The leaders of the leftist movement don't point out the logical inconsistencies of the anarchists' postions because they like having as many people on their side as possible, and it's useful to have people on hand who are willing to break things and set things on fire. The goal of the left is anything but anarchist, of course, but they have no qualms about using anarchists for their own ends and then...abandoning...them once their goals are achieved and they're securely in power.
The complete lackwits who spray painted these symbols on that church, however, tipped their hands by including the anarchists' symbol. Atheists tend to be leftists, and their emotions tend to get the better of them when it comes to religion.
This is the kind of thing which is typically the purview of the subsentient adolescent. I'd wager the perpetrator isn't old enough to drive, and has only just discovered leftist politics and thinks it's the Greatest Thing Ever, and he decided to vandalize the church because This Will Show Them How Wrong They Are (and it'll be hilarious).
Subsentient leftists who see this will cheer: "Yeah, that'll show them!" Meanwhile, the adults just sigh and shake their heads, because this kind of thing isn't "edgy" or "ironic" or anything other than fucking stupid. It's a waste of spray paint, really.
* * *
Looks like we need more restrictions on high-capacity assault weapons. Oh, wait, he used a car, so it's the person, not the tool. This is how the media does things.
When someone goes and shoots up a theater or a school, it's the tool's fault: the bad guy had a gun, and he wouldn't have killed people if guns were illegal.
When someone--as in this case--gets into his car and purposely uses it to mow down pedestrians, it's the person's fault: the car is just an inanimate object, and the guy driving it is just a bad person.
*rolleyes*
* * *
During the Bush years, people on the left shrieked repeatedly about how imperial the Presidency was becoming. Where are those people now?
Obama is arrogating unprecedented (and flatly unconstitional) powers to the executive branch. Of course, no one is trying to stop him, because our federal government is aristocratic.
And that's why Obama is abusing his executive authority. There are no provisions in Obamacare exempting Congress from its strictures, yet Obama has decided to carve one out. The chief aristocrat is taking care of his aristocrat buddies down the street.
Congresscritters earning $74,000 to $135,000 per year need a 75% subsidy on the costs imposed on the citizen by Obamacare, because the monetary costs are simply too high for them to bear. You serfs out in the hinterland? Bah, you need to gut it up and pay the freight, because we know what's good for you, and you'd just waste that money on stupid things anyway, like food or electricity.
Make no mistake about it: inside the beltway they are all friends first and political opponents second. The GOP doesn't want to rock the boat because they've got power and access and perks; they're just fine with all the taxes and fees and regulations.
Because if they weren't they would actually be trying to do something about them, and they're not. The GOP is barely even making token efforts to scale back government overreach, and their efforts at so-called "deficit reduction" are, as I have said again and again, nothing more than rounding errors.
* * *
I agree with Vox Day: if a business doesn't want you to carry your firearm on its premesis, they don't need your money, either. I can understand how someone who owns a bookstore would decide they didn't want people bringing in their guns; bookstore owners are usually hard leftist.
I was going to write, "But you would think they'd consider the variables before--" and then stopped myself. They don't think. If any thought was involved at all, it was along the lines of "Ha, ha, you neanderthal Rethuglikkkans! If I put up this sign, the law says you can't bring your gun into my gun store! HA HAA!" and it went no farther than that.
The people involved gave no thought to a few salient details:
1) Bookstores are, in general, going out of business. Even the big chains.Vox Day opines that the owner of this blighted store must think that gun owners can't read, or something. Well, he'll find out.
2) Any book you can buy in a bookstore, you can get from Amazon, usually without paying shipping or sales tax.
3) Gun owners can vote with their feet--and their dollars--as effectively as anyone else can, and do.
4) That piece of paper will only keep out the law-abiding gun owners. You might as well put up a sign saying "Please rob me, because I don't believe in self-defense". (If you have a gun on the premsis, to protect yourself, you are a hypocrite. But that wouldn't be a surprise, either.)
* * *
DOOM! God bless Monty, really.
I guess we can call this the "new normal": a piddling 1.7% rise in GDP is now considered "brisk". Yet reality bites our ever-psychotic business press as jobs numbers "disappoint". Maybe we can say that the economy is "briskly disappointing".I can remember when GDP was rising much faster than that, when the country was at full employment--when business was straining against the limits of the labor supply, in fact.
It's not that way now, of course. There's no recovery; it's all numbers games and we can't pay rent or buy food with cooked numbers. Our rulers in D.C. couldn't care less; they have no trouble putting food on the table or keeping the lights on (especially since they're going to get a nice fat 75% subsidy to help them pay their health insurance bills!) so obviously the country is doing just fine, thanks!
*sigh*
* * *
Tactile feedback from a touchscreen.
This is something I was only just thinking about in the past few days. My use of the Nook HD+ has led me to realize that one of the biggest problems with touchscreen interfaces is the complete lack of tactile feedback. I was having an on-line chat with Og and kept mangling keys because I touch-type on a real keyboard and am no longer in the habit of looking at the keys. You can't do that with a tablet, because you can't feel where the keys are, and you end up typing howlers like "itsbgood thatyourebdoingbbetter". (To say nothing of the awkward punctuation arrangements, meant to save screen space. Having to switch to another keyboard screen for apostrophes is stupid.)
The developments mentioned in that article would help enormously.
* * *
"Today, I wore a bikini to the lake with my parents. I didn't know that my back was covered in bruises, and ended up having to awkwardly explain to my parents that I am not in an abusive relationship; the bruises came from the sex I had last night. FML"
WTF kind of sex are you having that leaves you covered with bruises? How do you not know that someone was pounding on your back hard enough to leave bruises?
"FML" my ass; it sounds like she deserved that shit. WTF.
* * *
The pot roast came out perfectly. Mrs. Fungus called to remind me to put in the potatos, so I had to take out the meat and put some taters in. Despite being put in a few hours late the potatos cooked nicely, and when she got home we had a tasty meal. It was the most tender pot roast I ever had. Win.
It's better for autumn or winter, though. You get very warm after eating a meal like that. I just finished a plate of leftovers, and despite the temps not going over 75 today I'm sitting here sweating.
* * *
So: yesteday I printed out five of the (whatever-odd) stories that are going into the anthology, so I could red mark them.
That stack alone came to 203 pages.
There are three or four more stories to hack into Word docs and get edited into shape, which means the conservative estimate for the length of the anthology is about 300 pages. Methuselah alone is about 29 pages (making the total 232 pages) so the remaining 2-3 stories need only total about 68 pages to get to the magical 300 page mark. Include the commentary I intend to add to the thing--perhaps two pages per story, one before and one after--and the story page count I need drops to about 52. With what I plan to include, I can get there, no problem.
300 pages for $2.99 is a penny per page, and these are some good stories. (IMNSHO.) I figure at that price it's a bargain and a good way to get myself noticed, if people like what they read.
One story, changing the text style totally destroyed all my formatting--all the italics just went away. *sigh* So I've got to go through the whole freakin' story and re-italicize things. Don't ask me to explain why Word decided to obliterate my typography when all I was doing was changing the text to single-spaced; Word is such a "charlie foxtrot" I don't think anyone can predict what it will do. It's more of a chaotic system than a word processor.
Looking at styles, I was trying to figure out why the text was double-spaced if the style said it was supposed to be single-spaced--but when I hit "apply" it all changed; and even better, in another story I was able to change all the straight quotes to open/close quotes with just a few mouse clicks, then change all the double en dashes (--) to single em dashes with a single search and replace ("Word has finished searching the document and has made 157 replacements.") so I guess I was due for some Word verfucklement.
As I increasingly find myself saying of late, no one said it would be easy.
* * *
Today I had occasion to try on my one pair of khakis, and discovered that the waist is tighter than it used to be. I am going to have to stop asking Mrs. Fungus to bring home Oreos when she goes shopping, even though we both like them. *sigh*
Besides that, though, Jewel has this dip, or spread: jalapeno, artichoke, and parmesan, and it's so damned tasty that if I have a tub of it and crackers I'll just eat and eat and eat. The jalapeno is just enough to give it a very pleasant kick, without being overpowering.
But while the dip is better for me than cookies, it is not really good for me.
I was doing pretty well on my "low carb but not a nazi about it" diet, until I got married. Well, it is traditional and typical for a man to gain some weight after he gets married, even if he's the one doing the cooking. I just need to stop eating Oreo cookies, which means not having them in the house since I cannot resist their siren song.
*sigh*