2019 archive
Meritocracy 0
Ed over at Gin and Tacos, who is an academician, expects any efforts to prevent another such scandal will yield more bureaucracy without positive results. Here’s a bit from his piece:
(snip)
I’m not saying it isn’t worth it to strive toward fairness and equality, but given the systems in place in this country we are so ludicrously far from either that we’re flat-out lying to kids by telling them anything is either fair or equal.
Eye Candy, Again 0
The KDE Plasma desktop on Debian Sid. Konsole is on the left with transparency enabled, Dolphin is shaded*, Swisswatch is in the upper right, and GKrellM is running in the bottom right. (If you haven’t figured it out by now, GKrellM is my preferred system monitoring application.)
____________
*Shading or “rolling up” is one of my favorite features of *nix desktop environments and window managers.
The Privatization Scam, Chartering a Course for Disaster Dept. 0
The Arizona Republic’s Laurie Roberts comments on a recent charter school “reform” bill in the Arizona state legislature. A snippet:
Follow the link for more.
Aside:
Charter schools were a con from the git-go.
Driven to Destruction 0
The headline for this story in the print edition was “Doomed Buggies.”
Sports cars don’t perform so well on the deep sands of the Outer Banks, but they keep coming anyway.
A purple Dodge Challenger bogged down on the Currituck beach Sunday. It was the third stuck sports car captured on social media since late December, and that’s just a sampling.
More tales of the stupid at the link.
Break Time 0
Off to drink liberally.
It’s Bubblelicious 0
Leonard Pitts, Jr., discusses “63red Safe,” sort of a wingnut Yelp, where right-wingers can find restaurants and the like that are safe for Trumpettes.
He notes that it is one in a string of efforts by right-wingers to create “safe spaces” for themselves and their fantasy world on the inner tubes. A snippet:
Then there’s Conservapedia, which counters the left-wing slant of Wikipedia by telling us, for instance, that Barack Obama was “reportedly” born in Hawaii.
Nor can we forget that attempt to translate a conservative Bible so that Christians would no longer have to put up with all that talk of “welcoming the stranger” and “helping the poor” you find in the King James Version.
And some singles now seek soulmates on DonaldDaters.com, apparently having discovered that grabbing prospective partners by the genitals actually doesn’t work as well as you’d think.
“Just the Vaxx, Ma’am” 0
David discusses Italy’s move against the anti-vaxxers, as well as the types of emails he gets from anti-vaxxers on the right and the left when he covers this issue.
Fly the Fiendly Skies 0
You can’t top this.
O’Connor had no trouble getting through airport security, but said at least four staff members surrounded her once she boarded her flight, prepared to forcibly remove her from the plane if she didn’t change.
Aside:
Not being familiar with the term “crop top,” I did a web search.
“Crop top” appears to be new speak for a “halter top” that is longer than a traditional halter top. Based on the images I saw, I’d have to say that Thomas Cook Airlines needs to have its mind washed out with soap.
“An Armed Society Is a Polite Society” 0
Polite politicos:
Jared Brown, of Malden, was booked into jail after police were called to the Spectator’s Bar and Grill early last Thursday. Brown, who is chief of staff for Republican Sen. Justin Brown, had not been officially charged as of Wednesday. The two are not related.
A police report said a 9mm pistol loaded with five rounds fell to the floor. It was recovered by another bar patron and Jared Brown, 45, was arrested, The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported.
Follow the link. It gets better (or worser, I’m not sure which) . . . .
