2019 archive
“An Armed Society Is a Polite Society” 0
DIY politeness.
Deputies say the 18-year-old stated that he had forgotten there was a bullet in the gun when he started working on it.
Rule one of having a gun is always to check whether it’s loaded.
The stupid. It burns.
Wall-Eyed Piker, One More Time 0
Dick Polman is not sanguine. A snippet (emphasis added):
Thank you, Teddy. Because today we have a massive failure, by inefficiency or otherwise. Today we have a perilous government shutdown that crystallizes everything about Donald Trump that everyone with an ounce of cognitive intellect warned about three years ago. I feel compelled, as a patriot, to point out that what we are now witnessing is an unprecedentedly toxic mix of narcissism and ignorance. Goaded by right-wing media cranks to conflate the phony wall issue into a national crisis, he is stripping 800,000 people of their paychecks and threatening much broader economic damage.
Taking the Hypocritical Oath 0
Robert N. McCauley explores the implications of evangelical “Christians” embrace of Trumpery. A snippet:
Follow the link for his reasoning.
Geeking Out 0
Screen capture of Electric Sheep, a dynamic visual delight, running under xscreensaver on Slackware 14.2:
I took the screenshot by telling Ksnapshot to take a screenshot after [mumble] seconds. Then I put the screensaver into preview mode and Ksnapshot grabbed the capture; I then sent image to the GIMP to crop it, because my monitor is 16:9 and Electric Sheep seems to default to 4:3.
(Note: In the current version of KDE, the Plasma Desktop, Ksnapshot has been renamed “Spectacle” for some fool reason. It seems to work pretty much the same way.)
Mitt the Flip This Company Speaks Out 0
Ben Boychuk, normally a reliable rationalizer of Republicanism, wonders whether Mitt Romney’s criticism of Donald Trump should put us in mind of a passage from the Gospel of Matthew. An excerpt:
Starting Points 0
Gina Barreca muses on how to start a conversation. A snippet:
All the News that Fits 0
Using the Wall Street Journal’s recent scathing editorial as a springboard, Will Bunch considers the Donald’s Trumpeting of Russian propaganda regarding Russia’s invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. After expressing surprise that Donald Trump was paying attention to international relations at the time, Bunch goes on to add context:
That would be Vladimir Putin and his allies in the Russian government.
Follow the link for the rest.
Scaredy Cats 0
At Psychology Today Blogs, Rosalind C. Barnett and Caryl Rivers explore the theory then white men are afraid that they are losing out. A snippet:
Henry James echoed this sentiment in his novel of the same era, The Bostonians: “The whole generation is womanized; the masculine tone is passing out of the world; it’s a feminine, a nervous, hysterical, chattering, canting age, an age of hollow phrases and false delicacy and exaggerated solicitudes and coddled sensibilities.”
Today’s closing frontier is not a geographical space but a psychological one. Ever since the founding of the nation, white men–especially straight white Christian men–have been in charge. They have been our presidents, our captains of industry, our generals, our Wall Street titans, and they held all the power. They were the ones in “The room where it happens,” as the Hamilton lyric observes.
Even men who had no wealth or celebrity or grand accomplishments could bask in the glow of white male hegemony. They could at least imagine themselves in those “happening” rooms because all the people there looked like them.
I commend the article to your attention. It raises points worthy of consideration.
More than They Could Chew 0
At the Bangor Daily News, Gordon L. Weil suggests that
He goes on to argue convincingly that both of them are quite wrong. Follow the link to read how he makes his case.
