Month: February 2015

FUCK.  YOU.

And the regulatory horse you rode in on.

FCC Commissioner Ajit Pai: Net Neutrality is a “Solution That Won’t Work to a Problem That Doesn’t Exist”

(Of course, we’ll see how long that stays up after Wheeler’s commissars take over.)

About-Face on Preventing Peanut Allergies

Study finds introducing peanuts in many infants’ diets could help avoid the allergies later in childhood

Some doctors now suggest that not eating peanuts may actually have helped spur more allergies.

Just.  Damn it.  Fucking goddamn idiots.  Of course if you don’t acclimate babies to aflatoxins from the start, they’re going to have problems with peanut products later in life.  Started early, kids build up a tolerance to them.  Just like they do for so many other things we eat that we probably shouldn’t — like potatoes, which also contain toxins.

Why the fuck do we listen to these fucking quacks?  All they do is quack quack quack all day long about dangers in foods that humans have eaten for millennia without issue.

And yes, there is always going to be a small subset of the population who have a violent allergic reaction to peanut products.  But not nearly as many as if people used FUCKING COMMON SENSE.

FedEx refuses to ship company’s new 3D milling machine that can make “untraceable” gun parts.

Of course, the controversy around Defense Distributed is far more than legal; plenty of other companies have opted to keep their distance. Indiegogo booted the group’s initial fundraiser off the site in 2012. And 3-D printer maker Stratasys refused to continue renting a printer to the group after learning that its machine was being used to make gun components.

FedEx seems to be joining the same club of companies trying to avoid any part in digital DIY gunsmithing. But as more tools like 3-D printers and CNC mills find their way into Americans’ homes, they may have to face the reality that those devices can also create deadly weapons, says UCLA’s Winkler. “It’s going to be very hard to get people to stop using these same devices to make firearms,” he says. “To a certain extent, FedEx will have to get used to shipping gun-making machines.”

That’s about right.  All you cowardly pukes are going to have to get used to the idea that free men (and women, of course) are always going to find a way to use your product and services in the cause of freedom.  Whether you agree with them or not.

As Michelle Malkin once trenchantly observed, “Shut up and sing.”  Well, FedEx, shut up and ship.

H/T.

I suspect Brandon Finnigan, writing at The Federalist, may be thinking that way: Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s recall was a deadly error for state Democrats and labor activists. It made a college dropout into a potential Republican rock star.

It seems like every new challenge builds the cult of Walker. Every visual overstep by his foes, like the recent protests at his parents’ house, or recent perceived gotchas, simply bring more money and more ground troops to Team Walker.

Sure seems like it, doesn’t it?  But read the whole thing.

Jeb Bush is a waste of money and time.  Nobody wants a third Bush presidency, and his immigration creds aren’t good anyway.  Christie is a RINO joke (regardless of his attitude about teachers, which I have commented favorably on in the past) and Rubio has fubared himself too many times in the past.  Cruz?  Hmm.

Cruz needs some seasoning in an executive position.  We don’t need another senator in the White House, we need a governor.  But Cruz would make an interesting Vice President — because he’d be President of the Senate.  And if he would take the Nelson Rockefeller attitude about the job, he’d be a great influence there, regardless of its partisan makeup.  And eight years of a Walker-Cruz administration might well give him the experience he needs (and I feel that he lacks) to be President in his own right.

But Walker?

The [recall] victory itself was a massive confidence-booster among conservative Republicans disillusioned with their party’s performance in Congress: they finally had a guy who fights. Even after the sting of the presidential race, a sizable portion remembered the man with the “throne of skulls.”

And this is a great point:  Walker is already vetted.

The ferocity of the anti-Walker attacks during the recall attempt cannot be understated: no stone was left unturned, no “scandal” or slip of the tongue left unmentioned, and this may only help candidate Walker going into 2016. The Democrats spent millions of dollars and thousands of hours digging, scooping, ad-cutting, and hammering. They threw the kitchen sink at the guy in 2012, threw their neighbor’s sink at him in 2014, and now nobody on the block will let them inside to pee. Out of useful topsoil, what do they do now?

Bottom line, Scott Walker is who Mitch Daniels wants to be when he grows up.  Okay, maybe that’s harsh 🙂

H/T.

I had to purchase some sheets of international Forever stamps today for an organization I work with.  So what was available.  Hmm.

The 2013 Global Forever Christmas stamp.

The 2014 Global Forever Christmas stamp.

And the Global Forever Sea Temperatures stamp.

WTF?

While the GFST stamp isn’t overtly political, just showing a map of Western Hemisphere (not “global”, btw) sea surface temperatures, there is a clear “global climate change” message here.  (Because they’re generally shitty about asserting a non-existent copyright on their stamps, I’ll just let you go there to see it.)

Besides the implied climate change BS, you have to wonder what this stamp is actually depicting, because the description doesn’t say.  Are they summer average temperatures?  Winter?  Seasonal means?  Sea temperatures on the date of Barack Obama’s first inaugural?  A map like this is useless for anything but propaganda unless you have a clear idea of what it’s talking about.

So, well…pretty picture, but since the people I’ll be using them to mail to are fairly savvy people, I’ll just stick with the 2014 Christmas stamp.

And why the HELL can’t the USPS just put out a standard Global Forever stamp without any environmental propaganda bullshit?  While I like the Christmas stamps, it’s the wrong time of year for them.  Something with American flags on it.  Fuck the rest of the world, this is America.

LATER:  I had some ideas for Global Forever stamps.

The Shores of Tripoli stamp.  The Halls of Montezuma stamp.  The Great White Fleet stamp.  The Hiroshima stamp.  The Saddam Hussein Spider-Hole stamp.  The Osama bin Laden Seal Team Six stamp.

Collect ’em all.

We still have a landline.  Comes in handy; for one thing, we have lousy cell reception here at the Manse, and I really hate using a cell phone to talk to people to begin with (crap audio, calls drop at odd times, the phone is not ergonomically fitted to my hand, etc.).

The problem with a landline, though, is that at least through AT&T, you can only block 10 numbers at a time.  And on a landline where we’ve had the same number since the 1970’s, we get a lot of junk calls.

I’m sure if I were to call AT&T and bitch about the inability to block more than 10 numbers, and how damn stupid that is in this day and age, they’d tell me that the system simply won’t support lists longer than that.  And I would have to call bullshit on them…because all of this stuff is database-driven (it has to be, or it wouldn’t have a chance in hell of working), and the only thing stopping AT&T from allowing me unlimited call blocking is that they don’t want to do it.  Probably because they’re afraid I’d start blocking all of the jerkholes who are exempt from the federal and state do-not-call lists, like politicians and charities and all those other people trying to hoover my hard-earned money out of my pocket.

I guess it’s time to start looking for a third-party alternative.  And don’t suggest that we switch to Comcast VoIP.  Number 1, the regular copper landline system doesn’t go down when the power goes out.  Number 2, Comcast only lets you block 12 numbers, so that’s no improvement.

Probably going to go with something like this.  There used to be computer apps that did this, too, by picking up Caller ID on your landline modem.  But who the hell has a modem hooked up to their computer anymore?

There’s also a service called Nomorobo that sounds interesting, but it only works with VoIP.  Oh well.

It’s kind of funny to read all the ham angst about the demise of Radio Shack.  There are the ones who bemoan it and then there are the ones who say “high time, good riddance.”  Somewhere in the middle is the truth; the little corner electronics store that decided to be first and foremost a cell phone store selling service for the third- or fourth-ranked cellular network in the US really pulled a doozy of a fuckup when it made that decision, and then couldn’t bear to admit it and pull back to its core business and competencies when it became clear that they were being taken to the woodshed by the competition.

Thing is, even with a cellular sideline, Radio Shack as an electronics store would probably still be in business if the business plan wasn’t (apparently) to have a store on every other corner.  Too much real estate, too many poorly-trained employees, and in the end the really bad and seemingly-irrevocable choice to be a cell phone store that happened to have electronic parts and gimmicks in the back, rather than being an electronics store that would sell you a cell phone if you wanted one, is what did them in.

A business plan that had only a few stores per metro area would have been a lot more agile and able to change and adapt to the times.  A city like Indy could probably have gotten by with three or four at most, and instead, if you look at the list of store closings, had twice that or more — not to mention the ones in nearby suburbs.  Unfortunately the good ship Radio Shack got too big to change course quickly enough, even if there had been any corporate will to do so.  Because of that lack, the good ship is headed to the bottom.  Requiescat in pace.

The city of Carmel should be forced to remove all of its roundabouts and replace them with sane, traffic-light controlled intersections.  At its own expense.

Either that, or it needs to really improve the signage.  Case in point.  My wife was going through the roundabout pictured below this morning, in the outside lane, and some idiot woman turned into her from the inside lane.

To add insult to injury, the cop responding told her it was her fault because you are supposed to turn right immediately if you enter the roundabout from the outside lane.  He also claimed that she entered the roundabout “too soon”.  (Say what?  The other driver was in the inside lane!)  And he gave her a warning instead of a ticket because she wasn’t aware of that.

Well, of course she wasn’t.  Look at the fucking signage!  Look at the paint on the road!  (Yes, this picture is from September 2013, but I just went through there on Sunday night and there has been no change.)

Looks to me like folks in the outside lane have the option of turning or going through.  Looks to me like people in the inside lane are supposed to go around and change lanes if they mean to turn, not turn from the inside lane.

Looks to me like the idiot in the inside lane who hit my wife should have changed lanes earlier if she was planning to turn onto Shelborne.

If anything, this looks like a no-fault accident to me.  Or fault chalked up to the city of Carmel because of poor signage.

Funny thing is, I went through the same set of roundabouts with a friend Sunday night and commented that I wondered when someone was going to try to turn from the inside lane when someone in the outside lane was continuing around.  Who knew.

NO MORE ROUNDABOUTS.  The state of Indiana needs to ban any and all further construction of these hazards to navigation.

(Have you been through that abortion of an interchange that’s being built at Meridian and I-465 North?  There was no reason why that couldn’t have been designed in a similar fashion as the recently-replaced one at Allisonville Road, except that the one at Allisonville Road is in Indianapolis where we actually care about road functionality, and the one at Meridian Street is in Carmel where their mayor has roundabouts on the brain.  If he has a brain, which is debatable.)

The new news that a couple of quantum physicists have found a way to dispense with the Big Bang and all the problems associated with so-called “dark matter” has been raising philosophical posts on Facebook in the past couple of days.

On one post, a fellow commented,

…as many Buddhists have been saying for centuries. It solves the Creation ‘problem’ and dispenses with the need for a Creator. And, let’s face it, ‘My Creator is better than your Creator’ is the source of many of the world’s problems.

And I almost responded,

These days it’s more like “We have the same Creator but He likes me better than you.” Which, reductio ad absurdum, becomes “Mom likes me best, so nyah nyah nyah KABOOM.”  (At least among the three major “Western” sects.)

But I thought better of it, and put it here instead 🙂