Surprisingly, this post about excessive regulation has been getting a lot of hits in the past month.
Everyone’s favorite about AT&T is always near the top of the “Popular List”
My view on Busybodies has also been trending lately.
There’s a lot more here, but these are probably among the best of the bunch.
Feel free to browse. The Tag list to the right hand side of the page is up to date for the more current posts. However the Category List at the bottom of a post will lead you down the rabbit hole to older posts.
One of these days I’ll decide to convert the Category list completely over to Tags and then everything will be fully in sync.
Enjoy yourselves and take these posts with a grain of salt, or in some cases… An entire salt lick.
Saturday at a commencement speech Our Chief Moron in charge once again outright lied!
Either that or he’s demonstrating that he’s not fit to hold office again.
During his speech he again referenced the Jan 6th riot as an insurrection. He said;
“A mob of insurrectionists stormed the Capitol, the very citadel of democracy. Imagine what you’d be thinking today if you had heard this morning before you got here that a group of a thousand people broke down the doors of the parliament of Great Britain, killed two police officers, smashed and ransacked the office of members of the British Parliament or any other, what would you think? What would you think?”
He said something similar back on March 3;
“Again, we’re not perfect — we’re not even close — but we never have walked away. And Vladimir Putin was counting on being able to split up the United States.
Look, how would you feel if you saw crowds storm and break down the doors of the British Parliament, kill five cops, injure 145 — or the German Bundestag, or the Italian Parliament? I think you’d wonder.
Well, that’s what the rest of the world saw. It’s not who we are. And now, we’re proving, under pressure, that we are not that country. We’re united.”
The problem is, no officers were killed during the riot. One U.S. Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick died the next day from a Stroke in his brainstem.
Several other officers committed suicide in the following weeks.
The people who died that day were Ashli Babbitt, there are reports of another woman being killed that day but some reports say she died in the vicinity of the Capitol riot due to a drug overdose and others say she was beaten to death.
The only confirmed death that day due to the Capitol riot was Babbitt’s and she was shot by a Capitol Police officer.
Can we just get him to stop spreading misinformation?
Oh and of course we had to hear about Beau dying of brain cancer again.
Yes Joe, we all know Beau died of brain cancer. You’ve repeated yourself on the matter again and again.
Biden said this according to Delaware Online;
“Biden recalled how after his son Beau died from brain cancer in 2015, he had no interest in running for president in 2016. He said the following year, when white supremacists marched through Charlottesville, Virginia, with torches, uttering Nazi phrases from decades earlier, he decided he needed to do something.”
Really? Does Biden or his handlers really expect anyone in America to swallow this line of horse shit?
He didn’t run in 2016 because Hillary was supposed to win. His handlers probably knew that against Trump and the mood of the country then he’d loose and split the Democratic ticket in the process.
America was tired of Biden and former President Obama. That is why he didn’t run in 2016. Hillary was supposed to win and give the country 12 years of loving Democratic Party rule.
Well Joe that’s not how it turned out.
Although had he run against Hillary and Trump, the odds are he wouldn’t be President now. Folks would have seen him for what he is then, and he’d be in a rest home eating pudding or ice cream.
Biden was in Uvalde, Texas, on Sunday. The claim is that he’s to be meeting with the families of the victims of the Robb Elementary School shooting.
I can hardly wait to read what he says to those grieving people.
I truly hope one or more of them verbally take Biden to task over the border, defunding police, and his attempt to make their tragedy, his political gain.
Since he’s going to be that close to the border, does anyone think he’ll actually see the disaster his policies have wrought?
I’ve been going through my computer and deleting stuff, for a variety of reasons.
I’ve come to the conclusion that I need to probably do a complete rebuild of the system. In preparation for this I’ve been evaluating several factors. One of those is how much software on my machine is actually useful to me today.
There was a time when all the applications on my computer had a function and were used often. Those days are past. So I’ve been purging applications and their associated data from my system.
So far so good.
Then I got to thinking about the fact that Apple’s new silicon runs much more efficiently than their previous Intel based computers. It’s likely that Apple will discontinue OS support for Intel systems within the next few years. That’s not Apple being bad guys, it’s just a matter of consolidating their programming & hardware resources.
Apple did this once before, when they transitioned from PowerPC chips to Intel. I’ve been to this rodeo before.
The question this raised is since I’m going to have to do a complete rebuild anyway should I take the opportunity to move to Apple silicon at the same time?
By complete rebuild, I mean a fresh start of the Operating System. The plan calls for reloading only those applications that actually serve my needs today. I’m going to clean out all the saved passwords from the various password keychains. (Those stored in the cloud and those stored locally on my devices.) It means the deletion of all the weird assed websites and caches, and deletion of all the bullshit accounts that every fucking website wants you to create these days. Then starting over.
The goal is to get as close to being a user that’s never had a computer as possible.
It’s a hell of a task. There’s lots of planning and preserving user ids that I still need, while shedding all the crap that’s built up over time. The worst offenders in this regard are the job search sites. They never have a login site that says plainly who the hell they are. This complicates immensely figuring out what to delete and what to save.
Since I’m going to all this trouble in the first place, does it make sense to make the leap to Apple silicon now and then plan to have a computer that is “Future Proof” for at least the next 7 – 10 years?
I like my current computer. I’m one of the few people who liked the much maligned TouchBar. This preference adds a time element to my decision. It just so happens that the last MacBook Pro that has the TouchBar and has the new M1 chip is also available in the size and configuration that I like. That being said, it probably won’t be available next year.
The advantages to a newer machine are better battery life, (almost double my current machine’s). The processing power in Apple Silicon is approximately double. The newer machine supports WiFi 6, which my current machine does not. The newer machine can give me 2 TB of Solid State hard drive space. The current machine didn’t have that option.
The disadvantages are that I lose 2 Thunderbolt ports. I’ll also lose (at least temporarily) the ability to run VMWare Fusion and therefore Windows on my Mac. Yes, I could use Parallels, but I started thinking about how often I actually use Windows these days. (Not once in the past 3 months.)
The loss of ports concerned me. Then I really thought about it, and realized that I rarely have need of 4 Thunderbolt ports. I think the maximum I’ve ever used is 3 of the four ports and that was maybe once.
I’ve got a Thunderbolt dock from CalDigit. It provides all the ports I need if I really need a bunch of accessories connected to the computer. There’s a CD/DVD drive connected to that dock right now that hasn’t been used in almost a year. My monitor uses Thunderbolt directly so even if the dock were to stop working, I’d just plug the computer into the monitor. The monitor even charges my computer when connected directly.
I’ve got several dongles that plug into my current computer but even then, it’s a very rare occasion that I’ve needed more than 2 at any one time. The dongle that gets the most use is an Ethernet port that lets me connect to a network if for some reason WiFi isn’t available.
What Microsoft applications I use, run natively on Apple Silicon. So there wouldn’t be any of the messy Rosetta application conversion that imposes a performance hit. There are a few applications that would use Rosetta but those are used infrequently enough that they represent a negligible impact.
Basically, moving to a new Apple system at this point would have little negative impact on me. All my accessories for the current machine will work the same on a new machine. All the work I’ve done to prepare for a system rebuild will work just as well if I transition, or keep my current machine.
Apple will credit me $400 if I trade in my current machine for a new one. Apple Credit will give me zero interest for a year and 3% cash back to boot. It’s not a huge savings but it’s better than a kick in the pants.
I’ve convinced myself… I ordered the new machine. It should be here in a couple of weeks…
All of above is what went into the decision.
What makes me feel old is that I’m looking at this new machine as possibly a computer that I’ll use until I’m dead. I feel old too because I’m not that interested in the hassle of maintaining or updating a bunch of applications anymore.
I first noticed this phenomena on my phone, I’ve gotten my phone’s application count down to one and a half pages. There are more applications on the phone that will probably be deleted because the benefit they provide isn’t worth the annoyance of finding them, or dealing with making sure the latest version is on the device.
That philosophy spread to my computer, and iPad too. I’m down to 81 applications on my computer. That includes those that Apple provides for free. The number is about the same on my iPad and iPhone. When the new computer arrives, I’m betting that the number will drop to 70 or so, maybe 10 of which I’ll use daily.
My Apple Watch is nearing the end of its usable battery life and rather than drooling over the rumors of the new Apple Watches, I’m thinking about a plain simple (not flashy) watch. My Rolex is still my favorite but I think I’m going to have to lock it in a safe so that I’m not mugged at gunpoint over it.
I’ve been looking at automatic watches in the 300 to 500 dollar range. Oddly, that’s the same price range as a new Apple Watch. If I go the plain watch route, I won’t have to worry about recharging or the $10 per month cellular fee added to my bill every month.
Don’t get me wrong, I like a lot of the Apple Watch features. But if I’m out camping or hiking for more than a day, power becomes an issue. I can turn my phone off to conserve power and have some privacy, but I kinda like to have a watch when I’m out in the wild. I don’t want to have to carry all the paraphernalia required to charge the darn thing. An automatic winding watch will die 2 days after I do. Rather than die after me wearing it for a day.
Sure, I can carry a solar panel, I’ve got one. I can carry a battery pack, I’ve got one of those too. They both fit in my backpack and work really well. But suppose I don’t want the added weight? Traveling by air with them is a pain in the butt. TSA always seems to have a problem with them. “What’s that? Why do you have it? Why do you need it?” You’d think the TSA agents would have seen stuff like this before, alas, apparently not. I keep waiting for TSA to ask me where my papers are.
I suppose that’s making me feel like I’m old too. I’m eschewing the “Trendy, Modern,” stuff for the old tried and true. As I’m getting older, I have less patience or indeed concern about making sure all the little bits of high technology in my life are working.
If something isn’t working, it might not be that important. The importance seems to be directly related to how long it took me to notice something was amiss.
The funny thing is that I don’t stress over a lot of these things when I notice them like I used to. Now it’s kind of, “huh that’s dead. Do I need it right now? Nope, okay I’ll look at it later when I have nothing better to do,” and move on with my day.
That’s the way my Grandfathers looked at their world. If something wasn’t immediately useful, they’d move on. When I was younger I couldn’t figure them out. They’d chide me about my leap to technology. They both thought I was nuts for using ATMs. I kept wondering, how could they not be annoyed that the TV wasn’t working? How come they’d be so calm if a power drill broke and just pick up a hand cranked one?
I thought they were just old and dumb. But now I’m seeing their wisdom, perhaps because I’m acting just like they did.
They’d realized that you only need one coffeecup, one plate, one glass, one spoon, fork, or knife. Especially if you washed ’em when you were finished using them. They’d managed to see what was convenience, and what was necessity. In that realization, they became particular about what they wanted. That led them to frugality, not because they didn’t have money, but because they wanted to un-complicate and un-clutter their lives.
At the time they died, the world was becoming more connected, more complicated, and busier. I’d enjoy taking with either of them about the world today. I’m sure they’d be simultaneously appalled and amused.
They’d both be holding their sides laughing at me tossing useless crap out of my life. They wouldn’t get the computer purging, but they’d be smiling as they watched me picking up bits of dead or broken technology and tossing it into the bin.
They’d probably get a big laugh out of saying, “Welcome to being old and dumb.”
In Charleston West Virgina, a guy armed with an AR-15 started shooting at a crowd celebrating at a graduation party. Things didn’t turn out as the shooter had planned. He ended up dead because he was shot by a woman armed with a pistol for self defense.
I’m sure that liberal heads will explode over this one. “But he had an AR-15, an Assault Rifle! How could it be that a woman with a pistol could stop a guy with an Assault Rifle?”
Well, it’s like this, an AR-15 is just a rifle. There’s nothing magical about it, clearly this lady kept her cool and had good aim. Mischief Managed! Or if you prefer, FAFO (Fuck Around and Find Out).
She stayed and cooperated with the police when they arrived. Had this lady not been there, had she not been armed it’s likely that there would have been a lot more bloodshed.
I caught a reference to this tweet on another site from Founding partner of Puck News Julia Ioffe yesterday as well. I was only able to track it back as far as a Fox News article, it looks like it’s being “disappeared” from other sites I saw in passing.
It almost made me wish I had a Twitter account so I could point out to this individual that she was an idiot.
She’s also a hypocrite. On the one hand she’s pushing for gun control because of 19 Children who were murdered on the other hand she’s Pro Abortion.
I’m not sure I would have tweeted this… But the thought that went through my mind was;
“Ms. Ioffe, in fact you can perform retroactive abortions with an AR-15. What’s the difference if the child is left to die after being born, on a tray in a clinic, or torn to shreds with a suction device, or in gunfire from an AR-15? They’re still dead. Aren’t you Pro-Abortion?“
I know that’s really brutal.
Ms. Ioffe received a hail of Tweets calling her out. She has since deleted her original Tweet.
She was trying to say that if AR-15s were used in abortions, then conservatives would demand a ban on AR-15s. She failed miserably.
I probably wouldn’t have fired off my comment. Not because I’m ashamed of it. I’d have typed it and then thought about it and decided that since I typed it in anger it’s one of those things that shouldn’t go out to the whole world.
My comment would have been very insensitive and inappropriate given that I’d have sent it as a reply to Ms Ioffe on the very day of the Robb Elementary School shooting.
Even today it’s raw and brutal. I put it here because my readership isn’t in the millions, and everyone here has been warned that I sometime say really off color things.
Had I fired that off in direct response to her Tweet, all of her followers would have been inadvertent recipients of my ire.
Where’s my safe space? Where’s my bottle? Where’s my reparations? Okay, a bit sarcastic…
I am offended though. After the horror of Elementary School kids being shot in their own classroom, Elementary School Kids? The politicians, the media, and everyone else jumped in with both feet to start pushing gun control again.
Our moronic halfwit in chief had to shoot his mouth off again with his “Deer in Kevlar,” and “People couldn’t buy cannons,” bullshit. So Joe, you’re saying that back at the founding of this country we could go and buy Human Beings, but not a Cannon?
You do realize Joe, that early cannons could be produced by a decent blacksmith with a large enough quantity of iron and a knowledge of casting large metal objects. Those cannons, had no moving parts! If you get down to it, an early cannon is nothing more than a large pipe with one end blocked and a small hole for a fuse. I swear, the moron in chief would do so much better if he just kept his mouth shut.
I digress…
I’m offended that these people couldn’t let the nation take a breath. They couldn’t allow us a freakin moment to process the enormity of what happened.
Instead, these animals had to try to capitalize politically on the tragedy.
Shame on them! Shame on them all!
It’s since come out that the killer wasn’t a deranged white supremacist. (Apparently an LA Times reporter was disappointed about that.) Although the shooter was certainly deranged!
He’d purchased the weapons legally, submitting to the required background checks. He had a number of red flags that were completely ignored. He shot his grandmother after saying he was going to do it on FaceBook, then he went back to Facebook to say he’d shot his grandmother.
He posted on Facebook his intention to shoot a school. He sent via a social media platform, unsolicited photos of guns to a female who was a complete stranger.
He had, according to two different acquaintances from his High School, cut his own face, (for the fun of it…) Others who attended High School with him said that he’d always been a bit off, scary, overly aggressive, or easily enraged.
He is reported to have been shooting at the school, after crashing his vehicle and making his way over a fence onto school grounds.
It took police 10 minutes to respond to the reports of shots fired. There was no School Resource Officer at the school, (in other words, there was no-one present to mount any kind of defensive action.) Some reports are saying that this killer had time to barricade himself in the classroom, and that he may have entered through an unlocked exterior door.
There are many questions to be answered where it comes to the police response.
One for example is that an off duty Border control agent received a message from his wife about an active shooter incident, while he was in a barber’s chair. This Agent has a child in that particular school and armed himself with a shotgun he borrowed from his barber. Then he went to the school and entered the wing where his child’s classroom was located. He helped get students from that wing, including his child out of the school and to safety.
The question here is, how does an unarmed off duty boarder agent have the time to arm up, get to the school, make entry, and start getting children out of the school with help from a few deputies, while the main force of police is still standing around in front of the school?
I think the hearings and testimony will be most interesting to read through.
To be sure, this is a tragedy. It is not however the fault of the gun, the gun manufacturers, the NRA, or gun lobbyists (as Chief Moron in charge would have us believe).
This tragedy is 100% the fault of a single deranged individual. It was his hand that loaded the gun, his hand that pulled the trigger, and his insanity that drove his actions.
The failure here is not that he could legally pass a background check and purchase a weapon.
The failure is that no-one paid any attention to the insanity the person before them presented. Even if they did pay attention, there was nobody to call, and no method to get this person the help they needed or the hospitalization they deserved.
Some of his coworkers have spoken about how easily he became agitated or angry while at work. It’s not like nobody noticed, “This child ain’t right.”
If someone reported him to the police, the police had no actionable violations, even if they had arrested him he’d be out in 8 hours or less. If someone reported him to social services, they had nothing more than a 72 hour hold they could put him in and probably no hospital with an open bed.
That’s the situation I live with in my neighborhood. There’s a female human, (I use that term loosely,) up on the next block who routinely screams she’s going to shoot, stab, castrate, bludgeon, or otherwise kill the man she lives with. Her behavior is no longer limited to just her house or property. Now her physical violence is being inflicted on the neighborhood. Her verbal violence has become commonplace over the past 20 years and no-one pays much attention to her ranting and raving.
The police can’t touch her, social services can’t touch her, and it’s my belief that she’s a ticking time bomb. Her saga will only end when she’s harmed someone and shattered and unknown number of lives.
Sounds familiar doesn’t it?
It sounds a lot like the Texas shooter, or the Brooklyn grocery store guy, or, or, or…
The problem to address is not the guns. The problem that needs to be addressed is a fundamental one.
Where does my right to be safe and secure in my person and property begin, and where do a deranged person’s rights end?
If lawmakers want to make laws and spend money, why don’t they start by working on mental health legislation?
There are a shit ton of Americans who have one or more guns in their homes who have never gone on a shooting spree. On the other hand, there are a lot of Americans who are, (or were,) in real need of mental health services and can’t access them. Those folks are the folks that have a propensity to go on shooting sprees and kill innocents.
Just for clarity’s sake. AR-15 does not stand for Assault Rifle 15. It stands for Armalite Rifle model 15.
Many gun manufacturers make AR-15 rifles, each with their own flourish and manufacturer label. At its heart, an AR-15 is an AR-15, and all of them work the same way. The legal ones are semi-automatic, (one round per trigger pull,) all are based on the original modular design of the Armalite Rifle company.
One can be purchased legally in most states for anywhere from $800 to $3000, depending on options.
Our politicians are quick to seize on the AR-15 as something that must be controlled. Okay, so they want to ban assault rifles. What exactly is an assault rifle? If politicians succeed in banning AR-15s. They’ll only remove a portion of available guns. What about the other guns? The rifles and handguns that aren’t banned? A lever action rifle, or a pump action shotgun, a revolver, or a semi-automatic pistol, all fling a wad (or wads) of lead at high velocities. All can inflict injury and all can cause death.
When lawmakers are talking about gun legislation what are they trying to legislate? The number of rounds that can be fired before reloading? The speed at which rounds can be fired? The caliber of the rounds being fired? What exactly are they trying to control?
Because the lawmakers are so imprecise about what they’re legislating, it leads me to believe that they’re trying to take away all guns. Regardless of the constitutional violation of doing so, if lawmakers were to succeed in removing all guns. (An impossible task) I’m sure that people would simply migrate to Compound or Recurve Bows. Or as in the case of the UK, knives.
The point is, some people will always seek to kill other people. In the case of deranged individuals, the weapon is far less important than the motivation. I think it was in Japan, one knife wielding crazy person wounded 20 people on a subway platform. I don’t recall how many died. This guy was walking through the crowd stabbing people and a lot of the people on the platform didn’t realize there was a threat at first.
Which leads back to addressing the real source of the problem. Mental health. Lawmakers need to enact legislation that provides the services to address mental health issues and where necessary remove individuals from society at large that are obviously a threat.
People who, for instance fantasize about killing, people who consistently state they’re going to kill someone specific or people at large, people who post threats on social media, etc.
When a neighborhood calls the police repeatedly about a disturbance where someone is screaming, “I’ll shoot you, I’ll stab you, I’ll kill you,” perhaps the police should send the person somewhere that they can get help. What should not happen is that the neighborhood stops reporting the issue because nothing is ever done.
School teachers are taught to look for signs of abuse in children. Perhaps they should also be taught to look for signs of mental health issues, and report them. Early intervention is much better than having to stop an active shooter.
So many of our politicians, pundits, and wags, jump up on their soapboxes after a tragedy like the Texas shooting. They demand, “Commonsense gun control”. I say they’re screaming to fix a symptom, not the disease.
New York and California have some of the most restrictive gun laws in the nation. I think both state have “Red Flag” laws where the guns of an individual can be seized and held in police custody until the owner is proven fit and competent.
I ask how is it possible that you can have a grocery store in New York become a killing ground? How is it that you can have a San Bernardino Shooting at a county office? If gun laws worked, these shooters wouldn’t have had the guns in the first place.
How about we take the elephant in the room outside? Let’s rise to the challenge of addressing that mental illness isn’t being treated, but it should be.
To our politicians, pundits, and wags. At least have the decency to let the bodies cool before making your political grandstand moment.
