Veterans Day

I must admit, I'm mildly confused about the name of this particular holiday. I would swear there should be an apostrophe in there, but these guys disagree.

In any event, be kind to a veteran today. I offer my usual suggestion to buy one a drink, but you'll have to disinclude me this year. I'm sitting around at home whacked out on Vicodin after surgery, so I don't think drinking is indicated.

Votinatin'

Once again, the voters of Texas are being asked to poke around in the dog's breakfast that is the state constitution and fix some of the screw-ups from days gone by. As a handy service, I have compiled a list of how you should vote if you are crazy enough to take my advice on politics. My list only covers the Amendments on the ballot because out in the sticks where I live, that's all that's on the ballot.

1 - Against. I was unaware cities and counties possessed military bases. If buffer areas are needed, the entity responsible for the base needs to handle the problem, not the surrounding jurisdiction.
2 - For. If I'm living in my house, it should be taxed as my house, not taxed on the theoretical value if my house was an office building.
3 - Against. I fail to see why things being done differently in Harris County vs. Blanco County is something the state needs to worry about.
4 - For. I'm just slightly for this. I could be convinced otherwise by a strong argument.
5 - For. It's an adjustment to the reality on the ground. If you need more people than you can get, what are you supposed to do?
6 - Against. You want more bonds, come back and ask for them again.
7 - For. If there's no conflict between National Guard service, why would there be for the State Guard?
8 - Undecided. While in theory, I am fine with what the state is doing, I am uneasy at the state providing resources to handle what should be a purely federal function. Once the state starts down the path, the fed may expect it.
9 - Against. Beaches are so goddamned important we should strip property rights away from people based on the whims of the weather? You're either for private property or you're not. If the state wants public beaches, the Lege needs to pony up some cash and buy the land.
10 - For. Two year terms essentially become endless campaigns.
11 - For. Given my views on eminent domain, I'll take whatever limits I can get.

Further analysis can be found here and here.

If you have candidates, I certainly hope you've done some research on them before today. If not, stay home. We have enough ignuts making policy without the rest of the ignuts encouraging them.

And as always, be nice to your election workers.

Hardware, Software, and Safety

So Tam had a post up last week musing on the various and sundry mechanisms firearms designers and manufacturers have employed over the years to make their devices less susceptible to idiocy. She notes, quite rightly, that the only way to reduce accidental discharges is training, training, and more training. She closes on the fervent hope the someday we won’t try to mandate hardware fixes to software problems.

Nice pipe dream, Tam, but it ain’t ever gonna happen.

Here’s the problem. Hardware is cheap and easy. Software is tedious, time-consuming and expensive. In my day job, I am a project engineer in a manufacturing facility. I get to design and modify complicated equipment. I am at the front lines of dealing with the modern industrial safety culture in which nothing bad is ever permitted to happen to anyone, no matter how much they may deserve it. Before you think of me as even more of a heartless bastard, let explain what I mean by “deserve it”.

Large pieces of machinery are not very forgiving. Steel is, in all cases, harder than flesh and bone. If you stick your appendages into moving machinery, you will lose. Once you are of an age to have a full-time job, this should be immediately obvious. You deserve to lose if you don’t have a healthy respect for the machinery. At some level, the machinery has to function and sometimes that means bad things can happen if you insert yourself in the process. There’s just no getting around that if you want to get things done.

This doesn’t stop my corporate overlords from insisting on making every process safer. I have sat in meetings where people have tried to tell me we needed to redesign a process so the use of a dead blow hammer was no longer required. Why? One of our employees hit himself in the mouth with a hammer.

Think about that for a minute. A hammer is, quite literally, about the simplest iteration of hand tool imaginable. You can make one with a rock and a stick. If it gets any more basic, you’re using rocks to bang on things. There are people, and I work with them, who cannot be trusted with hammers because they hurt themselves.

So, if hammers are too fucking complicated, is there any hope for a really complicated device like a firearm?

The Prophet Orwell

Too many people in DC apparently think 1984 was an instruction manual. Steny Hoyer (D-underhead) comes to mind as he is currently working on our very own homegrown version of Newspeak. I’ll let you read his flatulent pertrouserations and decide for yourself.

By the way, let me make it clear: I don’t refer to nor do I believe that these are penalties. What we are saying is everybody will contribute, whether you are a business, [or] an individual, contribute to making sure that health care options are available to all of our citizens.

So, when the government forces you to pay for something you neither want nor need, that’s a contribution.

Nancy Pelosi (D-unce) has jumped on the bandwagon as well.

“It’s not really a public option,” she said. “It’s a consumer option.”

Got that? The government version of health care is a “consumer option”. Who exactly is the consumer and who is the consumed I leave up to your imagination.

Finally, the President is reportedly going to sign into law, if he hasn’t already, the odious Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act. We’ve got the Orwellian trifecta today. Two Newspeaks and a thought crime bill!

Orwell thought he was writing fiction. More and more it seems he was writing a prophecy.

On "Awareness"

Apparently October has been "breast cancer awareness month"...I'm aware. Who the hell isn't at this point? If you haven't seen the insipid pink ribbon graphics all over half the products at the grocery store, then I guess you don't eat. Hell, there is very little you can't buy right now in pink to "promote breast cancer awareness".

This may be a little controversial; however, I find the concept of "awareness" to be particularly distasteful, terribly retarded, and basically pretty worthless.

I get a few e-mails a year from friends asking for donations for a fun run, bike ride, or whatever else because they're "promoting awareness" of some advocacy group, whether it be the NCS, NDA, or whatever. Basically, I just ignore these pleas. Frankly, if you look carefully at the financials of most of these advocacy organizations, not one of them has any interest whatsoever in eliminating whatever disease it is for which they're "promoting awareness".

Actually, it is typically just the opposite; how in the hell are the heads of these groups going to keep their half-million to million dollar a year jobs if we don't continue to have rampant cancer or diabetes or whatever? What will these charity welfare types do to earn a real living? These organizations thrive because these diseases exist. They do what they must to appear to legitimately help and keep your money coming in, but not enough to actually do any real good. Don't believe me? Visit Charity Navigator.

Personally, I just wish people would keep the whole mess away from me. I think Christian Lander put it at least more diplomatically than I ever could. Note, he's writing satire about urbanite & wannabe white liberals, but I think it applies to anyone who thinks the concept of "awareness" is actually meaningful.

An interesting fact about white people is that they firmly believe that all of the world’s problems can be solved through “awareness.” Meaning the process of making other people aware of problems, and then magically someone else like the government will fix it.

This belief allows them to feel that sweet self-satisfaction without actually having to solve anything or face any difficult challenges. Because, the only challenge of raising awareness is people not being aware. In a worst case scenario, if you fail someone doesn’t know about the problem. End of story.

What makes this even more appealing for white people is that you can raise “awareness” through expensive dinners, parties, marathons, selling t-shirts, fashion shows, concerts, eating at restaurants and bracelets. In other words, white people just have to keep doing stuff they like, EXCEPT now they can feel better about making a difference.

Raising awareness is also awesome because once you raise awareness to an acceptable, aribtrary level, you can just back off and say “Bam! did my part. Now it’s your turn. Fix it.”

So to summarize – you get all the benefits of helping (self satisfaction, telling other people) but no need for difficult decisions or the ensuing criticism (how do you criticize awareness?). Once again, white people find a way to score that sweet double victory.

How about this: if you want to really do something meaningful to help fight breast cancer, send a check to a cancer research hospital, like UT MD Anderson Cancer Center with an innovative experimental treatment. If you don't have the money, but do have enough time to train for and take a bike ride or a 15K walk or whatever, why not think about splitting your time between getting some exercise and maybe going over to a hospital and volunteering to work with and help the sick people for whom you're supposedly "promoting awareness"? Volunteer to help people in need or without hope for a cure for their disease find active clinical trials programs. Maybe help someone who wouldn't otherwise be able to get to a trial by providing transport. You might actually do something productive with your time, other than bug the hell out of everybody else about nothing. And, you might actually make a difference, help someone, and have something REAL to feel good about.

Nuke Geneva

It's the only way to be sure we stop them in their tracks.

I Have None

I don't think I've mentioned this yet, but Regretsy is my new favorite website.

How Many?

So, being a bit amiss in keeping up with my book series, I note the new Robert Jordan & posthumous collaborator book will be out soon. I also note instead of a final volume, we will get a final 3 volumes, bringing the grand total up to 15 volumes if you count the prequel.

15 volumes, each the size of The Lord of The Rings. Seriously, was all the verbiage necessary? Surely some editing could have trimmed it all down to a more manageable number. Deleting the endlessly repeated bromides on women vs. men would have been a great start.

Anyhow, 4 also answers the titular question in regards to dogs. We will have 4 puppies if all goes well.