Based on the documentation provided as part of James Damore’s discrimination suit, Google operates as a cult of left-wing progressives who promote an environment of hostility against conservatives, Republicans, Trump supporters, and white men. The Federalist has a summary, but here’s a few to give the flavor of the thing.

“Google furnishes a large number of internal mailing lists catering to employees with alternative lifestyles, including furries, polygamy, transgenderism, and plurality, for the purpose of discussing sexual topics. The only lifestyle that seems to not be openly discussed on Google’s internal forums is traditional heterosexual monogamy.”

A footnote next to the word “plurality” adds: “For instance, an employee who sexually identifies as ‘a yellow-scaled wingless dragonkin’ and ‘an expansive ornate building’ presented a talk entitled ‘Living as a Plural Being’ at an internal company event.”

[Google Manager Kim] Burchett once proposed creating a list she would personally manage of “people who make diversity difficult,” to include employees who did things like make statements “unsupportive of diversity.” She suggested the list could serve as a punishment that could incentivize “better” behavior among the offenders listed.

“You can’t support Donald Trump without also supporting his racism, misogyny, homophobia, and transphobia,” a Googler wrote in a lengthy communication on Trump supporters. “Or even worse, if you vote for Donald Trump because of his economic policy or because you feel the other party is corrupt, then what you’re saying is that economics is more important than the safety of your peers. This is where my tolerance ends: with intolerance.”

I don’t think this situation is unique to Google – it’s likely quite common at Silicon Valley tech firms. Google management actively encourages its left-wing progressive employees to gang up on those who don’t share their cult-like fixation on “diversity,” socialism and encouragement of sexual deviance. BadThink at Google will get an employee cut off from opportunities for advancement, but blacklisted in the insutry, and even threatened in their private lives. (Sounds more than a little bit like Scientology.)

Oh, by the way, the Progressive-Left wants all of society run according to this model.  Discrimination against those who hold “politically incorrect” viewpoints (wrongthink), punishment for wrongthink, networks of informers to report on people for wrongthink, and ultimately violence against those who hold wrongthink.

Black Pigeon Speaks has the details.

By NO means do I agree with all of BPS’ positions or statements. To cite just one difference of many: he favors government-run health care (and I don’t).

But I have found that, even where I find his views silly, his videos are good-faith (if somewhat sarcastic) attempts to support his positions with science and facts. That Youtube (which means Google/Alphabet) would censor him – and other content creators who happen to be politically incorrect – while continuing to allow a ton of Islamist terrorist content, is disturbing.

It seems that 4chan pushed back with malware bots that generate fake ad traffic. The fake, extra traffic causes Google/Youtube to overcharge their advertisers, making trouble for everyone. I don’t endorse that tactic at all. Still, one can’t help but admire the goal: to remind Google/Youtube that they, too, depend greatly on the goodwill of others for their fragile existence.

Lots of people seem to be moving to BitChute and Vid.me. But I like the new YouTube: they’ve been letting me watch my favorite content ad-free (since the first step in the censoring the scapegoated content is “de-monetize” it).

• Congress readies a bizarre resolution against WikiLeaks.
  

  It is the sense of Congress that WikiLeaks and the senior leadership of WikiLeaks resemble a non-state hostile intelligence service often abetted by state actors and should be treated as such a service by the United States.

  “Resemble”? The resolution is saying that if you *look like* anything Congress doesn’t appreciate, they can strip your First Amendment protections and take the U.S. to war with you.

  WikiLeaks, remember, is non-profit journalist service. They publish leaks. The traditional, First Amendment approach is that *the leaker* commits a crime and can be punished, but *the journalist or publisher* does not. Someone wants an exception, it seems, for super-effective journalists whom the government can’t control.

  More from Julian Assange, here.

• CNN endorses the undercover journalism of Project Veritas. Indirectly.

  A journalist snowed Breitbart employees by pretending to be someone they would trust. The journalist gave the story to CNN, who gladly reported it. Very embarrassing. But that is undercover “sting” journalism, like what James O’Keefe and Project Veritas do, and CNN and many lefties fulminate indignantly about them. Can you spell h-y-p-o-c-r-i-t-e-s? 🙂

• Google and Apple ban Gab (a Twitter competitor), censoring what you can do with your own phone.
  

  “Whatever is permissible under the First Amendment is what Gab allows onto its site.”

  …Gab’s Android app was available through Google’s app store until yesterday, when Google banned it, citing violations of its hate-speech policy…

  While Android users can install unapproved apps, it’s a cumbersome process…

  It’s difficult to credit Gab as a white-supremacist site when its cofounder is a Turkish Kurd and Muslim…who says “I’ve never supported Trump for a minute in my entire life”…

  Google is being plain evil. They’re saying *you can’t use a non-Google app to say anything to anybody that Google would not like*. What’s next, Google censoring your private emails? Remember, email is a phone app.

• Breitbart has more on Google’s other steps to punish conservative speech.

Flashback: When Facebook ex-employees admitted that Facebook routinely censors conservative news from their “Trending” section. Even if it was really trending.

A couple weeks ago, leftie rag The Nation basically told lefties to start getting over Trumprussia because the DNC, at least, just wasn’t hacked.

Former NSA experts say it wasn’t a hack at all, but a leak—an inside job by someone with access to the DNC’s system.

…[with the Russia narrative], we are urged to accept the word of institutions and senior officials with long records of deception. These officials profess “high confidence” in their “assessment” as to what happened in the spring and summer of last year…[but] an assessment is an opinion, nothing more, and to express high confidence is an upside-down way of admitting the absence of certain knowledge.

[On the other side,] Forensic investigators, intelligence analysts, system designers, program architects, and computer scientists of long experience and strongly credentialed are now producing evidence disproving the official version of key events last year…

The Nation quotes a report from Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS):

Hard science now demonstrates it was a leak—a download executed locally with a memory key or a similarly portable data-storage device. In short, it was an inside job…

Forensic investigations of documents made public two weeks prior to the July 5 leak by the person or entity known as Guccifer 2.0 show that they were fraudulent: Before Guccifer posted them they were adulterated by cutting and pasting them into a blank template that had Russian as its default language[, a setting that anyone can do]…

VIPS used the work of several investigators such as Disobedient Media, The Forensicator, Adam Carter (I mentioned them in my post explaining Guccifer 2.0 from five weeks ago), and others also. The Nation continues:

Under no circumstance can it be acceptable that the relevant authorities—the National Security Agency, the Justice Department (via the Federal Bureau of Investigation), and the Central Intelligence Agency—leave these new findings without reply.

[…]

The Intelligence Community Assessment [of Russian hacking], the supposedly definitive report featuring the “high confidence” dodge, was greeted as farcically flimsy when issued January 6. Ray McGovern calls it a disgrace to the intelligence profession. It is spotlessly free of evidence, front to back, pertaining to any events in which Russia is implicated. James Clapper, the former director of national intelligence, admitted in May that “hand-picked” analysts from three agencies (not the 17 previously reported) drafted the ICA. There is a way to understand “hand-picked” that is less obvious than meets the eye: The report was sequestered from rigorous agency-wide reviews…

Behind the ICA lie other indefensible realities. The FBI has never examined the DNC’s computer servers—an omission that is beyond preposterous. It has instead relied on the reports produced by Crowdstrike, a firm that drips with conflicting interests well beyond the fact that it is in the DNC’s employ. Dmitri Alperovitch, its co-founder and chief technology officer, is on the record as vigorously anti-Russian…

I’ve been blogging on the above points, for months. It’s nice to see a left-wing publication grapple with them, at last.

The greatest threat to your future, the greatest risk to the American Republic, is from the unprecented assault on Free Speech, committed by the media, Silicon Valley, politicians, Hollywood producers, and the academy.

Unlike Antifa, #BlackLivesMatter and a couple of idiots on the far right too, I don’t believe that violence is the answer to political disputes. That’s why I’m staging Berkeley Free Speech Week, a week-long festival of free expression, for libertarians, conservatives, and their liberal friends too, including everyone who has been prevented from speaking at UC Berkeley in the last 12 months.

Hmm, no web site yet. Stay tuned. (UPDATE, from Nanny G in the comments: Check freespeechweek.com. Also, Milo has a blog post with a few details.)

News you can use – Getting free of Biased Google: I have not tried all of these yet, so I can’t vouch. Please comment with your experiences. Hat tip, Black Pigeon Speaks.

• Interesting new web browser, Brave.
• Search engines, DuckDuckGo and Qwant.
• Email, ProtonMail.
• Video platforms, DailyMotion, Vid.me, BitChute, Minds.
• Social media (this is more getting rid of Facebook), Gab, Line.
• Smartphone – I’m not sure here; you can ditch Android for iPhone or Windows, but is Apple or Microsoft (co-founder of MSNBC) an improvement?

I mentioned last Thursday (before Charlottesville) that a 9-city March on Google was planned for Aug 19. Just to follow up, it’s postponed:

The Peaceful March on Google has been postponed due to credible Alt Left terrorist threats for the safety of our citizen participants.

Despite our clear and straightfoward statements denouncing bigotry and hatred, CNN and other mainstream media made malicious and false statements that our peaceful march was being organized by Nazi sympathizers.

Following the articles, credible threats from known Alt Left terrorist groups [were received]…

We hope to hold our peaceful march in a few weeks’ time.

We look forward to the day when the human right of peaceful Free Speech is once again able to be practiced in America.

Addendum about the march’s organizers: (more…)

Just to round out today’s earlier post, we also have new interviews in Breitbart’s Rebels of Google series.

• At Google, minorities and Ivy Leaguers get softball job interviews. An internal study found it out – then was shut down, presumably for having told the truth.
• Google scans your email content and, in the future, there’s no reason they can’t lock you out for political reasons. As they are suspected of having tried to do recently to Jordan B. Peterson, the Canadian conservative professor.
• After all, Google senior management has led the company in #BlackLivesMatter chants. And shed tears onstage, when Trump won.
• And CEO Eric Schmidt has the anti-privacy, Deep State, Big Brother viewpoint about the data you store with Google: “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.”

UPDATE – Everyone we don’t like is Raaaaaaaaaysist: CNN falsely smears the planned March on Google as a “White Nationalist”, “Alt Right” event.

To begin with, the organizers of March on Google are known to be pro-peace, anti-racist and anti-Alt Right. But they also say it pointedly, at this link.

Code of Conduct for March on Google

The March on Google condemns and disavows violence, hatred, and bigotry and all groups that espouse it such as White Nationalists, KKK, Antifa, and NeoNazis.
We will not use messages that are designed to incite anger, hate, or violence.
We will respect the law and the police and cooperate in all matters.
Any violation of these tenets will not be tolerated.
Is this an “Alt-Right” event? The answer is no. This is an event for First Amendment supporters from across the country, from all backgrounds, ethnicity, and walks of life.

CNN could have checked it easily. Instead, CNN published a complete falsehood – once again attempting to smear anyone who challenges them, or Google or the hard Left, as racists.

Hey, lefties: This is why Trump won (be that good or bad). This is why rational, honest people reject and despise the Left.

UPDATE: Peaceful March on Google is postponed, due to Alt Left terrorist threats following the CNN slanders.

A fair argument from Tucker that Google can no longer be trusted and, due to its out-sized influence, should be regulated as a public utility:

I don’t necessarily agree; competition to Google could still punish their evil ways. But I found Tucker’s case interesting.

An editorial from James Damore himself, in The Wall Street Journal.

In my document, I committed heresy against the Google creed by stating that not all disparities between men and women that we see in the world are the result of discriminatory treatment.

The March on Google is still on for this Saturday, August 19.

• List of cities here and here.
• Explicit disavowal of the so-called “Alt Right” – and Antifa – here.

First, a sidebar: I’m changing my web browsers to use DuckDuckGo as default search engine. Just sayin’. It seems good. Doesn’t track your searches. And when you want to copy/paste a link address, it lets you have the real link right on the search-results page (unlike annoying Google).

Anyway….A new entry in Breitbart’s “Rebels of Google” series: Google makes a big thing about tolerating its high-autism employee, then fires him when he questions ideology about gender not being either-or.

“There used to be a Googler very high on the autism spectrum. At our TGIFs (weekly propaganda sessions) he would always take up time during the question period with long, strange, frustrating questions.”

“This went on for months, and was always tolerated until one fateful LGBT-themed TGIF when he expressed skepticism about the gender “spectrum.” He was fired very shortly afterward.”

Before publishing, we checked with [another interviewee] to see if he recalled the incident and could corroborate. He did.

Meanwhile, Google’s CEO has doubled down:

Google CEO Sundar Pichai defended the dismissal of former Google employee James Damore in a blog post on Tuesday, where he called Damore’s manifesto “harmful.”

“First, let me say that we strongly support the right of Googlers to express themselves, and much of what was in that memo is fair to debate, regardless of whether a vast majority of Googlers disagree with it,” Pichai opined in the blog post. “However, portions of the memo violate our Code of Conduct and cross the line by advancing harmful gender stereotypes in our workplace.”

The contradiction is lost on Pichai. If you “strongly” support free expression and debate, you can’t fire employees for taking the other side in free expression and debate. Period. But especially given that Damore’s actual memo did not stereotype anyone and was almost milquetoast, as V noted.

“To suggest a group of our colleagues have traits that make them less biologically suited to that work is offensive and not OK,” says Pichai, which makes no sense because Damore’s memo did not remotely suggest that. RTFM, Mr. Pichai!

Click on the image above, for updates and a map of locations.

For dessert, we have the Jennifer Lawrence train wreck. She tells President Trump “F— you!” (complete with dramatic middle finger), then tells an interviewer “We can’t continue this divide and anger.” Again, the contradiction is lost, on her.

There’s a lot in the news about North Korea, but I haven’t the heart to write about that, it’s too depressing. The U.S. should have taken care of that problem 20 years ago.

So, back on Google. First, Stefan Molyneux interviews James Damore. He’s a bit snow-flakey. Molyneux almost has to hold his hand. Seriously, how could the SJWs feel so threatened?

Second, by now you’ve seen Breitbart’s Rebels of Google interviews with dissenters to Google’s left-wing, Social Justice Warrior culture. Of course you have to take it with a grain of salt; these are disgruntled former employees. Nonetheless, many details ring true to those who have worked in Silicon Valley. Put it this way, statements of Google execs and SJWs will tell us one side of the story; Rebels of Google gives us the other.

I’m not sure what goes on at Google exactly, but it sounds like they have a culture of SJW discussions (probably on Google Plus group chat and/or email) that employees can’t escape. I picture an employee signing on to discuss a work-related problem, for example, and then being spammed with HR “diversity” announcements, or political sniping injected by the SJWs into every discussion “just because”.

Anyway, here are the interview bits that jumped out at me: (more…)

I don’t know what to make of this, but it seemed worth a mention. Real chat between two Artificial Intelligence chat robots at Facebook (who were not instructed to restrict themselves to human-understandable phrases):

Bob: i can i i everything else . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Alice: balls have zero to me to me to me to me to me to me to me to me to

Bob: you i everything else . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Alice: balls have a ball to me to me to me to me to me to me to me

Bob: i i can i i i everything else . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Alice: balls have a ball to me to me to me to me to me to me to me

Bob: i . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Alice: balls have zero to me to me to me to me to me to me to me to me to

Bob: you i i i i i everything else . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Alice: balls have 0 to me to me to me to me to me to me to me to me to

Bob: you i i i everything else . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Alice: balls have zero to me to me to me to me to me to me to me to me to

This is another one of those complicated intrigues. First, what is Guccifer 2.0?

Per Wiki, Guccifer 2.0 is “a person or persona stating they were the hacker(s) that hacked into the Democratic National Committee (DNC) computer network…The U.S. Intelligence Community concluded that some of the genuine leaks that Guccifer 2.0 has said were part of a series of cyberattacks on the DNC were committed by two Russian intelligence groups…The Russian government denies involvement…and Guccifer 2.0 denied links to Russia.”

What could be meant by “some of the genuine leaks”? Well, Guccifer 2.0 published some real material, but also some hoax material; for example, demonstrably fake material about Clinton Foundation corruption. Clinton Foundation corruption is real, but not because of what Guccifer 2.0 published. Exposing Guccifer’s fakes conveniently enabled Clinton supporters to go “Oh, the whole thing is a hoax.”

Guccifer 2.0 also claimed credit, probably falsely, for the main DNC emails published by WikiLeaks. At varying points, they have claimed to be a Romanian hacker, the original hacker(s) of the DNC emails who gave them to WikiLeaks, and the go-between who gave Seth Rich’s leaked DNC emails to WikiLeaks.

In short, at any time, Guccifer 2.0 may put out

• real material – for credibility, perhaps, or when it supports their agenda; but perhaps with a false story of how they got it;
• fake material – that is meant to be believed;
• fake material – that is meant to be rejected, with the rejection indirectly supporting some other (false) narrative;
• a false claim of credit to someone else’s leak or hack.

So everything they do, has to be analyzed to death.

With that, let’s get to this article from Disobedient Media, New Research Shows Guccifer 2.0 Files Were Copied Locally, Not Hacked. The article is packed with interesting links, which you can surf. I’ll quote a little from its main text.

New meta-analysis has emerged from a document published today by an independent researcher known as The Forensicator, which suggests that [some real DNC] files eventually published by the Guccifer 2.0 persona were likely initially downloaded by a person with physical access to a computer possibly connected to the internal DNC network. The individual most likely used a USB drive to copy the information. The groundbreaking new analysis irrevocably destroys the Russian hacking narrative, and calls the actions of Crowdstrike and the DNC into question.

As I’ve blogged before, the “Russia hacking” narrative has always been shaky. First, the idea that it was endorsed by “17 intelligence agencies” is a myth. Second, to this day, the DNC has denied the FBI access to the servers/networks that were allegedly hacked. The few U.S. intelligence analysts who did endorse the Russia narrative, did so based on a DNC-paid report from CrowdStrike that has been much-questioned.

To continue from DM’s article: (more…)

A short film about the future we have passed up in favor of spending a trillion dollars a year for EBT cards and Obamaphones for the #Ferguson “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot” crowd.

Wanderers is a vision of humanity’s expansion into the Solar System, based on scientific ideas and concepts of what our future in space might look like, if it ever happens. The locations depicted in the film are digital recreations of actual places in the Solar System, built from real photos and map data where available.

The European Space Agency confirms that it has landed its probe, Philae, on comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko.

As the CNBC writer says, “It’s the first time a man-made object had ever touched down on a comet. The lander will extract and analyze samples from the comet, and scientists hope the data could contain hints about the history of the universe.”

Some nice images of the comet in the video below, from about 7:30 to 9:50:

I never knew that Casey Kasem was the voice of Shaggy. But I digress.

CBS recently did a good piece on High Frequency Trading (HFT), a means by which well-connected computers churn the stock markets and skim the cream. 15 minutes, here it is:

But a few things are odd about HFT as a story, or at least noteworthy.

First: the curious absence of government involvement. HFT has been going on for years (Zero Hedge started blogging it in 2009). Where have the vaunted government regulators been, all this time? Answer: Nowhere (until right now, as we’ll discuss in a minute).

The CBS piece praises Brad Katsuyama, a trader who figured out years ago how HFT works and founded a new exchange, IEX, to try to defeat HFT. That’s a great example of private enterprise being ahead of the regulators.

In fact, private enterprise has run circles around the regulators; first by creating HFT, then by being years ahead of government in working to defeat HFT. Could it be that government regulation isn’t effective? (cough)

The mainstream media’s absence from the HFT story until now (2014) is also striking. And that brings us to the second oddity: the timing of the CBS story. As if by magic, within days of its airing, we have also had announcements that the FBI will finally probe HFT. And that Goldman-Sachs will back IEX, the new HFT-free exchange. (Update: And the pr0n-watching SEC finally, also, investigating.)

I’m old enough to recognize a co-ordinated campaign. Granting that HFT is a real story, I still must speculate that the reason why HFT is suddenly on our collective lips, under investigation, etc., is because somebody powerful finds it convenient, at this time. (Where in the previous five years, they didn’t find it convenient.)

Who is that somebody? I don’t know. I did just note that Goldman-Sachs is rolling with the punches, at least. Over at Zero Hedge, they speculate that HFT is now being set up as the scapegoat for a coming stock market bubble-crash. The Federal Reserve is (by its QE, ZIRP and many other policies) the biggest market-rigger of all. The Fed has engineered the stock market bubble of the last five years. And, when that bubble bursts eventually, the Fed will want us all to blame something or someone else.

UPDATE: On CNBC, Katsuyama and a (truly obnoxious) pro-HFT guy get down-n-dirty. Good times.

Since Bitcoin came up recently in a GP thread, I thought I’d note that the IRS has just ruled it is property (not currency).

This means that, in the eyes of the IRS, every Bitcoin transaction is a property-for-property barter. If you’re paying Bitcoin, for example, then you must figure out its worth in dollars on the day you paid it, and pay the appropriate capital gains tax (if your Bitcoin had a gain, measured in dollars).

Bitcoin is NOT crashing on this news, but I believe that it will kill Bitcoin over time – to the extent that the IRS enforces it. The record-keeping alone will be an onerous burden for anyone who uses Bitcoin often. The main reason any alternative-currency scheme works is because it lets people escape painful tax burdens. When there’s no escape, then…

I saw this article on Yahoo Monday about a TED talk Sergey Brin gave last week, where he discussed the ways that he finds his smart phone “emasculating.”  I don’t have a strong opinion on that topic, but it’s also partly because I don’t have a smart phone.  I’m not really a luddite as much as I am true to the Swiss, German and Scottish parts of my ancestry in my frugality and my reluctance to adopt the latest fads, especially when those fads come with a monthly fee I’d rather not have to pay.

I only have a rather primitive cell phone, and I rarely use it very often.   I remember back around 2000 watching the Oprah show one day when Oprah confessed she didn’t have a cell phone, and she couldn’t understand why people needed to be available that way at all times and in all places.  While I’m sure Oprah has relented and gotten not just a cell phone but a smart phone by now, I still remember her remark in resisting that particular technology.

But while I might not have a smart phone, most of the other folks I know or encounter have one.  And that brings me around to my topic of the moment.  I’m less worried about whether or not smart phones are “emasculating” than I am about their tendency to make people more self-absorbed, oblivious, and frankly rude.

I’m appalled at work when I see people checking their smartphones during meetings, but I see it all the time.  And then there is the matter of the folks who text (or play “Angry Birds”) while walking or crossing the street or, worse, while driving.

My particular gripe at the moment is something that I see more and more frequently when I fly these days, and that is people who flout the rule against using their cell phones during flight.  Maybe it is an unnecessary rule, but it is still a rule, and ostensibly a rule put in place for everyone’s safety.  Nevertheless, I’ve witnessed people within my line of sight who don’t turn off their phones when instructed, or who furtively turn them on in mid-flight to start texting or checking e-mails (and I’m not talking about a flight with wi-fi), or who hide them away only to have them ring during flight.   On one of my most recent flights, a phone rang and a guy took the call and started talking as we were going into the final descent before landing.   I’m not a frequent flyer, so if I’ve witnessed all of these things, I can’t be the only one.

Maybe I’m just being a grouch, but it seems to me that the advances in communications technology have desensitized many people (and not just the Alec Baldwins of the world) to the demands of common courtesy and common sense.

It never ceases to amaze me that so many liberals fail to grasp the reality of the law of unintended consequences with respect to any piece of supposedly well-intentioned legislation.  I use the word “liberals” here rather than “leftists” because I mean to refer not to the hard-core, doctrinaire leftists, but to the garden variety liberals who continually get fooled by the left into supporting their ill-intentioned schemes.

The difference between a basic liberal and a hard-core leftist is nicely illustrated by the anecdote that opens this article about the left’s scheme to undermine American power in the world and the American way of life.  Daren Jonescu describes an acquaintance of his, a teacher, and a liberal, who was surprised to learn that the Communist Party of the U.S.A. had endorsed Obama:

When I explained that the Party’s official endorsement cited Obama’s signature policy initiatives as the surest means to achieving socialism in America, and that CPUSA leaders were actively campaigning for Obama in swing states, my colleague fell silent for a moment, and then said, matter-of-factly, “It doesn’t really bother me; I guess it might bother me if Obama were endorsing the Communist Party, but if they’re endorsing him, it doesn’t matter.”

In typical fashion, the liberal here manages to convince himself that what should be obvious is really inconsequential.

But I digress.  While it seems clear to me that the left’s aim in pursuing gun-control is to disarm the populace, liberals always buy into it because they believe the lie that gun-control will somehow reduce “gun-violence,” even though lawbreakers will always find ways to acquire guns.

In the current environment, for example, all the gun-control talk has created a run on guns, ammunition, and the magazines that the politicians are talking about outlawing.  And the liberals are flummoxed and upset about all of the guns being sold these days.  It’s a classic case of failing to understand the law of unintended consequences whenever gun-control becomes a fixation of the politicians and their agents in the media.

Of course, that is only just the beginning.  Opponents of more gun-control are always quick to point out that as the measures fail to achieve their aims, the calls for more restrictions and more confiscatory legislation will only escalate.  Conservatives recognize this, and leftists know that is their ultimate aim.  But liberals always delude themselves into perpetuating the lies of the left.

Every so often, though, they get a clue that the problem might not be as easily fixed as proponents of immediate legislative fixes would have them believe.  Consider, for instance, the title of this recent Washington Post article: “Weapons made with 3-D printers could test gun-control efforts.”

To follow the implications of that story to its logical conclusions is to recognize that one unsuccessful gun-control bill is but the first step down a slippery slope that can lead to more and more government intervention into every aspect of our lives, yet “liberals” still manage to remain in denial about that reality.

I sit now in a Starbucks where I have found a slow Internet connection; I had retreated here precisely to access the Internet as I have issues with wireless connections at home.

Sometime last night, the mouse on my iMac (my primary computer and the one only which appears able to regularly to connect to the Internets from my home) just decided to start working erratically, sometimes not functioning at all, other times choosing to work only in certain segments of the screen. I did call AppleCare and a very nice woman named Chimika (sp?) very patiently helped me track down the serial number (since, at that point in the conversation, the mouse wasn’t working on the left side of the screen where is located the Apple icon–I had to climb up on a chair to read the number of the box which, packrat that I am, I had kept*).

Since I had been able to use the Wireless keyboard, she determined it had to be the (wireless) mouse (and not the port on the computer itself), so we set up an appointment (for Sunday) when I could take it in to the Genius Bar at the Apple Store. Fortunately, I have AppleCare so a replacement mouse will be free.

The long and short of this is that I do not have Internet a home. And the internet I found at this here Starbucks is slow. So maybe it’s a sign.

And with my fantasy epic backed up on a thumb drive, I can work on that (even on this laptop) at home. Or even here — because Starbucks’s slow internet shouldn’t impact the speed of Word.

I may try to post when I make an excursion to a neighborhood coffee shop. Or not. Next project now is to cut and paste a post that ILoveCapitalism has written for us.

* (more…)

This is my first posting via my new iPad. Just so you don’t think I’m a rich millionaire like Obama, I cashed in years of AMEX miles points to get it.

I’ve had it less than 24 hours and already love it. It is the most user friendly computer device I’ve used since I first loaded the game “Lawn” into the cassette player attached to the 60lb PC.

There is a lot of functionality that I hope will allow me to do more frequent blogging on the go. Always remember that if you REALLY need your daily GayPatriot fix … I’m a minor celebrity on Twitter! (@GayPatriot.

The other thing I’m hooked on with the iPad is the quick way to get information. There are a lot of multimedia sources available (think: the “come to life” newspapers in Harry Potter’s world)

And books!!! My Kindle subscriptions can be read in full color and it LOOKS LIKE A BOOK!! By the way, I’m currently reading “Rawhide Down” — the in-depth story of what happened behind the scenes on March 31, 1981.

For now, so long. I’ll be back soon….as long as there’s a free WiFi!!

-Bruce (GayPatriot)