Your Experienced Judgement Is Racist, Sir!

For a bit of perspective that is sure to go unreported in the USA press and elsewhere, please read this first-hand account of the reason why the KAL flight crashed a few weeks ago.

After reading that, my opinion of just what went wrong on that 777 is that you can call it two ways, at least:

1. Asian culture is broken when it comes to training pilots or
2. Pilot Error every.single.crash. – and gee why does this keep happening?

Of course, to point out that typical Asian cultures are deficient when it comes to training a pilot competent to fly his own plane (vs. trusting the robots) when compared to the West is . . . RACIST so feel free to just forget you read the whole thing, and feel comfortable flying all over Asia with pilots having “10,000 hours of flight experience”

Too Outrageous, Even for Me!

• Homeowner has a mortgage for $400k
• State considers fair value to be $200k
• State condemns mortgage and pays bondholders of mortgage backed security “fair” value of $160k
• State charges it off as bad debt at a value of $190k
• Homeowner is offered a “refinance” of $190k
• State profits $30k
• Bondholders who took the risk on the original note are out on their ass
• Homeowner gets “$10k equity” in their home

Update:

• Homeowner gets $65,000 federal and state income tax bill

Oh, and P.S. in addition to being morally repugnant, it is also clearly against the law in California.  Not that illegality is enough to stop a bureaucrat in California, apparently.  Now I have to go take a shower after reading about this plan.  Here’s hoping the City of Richmond, California ends up in bankruptcy after thoroughly bungling this horrible idea.

Good For Them

The world, and especially the female half of that part blessed with running water, electricity, and telecommunications, is all abuzz about the birth of the new royal baby in UK.  The male half is roundly deriding the female half, and saying what’s the big deal/big whoop/don’t care.  Well I do care.

Hold on there.

A little.  I care a little.  I am very happy for the (royal) couple, on a human level.  I am especially happy for Prince Harry, in particular.  You see, in addition to being the latest in a long line of inbred royalty, the new baby is also part of a new family (which is a Positive Good al to itself).  We have a Father/Prince who is not only a genuine warrior but “gets it” when it comes to being a warrior (another Good Thing).  He is now the proud father of a first-child-son (two more Postive Goods) who it in line for his throne after him (yet another).  So good for Prince Harry x5.  Plus he continues to win at life because he has a hot wife, who can bear children, and who for the short term future is going to have a fantastic set of knockers.

So tell me where’s the criticism coming from?  Sure I’m not standing outside Buckingham Palace in the heat, but I’m also not joining the 100,000 people at a NASCAR race this weekend either.  Different strokes for different folks, just let them be happy already.

What If We Threw a Paradigm-Shift Party . . .

. . . and nobody showed up?

Everything you know* is wrong.
*about vitamin supplements being a good thing for everybody in general

Read this: The Vitamin Myth: Why We Think We Need Supplements and then stop taking vitamin pills unless you have a diagnosed deficiency that’s fixed by taking supplements.  I think I’ve just sworn off ’em personally and I’ll encourage my family to make an experiment for a year to see how we feel without popping pills.

How Do You Eat An Elephant?

I cleaned my garage today.  My Darling Wife took off to the San Antonio Zoo with her girlfriend and a haffadozen children, and they ran out of seats in the van.  As soon as I heard I was the odd-man-out, I thought “finally, I’ll have a legit DAY to work out in the garage with no ‘can you be done now?s”

So for about 10 hours with a couple of meal breaks, I cleaned up the garage.  Only one bag of trash and one bag of recycling were taken out, plus some cardboard – it’s not Junk, it’s Stuff!  How deep was this cleaning, you ask?  Whereas previously walking in the garage resembled modern dance between the piles and there were specific places to place a foot . . . I swept the entire garage floor.  And whereas my bench had become a place to store stuff between working on stuff, I cleaned the entire benchtop, most of it with isopropanol to clear out some stains.

• Step 1: Find something out of place
• Step 2: Put it where it goes
• Step 3: Repeat steps 1 & 2 as necessary

It’s The _______, Stupid!

Between the time Trayvon Martin was killed and the time George Zimmerman was acquitted by a jury of both Murder and Manslaughter, about 11,000 people were shot dead in the United States of America.  This could be spun as a problem of guns being too readily available, or as a problem of “stand your ground” laws unreasonably expanding the concept of self-defense – and the Obama administration are trying those angles*.

Hold on there.

93% of those shootings were young black males shooting other young black males.

A caller to a local radio show recounted the experience of coming from UK to USA and not being able to hang out with black people.  He described the universal sense of entitlement among the black culture here and the culture of violence as a “social disease”.

But banning horrible cultural elements (or trying to reduce them) is decried as racist.  So: is it better to tread lightly on black cultural sensitivities in America, or is it better to try to reform black culture even though it is racist and hurts feelings?  If your own demographic were the source and cause of statistically almost ALL shooting deaths in your country, would you consider it a gun problem or a culture problem?

It’s the culture, stupid.

********
Gun control: it’s not about the gun.

Zimmerman Acquitted. Good.

I was praying for him, and I’m glad he’s off the hook.  For a while there I thought we were witnessing our first hugely-publicized soviet style Show Trial, where the outcome is known before the charges are ever presented.  Then I was worried about the all-female jury being susceptible to the emotional presentation from the persection.  But the women were able to see logic and reason at least as well as everybody in the Police department that refused to press charges in the first place.

Now there are cries from the racists that there must be a federal trial.  I’ll be happy to give those people some credence as soon as they tell me the names of the people murdered by “gun violence” in “gun free” Chicago, without having to look it up.  Joseph Stalin had a name for these:

Useful Idiots.

I will consider it a very promising sign indeed if Eric Holder’s Department of “Justice” declines to pursue federal charges.

“Whoopsy”

Or, to quote Governor Perry: “Oops.”

The 777 that crashed in San Francisco was being flown by a pilot in-training.  He has thousands of hours in other planes, but only 43 on the 777 and had never flown into that airport before.

Well I suppose if we’re willing to give brain surgeons a mulligan we’ll just . . . oh, wait . . .

“Happy forth”

Well, I don’t know about forever . . .

The celebration is of Independence Day.  The date itself is almost arbitrary, really.  It is a coincidence that the Declaration was signed on the fourth of July.  It could have been the fifth or the third, and we would likely not have broken free of Mother England any sooner.  This past Thursday, everybody was saying “Happy Fourth” at each other – and for once it suited me just fine.

When your every action is spied-upon by your servants “for your safety” and there is no riot; When over half your money is taken from you before it hits your accounts and we re-elect them all who rubber stamp the tax law; When you catch flak for even contemplating going out with an UNloaded arm in public; When a teenager sits in jail for quoting a published song during a social media conversation; When your little girls’ privates are fondled by a bull dyke in the name of security; When you can’t shoot off even Black Cats or Lady’s Fingers for fear of being arrested;

I think it is safe to say that Independence Day is well and truly a sham.  It used to bother me that people say the name of the holiday on other days but not on Independence Day (merry Christmas, happy Thanksgiving, etc).  Anymore, it bothers me if on the Fourth of July someone does say “happy independence day” because it used to be a free country.  Now look at you.

The man said, “Fat, drunk, and stupid is no way to go through life, son.” but now it has become the New American Standard.  Way to go.

********

I think next year I’ll just tell people “happy forth” and mean it.  That is to say, ‘I hope you can go on from this moment, and manage to be happy as a slave to a system you don’t know exists, let alone understand’.  I shall henceforth intend “happy forth” to be a paraprhase, but in my heart I will be sad while I smile and say it, because it is a paraphrase of only part of a phrase.

Good Times and Teamwork: iartman Texas Imagery and Graphic Design for the WIN!

A couple of the guys associated with iartman achieved several objectives at once last Saturday:

1. Promote a Good Cause
2. Have Fun
3. Make contacts to get in the door for more MMA graphic arts promotional work in Central Texas
4. Free tickets to see some good fights

I was one of the iartman photographers and got some pictures that were technically good, and some that were technically not so good but the content more than made up for it.  Shooting action, in the dark, through a chain link fence, doesn’t always come out so great . . . but  the graphic arts man at iartman did his thing, and facebook is now full of much love for the results: