...after openly and brazenly taking sides, [the press seems] completely mystified why they're now hated by half of America. I'll never forget the Mitt Romney press conference where he asked a pretentious, monologuing J-school 'tard who he was and why was he making a speech, and the sanctimonious blowhard said "I represent the people," like he was part of some fourth branch of government. And then Mitt, bless his heart, immediately fired back, "No, *I* represent the people. *You* represent corporate media interests." Which is exactly right.The press does not represent anyone. The only mention that the press gets in the Constitution is in the First Amendment; nowhere in the body of the original document does it say so much as one bloody word about the press having any function within the government whatsoever.
So, click past the fold and what do you see? Some moron who doesn't understand math: "according to studies, 4 percent of Americans are LGBT. that's 2 out of 5 people." SIC, I say.
No, senor-or-senorita-or-WTF-ever-you-are, four percent is two out of fifty people. So you yourself can go fuck yourself because I don't give a rat's ass what you consider "realistic" when basic mathematics is so obviously beyond your grasp.
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AND of course it's a DEMOCRAT. Democrat in Texas wants to make beehive removal needlessly expensive. The bill requires a shitton of training and certification, and licensing (of course) but fails to explain why this is necessary.
Look: people don't just up and decide, "You know what? I think I'll go into beehive removal. That'll be a nice profitable business!" At least, not without knowing something about bees, because--well, shit, you know why, and I know why, but apparently some people require an explanation.
Bees have stingers. And a hive contains hundreds if not thousands of bees. If you make a mistake while handling them, you will get stung. A lot.
Which will hurt.
...most people can't stand to be around one bee let alone an entire hive's worth. I've seen grown men flinch and run from a single bee hovering over a flower they're standing next to. It's like, "Dude, it's not just going to up and decide to sting you because you're standing there." Okay? Bees have landed on me, and I've looked at them and blew them off...and they go away. That is the reality of bees, which is why we can keep them and harvest their honey. It takes some knowledge and skill to handle a hive, but most people are aware of that. Hence the "OH DICK IT'S A BEE RUN" reaction that even some grown men have towards the things.
Aside: in that vein we have this from Brickmuppet:And the average person isn't going to randomly call people in the Yellow Pages until he finds someone willing to handle his bee problem. "Hello, Homer Smith? I've got a big beehive I need removed; can you help? Oh, you're a plumber. Have a nice day." *dials* "Hello, Hubert Smith...?" How did he get to the "S" section ofthe phone book without finding someone who will come and take his bees away? Clearly Texas needs to regulate this!
"Oh. My. God. There's a wasp!" when the wasp is 75 feet away on the ceiling in a warehouse where no one can reach it is not "unsafe conditions".
Furthermore it does not authorize you to evacuate the building.
*rolleyes*
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Disclaimer: Wasps do not produce honey.
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Don't blame the pilots for what is clearly a problem with the airplane.
"The thrust was full bore the whole way," said Roger Cox, a former accident investigator at the National Transportation Safety Board, who flew earlier models of the 737 while working as an airline pilot. "That is extremely curious."No it isn't. The one thing you do when you are desperately trying to gain altitude is firewall the throttles because engine power is altitude.
If you want to climb, no matter how big or small the aircraft, the first thing you do is add power. If you are losing altitude, you do not reduce throttle, ever, because the energy needed to lift the aircraft is not going to magically appear from nowhere.
There is absolutely nothing unreasonable about full thrust when you're trying to climb in an emergency. That's the first thing any competent pilot will do: "Oh, shit, I need to climb and I'm not climbing, shove that throttle all the way forward," will be his absolute first instinct.
The 737MAX is a bad design: when climbing, too much engine power will cause the nose to come up even more, leading to a stall if uncorrected. That's a positive feedback loop, and that kind of performance does not belong when it comes to commercial aircraft. To fix it, Boeing slapped on a ludicrously inadequate band-aid. Do not blame pilots for the shortcomings of a badly designed aircraft.
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SLS will not get us back to the Moon before 2030. It can't. It's a NASA project, and they haven't been able to do anything quickly since 1970. SLS is too expensive, too ponderous, too hidebound, and it's already obsolete to boot. I mean, how much of it is reusable?
Which is not to say that disposable rockets are entirely passe but their niche is dwindling. A rocket you can make cheaply doesn't need to be reusable.
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The current GPS epoch is ending tomorrow. The current one started August 21, 1999.
I have no idea what effect this will have on existing GPS devices. Hopefully most of the ones in service will not suddenly try to take you to Abu Dhabi when you're just trying to find Aunt Tillie's new house. Yeah, or suddenly every route takes you to Area 51 and the aliens get you. No thanks.
Seriously--most GPS units will probably account for this, particularly if they've been manufactured in the last several years. For others it ought to just require a software update to fix, if anything actually needs fixing.
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Socialists don't understand that "THIS MEANS YOU, TOO" when it comes to everything about it.
It is safe to say that San Francisco is the home of the nation's wokest progressives. In 2016, just 9,000 people who live there voted for President Donald Trump, so finding someone right of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) is about as rare as discovering a sidewalk free from fecal matter. It is also ground zero for NIMBYism, also known as "not in my back yard."Of course they aren't. They support all the right causes and mouth the right platitudes; that exempts them from further responsibility for the issues and they don't want those people being homeless near them.
Last month, Mayor London Breed approved a 24-hour, 225-bed waterfront homeless center in a 2.3-acre empty parking lot in an upscale neighborhood south of the Bay Bridge. The Navigation Center would allow the homeless to bring their lovers and pets so staff could connect these individuals with local resources and services. The affluent are not pleased.
Leftists insist that only renewable energy is good, but the last thing they want is to have windmills by their homes. Even as they campaign for open borders they'll turn right around and campaign to keep the necessary immigration processing facilities out of their sight. They want the government to raise taxes on the rich because the government doesn't have enough money, but they won't voluntarily pay more taxes than they owe, and they'll hire an army of accountants and lawyers to see to it that their tax liability is as low as possible.
Because hypocrisy is an essential component of being a leftist or progressive or liberal or whatever it is they're calling themselves these days. It changes as people get wise to their horseshit.
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The Chicago Hate Crime Hoaxster is being sued by the Chicago Police Department. Good.
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Europeans who are critical of the US' car culture don't get how frigging big the US is. One commentor sums it up:
You’d be surprised at how many times I am asked by a European, who feels very qualified to criticize American domestic politics and policies, asks me if I drive to New York for the weekend to go to the theater. The look on their face is priceless when I tell them that that drive is like driving from Berlin to Moscow.To be fair, a lot of American elites don't get that, either. Those who have never left the east coast metroplex (and its colonies) don't seem to understand that many Americans live in places where there is no public transportation.
Okay, the guy who lives at a crossroads in the middle of Nowhere, USA, is not going to have the option of taking a bus or a cab to the store that's fifty miles away. If he doesn't have a car, how does he get there?
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Last night I dug into the pile downstairs a little bit.
Among other things, Mrs. Fungus and I have established a "games shelf" in our linen closet. This is where we store all our board games. So last night I put my copy of Orcs at the Gates in there; and then I found my oldest games. Star Wars: Escape From the Death Star, The Six Million Dollar Man, and Breaker 19: The CB Trucker's Game, something that came out during the big CB craze of the 1970s. I have no idea why someone thought I'd enjoy that one, but I did actually play it a few times with friends when I was a young 'un.
The funniest thing about the SW game is that it shows the characters on the front. Luke Skywalker. Princess Leia. Han Solo. Chewbacca. Darth Vader. Stormtrooper. R2-D2. See-Threepio.
..."Stormtrooper"? They couldn't have put, I don't know, Grand Moff Tarkin on the thing?
And the way "Stormtrooper" was right in the middle--I just laughed at how silly it was. "Here are all our major characters, and some nobody! Hooray!"
Anyway, their boxes needed a little bit of taping--surprisingly little, considering their age--but when I went to put them away it was 2:30 AM and they're too long to fit in the space in the linen closet, so I put them on the kitchen counter. I'll do some rearranging and cram them into the closet later, after work tonight.
The SW game has an asking price of $25 on Ebay. Not bad. The "Six Million Dollar Man" game runs about $20. The CB game, maybe $15. So, no hidden treasures or anything.
What amazes me the most is that they're complete. Generally, when you give kids board games, the pieces get lost and everything gets messed up. These games are complete, have all their pieces, and when I opened them I found them to be neatly packed away. Considering that I last played them some forty years ago that's kind of impressive, really.
The Six Million Dollar Man box was in the worst shape. That's mainly because that box is where I kept my girlie magazines, when I was a teeager.
But! I did all this while working on another computer from the pile. It, too, was my father-in-law's; this was his desktop. I spent an hour trying to de-crud-ify it, to get rid of all the antivirus and antimalware nonsense he had on it. Cleared this, cleared that--finally gave up and just ran an OS reset on the thing. At 2:30-ish it finished, restarted, and...BSOD: some problem with the boot drive. I gave up for the night.
The computer could use more RAM, but it's overall not a bad unit. With a dedicated video card and more memory I think this thing could be a great gaming box. But what I will be doing with it is to use it as my "monk's cell" computer, so more memory and a dedicated video card are superfluous.
Next paycheck I'm going to order some spare SATA cables from Amazon. I don't have any spares at all; to get the optical drive working in that computer I had to borrow one from El_Hazard, which has its own set of problems. (Such as the power supply fan not working.) I'd like to have half a dozen on hand, just in case; they shouldn't cost much and won't take up much room.
This weekend I plan to do a little more work on the bathroom--a little more is all it really needs--and change the oil in my wife's car. Otherwise, I am hoping against hope to have a calm and relaxing weekend where I don't need to do very much. We'll see how we do, though.