I’ve been watching the Elio with lots of anticipation though I still can’t decide whether it’s all hype or something gonna-be cool. Might be time to start watching the Local Motors Strati, too. 3D printed car. “The Myth of Washington Gun Rights Groups.” a monster take-down of Gottlieb’s newest sock puppet proxy, the “honorable” Adina Hicks.* (Via Mike V. who asks “where’s her bow tie?”) One year after: Colorado and pot are doing well. The Obama administration’s idea of cool-and-groovy solidarity: Sweet Baby James Taylor. The nanny state picked the wrong family to hassle this time. 10 reasons the Mafia…
Category: Government
Government evils — but I repeat myself
For your reading “pleasure.” How a gang of borderland narco cops just loooooved their jobs so much they became major narcotics thieves. And of course used their cop power, cop equipment, and cop cover to do it all. You kinda get the impression they’d happily do it all again, too. Vice wars. They corrupt everybody they touch. Always have, always will. Long, but interesting article.
… for the long, idle post-celebration hours ahead. In The Atlantic James Fallows writes about “The Tragedy of the American Military”. How we can reflexively say, “Thank you for your service” and claim that all soldiers are heroes — precisely because most of us are so removed from the realities of their lives, their missions, and the management of military matters. The German ‘zine Spiegel Online goes inside the NSA for an educated guess about what types of encryption the NSA has broken, which it’s working on, and which are so far safe from its prying eyes. Both articles are…
Mostly not nooz. 🙂 Think your way to stronger muscles. (No doubt has a lot of applications beyond muscles, too.) (Formerly) dying man says adopted stray dog — that he didn’t even want — helped cure his cancer. It’s not really news that religious people are happier than us non-religious. Question is, are they happier because of something about their religion or are they happier because they’re the sort of people who don’t poke and prod at every extraordinary claim, the sort who just accept the word of their chosen authority and get on with life? Yes, Christmas Eve was…
PayPal the Terrible I won’t go into detail about how my PayPal account became overdrawn.* It was a mistake (not mine). The mistake-maker assured me the problem was resolved days ago. PayPal being PayPal, though, what’s “resolved” on one end may not be on the other. So there’s a $50 negative balance and nobody will fix it. That means I can’t use my account. No problem. Hey, I’ll just add money. There’s a handy-dandy button for that. But suddenly, for me, the button yields only a variety of bizarre messages (“talk to the person responsible for setting permissions on your…
Just in case you ever wanted to become a crooked psychic/fortune-teller/medium … or in case you’d like to explain to a gullible relative how not to be so easily conned, here’s how cold reading is done. Wow. Sometimes using stupid passwords could be a good thing. Might have saved this young woman’s life. (But ohboy, OnStar, what a fail!) The Centers for Anything But Disease Control. Michelle Malkin lists just a few of the “diseases” the CDC has spent its billions on. I don’t intend to make this the all-Ebola all-the-time blog because I do think the fear is overblown…
… it sounds as if Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital wasn’t prepared for any severely infectious disease, let alone Ebola. As a health-care outsider, but one who cares about preps, I wouldn’t necessarily expect a hospital in the midlands to be ready specifically for Ebola. But with all the talk these many years of potential biowar attacks and pandemics, I’d certainly expect more and better preps at any hospital than the slapdash, make-it-up-as-you-go, and dangerously half*ssed measures the anonymous nurses describe. Of course, they are anonymous, and on the face of it, it’s hard to know whether their statement represents a…
Furrydoc asked in comments the other day, “Where’s the CDC?” (in fighting Ebola in the U.S.) Rhetorical question, of course. She knows quite well where the CDC is: giving bland assurances to the media about being just right up there on top of Ebola while primarily occupying itself with profitable and political mission creep. These days it’s focused on “epidemics” such as obesity and “gun violence.”
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Ron Fournier, at the National Journal says the scariest thing about Ebola isn’t the disease but our growing lack of trust in government and other institutions.
Sorry about the loooooong BHM-wide downage yesterday, guys. Oliver the webmaster tells me it was the result of a security update gone awry at the hosting company. But all should be well now. —– Today is the day The Great Roof Project begins! Two stages. The first involves returning part of the roof to its original form (after a long-ago “improvement” done by a committee of chimpanzees on a no-bid government contract). After that, the actual roofing crew comes in. Crews must coordinate with each other on timing. Weather holding so far. Might have a few nervous-making days. But winter…
“What I did after police killed my son.” The food insecurity lie. 12 graphs showing why people get fat. Oh, Canada. What you’ve reduced your people to. Airhorns? Seriously? Airhorns against thug barbarians? (H/T L.A.) Couple of weeks ago I linked to Ryochiji’s farewell to his Serenity Valley cabin as he prepared it as best he could against approaching fires. Good news; his cabin survived. Barely, but it made it. Yep, that would be about par for the course for U.S. surveillance priorities. Um … I’m really not sure why various news media keep presenting this as amusing. I know…