December, 2016 archive
Shoot the Messenger 0
Reg Henry has a theory that Donald Trump’s campaign strategy involved beating a dying horse. A snippet (emphasis added):
After 50 years of lesser politicians trying, Mr. Trump finally persuaded the people to blame everything on those who would hold politicians accountable. He sold the theory that the media constitute one great liberal monolith marching in lockstep.
But that doesn’t reflect reality. Never before in history has news come from such diverse sources — and fake news is available to those who don’t find the real news slanderous enough and need a pain-relief patch for their brains.
I gave up on television news a long time ago, when I noticed that it made creme-filled doughnuts and candy corn seem nutritious. As my two or three regular readers have probably figured out, I visit lots of newspaper websites every few days or so. (No, I do not read every word of every website.) Despite the annoyance of ads and other distractions, newspapers still provide some depth of coverage and reading a number of them provides some breadth of coverage, neither of which are available between the Xarelto ads on broadcast news.
Follow the link for the rest of the article.
The Rebranding, Reprise 0
Badtux points out that nothing beats calling something new and improved, when all that’s new and improved is the label. A snippet:
(Open tag fixed.)
All the News that Fits, a Taxonomy 0
I think Fox News should be lower down on the “Reliability” scale. Any objectivity or accuracy that they may demonstrate in their news coverage is neutralized by the cavalcade of lies on their opinion propaganda shows.
Via PoliticalProf.
Geeking Out 0
Listening to Old Time Radio with Real Player in a VirtualBox virtual machine of Windows 7 on Slackware —Current.
OTR.NET is one of the better Old Time Radio sites; I have made small donations to it several times. Unfortunately, all the files are in Real format, which is one of the most heavily encumbered codecs and requires use of their proprietary, but free player. There was once a Linux version of RealPlayer, but it was abandoned about five years ago.
In case you are wondering, the VM is running a legitimate activated copy of Windows 7 that I purchased via Amazon. Windows 7 CDs are cheap these days.
I’m working with Windows in a VM because there are certain specific items I wish to test. Windows is still a kludge.
Hacks and Hacks 0
Thom discusses with a caller what the “Russian hacking” may have meant–and may not have meant. His conclusions are subtle and sophisticated and may not be what you–or what I–expected.
Mitt the Flipped-Off 0
Field draws some lessons from the Trumpling of Mitt Romney.
Aside:
The Booman reminds me why I started calling him “Mitt the Flip.”
The Voter Fraud Fraud, the Jim Crow Election Dept. 0
Good luck with Trump’s “Justice” Department.
How Stuff Works, Contracting the Franchise Dept. 0
Will Bunch listened to something Donald Trump said during his victory lap and finds a lesson for the polity. Here’s a bit of his article; follow the link for the rest (italics in original; bold added):
That’s right — the next president of the United States, and the future guardian of our democratic norms, praising citizens who didn’t exercise their right to vote because it helped him politically. That’s appalling, but it’s also something that Trump, still a political neophyte even after winning politics’ biggest prize, does a lot. He blurted out a basic truth of modern 21st Century elections — that Republicans win when they find ways to keep anyone who’s not part of their heavily white and older voting base away from the ballot box. It’s just that no other GOP stalwart would ever say this out loud.
A Common Thread 0
Shaun Mullen finds an eerie similarity in certain recent events. Here’s a snippet:
We also were told to buck up and move on when:
- The Reagan administration secretly sent weapons to Iran, a state sponsor of terrorism, in 1985 as part of the Iran-Contra scheme. Reagan couldn’t be impeached, we were told, because America was still getting over Nixon and Watergate although only a few years later Bill Clinton would be impeached for a blowjob.
- The Supreme Court in 2000 jumped the extra-constitutional shark and meddled in a presidential election, ruling that the winner was George Bush, who “won” because the Republican-controlled election apparatus in Florida was as fixed as the high court majority turned out to be.
- The very moral foundations of our democracy were subverted by a secret post-9/11 program of dark-site prisons and the use of Nazi torture techniques no matter if the victims weren’t terrorists, which they often were not. This yielded no valid intelligence but did tank America’s standing abroad.
Is it merely a coincidence that all of these outrages were perpetrated by Republicans?
Do please read the rest.
“An Armed Society Is a Clean Society” 1
Practice random acts of politeness.
The news release does not indicate how or why the gun fired.
Geeking Out 0
Windows 7 in a VirtualBox virtual machine running on Slackware —Current on a Zareason Limbo desktop viewed through a Virtual Network Connection using the TightVNC viewer on Mint 17 running on a Zareason Strata laptop to connect to the X11vnc server on the Slackware box. In the foreground is the apt-get man(ual) page in the Terminator terminal emulator.
(The VNC window falls off the screen because the monitor of the target computer is larger than the monitor of the viewing computer, but it can be moved about with ALT-Left-Click-and-Hold. I would not be surprised that there’s some way to manage that more effectively, but I haven’t learned it yet.)
Droning On 0
What’s in a name? A drone by any other name would reap the same.
