2016 archive
Childhood’s End 0
No, not the science fiction story. This:
They had already gone through parts of a book – front cover, back cover, spine – as they sat outside on the grass in Santa Monica. People walked by with their dogs. One floated past on a hoverboard.
The children, ranging in age from 3½ to 5, were engaged in more serious pursuits. They were at KinderPrep, a $1,000, weeklong boot camp designed to prepare them for the rigors of kindergarten.
Words fail me.
Snared by the Snaring Economy 0
She pulled over to check that she had not forgotten her prescription and she got shared.
. . . she heard the car door behind her open.
A young woman was already seating herself in the back of Sue Ellen’s sedan and a young man was about to open the rear door on the passenger side.
“I think you have the wrong car,” she said – pleasantly, I’m sure. That’s the kind of person Sue Ellen is.
“Oh, then you’re not our Uber driver?” the young woman asked.
We are a society of stupid.
Original Spin 0
Via Rants from the Rookery.
Dis Coarse Discourse 0
Shorter Dick Polman: The corporate media will go absurd lengths to maintain its pretense that “both sides.”
Also, too.
The Fee Hand of the Market (Update) 0
Monopoly: it’s not just a game; it’s a business plan.
Addendum, Later that Same Day:
At The Guardian, Liz Richardson Voyles writes of living with her daughter’s food allergies, which necessitates having EpiPens in the ready. A snippet:
Nothing To Do, Nowhere To Go 0
Still not bad.
(snip)
Filings have been below 300,000 for 77 straight weeks, the longest stretch since 1970. That is typically consistent with an improving job market.
The number of people continuing to receive jobless benefits dropped by 30,000 to 2.145 million in the week ended Aug. 13, below the Bloomberg survey median forecast. The unemployment rate among people eligible for benefits held at 1.6 percent. These data are reported with a one-week lag.
Plus Ca Change 0
At the Boston Review, Andrea Mammone sees the British Brexit vote and similar expressions of a national turning inward in other Western countries as not unprecedented. He traces part of their lineage. Here’s a bit:
Geeking Out, Bit Bucket Dept. 0
/dev/null is your friend.
This screenshot captures part of my .procmailrc file showing how I send spam and other unwanted email to the bit bucket. The .procmailrc file is in the right pane of the Terminator window; the left pane is my Mutt inbox. (The music player is qmmp, currently streaming KCEA.)
All the “From” addresses listed in the right pane go to /dev/null, and that’s a small portion of those so designated. Since I refined my .procmailrc file to filter the junk before it lands in Maildir, Mutt has been ever so much more responsive.
Peeking out from the back is Ktorrent, which is seeding downloads for the recently-released Slackware 14.2 so as to take some of the load off other Slackware mirrors.
The window manager is, natch, Fluxbox.
Oh, yeah. You can’t do this on Windows.
Look! It’s Aurora Borealis Briggs and Stratton!
0
Whoops.
Unfortunately, this extraordinary alert was withdrawn just four hours later when it was discovered that a groundskeeper driving a sit-on lawnmower had disturbed the readings of a local magnetometer.
Craven Images 0
Dick Polman calls out the hypocrisy of Republicans who are against the evul Fed’rul guvmint except when they aren’t, that is, when they want its (that is, our) money.
This is an old behavioral pattern, freshened anew by the latest infusion of hypocrisy. It’s always amazing how Republicans’ ideological hatred of “big government,” their abstract nanny-state boilerplate, gets trashed in a flash when real life floods in.
That’s just the beginning. Follow the link–it gets better.