The right of the citizens to bear arms in defense of themselves and the State …
Getting some nibbles in the job search again. Had to respond to a few people today on that front. Then the drip tray under my grill gave out because it had rusted through. I had my eye on a nice 500 dollar Weber grill, but then the job went away. I’m going to try to rig a makeshift drip tray so I can keep grilling.
Blogging will resume shortly, if I can find something to blog about. I haven’t even looked yet today.
I just saw something flash by me on Twitter about MTV censoring the word bullet in a song. I couldn’t believe it. Seriously, the word bullet? I mean Jersey Shore does more cultural damage to the world than any use of the word bullet.
Anyway, Google is my friend and they directed me to a nice little profile of captured MTV censorship of key words in various songs. Turns out that the word gun is regularly censored from songs.
In fact, even the NY Daily News, hardly a friend to the gun culture, ran a column on the absurdity of this censorship in one recent video:
In this case, they might have been a little fast on the trigger.
Not complaining, mind you, but Rihanna sings about sex and how chains and whips excite her and that’s just fine with the censor gods. Yet Foster the People’s gun references get shot down.
In the middle of the day, the main MTV channel airs commercials for Trojan condoms – during a telecast of “16 and Pregnant,” of course – and that’s okay.
They note the edited version ran at night during content aimed for college students. Because even though MTV will celebrate teen pregnancy during the day when kids are more likely to be in front of the tv, they feel they must protect the delicate ears of adults who are old enough to vote, buy tobacco, drink a beer, and even purchase their own guns from such evil words.
When I was in college, I was a member and pseudo-leader of a group called the DUsers, which was actually the first Mac user group in the country, founded at Drexel University in 1984. There are other groups that will also claim to be the first, but they are blasphemers with no evidence to back up their claim. My friend Jason, who has occasionally co-blogged on here, wrote a Shareware game for the old black and white Macs, and last I heard still had a check from Steve Wozniak somewhere, who apparently thought his game was pretty cool and decided to pay for it. The DUsers were absorbed into another student group a number of years ago, and I don’t know what’s happened to them since. I also don’t know what happened to a lot of our vintage archival material.
Once being a Mac user went from being Geek to Chic, a lot of the old user groups died out, and while the Apple community has gained substantially, it has lost something in becoming the “in” thing. I was part of the community when Apple was getting steamrolled by Microsoft, and being an Mac aficionado was something a bit odd, rather than stylish. It is in that spirit I share this with you. It is classic Steve Jobs. Cordial, and at the same time arrogant, but also speaking the brutal truth:
For those of us who were Mac users during the days of John Scully, Michael Spindler, and Gil Amelio, what could also be charitably referred to as “the dark years,” it’s hard to imagine what Apple will be like, once again, without Steve Jobs at the helm. Does Tim Cook have the minerals? We shall see. Google is a much tougher competitor than Microsoft ever was, and operating systems, at this point, are easily commoditized.
Those of us that have been around the Apple world for a while might remember that before Apple bought NeXT back in 1996, it was also rumored to be flirting with Be Inc, maker of the BeBox, which ran BeOS. Be was lead by Jean-Louis Gassee, who was probably every bit Job’s equal when it came to personality. Gassee was once famously, and humorously quoted as saying:
“For God’s sake, don’t compare us to NeXT. We want to be a better tool for developers, not to be tasteful. We don’t cost $10,000. We have a floppy drive. We do not defecate on developers.”
Of course, Apple ultimately bought NeXT, rather than BeOS, and Steve Jobs proceeded to rearrange the Apple board, and orchestrate his return to the helm. How different of a world it would be today if instead of bringing back Steve Jobs with Apple’s acquisition of NeXT, they had bought Be Inc, and with it Jean-Louis Gassee?
A major paper publishes a story about how homicide rates are not linked to gun control. Did I mention the major paper is Canadian? Once you turn the issue from one where the media and other powers that be say “Well, gun control, of course,” to turning into a legitimate issue of contention, you’ve automatically started to win. Canadian gunnies are obviously a long way off from recovering serious lost ground, but they are moving in the right direction.
Our opponents only survive in “Well, gun control, of course,” political climates. Once you can shine light on the futility, ineffectiveness, and often outright intellectual and factual dishonesty of their positions, you will start pulling in more and more allies.
I have more ideas than I have time to implement, unfortunately. But looking over the latest creation of our sad and pathetic friends at Coalition to Stop Gun Violence Ownership, I’m struck by how easy this Meet the NRA site would be to parody, given how pathetic many of their gotchas are. I was thinking the parody would go something like this, picking Bob Smith as a generic name to act as a stand in for any given Board member:
In 2011, Bob Smith walked into a bar for a drink. Two hours later, well known white supremacist and conspiracy theorist Bill Halfwit came into the same bar, and reportedly sat in the same seat as Mr. Smith. Mr. Smith had left his attaché case under the bar. Halfwit turned the case into the bartender, and it was later returned to Mr. Smith. This demonstrates the links NRA Board Member have with the white supremacist movement. It was also reported the Attaché case was made by a company that employes child labor in China.
Or maybe something like this:
In 2008, an article written by Mr. Bob Smith of the NRA Board appearing in the February 2007 issue of American Rifleman was found at a shooting bench. Three hours before, the Citizen’s Militia of Bungsucker County had been drilling at the range, occupying the majority of shooting benches. Mr. Smith’s ties to right-wing militias are clear.
Finally:
In 1946, NRA Board Member Bob Smith, just getting started in his career as a criminal defense attorney, defended a one Jimmy Billabob on a tax matter. Billabob, in 1956, gave a speech to his County Sewage Improvement Board favoring a policy segregation, declaring “There ain’t pooh from any colored feller that’s fit to mingle with mine!” During Smith’s career as a defense attorney, he associated with a large number of unsavory characters, declaring that “Every man, even racist men, have a right to fair trial,” as he defended every manner of person from murderers to Klan members. Fortunately, Mr. Smith has since retired from defending murderers, rapists, and Klan members, but rumors of involvement with defending right-wing militias still persist.
All of these are based on actual accusations, and the general tone of the site, but exaggerated to a greater level of ridiculousness make the parody. I think this was meant to help CSGV attract more members of the loony left, and probably also give them a way to fill out their day in a way that will help them forget the fact that they are being pummeled into oblivion by a bunch of people they feel are beneath them. I suspect it’s more the latter. For their sake I hope it is, since we discovered the loony left doesn’t seem to be too fond of their agenda.
That seems to be the latest deflection from the Administration. I’m not really all that concerned about whether there were guns being walked during the Bush Administration too. If that’s the case, a pox on the Bush Administration as well. But Bush isn’t in office, Obama is, and Holder decided to let it continue rather than stopping it. Sorry guys, but trying to deflect the blame isn’t going to cut it. You want to go after Gonzalez or Mukasey? Be my guest. But this isn’t a get out of jail free card.
Count this among things I’d never thought I’d see even just 5 years ago: editorial in the Denver Post sticking up for gun rights for medical marijuana users. This issue would take care of itself if Congress passed a medical marijuana law, because then those users would no longer be “unlawful.”
I got the play-by-play on the first non-Steve product release. First part of the presentation was how they had caught up to Android. Jobs never would have done that. Trying to edge other products and play “me-too, only better” was what Apple did during the Gil Amelio days, and it didn’t work out too well for them.
The improvements in the camera are welcome, and I think they are going in the right direction with the speech technology. I don’t really give a crap about being able to speak searches, or have a device take dictation, but being able to set and review appointments via voice, or to get updates on weather and traffic via voice would be a great help.
Apple is very proud of Lion. Initially I didn’t think Lion was too bad, but it’s a horrible release. It’s buggy as hell, and Safari is now full of quirks and bugs, whereas it was one of the cleanest browsers out there.
I will probably get an iPhone 4S, but only because I currently still have a 3G (not even the 3GS) with a screen that has streaks of failed pixels all through it. But I worry Apple is headed back down the road to being “me too, only better” while chasing everyone else instead of really innovating.
Perhaps history will repeat itself a bit here. After Apple release the Macintosh (which was truly innovative in the same way iOS was, in that Apple stole/bought the technology from Xerox/Fingerworks), quickly had the technology stolen by competitors (Microsoft/Google), Steve was booted/left for health reasons, leaving Apple to slowly wither as their competitors killed their market share as Apple lost ground in the gadget race.
Only this time it could be worse. Windows 3.0 was a piss poor knockoff of MacOS. Up until Windows NT 4.0, Microsoft arguably had a product that was inferior on nearly every way, and despite the flaws of MacOS at the time, I still largely preferred it to NT 4.0’s user interface. Android is a stellar implementation of the ideas originally pioneered by Fingerworks, and later bought by Apple. Google is also a lot smarter than Microsoft. Apple is going to have to impress people better than they did yesterday if they want to hold on to their market share, which means the iPhone 5 is going to have to introduce something very new.
UPDATE: Speaking of the early Windows NT reminds me, nothing is really all that new, even in technology. It’s kind of like guns in that regard. Microsoft produced NT by snatching away all the top operating system developers from Digital Equipment Corporation. Because of that, it’s long been believed that Windows NT (now just called Windows) still retains an awful lot of VMS-like constructs, and that its internals are very similar to VMS. MacOS is really just a candied up version of NeXTStep, that was developed by all the same people who were brought in when Apple bought NeXT. And even NeXT was just a mach microkernel with parts of BSD Unix grafted on.
Clayton Cramer shows just how nutty the State of California is becoming, warning about Mountain Lion predation, but the prohibiting all weapons, and suggesting such things as this:
Do all you can to appear larger. Raise your arms. Open your jacket if you are wearing one. Throw stones, branches, or whatever you can reach without crouching or turning your back. Wave your arms slowly and speak firmly in a loud voice. The idea is to convince the mountain lion that you are not prey and that you may be a danger to it.
Fight back if attacked. Hikers have fought back successfully with sticks, caps, jackets, garden tools, and their bare hands. Since a mountain lion usually tries to bite the head or neck, try to remain standing and face the attacking animal.
For those of you unfamiliar with feline taxonomy, Mountain Lions, also known as Cougars, are the largest of the Felinae subfamily, which includes Cheetah’s, Lynxes and domestic cats. Clayton notes:
And best of all: firearms are strictly prohibited in the nature preserve. So, remember, if all else fails, fight the mountain lion in hand-to-hand combat. Look, I have had house cats that made me regret trying to pick them up, and I’m supposed to fight a 150 pound mountain lion unarmed?
I think, unfortunately, there are more than a few kooks in the State of California that would think being preyed upon by a Mountain Lions was just desserts (no pun intended) for a species that rapes the earth as much as we do. As a cat person, I would certainly attempt to avoid killing a cat if I could, but I’d prefer to have the option of a few rounds of .44 Magnum. I think it would prove to be much more effective at convincing Mountain Lions that humans are not to be tangled with than harsh language.