"In a democracy (‘rule by mob’), those who refuse to learn from history will be the majority and will dictate that everyone else suffer for their ignorance."
Signs of stagflation: sooner or later a cuppa coffee…
Well, that is what The 0! and his minions, cheerleaders and fellow travelers in the nomenklaturasee here as well are after, isn’t it: The complete devaluation of the currency and the destruction of the economy on the road to enslaving the populace?
[N.B. This should be the last of this kind of post between now and the 25th.]
Saw this at “etsy” (off a reference from Lovely Daughter’s blog, A Dash of Nutmeg),
It attracted my eye because of a lil schtick I pull from time to time: shopping in a store, set something down (perhaps in a cart or basket or even at the checkout), point at it and glare sternly saying, “Stay!” It almost invariably gets a decent reaction from whatever audience I have.
“Tis a small thing but my own.
As crass commercialism and political correctness collide to create “The Contemporary (Generic) Holiday Season” once again this year, may I–once again–offer a modest proposal not to just defend a traditional “Merry Christmas” greeting but to stop and consider the season?
The Gift
Trees and lights and bells and carols,
Bright-wrapped packages piled high.
Winter’s sharp blow joins the heralds:
“Christmastime is nigh.”Mailmen hurry; shoppers scurry;
Time is fleeing–Oh! so fast.
Parties gather, loud and merry,
Grander than in Christmas’ past.Pause a moment to remember
That a Savior’s simple birth
Still stirs angel wings in susur’–
“Peace to men; goodwill on earth.”Now the Father’s hands that molded
The first Adam in the clay,
Gently ’round a manger folded,
Cradle a Baby in the hay.So, the Greatest Gift extended–
Gift of love and peace to all;
God’s great love to man descended
Calls us to a stable stall.Tiny Babe, Eternal Son;
First step to Calv’ry, vict’ry won.©1990-1991 David W Needham
Nice enough, but I want to hook it up into home automation hardware/software. Heck, I want to hook it up into some robotics… send a robot on down to the PO to pick up my mail, to the grocery to buy some munchies, to the kitchen to cook up dinner (and then serve it), to a client’s to work on some hardware. Now, that’d really let me sit n veg out, lard on the fat, whatever.
This isn’t nearly to that point yet–not even within an order of magnitude “near”–but it is cool enough for what it can do. Hmmm, with voice recognition software integrated, it could enable a lot more “hands free” computing. Too bad it’s just for gaming at this point, since I have just about zero interest in that.
I’ve grown to appreciate the new Win7 toolbar enough that when I have Windows “on top”. Aside: Linux Mint runs in a VM, now, so I no longer have to dual boot with Ubuntu, save in those rare instances when I attach an old peripheral and need hardware compatibility. Eh? Linux for hardware compatibility?!? Yes, like today when I discovered I’d misfiled the power supply to our nice scanner and had to plug in an “old” Canoscan LIDE 20. Apparently, Canon isn’t all that interested in making an older, $50 (retail, if you can even find it retail anymore) scanner compatible w/Win7. Yeh, Canon offers a driver it says works, but Canon lies. *heh* Anywho–Ubuntu is much better at having drivers for some older hardware, I’ve found, than Win7.
But back on point. Clean desktop.
Yes, I edited my location out of the weather widget. Anyone with two active brain cells can locate me, if they’ve read here long, but no sense giving trolls an easier time of it.
The point is simply that, since the Win7 toolbar is more useful than in previous iterations, and the “Start Orb” includes some very nice ease of use functionality, although I do have a bunch of icons on my desktop, I can hide ’em and not really miss out on getting things rolling whenever I need to.
Very nice.
Ubuntu (and Mint and most other Linux distros, as well as desktop BSD distros) includes other kinds of usability tweaks and features that allow me to keep clean a desktop when I run it, too–just differently.
No clutter. Quite a contrast to my RW desktop. *heh*
That’s from “In Enemy Hands” by David Weber. And no, that’s not the novel I referred to in an earlier post this week. (What?!? There are folks who read fewer than 6-10 books/week? ;-))
Sad that the micro-excerpt quoted as this post’s title really is true. Sad because principle ought to be completely predictable but is not because so many people compromise what they falsely call their “principles”. So, what that really means is that when someone takes a “principled stand” there’s a very good chance (about 99% in politics, I’d say) that person is lying through their teeth about their “principles” and is merely acting as though some high ethic were driving his ambition.
One will not often go far wrong when estimating the venality of politicians as overriding any “principled” stand–unless one were to rightly divine a politician’s prime motivator, his principles, as being grounded in ONLY “What’s in it for me.”
And that is the reason so many in Congress want to keep the electorate fat, dumb and thus happy. Of course, as so many are being required to tighten their belts because, of the stupid, venal and corrupt practices of our beloved congresscritters *spit*, “fat” and “happy” don’t seem to be long for the world with a growing number of citizens. “Dumb” is another problem. *sigh* Have to really work on that one with one-on-one and in mass education efforts to combat the Mass MEdia Podpeople Hivemind, the long-term results of “prisons for kids” (A.K.A. “public schools”), in the lies that “fat, dumb and happy” citizens wannabe self-enstupiated serfs have swallowed so eagerly for so long.
But congresscritters working like turks to erradicate “fat” and “happy” could very well–hopefully–lead to the Number One Deadly Weapon Known to Man being pulled on our beloved congresscritters: surprise. At the polls, of course. Let’s concentrate on keeping the nomenklatura in Congress “fat, dumb and happy”… until the hammer falls.
That doesn’t mean not raising a stink at their refusals to keep their oaths to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic…” and to ” …bear true faith and allegiance to the same”. No, but it’d be a Good Thing if organizing at the local level to get informed patriots (and efforts to fully inform folks about just how blatantly our congresscritters are, urm, “spitting” on the Constitution MUST be an integral part of organizing locally) to the polls next November caught them with their pants around their ankles, so they could get a return shafting (with a rusty hammer, as it were) for the shafting they’ve been given us as a nice lil surprise.
Surprise! Surprise!
Little things, good:
Letting the second fermentation of the hard apple cider go an extra five days: good. Very good, as it turns out. Now for some bottle conditioning… Used some “unconditioned” raw product in some hot “mulled” (OK, microwaved) cider w/cinnamon. Nice. ‘Tis a small thing, but my own. 🙂 Nice lil kick, too. Only 8oz, so not too much on top of my “one or two beers/day” rule (that was one 16oz beer today).
Little things, bad:
Re-reading a book by a fav novelist and being gigged once again by his unusual vocabulary lapse in this book (very weirdly, strangely and uncharacteristically–wrongly–using “temporal” to stand in place of “sacred”–very, very strange vocab lapse in an author who’s usually very accurate in word usage.. Not just once, but three times, so far in this book. Petty of me, I know, but it almost ruins the story. Almost. [Edit: *argh!* I just ran across another weird word use, a malapropism that the author should KNOW is wrong, and if not the author, any number of proof readers or an editor: “Here, here” for “Hear, hear.” *sigh* Sure, on the vast subliterate web, “Here, here” out polls the correct “Hear, hear” but NO author with as firm a grounding in history and as large a vocabulary as this one should EVER make such an egregious error of usage.]
Little things, good:
Called up my ins agent today. I’d cleaned out my glove box and had “cleaned out” the current ins verification form I’m required to keep there (bad). Didn’t really want to call him and have him fax me another one. Faxes are just… so 20th century–and poor quality reproductions of documents at that. And his agency had never “been able” to scan (a much higher resolution image) and email me a copy before. Have a fax machine; I just hate the thing for faxing. But, surprise! surprise! I got him (not another agent working under him or a secretary or his office manager) on the first ring and… he’s muuuuch more tech savvy than the folks he has had working for him in the past. Simply made a pdf and emailed it to me. A Good Thing.
So, one bad little thing, two good little things today. Not bad.
In order to make your very best first impression, practice your suicide bombing at home first, preferably with all your friends and family present to “critique” your efforts.
You’re welcome.