Full of content, because when I bring it, you will know it has been brought.

Posted by: Dave in Texas at 08:01 AM | Comments (345)
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Well Done, Colorado

Here's Charles C. W. Cooke's rundown of the Colorado recall elections. It's a must-read.

Guns are a notoriously touchy subject in America — a supercharged third rail, if you will. But so too is the notion of accountability. The country was founded, after all, by men with guns grumbling about the nature of their political representation. It was in this proud tradition that the disgruntled banded together in Colorado to try to recall two sitting state senators who had not just voted to pass new restrictions on the right to keep and bear arms, but had steadfastly refused to listen to the opposition. The new gun laws, locals in both Colorado Springs and Pueblo told me repeatedly, were “the straw that broke the camel’s back.” Their more fundamental message: “Listen to me, goddamnit!”

Still not listening: Angela Giron

Meanwhile, In New York City ...

... where it's difficult for anyone but law enforcement to get a gun permit and civil rights have been wantonly violated under "stop & frisk", the NYPD continues to blaze away at unarmed suspects but only manages to hit innocent bystanders. There's a pattern here.

Perhaps Ray Kelly and Mike Bloomberg could focus less on taking my guns from me and more on teaching their employees what to do with their own.

Gun Of The Week

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Posted by: andy at 05:55 AM | Comments (109)
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A test score of 400 would require a donation of new football uniforms, 300, a new dormitory. In your sonÂ’s case, we would require an international airport.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 03:16 AM | Comments (186)
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I've tried writting a rough draft on this thing a few times already and deleted them. I just don't really get this product. Don't get me wrong, it's a low risk investment for Sony which is good but I don't really see a market for the thing either. Like a lot of things, the whole $99 price is a trick as it's a tard pack in all the senses of the lexicon. It only has 1GB of storage on it but you need to have a DS3 or DS4 controller which if you're a gamer, that gig is not even enough to get a Vita game on it and if you're a mainstream consumer, you get nothing to control the device without also buying a controller separately. The $150 bundle isn't bad per say as it gets you a controller and a 8 gig memory card but it shines a light on the whole fact that they're going to bend you over on their overpriced proprietary flash memory cards. And with Andrew House claiming that they're aiming it as a shot to the AppleTV and ChromeCast and I just can't but help laugh at the notion due to the lack of media features that is on the Vita and the fact that the video output is only 720P/1080i. As a gaming device, it goes against the current market trends of gaming on the go. And frankly, none of the Vita games are good enough visually to make you want to see them upscaled on a TV. Like the VR headset, this comes off as Sony Japan being Sony Japan. Like I said, it's a low risk accessory (just cannibalize the unsold Vitas) but I can't but help think it's a very low reward proposition as well. Where is Xzibit when we need him?

more crap below
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Posted by: Gang of Gaming Morons! at 10:56 AM | Comments (114)
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The Man Who Wasn't There

Good morning morons and moronettes and welcome to AoSHQ's solemn and prestigious Sunday Morning Book Thread. Where men are men, and the women are smokin' hot.

Take Your Totalizing Metanarrative And Shove It

Last week in the comments, Pave Low John proffered this craptacular sentence from a post-modern book he is requied to read:

"This three-part phallogocentric negation and sublation of history can be grasped easily. Yet even such a sublation, of history as timing through the mediation of law--the vanishing moment of sequential human temporality into a catachresis named Time, is not the final hortatory instrument of the text."

Yeesh. My spell-checker just had a nervous breakdown. Into this grotesquely viscous, near-inpenetrable morass of verbal diarrhea waded FenelonSpoke, after first donning a hazmat suit. She miraculously survived and brought back the following as a translation:

The way the penis (men) has/have kept women subjugated and silent by unjust laws is both very bad and very apparent, and this theme transcends history as it is portioned off into neat linear, sequential segments.

The question is, if that's what she meant, then why didn't say it that way to begin with? My theory is that postmodern obfuscation is a device used by incompetent authors to disguise their dreadful writing. My other theory is that the academic disciplines that have been ruined by postmodernism (i.e. the "soft" "sciences") have gotten all puffed up and full of themselves and think that they're somehow Serious You Guys Legitimate if they produce reams of text couched in indecipherable jargon just like, for example, those geeky guys over in the math building, what with all their fancy-ass equations with squiggly lines, Greek letters and stuff that look so awesome because we don't know what they're saying. So you shouldn't be able to read our stuff, either, but you can take our word for it, it's Totally Super Cool.

But see, here's the difference: the postmodernists got punk'd real bad bacl om 1996 by physicist Alan Sokal He submitted his essay Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity to the peer-reviewed postmodernist journal Social Text, and they printed it. But hilarity ensued when Sokal admitted in another publication that it was a giant load of horse doots. As a hoax, he just strung together a bunch of gibberish using postmodernist lingo, and they bought it. But you couldn't do this to a math journal (although I suppose you could try). They'd fact-check your butt back to square one and send you packing if you pulled something like Sokal did. As difficult as it can be, mathematics does make sense. I'm not sure that post-modernism does.

You morons might enjoy reading Chip Morningstar's famous essay How To Deconstruct Almost Anything: My Postmodern Adventure, written in 1993 at the dawn of teh internets. The gist of this piece is that the reason pomo analysis sounds like crap is that most of it is crap and this is because pomo crap is generated by pomo crap academics who've never had to talk to anyone other than other pomo crap academics, so they've developed this inbred little pomo crap language that's all but unintelligible to anyone outside the pomo crap academic community. Actually, Morningstar's phrasing was a lot more congenial than mine, but you get the idea. And he does say sometimes the pomo academics ask a worthwhile question, or try to get you to look at something in a way you perhaps wouldn't have thought of yourself, so he doesn't write them off completely. Like I just did.

And every time you reload this page, you get a new, randomly-generated postmodern essay.

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Here is a good, working definition of the postmodern perspective:

Postmodernism is a complex of concepts that asserts that all our constructs are just that, constructs; that there are no grand narratives or abiding truths; that all such grand narratives are illegitimate power moves; and that every perspective is necessarily a limited and local one.

One year of free AoSHQ Premium content goes to the first moron who spots the giant logical hole in this worldview.

Update: Ding! Ding! Ding! Baldilocks is our winner, coming in at comment #3. Please step up to the window and collect your winnings.
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Posted by: Open Blogger at 07:15 AM | Comments (237)
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OK, so I've always believed that those who take the dogmas of the religious system known as "progressivism", and faithfully follow them as much as possible, and to their logical endpoints as much as possible, and do this over the long term (for years) they will accumulate enough psychological and emotional damage that it will eventually manifest itself as physically. Progressivism, based as it is on falsehoods and outright lies, causes human beings to violate their own design specs, like ignoring the oil light on your car day after day.

All that seething hatred just twists you up inside and eventually it shows.

Well, looky here: This amusing photo slideshow appears to bear me out.

Yeah, I stole this from the ONT of a few days ago. But I think it's worth a re-run.

Posted by: Open Blogger at 02:18 PM | Comments (492)
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You know the only reason I'm posting this, right?

Posted by: Purple Avenger at 12:09 PM | Comments (257)
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This link will pump the original German transcript through the Google auto-translate thingie so a click renders in English. The translation is plenty good enough that you can figure out what's being said.

The science doesn't appear to be settled.

...Another explanation could be that we have been the effect of greenhouse gas a bit overrated, that we therefore expect stronger warming. Or finally, that another factor participates here: You could, for example, because think of the sun or the like...

In fact the science appears to be pretty damned sketchy since this guy is grasping at any straw to explain how reality could deviate so far from the Holy model's predictions.

Curiously, he says to continue trusting models (gotta keep that phat grant cash flowing), then goes on to explain how not accounting for actuals maybe means some kinda/sorta/possibly crucial stuff is missing or wrong...but hey, trust us. Perhaps evil twin Keebler Elves were at work too...who knows?

Its not quite a walkback, but its a solid softening up laying the groundwork for a possible walkback if that proved unavoidable in the coming years.

Enjoy.

H/T NoTricksZone (who adds good commentary too)

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Posted by: Purple Avenger at 09:46 AM | Comments (168)
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This news isn't gonna get my kids to move out when they're old enough damn it. Nearly half of American jobs will be done by computers in 20 years.

The authors believe this takeover will happen in two stages. First, computers will start replacing people in especially vulnerable fields like transportation/logistics, production labor, and administrative support. Jobs in services, sales, and construction may also be lost in this first stage. Then, the rate of replacement will slow down due to bottlenecks in harder-to-automate fields such engineering. This “technological plateau” will be followed by a second wave of computerization, dependent upon the development of good artificial intelligence. This could next put jobs in management, science and engineering, and the arts at risk.

Posted by: CDR M at 06:02 PM | Comments (485)
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Spring has sprung and fall has fell, when summer comes back it's hotter than hell.

The big game today, (1) Alabama @ (6) Texas A&M, 3:30pm. If Nick Saban brought a bunch of bright shiny objects then Tide wins cause Aggies always fall for bright shiny objects.

Other top ten games today, all times EDT:

(7) Louisville @ Kentucky, noonish

(5) Stanford @ Army, twelve-hundred hours exactly

Nevada @ (10) Florida State, 3:30pm

Tennessee @ (2) Oregon, 3:30pm

(4) Ohio State @ California, 7:00pm

Kent State @ ( LSU, 7:00pm

Week two College Pick Em standings via @MikeTalley73 (top 5)

Knightbrigade - 27
Dreams from my T-Bone - 27
BigBoy - 26
WVhokie - 25
BQ Football - 25
Murph - 24
tiger23 - 24
Gator Nation - 24
Syrias You Guys - 24
Boyz in da Hoodies - 23
WhatDoesItMatter - 23
Jay in Ames - 23
MikeTalley73 - 23

Have a great weekend you goobers.

Posted by: Dave in Texas at 07:01 AM | Comments (239)
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