Worth Knowing, Probably Not Quite Threadworthy, 10/21

[SVPete]

New Friends: Twenty Years of Socialism Went Down the Drain in Bolivia Sunday

https://hotair.com/tree-hugging-sister/2025/10/21/new-friends-twenty-years-of-socialism-went-down-the-drain-in-bolivia-yesterday-n3808059

Almost thirty years ago, an indigenous Andean farm laborers' unionist and cocolera (coco leaf farmer/activist, grown for precisely what you think) was elected to the Bolivian Congress, and became leader of the Movement for Socialism (MAS). A short decade later, Juan Evo Morales, a fierce critic of the U.S. as well as its 'War on Drugs,' and ardent socialist, would become the first indigenous president of Bolivia.

He and his group of land reformers and income equity crusaders would go on to rule the country for the next twenty years as a grand socialist experiment.

Morales' attempts to waive the presidential term limits aside, between him and his successor, the mish-mash Marxist, socialist, and anarchist blended ideology of MAS held the reins of power in La Paz from 2006 until Sunday night, when it was decisively rejected by the very peasants it had once seduced with promises of 'Living Well' through socialism.

In a run-off election two days ago, Bolivians chose a center-right new president. One who is open and looking actively forward to working with the United States to rebuild his tottering country.

Bolivia, sadly, has a Potemkin-Village high literacy rate - many people whose only language is Quechua are "literate" in Spanish.

That snark aside, Bolivia is rich in natural resources - including its people - so hopefully the new government can rebuild the country.

[SVPete]

Wow: Loudoun Teens Rebel Against Woke School Board And Demand Female-Only Spaces

https://hotair.com/ed-morrissey/2025/10/21/wow-loudoun-teens-rebel-against-woke-school-board-and-demand-female-only-spaces-n3808064

Maybe the kids really are all right, to paraphrase The Who (and, apparently, Chloe x Halle). At least the kids in Loudoun County have a clear look at truth over fads, and biology over wokery. Too bad the adults in charge have it the other way around.

That, however, is precisely what some Virginia teens want to change. In an echo of the parents' revolt four years ago, WJLA reported yesterday that Loudoun teens are taking to the streets to defeat school-board incumbents that want to allow males into female spaces, especially locker rooms and bathrooms (via Twitchy):

There's an embedded video clip of a news report about this, and many of the teens trying to defeat the trans-supporting school board members are boys.

[enslaved1]

AWS crash causes $2,000 Smart Beds to overheat and get stuck upright

A major Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage on October 20 had the unexpected side effect of causing chaos in bedrooms across the US, as owners of Eight Sleep’s $2,000+ ‘Pod’ mattress covers found their smart beds had no offline mode and were stuck at high temperatures and odd positions in the night.

The outage began around 3 am ET, when AWS reported “increased error rates and latencies” in its US-EAST-1 region. By mid-morning, Downdetector had logged more than eight million reports of disruptions affecting apps, games, and banking platforms.

Eight Sleep’s products rely on cloud connectivity to control temperature and track biometric data. When AWS went down, users lost access to the app that manages its water-cooled coils, leaving them stuck with whatever setting was last active.

Some beds overheated, others stopped cooling altogether, and several users said their devices became completely unresponsive.

EVERYTHING DOES NOT NEED TO BE CONNECTED TO THE FREAKING INTERNET!!!!!   

[Ralph Wiggum]

Wrong date, buddy. 

Anyway, no link because it arrived via e-mail by the Washington Compost (paywall protected). Sometimes the headlines from such lib sites literally make me laugh out loud, and this one certainly did:

Eating meat is worse for the planet in some cities than in others. Look up your city.

Researchers have documented for years that eating beef, pork and chicken has a significant environmental impact, especially when it comes to heating the planet.

But it’s far from a uniform impact. What you eat, and where you eat it, can have a big effect on how much you’re contributing to climate change, according to a study published Monday in the journal Nature Climate Change.

For the first time, researchers calculated the planet-warming pollution emitted from raising the beef, pork and chicken Americans eat — their carbon “hoofprint” — for every town and city in the country.

Across the country, eating beef is the bigger contributor to harmful pollutants. But it’s not as simple as that. Its origins matter. Eating a steak or a burger in Milwaukee, where the meat comes from nearby dairy cows, generates fewer emissions than in Oklahoma City, where beef tends to come from feedlots.

[SVPete]

Date fixed