Culture

“Smartphones Are Killing Americans, But Nobody’s Counting”

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“Amid a historic spike in U.S. traffic fatalities, federal data on the danger of distracted driving are getting worse“:

Over the past two years, after decades of declining deaths on the road, U.S. traffic fatalities surged by 14.4 percent. In 2016 alone, more than 100 people died every day in or near vehicles in America, the first time the country has passed that grim toll in a decade. Regulators, meanwhile, still have no good idea why crash-related deaths are spiking: People are driving longer distances but not tremendously so; total miles were up just 2.2 percent last year. Collectively, we seemed to be speeding and drinking a little more, but not much more than usual. Together, experts say these upticks don’t explain the surge in road deaths.
 
There are however three big clues, and they don’t rest along the highway. One, as you may have guessed, is the substantial increase in smartphone use by U.S. drivers as they drive. From 2014 to 2016, the share of Americans who owned an iPhone, Android phone, or something comparable rose from 75 percent to 81 percent.
 
The second is the changing way in which Americans use their phones while they drive. These days, we’re pretty much done talking. Texting, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram are the order of the day—all activities that require far more attention than simply holding a gadget to your ear or responding to a disembodied voice. By 2015, almost 70 percent of Americans were using their phones to share photos and follow news events via social media. In just two additional years, that figure has jumped to 80 percent.

Time will tell what’s really going on but the smartphone distraction hypothesis seems likely. Walk around an urban area and you see many drivers who are obviously distracted. It’s not just texting. People are glued to navigation apps, watching videos, doing all kinds of mentally absorbing activities with their phones while they are behind the wheel. Some people are clearly incapable of having a phone conversation without losing focus on whatever else they are doing, such as driving. They look like pilots flying on instruments down busy streets. Quite a few pedestrians are looking at their phones too, which raises the question how many smartphone-related accidents they are responsible for.

I’m guessing there will eventually be a cultural backlash against distracted driving as there was with drinking and driving, and that rules, customs and technology will be changed to reduce the danger. In the meantime it seems like a good idea to be extra careful.

Harvey’s Horrid Hollywood Handmaidens

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I don’t normally comment on popular culture, but the  ‘Hurricane Harvey Weinstein”  Hollywood sex scandal marks a such a radical change in our “cultural high ground” that it deserves comment based on observation’s I’ve read from Twitter commentator Thomas Wictor and science fiction and fantasy writer John Ringo over on Instapundit.

First, Thomas Wictor was a music journalist for 10 years in Hollywood and has just posted a tweetstorm about  Harvey Weinstein Hollywood sex scandal in light  his experiences then.

See this link for the concise posting of those tweets —

Short form: Everybody knew about Harvey Weinstein’s predatory nature…and were silent.
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Second, John Ringo also commented upon the ‘Hurricane Harvey Weinstein” Hollywood sex scandal   here —
and Ringo closed it out thus —

…So do liberal actresses and models and all the rest really think conservative men are the worst human beings in the world?

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Yes. Yes, they do. Because they have to work every day with some of the ACTUALLY worst human beings in the world. And they have to believe conservative men are worse. Otherwise, there’s no point to being on the ‘good’ side.

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Thus when Donald Trump said some needlessly crass things and alleged to have groped women, they immediately saw in him not just Harvey (all the rest of the abusers in Hollywood High not to mention Billy ‘I did not rape that woman’ Clinton) but WORSE THAN HARVEY.

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Because Trump has to be worse. They can’t really be slaves to some of the most vile human beings on the face of the planet.

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Got news for you ladies: Yes, yes, you are. You enable them every day and by doing so you not only support the abusers, you directly or indirectly tell all the hurt new cheerleaders: Welcome to the bigs, sis. Now shut up and act.

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You’re blaming the wrong side.

And both these observations together   made me realize that  Margaret Atwood’s  1985 novel “The  Handmaid’s Tale” wasn’t so much about a conservative  patriarchal  dystopia converting  women into tools of the patriarchy than her projecting her life  experiences in the  Harvey Weinsteinesque  “rape culture” in the patriarchal male dominated, progressive left, media institutions onto conservative men a’la Ringo.

In other words, if Ringo’s Lefty Female/Feminist Projection model holds and I think it does,   Margaret Atwood appears to have been as much a “Handmaiden” in 1985 as was Ashley Judd was in 2016.   And so is every other lefty actress who was screeching at Pres. Trump, that Harvey Weinstein “Helped” career wise, including most of the actresses given Oscar’s over the last 20 years.

All those Hollywood women’s achievements are now tainted not only by the question of whether or not they slept with  Harvey Weinstein, but how complicit they were in enabling his Handmaiden style systematic patriarchal abuse of women for decades.

Because we know from Ringo’s and Wictor’s observations — and by what what these actresses said about Pres. Trump, and what they didn’t say about Harvey Weinstein — that they are all  “Harvey’s Horrid Hollywood Handmaidens.”

Creative. Destruction

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The mass freak-out following upon the election of The Donald to the highest office in the land continues unabated to this very day and hour. It’s been a little more than ten months; you’d have thought that the Hillary fans and the Bernie bros would have gained a bit of perspective, even a soupçon of philosophical acceptance. All contests, except for those held for elementary school-aged children where everyone gets a participation trophy, have winners and losers. But the political loss of the Dowager Duchess of Chappaqua to Donald Trump would appear to be the very first time that her loyal courtiers have ever experienced a tragedy of that magnitude, and so animus against Donald Trump and the people who voted for him continues unabated; loud, proud, 24-7 and ever more unhinged. (I’ve written before about this, here at Chicagoboyz and at NCO Brief.) It’s kind of hard to tell who the Hillary-adoring glitterati, entertainers, intellectuals and bureaucrats hate more; Donald Trump or the regular Joes and Josies who voted for him. And it’s not just the Trump-hate, but the continuing, relentless social justice warrior posturing about everything from gay marriage, transsexual privilege, to members of the black urban underclass having an unfortunately terminal encounter with the forces of law’n’order. It’s all become quite exhausting, even keeping track of who is supposed to be outraged by what.

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Our only enemy was gold

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I’ve always thought Edwin Muir’s poem ‘The Castle,’ like Burns’ ‘Parcel of Rogues,’ referred to the Acts of Union of 1707. Many Scots considered the union of Scotland and England to be a corrupt bargain in which Scottish nobles and landowners who’d been ruined by the Darien scheme were bailed out with English money in return for signing over Scotland’s independence. (I don’t want to argue the merits of that theory; historians have been batting it around for four hundred years without reaching agreement. I just want to point out that the attitude exists.)

It did just occur to me recently that there could be another, slightly anachronistic interpretation of the poem. If Edwin Muir had been given a glimpse of Scotland’s condition today and the destructive effects of welfare dependency, he might have written exactly the same poem. For generations Scotland was a poor country whose greatest natural resource was its people and their devotion to education. They educated their young people and sent them out all over the world, and as George MacDonald Fraser said, “A Scotsman on the make is a terrible thing.”

The expansion of the welfare state has eroded that, perhaps fatally.

All through that summer at ease we lay,
And daily from the turret wall
We watched the mowers in the hay
And the enemy half a mile away
They seemed no threat to us at all.

For what, we thought, had we to fear
With our arms and provender, load on load,
Our towering battlements, tier on tier,
And friendly allies drawing near
On every leafy summer road.

Our gates were strong, our walls were thick,
So smooth and high, no man could win
A foothold there, no clever trick
Could take us, have us dead or quick.
Only a bird could have got in.

What could they offer us for bait?
Our captain was brave and we were true….
There was a little private gate,
A little wicked wicket gate.
The wizened warder let them through.

Oh then our maze of tunneled stone
Grew thin and treacherous as air.
The cause was lost without a groan,
The famous citadel overthrown,
And all its secret galleries bare.

How can this shameful tale be told?
I will maintain until my death
We could do nothing, being sold;
Our only enemy was gold,
And we had no arms to fight it with.

Happy VJ-Day, Plus 72 Years

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Happy Victory over Japan Day!

On August 14th in 1945 Imperial Japan accepted the terms of the Potsdam Declaration and averted Operation Downfall, the two stage invasion of Japan. On Sept 2, 1945 the surrender was signed on the USS Missouri in Tokyo bay, This invasion would have resulted in at least a million American casualties (see below) and likely millions of Japanese dead from direct effects of the invasion plus the mass starvation that would have been sure to occur in its aftermath.

Since August 2010, it has become an eight years and counting tradition (See link list at the end of this post) for the Chicagoboyz web site to commemorate the major events closing out World War II in the Pacific and address the leftist agitprop surrounding those events. Where the worst recorded war in human history became a nuclear war via the August 6th and 9th 1945 A-bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, followed by the Imperial Japanese acceptance of the terms of the Potsdam Declaration, and the Sept 2, 1945 formal surrender on the battleship USS Missouri.

This years year’s Chicagoboyz commemoration will focus on the academic “revisionist history” controversies regards American casualties in an invasion of Japan versus the use of two Atomic Bombs.

  • The controversy traces from the rise of the leftist “Atomic Diplomacy” revisionism in 1946-1965.
  • Atomic Diplomacy’s subsequent credibility collapse of  “Atomic Diplomacy” historical underpinning in the 1995 Smithsonian Enola Gay Exhibit controversy.
  • Its enshrinement as a leftist academic virtue signaling cult in the aftermath.

 

Color Photo of the Sept 2, 1945 Imperial Japanese Surrender ceremony marking the conclusion of WW2 on the Battleship USS Missouri.

Color Photo of the Sept 2, 1945 surrender ceremony marking the conclusion of WW2 on the Battleship USS Missouri.

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