A "surly curmudgeon[], suspicious and lacking in altruism." (Robert A. Heinlein)
Kurt Schlichter is on fire.
Hillary is not even a competent liar
You know, the Hillary Body Double theory is pretty hilarious, but admit it – who would actually be surprised if it turns out she has a body double? Secretly, even the liberals are thinking to themselves, “You know, I can totally see that.”
Read, as they say, the whole thing.
and poorly-thought-out control interfaces.
Yes, I could be talking about just about any piece of computing equipment and its operating system, but today I’m talking about the Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge. A very nice phone, by the way, but still a phone with quirks.
My wife upgraded to one some months back. By all accounts she likes it very much. Except that it would randomly buzz or ring on a fairly regular basis for what appeared to be absolutely no reason at all. She’d look at the notifications bar after it did so and there’d be nothing there waiting for attention. And this went on all the damn time. All day and all night long. So I’d be lying awake for whatever reason at 2 or 3 AM, and I’d hear “bzzzzt” from her nightstand as the phone vibrated for no discernible reason.
This past Sunday morning, I had finally had enough. I googled “samsung s7 edge beeps no notification”. Now, mind you, we’d googled this like mad, taken the phone back to the store, talked to young friends who know more about these pocket computers that we do, and EVERYONE has been stumped.
So then I found this blog post. Which was really for the Galaxy S6 Edge, but the same fix worked for the S7.
Turns out it’s a notification reminder. It goes off to remind you that you have unread notifications (which is a lie, because THERE WERE NO FUCKING UNREAD NOTIFICATIONS). And it is set BY DEFAULT to go off EVERY FIFTEEN FUCKING MINUTES, DAY AND NIGHT.
WHY? Samsung, spare us the goddamn nannying. We don’t need it. What do you think we are, millenials still living in our parents’ basement? Geez.
And what’s worse, the setting for this isn’t in the normal place in the settings where you deal with turning notifications on and off, it’s hidden away in the fucking Personal/Accessibility section — where NOBODY WHO ISN’T HANDICAPPED IS GOING TO LOOK. Because, believe me, we LOOKED. And we never in a million years would have figured out that the setting was in an accessibility area. Because it makes NO FUCKING SENSE TO HAVE IT THERE.
But, like I said: Nice phone. And at least it doesn’t blow up like the S7 Note. And I am a godlike hero to my wife, because I finally made her phone stop blowing her shit.
Yesterday, a fucking idiot claiming to be a journalist posted this on Twitter:
He has since deleted it, because he was getting clobbered by people who know better. This will stay here as a reminder of his idiocy.
I’ve had the same work email address for over 22 years.
This morning’s mailbag included 11 items of actual legitimate communication, and 67 items of spam/malware. By the end of the day, there will be tens of good emails and hundreds of spam and malware emails.
The people who write SpamAssassin should be hanged for false advertising. So should the people who write anti-virus software.
God, I wish I could retire. It gets so old spending half my time tossing all this crap.
Someone posted a “ha ha” graphic meme on Facebook earlier today (for all I know it’s been making the rounds for ages, but this is the first time I saw it) that read, “Walmart is closing 269 stores in 2016, putting 14 cashiers out of work.” Ha ha ha ha blah.
My wife shops there a lot, mostly for groceries, but I hate the place. On the other hand, I hate Target and Meijer, too, their only competition around here. Which brings me to trying to define why I hate them, because Target stores are generally clean and well-lit, Meijer stores try to keep up with Target (in my experience), and Walmart stores are just disgusting and make me want to pack my .45 and sling an AR-15 over my shoulder when I go in.*
I feel the same way about big box hardware stores, too, Lowe’s and Home Depot (which I invariably call “Home Despot”), but I can at least partly quantify why. I used to love the old time, small-town, privately-owned hardware stores, the ones with the wood plank floors and the narrow aisles packed with any conceivable thing someone might need to fix or replace something, or simply add to their possessions. You could buy nails by the pound in a paper sack, weighed out on an old balance scale that might have been purchased by the current owner’s great-grandfather, root through the drawers that contained all kinds of odd fasteners and bolts and nuts, might find a small toy section, definitely would find kitchen goods, paint, wallpaper, guns (!) and ammo (!), maybe even some dynamite (!!!) for blasting that stubborn stump out of the back 40. And the smells were indescribable. Sawdust and rubber and paint and oil and kerosene (which was hopefully outside) and any number of other things.
The last hardware like that in Indianapolis that I was aware of was the old Handy Hardware on Guilford Avenue in Broad Ripple. I think when Broad Ripple got trendy, they moved out of there and over to a building at 54th and Keystone, but I don’t know if they’re still in business. (Fox’s Deli was next door. You’d go have lunch and then go to the hardware, then back to work.) But there were plenty of those old hardware stores out in the boonies in northern Indiana when I was growing up and traveling around with Dad, working on people’s furnaces and maybe installing their first central air conditioning. (We did a lot of the latter in the early 1970’s.)
Like so many things, those days have passed. I think of those days as the last truly civilized period during which I’ve had the privilege to live. Since then, so much retail has turned into national or regional big boxes that slowly but surely put local business out of business. And I’m sad to say that shopping in a Lowe’s or a Home Depot is not the same as shopping at Handy Hardware, or the old Ace Hardware that used to be in New Augusta Plaza, or any of the little small-town hardwares I visited back when I was a teen. And our civilization is the worse for it, because you no longer know the owner, and no longer have any real community connection to the place. Instead, you have faceless sales drones who probably don’t really know anything about what they’re selling, and who are just itching for the end of their shift so they can go home and watch cable or surf the web.
The other night, my wife and I got to attend a baseball game at our local AAA park. We were there as guests of the local medical school dean, because I’m on a board that gives the med school a big donation every year to help fund research into an “orphan” disease. This was one of the ways that the school shows its gratitude to us (they also threw a splendid lunch for us some months back when we presented them with the check, and they’re always happy to send the researcher whose work we’re subsidizing to talk to our general membership about his work). As we sat at the park eating the seriously good food that had been laid on for the med school, I thought to myself that here was community. We don’t just hand over a big check every year to a faceless administrator. The dean spends time with us and makes sure that we have everything we need. His staff do the same. They are genuine people who are genuinely trying to make a difference in a crazy world that looks to be getting even crazier by the day. They provide grounding, and knowledge that we can still truly do good work despite the craziness.
And that’s what the old mom-and-pop stores and diners and gas stations and other small businesses in small towns all over the state used to do. They provided grounding. They were community. They knew you, and you knew them.
So many people are no longer grounded in our communities. Is it any wonder that we see our communities decivilizing before our eyes?
I don’t think so.
These are the Crazy Years.
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* For my own defense, in case Homeland Security is reading this. People in Walmarts can be nuts, you know.
Cato the Elder would approve.
There cannot possibly be a person out there who truly believes that a simple declaration of a space as a gun free zone prevents people from bringing guns into it. If you do, you are living in a dream world. If you do and you are a politician, you need to be directed to the nearest political exit and never be allowed to hold public office again.
We have yet to see a situation in which an armed citizen, armed only for his or her defense, has suddenly gone mad and started mowing people down. Indeed, we’ve seen plenty of cases where armed citizens have stopped a criminal act cold. Sadly, local media rarely cover the latter, or downplay the armed citizen’s involvement, because “white-hat” armed citizens don’t fit their progressive narrative.
But we’ve seen plenty of cases where lone gunmen — typically, initially blamed on the right wing (usually the NRA), but almost invariably turning out to be somehow associated with the left, or the radical Islamic terror network (but I repeat myself) — have opened fire in gun-free zones where no law-abiding citizen was able to carry a weapon.
This madness must stop. The 2nd Amendment exists for a reason. But the gun-grabbers of the world do not want American citizens (or any citizens, for that matter) to be able to protect ourselves, because they are a wholly-owned subsidiary of those who believe that we must submit to the dubious protection of our government. “Government knows best and will protect you from these bad people,” is their cry.
Yet, government cannot tie its own shoes, button its own pants, or balance its own budget, or get much of anything else right. Indeed, sometimes it even acts maliciously for its own purposes (Animas River, anyone?) It doesn’t even seem to have the will to protect our interests in the world outside our borders (let alone inside them). And it clearly cannot prevent San Bernardinos or Orlandos even when it’s aware of damning facts about the eventual shooters. Why, then, should we subject our personal safety and that of our families to it? The Founders and the Framers did not believe that we should. Nothing that has happened in the past 200+ years suggests they were wrong.
I call on governments everywhere, local, state, and national, to outlaw gun-free zones. It is the Constitutional right of every American to carry a weapon for his or her personal defense, and this right has been upheld countless times by the courts, regardless of what politicians believe makes good law. (Or for that matter, what the Ninth Circus, always an outlier and the most overturned circuit in the nation, has to say.)
Want to stop the madness? Stop disarming citizens. After September 11, 2001, as soon as terrorists realized that Americans would fight back on airplanes, attempted hijackings and attempted bombings of American airliners stopped, regardless of what TSA wants you to think or anything they claim to have done. The same could be true of our self-inflicted free-fire zones, otherwise known as “gun-free” zones.
This came out of musings regarding a FB post bemoaning the use of the construction “If you don’t like my attitude about this, feel free to unfriend me” — something I’ve used a couple of times recently myself. (I lost exactly one friend over that, according to FB Purity.) This got me to thinking about the difference between real friends and Facebook (or social media in general) friends.
One of my best meatspace friends is a Bernie supporter. I can’t help it if he’s an idiot about that. We’ve been friends for four decades. We have much more in common than we do otherwise. So we get along and don’t talk politics. Much 🙂
My wife is a lifelong Democrat (but despises Hillary). I knew she was a Democrat (so are her parents) when I married her. But again, we don’t discuss politics…much. (On the other hand, it helps that she’s more of a Scoop Jackson Democrat, not a wild-eyed radical dirty hippie like so many on the left are anymore. She thought Occupy was stupid, too)
One of my fraternity brothers is not only a Democrat, he’s a union negotiator for the UAW. But again, we have more in common than we do otherwise. He holds political views that I disagree with…but we don’t discuss politics. Much 🙂
Note the common denominator — I know these people well. They are long-time friends and associates in real life. I would no more “unfriend” them in real life than I would cut off my trigger finger.
On the other hand, I associate on social media with any number of people I barely know, and have either never met in meatspace or with whom I have only extremely limited associations.* Some of those hold political views I find abhorrent. I’m sure they think the same of my political views. And the links with those people are often so tenuous that I honestly don’t care if they unfriend me for political reasons, or not.
Social media has been the catalyst for a lower and lower standard of social and political discourse over the past couple of election cycles. As I touched on, below, in Democracy usually fails, the real-time ability to comment on other people’s opinions has turned the mill run of us into a community of mean, sarcastic assholes when it comes to those opinions. The great Facebook Democracy of the Unwashed is driving our political conversation today, as it has for at least the last two elections. What is sad is that the monolithic move to social media has led to the retirement (or near retirement) of a number of sane, thoughtful bloggers — because nobody reads blogs anymore. That takes too long, when it’s easier to read pithy crap typed by your “friends” or view picture memes as if we had suddenly been reduced to a basic reading level where informed, thoughtful, and logical commentary is seemingly Sanskrit to the masses. (In fairness, most millenials are already at that level, thanks to our crap schools.)
So when someone says, “If you don’t like my opinions, unfriend me,” maybe we should take them at their word. It might make people spend a little more time thinking about what they say and write. And that could only be for the good.
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* Many of them “handshake” Masons that I’ve met in real life maybe once, and en passant, or may not have ever met at all. I’m the international secretary-treasurer for a fair-sized Masonic organization with members all over the globe, so I get a lot of friend requests from people I know only because they send in a check once a year. But I also have a lot of “friends” for whom I can’t really find a connection. Naturally, if one of them starts spouting political crap that I’m diametrically opposed to, the likelihood is that I’m going to dump them.
Gun bloggers and Baen SF writers, in my view, are generally exempted from the “social media” category. I’ve drunk good beer with some of them (well, not the SF writers — yet). We get along.
Pure democracy, anyway. Our Founding Fathers knew it; that’s why they created a Republic for us. Little did they know we’d only take two centuries to fuck that up.
Anyway. After reading comments on an article regarding the dustup between CBS/Paramount and the fans who are producing the “Axanar” spin-off Star Trek movie, I really do wonder if the Internet has done us any favors. What would have been, pre-1994, a simple article in something like Variety (it used to be printed exclusively on newsprint, for those not old enough to remember) that might have been discussed a few days later on a Usenet newsgroup that practically nobody actually read, has in 2016 become an instant forum in which readers may projectile-vomit their undistilled raw thoughts about the article anonymously and without regard for what anyone else thinks.* (Indeed, such microcephalic idiots generally operate without filters between ears, brain, and mouth even in real life conversations and other interactions. Sometimes even those of us who do normally operate with those filters engaged nevertheless find ourselves issuing that kind of internet comment, too. So sadly, it’s not just those with tiny brains** who succumb, suggesting that the problem is really the siren call of the medium beckoning one to yield to that blinking cursor, not simply the individual’s solipsistic need to assert that the universe does, in fact, revolve around himself and that his opinion actually has any worth to anyone but himself.***)
The thing I don’t understand is why it’s anyone’s business except that of the parties involved. Why did this article need instant comments at all? It’s a simple report of news. You want to respond to it, write an email to the editor like we used to do back in the day (although generally we typed or hand-wrote it on paper, stuck it in an envelope with a stamp (remember those?) and threw it in the mailbox to be delivered sometime in the next couple of days). If the editors liked it, they might even print it in the next issue, and might even respond to you, thanking you for your well- or not so well-reasoned arguments, and in the latter case, gently explaining why you were a fucking idiot who needed to be spoon-fed the Truth as handed down by your Betters.
Oh, and — if you wanted to be taken seriously, you wrote politely. Even if you were pissed off. Such was the Republic of News; it was serious, it was considered, it was grave, and it was polite, even when it excoriated local or national politicians for real or imagined sins. And it had its gatekeepers. If they didn’t like your tone, your letter went into the round file with that of other barbarians and kooks.
Today we have the great Democracy of the Unwashed who simply react reflexively rather than respond thoughtfully. And that’s why the comments section of that article about Axanar — and the comments section of so many other articles — is something you read only if you have no care for your sanity.
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* And often, without regard for correct grammar or orthography, either.
** Or small phalluses, but that’s really kind of beyond the pale, even for me.
*** Women also have this problem, but I’ll be damned if I’ll yield to political correctness and fuck up the flow of this post.
Shrillery keeps talking up the failed Australian gun grab as a model for the US. Where gun grabbery fails every time it’s tried — for example, New York and Connecticut.
And all the Trumpettes start freaking out and hitting the gun stores, and buying up all the damn ammo. Fuck. I’m not in a position to buy 10K rounds of 9 right now, damn it.
But let’s face it. There aren’t enough policemen or soldiers in the country to take away the 300 million guns we have scattered around — not without a fight, and they don’t want one (particularly not the soldiers; they’re not interested in shooting their own, they want to shoot American’s enemies. Plus, all that posse comitatus shit). And most of them would look the other way under an Australian-type gun confiscation. This is not Australia — thank goodness. Most of our cops can make the distinction between a legal gun owner protecting his property and his family, and a gang-banger out trying to make trouble with a firearm.
Plus, I keep reading articles where commentators keep making the point: If Obama had thought he could actually take our guns, he would have taken them in the first two years of his first term, when the Dems had total control. That he didn’t indicates that he recognizes the total impossibility of that happening. Instead, he’s been content to snipe around the edges and try to make gun ownership harder for good actors, by ignoring the fact that the vast, vast, VAST majority of gun crime is committed by…er…criminals.
Either Shrillery is completely bugnuts and really thinks she can do it, or this is just nothing but politics as usual from the gun-hating Democrats. Either way, I’m pretty sure confiscation ain’t happening — just like it didn’t happen in Australia (where the law was ignored to the extent that only about 20% of the weapons it covered were actually turned in), and didn’t happen in New York or Connecticut (where it’s estimated that even fewer gun owners complied). Analysis: The American people will, by and large, ignore a stupid and unConstitutional law if passed, and nothing will happen to them.
I’m told that the Trump folks who hang out in gun shops are livid about this, but I discount that because they still don’t seem to recognize that Trump is a Democrat in Republican clothing. If they’d have gotten behind Cruz, they might have had a candidate who would actually protect their rights. But what the hell do I know.
that Drumpf and Shrillery won their respective primaries in NY State last night.
Both of them are Favorite Assholes in a state well known for same.