Category: Current Events

Posted on

Fired Up

Being a gadget freak, I’m always eager to hear about the latest whiz-bang computing devices. Alas, I’m only limited by the power of money. If only the kids didn’t like living in a house and eating food so much…and those braces? Meh.

C’mon boys, wouldn’t you rather Dad got an iPad?

And if a frog had wings it wouldn’t bust its ass hopping. $700 is a lot of money to play Fruit Ninja. But I can dream, right?

So let’s narrow this down a bit: being a budget-conscious gadget freak, I’m always eager to hear about the latest whiz-bang devices from Amazon. Which means today I’m a very happy boy.

Checking off the latest techie goodness from the Left Coast:

Front-lit Kindle touch? Tick.

Cheaper Kindle Fire with more memory and battery life? Tick-tick.

Kindle Fire HDs with 16GB memory and screen resolution comparable to iPad’s Retina? Tick-tick-tick…

But wait, there’s more! The HDs come in 7″ and 9″ models, priced at $199 and $299 respectively. BOOM!

There’s also a higher-capacity Fire HD with 4G LTE wireless, at a price point that gives Apple the Big Middle Finger.

Lots more from Wired’s live blog of the Amazon event, just follow the link above. There’s also a quick write-up at Gizmodo.

After singing the praises of indie publishing through Kindle Direct, Jeff Bezos also announced a new product from the KDP service: Kindle Serials. For one price, you can buy a serial novel and automatically receive each new chapter as it’s published. As a bonus, you get to interact with the author during the writing process.

I like the sound of this, as the next book I have in mind after the Perigee sequel would be big. As in spanning-generations big. I’d figured on it being a three-volume work but a serial version might be just the ticket.

Finally, it appears that Kindle Singles are now being priced at $1.99. Not sure yet how that might affect the $0.99 price as a promotional tool, but my first guess is that we won’t see many more novels priced that low.

Posted on

The Eagle Has Wings

Neil Armstrong has passed away. He’d not been well, having recently undergone heart surgery.

He was, of course, pretty much at the top of my list of boyhood heroes. And he was certainly the most reclusive of the Apollo veterans, famously avoiding the media spotlight. It’s been speculated that his quiet, taciturn personality was a big reason he landed on the short list of potential first moonwalkers. Continue reading “The Eagle Has Wings”

Posted on

Paging Dr. Strangelove

On the heels of the Hiroshima anniversary, Business Insider posts a couple of stories about nukes, missiles, and defenses against such. Both are scary in their own way.

How a bullying general and internet porno cost the Army control of the Missile Defense Agency; a study in leadership failure. Hint: stars on your shoulder still doesn’t give you the right to act like an ass. Unless your name is George S. Patton. Which it ain’t.

Here’s the really scary one, and a good example of why we need missile defense no matter what the Iranians or NoKs do: how close we came to a nuclear exchange with the Russians…in 1995.

I guess we’ll never really be able to stop worrying and love the bomb.

Posted on

The Amerikan Way

If you’ve never read Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism, you should consider doing so. Its controversy-inspiring title was itself inspired by an unlikely source. Remarking on the likelihood of tyranny coming to America, George Carlin said, “it will not be in brown and black shirts. It will not be with jackboots. It will be Nike sneakers and smiley shirts. Smiley-smiley.”

True, dat.

Lest you think I’m trying on tin-foil hats again, consider the case of Buckyballs, which is an adult desk toy made of magnetic balls. And while you’re at it, quit laughing at the juxtaposition of “adult”, “toys”, and “balls” in the same sentence. I’m trying to be serious here. Really. Quit it. Continue reading “The Amerikan Way”

Posted on

Curiouser and Curiouser

Ho-lee crap. NASA actually pulled it off. Curiosity, a rover that’s roughly the size of a Mini Cooper, is now safely on Mars and ready to cruise.

This was a real feat – if , like most normal people, you haven’t been paying attention (as opposed to abbie-normal space geeks like me), this wasn’t your average Mars landing. Which proves we’re living in the future: namely, that “average Mars landing” is not a downright laughable turn of phrase.

Anyways, this one was lowered by a hovering rocket-powered robotic sky crane like something from The Terminator. Guess the bubble-wrap air bag technique wasn’t going to work this time.

I’ll post more later, for now here’s some linkage to sites with a lot more information than I have time to gather.

Oh, and did I mention it also has a rocket-blasting laser? Cool points are off the scale.

UPDATE: An overhead shot of Curiosity under parachute, from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. I don’t think you can even measure the cool points anymore…

Posted on

The Opression of the Tolerant

Yeah, I’m kind of late to the Chik-Fil-A party but it’s been a busy couple of weeks. Being a good Southern boy, they’ve always been first and foremost in my mind whenever the term “chicken sammich” is uttered. My heart leaped with joy when they (and Waffle House) started opening franchises up here in the blighted cultural wasteland that is Ohio.*

Having established that foundational truth, I’m ashamed of myself for not participating in Wednesday’s grand nationwide customer love-in. Couldn’t get away from work for the time it would’ve taken just to sit in the drive-through. Thursday was a different story, but it turns out they were just as crowded! Apparently everyone who couldn’t make it the day before (like moi) was there to make up for it.

Well, good for them. Because you all know what this is really about, right (besides yummy sammiches)? Continue reading “The Opression of the Tolerant”

Posted on

Indefensible? Not Necessarily…

I’ve not seen the new Batman movie yet, and have to admit I’m in no big rush anymore. Even my boys aren’t in as big of a yank as they used to be, though being young boys, they’re certain to feel differently soon enough. Doesn’t make sense if you really think about it anyway – I’d say the chance of a similar event happening anytime soon is approaching zero.

Nevertheless, here are some tips on how to protect yourself from an Aurora-type mass shooting attack, from former SEAL Brandon Webb.

I’m certainly not prepared to debate this man’s advice despite my previous statement, namely that “the best defense against a gun is another gun.” Continue reading “Indefensible? Not Necessarily…”

Posted on

Not Again

So now you can’t even go to the movies without fear of some psychopath shooting up the place. I can’t begin to imagine the horror, or what the families are going through right now. One of the victims was a six-year-old.

Regardless of the wisdom of taking a young kid to a midnight movie, many wise fathers have told their sons, “nothing good happens after midnight”. There is so much to grieve and/or get pissed off over that it’s hard to know where to start. So let’s just start ticking ’em off as they bubble up through the old frontal lobes…

Like too many businesses, the theater had a strict “no weapons” policy. Which, in this case, worked out entirely as expected assuming one tries to understand the criminal mind. To wit: if someone enters a public place with the intent of doing mass murder, do you really think a sissy little “no weapons” sign is going to stop him? If this doesn’t illustrate the absurdity of such thinking, I don’t know what will.

But then again, who am I kidding? The usual hand-wringing pantywaists are already jumping on the gun control bandwagon. I’m looking at you, Piers Morgan. Please explain how the UK’s draconian anti-gun laws have demonstrably affected violent crime in your home country. Hint: it hasn’t been for the better. Unless you’re a bad guy, that is.

When or how does this “dangerous spiral” stop? When we get over our collective cultural fear of self-defense, that’s when.

Last year I did a couple months’ worth of Krav Maga training, which is an Israeli army martial-art form that looks an awful lot like MMA. Some of the things we learned were how to fight your way out of a flash mob, and how to disable an armed assailant. Neither are situations I’d want to find myself in.

But you know what that showed me? That the best defense against a gun is another gun. It’s an ugly fact, but so is mass murder.

Lest you think I’m just another knuckle-dragging 2nd Amendment nut, here’s an illustration of that principle in action from earlier this week. And while clearly justified, it’s also a cautionary tale of the responsibility gun carriers have to be alert and to control their adrenaline in any way possible.

Finally, we can always count on the one-party media to fall all over themselves as they attempt to link another mass shooting to the Tea Party. Because, you know, there can’t be that many people named “James Holmes” living in the Denver area – right?

Whoops. Looks like they pulled another Loughner boner. Sarah Palin, call your office…

So I guess we are to believe the vaunted ABC News operation was tripped up by “social media”? More like they threw away any sense of restraint in favor of taking the opportunity to smear conservatives. Again. It’s like they’re just waiting for the chance or something. What’s even worse is knowing that’s how they really look at us; that it’s inconceivable anyone could fundamentally disagree with their worldview and not be crazy.

What’s crazy is when they keep doing the same thing while expecting a different result. That kind of sloppy, agenda-driven “reporting” has blown up in their faces every single time – so why they expected this to go any better is beyond me.

Which brings us to the not-yet-final punchline to this horrible event: the suspect may even be a registered Democrat.

Not that it matters, no more so than the Occupiers who tried to blow up that bridge in Cleveland. Right?

But I’m just a blogger. Don’t take my word for it.

Posted on

The Day After

Surprise! We didn’t get our preferred outcome yesterday, but the sun came up this morning anyway. And I don’t have any more thoughts (intelligent or otherwise) on the Obamacare ruling.

Fortunately, Dr. Krauthammer does. Taking a sober look at the long view, he explains how this was Justice Roberts’ “Nixon to China” moment:

It is clearly the most significant piece of social legislation in decades. Roberts’s concern was that the court do everything it could to avoid being seen, rightly or wrongly, as high-handedly overturning sweeping legislation passed by both houses of Congress and signed by the president.

…

Assign yourself the task of writing the majority opinion. Find the ultimate finesse that manages to uphold the law, but only on the most narrow of grounds — interpreting the individual mandate as merely a tax, something generally within the power of Congress.

Result? The law stands, thus obviating any charge that a partisan court overturned duly passed legislation. And yet at the same time the commerce clause is reined in.

…

Law upheld, Supreme Court’s reputation for neutrality maintained. Commerce clause contained, constitutional principle of enumerated powers reaffirmed.

That’s not how I would have ruled. I think the “mandate is merely a tax” argument is a dodge, and a flimsy one at that. (The “tax” is obviously punitive, regulatory and intended to compel.) Perhaps that’s not how Roberts would have ruled had he been just an associate justice and not the chief.

I’m waffling between feeling this is “just about right” vs. “pretty thin gruel”. But don’t take my word for it – read the whole thing.

20/20 HINDSIGHT UPDATE: Well, my BS meter went clear past “pretty thin gruel” to “CRAP SANDWICH”. This is a stupendously convoluted decision that defies logic, particularly from a Chief Justice who claimed to be a constitutional originalist.

To wit: on the very first day of oral arguments, the court ruled that ACA was specifically not a tax. This was the entire reason the rest of the case was heard, because if it they’d determined it to be a tax, then the case would’ve been booted until at least 2014. This is because one cannot claim damages from a tax until it’s actually been collected.

So from that initial judgment, how does one arrive at the conclusion that ACA is something they’d previously determined it isn’t?

If that were really the case, then shouldn’t the entire decision have been stayed (or whatever the legal  beagles call it) until the full law went into effect?

Such is the pretzel logic of the credentialed elite.

Website Powered by WordPress.com.