An empty suit speaks to an empty room: Joe Biden at NAACP the other day.
Consider the DMV (and Some People Think It’s a Good Idea to Have Government Manage Health Care?)
Sarah Hoyt posted yesterday about her experiences with “gummint bureaucrappy” (my neologism applied to her descriptive narrative on bureaucracy), and that prodded one of my two active brain cells to simulate something like life.
Her youngest son had to trek (with Mom, for reasons Hoyt skewers) to the DMV for his license.
“…which will then be mailed to him, in a week or two…”
Good Sharkey, Colonel God! That’s worse than I’ve experienced from any DMV in 40+ years’ experience driving! Most recently, it took me 15 minutes and I walked out with my new license. BUT, it did chap my gizzard that for the VERY FIRST TIME IN MY LIFE, thistime, although I have a 40+ years’ easily-trackable record with four states’ DMVs (20 years in this state alone), THIS time I had to have my birth certificate to “prove” I am me. (WTF? How does my birth certificate prove that I am me, unless the whorls on my baby footprints were to be matched up with my adult footprints?) The funny thing? (No, not “funny ha-ha” but “funny gag-gag”.) My birth certificate was temporarily unavailable (long story), so I sent off for a duplicate (yes, a photostatic duplicate that was as exact a duplicate as can be produced, as comparison with my original later demonstrated). To obtain it I had to include a scanned copy of… my current driver’s license.
So, my (then) current driver’s license was all I needed to obtain a duplicate birth certificate… which was needed to renew that driver’s license.
Complete, absolute and total paper-shuffling B.S.
I draw from this sort of thing–and from Hoyt’s post, to which you can surely add your own examples–an extended lesson:
Governments cannot run without some form of bureaucracy, but since bureaucracies are subject to both Parkinson’s Law and Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy, perhaps that’s an argument for anarchy. *heh* The bureacrappic anarcho-tyranny that is now strangling our economy, castrating our liberty and aiding in stultifying society is certainly the most potent argument against surrendering health care to the “tender mercies” of yet more “gummint bureaucraps”.
Just sayin’
I am So Behind the Times
Thank God!
Flipboard is apparently THE “killer app” in some demographics for iPad, iPhone and Android phones. Here’s what the app has to say for itself (OK, via developers’ plug):
Flipboard brings together world news and social news in a beautiful magazine.
Flipboard’s award-winning experience lets people see everything in one place. By bringing together the world’s stories and life’s great moments, you can stay up to date with the things that matter most. Flip through the news from your Twitter timeline as well as from outlets like the BBC, USA Today and The Verge. See everything from posts and photos shared by friends on Facebook and Instagram to videos from Stephen Colbert and pop culture nuggets from Rolling Stone. Find inspiration for your travel, style and life from places like National Geographic, Oprah and Cool Hunting.
It’s the one thing to simplify your daily life. Bring Flipboard on the train during your morning commute, catch up over coffee or on vacation, use it as a tool at work or simply to wind down your night.
Talk about damning itself in the eyes of anyone with more than two active brain cells. Absolutely nothing listed above is worth aggregating into an electronic magazine experience, unless one’s goal in life is to make oneself stupid(er). If auto-lobotomy is one’s goal, then the “benefits” of Flipboard are manifold. If one instead wants to preserve a few brain cells for actual thought, then it would seem that avoiding the things touted above would be a Very Good Thing. (OK, with highly filtered and limited use, Facebook and National Geographic could be less brain damaging than the other things listed, but FB is filled with crap and NG has been degraded to barely better than just another Mass MEdia Podpeople Hivemind propaganda organ. *sigh*)
Thanks, Flipboard, but I’ll pass. Aging brains need to be stimulated with information that’s not toxic cotton candy in order to preserve mental capacities as much as possible.
I Really Need to Get Off My Lazy Butt…
…and check into configuring the Amazon Cloud Player differently, but I figure I can Get Around to That Real Soon Now (or maybe defer it until after the next Procrastinators Anonymous meeting… although I think that’s been postponed again. ;-)). Still, since it randomly selected one of my fav Beethoven symphonies (OK, they’re all favs, but this one is one of the “fav-er-er” ones *heh*), I guess it’s OK for now anyway.
MSOffice Spellcheck: Terminally Stupid
Try as I might, I canNOT train MSOffice’s spellcheck in the differences between “affect” and “effect”. Dumbass subliterate M$ programmers seem to refuse to allow “effect” to be used as a verb. Of course, most people can’t discern between the two words, but one might think that fixing a spellchecker’s mistakes would be allowable for a user to effect.
(Yet another reason why I generally prefer OpenOffice/LibreOffice, although I have come to prefer and migrate back to Outlook 2010 from the “open[er/ish]” Thunderbird mail client.)
Ya Think?
Oh, Well…
Since the materials list to re-roof our home come in at roughly half what I had feared (that’s the danger of physically going to the manufacturer’s plant and personally getting a bid for materials *heh*), it looks like the roofing project is on for this summer.
Oh, well. At least I get to buy some cool tools and equipment to make the job go faster/safer. ILIWAPCT, don’t you?
Looks like it’s time to start rounding up the crew… 😉
Eric Holder Needs a Dope Slap* from the Folks Who Run Comic-Con
*It’s IMPORTANT to stamp out vote fraud, Mr. Fraudulent Attorney General, so listen to this Comic-Con advice and let States do their job:
“…avoid awkward moments by having proof that you are the guy whose name is on the badge.”
Get the Department of INjustice OUT of enforcing Vote Fraud and into aiding the enforcement of legitimate polls!
*sigh* This Is What Happens When People Interfere with Evolution
If it weren’t for people interfering with evolution, tomorrow could be a Much Better Day with many, many thousands of people who ought to be living in “Assisted Computing Facilities” (“Here, dearie, let me make that mouse click FOR you… “) having locked themselves out of Internet access via their own stupidity. But no, the dumbasses HAD to warn ’em… *grumble, grumble, gripe, complain*
Internet blackout looms for thousands: What you need to know
Dumbasses! Just think of the bandwidth NOT freed up because of warnings like this!
Running Lat(er)
*heh* So “Spring Cleaning” got out of hand and has run on into “Summer Cleanup” with bags of clothes and unused furniture making their way to charity and boxes of “stuff” still being sorted with discoveries of tools, electronic equipment, as-yet unread books and scads of other stuff floating to the surface out of storage areas to be sorted into Keep-Give Away-Toss piles. Oh, and meanwhile tons of lil (and some not so little) landscaping/yard jobs that’ve been *cough* “deferred” for some time resulting in more summer sun than I’ve seen for a few years… and bunches of home made charcoal, etc.
But it’s kinda fun to turn up lil gems like this from time-to-time:
Beats the socks off the other labeling measures we’ve been taking. The thing’s been packed away for more than a decade, unused–never used! (Ordered it just before a major “event” in our lives and just never got around to using it. *shrugs* Casio is still selling the thing and has even updated the software for 64-bit Windows.)
What with all the “lost” tools I now have to integrate with some tools gleaned from a barter deal earlier this summer, the garage cleanup is also looking more and more urgent. *heh*
Need to get all this sorted out before things cool down enough to put on a new roof and paint the siding, though. Now those lil chores should be loads of fun!