence, and a resounding defeat for discrimination."

Padlock

Macau shuts all casinos in bid to contain worsening Covid outbreak

Casino
© Jason Lee/ReutersCasino Lisboa
Macau has shut all its casinos for the first time in more than two years as authorities struggle to contain the worst coronavirus outbreak yet in the world's biggest gambling hub.

The city's 30-plus casinos, along with other non-essential businesses, will shut for one week from Monday and people have been ordered to stay at home. Police would monitor flows of people outside, the government said, and stringent punishments would be imposed for those who disobeyed.

Hospitals, pharmacies, supermarkets and fresh food markets are some of the essential services that can remain open.

Macau has recorded about 1,500 Covid-19 infections since mid-June. Around 19,000 people are in mandatory quarantine, according to government figures. More than 30 zones in the city that have been deemed high risk are now under lockdown, meaning no one is allowed to enter or exit for at least five days. While the government said it was not imposing a citywide lockdown, the stringent measures mean Macau is effectively closed.

Comment: It seems all science-based bets are off the table.


Black Cat

America has been flirting with Leftist disaster - It's time to stop compromising

children of the damned
The political left as a movement has proven to be made up of some of the worst people imaginable - The kind of people that thirst for destruction and take joy in the oppression of others. They might think they are reveling in a form of anarchy, but they are actually the opposite: They are chaos creators, but only as a means to gain total control.

However, while leftists make my skin crawl with their pungent scent of evil, there is one group of people that is even more annoying, and that's the fence sitters and fake moderates.

Though these people will never admit it, there are times when social conflict arises and one side is completely right while the other side is completely wrong. Fake moderates pretend as if there are merits to the side that is wrong even when there are none because they want to appear as though they are "wise." The truth is they don't have the guts to take a stand one way or the other, and so they act as if neither side is correct, or that both sides are partially right.

Meaning, the side of destruction is given license to continue their pillaging because, hey, we don't want to seem like we are discriminating or biased, right?

Passport

Russia offers fast-track citizenship to all Ukrainians

Russian passport
© RIA Novosti/Vitaliy Ankov
All Ukrainians, as as well as citizens of the two Donbass republics, may now apply using a simplified procedure

Any Ukrainian national may now apply for Russian citizenship under a simplified scheme, according to a decree signed by President Vladimir Putin on Monday. The measure also applies to stateless persons permanently living in Ukraine as well as to citizens of the two Donbass republics, recognized earlier by Russia as independent.

Ukrainians may now file the relevant request without the need to live in Russia for five years, to have a source of income or to pass a Russian-language test - something foreigners are normally required to do before they can apply for Russian citizenship.

Comment: . Russia had already been paying the pensions for those refugees who were cut off by Ukraine at the start of the rebellion in 2014, and now has brought them under the umbrella of Russia itself. With Russian citizenship comes a bounty of benefits such as
  • An apartment if you are low income, though the wait times are long.
  • $10,000 for a first and second child to help with their upbringing
  • Free Education, once the child is out of kindergarten
  • Every Russian citizen has the right to free medical care
  • Free public transport as governed by the different regions



Stock Down

Twitter vs. Musk -- who is lying in battle over social media company's future?

Musk/Twitter
© Photo Illustration/Tayfun Coskun/Anadolu Agency/Getty ImagesElon Musk and Twitter
Elon Musk wants out of his deal to buy Twitter. The world's richest man claims that Twitter's management is in "material breach" of various provisions in the purchase agreement and that the company has made "false and misleading representations" about its business. Management denies Musk's complaints.

Musk wants to know how many active daily users on Twitter are actually "bots" - or fake accounts. He says management refuses to turn over information that could accurately determine the number. Since 90% of the firm's revenues come from advertising, the information is critical to advertisers, and to valuing the company.

Management says only 5% of its ADU (average daily users) are spam, and claims it kicks one million bots off the site each day; as recently as May, CEO Parag Agrawal claimed the number of fake accounts ejected was half a million. The lack of consistency is not reassuring.

Who is telling the truth? My bet is on Musk.

Comment: Apparently the Twitter concur with Elon, as do Twitter shareholders:






Cult

Best of the Web: Woke is a (terrible) religion

wokeness cult mythology
© Carlos Quevedo/Max Solve/Deviant Art
Theophilus Chilton has a recent piece comparing the Church of Woke to Evangelical revivalism, which inspired me to put down some of my own thoughts on the subject. Likewise, see Niccolo Saldo's thoughts on the Last Pagan Generation.

The collapse of Christianity in the West has left a spiritual vacuum. The Enlightenment proclaimed the liberation of reason from revelation. God's death was pronounced. Finally, gradually and then all at once, the churches emptied. Yet the soul, like nature, abhors a vacuum. Humans are religious beings; we crave purpose, meaning, participation in something that transcends the grubby banality of our individual lives.

And so the Great Awokening blossomed in the lands denuded of faith of their fathers.

NPC

Dating website Match.com has option for 31 genders

Match.com
Twitter account Libs of TikTok - which aggregates videos posted on TikTok by deranged leftists, tweeted a short video clip of someone scrolling through more than two dozen genders now listed on popular online dating website Match.com.

Gender fluidity is on full display as users of Match can pick from 31 genders. Some of the genders listed include "Two-Spirit," "polygender," "pangender," "neutrois," and "gender questioning."

At the start of the short video clip, Match asked the user: "Hi, let's get started. Which best describes you?" There are options for "I'm a man," "I'm a woman," and "more options."

The user picks "Man" but is also greeted with a list of 31 genders. Some of the other genders include "transgender person," "genderqueer," "gender non-conforming," "non-binary," "gender variant," "transsexual man," "gender fluid," and "bigender," among many others.

Comment: See also:




Sherlock

Gates-funded grocery delivery facility Picnic burns to the ground in the Netherlands

Picnic fire
© Wouter de Wilde / WDW PhotosThe Picnic building is completely on fire.
A large facility in Almelo owned by Picnic, a Bill Gates-funded grocery delivery company that uses electric vehicles, has suddenly caught fire in the dead of night.

Last year, the company was given a whopping 600 million euros from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and many participating in the ongoing farmers' protests in Holland have openly stated they believe Gates may be partly responsible for pushing additional climate laws.

Comment: It's perhaps no coincidence that this occurs at the same time the government in the Netherlands is attempting to put its nations farmers out of business; however, this fire is unlikely to be the work of the farmers, meanwhile the authorities, however, have shown little restraint nor reason in the push to throw them off their land:



Netherlands Post English provides additional information on the fire:
The building of online supermarket Picnic aan de Zeearend in Almelo burned down completely last night. Flames sprang from the building several meters high. The fire brigade was present with several units and quickly scaled up to a very large fire.

It is unknown how the fire started. There is speculation about a short circuit in one of the electric delivery cars in the building, but the fire service is not yet able to say anything about it. There were no employees in the building at the time of the fire.

Although the fire service responded quickly, the building could not be prevented from burning completely. The owners of the neighboring company Brans Almelo bv experienced anxious hours because it seemed for a moment that the fire would spread. The fire brigade was able to prevent that.


It's notable that the fire consumed the building so quickly and so completely.


The fire was fought by fire brigades from around the area. Because there was a threat of a shortage of water, a pipe was laid to the canal with which water was supplied. The extinguishing lasted until well after midnight.

The Picnic company has been in the building on the Zeearend for just over a year. Almelo and the region are served from that location. About 60 people work at the site.

The fire was big and bright. The flames flew many meters into the air through the roof. There was also a lot of smoke. Initially, it seemed to blow towards the hospital ZGT, but it turned out that ZGT was just out of range. The smoke was blown towards the Nijrees residential area and it must have been very noticeable there. However, no dangerously high concentrations of hazardous substances were measured during measurements by the fire service.

A number of surrounding roads were temporarily closed due to the fire. During the fire, Argus, the drone of the fire brigade, was used to map the seat of the fire.
Big Food - Big Corporate reports:
Thierry Baudet, Dutch Member of Parliament questioning why in this time of food insecurity Dutch farmers are being run off their farms by their government enacting the UN 2030 sustainable enslavement agenda (props to James Corbett for this apt phrase).



Megaphone

Hundreds of protesters swarm bank in China over frozen deposits

china protest bank
Image from the protest
Several people protesting in the Chinese city of Zhengzhou over the freezing of deposits by some rural-based banks said they were injured on Sunday when heavy-handed security personnel dispersed the crowd.

The banks froze millions of dollars worth of deposits in April, telling customers they were upgrading their internal systems. The banks have not issued any communication on the matter since, depositors said.

None of the banks has responded to emails and telephone calls seeking comment. Chinese media has reported that the frozen deposits could be worth up to $1.5 billion and authorities are investigating the three banks.

About 1,000 people gathered outside the Zhengzhou branch of China's central bank on Sunday to demand action.

Comment: