Being kind is ideal; I strive to be kind in every interaction. That should be the goal — even if we fail — of every thinking human.

I even support the idea of trigger warnings, but rebel against their use as a cudgel to censor and suppress undesirable ideas, which seems to be their primary purpose these days.

Because the truth is everyone who has experienced violence and trauma has triggers. Because in a violent world, so-called “triggers” are not maladaptive. They are in fact very useful.

Today we were at a restaurant where many people were walking behind me and I couldn’t see them well. I do not like people behind me because of how many times I’ve been ambushed and attacked from behind in my life.

It’s nearly impossible to sneak up on me because I’m so watchful of people in my periphery and (luckily for me) have ridiculous (for humans, anyway) peripheral vision — but still, people walking up behind me puts me in attack mode. It’s something I have to deliberately suppress.

So it doesn’t make for a pleasant dining experience, and it might make for an extremely unpleasant dining experience indeed if someone made the mistake of touching me from behind if I happen to not see them.

That’s a trigger. That was also completely adaptive where I grew up.

What should I do, put a sign on my back in blinking lights that says, “Don’t sneak up on me from behind unless you like the flavor of knuckle sandwiches?”

Of course that’d just make some assholes try it.

Expert systems are already better able to diagnose illnesses than doctors. Have been for many years.

My contention that if allowed to expert systems would be far better at picking long-term partners than we ourselves are.

The future might once again be arranged marriages — but marriages arranged by machines, that nearly everyone participates in because they are so superior to what we’d choose ourselves.

I was going to make a joke about Ram Dass, but not sure anyone would know who he is.

Anyway, I have a collection of burned CD- and DVD-ROMs that are from five to 13 years old. Remember how those things were marketed as good long-term backups?

Not so much! Of course that has been known for years.

But it’s true; of the oldest ones, about half the data is readable. A few of the disks do not work at all (though I tested them all when burned). Not the first byte can be read from them.

These are mostly photos I took on my old digital cameras, so no great loss. But still, if you have any older CD-ROMs or DVD-ROMs, pull the data off them now before it’s too late.

Why are donuts the most popular pastries in the US?

They are terrible. Almost every pastry except scones — which are an abomination — is better than a donut.

Donuts are the fast food of such confections — all similar-tasting, all too cloyingly sweet and with all the personality of a rock.

In Germany, walking into a true bakery for the first time I was agog. I ordered literally as much as I could carry. The pastry counter alone must have been twenty feet long. Approximately 150 selections. There is nothing like that in the US, not even in NYC.

And this was just an average bakery in Germany. There were far better and larger ones, claimed many people.

Absolutely everything I ordered was delicious, better than any almost anything I’ve ever gotten in the US at any bakery.

Why is that impossible here? Perhaps the contemptible donut cabal is suppressing all the good bakeries. 😉 Either way, nearly all the food I’ve had overseas is better than what you can get in the US at any price, generally speaking.

I’m probably one of the few people around who routinely sends text messages in iambic pentameter couplets.

I make no apologies.

What’s funny about Bernie Sanders’ supposed “unrealistic, utopian” dreams is that to a one they are all things that we used to have — like free college in various places — or that other countries have implemented successfully and have had for many, many years.

In fact, many of the pundits who are accusing Sanders of these crazy utopian dreams were educated in California in the 1960s and 1970s where they — you guessed it and I checked it — received a completely-free college education.

That there are so many people intent and bent on telling us that we just cannot do something is mystifying especially when it’s something that we have already done.

The Problem With Elite-College Admissions.

Really, all college admissions.

The brilliant poet, distinguished novelist, or political cartoonist of the future who just did not care about that physics course in his or her sophomore year (and received a grade that showed it) is told that he or she doesn’t have a prayer of getting into one of the selective schools. So is the kid who starts out entertaining tourists on the street but who will eventually do extraordinary work as a performance artist. There is an appreciation for diverse talents, but only if they go hand-in-hand with great College Board scores and uniformly high GPAs.

The truth is due to my past I couldn’t get into any university except maybe Phoenix (and who would want to get into that one), but in all areas except some math classes, I’d blow even 99.9% of top students out of the water every time.

That’s not being arrogant or rebarbative; that’s just a fact. But why would I want to do this? I don’t need a piece of paper to tell me this. That is utterly worthless to me.

College is optimized to churning out unquestioning corporate drones at the undergrad level or spawning more academics at the grad level — those things aren’t intrinsically wrong, by the way, but are just how matters currently stand.

It is a system that like most is finely-tuned to perpetuate itself and little else. Pretending that it’s anything more than that does not square with reality.

I was looking through some old PowerShell scripts of mine.

What in the world was this attempting? It appears to be trying to add, multiply and concatenate numbers, and to be reading out the contents of files and directories to the console. Which are completely unrelated and connected by no logic. Why, just why?


Function Examine-Dir($contents, $padding)
{
write-host "Examining folder"
$spacer = "".PadLeft($padding)
Foreach ($file in $contents)
{
$isDir = Test-Path $file -pathtype container
write-host "$spacer Found $file $isDir"
if ($isDir)
{
$childContents = Get-ChildItem $file
$childPadding = 2+$padding
Examine-Dir $childContents $childPadding
}
}
write-host ""
}

$files = Get-ChildItem
$padding = 2
Examine-Dir $files $padding


I can think of no reason I wrote that, nor what I ever would’ve done with it.

By the way, if I were to vote in the 2016 election — which I am not going to — I’d vote for Jill Stein.

Just in case anyone was curious.

Update: I did get registered and decided to vote. I did indeed vote for Jill Stein.

The new conventional wisdom among truth-challenged liberals is that sexual assault and harassment were just as bad from German men prior to the events in Cologne and other cities — and in fact that those evil German men may have even taught those gentle, lamb-like North African men how to harass those German women! Who probably deserved it anyway for being, like, racist or something and wearing short skirts to tempt those meek little kittens into evil!

Never even among the conservative loons, morons and nutcases have I seen such a sorry display of treachery and a forsaking of the values that one professes to hold.

And the odd thing about it is that it’s (mostly) women who are telling these assaulted and harassed women that they had it just as bad before — when both the stats and anecdote show pretty definitively that this was absolutely not the case.

I know that the legacy of racism causes huge cognitive dissonance among liberals when anyone whose skin is darker than Heidi Klum’s does something wrong — but good god, I never thought I’d see a whole bloc of my fellow liberals perfectly willing to tell millions of women to lie back and try to enjoy the theft and rape because they probably either deserved it or brought it on themselves.

It is not any kind of rebellion to be fat and unhealthy (which, yes, statistically do go hand in hand) because some men prefer you’d be lithe and limber.

That’s only rebelling against yourself, which isn’t that useful.

Being fat and unhealthy is its own punishment, on many axes. Your life will be more uncomfortable and difficult. You’ll tend to be a burden both literal and metaphorical on others. And you’ll die earlier.

Corpulence to spite some ill-perceived expectation from others is roughly equivalent to gouging your own eyes out when you see something on TV that you don’t like.

Reason, though, is the last thing people try and only when all other approaches have failed. This is no different.

I’ve finally found (after using a version of this one many years ago) an image viewer that works correctly on all platforms and doesn’t mangle images, have a terrible interface or just generally behave badly. The default image viewer is terrible on MacOS, but that’s true on every OS.

But my image-viewing savior is XnViewMP and it’s free — but I donated to the project because it’s so great. And so fast, unlike nearly any other image viewer I’ve ever used.

Download it here.

Reading things like this, one begins to realize how delusional modern liberalism has become.

I normally agree with Laurie Penny and have long endeavored to read everything she writes — but when one is in the grips of an ideology, it is impossible for her or for any of the “everything is racism and all cultures are equally great” liberals to see things clearly.

I do agree with her that all sexual assault should be prosecuted — that for harassment and rape and all such crimes, there should be no tolerance whether the perpetrators are German or Syrian. At least she’s not (mostly) making the usual argument that “it’s just their culture.” But what she is doing is pretending that Germany was a country that had a major problem with sexual assault — it did not — and that there is no categorical difference between the violently- and virulently-misogynist men Germany insists on importing and German citizens.

And then shamefully — as Penny does — telling the woman who will be assaulted by these men on the streets that “German men are just as bad.” Which is demonstrably not true both by data and by anecdote. And is truly reprehensible and a betrayal of the very women she is pretending to be concerned with.

But hey, she made the right noises so her karma is good, right?

On that list I linked to earlier, did you notice how very high the sexual assault rate in Sweden is? Ever wonder why? Of course it’s politically unacceptable to talk about it (as if I give a fuck), but it’s because of Sweden cursing itself with influx after influx of North African/Islamic refugees.

No mystery there.

Did I just offend you?

Good. That often leads to thinking. As in this article.

When refugees arrive in Western countries, they bring with them violent and sexist cultural attitudes that contributed in part to the mess they fled. Consider a global survey by the Pew Research Center; when asked if women should have equal rights, only 45 per cent of Egyptian men agreed, compared to 97 per cent of Germans. Similarly, not a single Arab or North African nation makes it into the top 100 counties ranked in the most recent World Economic Forum’s gender-gap report. Those medieval attitudes translate into barbaric actions. Due to reporting variances, tracking sexual assault statistics between countries is extremely difficult, but a large comparative database created by the WomanStats Project ranks Muslim countries among the world’s most dangerous places for women. If you’re surprised that some refugee groups in Europe commit crimes at a higher rate than the general population, you’re either not paying attention or you are lying to yourself.

And the US sexual assault rate being so high? Not refugees. Nope, just a ridiculously patriarchic and fundamentalist culture here. Kind of remind you of anything? Like Islam?

Huh. Funny that.

I confuse the shit out of people because they think they have pigeonholed me. But there ain’t no hole I can fit in. I explode out of them like a Hellfire missile, delivering a flaming epistle.

Ah, he seems to hate refugees, he must be a conservative. What? He thinks 50% of all CEOs and board members of any corporations should be required by law to be women, supports UBI and Social Security and — oh my god — socialism? BRAIN BREAKING ABORT ABORT ABORT

He supports Jill Stein, reads Andrea Dworkin, believes in reducing the military to less than 100,000 active duty and supports radical equality and qualified eugenics, too — and admires the Black Panthers and Malcolm X? HOW POSSIBLE?

Here’s the thing, though: when you think for yourself, everybody’s gonna hate you. And you fit nowhere. No tribe will have you.

Fine with me; I’m so used to it that I’ve come to like it.

The crazy uncle archetype fits me well. I’d rather be right than respected; right than accepted; rather be right than with conformity tainted, with broad brush painted, me and the truth unacquainted.

Yeah, I’m a pugnacious little prick, North Florida redneck from way back, never sure I’m on the right track but not afraid to circle back, take the other tack, fly through the flak. Wish others could learn that trick, see what makes me tick.

Because this liberal moron bullshit just makes me sick.

In general, I like Mac OS. It’s stable, renders fonts at 5K far, far better than Windows and generally gets out of my way.

But there is no good music player on the platform. Not the first one. It’s the glaring gap of the entire OS.

iTunes is an abomination of application overreach, poor coding and features an inscrutable and hostile user interface. And somehow all the alternatives are even worse.

I don’t want some damn media manager snarfing up my whole music library. I don’t want it re-encoded, dropped into folders, made into playlists automatically, fucking album art downloaded or my data uploaded to the goddamn cloud.

I just. Want. To. Play. Music.

Is that so hard?

Right now I use Clementine but that hasn’t had a new release in over two years and it has various bugs (such as sometimes not advancing to the next track).

Why is a simple music player so difficult? I’d even pay for it if a decent one existed but the paid ones also look disastrous.

As with smartphones, I’m not the target market I know because I don’t want to “social” my music into the “cloud” — I just want to listen to the goddamn songs.

But apparently that’s asking the impossible.