May, 2017 archive
“An Armed Society Is a Polite Society” 0
Be polite to our feathered friends.
Camellia, a 7-year-old male eagle, was shot in the southern part of the city near West and Benefit roads, according to Reese Lukei, research associate for the Center for Conservation Biology at the College of William & Mary.
(snip)
“You cannot mistake a bald eagle for anything else,” he said. “For somebody to just shoot a bird is just disgusting.”
This was done no doubt by a Real Big Man.
Mutual Assistance Pact 0
You may recall that, in the dim dark past of about a year ago, many Republican regulars were skeptical of Donald Trump’s campaign and even of his competence.
No more. Now they appear to be all in for Trump.
Werner Herzog’s Bear explains why. Here’s a nugget; follow the link for the whole article:
“Making Lazy Circles in the Sky” 0
At the Boston Review, K. Sabeel Rahman discusses the return of “Vulture Capitalism.” Here’s how he starts his essay:
But behind the monopolies lay an even more dangerous force: the financiers who jointly invested in these companies through a variety of legal and corporate vehicles. For Brandeis, this “money trust” of “banker-barons” was the ultimate villain in the industrial economy since it existed beyond the ordinary scope of traditional checks and balances. In his famous pamphlet, Other People’s Money, he warned that financiers had “acquired control so extensive as to menace the public welfare.”
Follow the link for the rest. The time it takes to read it will be well spent, because all that was old is new again.
The Doctor Is In(censed) 0
In The Charlotte Observer, a North Carolina physician unloads on the AHCA (that is, Trumpcare). A snippet:
How Stuff Works, Insurance Dept. 0
At Psychology Today Blogs, Mark B. Baer explains why Trumpcare is in no way health “insurance.”
Read it.
Light Bloggery (Updated) 0
Posting will be spotty today.
I have some site maintenance to do (I need to deploy SSL* so Firefox and Vivaldi stop nagging me that this site is insecure, even though there’s nothing here that requires security other than my own password, as this is a hobby, not a business and I do not have anyone’s confidential information**), and I have some errands to run, but mostly I need a break.
Reality is just too damned depressing, even though there was a bit of good news from France last night.
Now, if only I could live in a fantasy world where down is up and up is down and lies are truth, as Republicans do . . . .
________________________
*How successful I’ll be is still an open issue.
**The notion that all websites should be SSL, even when there is no legitimate reason for encryption, is a curse and a pox. If I’m visiting, say, IMDB to see who the members of the cast of a movie or television show are and have no intention of logging on (I don’t even have an IMDB logon)–when all I’m doing is looking at a website and not passing any information to it other than what is in my user agent string, when all I am doing is looking at public information–there is no legitimate reason for requiring encryption.
Unnecessary security is not security.
It’s security theatre.
Addendum:
It was too pretty a day to spend it mucking about with computers. I went for a bike ride, then drove my little yellow truck to the grocery store (chicken piccata tonight, yums), then sat on the deck doing a crossword puzzle (this is one household where there is ever a crossword).
Mucking has been postponed until tomorrow and, after I poked about tonight regarding some of the issues I need to resolve, I must say that a call to my hosting provider’s most excellent tech support is a possibility. Fortunately, my phone has a speaker that I can enable so I can do real stuff as I wait for tech support to come live . . . .
And I needed the break from following the Trumpling of the American Dream. It was refreshing to ignore for a short while that the Secesh are now in charge.
Godwin’s Law and the Kaiser Korollary 0
Richard Cohen thinks that those who would compare Donald Trump to Hitler, amongst other dictators of the past and present, are missing the mark. He suggests that a different German leader is a more apt comparison.
That war, more than the greater one that followed, continues to intrigue historians because its cause is so hard to isolate. By Armistice Day, four empires were no more, about 17 million people were dead and the stage was set for a further calamity. But what started it? There are many explanations, but one factor, certainly, was the bellicosity and idiocy of the German kaiser.
Anyone who turns to Christopher Clark’s book about the run-up to WWI, “The Sleepwalkers,” will recognize a Trump-like figure. The kaiser was a tweeter before his time, firing off letters, telegrams and orders without pausing to wonder about contradictions or policy or even common sense. (He demanded plans for invasions of Cuba, Puerto Rico and New York.)
Afterthought:
Cohen’s comparison gives me no comfort.
Immunity Impunity
0
Leonard Pitts, Jr., remarks on the deployment of yet another Get Out of Jail Free card, this time via passivity.
Pay for Performance 0
(snip)
And as a reward for complying, drivers will receive chocolate as a gift in return, he added.
I remember that, early in my time at Amtrak when I worked in the Adequacy of Service Bureau Complaint Department, commuter stations in the Northeast Corridor had signs posted for trains of different lengths to make it easier for engineers to stop their trains in the same places on their runs.
Some commuters would stand where they expected the doors to be. If the doors weren’t exactly where they expected them to be, they would write complaint letters, which I had to answer.
Those commuters used the Princeton Junction, New Jersey, station.
One of my coworkers had worked with the Long Island Railroad before he came to Amtrak. He could remember complaints from those same passengers when they lived on Long Island, before they moved to central Jersey.
That’s when I learned that a self-centered arrogant sense of entitlement could be migratory.
Afterthought:
If you want a quick course in Abnormal Psych, work in a complaint department. After that, nothing that people do will surprise you.
Amuse you, disgust you, repulse you, sicken you maybe, but not surprise you.
“An Armed Society Is a Polite Society” 0
A father must teach his children to be polite.
(snip)
While being interviewed by the DHHS, the 11-year-old said he and his brother were shot because they failed to do their chores.
In an interview “Pelletier admitted to shooting the children not out of anger, but as a rite of passage to get their own BB guns and to know what it feels like getting hit so they won’t shoot other people,” state police said in the post.
Our whole damn country is suffering from lead poisoning.