Tab Clearing

Five years after his honorable discharge, arrested for desertion.  And spent a month under confinement at Pendelton.  And didn't get paid.  Because he wasn't actually a deserter.  The Big Green Weenie found him, big time.

State Rep. Elizabeth Coggs, the Milwaukee Democrat running in the August primary for state senator, urged a gathering of ... voters Saturday to “vote for someone that looks like you.”

Race Hucksters - God Save Us from Federal Help, by Fred Reed

Cryptocat Development Blog

Is it time for password-less login?

You'll poke your eye out kid

Often heard argument against carrying guns in public;

"But if you have a spree-killer and you have guys shooting back they'll just make things worse."

Has this ever happened?

Words to Live by -If You Are a Super Hero

From here.

"Words to live by," Diaz claims.

Bullshit twice over.

Bullshit the first, just two pages after this graphic, elderly retired cop James Gordon uses his firearm ("Of course I still carry it") to break up a riot, enforce order, organize a bucket brigade to save a burning building.  Without Batman or his army of testosterone-ripped thugs.

Gordon as a character has always stood for doing the right thing, even if it wasn't popular, or legal.  Fundamentally, he's just a guy, counterpoint to the looney-tune Bruce Wayne, an everyman, with a sense of duty.

 As Gordon monologues, drawing his gun: "They start listening."


 Bullshit the second, we don't live in a comic book.  Batman is fantasy, not an instruction manual.

Self-defense is the first human right.  Firearms enable the weak, the helpless, the everyman to exercise that fundamental right.

Where firearms are, there is civilization. [1]

[1] Apologies to Mr. Twain

Life is pretty darn good

Today Connor has made some important decisions.  There should be no cushions on the couch.  It is more fun to shut doors with his head.  Backwards is the only way to walk.

From my daughter, on my grandson.

Yes, he is an awesome toddler.

On being unarmed while being shot at

Reading this and that on the internet today about the Aurora Massacre I realized with mild shock that I've been there.  In that situation.  I don't think about it much - it's just something that happened once.

Which is to say that I was once under arms without ammunition [1], a dozen feet from a guy who was trying real hard to kill people.  He didn't [2] which is down to darkness and a whole lot of luck. [3]

But I gotta think than anyone who has actually been there, experienced it first hand, has thought about it, doesn't have a lot of truck with people who want victims to cower under a desk, for them to wait for the cops to show up, who feel that an armed citizen facing down a killer just makes it worse.


[1] Which is the stupid-silly kind of thing that happens in the military.  That time it was poor communication, happenstance, and fum-duckery, not SOP.
[2] F*cking boot.
[3] The good guys trying to kill him back didn't succeed either.  Lots of luck running around that night.

Obama and the AK-47

"But I also believe that a lot of gun owners would agree that AK-47s belong in the hands of soldiers, not in the hands of criminals -- that they belong on the battlefield of war, not on the streets of our cities."

Barack Obama

This citizen believes an AK-47 belongs in the trunk of my car.  One over the fireplace.  Upstairs in my closet.  F**k a lot of soldiers, why should they get to have all of the fun?

But never mind.

Some will call our Commander-in-Chief clueless about the very basics of the armed forces he has been elected to lead.  Not I.  Some will say he's a dimwit, a tool to his teleprompter, victim of a speechwriter without clue.  A man who lacks curiosity about anything not in his cozy, narrow, cone of light. 

Not me. [1]

I say that it proves is that he's never, ever, seen that classic Clint Eastwood movie 'Heartbreak Ridge'. 

For if he had this line would be seared into his memory:

This is the AK-47 assault rifle, the preferred weapon of your enemy; and it makes a distinctive sound when fired at you, so remember it.



[1] Not today, at least.

cmdfu

The internet continues to delight and amaze.

cmdfu

Put this in .bashrc (or aliases.zsh if you swing that way)

cmdfu(){ wget -qO - "http://www.commandlinefu.com/commands/matching/$@/$(echo -n "$@" | openssl base64)/plaintext"; }

And ...

$ cmdfu awk
# commandlinefu.com by David Winterbottom

# Get the IP address
ip -f inet a | awk '/inet / { print $2 }'

# Get the IP address
ip a s eth0 | grep "inet " | head -n 1 | awk '{print $2}' | cut -f1 -d'/'
(snip)

Whoa.

From.

Nutty Things I Found Out Today

Muhammad's name is written on Mars.
and
Muhammad split the moon apart.  Then put it back together.

Which ... fine. It's nutty, but no nuttier than believing bread and wine turn into Christ's body and blood.

It gets better: guys are going around using state of the art technology to prove that medieval miracles really did happen.

'NASA footage shows ..' 'Pictures from satellites are proof ..'

I'd be more impressed if that crowd could build satellites, or the computers, or moon rockets, or even a 1969 Torino GT convertible.  Instead of depending on other people to do it for them.

All these guys can do is smash things apart that they can't build.  Kinda sad.

Compartmentalize

Springsteen begins to mumble in what the music critic Jody Rosen calls his “flat Dust Bowl Okie accent,” and I can’t make out a word he’s saying. I ask Christie if he understands him.

“You want to know what he’s saying?,” Christie asks. “He’s telling us that rich people like him are fucking over poor people like us in the audience, except that us in the audience aren’t poor, because we can afford to pay 98 bucks to him to see his show. That’s what he’s saying.”

Wait a second, this is Bruce Springsteen we’re talking about, the guy you adore?

“I compartmentalize,” Christie says.

Jersey Boys - The Atlantic

Sex and Starship Troopers

Starship Troopers, Chapter 11, the protagonist is on leave from the war.  He describes a strip of bars, pawn shops, dives, strip joints, tattoo parlors, and book stores outside the base.

Then Our Hero, Rico, narrates ..

If you are able to get past these traps, through having already been bled of all valuta, there are still other places in the city almost as satisfactory.  I mean there are girls there, too. Which are provided free by a grateful populace.  Much like the social center in Vancouver, these are, but even more welcome.

A brothel, by golly, run by the city.  Take a number, soldier, the wait time is 20 minutes.

My mind is in the gutter.  It's the USO that is free.  Sure.

Heinlein was careful, he had a way with prose. 

That ain't no accidental clunker of an ambiguous sentence.

Vote for Gary Johnson because he'll abolish the IRS

Gary Johnson will END the IRS (YouTube)

Gary Johnson 2012 - The Economy and Taxes #2: Cut Taxes

THE U.S. TAX SYSTEM IMPOSES AN ENORMOUS toll on productivity through high marginal rates, absurd complexity, loopholes for the well-connected, and incentives for wasteful decisions. A better, fairer system will be:

• Abolish the Internal Revenue Service.
• Enact the Fair Tax to tax expenditures, rather than income, with a 'prebate' to make spending on basic necessities tax free.
• With the Fair Tax, eliminate business taxes, withholding and other levies that penalize productivity, while creating millions of jobs.
• Suggested Reading: www.FairTax.org

No more IRS?  An entire thugocracy turned out to honest labor?  Getting rid of a friggin' wind anchor on the ship of state?  Sign me up.

Also - Gary Johnson wont have a (*&(^*&^^ kill list.

Tab Clearing

Responsibility and Clicking: Such people have no problem with the idea of magic, because everything is magic to them, even science.

Summary of the AWS Service Event in the US East Region

Perl Net::FTP

4 min Emacs screencast inspired by Bret Victor's Inventing on Principle (emacsrocks.com)

emacsrocks.com

michaelw's Emacs Hackery

Microsoft’s Downfall: Inside the Executive E-mails and Cannibalistic Culture That Felled a Tech Giant

File Management with Emacs (dired tutorial)

The Collected Writings of Mencius Moldbug

List of wireless router firmware projects (wikipedia)

The Socialization Of America Is Economically Impossible

Dear Person Seeking a Job: Why I Can't Hire You

Defending Against SWAT Entries (Not What You Think) TL:DR - if the police assault you, it's your own fault. Next column: Defending Against Rapists (Not What You Think).

It's not the heat ...

Hot.  Sultry.  Sweaty.  Humid.  So hot the rabbits ain't gonna run and the dog ain't gonna hunt.  How humid is it?  Don't ask.  August in Texas finally found me up here in Wisconsin in July.

Only good thing about riding a bike to work is that I don't have to climb into a car sealed up and baked in the sun.

Did I mention it's hot outside ...

Master Funnery Sergeant

Who is this? Who the f*** is it?

Not just a phoney-fake Marine but a phoney-fake Marine who got to jump out of airplanes.  And not just a phoney-fake Marine who can parachute but one who got himself a Special Warfare insignia.  And an EOD badge.

And not just a phoney-fake parachuting Marine/SEAL/EOD man but a phoney-fake parachuting Marine/SEAL/EOD man who can't arrange his shooting badges correctly or assemble his cover correctly.

Jesus Christ and Saint Peter in a sidecar.

You know - you just know - this guy is sitting at home after work.  He has no friends.  None, zero, zilch, nada.

I feel sorry for the guy.

Via Terminal Lance