"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."
The Dhimmicrap Circus of Klowns has put forth its A-Team:
(And yeh, as known to any literate person, the 20th Century KKK was a Democrat organization and populated by such notables as Senator “KKK,” Robert Carlyle Byrd, so the Koup Klutz Klan has tradition going for it in its lynch mob tactics.)
Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people”:
First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy, many of the engineers and launch technicians and scientists at NASA, even some agricultural scientists and advisors in the former Soviet Union collective farming administration.
Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself. Examples are many of the administrators in the education system, many professors of education, many teachers union officials, much of the NASA headquarters staff, etc.
The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions within the organization.
For the last three years, contacts with the public works department here at Third World County™ Central have been rather. . . pleasant, ever since the new director of public works has come on board. It’s exceedingly pleasant to deal with a member of ANY government bureaucracy who just wants to do what his job description asks of him and actually behave as a public servant. Heck, I’ve seen the guy actually get down and use a shovel himself to help get things done faster. Shocking, I know!
Kicker: he’s available, and pleasant to deal with even on a Sunday, and even via his personal cell phone. (And a good thing, too, because the one remaining sore point–poor funding for public works–means that public works has had to keep patching a water line that should be replaced. False economy, of course, because multiple calls for water leaks on public works’ own supply line have ended up costing more than replacing the line once would have been. That’s not on the public works director. It’s on cirty government and its other, non-infrastructure priorities.)
Note: None of the above addresses the issue of whether any given bureaucracy has a legitimate reason for existence. That’s a whole different critter.
Given all the anti-Russia yammer in the Hivemind and elsewhere, I’ve enjoyed sitting back (admittedly behind a decent VPN) and using Yandex for more and more things “Interwebby.” Save for a Gmail account that I use less and less, Google, THE single most evil internet gang, is completely blocked on my computers. Yeh, I know Google says its tracking of me and suchlike is turned off, and what it reports as having on me is the next thing to zero (Google’s lying, of course), but thanks to a decent VPN and other measures (TOR!), much of what Google has on me is ancient history, and much of the rest is. . . not exactly accurate. It’s a pleasure to not have seen a Google ad for years, now, for example.
Yandex is a Russian-based, multi-national company and “is the 5th largest search engine worldwide after Google, Baidu, Bing, and Yahoo!.” (Wikipedia) I quite often use its search capabilities to good effect, and the email service it offers is slowly replacing Gmail in my daily use. Slowly. Perhaps because of my VPN use, and a few other things, ads and other obvious intrusions from Yandex just haven’t appeared on my horizon, and I have yet to discover any blatant politicizing of search results, as seemed so common with Google.
And, by avoiding Google as much as possible, I lend as little support as possible to such as this:
BANNED BY GOOGLE FOR OPPOSING INFANTICIDE
As I said in the post title, it is my considered opinion, supportable by evidence such as that which is noted at the linked article above, that Google is evil. Period. IMO, not even Me$$y$oft, Apple, and FarceBook combined approach Google’s evil. Avoid Google “services.” The (as yet) unborn will bless you, if nothing else.
The Puffington Host touts the bill referenced in the linked article as “The Most Dangerous Bill You’ve Never Heard Of.” Dangerous to whom? Certainly not to citizens who are concerned about the tsunami of “feddle gummint” encroachment on their rights. Hmmm, must be dangerous to statists and other anacho-tyrannists. . .
This bill is barely a start on reversing the illegitimate encroachment on God-given rights that darned near the whole apparatus of the “feddle gummint bureaucrappy” has become.
Everyone is familiar (by “everyone” I mean, of course, everyone except the historically and culturally illiterate 80% of our current society *sigh*) with the Jefferson comment,
“The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots & tyrants. It is its natural manure.”
May we now add the tears of soi-dissant “liberals” to the nurture of liberty? Oh, and how about the tears of CACAs (members of the Cult of Anthropogenic Climate Alarmism), as well?
“Don’t Leave Your Kids Near Judgmental Strangers” highlights once again the evils of “No Child Alone–EVER!” societal/judicial constructs.
Frankly, I think parents who are unjustly harassed by nosy parker buttinskis should go on the offensive and sue ’em (defamation? Something like that), demanding p-sych evaluations, background checks, and more. Put the (steel-toed, spike-soled) shoe on the other foot. . . and give ’em a really swift, hard kick in the “fundamentals” with it.
Repeatedly. Until, they go away and stay away.
FarceBook is. . . interesting, but primarily in the “that’s an interesting train wreck” way. I find myself drawn back to watch and even react to the various inanities, stupidities, and rare–more and more extremely rare–status updates that have any usefulness (apart from just observing “The Weird”). Heck, I’m not even all that interested in my “family” FarceBook account, since the only family I’m really interested in staying up with are my wife, kids and Mother, and I have face-to-face (or in Mother’s case, phone-to-phone) contacts for that.
But. . . “The Weird” draws me back.
And then it repulses me again.
The Stupid is also very powerful on FarceBook, and its practitioners are immune to mocking (Dunning-Kruger and a “safe places” mentality). Besides, mocking self-made morons–not born that way; self-enstupiated–isn’t really good for me in the long run. It feels soooooo good, but is sooooo wrong. . . or is it? Is NOT mocking self-made morons, just ignoring their obstinate stupidities, just enabling their destructive behavior?
I dunno, and more and more I care less and less about them.
But they are fascinating. Ah! I think I have it now! FarceBook is a 21st Century freak show! Small doses may be interesting, even amusing, but a steady diet of fake interactions with family, stupid “posts” and comments by self-made morons, so-called “memes,” and suchlike is just not productive.
Methinks a weekly check-in to see how things are going in the nuthouse might be OK, but a steady diet of the Freak Show would rot my brain.
So, fifth time in six years that “city” *cough* workers *cough* are “repairing” the water line to the house. Yeh, the guy in the hole didn’t like me sticking around to see that he was just putting a patch over the hole in their line. Replace the faulty line? Heck no! That would take work. *sigh*
But at least it keeps them busy going back and re-doing their crappy work.
One of the principles of Type II “Bureaucraps” is to NEVER actually solve a problem, because that doesn’t let them request more funding, more personnel (at the end of the “job” there were five “workers” busyworking the job. Oh, it never needed more than one to do the “work” and another to lean on a shovel and issue directions (which, when it came to the so-so use of the backhoe/FEL at least gave the guy five minutes out of two hours of legitimacy, but it needed five to eat up some time on some time cards), more “turf” to claim as their own.
And their supervisor, of course, set it all up the way it was run, from excess workers using equipment oin a manner assured to take the most possible time with the equipment used, to shoddy repair. All designed to eat up resources in the most inefficient manner possible and assure ANOTHER leak down the road.
1.) The book blurb for a self-pub contains orthographic and grammar errors as egregious as this, first sentence of a blurb did,
“A global flu pandemic has wiped out ninety nine [sic] percent of the worlds [sic] population.”
The first page of the book includes, among other offenses, “He staggered back, unable to breath.”
You might well, with signs like this, think, “Hmmm, Cupcake, if you haven’t bothered to learn basic English, why should you expect to have English speakers/readers buy your book?”
Oh, and if “Cupcake” thinks so highly of his own subliterate capabilities (and is so dismissive of his readers) as to eschew paying a competent line editor to mend his execrable grasp of grammar and vocabulary, well, that’s another strike against him and his “literary” non-efforts.
(And yeh, the butchery of English continued in that case, until I finally exited the snippet and sought some mind-cleansing in better-written text.)
Note: there is a lot of non-fiction written nowadays that is just as bad as in the fiction referred to above. Damn democratic influences in the arts! *heh*
N.B.: I frankly DGARA about foreign affairs, except where developments might have a local effect because of “feddle gummint” stupidities or deliberately malicious intent (toward citizens) in policies. So, by “current scene” you can expect me to comment on what was once quaintly known as “the home front,” for the most part.
Today’s topic: Censorship, “feddle gummint” skulduggery, Sharyl Atkkisson, First Amendment, Fourth Amendment, and a possibly appropriate citizens’ response.
By now, anyone with at least one firing neuron who’s not been living under a rock knows that our dear “gummint” placed spying software on Sharyl Atkkisson’s computers. Anyone in denial about the runaway skulduggery in effect in nearly every agency of the “feddle gummint” is either delusional or a part of (or expects to benefit from) the underhanded, nefarious, unscrupulous behavior that seems to now be the norm for “feddle gummint bureaucraps.” Heck, even the WaPo is “viewing with alarm” the appallingly stupid, criminal “feddle gummint” spying on a journalist.
If the feds can do it to her, they can do it to you. “Evidence” of “computer crimes” on ANYONE’S computers is now subject to The Sharyl Atkkisson Caveat: if the feds can plant things on her computer, who’s to say they didn’t plant stuff anywhere else they wanted to?
From now on, any claims by the “feddle gummint” to have found “evidence”–of ANYTHING–on a citizen’s computer should be loudly and raucously mocked.
Citizen response? So far, just the usual “view with alarm” stuff like the WaPo article. Sound and fury, etc. What would be appropriate, I think would be for a “vigilance committee” of patriotic hacker citizens to engage in a “Manhatten Project”-style effort to crack open every government computer system possible and flood the net with everything they want to hide from us. Snowden? He should be so far back he wouldn’t even be visible in the rear view mirror. Of course, it could happen that _some_ secrets could be minimally detrimental to national security, but I seriously doubt there are many such. Most “national security” secrets are more than likely just bureaucratic turf building/protecting.
Sadly, I do not have the skills necessary to make a contribution to the effort, and nor do I any longer have an audience/readership to influence toward that effort, since my work to remake this blog into nothing more than exercise space for “the voices in my head” has borne fruit. *heh*
In further mind-boggling abuses of rights supposedly protected under the First Amendment, while a student who is a Sikh has rightly received a pass on carrying a knife (“ceremonial dagger”) in pubschool, for religious reasons, Christian students who carry or read their Bibles, share their faith with other students or who are seen or heard praying or even just expressing opinions informed by their faith are continually oppressed. (Sure, schools pretty regularly lose in lawsuits over this, but the push against Christians practicing their religion in a pubschool setting is regularly, improperly, assaulted).
And cognitive dissonance never sets in with the left, because. . . it requires cognition? *sigh*