A "surly curmudgeon[], suspicious and lacking in altruism." (Robert A. Heinlein)
Just putting these here for my future reference.
Mandatory FTC disclaimer: I have no connection with the companies or the software referenced below.
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How to make Windows 10 File Explorer look like Windows 7 Windows Explorer
Windows 10 breaks Outlook 2010 clickable links in messages if IE 11 is default browser
Sitting in the doctor’s office waiting for my appointment just about the time the moon wolf was starting to eat the sun goddess, I got to watch the full totality somewhere in Idaho courtesy of their TV which was set to ABC’s “Great American Eclipse” — and isn’t that just precious.
Anyway, the talking head chick was mentioning how chilly it had gotten all of a sudden, and I had to snicker, thinking,
“And you people who believe in globull warmerongering don’t think the sun heading for the bottom of the cycle minimum has anything to do with the fact that global temperatures aren’t rising and climate change cruises to Antarctica keep getting stuck in the ice.
“Unexpectedly!”
Turn that big H->He converter in the sky off for just a few minutes in a comparatively small area of the planet and look how chilly it gets immediately from the lack of insolation.
If there were a just God, he’d turn the damn thing off altogether and let us freeze, as stupid as the mill run of us are.
And, yep — True.
Now if General Kelly would take the President’s Twitter account away from him, maybe something substantive could get done.
A friend noted that one of our local television stations had prematurely labeled church vandalism (Nazi-esque, pro-Donald Trump graffiti spray-painted on the exterior) in a southern Indiana county last February as a “hate crime”, prior to discovering that, in fact, the church organist vandalized the building as a protest against Donald Trump.
Talk about egg on their face. But, nah, let’s talk about “hate crimes” instead.
On some level, all crimes are potentially hate crimes. Designating certain types of crimes as official hate crimes under law is an exercise in legislative opinion (and as a primarily-political opinion, it makes for bad law). It’s all well and good to fix in law that vandalism of a religious property is a hate crime, to be prosecuted with special attention to the mental state of the perpetrator; but once you have designated one thing as a hate crime, you’ve got a foot stuck in the door to eventually broadening the definition of a hate crime. And we’re already headed down that slippery slope, with “thoughtcrime” already being sanctioned, however unofficially, by the media and by various Internet services like Facebook and Twitter.
And you thought 1984 was just a book. “Two-Minutes Hate,” anyone?
I, for one, strongly believe that tearing down Confederate memorials is a hate crime. Not because I hold any brief for slavery, or for the rebels and their ill-conceived secession and the war it engendered, but because to destroy or remove these monuments destroys our national history out of no emotion other than hatred for that history. As an historian, I strongly believe that we MUST embrace our history honestly, warts and all, and not try to erase the “uncomfortable” parts just to make ourselves feel better.
On the other hand, there are people out there who believe the opinion I just expressed is itself a hate crime. The next thing we know, it may become a hate crime to express opinions that are out of the mainstream.* If you think that’s impossible, don’t think the First Amendment will protect us from that; remember, the Second Amendment is very clear that the right to bear arms is not to be infringed, yet there exists a multitude of local, state, and federal laws that significantly infringe the right. Legislators can always find a way to get around the Bill of Rights, and with the right (meaning the left) judges in place, they can take away God-given rights we have long thought inviolable.
Don’t be so quick to label anything as a hate crime. Or at least, wait until the investigation is complete and the facts of the case have been made public. Remember that a lie can make it around the world twice while the truth is still lacing up its boots.
_________________________
* Oh, wait — as I pointed out, it already is, on Facebook and Twitter.
They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning,
We will remember them.
Happy birthday. I love you.
I was accused of moral relativism on Facebook when I stated that both sides were to blame in Charlottesville. This was supposedly because, by blaming both sides equally, I was entirely absolving one side from blame in the death of the young woman who was struck by the jerk in the car.
I can’t parse that, and you probably can’t either. To me, that young woman would still be alive today if both sides had stayed the hell home. There is indeed blame on both sides. Both sides are full of hate and both sides espouse hate. That one side in this particular contretemps espouses hate against non-whites, and the other side espouses hate against those who hate non-whites, seems immaterial to me. Either side is as bad as the other.
After all, the SS blackshirts were just as bad as the SA brownshirts whom they destroyed. But that’s history, after all, and not many people actually learn history anymore. But the analogy holds.
I was so assaulted because I dared (in this person’s opinion, anyway) to diminish the culpability of the white supremacists who, after all, started it all by having their protest in the first place. However, I suspect the real reason for this assault on my integrity is merely because the person who did so is a rabid neverTrumper who will never back down from his now-untenable position; I mean, come on, the guy was elected and he’s president, and he’s not a Nazi. And by insisting that I’m letting the Nazis off by including antifa in the mix, this person is implicitly stating that antifa bears no blame whatsoever. Does he support antifa? I’m going to guess he’d be horrified if someone told him that. But that’s what he’s doing by claiming it’s moral relativism to blame antifa equally with the Nazi group for the death of that young woman.
As I told him repeatedly, if antifa hadn’t shown up, that young woman would still be alive. But it would have been even better if neither side had shown up at all.
However, the main point this person misses in the process of being all het up about spreading the blame around is that any culpability for the young woman’s death is not placed on the group — it’s placed on the person who actually ran that car down the street and killed her with it. And that’s an important point.
In our system, the group to which that young fool belonged won’t be on trial anywhere except in the court of public opinion. The court of law that will try said young fool for vehicular homicide isn’t going to be interested in his political views, or what hate group he happens to belong to — they will be concerned only with his disregard for the law and the consequences of that disregard. And that is because our courts are courts of law, not courts of political justice.
Make no mistake — antifa would like nothing better than for our courts to become courts of political justice, wherein they could, in Stalinesque show trials, condemn the 1% to death and then start in on the bourgeois middle class. Which is why I oppose antifa as much as I oppose asshole white supremacists who dress up in swastika-festooned clothing, wave the swastika flag, and play at being National Socialists just like the bunch of pin-headed, slack-jawed wanna-be Hitler Youth they are.
These two groups are two sides of the same adulterated coin. National Socialists vs. International Socialists. All left-wing, no matter how hard the left tries to push them off on the right (the soi-disant “alt-right” being little more than a fabrication of feverish brains on the left side of the spectrum). All of the repugnant ideologies on parade last weekend, nay, since it became clear that Donald Trump was a serious threat to Hillary Clinton’s coronation, originated on the left. The KKK? A left-wing Democrat institution for many, many years. Fascists and Nazis were both leftists, and made no bones about being leftists, despite generations of Gramscian historians who have tried to frame them as being phenomena of the far-right. Black Lives Matter? Left-wing anarchists with a desire to destroy the police as a force for civil order. Name a disruptive domestic terrorist group that has been in the ascendant in the past two or three years, and every one of them is a tool of the left. Hell, even the Southern Poverty Law Center has become a leftist tool of destruction, by tarring innocent and well-meaning right-wing organizations with the “hate group” moniker.
And they are all to blame for what happened last weekend. Because they have weakened the social structure of this country to the point where such things not only can happen, they are happening — with great regularity.
What is most alarming about this is that the number of people actually involved in these actions is tiny in comparison to the rest of the country. In other words, we could easily scrum ’em if we chose to.
I fear we’re coming to that. And sooner than we think. It’s going to be messy.
And there won’t be a damn thing that’s morally relative about it.
“[S]ize matters, and Silicon Valley’s giants are just too darn big. Time to chop them up like old Ma Bell. Let’s apply the antitrust laws that were made for taming just these types of octopod monopolies. For example, Google and Facebook’s tentacles have slithered into every corner of the web and strangled the competition. There was a word for that back in the day – what was it? Oh, yeah. ‘Monopoly.'”
Kurt Schlichter: On fire.
And by the way, the same could be said for monolithic media companies like Gannett, too. When everybody’s “local” newspaper is being run by the same company in Tyson’s Corner, VA, copyediting and composition occurs at a central facility in another city two hours down the road, and the local reportorial staff has shrunk to nearly nothing, what level of independent journalism is actually left?
You’re sure as hell not going to get anything like the crusading style that used to keep local government on its toes instead of sitting back dumb and happy while the tax revenues roll in and the local fat cats get fatter. This is how outrageous billion-dollar stadium deals and 10-year bribes, er, property tax abatements, to entice companies to relocate to your city happen with little to no public comment, even as property and other taxes (like the county option tax) keep rising steadily as the years go by.
Case in point: How does the mayor of Carmel, Indiana, keep getting re-elected? He’s destroyed traffic patterns throughout Clay Township, spent hundreds of millions of dollars on infrastructure and grand architecture that I don’t think anybody up there has a clue how it’s all going to be paid for, and to hear people talk, everybody hates him — but they keep voting for him anyway. A good, crusading local newspaper might have chucked a spanner into Brainard’s gears before now, but Carmel hasn’t got one, and the Gannett Star isn’t going to worry itself over what goes on in the next county.
Break ’em up. Go back to local control of media.
The defeatist bullshit I’ve been reading on Facebook ever since the election has reached a breaking point.
The assholes in Charlottesville yesterday do not represent the vast majority of good, non-bigoted Americans who are just trying to make it through life. In fact, they do not represent America at all.
I just read a post from an old fart like me who has, to all intents and purposes, given up and decided to watch it burn while sitting back and wishing the next generation the best of luck.
Well, to hell with you, old man. My father and uncles didn’t spend several years on a European shooting vacation so I could sit back in my old age watching everything they held dear collapse around me. I have skin in the game — two lovely grandchildren who will have to grow up in the world you’re happy to watch crumble. Well, fuck that. Wake up and fight the future, you unmitigated pussy. What the hell are you afraid of? Dying? That’s coming anyway.
The world does NOT end with our death. Other people have to live in it. So, why not fight on to the end? It’s what we were made to do, not to go quietly into that dark night while, unopposed, the forces of evil claim the field.
Honestly, I do not understand why so many people have their panties in a wad over Trump’s statement regarding what the US would do if Li’l Kimmy fired a nuke at us. (Or more likely, at Guam, or even more likely, at the little fishies in the sea since his missiles aren’t always successful. But I digress.)
As has been reported elsewhere, such statements have clear precedent in US history. It’s not as if measured, diplomatic statements have had any particular affect on the fat boy, in any case. Let me tell a story in that wise.
Years ago, when I was but a tad, I used to go with my dad up to my granddad’s place in a tiny-ass, blink-and-you’ll-miss-it town up between Peru and Wabash, Indiana. Granddad had about a quarter-acre lot on which he’d parked an old 40′ travel trailer next to a fair-sized shed. (Or maybe he bought the lot with the trailer already on it; I don’t honestly remember, that was damn near 50 years ago.) I could go on and on about this little pied-à-terre of his, but suffice it to say that it was not a place where I would have wanted to live, or even spend the night. For the first year he was there, all he had was an outhouse, and as I recall, no running water at all in the trailer. And this was in either 1969 or 1970.
Granddad also had about 14 little yap dogs, and I am not bullshitting about the number. They were all miniature terriers of some sort and technically I think he was breeding them for sale. In the winter, we’d get there and all the dogs would be in the trailer with him. This was sub-optimal because Granddad had big-time emphysema and could barely breathe when the air was clean, let alone stunk up to high heaven and full of hair from all those dogs. So Dad and my uncles would give Granddad hell and take the dogs out to the shed — which had a little oil heater, so it wasn’t like they’d freeze to death — and the dogs could run around in the little fenced yard next to the shed and come back in when they got cold.
We’d go up the next weekend and all the fucking dogs would be back in the trailer. Wash, rinse, repeat.
Finally, my dad — who had a bit of a temper — unloaded on Granddad, and used some fairly shocking language (remember, I was only about 10 at the time) in the process of doing so. I don’t recall him escalating to the “F” word, but there was a lot of “goddamnit” and “hell” in there.
On the way home, I asked my dad why he had talked to his dad that way. He was quiet for a moment, then he said, “Because sometimes, that’s the only language he understands.”
It’s the same thing with diplomacy, which is, after all, the art of saying “Nice doggy” while you hunt around behind you for a big stick. Kim Jong Un doesn’t understand that when we talk nicely but firmly about how he needs to back the fuck down, we mean that if he doesn’t, we’ll eventually get around to doing something about it.
Donald Trump has decided that after 25 years of saying “Nice doggy” to Kim and his daddy, it’s time to drive home the point that the US has a very large stick with which we’re going to start beating him if he doesn’t back the hell off, and that soon. In this, he is operating very much in the mold of Theodore Roosevelt and Harry S Truman, and I don’t really understand why any real American would have a problem with that.
Of course, I’m still not sure why we aren’t actively shooting down his missile tests, since we have THAAD. But there is that whole thing about allowing him enough rope to hang himself. And he’s certainly got the South Koreans and the Japanese upset enough at this point to let us start talking about kicking the chair out from under him without causing much more than a few raised eyebrows in the affected nations. Raised eyebrows signifying, in this case, “Well, it’s about goddamned time; we didn’t think the Americans had it in them anymore.”
MAGA, baby. MAGA.
A friend reposted a photo of Mahmoud Abbas and King Abdullah yukking it up after Abdullah apparently made the usual representation to Abbas that East Jerusalem would be the capital of an independent Palestinian state, eventually. Which of course had Jewish friends up in arms.
But really, this goes on all the time, and it happens because Abdullah has a serious problem, and it’s not his buddy-buddy, hail-fellow-well-met approach to Abbas, either. That’s more than likely an act for the peasantry. Think about it.
He has more Palestinians living in his country than any other Arab country. Jordan’s total population is about 9.5 million, and UNRWA says there are “more than” 2 million Palestinians living there, most but not all with full Jordanian citizenship. There are 10 recognized refugee camps in Jordan containing 370,000 Palestinians, again, according to UNRWA.
If you are the King of Jordan, and more than 20% of your population might just rise up against you if you treat their relatives in Gaza wrong — or, shoot, even if you just look at them funny — wouldn’t you temporize a lot, make supportive mouth noises, and hope the Israelis, whom you know are your only real friends, will keep the Gazans and the West Bankers busy for you while you keep an uneasy eye to the north and east watching the Iraqis and the Syrians?
That’s what Abdullah’s dad did. And I wouldn’t be surprised if Abdullah avails himself of a long hot shower after any meeting with Abbas, just to wash the stink off. The King knows the Israelis are never going to agree to give up sovereignty over Jerusalem, and that probably suits him just fine, since that means he doesn’t have to beat up on the Waqf when they get out of hand.
Make no mistake: This is no apologia for the King of Jordan for looking like an ass, but sometimes a King must do things in his public life that he abhors in private. My money says that Bibi knew all about this meeting and what Abdullah was going to say before it occurred.
I could be entirely wrong. But Jordan has never really been a place where Palestinians were welcome; the problem was that they didn’t have a whole lot of choice in the matter of letting them in, unlike the rest of the Middle Eastern Arab countries.