Day: November 7, 2011

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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. 😉

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Death to DST! *heh*

OK, I’m sure some “old Indian” somewhere has said something similar, since I know both my grandfathers uttered similar observations about DST, but it’s a decent graphic presentation of an old, old truth: government is best at screwing things up, or at least at its normative “best”.

(Just CLICK the pic if it doesn’t display correctly in your browser/display resolution)

Study: Daylight saving time a waste of energy

The result of the study showed that electricity use went up in the counties adopting daylight saving time in 2006, costing $8.6 million more in household electricity bills. The conclusion reached by Kotchen and Grant was that while the lighting costs were reduced in the afternoons by daylight saving, the greater heating costs in the mornings, and more use of air-conditioners on hot afternoons more than offset these savings. Kotchen said the results were more “clear and unambiguous” than results in any other paper he had presented.

Anything else we want to leave in the feds’ hands? Charity? The cost of so-called “welfare” as exercised by the feds–excluding the societal costs of having the feds thumb their noses at the Constitution–are well known, both the upfront excesses and the backend societal costs of breeding more irresponsibility and a leisure, entitlement-minded “welfare class”. Meddling in the marketplace? The “compassion industry” in the “feddle gummint bureaucrappy” as specifically empowered by serial Congresses and presidents gave us the housing bubble and mortgage collapse that led directly to our current economic woes. Want more of that? Border security? An oxymoron.

Oh, and one acronym: TSA. Thugs Standing Around has to stand as the most blatant “feddle gummint” exercise of Security Kabuki, Theater of the Absurd that puts Beckett, Camus and Albee in the shade. It’s nothing but a full-employment program for low-brow dumbasses and thugs designed to train those who were once citizens into becoming “good subjects” (that is, docile sheep).

I think DST stands as a good example of the simple fact that the more the feds–congresscritters, executive branch, ALL “feddle gummint bureaucraps” (and even many–few though their raw numbers may be–decent bureaucrats caught up in the monstrous federal bureaucracy) and the federal injudiciary–intrude into citizens’ lives, the worse off we as individuals and the country as a whole become.

Death to DST! *heh*