Clowns. They're STILL all clowns.

Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) couldn't be bothered to read the article he linked in this tweet to learn that the goods sold he's so up in arms about (see what I did there?) were sold in 2014, under the Obama administration. Way to go, champ.

https://twitter.com/ChrisMurphyCT/status/1092627434053222400

Link to the CNN article.

And a screen shot of the tweet for when he inevitably deletes it without further explanation.

Bombshell, indeed.

Clowns. They're all clowns.

Yesterday, the progressive left exploded in outrage over the conditions under which immigrant children were being held by the Trump administration, citing an article from AZ Central. Looking at one of the pics, it's easy to see what set them off:

The only problem was that the article (and accompanying pictures) was from 2014, smack in the middle of Barack Obama's second term. A lot of tweets were very quickly deleted, but not before they were captured for posterity over at Twitchy.

Well, those progressive geniuses are at it again. Today, it's this pic...from a 2016 article during the waning months of the Obama administration:

It's worth noting that, according to the two year old article, this isn't a "prison bus" for babies, but one equipped to safely transport toddlers and small children for field trips. But don't bother telling that to reliable CNN token "conservative" Ana Navarro:

America, this cannot be who we are. https://t.co/RaINBHGh0Y

— Ana Navarro (@ananavarro) May 28, 2018

And in the likely event that she deletes the tweet, here's the screen shot:

Clowns. All of them.

NFL rules and the first amendment

National Football League owners approved a rule this week requiring on-field players and team staff to stand during the national anthem. Predictably on the left, there's a 4-alarm freakout over first amendment rights and threats to boycott the NFL.

Jacksonville Jaguars defensive end Dawuane Smoot weighed in on Twitter:

Freedom of speech does not exist for NFL players now, we get fined for protesting for something we believe in, FINE ME!!!! You can’t change my opinion, and can’t stop my protest I have a right as an American to protest when I feel there is injustice in this country.

— Dawuane Smoot (@Bigsmoot_94) May 23, 2018

OK, everyone, repeat after me: "This is not a first amendment issue!"

Freedom of speech still exists for Dawuane Smoot and every other player in the NFL. The first amendment to the constitution restrains the government from infringing on your rights to freedom of speech, not your employer.

My employer often sends me to speak at marketing and industry events, and if I opened a talk with "...but first, let me cram my pet social justice cause down your throat", I'd be quickly shown the door, and for very good reason.

Go ahead and use your fame and name recognition to protest, but do it on your own time. Better yet, use some of that fat paycheck and buy some commercial air time during the game to make your statement.

Journalism in decline

I read this Reuters article on last night's bombing in Mississauga, Ontario, and the closing paragraph had me scratching my head:

India’s Foreign Minister Sushma Swaraj said in a tweet that the she was in constant touch with the Consul General in Toronto and the Indian High Commissioner in Canada and that the missions would work round the clock.

Um...why? Sure, the bombing took place at an Indian restaurant, but beyond that, there's nothing in the article hinting that that had anything to do with it, or that any Indian nationals were targeted or injured in the bombing.

Whatever happened to who, what, when, where, why, and how? This is lazy, incomplete reporting.

The War On Boys

Blowing off the dust and clearing the cobwebs here so I can put up a new post. Geez...it's been a while.

There's been another school shooting, which means it's time for another toxic "debate" on gun laws. I use scare quotes there because, as we all know, there's no real debate, just meaningless posturing and moral preening from the gun grabbers and repeated denials that they don't really want to take away your guns when we know that's just not true.

But as always with these incidents, our shitty politics drives everyone into a pointless argument over the tool used by the latest unhinged high school kid while we all studiously ignore the more important point: Why in the hell are so many boys opening fire on their classmates? If over the last 20 years there'd been a rising trend of boys stabbing their classmates to death, what would we all be talking about? Surely not "common sense" knife control. Instead, we'd be having a more useful debate over what's causing boys to act out in such a horrifying way. It's time to separate the debate over why school shooters do what they do from the debate over the tools that they use.

I hate to break out the "back in my day" shtick, but when I was a kid in elementary school, boys were allowed to be boys. We played tag (sometimes aggressively), we played dodgeball (very often aggressively), and we got into fist fights. By the time we were in high school, we'd more or less sorted our shit out. Not that we were all perfectly well-adjusted young adults or anything like that, but we weren't complete and total assholes, either.

But something happened starting in the 1980s or thereabouts, and boys were no longer allowed to be boys. Boys became something to be feared and despised and, ultimately, controlled. In the process, boys' natural tendency towards aggressive play became something to be suppressed and stigmatized. These observations are nothing new. Christina Hoff Sommers wrote on this topic 18 years ago.

But it's not just what's happening in schools. In media and pop culture, one of the few remaining acceptable objects of ridicule is the American male. Just watch TV for a while, and watch the non-stop parade of male inferiority. Here's just one example of it in an Allstate commercial currently airing pretty regularly. The open contempt for males is palpable.

It's time we had an honest discussion about the "war on boys" and its links to school shootings.

The Kermit Gosnell case: When politics kills

It's astonishing that the coverage (or lack thereof) of Kermit Gosnell's abortion house of horrors has become a bigger story than the story itself. But such is the world we live in today. Had this happened 20 or so years ago when things were slightly less polarized, I imagine the story would have received a level of attention approaching that which it deserves. As has been already pointed out elsewhere, this story has so many sensational aspects to it that, under other circumstances, would have had editors everywhere working their entire reporting staff around the clock to cover every angle of it. Even after you get past the horrifying mental imagery of "rain[ing] fetuses" and babies surviving abortion only to have their spines "snipped", there's still the story of the politically-driven systemic failure of even the illusion of any kind of oversight of the abortion industry.

Right-of-center bloggers and commentators have opined that there's a left-wing media blackout on the story, and I think that's true, but only up to a point. The coverage on ostensibly right-leaning Fox News has been pretty thin outside of their opinion programming, and even today, just as the story is really gaining momentum and traditional media outlets beginning to acknowledge their dereliction, the latest item is buried "below the fold" on the foxnews.com web site.

Inevitably the story will turn to how this was allowed to happen. The gun-grabbing left likes to point to some imagined culpability of the National Rifle Association whenever there's a horrific mass shooting like Aurora or Newtown. But at some point, the Abortion Unlimited crowd will have to answer for the very real culpability of groups like NARAL for their militant cowing of politicians to the point that they fail to stop a serial murderer like Kermit Gosnell.

Gun owners...the new drunk drivers

It occurs to me that the campaign against American gun owners can be compared to the campaign against drunk driving of the early 1980s. I came to this realization during an e-mail exchange I was having with a group of co-workers on the whole gun control debate, and the more I think about it, the more apt I think the comparison is. I'll just paste below a portion of an e-mail I sent on that thread:


...The larger point is that if the gun control lobby’s goal is, truly, to place “reasonable” limits on private ownership of firearms, they’ll have to do so with a Constitutional amendment. As things stand now, they get to hop in front of the TV cameras whenever something horrifying like Sandy Hook goes down, gnash their teeth and rend their garments…and let the donations pour in. But if they got their way, they’d have two choices: Cease operations and hit the unemployment line or…push for even MORE restrictions.

Take a look at MADD (Mothers Against Drunk Drivers). I’m old enough to remember when they came into being. Before MADD, getting popped for drunk driving generally meant having the cops take your car keys and getting tossed into the drunk tank until you sobered up. It was only if you actually damaged property or injured or killed someone as a result of drunk driving that there were any real consequences. Then MADD was founded by a lady after (IIRC) her daughter was killed by a drunk driver. This lady was tireless in her efforts to make drunk driving a national issue, and she succeeded. Pretty soon, every state had laws on their books limiting blood alcohol content to .10. Victory! This lady could now get on with her life, right? Not so fast there, Skippy. MADD eventually decided that .10 was too high, and pushed for levels of .08 as a standard. Once again, MADD got their way, and now just about every state sets the legal limit at .08. Along the way, the penalties have gotten more and more severe, we have roadblocks set up specifically for the purpose of finding tipsy drivers, and there’s talk about lowering the BAC limit to .04.

It. Never. Ends.

Note: At the time of writing that e-mail I excerpted here I was writing off the top of my head, so some clarification is in order. First, it's Mothers Against Drunk DrivING, not DrivERS as I originally wrote. Second, it was, indeed, the mother's daughter who was killed by a drunk driver. The woman who founded MADD is Candace Lightner, and she left the group after five years because they didn't know when to quit.

Monster spray

I've let this blog go sort of inactive lately, but it's hard to let something as horrific as last week's shootings in Connecticut to go by without comment.

When children are very young, they often harbor a fear of the dark that manifests itself as a fear of monsters under the bed or in the closet. As parents we do our best to assuage these fears, and sometimes play along with those fears with such monster countermeasures as spraying air freshener in the room while explaining to the troubled youngster that it's "monster spray" which keeps monsters out.

This is, in effect, what the anti-gun crowd is doing with all the gun laws they'll be proposing over the coming weeks. What happened last week in Newtown, CT was as awful an event as we're likely to see for some time, and it goes without saying that nobody on either side of the gun debate wants to see anything like that happen again. But while the anti-gun crowd is clamoring for monster spray, the pro-gun side of the debate is begging to do something about the monsters.

But don't take it from me, take it from St. Louis County Police Chief Tim Fitch:

If there’s somebody that’s really hellbent on doing something like this, they’re not going to care what the law is.

Chief Fitch advocates arming school personnel much like many airline pilots are now armed as a last-ditch defense against skyjacking.

Doug Ross points out the futility of gun-free zones in this post, and Gateway Pundit points out that besides gun-free zones, the other thing all these recent cases of mass shootings have in common is undiagnosed (or untreated) mental illness.

But this won't stop politicians from rushing out useless legislation rooted in emotional response and wasting everyone's time and energy on equipping us all with monster spray.

Update: Oh, and by the way...don't count on the media's vast expertise in firearms to correctly frame the debate.

Outsourcing and offshoring

One of Obama's favorite attacks on Mitt Romney is that Romney "outsourced" jobs while he was in the private equity business at Bain Capital. That may be true, and in fact, it's pretty damned likely that it's true. But let's not confuse "outsourcing" with "offshoring".

If you decide to hire a plumber to fix your sink instead of fixing it yourself, you've outsourced that job. If a company reassigns a business function to an outside contractor, that's also outsourcing. It doesn't matter whether that outside contractor operates inside our outside the United States, it's outsourcing. If that contractor does operate outside the US, then it's offshoring, as well as outsourcing.

Let's take the example of two fictitious banks...Security First Trust, and Fred's Bank. Both banks have decided they can save money by focusing on their core competencies - banking - and letting someone else handle the IT business.

Fred's Bank is a regional bank headquartered in the Southeast United States. They own a single data center in Columbia, South Carolina supporting all of their operations but have entered into an agreement with Joe's Global Systems under which all of Fred's IT employees will transfer to Joe, and Joe will operate Fred's Columbia data center for a fee. Fred has outsourced his IT business.

Security First Trust is a global concern with subsidiaries all over the world, and they have a major data center in Mumbai, India. By consolidating all their IT functions in Mumbai, they can eliminate the bulk of their US-based IT staff and move all the US IT services to India. They've offshored their IT business, but because they own the Mumbai data center, they haven't really outsourced it.

There's a difference between "outsourcing" and "offshoring", and when Obama and his minions bring up the "outsourcing" charge, someone needs to make them explain exactly what they mean.

Gadget review: Archos 80 G9 Android Tablet

It's been a while since I've done a gadget review, so I figured it's time.

Mrs. Pool Bar decided it was finally time to make the jump to an e-reader. She's not exactly a Luddite, but she is a little resistant to gadgetry. We read a lot of the same authors, so for her to catch up on the books I've already read that she also wanted to read, her only alternative was to go out and get the dead tree edition. I have a rooted Nook Color running both the Kindle and Nook apps for Android, as well as Kobo (old Borders) and Sony Reader apps. I have a handful of titles on the Nook, Kobo and Sony apps, but the vast majority of my e-book collection is on Kindle. Still, I wanted my wife to have access to any of the books that I'd already purchased.

As it happened, I had a fair amount of Amazon gift card credits parked in my account, so I figured I could do something on the cheap. And by cheap I mean free or nearly free, depending on how much I spent. I was tempted to go with the Kindle Fire, but that locks you into Amazon-only content, and even if you root it, the lack of external SD card storage makes it a non-starter. So during my poking around on Amazon's site, I stumbled upon the Archos 80 G9 tablet, which was right within the price range I was looking at (right around $250 with shipping).

I have to say that I'm pretty impressed with this gadget, and find myself suffering a bit of tech envy as a result. The display is very crisp, performance is snappy, and there's very little to complain about. There are plenty of detailed reviews available elsewhere online (try CNET and Engadget, for starters), so I'll just post here some of my own observations. First the bad:

• Camera: The 80 G9 sports just a single, front-facing camera. OK, I get it, it's intended for video chat and is really more of a web cam, but...still. Just try snapping a picture when you can't see the picture frame.
• SD Card Slot: When you insert a Micro SD card into the slot, it protrudes from the case by about a millimeter, maybe a little less. The slot's positioned right next to the power switch, which protrudes from the case by about a millimeter, maybe a little less. You can surely see the problem that potentially represents.

And to top it off-- actually, that's about it. I have no other real complaints about the tablet. Sure, I can see the built-in kickstand (a very convenient feature) breaking off at some point, but short of making it from tungsten steel, I don't know how much can be done about that.

The tablet shipped with Android 3.something (Honeycomb) installed, but Archos was already in the process of rolling out Android 4.0.3 (Ice Cream Sandwich, or ICS) as a downloadable or over-the-air (OTA) update. Sure enough, about 10 days after it arrived, a notification popped up saying that the ICS update was available. The update went seamlessly, but post-update, there were intermittent WiFi drops and some truly awful slowdowns. These issues were pretty widely experienced, and Archos was quick to issue another update, which also went smoothly and seems to have cleared up the issues. This is important because it's indicative of Archos's level of commitment to the product and sustaining support.

You can pick up the 8GB Archos 80 G9 for under $250, and at that price it's definitely worthy of serious consideration if you're looking for a decent Android alternative to the $500 (and up) iPad.

UPS: When it absolutely, positively has to be there some day

Last week I ordered a new gadget for Ms. Pool Bar from Amazon, and opted for the standard shipping since there was no big rush for it. Amazon estimated deliver for today, 2/29. So far so good, right? Well, a few hours later I get an e-mail saying the item had shipped, so I figured maybe it would arrive a day or two early. Since I'm one of those who'll keep pushing the elevator call button in the hopes the elevator will get there faster, I checked the UPS tracking link that Amazon provided and saw that the package had left Phoenix, arrived in Tempe and arrived...back in Phoenix. I kept checking the progress over the next few days and was vaguely amused. Today it shows that it's out for delivery, which is on schedule so I'm not really complaining, but check out this shipping history (click for larger image):

I'm particularly amused by the package's stopover in Louisville. What did it do, run out for a pack of cigarettes while it was there? It's almost as if UPS had to go to extra effort NOT to provide 2-day delivery.

Ending the gay marriage drama

I have a plan for putting an end to the gay marriage debate once and for all. A laughably simple plan. I'm not a lawyer so I'm sure there are holes in it, but I think it would be a great start.

Since marriage is rooted in our history and culture as a religious construct, let's just get the state out of the marriage business altogether. Within public law, marriage would be replaced with...I don't know...let's call it "domestic partnership". Any consenting adult would be allowed to enter into a domestic partnership with another one, subject to the following constraints:

• A domestic partnership may consist of no more than two people.
• No party to a domestic partnership can be related by blood to another party of the same partnership.
• Nobody can be party to more than one domestic partnership at a time.
• If a state decides that rules against polygamy constitute unjust intrusion on religious doctrine, it can just drop that first rule.

Within the law, the word "spouse" can be retained as a term describing any party to a domestic partnership, but someone will need to fire up Word and do a global search and replace to change all occurrences of "husband" and "wife" with "spouse". And hey, if the law specifically refers to a husband or wife anywhere, then that section of law probably needs to be reviewed, anyway.

This eliminates the stickiest part of the debate - that of redefining "marriage" - and allows adherents of a given faith to preserve the definition of marriage as their religion sees it, and lets the law provide equal protection to all spouses without regard to sexual orientation.

Yeah, I know...it won't be enough for those activists of no religious affiliation who'll say they want to be married, dammit! They'll say that because for them the issue isn't about legal status, it's about wanting to feel included and accepted. But the law is concerned only with equal protection, it doesn't really give a crap about our feelings.

Having solved that problem, let me go take a look at that national debt thing...

Liberal bias goes pathological

I've gotten pretty used to seeing liberal bias in the media, but at least it's usually fairly subtle. Not so with this breathtaking example by Emily Sohn in Discovery News:

Still don't see the bias? Ok, here...I've highlighted it for you:

I'm not sure why this piece hasn't picked up more traction on conservative blogs or conservative Twitterdom. In fact, I lifted this from one of my favorite righty blogs, Ace of Spades HQ, which doesn't even remark on the obvious bias. Maybe they've become so accustomed to this type of bias that they don't even notice it any more.

The bias is so deep and widespread now, it's become a pathology. When I tweeted a link to the Discovery article inviting people (sarcastically, I thought) to spot the liberal bias, I received this response from @LouYoungNY:

So pathological is this bias that it's taken by liberals as an absolute truth that conservatives are intolerant and close-minded. Keep in mind that this article (presumably) got past fact-checkers and editors before publication.

Oh, and you may want to keep an eye on what your kids are reading for science.