Out of My Mind: 9 August 2016

I’m back for a test ride, to see how much this platform’s improved since I’ve been gone.

 

Our next president

At a rally in Detroit, Donald Trump said “titties” while attempting to say “cities.”

I dunno, says something about Trump.

You know disagrees with Trump? Trump does. Even he thinks he’s full of shit; watch him confess!

Gonna help the little people just like decades of Republican policies haven’t done for decades:

[H]e’s going to be more of a good ol’ Republican: less talk of China and returning jobs to the heartland, more talk of freeing banks from regulation and “strengthening intellectual property protections” and other exciting policies sure to delight the Trumpkin base.

More here. Coincidentally, huge benefits for his family — which means maybe a crumb or two for his supporters. Speaking of which, Trump had to endorse Ryan before he could steal Ryan’s bold, radical economic plan (again, the same old shit).

You know which president paid a ransom to Iran? Ronnie Reagan. And gotta keep repeating the lie that Obama did in order to make people believe it.

50 senior GOP national security officials don’t think Trump’s the man for the job. It’s true, of course, but coming from these guys, one almost starts to have doubts. (Me, I really wonder how awful he would be. Worse than G.W. Bush? Reagan? Nixon?)

Voter Fraud Update: Still doesn’t exist, just the lies and disenfranchisement laws do. Sounds right.

 

 

Elsewhere

When Philando Castile was killed by a Minneapolis cop after a traffic stop, we learned that he had been stopped 46 times before and had been fined for driving without a license.

Castile isn’t the only black man in America to be subjected to multiple stops, nor to multiple fines — including fines and stops for failing to pay fines, resulting in more fines. The Ferguson uprising brought attention on the city’s “debtors prisons”, which were the inevitable result of the city’s reliance on fines levied against poor black families as the means of paying its bills (when you want to incentivize people who can’t afford fines to take desperate measures to pay up, it helps to have inhumane prisons with forced labor and other unconstitutional practices to use as a threat).

It’s not just Ferguson and it’s not just Minneapolis: the blacker a city is, the more fines it levies against its residents, and the fines are disproportionately directed at black residents.

You can only find crime where you look for it: racially profiled traffic stops and stop-and-frisks lead to overpolicing of racialized people. That means that racialized people are assessed more fines. That means that racialized people are more likely to fail to pay their fines. That means racialized people are more likely to be stopped — by profile stops, or by “empirical” tools like automated number plate recorders — for failure to pay fines.

Lather, rinse, repeat: now you’ve got a country where significant numbers of already poor black people end up in the criminal system for seemingly objective reasons like traffic infractions and failure to pay fines.

(Link.) Racism isn’t going away anytime soon, more so under Trump. It’s heritage and, as shown above, state-supported. Too, privatized prisons need their beds filled, and they pay pols to keep them filled. And how else does the state get money out of people who don’t make enough to pay taxes if not with gratuitous fining? Of course, besides being an obscenity, this system is self-defeating (exclusive of the harm of reinforced racism); when the people get too impoverished to pay fines and are jailed which is to unemployed and then unemployable, the meager pool of funds shrinks and shrinks and….

And speaking of cops becoming the pigs we prematurely called them decades ago, there’s Chicago’s finest celebrating a gratuitous shooting.

 

College rape victims have an issue with how colleges treat the cases. What’s wrong with the traditional system of covering up and maybe attacking the victim? I mean, it’s not like we’re living in progressive times or anything.

 

Technology cheerleaders love to talk “leapfrogging,” the idea that developing regions that haven’t adopted traditional technology (like an electrical grid or banking systems) can jump straight to the newest, “better,” thing more quickly. Occasionally, that’s true, like in parts of Africa where empowering mobile phones took off long before most people had landlines. Now the big idea is that drones will negate the need for roads, and save lives in the process.

Link. Leapfrogging’s one thing. But really, drones instead of roads? Like drones obviate the need to get to work? Really?

 

Fox host Andrea Tantaros says that she complained repeatedly about sexual harassment at the hands of the network’s head, Roger Ailes. Tantaros says she was at first demoted then taken off the air entirely after speaking up, though Fox continues to pay her. That complicates the story for Fox executives, who had claimed that the much-publicized lawsuit against Fox by anchor Gretchen Carlson was the first time they had heard of any impropriety on the part of Ailes.

(Link.)

 

Olympic priorities: Identifying medal winners not by their names but by telling you who they’re related to. This might be limited to female athletes. Long version rant here.

 

What I don’t understand: “Smart” thermostats for homes — specially the hackable ones. And 75% of bluetooth locks can be hacked as well. And a billion monitors are vulnerable to firmware attacks.

 

I hate Uber. I just do. Maybe it’s because it’s a bit of a scam, their CEO is a documented asshole, and I think the people who use it instead of calling a local cab service are jerks?

 

Russia. Feudalism followed by decades of Bolshevism do something to an entire people — nothing good. That is all.

 

My Favorite Recent Comic

Avenging Spidey-Man 9. Erotic in the Freudian sense in that it’s just a beautifully life-affirming job. So well done on every single level. Highly recommended. No; I can’t recommend it highly enough. Ditto, actually, Captain Marvel 1. Rumors are right: Full-flesh story. Thought out, fully written, breathtakingly good.

As for the “new” Captain Marvel, there’s this. Great thing about the new costume is that the character still comes completely through, maybe even more so. Just hope they find an appropriate use for the old one. It’s a gorgeous design.

Sweet Fix

So the phone battery starts dying Sunday morning. Only holds charge for five hours or so.

First place I go to can’t quite do anything on the spot, so go to Grand Central Terminal Apple Store Genius Bar.

First, battery is in fact (understandably) dying. Replaced on the spot.

Also recommends restoring of OS. Wipes the phone.

Go home, restore.

But this is where it gets really cool: After OS is reinstalled, restores phone from last automatic wireless back up to Apple server. This is done every day or so when the phone is connected to a charger and is on wifi.

Takes a couple of hours but everything gets reinstalled, including apps’ login info, contact info, mail, diary.

Only exception is music, for which I have iTunes Match, so I download a dozen or two albums and two playlists.

Please. This is the best.

Cage Match! Cablevision vs. Verizon FIOS

Haven’t had 24/7 internet from Cablevison in months.

Then again, this is a company that has abused a monopoly bought by corrupting politicians since the first day of business. A company free to abuse customers because our options are limited.

Today’s fun fact: Customer service doesn’t know that there’s an outage (what we had this morning) until and unless they get a number of complaints from a localized area. In other words, customer service doesn’t and can’t know the status of the system.

So I end up having to drive for a replacement modem because CS couldn’t tell me my modem wasn’t a problem. A tech making a house call later in the day told me that I had been blessed with this morning was the worst one used in the system. He replaced it with what he said was the best.

As if it matters.

The store told me I could register the new modem by phone call to CS. CS said I actually couldn’t do it till service was restored. Which was still hours away.

At least my last payment to Cablevision was my last.

I ordered FIOS.

I am optimistic and hopeful, but only guardedly so.

On the other hand, I’ll be saving so much that Verizon will have to be much worse than Cablevision is to make it a bad decision. And since Cablevision is the worst there is….

As I said, guardedly hopeful.

But happy to be rid of Cablevision. (The TV and phone providers far less so but the former got just too greedy….)

THIS BLOG HAS MOVED

Presently relocated to:

http://bookofdoomed.tumblr.com/

I am, for the moment, jazzed. Tumblr is a little easy for us unfocused sufferers of ADD.

Join me there!

 

Doomed Enough?

The American middle-class: pretty much dead, dead, dead.

So I was wrong. I thought as the hardships trickled up from the poor into the middle class, so would the will to address them. I figured that if altruism weren’t enough, self-interest would spark a spirit of shared sacrifice motivating Americans to focus their government’s power to fill gaps in the private economy. Instead, the only people who gained from the trickle-up theory were the recipients of government bailouts at the very top of the financial hierarchy, which housed those who got us into the mess in the first place. — David K. Shipler

Doomed. For real. An inexcuseable, shameful failure of thge Whores who Rule Us.

See what a superior job in the economy Republican leadership performs.

If this doesn’t say it all, it says close enough to it all….

Lies rule.

Anyone surprised that Nikki Haley’s a complete dishonest, thieveing of garbage wasn’t paying attention — and not much was needed to realize it.

Doomedsday!

I wonder what Eisenhower would make of today’s US, with a military grown from 3.5 million people to 5 million. The western nations face less of a threat to their integrity and security than ever in history, yet their defence industries cry for ever more money and ever more things to do. The cold war strategist, George Kennan, wrote prophetically: “Were the Soviet Union to sink tomorrow under the waters of the ocean, the American military-industrial complex would have to remain, substantially unchanged, until some other adversary could be invented.” — Simon Jenkins/The Guardian (the best paper you don’t reader and a sterling example of a still-great newspaper — over Keller’s and Pinch’s minds, of course).

Doomed:

The result – that one theory has been proved wrong, another proved right, yet the world continues to believe in Theory #1 – is frustrating. It’s also tragic, because that intellectual obstinacy is contributing to the “new normal” of permanently high unemployment. — Krugman.

Doomed:

In the United States, we learn that Barney Frank was responsible for the housing bubble and the financial crisis. Who knew that a member of the minority party in the House, at a time when Republicans not only ruled the House with an iron fist but also controlled the White House, had such power? — Krugman.

Doomed:

[I]f powerful political forces block any effective response to a crisis, there is no effective response to that crisis. — Krugman

Doomed!

Medicare must be destroyed because private insurance — vouchers — is a superior solution because Medicare costs are rising slower than private insurance premiums.

Doomed! The Big Banks want another crash because if they lose enough, they get the government to cover their bad speculative losses — and the Supreme Court is making it easier for them.

Doomed! Because Our Leaders are unprincipled, opportunistic, dishonest assholes.

Doomed! Things just aren’t getting better.

Good news for Bristol Palin: I still won’t think of the publicity whore daughter of a deranged, dangerous, greedy publicity whore as a slut.

The Book of Doomed

Here’s your fair and balanced: Thomas Jefferson, hero of the modern conservatives:

Whenever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government.

If once they [the people] become inattentive to the public affairs, you and I, and Congress, and Assemblies, Judges, and Governors, shall all become wolves.

Enlighten the people generally, and tyranny and oppressions of body and mind will vanish like evil spirits at the dawn of day.

That was then, this is now.

Doomed:

It seems the Gang of 500 has decided that it’s ok to notice that people are unemployed again, although since the solutions from politicians seem to be “cut taxes and spending” and “cut spending but not quite as much” we’re probably not going to get any kind of real discussion of what might actually help those weird foreign creatures known as the unemployed. — Atrios

Doomed! Contra Atrios, the Republicans would be happy fiscally if they just destroy Social Security and Medicare and cut the wealthy’s taxes. All they care about is getting money away from government and into the hands of the speculators (not investors, because the Republicans’ policies hurt investors and small businesses).

Doomed! because none of our leaders care about anyone but the .1%.

Doomed! by retarded partisan assholes whoring for the .1% instead of leading.

Doomed! because this is the level of leadership we accept and empower.

Doomed! — the proof. Only hope that the professor’s prediction is correct, but the electorate are dumb, ignorant and fickle, unable to see the truth in front of their eyes….

Doomed! Just another example of lies setting policy.

Doomed! By historically inept leadership —posturing instead of policy.

Don’t this Say it All Too

Marc Faber in the 13 June 2011 Barron’s: “The world has a dual economy. In the economy of the super-rich, Bentleys and Rolls Royces and Ferraris and Porsches sit in front of fancy hotels. Quantitative easing has had a huge impact on this economy, as the people who own equities and commodities have done very well. Singapore and Hong Kong are boom towns because of quantitative easing. China has been helped dramatically by artificially low interest rates and a recovery in consumption in the U.S. and elsewhere. At the same time, the economy of the workers and lower middle class is doing very badly. Wage increases don’t match cost-of-living increases.”

Don’t this Say it All

Fred Hickey in Barron’s: “I also own government bonds in New Zealand and Canada. They are a play on natural resources, but mostly on better-run governments.”