July, 2016 archive
Virtual Unreality 0
This looks like a clear case of date-and-switch:
The existence of the fembots – fake profiles used to keep men on the “Life is short, have an affair” forking out funds in case they got lucky – was revealed after the infamous hack of the site. . . .
At its worst, the site was accused of having just 1 per cent of “real women” among its members: the rest of its female profiles were fembots.
Investment Advice 0
Buy a politician.
“An Armed Society Is a Polite Society” 0
Vengeance is mine, sayeth the polite.
“He then chose to fire off another round into the bed in the camper he was staying in because he was upset that he just wounded himself,” Mast said.
We are all safer when persons like this pack heat, are we not?
Via Southern Beale.
Misdirection Play, the Cost of Culture Wars 0
Charlotte Rampell points out that Republican culture wars are getting expensive. Here’s some examples from her list of culture wars. She makes the “misdirection” in the “plays” quite clear:
Is your state so broke it’s shaving days off the school year? Copy Kansas and implement some draconian antiabortion legislation.
Have the highest uninsured population of any state? Look to Texas and pass even more draconian antiabortion legislation.
Are your constituents unhappy with declining economic opportunities? Check out Indiana, Arkansas and Georgia, among others, and introduce legislation to make it easier to discriminate against gay men and lesbians.
Has your state’s credit been downgraded nine times? Is your governor facing a sex scandal? Have you become the nation’s tragicomic punch line?
Find role models in New Jersey, Alabama and Florida, respectively, and join the crusade against Planned Parenthood.
Follow the link for the expense report.
Make TWUUG Your LUG 0
Learn about the wonderful world of free and open source. Use computers to do what you want, not what someone else wants you to do.
It’s not hard; it’s just different.
What: Monthly TWUUG Meeting.
Who: Everyone in TideWater/Hampton Roads with interest in any/all flavors of Unix/Linux. There are no dues or signup requirements. All are welcome.
Where: Lake Taylor Transitional Care Hospital in Norfolk Training Room. See directions below. (Wireless and wired internet connection available.) Turn right upon entering, then left at the last corridor and look for the open meeting room.
When: 7:30 PM till whenever (usually 9:30ish) on Thursday, July 7.
Directions:
Lake Taylor Hospital
1309 Kempsville Road
Norfolk, Va. 23502 (Map)
Pre-Meeting Dinner at 6:00 PM (separate checks)
Uno Chicago Grill
Virginia Beach Blvd. & Military Highway (JANAF Shopping Center). (Map)
Join the forums.
Days of Passed Future 0
Tony Norman looks in the Trump cards to see what the future holds.
It defies excerpt or summary. Just read it.
Aside:
He’s more optimistic than I. My life experiences have convinced me that Mencken was right.
The Next Looming Scamdal 0
Prepare for the coming scamdal about the fact that there is no there, there in yet another Clinton scamdal.
The fact that the mud has not stuck will not keep Republicans, Fox News, and their dupes, symps, and fellow travelers, from continuing to throw the mud.
After all, it’s their mud. They created it out of lies and innuendo, they sustain it, it’s all they got.
Class Acts 0
Nancy Isenberg examines three myths about class in America, myths that permeate and distort what passes as “political commentary” in the corporate media. Here’s one (emphasis in the original):
The working class is white and male
Trump is often credited with engaging the working class. He “won with the working class voters the GOP forgot,” blared one Breitbart column. Meanwhile, “Hillary is losing white working Joes,” proclaimed the Toronto Star. Even Sanders argued that Democrats had allowed Republicans “to capture the votes of the majority of working people in this country.”
Of course, that’s true only if you ignore Asians, Latinos and African Americans. “Factor them into the population of ‘working people,’ ” Slate’s Jamelle Bouie writes, “and Democrats win that group, handily.”
Follow the link for the others.
Afterthought:
Do not think too hard about the knee-jerk automatic exclusion of Not White persons from the “working class.” Doing so will lead to depressing realizations about the punditocracy, its vision of society, and its inability to look about itself and see who’s doing the “work.”
The Berned-Over District 2
From the Bangor Daily News, William M. Daley poses a question for Bernie Sanders. I’ll paraphrase it:
I’m a member of the Democratic Party for a very practical reason; I even volunteer in my own small way.
I realized that, after decades of voting, I had only ever voted for two Republicans (Larry Coughlin when I lived in Pennsylvania and Bill Roth when I lived in Delaware, both of them good and decent men, though Roth was in his dotage when he ultimately left political life); neither would be welcome in Today’s Republican Party(TM).
As I try to live in the real world, whatever the details of my ideology might be (trust me, it’s much farther left than you might think-I might even be willing to voter for Franklin Roosevelt, were he on the ticket), I decided that I had to cast my lot in the real world. I joined the party that better represented me, as there are only two realistic alternatives in the USA. (If you have a pipe dream of a third party* in the United States, all I can say is that I want a drag on that pipe, because it must be some really kick-ass stuff . . . .)
Parties are organized and have rules; it’s part of what makes them “organized” “parties.”
You just joined the Party, Bernie, solely so you could run for the nomination and for no other reason. Hell, I’ve been a Democrat longer than you have, and I’m nobody who is younger than you and who officially joined the Party just a few years ago.
You knew the rules going in, and now you want to dictate new rules because your grapes turned sour.
If you lose according to the rules, you have lost. The rules didn’t beat you.
You lost.
Forget the Corvair; Ralph Nader’s legacy will forever be President George the Worst. It would be a damned shame if Bernie Sanders’s legacy is President Ronald McDonald Trump.
Give it up, Bernie; you’ve worn out your welcome. Don’t be another Nader.
Grill of My Dreams 0
I never have quite gotten this notion that a grill is somehow a man’s domain (probably some notion propagated by men who think a big grill makes up fo–never mind).
My father’s mother cooked on a wood-fired stove. It don’t get much grillier than that.