Tag: Meta

It’s Give no F%$# February

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In January, I announced that, given the unprecedented events of that month, that I would be eschewing my embargo on profanity for the month.

To be accurate, I have never actually abjured profanity.

In fact, I would argue that my writing has rather more profanity that a lot of people out there, but I bowdlerize my swear words, so instead of the actual words, I will write, f%$#, or sh%#, or c%$#sucker, or motherf%$#er, 

So, it’s back to the f%$#ing, “%$#”s, though I may make actual profanity a January thing.

It has been a liberating experience for me.

I haven’t decided yet.

Announcing “Say Fuck” January

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Given the events of the past 48 hours or so, I am suspending my policy of %$#ing out dirty words on my blog for the month of January.

My writing is rather profane, but I %$# shit out because I don’t want to offend someone whose children are reading this.

Occasionally, when quoting someone, as when then VP Biden called the passage of Obamacare a, “Big Fucking Deal,” I quote people, and occasionally, I miss the obscenities in a quote, Twitter embeds are not editable, and sometimes, I just fuck up and let it through.

So, fuck and shit, and the rest of the “Anglo Saxon Lexicon” will be on display for the rest of this month.

That being said, I still won’t be using the “C-word” for reasons best illustrated in the Harley Quinn animated series first episode.

Also, I will not be using the word, “Slut”, except in an illustrative manner, (as I just did) because I find it almost as offensive as the “C-word”.

As to the comments, my policy is to eschew moderation, except in the cases where the content is clearly spam, though if someone were to start dropping the “N-word” in the comments, this might change.

Boy, I Screwed up This One………

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In 2014, as Gamegate affair was metastasizing into an orgy of white male privilege and terrorism, I made fun of what I referred to the “Quinnspiracy“, seeing it as little more a controversy about gaming and gaming journalism.

Shortly after that, what was a kind of an inside-baseball controversy became the blueprint for white male (and it is almost always white male) terrorism via the internet.

At the time, I thought that it was a metaphor for the corruption in game journalism, and how it made it difficult for independent studios to get any coverage. (Valid, but irrelevant to what it revealed)

The real story, which was that an army of violent racist, sexist, and homophobic dirt-bags poised to terrorize our society, and in 2016, our electoral politics.

I Am So Eager for This to Be over, and I So Dread Tomorrow

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I am sure that I am not the only one.

I want this to end, but tomorrow will be pure hell.

Even if it is a Biden blowout, I will have to be watching the new coverage, which means that I will have to watch the pundits pontificate.

Well, I refuse to do this sober.

BTW, my prediction. (joking)


Click the map to create your own at 270toWin.com

Light Posting for a While

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If You Miss an Opportunity to Reference The Princess Bride, You’ll Be Gleeped by the Todal

Google Blogger has updated,and they have broken my Firefox addon, bbCode for Web Extensions (bbCodeWebEx).

Between that and work, and a desperate need to avoid dealing with the impending sense of dread over the upcoming election, I’m swamped.

I have an app to fix, my country’s 500th anniversary to plan, my wedding to arrange, some fleas to murder, and Guilder to frame for it. I’m swamped!

Disclaimer: I am not going to war with Guilder this week, but you know, The Princess Bride.

The New Blogger Sucks

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The authoring, both in rich text and in HTML is indescribably awful.

The tag applications still do not work reliably, and both interfaces are clearly slower.

Either this is an attempt by Google to drive people away from Blogspot to justify their shutting down the service, or their programming team for Blogger needs to be fired.

I have no clue as to who, and how, they evaluate user interfaces at Google, but these folks need to be fired too.

Reality Has a Well Known Liberal Bias

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Someone finally did a comprehensive catalogue of the sparse research on gun safety, so now, despite the best efforts of the NRA and Congressional Republicans to shut down testing, we have the the beginnings of a knowledge base on fun safety:

Gun control discussions often get mired in competing academic claims regarding the effectiveness, or lack thereof, of various policy options.

Do concealed carry laws increase violent crime or make communities safer? Do assault weapon bans reduce mass shootings or do they have no effect? Do background checks reduce homicides and suicides or are they ineffective?

With so many disparate findings swirling about, it can be difficult to determine where the balance of evidence lies. But a report from Rand Corp., a nonprofit think tank, has distilled reams of gun policy research published since 1995 to tease out the scholarly consensus.

………

Not all academic studies are created equal. Many simply show correlations between various phenomena — links between assault weapon bans and mass shootings, for instance, or between suicide rates and gun purchasing habits. Such research can be useful when higher-quality data isn’t available.

But policymaking requires higher-caliber evidence, from studies that go beyond simple correlations to demonstrate a causal effect. Distinguishing those studies from less-powerful ones was one of the chief objectives of the Rand report.

………

They narrowed down thousands of studies to those that met high standards for causal evidence — just 123 of them since 1995. Taken together, this research yielded a number of conclusions.

First, there was a clear consensus (indicated by three or more high-quality studies in agreement) that stand-your-ground laws, which allow people to use guns to defend themselves in public even if retreating is an option, result in higher overall rates of gun homicide. The higher rates aren’t simply from “bad guys” getting shot; the research shows the additional deaths created by stand-your-ground laws far surpass the documented cases of defensive gun use in the United States.

There was also a broad consensus that child access prevention laws, which set requirements for how guns must be stored at home, are effective in reducing self-inflicted gun injuries among children and adults.

No other policy realm showed the clear scholarly consensus as did stand-your-ground and child access prevention, although there were a number of cases in which the research yielded more moderate evidence of a policy’s effect, by way of two or more high-quality studies in agreement.

This could be a basis for common sense gun laws, which is why the NRA has strenuously opposed any funding for studies for decades.

Removing the Olympics from My List of They Who Must Not Be Named

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Normally, I do not watch the Olympics, summer or winter, and I do not write about it, because the coverage is painful to watch, and because I think that it does more to foment international hostility and discord than any other mass gathering in the world.

That being said, when Covid-19 forces a 1 year delay of the games, it does take on a significance beyond sport and mindless nationalism:

A week ago, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe of Japan and Thomas Bach, president of the International Olympic Committee, were promoting the Summer Olympics in Tokyo as the balm the world needed to show victory over the coronavirus pandemic.

On Tuesday, the virus won out.

Bach and Abe bowed to a groundswell of resistance — from athletes, from sports federations, from national Olympic committees, from health experts — and formally postponed the Games, which had been scheduled to begin in late July, until 2021.

I guess that the Covid-19 pandemic now qualifies as real news now.

She is Off My “They Who Must Not Be Named” List?

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I have a list of people that I refuse to cover, They Who Must Not Be Named.  Basically, these are folks who occupy a significant role in popular culture, but I consider too trivial for me to write about. (Tabloid fodder)

I have applied this to actors, singers, the entire royal family, and celebrities for no reason at all, such as the the reality show family whose last name resembles an adversary race in later series in the Star Trek franchise.

My standard statement on this is:

Absent some sort of political activity, such as endorsements, running for office (PLEASE GOD NO!!), or their attempting to assassinate someone, they will not be mentioned here.

Well, the first person is coming off the list and it is Britney Spears, of all people, because she is calling for a general strike and a massive reorganization of society, which I think qualifies her for removal from the list.

Also, she is sounding Trotskyite, which means that referencing her will piss off my brother, Stephen, aka Bear who swims:

Britney Spears has called for us to strike.

On Instagram, Spears shared a graphic that included the words, “We will feed each other, redistribute wealth, strike.” Her comment on the graphic “Communion goes beyond walls 🌹🌹🌹” included three roses, the symbol associated with socialist movements in the United States, United Kingdom, and beyond. That, dear reader, is the main thing we needed to tell you.

A post shared by Britney Spears (@britneyspears) on



Spears is a surprising but very welcome ally in the struggle to ensure that our response to the global coronavirus pandemic is a just one. But her meming also points to the fact that this is a very rare and unusual time: a period in which draconian, repressive government measures could be introduced, but there is also an opening for people to demand a better society. Across the globe, quarantined people are increasingly reliant on low-paid workers. Governments are swiftly discovering that the actual backbone of society is the lowest paid and, in the case of the gig economy, those with few rights.

Adventures in Crap Advertising

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Once again, Google™ Adsense™ has completely screwed the pooch on an ad that they are serving to my blog.

This time, they are trying to get me, and my reader(s) to click through to the National Rifle Association.

Seriously, putting an NRA here, particularly one with a picture of that odious little grifter Wayne LaPierre on it, is not a piece of well targeted marketing.

Why the f%$# does Google on the online advertising market.

Seriously, F%## the NRA, f%$# Wayne LaPierre, and f%$# Google.

And that goes for your little dog too.

My standard disclaimer on any post about the aforementioned service applies:

Also, please note, this should be in no way construed as an inducement or a request for my reader(s) to click on any ad that they would not otherwise be inclined to investigate further. This would be a violation of the terms of service for Google™ Adsense™.