Author: David

Over-educated Curmudgeon, Bit-Bucket Tuner and Budding Brewmeister.
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“…but most of it is dreck”

Eric Schmidt: Every 2 Days We Create As Much Information As We Did Up To 2003

Of course, to Schmidt, “information” is just bits ‘n’ bytes of data crunched by Google. But still, our society is awash in information. Most of it, IMO, is misinformation, disinformation and just plain uninteresting or completely trivial.

Take Twitter. Please. The “information” channel for twits*.

Far too many people “know” things that are simply untrue, fallacious, destructive and harmful. They’ve heard these things from “friends” (though few seem to know what a friend is) and acquaintances, seen these things on TV, heard them on the radio or, in rare cases, read them in newspapers or more likely on Farcebook, Twitter or blogs… written by other subliterate, ill-informed, misinformed, DISinformed, or simply self-lobotomized sheeple, dumbasses and liars.

How to sift the wheat from the chaff, separate the meat from the sizzle, refine the gold from the crap?

First, by attempting to become really literate. Seriously. No, not able to laboriously puzzle out those funny squiggles and put words to them or even to (mostly) understand some of those words’ primary meanings, as known to today’s subliterate culture. No, a literate person–or even one who’s made serious efforts to become literate–just automatically performs historical-critical analysis of what he reads and has multiple primary or other relatively reliable sources and resources to draw on in understanding a text.

Start with any of the “100 must-read books” lists that abound. Sure, they’ll all contain multiple instances of propaganda masquerading as history or historical novels like “The Grapes of Wrath” or many of the ancient historians like Thucydides or darned near all modern historians (though the classical histories are less arrogant and sneering than the modern propaganda papers), but they are at least well-written, for the most part, and as close to primary documents for their respective ages as can be found.

BTW, look askance at any “must read” list that doesn’t include The Bible and ALL of Shakespeare’s works. Lists that don’t include those two things are likely to be wanting throughout. In fact, I’d suggest reading the King James Version until you understand the language there at least as well as you understand contemporary English. It will serve you well both in reading many of the classics and in grasping the many, many cultural memes still expressed with biblical expressions.

Add to those lists some books and other resources that are often missing, such as The American State Papers (including The Organic Law of the United States), Ortega’s “Revolt of the Masses” and the modern “classic”, The Founders’ Constitution, and you’d have a good strong base of reasoning ability and knowledge from which to become more literate and able to at least evaluate the masses of infrmation flowing from various media nowadays.

Just sayin’.

*1twit noun \?twit\

Definition of TWIT…

2: a silly annoying person: fool

Continue reading ““…but most of it is dreck””

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Earthy Common Sense…

…bowdlerized, is actually sometimes more accurate. Smitty, at The Other McCain, opines in a recent post,

Jerry Sandusky Is To Joe Paterno As. . .

. . .Eric Holder is to [analogous parallelism: The Zero–ed.]

They told me that if I voted for John McCain, executive accountability would be for the little people. So far, they’ve been proven quite correct, no thanks whatsoever to that craven sack of a Senator from Nevada.

Nice to see someone making a clear, if elliptical, link between “Senator”–especially that one, and by implication, all his ilk–and “shit”.

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Just to Be Clear…

Seen here:

As commented at the site where I saw this, “”Just to be clear, Karen Kraushaar is the one on the left.”

That poor gelding. (If he isn’t, I’m sure she can have her lawyer attempt to make him so.)

If Herman Cain did “hit on” Karen Kraushaar, it’d dim my support for him on the basis of evidence of extreme bad taste alone. I’ve seen pics of his wife, and I just can’t find that to be credible.

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“My client is an intelligent, well-educated woman… “

…who knows how to attempt a shakedown, the lawyer for Cain accuser Karen Kraushaar, should have continued. The Cain event wasn’t her last attempt at a shakedown for special treatment. Will we also discover at a future date it wasn’t her first? Notice that she’s “worked” in “feddle gummint” jobs since she was shuffled off the NRA payroll, where Cain at one time described her as a ‘poor employee”, with a penurious severance package.

Hmmm, even at a “feddle gummint” featherbedding job*, she couldn’t work well with others. Multiple times, she asked to be allowed to work from home, finally filing a complaint including sexual harassment charges when she wasn’t allowed to work from home after a car accident. Sound familiar? She had multiple work-related complaints when she worked at the NRA and limped in accusations against Cain to add some traction to them.

Oh, and what did she want in “compensation” for not being allowed to work from home and having seen an email joke about computers, women and men that we’ve all had a couple of chuckles at? She demanded YOUR tax dollars to pay for “thousands of dollars in payment, a reinstatement of leave she used after the accident earlier in 2002, promotion on the federal pay scale and a one-year fellowship to Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government…”

Oh, that’s all? In this one case, the “feddle gummint” gorilla worked in our favor. She got bupkis, which was actually less than she deserved. IMO, she deserved firing for being such an ass. (I added the “IMO” because she has shown a propensity for filing lawsuits and her layer has, IMO, no moral fiber whatsoever.) Oh, and her one big “contribution” during her sojourn at INS? Participating in the official INS/INjustice Department kidnapping of Elian Gonzalez. Yep, her one great accomplishment in life was to be a part of this:

This whole process is very illuminating, but these women don’t seem to understand just what they are demonstrating.

*featherbedding job? She “worked” an office (“bureaucrappic”) in the ineffectual and bloated INS.

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Again With Theft by “Journalistas”

Look, so-called “journalists” who actually, you know, write or edit or publish stuff for a paycheck get paid, in largepart, to be professional wordsmiths. A plumber who can’t solder a pipe joint–or perform similar essential tasks–or en electrician who can’t properly wire and outlet are stealing when they get paid to do those things improperly. Just so “journalists” who don’t even bother to use the language they’re writing in correctly.

Latest example (of many–this is just the one that was this week’s “last straw”–and so early in the week, too *sigh*)? Obscured for obscure reasons, a caption under a photo:

“‘X’ is skeptical about ‘y’ and let’s it be known… ”

WTF?!? “‘X’ is skeptical about ‘y’ and LET US it be known… “?!?

No, “‘X’ is skeptical about ‘y’ and LETS it be known… ”

It wouldn’t have been so bad except that there were more than a few other examples of stupid grammar and word MIS-usage in the same article.

You see similar idiotic misuses of apostrophes all the time, I’m sure. Similar; not same. Prime example (seen too many times to count in the last few days, which is probably what tipped me over the edge when I saw this very different misuse of an apostrophe):

It’s for its. “It’s” is a contraction of “it is” or “it was” etc. Pronoun-verb. “Its” is the possessive form of “it”–just as “hers” is the possessive form of “her” and “his” of “him” and “ours” of “our”. When someone consistently writes “it’s” when intending to indicate a possessive form of “it” you can count on it that they’re not really literate in English. When that person–say a so-called “journalist–is collecting a paycheck for writing something, that person is a thief. Who can trust “reporting” done by someone who collects a paycheck for not doing his job competently–and is willing to prove it by his writing? Not this guy.

Oh, there are worse excrescences, even apostrophe-based offenses (“‘s” to indicate plurals, for example *shudder* the habit of true idiots), but so many people who GET PAID TO WRITE are the next thing to complete illiterates that it just chaps my gizzard.

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OK, I Barely Felt That One

Sitting here at ~9:45 p.m. or so this evening, just goofing off on my lil Asus P50IJ while my Wonder Woman watched some Hulu something-or-other, I felt a shaking back and forth, in a roughly east-west direction. Turned to her and asked, “Did you feel that?” Nah, of course not. She was watching a show–focused, you know. 🙂

Yeh, 4.7; another OK quake.

It wasn’t anything much here in America’s Third World County. After all, the location noted by the USGS was Prague, OK, some 200 miles away, and it was a magnitude smaller than the one Saturday a.m.. I’ve felt more from a bad taco and more from C-130s doing touch-and-gos not far from our house early in our marriage. LOTS more when artillery barrages were going off. *heh* Was fun living in an Army town.

Still, my first earthquake awake and aware of the event. Had to wait better than six decades for it. Kind of a letdown.

😉

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Double Standards Can Be a Good Thing

Double standards, openly revealed, can demonstrate in many ways the qualities of both the people they are applied to and those applying the standards. Let me let Andrew Klavan explain,

…what if a drunken Republican senator had accidentally dropped a car containing his adultery mate into the water? What if he had sauntered back to his hotel to clean up while the poor woman desperately pounded on the car window until she drowned horribly? Would conservatives have re-elected that man? Would they have declared that man “The Lion of the Senate?” The very idea makes one ill. Conservatives would have demanded his arrest and trial with a single voice.

So the double standard continues with Cain. Not only have the reliably left wing news sites like ABC, CBS, NBC and CNN been acting as if this were the story of the decade, but right wing sites like Fox and our own PJMedia have added fuel to the fire, eagerly tracking down more details. You can be sure that will keep happening as the story proceeds. And if Cain turns out to be guilty, you won’t be hearing any excuses for him here.

And yes, it’s unfair. But there’s a reason it’s unfair—a reason it should be unfair. There’s a reason we right wingers vet our candidates while the left adulates theirs, a reason we condemn our miscreants while the left elevates theirs, a reason our news outlets cover stories that the left covers up.

The reason is: we’re the good guys. We have to do what’s right. The left doesn’t. Sorry, but that’s the way it works. It’s the price you pay for defending what’s true and good, the price of holding yourself to a high moral standard. Our politicians have to be better than their politicians. Our journalists have to be more honest. Even our protesters have to behave with decorum and decency—and still suffer being slandered—while theirs can act like animals and commit acts of violence and lawlessness and spew anti-semitic filth and still find themselves excused and glorified.

Go. Read the whole thing.

And, of course I agree. If Herman Cain actually did engage in sexual harassment of employees (or anyone else, for that matter)–and so far nothing, including the most recent and finally open allegations have elicited any credence from me–then he deserves public condemnation and an end to his political aspirations.

But so far, all I have read have been either anonymous allegations of things that either lack credibility or any basis for claiming sexual harassment (undefined non-sexual gestures that some women took offense to, for example? Get real) and some woman who apparently, from what I’ve read so far, her claim of reasons for not filing a complaint against Cain when the events supposedly occurred is ludicrous, and her hiring of Gloria Allred sinks her late-blooming assertions now completely, as far as I’m concerned. Lie down with dogs, and all that.

But still, if there turns out to be any real meat on these dead men’s bones, I’d be happy to dump Cain in a heartbeat. I’m not holding my breath, though.

Update: Harvey applies the leftards’ standards for them.

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To make a short story long…

I’ve been doing some lil things in our kitchen over the past *mumble-mumble* while. One of them was installing a new light ficture over the sink and finally having a switch for it instead of the 40-something-year-old pull chain that had been there since the house was cheaply urm, inexpensively built in the late sixties/early 70s (different reports from different folks, although I kind of think the builder’s estimation of when he built it is pretty close–late 60s).

It’s a modestly-sized house–a tad over 2,000 square feet, including the finished basement. Almost everything was built within acceptable norms for late 60s construction, and certainly as good as or better than much housing built in America’s Third World County during that era.

But.

The electrical system stinks. When we bought the house, not one single solitary 110 circuit in the house (two outside circuits were grounded–but they’d been added later) was grounded. Not one. As it stands now, individual circuits are now grounded–by “Jackleg Elektrokill”–and one has been pulled from the box (which was built to have/create grounded circuits!) with all new wiring as a properly grounded circuit. I hope to slowly morph the rest of the circuits in the same fashion as time goes on, but it’s a tedious process.

Anyweho, wiring the lighting fixture above the kitchen sink so that a typical light switch was now available meant, of course, wiring in a junction box, and that meant cutting a hole in the (otherwise useless, unused, lost space) soffit above the entire west side of the kitchen so that junction box could also serve as the primary attachment for the lighting fixture. (Long process cut short :-))

So far, so good. Just normal run-of-the-mill carpentry and electrical stuff. Then: junction boxes MUST be accessible for service, so I could NOT just reseat/patch the drywall over the hole. I HAD to build an access hatch.

No problem. Lil cabinet door built to mimic thickness/appearance of existing cabinet doors and matching hardware attached.

All reassembled and looks good. Except. *sigh* To my eye the access hatch appears to be about 1/8″ off level. *profound sigh* Check with level. Nope. It’s level. Check soffit. *arggghhh!*

*heh*

I’ll “fix” it for my eye with the “plastering” of the soffit.

But it’s kind of that way throughout the house. Little things that add… character. Like the central–load-bearing–wall that’s been a hair out of plumb since forever, apparently. It was that way when we moved in 16 years ago and has remained stable, just a tad out of plumb. Not a real problem, since the floor joists/cieling rafters, etc., are all 2″x10″, which is easily sufficient for the spans they have to cover, and provide more than adequate stability… as is witnessed by the unmoved out-of-plumb central load-bearing wall. *heh*

All that’s just prologue.

So, the short story made long, Son&Heir and I were chatting over coffee this a.m., and I noted–in my usualy prolix, rambling, long-winded and excessively wordy fashion, that his mother, my dear Wonder Woman, had selected a new faucet for the kitchen sink that would require a trip “through the swamp” to install.

Oh, yeh, that’s two more things. The only inside shut-offs to plumbing fixtures in the house are those I’ve installed since we bought it. Yep. And I’ve just not done those under the kitchen sink yet, for whatever reasons I could conjure at the time (sheer laziness? *heh*). “The swamp”? That’s the “city’s” fault. Their water line is leaking at their water meter. I was told by the guy who’s now mayor, back when he was in charge of city maintenance, that they really needed to replace the city’s water line in that area but just didn’t have the time right then. Well, they need to replace it now.

I reported the leak four months ago. Two months ago, the city had utility lines marked, as required by law in our State when any excavation is to be done. Of course, the city’s not yet gotten around to actually doing the repair yet, so my front yard’s becoming swampy.

But… given the quality of work I’ve seen from city crews recently, that might not be such a bad thing. My Wonder Woman and I were out for a walk last week and ran across some recent work a city crew’s done on a water line. They excavated down to the line at two water meters and… ran a hose ABOVE GROUND between the two meters.

It’s been freezing most nights recently, so I’m sure that arrangement has worked out Really Well.

Dumbasses.

So, in that context, Son&Heir had this response to the soffit access panel, “You could fix the access hatch by doing this [holds his hand in front of my eyes] \o/ I could work for the city!”

*heh*

Smart alec. 😉