UPDATED: RIP, Joan Rivers

Celebrity, Comedy & Humor, Healthcare, Human Accomplishment, Political Correctness

The great Joan Rivers has died. I’ll miss her wit. She had undergone countless facial procedures, and should not have gambled yet again with her good health for no good reason. There is no such thing as minor surgery. If it’s meant to fix a “minor” matter, like the vocal cords, then surgery need not have happened.

Via Fox News:

Rivers went into cardiac arrest on Aug. 28 following a procedure at a clinic. She had been moved out of intensive care yesterday and into a private room.

In a statement, her daughter Melissa said:

It is with great sadness that I announce the death of my mother, Joan Rivers. She passed peacefully at 1:17 p.m. surrounded by family and close friends…”

From “Joan Rivers: Antidote to PC Totalitarianism“:

Already in her 80s, the octogenarian is best-known nowadays for the sartorial send-up “Fashion Police.” The Rivers repartee is so ribald—it’s fair to say she’s the only woman who can get manly men to watch a show about fashion. While her humor has become a tad tame for me—Rivers once even disgorged, albeit with difficulty, praise for the loathsome Lena Dunham of “Girls” fame—she, nevertheless, stands out as the only public persona who flatly refuses to apologize for her signature wit.

Examples: Joan has compared the guest room she occupies at her daughter’s abode to the basement in which the “Cleveland kidnapping victims, Gina DeJesus, Michelle Knight and Amanda Berry, were bound, raped and tortured for years before their escape. ‘Those women in the basement in Cleveland had more room,’ quipped Rivers.

Describing one awful outfit on “Fashion Police,” Rivers ventured that “on the scale of really bad ideas, it falls between marrying Charlie Sheen and using Oscar Pistorius’s bathroom.”

When Madonna accused Lady Gaga of stealing her “music,” Joan wanted to know how you could steal a rash.

And, Ms. Rivers walked in on a football party thrown for her grandson and his rowdy small friends by daughter Melissa. Looking on with disdain at the grubby little boys, Rivers blurted out: “I don’t know how Jerry Sandusky managed to do it.”

All wickedly clever. …

READ how Joan Rivers destroyed CNN’s Fredricka Witless HERE.

UPDATE: A well-written piece, at the Daily Beast, by British journalist Tom Teeman: “Joan Rivers: An Epic, And Epically Funny, Life”:

Anger motivated her. “I don’t know where mine comes from, but thank God it’s there,” she said. “Anger at the stupidity of everything around you. … Rivers denied, as I suggested, she’d been rude to so many people. “I told the truth. I don’t think it’s rude. I haven’t been invited to the White House since the Reagans were there.” … Rivers told me she didn’t know why she was still the outsider …”

We know why.

Parrot Smarts

Environmentalism & Animal Rights, Intelligence, Science

Those of us who’re owned by a parrot know of their great intelligence and wish the general public would come to sympathize with their plight in the wild and in captivity. Scientists are slowly becoming hip to this remarkable intelligence. Hat tip to Marc Harper for “Cockatoos teach tool-making tricks”: “Cockatoos learn to make and use tools when shown by another bird, research reveals.”

And Goffin cockatoos have now shown an impressive ability to learn from one another how to use and even how to make tools.
A team of researchers has discovered that the birds emulate tool-making tricks when they are demonstrated to them by another bird.
The results are published in the Royal Society journal Proceedings B.
The researchers are interested in what they call “technical intelligence”, which is essentially animals’ ability to use objects to solve problems.
It confirms how innovative and how adaptable this species is to novel problems”
“Cockatoos are very interesting for this, because they’re very playful with objects,” explained lead researcher Dr Alice Auersperg, from the University of Oxford and the University of Vienna.
She and her colleagues had already noticed that one of birds in their research aviary, named Figaro, spontaneously used sticks to drag nuts under the bars.
Figaro also worked out how to make his “fishing sticks” by stripping long, thin pieces off a wooden block in his enclosure.

For me the more remarkable aspect of a Cockatoo’s fashioning of a tool to retrieve a treat is the superior intelligence of the one bird and the flock’s ability to learn advantageous behavior from this leader.

The one researcher, however, seem a little dim in his disbelief, postulating that the observed learning is but “trial and error learning,” as if the two were mutually exclusive faculties. I wonder how this skeptic thinks kids learn? Modeling, schedules of reinforcement, trial and error: has this guy heard of B. F. Skinner?

Parrots are flock animals: They watch each other, need each other and learn from one another as a matter of survival. In the absence of a flock, humans become their family. Thus nothing is crueler than isolating a parrot.

Read more.

Treason And Terrorism: Beware Puerto Rican Nationalists

Homeland Security, Islam, Terrorism

The business of the US government is treason against the people it purports to serve. Of that no more proof is needed than “the FBI’s most recent national threat assessment for domestic terrorism,” in which no Islamist terror threats are mentioned. Warnings are, however, issued against “anti-government militia groups and white supremacy extremists, along with sovereign citizen’ nationalists, and anarchists; violent animal rights and environmentalist extremists, black separatists, anti- and pro-abortion activists, and Puerto Rican nationalists.” These groups are considered a signal danger to the homeland.

Scholar of Islam Robert Spencer marvels at this calculus, given that “last year’s Boston Marathon bombing and the 2009 Fort Hood shooting” were both carried out by radical Muslim Americans.

“Some such groups may indeed be violent and dangerous, but they’re nothing compared to the global character of jihad terrorism – and yet jihad terrorism didn’t even make the FBI list,” wonders Spencer.

This the traitor class knows all too well. This is indeed “willful,” but unlikely to amount to “ignorance.” The aim is population control; to criminalize the opposition to tyranny within, not to defend the people from real danger.

Oh, and Puerto Rican nationalists had attempted “to assassinate Truman in 1950 and their shooting of five congressmen at the House of Representatives in 1954.”

Orwellian Labor Day

Economy, Inflation, Labor

Even when America’s official cognoscenti—those who see to the dissemination of information—finally report reality as it is, they will typically obfuscate it by cleaving to the truth as they see it. What do I mean? The title of a PBS news story covered on Labor Day is “U.S. optimism lags behind economic gains, study finds.” The subterranean message PBS is transmitting with the title is that Americans have failed to notice the “steady economic recovery” afoot. Too dense, perhaps? In fact, the headline twists the researcher’s finding, as he states them, for he did not make any mention of these so-called “economic gains.”

Smart.

The fact “that more people feel there’s been permanent damage [to the economy] now …” tells me that the cohort questioned is cognizant that something in the (inflationary) policies pursued by DC, irrespective of who’s in power, is “damaging” their prospects for good, and that whatever the stock exchange is doing; this has no bearing on their financial well-being.

… 42 percent say they have less in savings and salary now than they did five years ago.

And they say that their current economic status for three out of five of them is either fair or poor. And so they have had some diminution of the quality of life. We asked two questions that allow us to try and frame this, whether they have had a major or minor change in the quality of their life and whether it’s been temporary or permanent.

And we have one-third in the country — so that’s 80 million people — who say there has been a permanent impact or their quality of life, either major or minor. So whatever has happened in the stock market and other indicators is not getting through to Main Street at all. People are struggling, and there’s been no letup really in the last five years. …

… We asked them how much confidence they had in Washington’s ability to solve problems. Just 2 percent said a lot. Another 20 percent said some.

If they had to choose between President Obama or the Republicans in Congress to handle the economy, they said neither of the above at 40 percent. And they don’t think unemployment is going to get better even if the Republicans take both houses of Congress in the fall.

MORE.