Quote of the Day – Roger Simon Edition

I don’t have a brief for Snowden. He seems to be a new form of narcissistic international creep, similar to Julian Assange of Wikileaks fame. I hope he gets dysentery in Ecuador or wherever he winds up.

But he may have done us a favor, putting an exclamation point on the activities of the NSA so there are no doubts. He also has made obvious the utter contempt with which Russia and China treat the Obama administration. (Evidently this was surprising to Dianne Feinstein on Face the Nation Sunday. Go figure.)

Also interesting is that the heightened concern for our civil liberties under government digital surveillance crosses political and party lines. Given the plethora of scandals confronting the administration, this presents an opportunity for dialogue we haven’t had for many years. Who knows if it will happen?

But if it does, I hope it will be intelligent and substantive. — What Snowden Knew

Don’t hold your breath waiting for that one, Roger.  What I find most interesting is who has come out in defense of essentially unlimited government snooping.  That crosses political and party lines as well.

114 Days

That’s how long it took for my Arizona CCW permit renewal from the day I mailed it until it came back to me.

Nice to be all legal again.

Still pretty much on hiatus.  Sorry ’bout that.

Falling Down on the Job

First rule of blogging:  Post Something Every Day.

FAIL!
I’ve been busy with work.  Three days in a row in Phoenix, leaving at 0500 and not getting home until well after 1700.  Too burned out to post.

Free ice cream machine is on the blink.  Read the archives or somebody else.  I’ll get back to this thing sooner or later.

UPDATE:

From the comments to this post.  I’ll just leave this here:

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tgbNymZ7vqY?rel=0]

Thanks.  I needed that.

Game of Thrones

Yeah, I’m a fan.  Don’t get HBO, but I caught an episode during the first season when I was on the road.  I’d read the first book in the series several years ago and really enjoyed it, but when I bought the second one I was put off by the “23 characters in search of a plot” storyline.  I didn’t pick up the third.  But having watched one of the shows, I thought it very well done, as a lot of HBO productions are.  It was available on Netflix, so I put it in my queue.  Watched the first disc, then the second, then went to Amazon and bought the whole thing.  My wife and I were hooked.

I pre-ordered Season 2.  Waited the better part of a year for it to ship, and we blew through it the weekend after it arrived.

Season 3 is on pre-order now.

I discovered that I could order the five available books as a set in eBook format, and I had some Barnes & Noble gift cards (and the Nook app on my iPod Touch), so I did.  I just finished reading A Feast for Crows, and I’ve come to a conclusion:

George R.R. Martin is a sadist.

Four thousand or so pages into this, and not one character has had anything good happen to them (at least that didn’t later turn to sh!t).  Major sympathetic characters have been slain horribly.  Major evil characters have been slain horribly.  Major characters have been maimed.  (And there are a LOT of Major Characters.)

And it.  Keeps.  Dragging.  On.  And.  On.  And.  ON.

HBO has done, as far as I can tell, the almost unheard-of:  It has turned the movie version of a book or books into a BETTER product than the text version.  Granted, this is because the live-performance version FORCES the screenwriters to prune viciously and excerpt only those parts that will make good cinema, but in general this editing process destroys the story being told by the book.  Not in this case.

I appreciate the grand, sweeping vision – the breadth of the world that Martin has built and the characters he has filled (FILLED!) it with, but I have the uneasy feeling that at the end of this series (assuming Martin finishes it before he shuffles off this mortal coil) the Others will rule that world, and everyone we’ve come to love and hate will be horribly, horribly dead.

Hodor.

UPDATE:  Joke from the comments – G.R.R. Martin’s Twitter account has been closed.  He killed all 140 characters!

I Don’t Like Your Face, Obama. Either One of Them

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7BmdovYztH8?rel=0]
Not that I expected anything different.  But it’s got to be a shock to those who thought him a “Lightworker.” 

Thanks to Grumpy Old Fart for pointing to this one in a comment.

Let’s add this one, too – also from a comment by QuadGMoto:

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B4-H8tbcQP4?rel=0]

Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!!

As Glenn Reynolds notes, all the scandals are about abuse of power:

(I)s it plausible to believe that a government that would abuse the powers of the IRS to attack political enemies, go after journalists who publish unflattering material or scapegoat a filmmaker in the hopes of providing political cover to an election-season claim that al-Qaeda was finished would have any qualms about misusing the massive power of government-run snooping and Big Data? What we’ve seen here is a pattern of abuse. There’s little reason to think that pattern will change, absent a change of administration — and, quite possibly, not even then. Sooner or later, power granted tends to become power abused. Then there’s the risk that information gathered might leak, of course, as recent events demonstrate.

Most Americans generally think that politicians are untrustworthy. So why trust them with so much power? The evidence to date strongly suggests that they aren’t worthy of it.

Let me repeat the GeekWithA.45’s warning again:

We, who studied the shape and form of the machines of freedom and oppression, have looked around us, and are utterly dumbfounded by what we see.

We see first that the machinery of freedom and Liberty is badly broken. Parts that are supposed to govern and limit each other no longer do so with any reliability.

We examine the creaking and groaning structure, and note that critical timbers have been moved from one place to another, that some parts are entirely missing, and others are no longer recognizable under the wadded layers of spit and duct tape. Other, entirely new subsystems, foreign to the original design, have been added on, bolted at awkward angles.

We know the tools and mechanisms of oppression when we see them. We’ve studied them in depth, and their existence on our shores, in our times, offends us deeply. We can see the stirrings of malevolence, and we take stock of the damage they’ve caused over so much time.

Others pass by without a second look, with no alarm or hue and cry, as if they are blind, as if they don’t understand what they see before their very eyes. We want to shake them, to grasp their heads and turn their faces, shouting, “LOOK! Do you see what this thing is? Do you see how it might be put to use? Do you know what can happen if this thing becomes fully assembled and activated?”

But the President advises, “Don’t listen to those voices.”

And here’s Bill Whittle’s voice on the subject from last year:

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VgrktRgjBXk?rel=0]

Your Moment of Zen

Arizona photographer Mike Olbinski has an interesting website.  In addition to doing wedding photos and such, Mike’s also a storm chaser.  I stumbled across him because someone posted a link to a time-lapse series of a supercell over Booker Texas he shot.  For YMoZ, here’s a picture I call “Smite.”

Smite photo smite.jpg
(click for full size)
He describes it as “Lightning over Casa Grande, Arizona.”  He doesn’t just do weather shots, though.  (THAT was a close second for YMoZ!)

If you live in Arizona and you’re looking for a professional photographer, you might want to contact him.  And if you like beautiful photographs, definitely check out his site.

Once Upon a Time…

…a newspaper journalist was on his way to cover a story when a tire on his car blew out.  He pulled to the shoulder and looked to discover that the passenger-side rear tire was shredded.  So, he popped the trunk and started working on changing it – he was running late.  As he was jacking the car up, he noticed that his car was just a few feet from a very tall, very sturdy fence, and the fence had a sign on it warning not to pick up hitchhikers because inside the fence was a facility for the violently insane.

He spun the lugnuts off the bad wheel and placed them carefully into the hubcap he’d put on the ground nearby, but as he was pulling the bad wheel off, he heard a cough behind him.  Startled, he dropped the blown tire and it fell onto the hubcap, throwing the lugnuts into the air.  When they came down, four of the five rolled directly into a nearby storm drain.

Looking behind him, he saw that a man in a suit and tie was standing just inside the fence, watching.  His hair was perfectly groomed, and he was freshly shaved.  He didn’t look insane.

“Well, hell,” the reporter said, “I’m running late, and now I only have one lug nut to put the spare on with.”

“Simple,” responded the man behind the fence, “take one lug nut off of each of the other three wheels.  That’ll give you four lug nuts per wheel, and that’s enough to get you where you need to go until you can get replacements for the ones you lost.”

A little stunned, the reporter replied, “That’s great!  I’d have never thought of that!  Are you a doctor?”

“No,” the man replied, “I’m one of the patients.”

“But, how could someone as intelligent as you be in there?” the reporter asked.

“I’m insane.  I’m not stupid.”

So we’ve had another rampage shooting, this time in California – land of the Roberti-Roos assault-weapon ban, no “gun show loophole,” “bullet buttons,” magazine capacity restrictions, etc., etc., etc.

And another known nutcase still managed to get his hands on an AR-15 and a bunch of standard capacity magazines, plus a black-powder revolver with a cartridge conversion cylinder.

But one more law will prevent this from happening again!

Which is both insane AND stupid.