2016 archive
Meta: Database Weirdness 2
I have several posts scheduled to pop yesterday and they are not visible.
I’ve checked them both in the WordPress interface and in phpMyAdmin and can find nothing unusual. They all report as “Published,” all have visibility set to “Public,” and all display in “Preview” mode. Granted, not a one of them was profound, but I found them amusing. Just for good measure, I did a “Check,” “Repair Table,” and “Optimize Table” on the database. No change.
Now I’ve got a puzzle to solve.
I wonder whether this one will be visible?
(Moments Later) Yup.
“An Armed Society Is a Polite Society” 0
Draw a bead on politeness.
“This looks like a tragic accident,” Fontaine said.
The boy and his father, Patrick Ursiny, were target shooting in their yard at 4290 Melwood Road, Fontaine said. When they reset the target, the 15-year-old boy was attempting to reload the small caliber pistol when it accidentally discharged, hitting him in the head, Fontaine said.
No.
Unintentional, maybe, but, if you point a gun anywhere but at the ground as you reload it (or to do anything else except fire at your target), it can be called many things, but “accident” isn’t one of them.
The Ballad of the Yammering Yam 1
Then came the campaign of Orange Julius,
Who said he knew how to rulius.
As the convention came near,
It became quite clear
That all he would do was foolius.
Full of It 0
Van Anderson discusses The Fulminator:
Follow the link to find out The Fulminator’s secret identity (if you can’t guess who it might be).
Stephen Colbert Connects the Dots 0
Warning: Questionable taste.
Dis Coarse Discourse, Pivotal Moments Dept. 2
The Washington press corps loves to talk about the “pivot.”
They have a fanciful notion that a candidate can be one person during primary campaigns and turn into someone else, or “pivot,” during a general election campaign. They are waiting anxiously for Donald Trump to pivot, to become “more presidential” (whatever the hell that is–maybe refraining from insulting peoples, cultures, races, and communities for a day or so, maybe not threatening to rain death on foreign peoples as causally as others discuss baseball scores, maybe just not wearing baseball caps indoors–who can say what they mean?).
We recall how well the “pivot” worked for Mitt “Etch-a-Sketch” Romney and John “McMaverick” McCain.
The notion of the pivot highlights the ultimate hollowness of a certain style of political reportage, one that holds no truck with substance. Rather, it believes that strategy is not just everything, it’s the only thing. They care not that somebody’s drugging the race horses and bribing the jockeys, so long as the horse race is exciting. Hell, they’ll quite happily drug the horses and bribe the jockeys themselves if it makes the race more exciting.
They also clearly believe that the voting public is incapable of remembering anything that a politician said or did prior to the most recent pivot. Furthermore, and this is the truly craven part, even as they pat themselves on the back for their “journalistic excellence,” they forsake–nay, they flee–their journalistic responsibility to remind the polity that what some politician said or did yesterday directly contradicts what he or she did or said today.
The true noxiousness of the narrative of the pivot, though, is that it reveals empty souls, souls with no substance and no values, souls which believe only in appearances, which eschew fact, which pay no attention to the men and women behind the curtain.
Aside:
I don’t have any secret methods for identifying who these “journalists” are other than paying attention to the discourse and reading Driftglass, who specializes in analyzing dis coarse discourse, but a good starting point would be a list of the “journalists” who most frequently appear on the Sunday talk shows.
Twits on Twitter 0
Twits who know that a picture is worth 10,000 words.
Nothing To Do, Nowhere To Go 0
Still not bad.
(snip)
The four-week moving average of claims, a less volatile measure than the weekly figures, eased to 269,250 from 269,500.
The number of people continuing to receive jobless benefits rose by 45,000 to 2.16 million in the week ended June 4. The unemployment rate among people eligible for benefits rose to 1.6 percent from 1.5 percent. These data are reported with a one-week lag.