Category: These Are The Crazy Years

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You keep using that word

The following was shared on Facebook by a left-leaning friend.

CardcarryingsocialsecurityistThis argument is invalid. I have (do not carry) a Social Security card only because the government forces me to have a Social Security account. Kinda hard to get a (legal) job, or generally exist, without one.  As Obamacare advocates would point out, I didn’t build that, and it’s the law.

Because historically, Socialists always have to force their programs down the throats of free men.

The original post was by an exceedingly giddy young (I assume) woman, who accompanied it with the observation, “Just found this today:-) gonna love sharing it with anyone who calls Bernie a Socialist like is a disease??”

Well, Bernie is a socialist.  Bernie is about the free stuff.  The problem is that this giddy young (I assume) woman doesn’t understand that, historically, in order to provide the free stuff, socialists take over the means of production and dictate who gets what, who lives where, who gets to attend college and become more than just a drone, and who labors as the drones to produce the free stuff for the elites.  That would probably surprise this giddy young (I assume) woman, who on her Facebook profile indicates that she is the “owner” of an Etsy shop that sells jewelry.  Silly woman.  Under a Sanders administration, nobody will own anything — not even their body.

Well, OK, maybe that’s extreme.  But it would not be outside the realm of socialist thought.

More to the point, she has not a clue about why and how Social Security came into existence, nor what it and the deluge of social programs that followed it have done to the very fabric of our nation.  Before FDR and the New Deal, these social concerns were taken care of locally, by families, extended families, religious institutions, and in some cases, the local government (think “county poor farm”).  In some of these instances, the solution wasn’t particularly nice (think “county poor farm”).  But where there was life, there was hope, and depending on the community you lived in, it wouldn’t be long till you were back on your feet, even if you were working a job at manual labor for a dollar a day — because the community didn’t have any use for layabouts and shirkers.

Because the 1929 Great Depression had so much more impact on the nation than previous downturns — or at least was perceived to have more impact, probably due to a combination of better news reporting and fumbling attempts (or non-attempts) by the government of the day to do anything to contain it — FDR was able to run and win in ’32 on an essentially socialistic platform which was parlayed into the New Deal.  Of course, FDR had no actual answers either, and the Great Depression got even worse before it got better, mostly due to his administration’s incompetent meddling with the levers of government.  (The man would literally wake up in the morning and set the day’s price for gold on a whim.  Don’t believe me, read some history.  Here’s a good place to start.)  As a result, the economy, which actually appeared to be recovering by the time the ’32 election rolled around (even though 1932 was the “worst” year of the Great Depression in terms of joblessness), went back into the dumper and hit a nadir in 1937 which was only alleviated by FDR backing off some of the more socialistic New Deal “reforms” he’d put into place.  And of course, most honest historians will acknowledge that the Great Depression didn’t end until the economy transformed from consumer-driven to war-driven with the onset of the Second World War.

But look what it took to implement FDR-style statism/socialism.

1) A historically-epic economic downturn in 1929.  But we’d had bank panics and downturns many times before in our history.  Here’s a list as long as your arm.  Somehow we always seemed to get out of them without handing over our lives, fortunes and sacred honor to the gummint.

2) An unwillingness to accept that, by the end of 1932, the country was in fact working its way out of the downturn.

3) The election of a rich bastard asshole one-percenter Democrat (but I may be repeating myself) from the Northeast.

4) A nascent national news media (via radio) that aided and abetted socialistic reforms by giving the President of the United States a true nationwide bully pulpit.

5) The packing and corruption of the Supreme Court with the tacit collusion of the Democrat-majority Senate.

6) A reading of the Constitution’s “general welfare” clause that was out of keeping with historical interpretation of the document.

7) A flatly unConstitutional requirement that workers in most industries must sign up for the new Social Security program.  (Railroad workers, among others, had sufficient power to avoid that until the 1960’s, when my grandfather, among others, got screwed when his railroad pension was converted over to Social Security.  He lived in penury the rest of his life as a result.)

And finally, 8) A populace that was gulled into a false sense of security by its federal servants, who became their masters without anyone really thinking about it.

To this day, with the later additions of LBJ’s Great Society and the general disaster known as the Obama Administration, little has been done to stem the tide of statism masquerading as socialism.  That old fascist Woodrow Wilson, creator of the federal income tax and nationalizer of railroads, would be pleased to see government firmly in charge of the people, with its grasp on their throats tightening more and more every year.

Which leads us back to the original point of this post.  The giddy young (I assume) woman who thinks it’s funny that we’re all card-carrying socialists because we’re forced to have SSI accounts proves that she has no idea of what came before.  Admittedly, I do only because I have studied history (I’se gots a degree innit, right?) and because my parents lived through the Great Depression and the War that ended it.  But I know more about why we have those cards than she does, or probably most average Americans do.  If you look through the list I provided above, you’ll see clear parallels between the Great Depression of the 1930’s and the Great Recession we’re currently still in the midst of.

Social Security is one of the best examples of a failed socialist program I can think of.  It is funded not by a trust fund, as the people were led to believe when it was created, but by current revenues even over and above what the FICA tax takes in.  The “trust fund” was shown to be nothing but a wad of IOU’s from the Treasury some years back.  All of us working stiffs are paying into FICA not for our own retirement, but for that of our parents’.  (Who, pray tell, will pay for ours?  I’m not sanguine about the prospects.)  The associated programs Medicare and Medicaid are rife with fraud, and the less said about the abuse and fraud associated with Social Security disability programs, the better for my blood pressure.

We have walked, eyes wide shut, into a fiscal disaster that has been the better part of a century in the making, all due to politicians trying to make us into socialists.  And now, the Democrat front-runner wants to impose even more socialism on us, if he’s elected.  (So does the Republican front-runner, but he’s being a bit more sly about it.)  Both parties are culpable and guilty of aiding and abetting this long, slow slide into state control of our lives.  People in Congress like Mitch McConnell and John Boehner (who thankfully is gone, only because — unlike McConnell and John McCain and others of their ilk — he recognized his time was at an end) should have been shown the door years ago, because they do not represent the people — they represent themselves, and the special interests that funded their rise.

And legislators seem honestly hurt by the fact that Congress polls at a rate lower than ever before.

So yeah, Ms. Denny Love, sure, yuk it up that we’re all Socialists now.  Laugh while you can.  In a few years, your sense of humor may be all you have.  But you’ll have to live with the fruits of your folly a lot longer than I will. Thank goodness for small favors.

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Hugo away now.

So, this year I joined WorldCon for the first time (as a supporting member) and got to vote on the Hugos.

I’ve been a science fiction aficionado most of my life. 50 years, or close to it; way back in the 1960’s, before I could even really understand what I was reading, I got hooked by a two-volume set of A Treasury of Great Science Fiction, edited by Anthony Boucher.

I was thereby introduced to A.E. Van Vogt (The Weapon Shops of Isher), Poul Anderson (Brain Wave), Alfred Bester (The Stars My Destination), George O. Smith (“Lost Art”, which is part of the great Venus Equilateral), and Nelson S. Bond (“Magic City”) among others. I later re-read them all in the light of somewhat greater maturity and understood that I had been reading classic SF from a golden age that had just preceded my own life. But that was the trigger that started me off reading SF nearly half a century ago. And it colors my appreciation of modern SF quite a bit.

You may notice that I have carefully avoided using the term “fan”. That’s because (and in someone else’s construction that I saw a couple of days ago) I’m a fan, not a Fan. I’ve been to exactly three SF conventions in my life, and I can name them easily: NorthAmericon in 1979, Rivercon V in 1980, and our local InConJunction 2 in 1981. NorthAmericon was as close as I’ve ever come to attending WorldCon, given it was held to give US fans something to do since WorldCon was being held in England that year.*

I stopped going to the local ‘con after one try because, frankly, I didn’t (and still don’t) like most of the people who were running it back then. Fen qua fen ordinarily give me the willies, and these folks were exceedingly strange, even for fen. (Some of us who were less than cordial about them were wont to refer to their SF club The Circle of Janus as “the circular anus”.) Anyway, as a card-carrying introvert even back then, I quit going to SF conventions about the time I was 22.** Fuck, I don’t even go to GenCon, and it’s here every year until the SJWs force it to move because they don’t like our governor. Which would be a pretty stupid reason to move it, but they’re SJWs, so I digress.

Over the years, particularly after Heinlein died, but moreso after Poul Anderson died, I sort of lost interest in “modern” science fiction, because most of it was new-agey, touchy-feely, socially-aware, globull-warmerongering-friendly feminist pap. And today, so much of it is post-apocalyptic “we’re doomed anyway” downer shit. (The Black Tide Rising series by John Ringo being a notable exception to the mill run of such.)***

But then I found Baen, and authors who were actually writing the kind of science fiction I wanted to read. Even if Eric Flint is a red diaper baby. I still like his stuff, and he has a good editorial eye. Plus, he likes a lot of the same authors I do 🙂

(Oh, and by the way: In the main, I hate fantasy, or what we used to call “sword and sorcery” (with a couple of significant, classic exceptions). I wish the fantasy genre had never gotten bound up with science fiction. They are completely different genres, with different sets of fans, and other than their common speculative nature, they really don’t deserve to be lumped together. But that’s a bone to be picked another day.)

So where am I going with this?

The year of the *.  (No, that’s not a footnote.)

I admit, fully and openly, that I sided with the Sad Puppies, and voted as one (which is not the same thing that the CHORFs**** are calling “voting the SP slate”, since there wasn’t a goddamn SP slate). I have sat here for many years and idly wondered from time to time just exactly who the fuck decided that certain Hugo winners ought to have a Hugo. Finding out that the Hugo voting has been largely taken over by the Social Justice Warrior (SJW) crowd AKA CHORFs went a long way toward explaining that to me.

I was not aware of Sad Puppies, by the way, until this year, which was its third annual iteration. And I’m not going to get into the Rabid Puppies vs. Sad Puppies distraction; I don’t know who Vox Day is, and I don’t much give a fuck, other than that he seems to be a raging asshole.

And as I said on Facebook yesterday, I’ve never bought a book because it had a sticker on the cover proclaiming it to be a Hugo winner or nominee. Someone else (I think one of Hoyt’s Huns) mentioned dollars as votes. Just so.

The fact that the number of No Awards for the Hugo in its entire history just doubled over the weekend tells me that the CHORFs are fully in charge and have no intention of relinquishing their hold (or what they perceive as their hold) on SF fandom. While I agree that the Puppies won by losing (and thereby proving what a total group of childish assholes the CHORFs are), it doesn’t mean I have to like it. And I don’t.

By all accounts, Toni Weisskopf really deserved a Hugo for Best Editor (Long Form), but because she was Puppy-tainted, she came in second to No Award.

And I read, critically, both KJA’s The Dark Between the Stars and Cixin Liu’s The Three Body Problem. (I tried to read Ancillary Sword, but the first chapter defeated me; I simply couldn’t be moved to care. The Goblin Emperor was crap from the first sentence. And I’m not a Jim Butcher fan; sue me.) Liu’s book was good, and I enjoyed it. But Anderson’s book was better and it deserved the Hugo. It didn’t get it because Anderson is smeared with the Puppies (plus he’s not a darling of the SJW crowd).

It just gets worse from there so there’s no point in discussing it.  Then there was the just-plain-nastiness of the SJW crowd, starting with “you can cheer the no-awards, but you can’t boo them.”  Fuck you, assholes.

The Hugo is finished as a serious award. It was finished anyway, years ago, because it was only voted on by a self-selecting group that either attended WorldCon or bought a supporting membership (after that became possible). When that group became slanted to the SJW/CHORF crowd, the awards started tilting toward the type of SF that I described as being distasteful to me, above. And now that the proggies have full control, they’re unwilling to let go of it, even when the awards they’re giving are going to pedestrian crap, or aren’t going to anyone (No Award) no matter how deserving.

There’s apparently going to be a Sad Puppies IV, but with all due respect to the organizers, I don’t think that’s the appropriate response. The Hugo is old and busted; something else needs to take its place. Whatever that something is, it needs to be disassociated from WorldCon (something else that’s old and busted), and made more accessible to the body of fans who actually buy and read the books. It’s clear that WorldCon and the World Science Fiction Society no longer represent a vital cross-section of fandom, and indeed, there seem to be a lot of fans out there who don’t know what either of them OR the Hugo are.

Regardless of the awe and respect that many fans have for the Hugo, it is clear that the sand of cultural progressivism has jammed its gears. When you’ve butted up against that immovable object with your irresistible force and still haven’t been able to budge it an inch after repeated tries, it’s time to walk away and try something new.

It’s a big multiverse. There’s room for more than one award in Science Fiction.

_____________________

* And at which it was my supreme pleasure and privilege to meet Forrest J Ackerman.  And setup and run his slides of the Ackermansion, which I got to visit two years later.

** Which doesn’t mean I don’t go to conventions of any sort. I’ve been to national and regional conventions of my college service fraternity, and I spend far too much time going to Masonic events, and I haven’t missed a Grand Lodge convocation since 2000. In fact, my wife and I are getting ready to run the Indiana hospitality suite at the 2015 Supreme Council session of the AASR-NMJ. But that’s different; the people who attend such things aren’t fen. They’re grownups. Well, by and large, anyway.

***My preference is what Sarah Hoyt calls “Human Wave” SF.

**** Here, let me Google that for you.

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And Karl Rove is talking out of his ass, too.

Fuck me.

Karl Rove: Violence Will Continue Until The Second Amendment is Repealed

What the fuck?  What the fucking fuck?

If Karl Rove thinks for one minute that repealing the 2nd Amendment will magically put a stop to gun violence in this country, he is living in the Pope’s dream world.  You could as easily say that racist, hateful speech will continue until the First Amendment is repealed, and you would be just as wrong about the outcome.

Someone at high levels in the Republican Party needs to leash and muzzle Rover before he bites himself in the ass.  Talk about snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.

H/T.

(Apparently he followed this up with “But that’s not going to happen”, or some such lame attempt to mitigate what he’d said.  But the very fact that he would say it means that he must think it, and if so, he needs to be pitched out of the Republican Party on general principle.)

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The Pope is talking out of his ass again.

Seriously, the College of Cardinals elected this guy?  What were they thinking?

Pope says weapons manufacturers can’t call themselves Christian

Seems to me that’s really big talk for a guy whose little enclave of peace and harmony exists only because putatively majoritarian Christian countries with big expensive militaries are defending it.

What’s next?  Calling Catholics who own firearms for personal defense hypocrites, too?

Oh, and by the way, your Holiness — don’t even try to bring the Holocaust into this.  The Holocaust happened in part because the Germans disarmed the Jews so they wouldn’t be able to fight back when the SS came to take them away.  That’s why any Jew today who isn’t armed and ammoed-up is living in a dream world — kind of like the Pope, come to think of it.

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Frustrating.

The RFRA recently passed by Indiana is a bad law, but it’s a bad law the same way as the RFRAs passed by 19 other states and the Federal Government are bad laws.  There is no need for the RFRA if the courts recognize pre-existing religious freedoms and freedom of association.  There is no need for the RFRA if people simply let free markets work.  If you’re gay and your baker of choice won’t bake you decorated cookies with gay power slogans on them because he is a devout Christian who doesn’t support your lifestyle choice, that’s his right — as it is your right to go out to your community and tell people that he isn’t friendly to your cause and that maybe his business should be avoided because of that.  See?  Free market at work instead of a tiny minority of hyphenated Americans wagging the full force of the law dog to force someone to do something that goes against his or her religious belief.  In other words, the way things have been done in this country for years, at least until the Perennially Indignant came up with the idea that you could litigate someone out of business for the most ridiculous of reasons.

The sheer amount of lying on the left regarding what this law does is just about enough to make me tear out the rest of my remaining hair, and then start in on the beard.  And it’s just plain lies.  It’s not just misconstructions or insinuations or little white lies, it’s great big fucking whopper lies.  My own wife told me the other night that our RFRA is the only one that specifically targets gays.  Problem with that is that I actually read the statute, and it does nothing of the sort.  In point of fact, the law in Indiana has never identified the LGBT community as one accorded special protection, so the Indiana RFRA doesn’t even infringe on some supposed pre-existing accommodation.

The governor of Connecticut is banning state-paid travel to Indiana because of our RFRA.  Except that his state has one that is just as bad.

The GOP mayor of Indianapolis, who isn’t running for re-election, could have kept his piehole shut, but he had to speak out on the issue and declare himself opposed to the RFRA.  Well, Mr. Ballard, if you were running again, you wouldn’t be getting my vote anyway, but this just would have put the icing on.

All of this is a distraction.  It’s being done to knock Pence out of consideration for 2016 (although as much as I like Pence, I have never really considered him as presidential timber, at least not till after he completes a couple of terms as governor — and I am very disappointed that he signed rather than vetoed the RFRA) and to distract from the unConstitutional and extra-Constitutional actions of our traitor President.  It’s being done to suppress voter turnout among whites, who are more and more turning against Obama.  And it’s being done because it does not fit the narrative of where the progressive left wants this country to go.

Libprogs would prefer this country to Balkanize itself and become a fractured nation of ethnic and national communities that can’t agree on a damn thing.  They hate the idea of the melting pot.  They hate the idea of American Exceptionalism, they hate the idea of the Pax Americana, and they hate everything that this country stands for with regard to individual liberty.  They hate guns, they hate the military, they hate the rich (even though some of them are among the richest), and they want everyone but themselves to live beholden to the State.

Fuck them.  I am not a slave, I am a free man.  The State can go hang.

My ancestors, right up to my father, and a number of my own cousins and other relatives, did not fight and sometimes die in the service of their country in expectation that it would turn into a Communist/Statist/Nanny-State “paradise”.  They may have voted Democrat back when the Democrats were a party worth voting for.  But like Ronald Reagan, most of my formerly-Democrat relatives have found that the Democratic Party has left them for one reason or another.

I know people who say that Pence is going to be one-and-done.  I wonder.  Indiana is a very conservative state, deep down.  If you rile up the base sufficiently, they will rise up from their electoral slumber and vote for the man who signed the bill that at least purports to protect their religious freedoms.

Was this a bad bill at the wrong time?  Yes, it was.  Someone I was talking to the other day stated their opinion that the GOP should have waited a year, and taken that year to write a better bill and build support for it in the community.  Maybe.  Maybe they would have figured out in that year that they didn’t need the RFRA at all and that common sense ought to rule in the state and in its courts.  (Common sense, unfortunately, is becoming a very rare commodity — again, because that’s what the libprogs want.)

If there was ever a time that conservatives — or as I prefer to call them, “classical liberals” — need to turn Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals back on their progressive proponents, it would seem to be now.  Whether you like the RFRA or not, libprogs are telling stories about it that simply aren’t true.  It’s time to punch back twice as hard.  Punch back, in fact, hard enough that Alinsky’s grandmother feels it.

And make sure that your so-called conservative Indiana reps and senators know that you think they are damn fools for putting the RFRA forward and that it needs to be repealed tout de suite.

If this stance on my part angers you, fine.  Go away.  Unfriend me on Facebook.  And don’t come back.  I don’t need friends who believe in and propagate lies.

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Mourn the Constitution…then work to restore it

This president has folded, spindled and mutilated the Constitution before.  Last night he simply balled it up and threw it in the trash.

Worst president since Wilson.

The next Congress is going to have to man up and take on this usurper, this Emperor in his own mind.  This is not Rome, and he is not Augustus.  He is but a man, and with luck he will find out soon enough that the people of this country and their elected representatives aren't as stupid as he and Jonathan Gruber think.

On the other hand, if our elected representatives don't start working to repair the damage, the people may have to exercise their right to take matters into their own hands.

We're still at the top of this particular slippery slope, but we're beginning to slide.  Keep your powder dry.

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Just a bunch of HOAs.

I see in the local popular media that the Hancock County prosecutor is telling a local homeowners' association that they need to back down from telling a Korean War veteran that he can't fly a flag from a flagpole in his yard.  That's nice, right before the election…ought to give that fuckface prosecutor a nice boost for standing up for a flag-waving patriot.1

The problem as I see it, however, is that the HOA's rules aren't negotiable in court.  As the perennial argument regarding ham radio antennae in HOA-controlled neighborhoods goes, when you signed on the dotted line (the many dotted lines) to close on your home, one of the things you signed was your agreement to abide by the HOA rules.  If you didn't sign that document then in all likelihood you wouldn't have been permitted to close on the house (or, in my case some years back, condo).

So other than grandstanding, I don't see where this prosecutor is going to be able to do much more than rant and rave.  I agree with him that the HOA are being assholes here, but the problem is not the one little rule that says "no flagpoles in yards".  And yes, yes, I get that many years ago (in years that I was alive, in fact) there were plenty of "neighborhood associations" and "civic leagues" whose only real reason for existing was to keep blacks out of their neighborhoods.  The Civil Rights Act pretty much put paid to that little conceit.2

No, the problem is HOAs themselves.  HOAs are creatures of the general contractor and they are put in place to handle things that the city or county don't generally deal with and that the contractor doesn't want to be hung with forever after the subdivision is 100% sold.  For instance, snow removal, garbage pickup, general maintenance of common areas, possibly ownership of a clubhouse, that sort of thing.  As far as snow and garbage and road upkeep go, the subdivision might not even be in a city district to begin with, and the contractor may have received zoning approval only after agreeing to set up a HOA so that the city or county wouldn't have to worry about them.  These are legitimate reasons to have a HOA, in my opinion; it is simpler and often cheaper to negotiate neighborhood-wide contracts for services rather than each householder contracting his own, and of course common property needs to be kept in good repair.

However, HOAs generally come with a generic set of bylaws and rules that are oppressive and (in my opinion) effectively constitute a "taking" of your right to own and improve property.  While it may be appreciated that the association bylaws don't allow your hillbilly neighbors out back to run an informal auto repair and body shop in their garage and side yard (something that residential zoning rules generally frown on anyway), bylaws that disallow individualized lawn improvements such as flower beds, flagpoles, fountains, or even trees and mulching without association approval — which may or may not be granted — may not float your boat five or six years into your residence there.  Oh, and that boat?  Keep it in storage somewhere else, along with your RV, because it's unlikely you'll be allowed to park either of them in your driveway or back yard.  And we'll not get into the whole "ham radio antennae and your HOA" business, other than to say that if HOAs weren't unreasonable, there wouldn't be a booming business in so-called "stealth" antennae among the ham radio set.3

The fact is that the vast majority of HOAs end up being little fascist neighborhood soviets with their spies out just waiting for you to violate the rules.  It is often nearly impossible to vote the control freaks out of office, and even when you do that, it is usually impossible to simply let the HOA fold up and die.4  Because of that, it seems to me that the time is ripe not for prosecutors to be telling HOAs that they can't prevent veterans from flying flags, but for the state legislature to start legislating in favor of property rights and put the brakes on HOAs in general, spelling out in statute what they can and cannot do to their neighbors — who, after all, have a sizeable investment in property that the HOA is trying to micro-control.  Most folks who buy and live in HOA neighborhoods don't have the easy option of saying to hell with the HOA, I'm selling and going somewhere else.  After all, they have to find a buyer, sell, find a new place to live, often negotiate purchase of a new home "pending sale of other property" because you can't have multiple FHA mortagages…and believe me, I'm still trying to sell an FHA-financed condo after moving out nearly nine years ago, while still trying to buy the house we're living in (the move was not because of the HOA, but because we needed a bigger place after we got married).  Buying a house is not like buying a car and trading it every two or three years.  You are sort of stuck for a while, unless you are independently wealthy, or unless your friend who just moved back to town is looking for a place to live and your mother is moving into senior living and is willing to let you live in the house till you can purchase it from her.  The latter being our case.

Bottom line, the HOA problem isn't going to go away without legislation.  The Hancock County fuckface prosecutor can grandstand all he wants, but in the end, all he's going to get is a specific HOA to back down in this one single case — if that.  Our legislators need to stand up for property rights and put limits on abusive HOA behavior.

UPDATE:  Looks like the HOA backed down.  I read the prosecutor's letter, and more or less I suppose his position is tenable, but IMHO, and all things being equal, I think the HOA should have fought him in court — a judge might have seen a certain amount of prosecutorial overreach.  Now we have an unresolved issue that will continue to be unresolved until either the courts rule on a different HOA issue, or the legislature finally acts to limit the power of HOAs in such matters.

The assholes who wrote the anonymous hate mails are funny.  "Now that you have destroyed Fieldstone, are you going to pay my mother’s nursing care costs when she is unable to sell her home there?"  Yeah, right.  Try proving your initial proposition first, i.e., that one flagpole flying an American flag and a POW/MIA flag has "destroyed" the subdivision.  And, "You have caused immeasurable harm."  Prove it.

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1 See here for why I consider the Hancock Country prosecutor a fuckface, and hope people vote for his opponent next week.

2  To this day I refuse to join or even go to the meetings of the civic league in this neighborhood, because they approached my father back in the early 1960s about that and he said, "What is the point of your association?  What is your main reason for existing?" and they hemmed and hawwed and finally admitted that they were trying to keep the black man out.  He told them to get the hell out of his house and off of his property.
      While I understand that today's iteration of that civic league is more about neighborhood watch and that sort of thing, the very history of the organization prevents me from becoming involved with it.  The least they could have done was changed the name.  Anyway, it is not a HOA and can't tell me what I can and can't do with my property, so it can go fly a fucking kite.

3  And let's be clear here — by "unreasonable" I don't mean that they don't allow a guy to have an 80 foot guyed tower with a dozen different antennae hanging off of it, topped with a hex beam good to 80 meters.  I mean not allowing things like a 27-foot ground-mount vertical in your back yard, because your neighbor might see it and have a heart attack.  Or getting bent out of shape because you have some nearly invisible wires hanging in the air outside that run down to your eaves and thence into your home.  This is why there is a bill in Congress right now that seeks to extend the "reasonable accommodation" already made years ago for TV antennae and satellite dishes to include "reasonable" ham radio antennae.

4  Although I was talking to someone recently who told me about his defunct, abusive HOA that had been taken over and then left to rot on the vine for the five years or so of inactivity that caused it to be dissolved completely, when all of a sudden, right before time expired, one of his neighbors crawled out of the woodwork and started trying to find candidates to run for office.  He told her to fuck off, and so did the rest of the neighborhood who were happy to have the fascists off their backs.

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I know Jesus said that he was bringing a new law

but even he might be scratching his head about this one.

A friend "liked" a post on FB this morning that I couldn't respond to because I'm not a friend of her friend.  Which is another reason FB is fucked up, but that's for another day.1

The post was a picticle2 that said, "Sometimes the nicest people you meet are covered in tattoos, and sometimes the most judgmental people you meet go to church on Sundays."

Isn't that special.

I don't get the tattoo thing.  I mean even from a general cultural standpoint I don't get it.  The only people — other than sailors, who are a bit of a breed apart — who used to get tattoos were thugs, gang members, and prison inmates (I may be repeating myself), and now it seems that not only are young men tatting themselves up, but nearly every young woman under 21 (and many of them over it) proudly sports a tramp stamp somewhere.3  But the ones that truly get me are the ones you see where some young athlete has branded himself with crosses and other religious symbology and text…when we know that Jesus, being Jewish, would have been well aware of Leviticus 19:28:

Ye shall not make any cuttings in your flesh for the dead, nor print any marks upon you: I am the LORD.4

Yet today even Jewish young people are now inking themselves in this barbaric manner, which of course is why Jewish Scripture inveighed against it — the Philistines and the Caananites undoubtedly did that sort of thing to show how rough and ready they were, you know, being barbarians.  Plus, you know, the whole Auschwitz thing.  Although when I think about it, I doubt that many of the young Jewish people today have ever actually met a Holocaust survivor.

I do know perfectly nice people who have tattoos, but that doesn't mean I have to pretend that I think they're the greatest thing since sliced bread.  And being me, the folks I know who have tattoos are generally aware of my disapprobation of same.  Does that make me judgmental?  I don't think so, regardless of the attitude such people take that sort of goes, "If you don't do it, you can't understand it."  I understand it, all right.  I really don't need to walk a mile in your shoes to believe that it's goddamn foolishness to decorate yourself with ink that doesn't come off.5

The prevailing mindset these days is "anything goes".  If you like it, do it.  If it feels good, do it.  The old civilized culture that some of us still remember has been marginalized by the radicals who have taken over our schools and universities and newspapers and television.  The rot has even reached into our churches and synagogues because today's clergy are the product of the radical march through the institutions that has taken place since the late 1960's, with no end in sight.

If you think that because I don't like your tattoos, that makes me judgmental, too fucking bad.  I'm a representative of a better time and I say you are a barbarian.  Enjoy those tats when you get old and they fade and sag.  And don't come crying to me if you end up with hepatitis C from a dirty needle, or can't find a job because nobody will hire you due to your visible tattoos.

Meantime, if you notice me gritting my teeth a bit while smiling when you show me your latest inking, now you'll know why.

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1 Briefly, why does FB tell me that friends of mine have made comments on other people's walls when I'm not friends with the other person?  Do they expect me to click the "Add Friend" button mindlessly, even if I don't know the person and don't have any interest in being that person's friend?  God, I hate Facebook.

2 I'm operating under the thesis that a "picticle" is something like a "listicle", in other words, as a listicle is a bullet-point list that poses as an article ("Ten Weird Things…"), so is a picticle a picture with editorializing (or moralizing) text overprinted that speaks ex cathedra from the poster's navel, and stands in place of making an actual argument with actual words and actual people who disagree with you regarding the subject at hand.

3 Including one of my nieces, who found out too late that the tattoos she had precluded her joining the Air Force, because they were too visible even with clothing.  She's now a paramedic in training and I could not be prouder of her, but because of the tats, several years of her life were spent aimlessly between the Air Force refusal and her deciding to get into EMS.

4 Of course, in context, the next verse is "Do not prostitute thy daughter, to cause her to be a whore; lest the land fall to whoredom, and the land become full of wickedness."  To which I can only shrug, and murmur, "Too late…"

5 Well, not without some really expensive treatments, anyway.  I keep thinking I should open a chain of tattoo removal salons…in about 10-15 more years I'll bet they will be damn profitable.

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Mawwidge

Look, I don't honestly give a flying fuck about states being ordered to let LGBT people "marry".  Because I don't think the state ought to be involved in marriage, in any case.

The problem I have with non-traditional marriage — by which I mean anything other than one man one woman — is that there are people out there who hold traditional religious beliefs who should not be required by the state to change their attitude regarding same.  There is that little thing called the First Amendment, after all, and it means that the government has no say over your religious beliefs.  If you want to worship Satan, that's your kink, just don't wave it in my face.*

The counter-argument is made, of course, to the effect that the majority wave their sexuality and religious beliefs in the minority's face all day every day 24/7/365 world without end amen.  And yeah, that's true; before about 10 years ago, most folks producing popular culture understood that the 97% of us who are straight have little or no interest in major characters in every TV comedy and drama being gay and out of the closet.  Lately, though, you'd think gays were at least 50% of the population, because every show has a flamer or two who get a lot of attention.  (Modern Family, I'm looking at you.  Just as a 'f'r'instance.)

The counter-argument goes on to point out that there are straight couples out there who 1) don't have children and 2) even if they do, they can't manage to stay together and end up divorced.  I don't really consider #1 a problem, not just because my marriage fits that description, but also because the fairy-tale shit about finding your soulmate when you're in your 20s and young enough to consider settling down and starting a family doesn't always come true.  I did not find my wife until I was 40 and she was 42.**  We were not about to start a family at that age.  (Good thing, too, because we'd have teenagers now and be looking at putting them through college when we'd really rather be thinking about retiring.)

#2, divorce, is a real problem, but I think it exists primarily because the previous generation was quick to pull the trigger on ending marriages that ended up being "inconvenient" (mostly because the woman decided she didn't need the husband, just his money) and the courts were far too amenable to agreeing to let the divorces proceed.  I know a couple of women who had children and then divorced their husbands because their husbands, quite reasonably, expected them to take care of the children to the detriment of what they considered to be their career path.  Abuse was claimed (mental in all cases) but I suspect that what was considered to be abuse was simply an old-fashioned expectation of motherhood being more important than a career.***

Anyway, gays point at these two problems of heterosexuality in the modern age and clamor for the same right to marry (and I assume, to divorce) as straights.  If marriage doesn't require that the female have children, and if marriage can be dissolved at just about any time for just about any reason, then gays may have a point, even if it's ill-made.

What is truly sad about the whole situation, though, is that being married without children is a pretty big burden.  There is that little thing known as the "marriage penalty", and it's meant that my wife and I have had to pay the government thousands of dollars in taxes over the past decade and a half that we would never have paid had we remained single.  I keep joking, in fact, that we really need to get divorced for tax purposes.  My wife doesn't laugh but it really isn't funny, the moreso because it's true.

Because the actual benefits of what we call marriage today are primarily civil and not religious in nature, I would argue (as I have done at the beginning of this article and as I have done before, fairly consistently) that it is time for the state to get out of the business of sanctioning marriage.  Let all "marriage" simply be a contract between two people, sex-neutral, wherein responsibilities (including those of child-raising) of each party are defined, merging of assets is delineated, and provision is made to redistribute those assets should the contract be terminated (divorce).  This could be reduced to a standard form, similar to the Jewish ketubah (which does in fact include provisions for divorce).

Once the relationship between two people is reduced to a contract, which can be handled by lawyers and recorded with the county recorder for a modest fee, any ceremony of solemnization becomes optional (one assumes that the lawyers for both parties, as officers of the court, could be empowered to handle that) and the religious community is then off the hook and may perform whatever ceremonies that it sees fit upon couples who fit its requirements for same.  No longer would a priest, minister, or rabbi**** feel cornered or coerced into performing ceremonies that their scriptural constitutions forbid, and their congregations could rest easy in the expectation that the two gay boys (or girls) who wanted to be married in their place of worship had no case whereby to sue them into compliance with some politically-correct statute.

Mark me well — If your particular denomination smiles on gay marriage, party on.  That's your cross to bear, and you can defend it when you're called to account at the end of time.  The important thing to me is that you stop trying to tell MY particular congregation or creed that it MUST accept marriage between anything other than one man and one woman.  And the way to start putting an end to that is to remove marriage from the realm of government sanction and make it simply a legal contract between two people — not between two people and the government.

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* Don't start with me about peyote buds and ritual sacrifice and that kind of shite.  Civil code covers most of that.  Murder is still murder, whether or not it was done to satisfy some elder god or suchlike.

** Yes, for me, the answer to the question of life, the universe and everything was 42.

*** We could go into the whole idea of women seemingly dominating the workforce in a day and age when an awful lot of breadwinner-type men are out of work, but I know too many strong and independent career-minded women who would probably kick my ass if I bitched about that. So never mind.  But as has been said many times, the future belongs to those who show up for it, and choosing not to have children — particularly if you could have done when you were young enough to build a family — does potentially have consequences.

**** I've left "imam" off of this list because I can't think of anyone of LGBT status, even some of the more liberal nutbag gays, who would have the balls to walk into a mosque and ask an imam to marry them.  Which is another problem for another day.

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KidsSysAdmins today.

Customer writes in about using our utility that takes one of our encoded system files and translates it to plain text so you can view it.

When I try to look at them using [utility], they scroll by so fast I can’t read them. Is there a switch or something I can use to view one page at a time?

Apparently nobody knows how to use the DOS command line anymore.  There are at least two methods of handling this without needing a switch.  Either redirect the output to a file, or pipe it to MORE.

Jeez.  We are doomed.  It's like in the Foundation series, where the soi-disant technicians and engineers who ran the atomic power plants no longer knew anything about the technology behind them, and couldn't so much as replace a part if it failed.

They were back in the office and Mallow said, thoughfully, "And all those generators are in your hands?"

"Every one," said the tech-man, with more than a touch of complacency.

"And you keep them running and in order?"

"Right!"

"And if they break down?"

The tech-man shook his head indignantly, "They don't break down.  They never break down.  They were built for eternity."

"Eternity is a long time.  Just suppose—"

"It is unscientific to suppose meaningless cases."

"All right.  Suppose I were to blast a vital part into nothingness?  I suppose the machines aren't immune to atomic forces?  Suppose I fuse a vital connection, or smash a quartz D-tube?"

"Well, then," shouted the tech-man, furiously, "you would be killed."

"Yes, I know that," Mallow was shouting, too, "but what about the generator?  Could you repair it?"

"Sir," the tech-man howled his words, "you have had a fair return.  You've had what you asked for.  Now get out!  I owe you nothing more!"

Mallow bowed with a satiric respect and left.

Two days later he was back at the base where the Far Star waited to return with him to the planet, Terminus.

And two days later, the tech-man's shield went dead, and for all his puzzling and cursing never glowed again.

—Isaac Asimov, Foundation, p. 176

Old-time ham radio operators who still remember homebrewing their own equipment snarkily dismiss this kind of thing as "appliance operating".  While I think that may be a little harsh and overblown, when it comes down to someone who only knows how to manipulate Windows through the GUI, I do sort of get their point.