Wednesday Night Open Thread

I first heard of Halley’s Comet on September 23, 1966. That was night the TV show The Time Tunnel first aired the episode about Halley’s Comet pass by Earth in 1910. I’d never heard of Halley’s Comet before then, but it fascinated me.

That’s why I was paying attention when a space probe first visited Halley’s Comet in 1986.


[The YouTube]

So, what do you want to talk about? Got something you’d like to share? A thought? Some wisdom? Some stupidity? Hey, it’s up to you. It’s Wednesday Night Open Thread.

What’s on your mind?

HG Wells Called: He Wants His Time Machine Back

Gaffing while trying to boost his foreign policy cred, Joe Biden bragged that he got a call complaining about President Trump from Britain’s current Prime Minister, “Margaret Thatcher“.

How embarrassing. I just hope Winston Churchill has a sense of humor.

Won’t You Be My Neighbor


[Why Cities Exist] (Viewer #1,343,584)

They have a lot of downsides, but if you can keep them fed with resources, the upsides outweigh all.

Link of the Day: Wait Till You See the Trendline on This, It’s Perfect

[High Praise! to Crime Prevention Research Center]

Major New Research on School Safety: Schools that Allow Teachers to Carry Guns Haven’t Seen School Shootings During School Hours

BONUS LINK (via Vice): Your phone is a bug owned by the company that sold it to you, and they’re using it to gather data on you to sell to marketers

Your Phone Is Listening and it’s Not Paranoia

Twice a day for five days, say during your phone conversations “I need some cheap shirts for work.”

[High Praise! to Oppo for bringing this topic up]

Think you have a link that’s IMAO-worthy? Send it to harvolson@gmail.com. If I use your link, you will receive High Praise! (assuming you remember to put your name in the email)]

Trump Truths: Grudge

Not saying President Trump has a grudge against CNN, but during White House pressers, he makes their reporter ask questions by spelling them out with wooden letter blocks. Then he knocks them down with a baseball and yells “kewpie doll!”

New York Times to Start Publishing Tax Returns of Everyone Who Cancels Subscription

“We’re the new bully pulpit. Minus the pulpit part.”

NEW YORK (AP) – Fresh off the intoxicating rush of power inherent in releasing the tax returns of the most powerful man in the world without his permission, the New York Times announced that it will become the official policy of the paper to release the tax returns of anyone who earns its wrath, beginning with those people who have cancelled a subscription to the print edition of the New York Times.

Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger explained how the new policy came about.

“We’re sitting here,” said Sulzberger, “publishing garbage stories about gay presidential candidates and unnamed royal babies and junk like that – no one pays us any mind. We say that we’ve got Trump’s tax returns, and next thing you know, everyone’s reading newspapers again. Or at least the Drudge Report, which is like an online newspaper. I wish WE were an online newspaper that people liked reading. We are going broke so fast.”

“Not that we’re really in this for the money anyway,” said Sulzberger. “We mostly just like telling people what to do and pushing them around when they don’t do it. We’ve warned Trump numerous times in our op-eds not to be a sitting President who I didn’t vote for, but he just wouldn’t listen. So we went behind his back and published his private information that has absolutely nothing to do with our policy disagreements or his ability to run the country. It’s like the accountant version of a Stormy Daniels interview.”

“So,” Sulzberger continued, “I thought, if this ‘publishing tax returns instead of news’ thing is going to make us rich and famous like that one frog from the Muppet documentary, maybe we could get SUPER rich and famous if we published even more tax returns. Now, who do we hate more than thieves, murderers, President Trump, and the musical Newsies? People who’ve cancelled their print subscriptions, that’s who! So we get to hurt little people who can’t fight back, which is fun, plus maybe they decide to pay us money to not hurt them any more, or ‘resubscribe’ as the suits in marketing like us to call it. Win-win!”

Let’s be honest,” concluded Sulzberger, somehow unaware of the irony contained in his speaking that particular introductory clause, “sure, you can read all the slanted, made-up news you want on Facebook for free, but wouldn’t you rather pay us just a little so your neighbor doesn’t find out your charitable giving makes Beto look like Mother Theresa?”

—–

< Deplatforming Is Not The New Book Burning Because Deplatforming Is Carbon Neutral (an Editorial by Harvey)

The Slightest Crime (Song Parody)

[High Praise! to Oppo]

The Slightest Crime (to the tune of “The Longest Time” by Billy Joel)

Whoa, oh, oh
For the longest time

If you said goodbye to us tonight
There would still be someone to indict
What else could we do?
We all conspired to prove
That something happened — for the longest time

Once presumption of innocence is gone
How the show and entrapments can go on
That’s why you find us
Trying to put our harms behind us
(But Biden’s been there for the longest time)

Whoa, oh, oh, oh
For the wronged, it’s time
Whoa, oh, oh
For the jaundiced —

We’re that voice you’re hearing on your phone
And the only principle we’ve shown
Is how we hate you
And how you baited us to
That hasn’t happened for the slightest crime

Maybe this won’t last very long
But it felt so right
Spies can’t be be wrong
Maybe we’ve been hoping too hard
But we’ve gone this far
And it’s more than we hoped for

Who knows how much further we’ll go on?
Maybe we’ll be sorry when you’re gone . . .
Nah, we’ll take our chances
We all get our book advances
Life hasn’t been fair for the longest time

We had second thoughts once before
We said to ourselves
Go on, two years more
Now we know the fighter that you are
Like Underdog so far
And Joe got what he’s groped for.

We don’t care what consequence it brings
We have Fall Guy Mueller for such things
We wanted so bad
We think you ought to know that
We intend to hound you for the longest time

Whoa, oh, oh, oh
For the longest time
Whoa, oh, oh
For the longest time

Straight Line of the Day: Prince Harry’s Newborn Baby Son Will Be Named…

Works like this: I feed you Moon Nukers a straight line, and you hit me with a punch line in the comments.

Prince Harry’s newborn baby son will be named…

The Illustrated Frank J: It Pays to Be Industrious

[source]

Disappearing Leftist Things

I’ll start…

* Occupy Wall Street

* Al Gore’s “We Can Solve It” (that was a fun one)

* The Coffee Party

* MoveOn.org

* Global Cooling

* Overpopulation

* The ozone hole

—–

Anything else the left has tried to slip down the memory hole?

A Request To Our Blog Friends…

Got a little housecleaning to do. And I have a request if you’re a blogger who has IMAO in your blogroll: Update our link or feed.

Here’s the background… back in 2017, IMAO added HTTPS protocol. That meant you could access IMAO securely at https://www.imao.us/

Now, we didn’t do anything to enforce that. By that I mean you could still type in HTTP and get to the blog, but if you typed HTTPS then you’d get to the blog securely.

Recently, though, we began forcing HTTPS. That means that if you type HTTP, or click a bookmark or link with HTTP, you’ll get redirected to HTTPS automatically.

Now, while that sounds all nice and good, there’s a side effect from this. Some blog feeds that try to go to HTTP instead of HTTPS just don’t work. This is true of third party feeds, and IMAO uses a third party feed. So, what’s this rinky-dink third party we’re using? Google.

You see, Google owns Feedburner, and it’s actually Feedburner we use. And some blogs that have us listed by the feed don’t update. For example, here’s a screenshot from Harvey’s blog:

Feed issue

See where it says that the blog last updated 2 weeks ago? That’s because it’s pulling from the old feed. It needs to be refreshed.

So, now that you see what’s happening, if you run a blog and have IMAO in your blogroll, check to ensure you have the current URL (the HTTPS instead of HTTP) or the current feed. You might even want to refresh it — remove it and add it back.

Yeah, I know, that’s a bit of a pain to do, but it would help out. And, you might want to check others in your blogroll that haven’t updated recently. It could be that they have, but they also switched to HTTPS and it messed up their feed.

Thanks. We would appreciate it.

Random Thoughts: Hellbender Cover and Gun Control

It’s 2019 and we still don’t have a toaster you can take in the bathtub.

Ah, another day on the internet. Time to find some people I don’t like and try to make them feel bad.

I did wonder if eventually they’d reference the famous “Get him a body bag!” line in Cobra Kai, and the way they did was pretty surprising.

I didn’t care much about the Mueller report beforehand and everything subsequent has just made me care less and less.
It became obvious right away there was nothing in there that seemed impeachable to anyone other than an extreme partisan, so it was like “Let’s move on.” Plenty more Trump awfulness coming down the pipeline.

The deal of capitalism—the deal that people like Bernie Sanders rejects—is that you can have more than you can possibly imagine—wealth and luxury people of the past couldn’t even comprehend—as long as you can put up with someone else having a lot more.

The Android Studio debugger shows the contents of a byte array in decimal. What is this? A programming language for children?

-103? What byte is -103?
I don’t think I ever in my life have dealt with a signed byte displayed in decimal. I don’t even know how to translate that to something useful.

I’m usually fine with these more modern languages that don’t give you memory access. When you’re doing trite things like describing how a GUI button behaves, they’re fine. But every now and then I have to do big boy programming with them and it is painful.

While talking about programming languages for children, I refuse to use “YES/NO” for booleans in Objective C. I’m not a baby.
Can’t razz on Objective C too much. It does give you a memcpy.

It seems to me that Joe Biden does have the best change against Trump, but 2016 left me with such a feeling that I absolutely no idea what’s going on that 2020 could end with a landslide going either way and neither result would feel that surprising.

I’ve never understood what rights gap the Equal Rights Amendment is supposed to fill.
A constitutional amendment we do need is a right to make a living. Licensing and regulation should be given the same scrutiny as restrictions on speech.

The left in this country have a huge problem with antisemitism and they absolutely do not want to have to deal with it.

That Beyond Meat seems cute, but if they can make it significantly cheaper than actual meat, then they have something. Capitalism is like 1000 times multiplier versus people purchasing something for ethical reasons.

I don’t know anything about the Prison Planet guy other than that he seemed pretty nutty so I avoided him. Then again, that describes a lot of people here so I don’t know if that means he should be deplatformed.

My view on climate change is that change is just a part of life, man. You gotta embrace change. Don’t get stuck in the old ways. Welcome the new.

States should pass a measure keeping socialist off the ballot since they’re commies, which it is illegal to be.

The left tactics to win a political battle are a bit like someone trying to win a brawl by throwing guns into the mix and then yelling, “But only people we like please use those.”
Oh yeah. I haven’t heard those numskulls bring up court packing in a while.

My next novel is coming out soon, and Ethan Nicolle (of Axe Cop fame) made the cover!
It has a katana in it which I find to be essential to good storytelling.

Here’s the full wraparound for the print version. Only regret is it’s hard to make out the name on the donut box because I thought it was pretty clever.

“What are the patient’s symptoms?”
“He got joo joo eyeballs.”
“Really? That’s rare.”
“He got monkey finger.”
“Both those things?!”
“He got walrus gumboot.”
“How is this man still alive?!”
“He got feet down below his knee.”
“Well, that’s normal.”

Bill de Blasio does have a path to victory, but it involves him surviving a virus that kills off 99% of the population.

There’s so much focus on which politician will win an election and what bill will get passed it’s like everyone forgot that the main point of politics is to have fun.

I found out from Smash Bros that the piece everyone knows as the theme to Super Mario Bros is actually called the “Ground Theme.” At least it’s not called something like “Suicide Is Painless.”

Oh man. I completely missed Cinco de Cuatro.

Why would you waste money on sunglasses when good ole squinting works nearly as well? Plus it makes you look badass like Clint Eastwood.

I’ve played enough video games to know how Game of Thrones ends: The iron throne comes alive and they have to fight it.

Palestinians? To Israel, they’re more like Enemy-estinians! #TopicalHumor

Sure, the patriarchy did get humanity from a bunch of loose tribes to an advanced prosperous civilization that landed on the moon, but if you have a better idea of how to do things, have at it.

Is Booker’s idea to license gun owners anymore constitutional than requiring a license for speech?
And what problem is he trying to solve with his expensive unconstitutional idea? A mass shooter isn’t going to go through a licensing process; he’ll just obtain one of the 400 million guns already out there like every other criminal.
Actually, every single one of Booker’s ideas seem to be just things to pester law-abiding gun owners and do absolutely nothing to stop any criminals from shooting someone.
No one seems to take the problem seriously. There are 400 millions guns out there. If someone wants a gun, they’re going to get one. Licensing, background checks, microstamping new guns won’t even have a nominal effect on criminals.
The laws that are shown to have an effect on gun crime are harsher sentences for using a gun in a crime–a law that has no effect on law abiding gun owners. Also won’t effect mass shootings, but no laws will.

I think people often confuse democracy with freedom, when in fact democracy is simply a tool that hopefully supports freedom, though 51% could vote to oppress the other 49%.

I’m starting to wonder if the analogy for democracy is refrigerator. It keeps your freedoms from spoiling right away, but doesn’t ultimately preserve them forever.

And one of the greatest aspirations of this country is protection of minority rights, and doesn’t majority rule seem like a particularly faulty way to go about that?

This may be sexist, but men who are fervently pro-abortion are about the creepiest thing imaginable.

There are countries with larger populations than the U.S., and theoretically they should be able to become richer than us. I think it’s unlikely for a country to pass the U.S. though because of one advantage no one else can match in the near future: We’re the least homogeneous.

I just realized I completely forgot who Hillary’s running mate was. That guy barely existed.
And while we’re remembering old things, remember Occupy Wall Street? Did anyone ever figure out what they wanted?
And was that whole “up twinkles” thing Occupy Wall Street supposedly did real or just something made by a brilliant satirist mocking them?

This doesn’t seem like a great time for a Netflix price raise with the much cheaper Disney+ and all its content on the horizon. With the first Netflix price raise, I didn’t think twice, but now Netflix is starting to lose value in my eyes.
Probably biggest value now is Prime Video. I watch a number of their original shows, but I only got Prime for the shipping.

That Could’ve Been a Lot Worse

In Florida, a 737 slid into a river with 136 people on board, with no fatalities.

Close call. That’d make a good 2016 presidential election metaphor. If Boeing created 263,000 jobs last month.