Quote of the Day - GOP establishment are idiots edition

This is just about pitch perfect:

The interesting question becomes whether the GOP will, petulantly, scuttle the chances of ejecting BHO rather than fall in behind a potential Palin candidacy. In other words, will the commitment to the traditional, broken, Ruling Class way be stronger in the GOP than the desire to, you know, live up to the party’s ideals?

The fact that this question even forms in the mind is why I’m pleased not to be a registered Republican.

What I find most useful about Sarah Palin's political impact is that it causes people to voluntarily sort themselves into the "Elite Bastards" and "Everybody Else" categories.  If she were to get elected President, this is likely to be her greatest gift to the Republic.

*Sigh*

Reading about the bloggers up in Knoxville for the machine gun shoot reminds me of how I was thinking about going, back a couple months ago.  It's only 3 hours or so from Atlanta.

Never mind that today's my anniversary, or that I've been in Austin.  I'm also surprised at just how achy I am from the 15+ hours in the car coming back.  I guess I'm not 18 any more (or even 40, mores the pity).

But dang, it would have been fun.

Carrie Underwood - Just A Dream

One death is a tragedy; a million deaths are a statistic.

- Stalin

Joe Stalin was a cold SOB, but he knew something of human nature.  We simply don't do well with the notion of shared sacrifice.  And so, Memorial Day becomes something very different from the original and solemn Decoration Day, with its mass trips to the cemetery.  It becomes a day of grilling burgers and steaks, opening the swimming pool, and occasionally thinking of those who didn't make it home.

But it's abstract.  As Stalin would say, it's a statistic.

For some, it's personal.  It's their son, husband, daughter, wife that didn't make it home.  Instead of a statistic, it's a brutal tragedy, a grief that may never end.  While Joe Stalin wouldn't care, he would understand.

We should understand, too, and care.  Fortunately, country music has a song for that.  Carrie Underwood is blessed with the voice of the century, which is what won American Idol for her.  She uses that voice, along with an outstanding video production to entirely capture the personal for Memorial Day.  Not "the guys who didn't make it back", but dreams turned to dust.

That's what those men and women - and their families - gave up, in their hundreds of thousands.  Inside the statistics lie a million shattered hopes.  Remember them this weekend.



Just A Dream (Songwriters: Gordie Sampson, Steve McEwan, Hillary Lindsey)

It was two weeks after the day she turned 18
all dressed in white, going to the church that night
She had his box of letters in the passenger seat,
six pence in her shoe
something borrowed something blue
and when the church doors opened up wide she put her veil down trying to hide the tears oh
she just couldn’t believe it
she heard the trumpets from the military band and the flowers fell out of her hands

Baby, why'd you leave me, why'd you have to go
I was counting on forever, now I'll never know
I cant even breathe
It's like I'm, looking from a distance, standing in the background
Everybody's saying, he's not coming home now,
This can't be happening to me
This is just a dream

The preacher man said let us bow our heads and pray
lord please lift his soul and heal this hurt
then the congregation all stood up and sang the saddest song that she ever heard
then they handed her a folded up flag and
she held on to all she had left of him oh and what could’ve been
and then guns rang one last shot and it felt like a bullet in her heart

Baby, why'd you leave me, why'd you have to go
I was counting on forever, now I'll never know
I can't even breathe
It's like I'm, looking from a distance, standing in the background
Everybody's saying, he's not coming home now,
This can't be happening to me
This is just a dream

Oh,Oh Baby, why'd you leave me, why'd you have to go
I was counting on forever, now I'll never know
Ohh i'll never know
It's like I'm, looking from a distance, standing in the background
Everybody's saying, he's not coming home now,
This can't be happening to me
This is just a dream

Oh this is just a dream
just a dream

Not statistics, but people.  Filled with hope for the future and love for their families.

The memories of the blissful moments I have spent with you come creeping over me, and I feel most gratified to God and to you that I have enjoyed them so long. And hard it is for me to give them up and burn to ashes the hopes of future years, when God willing, we might still have lived and loved together and seen our sons grow up to honorable manhood around us. I have, I know, but few and small claims upon Divine Providence, but something whispers to me—perhaps it is the wafted prayer of my little Edgar—that I shall return to my loved ones unharmed. If I do not, my dear Sarah, never forget how much I love you, and when my last breath escapes me on the battlefield, it will whisper your name.

- Sullivan Belleau's last letter home before his death at Bull Run

Remember them.

Why did America invent the First Person Shooter video game?

Interesting discussion of cultural influences in the development of video game tropes.



Via #2 Son.

Stand by for incomming transmission ...

... from Borepatch High Command.  Mike Golch emails to point out an outstanding VFW program to collect signatures for thank you cards for hospitalized veterans.  They're trying to collect 50,000 signatures by midnight (tonight) so they can deliver the cards this weekend.

Yes, they'll have you on their email list, but you can always get your email reader to chuck it in the spam can.  This strikes me as a great program to send a well deserved thank you to a bunch of folks who don't hear that very often.

Royal Society: those beastly Deniers are asking for us to show our work

Quick, break out the smelling salts:

Freedom of information laws are being misused to harass scientists and should be re-examined by the government, according to the president of the Royal Society.

Nobel laureate Sir Paul Nurse told the Guardian that some climate scientists were being targeted by organised campaigns of requests for data and other research materials, aimed at intimidating them and slowing down research. He said the behaviour was turning freedom of information laws into a way to intimidate some scientists.

Those brutes!  I mean, who would have the effrontery of asking a Scientist for his data?  Especially in Climate Science, where it is well known to all Right Thinking People® that the data is classified Top Secret.  Need to know and all that.  But it gets worse:

Myles Allen, a climate scientist at the University of Oxford, said he has been involved in many long-running exchanges with people making freedom of information requests for his data. "In the case that went on the longest, I answered all the guy's questions. I spent half a day writing a long email explaining the answers to all his questions, but it wasn't really that which he was after: he was after some procedural questions about IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change]. He wanted some evidence that an IPCC statement had been changed – it wasn't about science at all; it was about procedure."

The bounders.  I mean, who would ever suspect that the IPCC reports would be filled with lousy science and used for political ends.  Really, it's more than a Scientist can bear.

It's all here, including references to the whitewash investigations of the "Hide the decline" crew that called no skeptical witnesses, and put the obligatory "of course, we should all strive for more transparency" blather in paragraph sixteen.  Somehow, it never gets to the point that if the scientists didn't hide their data, they wouldn't have to answer FOI requests from people looking for their data.  The article hilariously stumbles across this, but seems not to notice:

Bob Ward of the Grantham Research Institute at the London School of Economics said the intention of many of those making freedom of information requests was to trawl through scientists' work with the intention of trying to find problems and errors.

Gee, ya think?  Or do these "scientists" not have to worry about pesky little trivialities like getting things right?  Criminey, and Nobel Laureate Sir Paul Nurse wonders why the public doesn't trust the scientific establishment or the press any more?  I guess you don't need to be all that smart to win a Nobel, then.

It's drivel of a quite shockingly low caliber.  Sir Paul, I'd like a higher caliber drivel, please.

"I thought you had to be in better shape to be a police officer."

I don't think that I have the guts to try this ...

Via Theo Spark.

Overheard in the Borepatchmobile

#1 Son and I are driving from Austin back to Atlanta today.  In Louisiana, we see a Fedex truck pulled over by two police cars.

#1 Son: He must have been hauling something bad.  Something illegal in Louisiana but legal in the other states.

Me: English Common Law?

#1 Son: Maybe he had an open beer.

Me: That's got to be the fastest way to get fired as a.FedEx driver.  The express lane to fired.

#1 Son: Of course, you can always spend an extra $15 for overnight fired.

The snark is strong in that one.

Posted via Blogaway from my Android phone


UPDATE 26 May 2011 23:26: Safely home inside the Camp Borepatch security perimeter.  Man, that's a long drive from Austin.  Traffic was fine the entire way until the Atlanta Perimeter.  Not at all secure, that Perimeter.  Just sayin'.

Fixed the weird HTML codes, which is a story for tomorrow.  If my posts are late, it's because I'm asleep.

Attention Borepatch readers

The tornado in Joplin, MO has been a disaster.  Midwest Chick has a post that's worth your while.

So that's where Osama really is

LOL.

Texas Republicans: Big Hat, No Cattle

Well, now, look at this:

As the anti-TSA-groping bill was debated on the Senate floor today, Sen. Dan Patrick (R-Houston) learned he no longer had the 21 votes necessary to pass the bill.

He thought he had 30.

The reason for the drop in support, Patrick said, was Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst's intervention -- "peeling off the votes," he called it. However, a spokesman for Dewhurst denied that was the case.

...

Capitol reporters are tweeting that Patrick says HB 1937 is dead, and the Lt. Gov. has no intention of picking it back up.

Janet Napolitano rolled the Texas Senate Republicans.  There's no way that she'd follow through with her threat - basically to shut down Dallas/Ft. Worth airport and paralyze air travel during a fragile recovery during the run up to an election.  Not even Janet Napolitano is that dumb.

So who got bought off, and what was their price?  Man, the Republicans sure aren't making it easy to vote for them.  Coke party, Pepsi party.

Mitt Romney sucks, volume MXCII

The People's Soviet* of Massachusetts may have silenced TJIC, and those are quite some boots to fill.  Indeed, it would take a fool to even attempt it.  OK, then, here goes.

Via the Silicon Graybeard, we find a family facing $90,000 in fines from the Fed.Gov.  It seems that if they don't pay up, they're on the hook for $4 Million in additional fines.

Woah.  What sort of nefarious activity have they been up to?  What antisocial activity makes them such a threat to the Republic that they're staring down the barrel** of Four Large?

Selling rabbits:

I shouldn't joke about this.  Facing a $4 Million dollar fine for selling a few (dozen) bunnies is not funny and could completely ruin this family.  It's not funny.  It's just that it's at least a little better than executing them on the spot, as the police state did with Jose Guerena in Arizona the other day or Erik Scott in the Las Vegas Costco last summer, or (you can insert a list here).

I guess this is the time for me to pro-actively get my TJIC on and say that Catholic Just War Doctrine does not (yet) justify the assassination of Fed.Gov Jack-Booted Thugs® breaking doors down and shooting someone thirty times because they had the wrong house, or thought someone was selling unlicensed rabbits, or something.

Instead, let me offer this up: GOP, you suck and I hate you.  It seems that this particular statute was passed in 1989, in the flush of the Reagan Renaissance™, when Conservatives™ Walked The Earth and Small Government™ was signed into law by George Bush major.  Glad we had the GOP to keep government small and off our backs.  Otherwise, we might have a rabbit infestation, or something.

Oh, and Mitt Romney?  You're the reincarnation of George H. W. Bush.  You suck, too.

As TJIC used to say, before the Massachusetts Super Cranial Beings*** got their panties in a wad, rope.  Some men just need hangin'.

And note to any overly sensitive would-be Philosopher King swooning over my "violent rhetoric", I have two words for you: Bill Ayers.  And then you could go look up Will Rogers: There ought to be one day that was Open Season on Senators.  Good Lord, the Founding Fathers would have wept.  And then they would have been the first to toss the rope over the lamp posts.

And so I say to everyone once again, the problem isn't the Democrats, and the solution isn't the Republicans.  The problem is a permanent Political Class who has contempt for you and me.  Vote them out.

All of them.  And Mitt Romney, I'll take this all back and apologize handsomely if you:

1. Say that your first act as President will be to apologize to and pardon Mr. and Mrs. Dollarhit,
2. Say that your second act as President will be to fire the entire FDA Department responsible for this atrocity to American Freedom,
3. Say that your third act as President will be to fire the U.S. Prosecutor who filed the case, and
4. Say that your fourth act as President will be to issue a R-gram**** to the entire Federal workforce saying "Cut the Crap"

Yeah, I didn't think so.  Rope.

* Yeah, yeah, I'm told that Massachusetts doesn't have a proper Soviet.  Great.  They have an improper Soviet.

** It's a fine backed up by police with guns.  Guns with barrels.  Duh.

*** You, know, these guys:

**** Look it up, Romney.

Cradle

This is the world's most famous garage:

It's where Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard started a company.  You might have heard of it, but it was tough for the wives when they started:

Hewlett and Packard, however, did much of the production work on the Model 200A oscillator at their garage and in their house.

When we started making the audio oscillators, we bought the cabinets but made the panels ourselves. We sawed them out of aluminum and drilled the holes. Then we'd spray-paint them at home and use the kitchen oven to bake the paint.

Lucile was said to have remarked that her roasts "never tasted the same" after they had baked the paint in the oven.

Hard work, and doing basically everything themselves.  But smart, and different, and a focus on quality made the difference - and World War II gave them their chance.

Brains and luck, and you might end up with a market capitalization of $6 Billion or so.  Better than I can do, quite frankly, even on my good days.

From and old email from Dad.  He kept me in blog fodder, although I didn't post quite a bit.  Looking back through my old email folders, I'm glad I started saving his messages.  He's still keeping me in blog fodder.

I guess I'll go through all his recommendations some day, and have to do my own posts.  Man, I'll hate that.

Something strange happened today

I was going through the iPhone, transferring everything off of His Steveness' Domain into the shiny new Android phone when I ran across something that made me stop short.

It was a voice mail from Dad.

Months ago, he called to see how I was doing.  Fighting the cancer that ultimately took him, he was calling to cheer me up.

I'll keep that.

TheOnesDay® humor

It was a freezing cold night in Washington, D.C., despite (or because of) the foot of new fallen Global Warming on the White House lawn.  Even with extra blankets and quilts, it was freezing cold as Michelle slipped into bed.

"My God, it's cold," she said.  Barack put down his New York Times and replied, "In bed, honey, you can call me 'Barack'."

This week's edition of TheOnesDay® mockery has been brought to you by Saul Alinsky.  Remember the Rules For Radicals, folks.  Mockery - it's what's for Breakfast.

Encouragement

Old friend Scotaku hasn't been blogging much lately, and is looking for some encouragement.  Unlike your dilettante host, Scott is an actual writer (you know, books, and everything).  He has some of his stuff posted.

If you haven't been there before, you should stop by.

Remember the High School loser?

Seems the TSA needs a few good men.

Testing ...

This is a test using the Blogaway Android app.

I have to say that the iPhone interface is a little more polished than Android.  But the utter failure of the iPhone to preserve my app functionality across IOS upgrade offsets lots of polish.

Posted via Blogaway from my Android phone

Finding the unexpected

What makes it unexpected is that we don't expect it:

The Asheville, North Carolina restaurant was one of those common to our post-post-modern world. Open and airy with a wall of windows framing hanging plants. Casual to the point of paper napkins. Sporting a list of local beers and -- surprise -- local wines. Tarted up with the kind of overtly ironic art on the walls where the painter has one statement and one image in his repertoire and repeats it ad nauseam. This time it seemed that the sensibility being trotted out was one of Hieronymous Bosch meets Hello Kitty.

What a fabulous opening.  Of course, long time readers know my opinion of Hello Kitty.  You also know my opinion of folks who want to turn North Carolina into the Massachusetts of Dixie:

This was downtown Asheville in the heart of the freshly gentrified, cosmopolitan zone and instead of pick-ups rattling down the streets, Porsches prowled growling in the night outside the rock-climbing gym. This was an armed cultural hamlet in the New South, guarded by down-home decorating parlors ready to give your custom log-cabin that shabby chic lived-in look; where the sentries were hair salons called "The People" with mirrors in front of each station resembling nothing so much as the guillotines that "The People" of France once used so effectively in solving their aristocracy problem. The difference here was that the new aristocracy of this region was busy admiring themselves in the mirrors of these guillotines with nary a Marat or Robespierre in sight. Instead, downtown Asheville -- or at least some small section at the top of the hills -- was relentlessly promoting our new secular religion of senseless and endless shopping opportunities.

The unexpected comes unexpectedly.  Maybe that is a statement that our imaginations aren't as imaginative as we like to think.  But the unexpected sometimes comes gloriously:

As I got up to leave the family of six at the long table across from me was served with the quick flourish and satisfied air of presentation that is the style of serving these days. The was food steaming in front of them, but none of them made a move towards it. Instead, they talked quietly amongst themselves and seemed to come to a decision. They made their selection from among them. It was to be one of the daughters, a girl of about 17 I guessed. The din in the restaurant rose and fell, but the family of six sat quietly and then bowed their heads as one. Then they said grace.

I stood motionless at my table. I had, I thought, never seen this before in a restaurant. I'd seen it in private homes to be sure, but upon reflection I realized that I'd not seen it there in quite sometime. And I was quite sure this was, for me, a rare event. I'd probably not been paying attention since it no doubt went on all the time, but still it was a startling moment. Perhaps I'd just been too long in Seattle where the only manifestations of spirit are flimsy; where the invocations are raised to a watery Buddhism or bloodless Unitarianism where God is impossibly distant if at all extant. Be that as it may, this simple act of saying grace did not so much shock me as still me. I paused to listen in. And the daughter did not disappoint.

Her's was no gestural grace -- "Bless this food. Amen. Let's eat." -- but an extended meditation on the good fortune to find oneself among family and before a rich selection of food; an acknowledgment of an unusual level of being blessed by God, and a calling down of God's grace on members of the family present and not present, and ending with a wish that God continue to bless the family, the community, the state and the country. Then, and only then, was "Amen" spoken and the meal begun.

This is quite a tale, and exceptionally well told.  We are surrounded by the unexpected, and we keep managing to miss it most of the time.  Our lives are marvels, but we're mostly too caught up in the mundane to marvel.  In this, we're no different from past generations; the non-canonical Gospel of Thomas relates Jesus saying The Kingdom of the Father is spread upon the earth and men do not see it.

Marvels, all around us.  Unexpected, they take your breath away.  All you have to do is see it.

Where I blog from

RomeoTangoBravo asks an interesting question: so where do you blog from?

I was out all last evening, so posts are late today.  I was going to blog from here:

But it seems that Apple's iTunes authentication has me sideways.  So not only is there music that I can't listen to anymore, but Blogpress is Tango Uniform - that's why posts are late today.  I can handle the AWOL music, but for me, the Internet is the killer app, and so as of today, the iPhone is only a phone.  All Internet and blogging will be from the Android.

But enough ranting on His Steveness.  The question at hand is where do I blog from, and the answer is everywhere.  Literally.

Most is done on the laptop, wherever I happen to be sprawled at the moment.  For example, here's Crash the WonderCat letting me know that I post too often.

Living room, Camp Borepatch.  In the background you see a door to the screened porch, where I do a fair amount, too.  Back in Massachusetts at Chez Borepatch, I also liked to post from the screened porch there.

But as I said, the comforts of home aren't available when you're not at home.  The obligatory airline blogging is described here, highway blogging here and here.

And so, the world is my oyster blog.  And that's why I'm shifting entirely over to Android except for 19th Century voice comms.  Killer apps aren't so killer when availability goes to zero.