“Ewwww… did the dog piddle over here?”
“No. She spent all afternoon licking the carpet.”
…
“That’s even more disgusting.”
This raises the question – has anyone else had to housebreak BOTH ends of their dog?
This little fun tidbit crossed my Twitter Timeline, courtesy of Friend o’ the Hive Sheila O’Malley:
My Help Desk guy’s name is Johnny Cash. I can’t help but say his first/last name. “Johnny Cash, hey, something’s up with my Outlook …”
So of course, fun things encourage playing along…
Well, my boss left the company when I got hired
Gave me a cubicle and then retired
My training was a stack of post-its in a drawer
Now I don’t blame him that he run and hid
But perhaps the meanest thing he did
Was before he left, he hung “IT” on my door
I never knew a thing about computer stuff,
So a lot of folks made it mighty tough
It seems I’ve had to fight the whole day through
Somebody would giggle when the printer jammed
Some fool would crash the network with Porn on Demand
Lemme tell you, life ain’t easy for an IT dude
I learned PCs and I grew a thick skin
You’ll get it fixed when I say when
As I roam from floor to floor to repair the probs
And I made me a vow to the moon and stars
That I’d search the chat rooms, Twitter, and blogs
And kill that man that gave me this awful job
Now you might wonder why I didn’t quit
But times were too hard to spit the bit
So I worked hard to learn all about PCs
And then one night, working overtime
From the corner of my eye, who comes online
But the mangy dog who made me work IT
I knew right away it was my old boss
From the IP address he used, of course,
And his avatar was the same from times gone by
He was crude and loud and a snobbish scold
So I logged in quick, and my blood rUn cold
And I Twittered – “How you be? I work IT! NOW UR GONNA DIE! #revenge”
So I blocked his feed before he could hide
And his email went down, but to my surprise
He come right up with a DoS attack
I rebooted and hacked him live
Crashed through the firewall and into the hard drive
Coding and uploading till both our screens went black
I tell you that I’ve fought tougher hacks
Though I can’t remember that far back -
He phished like a pro and spammed like a Nigerian Prince
I saw him LOL and I saw him WTF
Went for his antivirus, but I booted mine first
And after a minute, I saw “colon-parenthesis”
“Kid,” he texted, “Times are rough
If you want to make it you’ve got to be tough
And I knew a typical degree wouldn’t last you long
So I give you a tech job and said good luck
I knew you’d grow unique skills or bust
And it’s those l33t skilz that’s helped to make you strong!”
“Now I know ur h8in, but why you mad?
It’s not the worst job you’ve ever had
And if you want to you could brick my PC
But you ought to thank me before you do
For your HTML and coding-fu
‘Cause I’m the lousy cuss who put you in IT”
What could I do? I got choked up, shut down my hack
Erased the virus and gave his passwords back
And I come away with a different way to see
And I think about him, here and there,
When I squash some bug or scrub malware
And if I hire a guy, I think I’ll…
SEND HIM TO MARKETING! I STILL HATE THIS JOB!
A lot of pixels have been spilled on the Democrat Party’s “We All Belong to the Government” nonsense, most of it in uproarious scorn, and for good reason. It’s simple syllogism: if we belong to the government, and the government belongs to the DNC, then we belong to the DNC. QED.
For far too long, statist bastards have inverted the whole idea of “public servant,” from “one who serves the public at their will” to “one who serves by telling the public what they will do, if they know what’s good for them.” They have also gone from “paid by the citizens, and thus their employee” to “the public is my bank, from whom I withdraw whatever I please, and they have no say in the matter.”
Well, some of us agree rather with Rush: Our minds are not for rent, to any god or government. Besides, these jokers, as is their hallmark, get it exactly 100% wrong. We do not belong to a government; the government belongs to US. We pay their salary. No, strike that – they don’t do a job that profits all of us, the way an employee does. It’s more that they do chores delegated to them while we, the adults, do the responsible things that earn our livings and keep a home for all of us. In short, our taxes are more of an allowance. Now the spoiled brats have grown sullen and rebellious: bored with how good they actually have it, they steal out of our pocketbooks, claim the whole damn world revolves around them, they know better about everything (because they FEEL so much), and stamp their feet and holler at even the suggestion of a limitation to their whims. The whole DNC convention is the political equivalent of “BUT EVERYONE ELSE HAS NEW STUFF! YOU NEVER LET ME DO ANYTHING! I HATE YOU!”
How well does that play? As well as any other public tantrum by any other brat. They had to move the whole spectacle from a 73,000 seat venue to a 22,000 seat venue, and even that’s still only half-full. I can hardly blame any rank-and-filers for their lack of enthusiasm about it. If I were still a Democrat I’d be slinking off in shame too. In ’68, the rallying cry was “The whole world’s watching!” – typically narcissist and self-absorbed, but that’s youth for you. Now, having grown much older but none the wiser, they can’t even draw the kind of crowds that typically turn out three dozen times a year for the truly terrible basketball team that normally plays there. (Click here, scroll down to “Bobcats,” and laugh and laugh.)
Oh, and apparently I’m blogging again.
UPDATE: case in point shared on Twitter by DrewM (one of Ace’s cobloggers):
DMM Orders RT: @dylanbyers: Dear Republicans The stadium-change cycle has passed. It didn’t make the front page. It’s over. Focus on tonight
— DrewM (@DrewMTips) September 6, 2012
Nice, right? The media refuses to notice something, and then uses that to try to tell us that we didn’t notice it either. So add “LALALALALA I’m not listening” fingers-in-their-ears avoidance to the long and thorough list of childishness on display.
Also – if that stadium isn’t full again tonight, do we get to focus on it all over again?
So, it’s law.
The local paper ran a two-color headline: YES IT’S CONSTITUTIONAL. I wouldn’t go quite that far. “Yes, It Stands,” maybe, or “Sure, Why the Hell Not?” or “Yes, It’s As Bad As You Feared and If You Don’t Like It, Scrap It Yourselves.” But constitutional? Even though the Supreme Court refused to strike down the ACA, I think that I’d stop short of saying that they gave it the Constitutional imprimatur.
For one thing, the decision basically outlines every last way in which this statute is bad law, and Constitutionally sketchy… which seems quite odd in an affirmation. For another, it’s quite possible for a very smart person to make mistakes that no average or middling intellect could ever. Justice Roberts’ reasoning in this decision is nearly a textbook example thereof. It’s almost as if he were searching frantically for a legal reason to avoid scrapping this monstrosity.
As a result, there are a number of thoughts within his reasoning that make sense in isolation. For example, there’s the statement that a bad policy isn’t de facto unconstitutional; also, the thought that the Courts don’t exist to spare us the consequences of sending morons to Congress to write dumb laws. Both eminently true. Alas, neither of these is the point at hand. The point at hand is, does Congress have the authority to force us to do what this bill requires? And a very simple reading of the list contained in the US Constitution of things Congress can do reveals that, No, they really can’t, not no way, not no how.
But they ARE allowed to tax us, right? OK, so fine, this is a tax and they’re allowed to do it! Splitting the judicial baby, as it were. Poor kid, he never stood a chance.
There’s a huge flaw in that thinking. I’m sure a cleverer mind than mine could paper over it, explain it away, much as today there are many clever minds explaining all the silver linings in this cloud that’s currently set to deluge us in another layer of unbearable government busybodery. In this case, let’s just look at the cloud, OK? Sure, the Congress can levy taxes – but why are they taxing us this time? That’s exactly what the decision refuses to examine, with a firmness and determination that I wish had been applied towards actually deciding the issue instead of punting it.
§ Insty reports a new wine in town.
On May 24, 1976, the British wine merchant Steven Spurrier organized a blind tasting of French and Californian wines. … The results shocked the wine world. According to the judges, the best Cabernet at the tasting was a 1973 bottle from Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars in Napa Valley. When the tasting was repeated a few years later—some judges insisted that the French wines had been drunk too young—Stag’s Leap was once again declared the winner, followed by three other California Cabernets. These blind tastings (now widely known as the Judgment of Paris) helped to legitimate Napa vineyards.
But now, in an even more surprising turn of events, another American wine region has performed far better than expected in a blind tasting against the finest French châteaus. Ready for the punch line? The wines were from New Jersey.
Bingley has been way ahead of the curve on this, apparently. Even I, who imbibeth but a little, have enjoyed the occasional winery tour-and-taste. Cream Ridge Winery is a good spot for that sort of thing if you’re visiting the Garden State.
Sometimes, I think the olden mapmakers were on to something we’ve lost. Sure, the continents were comically misshapen, and they often favored beauty over legibility, but there was a certain style to the operation that’s sorely lacking now. And of course they were just as interested in precision and accuracy as we are today; they just lacked the tools. Where they excelled and we falter is that they didn’t sit around waiting for the tools before they drew the best maps they could. They also didn’t stop there and consider the latest thing they’d done to be finished forever. They kept at it. (And they weren’t afraid to just up and stick all sorts of mythological beasts in the margins. A little imagination counts for much in the world.)
We ought to bring their approach to the misshapen mental landscapes of the far-left.
Morgan’s been trying to map these burbling swamps for a long while now, and his latest expidition makes for a good read. A sample:
I think the thought process in place is as follows, and this is my observation: If you have some (free speech), that has to mean they are missing some. After all, that is how they look at money, is it not? It’s okay for you to have, oh, one or two hundred dollars in your bank account…maybe four digits in the balance instead of three, if you’re about to sit down and pay your bills. But if you are “two-comma” wealthy, that’s bad, because that has to mean someone else is missing something.
He then adds that he remembers when “nuance” was the buzzword of the day for the left: a vague, gassy way of praising themselves. This word is no longer in vogue, you’ll notice – it was a pretense all along. And true to Morgan’s observation, the left had all of the nuance and the right had none, those simpletons.
It’s hard to know which is worse: the progs’ pride in their “nuanced thinking” or the complete absence of any evidence of it in their actions. Or – no – maybe that’s a little over-simple. There is one way in which they show an amazing plasiticity, which no doubt fools them into thinking that they’re nuanced. They are masters of winnowing out some measly sliver of a difference between what they are vociferously condemning and what they are in fact advocating or doing at the moment. Then they project searchlight levels of wishful thinking at that sliver in the hope of casting enough of a shadow for them to hide in.
A Kuwaiti man was sentenced to 10 years in prison on Monday after he was convicted of endangering state security by insulting the Prophet Mohammad and the Sunni Muslim rulers of Saudi Arabia and Bahrain on social media.
Sometimes we in the U.S. seem shrill about our own problems, such as the people getting spamblocked on Twitter, Obama’s infamous “truth teams,” and the conformist mentality threatening many of our institutions. And there’s an important distinction between those things and what has happened to Hamad al-Naqi with this ruling: as horrible as those three above examples are, they are still (for now) the free actions of free people. It’s not welcome for them to merely shout down others, but in itself it’s not the same thing as active State interference in our ideas and opinions.
The problem is that it never just stops at that. If it did, it would be inconvenient to the one side, but eventually futile for the other. Those who have been “twitmo’d” have their accounts restored; “truth teams” meet with the approbation and scorn they deserve; the conformists eventually get out into a real world that they have yet to succeed in silencing. Ultimately those things hurt professional lives and reputations, but in the States, at least, you don’t yet go to the pokey for merely insulting someone.
But it’s worth saying that all those things lie on the same continuum that gets us to the criminalization of thought. Those who are comfortable with those acts are usually also comfortable with the next step – from insult, to dirty tricks, to getting people in actual trouble with authority for daring to say such things. In Canada and England people have gone to jail for expressing unapproved opinions, under their hate-speech legislations. Mark Steyn was called onto the carpet by Canada’s Orwellian Human Rights commissions for article he wrote that appeared in Maclean’s, and he’s only the most prominent example. (You’ll all have seen the clip of the unhinged high school teacher insisting that her student can be jailed for speaking out against the President’s policies and qualifications.) Most recently, Robert Stacy McCain was forced to relocate his entire family because of the “lawfare” tricks of Brett Kimberlin, while Aaron Worthing has actually been jailed (hopefully temporarily) through Kimberlin’s legal bombardment – more a wearying of opponents rather than carrying the day with actual proof of tangible harm.
These are dangerous precedents, and not to be encouraged. There’s no guarantee that Western governments won’t simply ignore the Constitution and rule rather than serve. We could fall into the worst trap of all – so thoroughly internalizing such onerous rules that we become our own thought police, denouncing ourselves to our betters, or not speaking when challenged. Every time someone says something that “requires’ one of those “public apology” statements, a part of me sickens worse. Often, the opinion itself is misquoted or not all that objectionable; even if offensive, well, again, there’s no law against that. But even if it’s appropriate to apologize, shouldn’t that be something the person does unprompted? By forcing the apology, we tend to rob all such statements, however heartfelt, of sincerity. “Oh, he did that for the PR,” we say, because half of the time it was just for the PR, just to fulfill that part of the cycle of theater that passes for too much public discourse.
Imagine a world where those momentary affronts stood. Wouldn’t that be a world in which we could judge for ourselves if an apology was genuine, rather than assume it was a sham? For that matter, wouldn’t it also be a world in which we could judge for ourselves if the affront was actually all that offensive? Could we not, in this world, pick and choose our protests, and have the other party pick and choose what they are and aren’t sorry for? I think I find even the possibility preferable to the endless parade of off-the-cuff comments leading to ginned-up “controversy” followed by routine “outrage” and automatic statements from “representatives.” Hell, we might just run the risk of not being so darned thin-skinned all day long, thinking a little before reacting, and maybe getting along better in the long run.
A world where everything triggers a quick, automatic (and completely predictable) reply is not a world where people are really thinking and interacting. It’s replacing the effort of human relationship with the simple stimulus-response of animals or machines. It can’t be healthy. We’re not to the point, quite, where we do risk a jail cell for protesting our leaders, or our religious figures. However, I don’t want to risk getting there. I also want you to actually read the article and note three things:
- This was a Kuwaiti man jailed, in part, for protesting OTHER governments, not his own.
- al-Nagi’s defense was that his account was hacked, not that the statements weren’t made.
- We’re told he insulted Mohammed, but the Reuters reporter does not repeat what was actually said.
This last is key. We are not Kuwaiti; why can’t we read for ourselves and make up our own mind about the statements? They wouldn’t warrant a prison term in any case, but really, what was written? Why did Reuters neuter its own report and deny us a key piece of information in the story? The piece had an author, two additional reporters, and two editors, and none of them felt it was worth the trouble of repeating the statements. It’s entirely likely they were expunged to “avoid offense” to anyone’s delicate ears.
“This verdict is a deterrent to those who insult the Prophet Mohammad, his companions and the mothers of the believers,” civil plaintiff Dowaem al-Mowazry said in a text message.
It worked on Reuters, anyway, and I’m not OK with that. We have every good reason to resist any hint of such a thing happening where we live. On with the truth, and up with the volume.
