This is depressing. Geoff measures labor stats from a different perspective: those who are earning paychecks and those who aren't in the Obama "recovery".

It's not pretty.

I'm thinking of a word. I think the word is "unsustainable". I'm not sure, it has more than two syllables so perhaps I should look it up.

...

Ok yeah, that's the word.

As I sit here doing my taxes and cursing, there is one thought echoing in my stupid head. I have a job. It's a good job. I'm glad to have it. But it could all change tomorrow as it has for so many others.

Too many Americans have lost too much while their government takes even more from them to buy votes to keep themselves in power. It sickens me. This is no way to run a railroad.

Posted by: Dave in Texas at 09:48 AM | Comments (112)
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Marco Rubio was all over the Sunday shows today fronting for Team Amnesty. I didn't see any of his appearances but I'm willing to bet he didn't mention this little factoid.

In fact, the latest NBC News/Wall Street Journal/Telemundo poll indicates that Latinos are clamoring for stricter gun measures more than most groups in America. According to the poll, 70 percent of Latinos believe that "that the laws covering the sale of firearms should be made more strict," while just five percent believe they should be made less strict and 22 percent believe they should be kept the same.

In case you've forgotten them, here's a handy list of reasons of why amnesty (and yes, it's amnesty) will have zero positive impact for the GOP.

As always, if you want amnesty because you think it's the moral thing to do, fine. Just don't pee on my leg and tell me it's raining new GOP/conservative voters.

Posted by: DrewM at 09:12 AM | Comments (88)
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The NRA 500

Asshat CT Senator Chris Murphy agitated against Fox's broadcasting the NRA 500 from Texas Motor Speedway.

This picture Laura Ingraham tweeted sums up the attitude of the Texan NASCAR fans towards that:

Chris Murphy's referring to the "extreme nature of the NRA" is particularly irritating. I'm the NRA, and I believe the second amendment means what it says. If that makes me an extremist in his eyes, so be it.

Meanwhile Down In Texas

The NRA Annual Meeting will be held in Houston next month, and Governor Perry is inviting gun manufacturers from all over the US to set up shop there.

Davy Crockett clearly had Chris Murphy and people like him in mind when he said, paraphrasing, "you can all go to hell, and I'll go to Texas", and that same spirit is alive and well there today.

Gun Of The Week

(answer below) more...

Posted by: andy at 08:30 AM | Comments (109)
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Mmm ... I love that new thread smell.

Posted by: andy at 03:00 AM | Comments (383)
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Gaming below more...

Posted by: Gang of Gaming Morons! at 10:05 AM | Comments (173)
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Did You Ever Have One of Those Weeks?

Good morning morons and moronettes and welcome to the randomly scattered, yet with deeper, hidden patterns Sunday Morning Book Thread here at the award-winning AoSHQ.

Last week, my opening greeting wherein I described this thread as "increasingly shakey and on the verge of collapse", Vic asked if this meant I was planning to shut it down for good. I would have addressed this in the comments, but, as the regular readers of the book thread know, I STILL CAN'T POST COMMENTS!! So, let me say this about that: No.

My description of last week's thread as being close to collapse was supposed to be a mirror of the dismal national financial picture, which was the theme of the thread, and that's all that was meant. I have no intention of quitting. I enjoy doing the book thread and there appears to be a good demand for it. I've gotten some really good book recommendations from you morons, plus, I've been able to meet some of you in e-mail, and that's been fun.

So, no quitting.

Here Come the Philistines!

OK, so the funny thing about the chaos picture at the top of the post is that it's on its side. When selecting visuals for the book thread, I prefer photos or images that are longer from side to side. I don't know why, I guess I just think oblong images fit on the page better. So I found an image that I liked, only it was more tall than wide. Then I remembered hearing stories of a museum janitor throwing out one of the exhibits because it looked like actual rubbish, and I thought, if I tip it over to get the shape I want, who's going to know? If I just saw that picture for the first time just like I displayed it, there's no way I'd ever know that it isn't supposed to be that way.

The original painting actually looks like this. As I said, I'd never know. And perhaps you wouldn't either. Would an art student be able to tell? Or perhaps such questions are only asked by philistines and boors and are only a revelation of ignorance.

What do I know? I'm a moron.

This modern art crapitude reminds me of a book that has been on my "Need To Read This Book" list for quite some time: Degenerate Moderns: Modernity as Rationalized Sexual Misbehavior, and I almost don't have to tell you about it, because the title pretty much says it all. And not just about art.

The main thesis of this book is that, in the intellectual life, there are only two ultimate alternatives: either the thinker conforms desire to truth or he conforms truth to desire. In the last one hundred years, the western cultural elite embarked upon a project which entailed the reversal of the values of the intellectual life so that truth would be subjected to desire as the final criterion of intellectual value. In looking at recent biographies of such major moderns as Freud, Kinsey, Keynes, Margaret Mead, Picasso, and others, there is a remarkable similarity between their lives and thought. After becoming involved in sexual license early on, they invariably chose an ideology or art form which subordinated reality to the exigencies of their sexual misbehavior.

Degenerate Moderns is published by the Roman Catholic publishing house Ignatius Press, so perhaps we shouldn't be surprised that there's a chapter devoted to Martin Luther. Personally, being a Reformed Protestant kind of guy, I think I'm going to have a bit of trouble with the idea that Luther was another sex-crazed degenerate, if that is where the author is going.

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Posted by: Open Blogger at 07:10 AM | Comments (181)
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Link to the bigger version

I was in a Rockwell bunker in Downey CA as this happened...praying my boxes didn't fail. Scary and fun at the same time.

Posted by: Open Blogger at 02:22 PM | Comments (384)
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You'll Get Nothing, And Like It

Sometimes when people are highly ideological, and driven to score all the points they can for their team, they fail to appreciate the necessary political compromises that exist in society. This is not a game, this is a nation. And absolutism simply fails to thrive in American politics.

In response to the Gosnell trial, some absolutist pro-choice folks are saying that the reason Gosnell's slaughterhouse was so awful is because late-term abortions should be legal, and women were 'driven underground' to see this illegal doctor.

Gosnell was a legal and known abortion provider, not 'underground.' His transgressions would have been caught if only he had been subject to the same inspections that every other outpatient facility is subject to. It sure wasn't rightwing zealots that shielded him from ordinary audits.

But that's neither here nor there. We need to address this insistence that there be no limits on abortion. Which means to legalize the termination of large, healthy babies that pose no risk to the mother's life.

The problem with absolutism is that it shoots itself in the foot. Truly radical pro-choicers do not understand that the assumption that abortion primarily kills very tiny, unviable blobs, is the very thing that keeps abortion legal. It is in fact the only thing keeping a majority of people ignoring the subject. more...

Posted by: LauraW at 07:30 AM | Comments (280)
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Well my old laptop finally kicked the bucket today. I had to swap to my old desktop which of course didn't have all my links so I've patched something together as best I can. I guess all that Windows 8 discussion last night just might help guide my laptop purchase direction.

Well, we had a CME impact the Earth earlier tonight. Some aurora possibilities for you high latitude types.

Go here for a pretty cool animation of a CME and how it interacts with Earth. more...

Posted by: CDR M at 05:31 PM | Comments (718)
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Here's something to ponder...

Is Windows Vista actually better than the rep its gotten?

Sure, there were teething problem and such when first released. There was a lot of new code there beyond XP, but a fully patched up install on TODAY's multi-core multi-Ghz hardware (or even 5 years ago hardware), with 4G or so of memory is NOT hideously slow or particularly unstable. An old Pentium 4 with a 1G of memory, and an 80G drive? Well...that's different. THAT sucks ass very much running Vista.

Would you rather have the Windows 8 bizarro world interface or the Vista rolling whorehouse pimpmobile interface? I'm getting kinda comfy with the pimpmobile in a machine I'm setting up to do some Windows Phone phone app development on.

Windows 7 is kinda like Vista minus the sketchy stability (at the time) bloatware glitz, plus moar drivers. I like Windows 7. W7 has a spartan Windows 2000 ambiance -- it doesn't get in your way.

I stuck with Windows 2000 from its release through early 2012. I had it on dual-P133 machines, dual Pentium Pro's, some Pentium II/III machines and found it to be pretty stable on officially supported hardware.

In 12 years of use I can count the number of W2K BSOD's I had on one hand, and all of those were due to busted hardware or some unsupported crap I was trying to prod into functioning with witchcraft and animal sacrifices.

The thing about W2K, and Windows 7 is they run OK on the hardware of their respective eras. There wasn't a big "expectation gap" like there was with Vista.

Suppose Microsoft had done a XP "second edition" with more hardware/driver support and delayed Vista a couple of years until hardware developments caught up with its voracious appetite for consuming hardware?

Would our impressions of it be different? I think so.

I know at the time I read the minimum hardware specs for Vista and thought "Wow, I don't have any machines in inventory with that!", so I passed on upgrading. If I did have a minimum machine, I'd have been disappointed anyway.

But today, you can find machines literally in the trash that have specs to run Vista just fine. In fact, the machine I just installed it on was dumpster dived. I replaced one bad memory stick that made it act like it was stone freaking dead, and it sprang to life again. And the replacement stick came from another dived machine, so expenditure of instantaneous cash for repair was $0.00.

I needed a brief respite from thinking about the Gosnell horror story. This was it. This vid is hilarious.

Posted by: Open Blogger at 10:35 AM | Comments (522)
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