Month: November 2011

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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*

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Was It Good for You, Too?

Supposedly felt in Arkansas, Kansas and Missouri, as well as in OK, where it occurred, yeh, well, I slept through the thing. What can I say? It was almost 11:00 at night, and I’d gotten to bed at a reasonable time, tired from “Chores Saturday”–mostly working on deck maintenance.

So, here in America’s Third World County, a wee tad off the beaten path in the SWMO Ozarks, what may well be the largest earthquake in the State of my birth went unnoticed by me.

Can’t really say I missed it all that much. *heh* Still, I know folks who live in the area, so I’ll probably get an earful as time goes on.

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I Just Hate This Kind of Stuff

Got an email from a politician. OK, I don’t mind that so much, since I solicit comments from politicians. What I disliked so intensely was the subject line:

Can I send you my book?

*feh* This is a politician who will not get my support. Of course someone on this pol’s staff actually wrote the email and that stupid subject line, but the pol’s responsible for the stupidity of “its” (my fav “gender neutral” pronoun *heh*) staff.

My answer, should the pol or its stupid staff care to read my reply email is, “Of course you CAN send me your book. You already have my contact information. You don’t NEED to ask if you CAN send it, dumbass. But since you ask such a stupid question, I’ll answer the question you ought to have asked instead. You MAY NOT send me your book, and if you do I’ll burn the thing rather than read something written by (or for) such a dumbass.”

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Stupidity Cubed

I’ve not said a lot about the recent Herman Cain flap–and nothing here, as far as I can recall. A couple of observations, though:

Every (and I do very specifically mean EVERY) case of workplace “sexual harassment” that I have been personally aware of, and near enough to know the players, has been bogus. Not just questionable: B-O-G-U-S. I’m not saying that sexual harassment in the workplace does not take place, just that I have no personal knowledge of ANY legitimate sexual harassment charges made based on workplace (or even remotely work related) behaviors. My own take, based on the cases I know personally, is that in each case, the women involved deserved and needed a whipping for having made their slanderous accusations, but in at least one case (and maybe another) some sort of “settlement” was made to make them go away. Very away.

That sort of shakedown really offends me.

And then there’s this comment in an ABC “story”:

Cain has already denounced the two previous allegations of sexual harassment against him as false, and suggested at least one of the women was a poor worker. But an ABC News investigation found that both women are highly respected professionals who have gone on to successful careers in and around government.

I hate to break it to the idiots who wrote that, but “Cain… suggested at least one of the women was a poor worker,” and “both women are highly respected professionals who have gone on to successful careers in and around government” does not form any basis for contradiction. Success in a “government career” isn’t necessarily based on being a good worker. Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy hints at part of the reason for this:

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.

As far as I’m concerned, since the women have “gone on to successful careers in and around government” anything they have to say now is worth less than a bucket of warm spit.

And then there’s the “substance” (such as it is) of the accusations I read. Cain made NON-SEXUAL “inappropriate gestures”? WTF is that, and how does something like that constitute sexual harassment in the mind of anyone but a seriously disturbed person who’s just itchin’ for a fight?

Still, I’m willing to suspend judgment–on the unnamed accusers (and the one woman whose lawyer has spoken). As Professor Jacobson says,

Let’s sum up the “facts” as they are known right now. Mostly unnamed people accused Herman Cain of unspecified conduct which some people who will not specify the people or the conduct have deemed “inappropriate.” And one of the unnamed people received a piddly $35,000 severance package almost 15 years ago for unspecified conduct which included conduct unrelated to Cain.

Now that they’ve got themselves a noose made of a bunch of hooie, the Mass MEdia Podpeople Hivemind looks like all it’s waiting for is a bit of gasoline to get on with the lynching and cross burning…

Update: Yep. I’m right. The media’s giving plenty of time and “ink” to someone claiming to be a lawyer of one of the women who was an accuser. “She’s not going to affirmatively make any public statements or public appearances about the case, everything will be through me,” the guy is quoted as saying. Sorry bubba and whiny baby claimed as client. Faceless accusers are worthless in my book. Worse than worthless. Using intermediaries to make proxy attacks while remaining in the shadows doesn’t even rise to the level of Tawana Brawley hoax “legitimacy” in my eyes.

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