Still working on that blogosaurus. So close to done. But I’m helping to put up siding today and I’m not sure how long or steadily I’ll be required as a construction minion. So here are some links for ya.
- Oregon legalizes pot and nobody cares.
- Good one from Kevin Wilmeth. “Outsourcing Empathy: What Could Go Wrong?” (Was saving this to link from my blogosaurus, but what the heck.)
- Courtroom DNA evidence: it goes the way of so much other prosecutorial “science.” (H/T S.)
- “Why we should just nationalize Facebook.” Um … no, “we” shouldn’t. Even if “we” had the authority and the ability. Still, I was shocked at this article’s claims about how entrenched FB is and how much access it controls. I always just thought it was a badly done, boring, privacy-raping site unaccountably popular for reasons of the moment, soon to fade.
- Sadly, they didn’t turn up in the thousands (despite over 6k telling FB they were planning to attend). But here’s what greeted Our Glorious Leader in Roseburg.
- Six thoughts on the Tamir Rice investigations. (Yes it’s Mother Jones; but it’s a sadly good piece.)
- Although we don’t have evangelical meditators in my neighborhood (just the standard door-knockers), this not-quite-anti-meditation article is interesting. (Tip o’ hat to Jim Bovard)
- Didn’t we already go through this 20 years ago with the clipper chip? And PGP as a “munition”? But the latest temporary good news is that the Obama administration is no longer going to fight for a backdoor to encrypted data.
- Heh heh. “A Liberal’s 10 Commandments.” (This reminds me a lot of “The Law in Hardyville,” which Charles Curley and I cooked up lo those many years ago and is still a favorite.
There are two kinds of stress, basically, with quite a bit of overlap. There is the stress that keeps us alert, focused and able to act. Good situational awareness is an example. Finding the right level to practice in various situations, and being able to adapt quickly, is a life saver.
Then there is the damaging stress caused by life choices, environments and association with people incongruous with your basic principles and convictions. Sustained, serious cognitive dissonance is a killer stressor, in so many ways.
The single most effective way to deal with destructive stress is to find a compatible job, change your environment, associate with people who share your principles and will support you instead of tear you down. No amount of drugs, mediation or exercise will do this job, so it is the most rational thing to do even if it is very difficult otherwise.
The real losers are usually those good people who think they can have it both ways. sigh
I spent a lot of years in contemplative meditation, but I didn’t get rid of the killing stress until I quit the Medicare rat race job and moved to Wyoming. I’ll never get rich, but I’m happy.
“[I]t seems weird to claim Facebook is a natural monopoly. There’s no physical infrastructure it has to lay down.”
I don’t think I’m going to take tech and economic advice from a clown who must believe cloud computing works in real clouds.
C’mon, Bear. He may be an idiot and a socialist (but I repeat myself). But I think you’re exaggerating what he means when he talks about no physical infrastructure.
Definitely let’s not take advice from this guy. I am, however, curious about some of his claims as to FB’s ubiquity.
I’ve always loved “the Law In Hardyville”. I try to live it, which is not easy for an opinionated, legalistic person to do.
I think it’s important to recognize that you can dissaprove of something without running to the law to get it banned.
I made it one of my personal commandments: “Government has no business dictating morality.” That makes it simpler. There are lots of things that I think people shouldn’t do, because it’s stupid or dangerous or immoral, but at the same time trying to force that would violate that commandment, so it stays in the realm of morality or ettiquette, not law.
[The fact that Rice was a kid, or that his gun turned out to be fake, are “irrelevant” in determining whether Loehmann’s actions were reasonable under federal law.]
Here we have the natural end result of the adoption of policing in the 19th Century. Tell me again why we need police?
Claire, Facebook is pretty ubiquitous. Look up at the header of this very page and you’ll see a FB button. The good thing about FB and ubiquity is that it provides people with a simple way to connect with each other without having to keep track of dozens of forums and sites individually. (The bad thing is the degree of personalized data collection that made possible for FB.)
Possibly what worries our little commie friend (Sorry; in socialism the companies are sorta-semi-more-or-less privately owned, but effectively centrally controlled by the government. Communism takes over the ownership on “behalf” of the people, which is exactly what this asshat is advocating.) is FB’s growing services — exclusive third party content, and especially the “internet.org” plan that provides free access to the poor, but restricts them to a walled garden populated by companies that pay to play… a bit like the old CSi/AOHell days, but with costs shifted the the providers. Add in their wifi drone ISP concept, and I can excuse the ubiquity fears to some extent.
I could fisk that idiot all day (gov must run FB and protect privacy because the poor dumb people can’t look after themselves, natural monopolies are those that require exclusive and massive infrastructure but FB doesn’t have infrastructure [!] and thus is a monopoly, monopolies are inherently bad because the company has too much control unless it’s a gov monopoly because those are always so mucvh better like the Postal Dis-service, EPA, and DOD purchasing.
Certainly if the gov ran FB, it would never abuse the position to increase FBI and NSA snooping. [grin]
At base, Comrade Spross equates ubiquity with monopoly. But there are options, and no one has to use FB; they choose to because FB is useful to them. If the abuse overrides the use, they will move to something else… so long as FB doesn’t become a gov-mandated monopoly (like the USPS letter monopoly, which we escaped by no longer sending letters).
So that’s what empathy means! I was always told to be “empathetic” in public school, but no-one ever felt it necessary to tell me what it was. I think that that might be a cause of the empathy/morality sellout problem. Its been less than a year since I got out of there, and lets just say I am VERY glad I did.
I meditate. Every day. Have done so since 1982, with a few breaks. I do it because I’m done with manifestation, and it’s the surest way I’ve found to make sure I don’t come back once I leave this body.
Stress relief? Sure. But that’s a like using a flame thrower to light a cigarette.
If government bullies are not going to keep fighting for a backdoor into encrypted data, it just means they found a way into all of it.
RE: “A Liberal’s 10 Commandments.” #3 GUNS “I will pledge that no one in my security detail will ever carry a concealed firearm of any sort”
I was going to say that it should state “will ever carry a firearm, concealed or otherwise, on person or in a support vehicle”. Then I thought that requiring the security details to carry weapons openly might cause the adoring masses to finally realize that the elitists with security details really do view to those adoring masses as “the hoi polloi”.
“Government has no business dictating morality.”
Amen. Too many people don’t understand that morality doesn’t consist of doing the right thing, but in chosing to do the right thing.
Completely OT trivia of only minor interest, and that only to Larry A.:
I was told back then that Phenix City used to be run by the mob, and that about 20 years previously the Lieutenant Governor of Alabama had been shot and killed there; afterwards the town was cleaned up, relatively speaking. A few years ago I talked to a man who actually was from Phenix City. He said that when he was five he watched a man have his head pushed through a glass window and then have the remaining glass used as a saw on his neck. His mother advised him, wisely, not to discuss this.
My level of inactivity there, I believe, didn’t make it to the criteria for sin. I simply watched a show. I can’t say there was any real continuity to the woman’s act, it just seemed like she knew how to do a bunch of tricks, so she went on stage and did them all. She came out in a bikini wearing a very large snake. She danced around for a little bit, and put the snake up. Then she broke out the tassels. Interestingly, at no time did I find any of this particularly sexually enticing in nature, which included the lights out, spinning flames stuff. Remarkably, she was able to bend over backward and place her palms on the floor – while keeping the tassels spinning. And almost unbelievably, she brought out a small chair and, I swear, spun the tassels while standing on her head. I swear. As she was doing this I was standing on my own chair, embarrassing the fellow trainee I came with. I still have no idea how she did it; I didn’t notice that she was moving her legs to make her body bounce. Sometimes we come across the most remarkable things when we least expect them 🙂
I’m very impressed that none of your people were awarded purple hearts. That also limits, in scope, the things you might have done. That impresses me, too. Only in recent years did I decide to find out about this interesting man https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_L._Benning