2017 archive
You Can’t Tell the Players without a Program . . . 0
. . . so The Guardian kindly supplies one.
Sporadic Bloggery (Updated) 0
Someone is getting hitched and I’m off to the festivities. I shall have a nice drive through the Virginia countryside clutching the hope that rain will not fall on their outdoor wedding, but I’m taking my raincoat with me.
With my own weddings, the rain always fell later . . . .
Addendum, That Very Evening:
Except for the part about the first hour of the drive taking two hours, it was a nice drive though the Virginia countryside from the seashore to the mountains. It’s been a long time since I did highway driving on two lane roads, but I was fortunately surrounded by good drivers who kept up the pace and stayed between the lines.
Then there was the sign from the Patrick Henry Tea Party (no, I’m not linking you up to their website–find it yourself). I tried to take a picture, but the light changed before I could focus:
Shovel Ready Jobs at the U. S.-Mexico border.
“Vile and loathsome” is an understatement.
QOTD 0
Rex Stout:
Man’s brain, enlarged fortuitously, invented words in an ambitious effort to learn how to think, only to have them usurped by his emotions.
Stout, Rex, Death of a Dude (New York, The Viking Press, 1969), p. 121-122
Stray Thought 0
I have been a Rex Stout fan for a long, long time going onto 50 years, and I always enjoyed his stories because they are good stories, but I did not realize what a damn fine writer he was until I started to reread his books with QOTD on my mind. (QOTD is a hungry beast that demands to be fed.)
If you are not familiar with Rex Stout, you should be. If you are not, it’s your loss.
Watch for more Stout in QOTD.
Afterthought:
As I line up the QOTDs in advance, I did not note that a Stout QOTD was next in the queue.
There will be more to come.
The Supremes 0
At The Roanoke Times, Keisha Graziadei-Shup offers a thoughtful meditation on the origins and fostering of feelings of supremacy, white or otherwise. A snippet:
Do I think evil is in everyone else but me?
The reality may be too horrible for most of us to face.
Second Amendment Delusions 0
Thom cuts through the contemporary rationales used by gun nuts and their sycophants and explains the historical origins of the Second Amendment.
“An Armed Society Is a Polite Society” 0
Cement your friendships with politeness.
(snip)
Brown said one of the men was handling the gun inside a holster when it went off; he wasn’t wearing the holster at the time. There was no evidence of an altercation, police said.
All the News that Fits 0
El Reg discusses a report from Trend Micro, a reputable anti-virus and security firm, about the “Fake News” industry. Here’s a bit (emphasis added because even the fake may be faked):
A year-long campaign to influence election outcomes is available for just $400,000, the study says. Whether such listings are in themselves an attempt at disinformation is certainly debatable. US intel agencies, Western politicians and security firms are nigh-on unanimous that attempts to influence the US presidential election last year were the work of the Kremlin. For example, UK defence secretary Sir Michael Fallon recently said the Kremlin is “weaponising misinformation” as part of a sustained campaign that goes beyond alleged meddling in the presidential election.
Follow the link for more.
Also, if you saw a news item on Facebook etc. and nowhere else, be very very skeptical.
The Court Is in Sessions 0
Dick Polman reflects on Attorney-General Sessions’s “testimony” before Congress yesterday. A nugget:
Follow the link to learn why he said that.
Under Cover of Darkness 0
Josh Marshall points out that
Follow the link for the full article.
