THEY DON'T KNOW HOW TO LIE

So between them the New York Times and NPR just make up fantasies and cite only the sources that believe in them as strongly as children once did in Tinker Bell. I've mentioned my distaste for the New York Times and I was once an avid reader who would arise early on Sunday to head to the neighborhood bookshop and then head over to the patio deck at Stratford Court Cafe where I would grab a table in the shade and spend the next couple of hours reading the paper and drinking endless coffee. They never cared how long one sat there and it was probably nowhere near as well known  back then as it is now.

In short, while I viewed the information gained from both the NYT and NPR some credence and took with huge grains of salt anything they commented on that fell into my bailiwick back then: money, guns and war, I thought they probably got the rest of it right. With the internet and access to all the news and sources from all around the world, the scales fell from my eyes. Damned scales. I can no longer bring myself to even touch the NYT's other than the magazine/puzzle section and listen to NPR now they way I used to listen to Pacifica Radio on long drives down the California coast from Emeryville to San Diego just to keep awake and mutter, "what a pack of absolute idiots."

On March 13, after weeks of rumors, Pacifica Radio's board of directors voted to fire its executive director, Summer Reese, during what was essentially a conference call. But nothing is as simple as all that in the oldest and oddest public radio network in the country.

”We desperately need adult supervision.” -Ian Masters
Four days later, Reese sent an email to the entire Pacifica staff announcing that she was not recognizing the board's authority: "I want to assure you that I am in possession of a signed and valid contract for three years of employment from the board of directors and that I fully intend to complete that contract." 

And so it was that Reese marched to the Pacifica national office in Berkeley on March 17, bolt cutters in hand, removed a padlock placed on the front doors over the weekend, and essentially occupied the building. When newly appointed interim executive director Margy Wilkinson showed up, Reese and 12 of her compatriots — including Reese's mother, a longtime anti-war and civil rights activist — refused to let Wilkinson, her husband and two of her allies pass. 

"You're all going to be personally liable — and I'm going to enjoy your houses!" Reese shouted at them, according to former board member Sasha Futran, who backs Wilkinson.
Later Reese read for all the staff, in her deep and booming voice, from the Book of Joshua: "Whosoever he be that doth rebel against thy commandment, and will not hearken unto thy words in all that thou commandest him, he shall be put to death: only be strong and of a good courage." 

"I feel like I've ended up in an insane asylum," Futran told L.A. Weekly a few hours later, still in disbelief.

I could pick up their signal for hours as I headed south and down the coast and I would fight fatigue with listening to absolute nonsense. Northbound I got hours and hours of Art Bell from his secret bunker. The AM signal used to cover the entire distance from the Grapevine up to San Jose.

Sadly NPR has come to resemble this pack of clowns and the NYTs shows no signs whatsoever of simply accepting reality as it is. Both of them now stick to asking questions and comments from each other and their primary and secondary sources are all full blown partisans. It's not that news is foreign to them, it's just they wouldn't know it if it bit them on the proboscis.

Look closely at what these people actually believe as their sole truth from the highest authority.
"Whosoever he be that doth rebel against thy commandment, and will not hearken unto thy words in all that thou commandest him, he shall be put to death: only be strong and of a good courage."

They all believe you better hearken to their words or they're going to kill you.

EXTRAORDINARY LENGTHS

The NFL has taken the unprecedented step of canceling Sunday night's games. They claim they are doing this because they reckon the games are boring and nobody would bother to sit down and watch them anyway but we know the real reason they cancelled the games. They wanted to spare the Browns the agony of total humiliating defeat and an 0 - 16 season. No more Lions!

UPDATE: The teams will play, they'll just be spared the embarrassment of having their play broadcast to their dozens of fans.

UPDATE UPDATE: The Browns have finally joined the Lions of Detroit in the ignominy of defeat and an 0-16 season. Let's hope that, mutatis mutandis, the Browns can win one in 2018.

It's kind of a pity. I was actually planning to watch the game. I used to be a Steelers fan and what they could do to the Browns would make Attila cringe. C'est domage.

WATCHOUT!

A GAPE WHITE SHARK!

CALLED AWAY

I was disadvantaged for a couple of days and then called away which explains the absence of blogging over the last few days. My 6 year old Macbook Pro keyboard suddenly bit the dust on the 19th and I didn't make it to the Apple Store for another 2 days, where they told me the keyboard was kaput. I was sorry to hear that.

I asked the genius at the bar what could he offer me as a replacement and explained that I had already begun looking at replacing and upgrading the old laptop but Apple didn't have anything better than what I bought six years ago. To explain, I was looking to buy a new macbook and figured after 6 years of development and refinement the new beast would have some of the spiffy kind of features and that Moore's Law would have kicked in at least something on the retail end of Apple, but alas, no.

My macbook had 4gb of RAM and a 250gb hard drive when I bought it at MCRD in mid-2010. What Apple sells today as a macbook pro has 4gb of RAM and 250gb hard drive. It has a spiffy new display in the same dimensions and it costs as much it did 6 years ago. I have a little trouble with that because it makes absolutely no sense at all.

I doubled the RAM in my machine for $16 by buying it from Amazon and installing it myself. That was quite easy and took me about 30 minutes. If I scale up my expectations and think about adding memory from the factory, the price starts to take off. That doesn't make any sense at all. Memory just isn't that expensive and installing a 32gb stick vice a 4gb stick just means nothing to production cost. Obviously, it taxes the operating systems and heat controls provided by Apple.

The salesman wanted to show me the splendid new sharp Retsina displays and I asked him to look directly into my eyes. We had a little stare down until I blinked and asked him if he noticed all the crud on my spectacles and said it was of little import to me how clear the display was as my view of the world was somewhat distorted from the start. It didn't phase the genius. He generously suggested that a macbook air would meet my requirements. I said that I noticed a distinct lack of an optical drive and he said that nobody used optical drives anymore. I accepted that was a valid point about everybody, but me.

Anyway, he restored my thoroughly unusable machine to working in a kind of Sea Sparrow fashion and I went home and rooted around for any old usb keyboards we have lying around the house, found one that suited me and now have a functional machine that will last another few months or years. The genius was probably spot on when he told me that my machine had a good life and a good run since most laptops die after just 3 years and anyway, Apple was discontinuing all support for macbook pros of my generation this June.

I didn't point out that my Dell Inspiron E1505 was still on my desk and worked as well as it did on the day I bought it ten years ago. It runs Windows XPpro and I use it for old games and for the historic stuff that runs on it. The only thing I've done to it is buy it a new battery from Amazon, $15, and a new power cord since the old one had become frayed and started arcing and sparking in the dark.

After I got home, I got a call from the manor telling me that the house had sold and they needed to have all the stuff out by mid-June. I'm going places and doing things every week until mid-June except this last weekend so I rallied around the aged 'rents and we drove about 8 hours to crash in the house without cable or any wifi at all in the neighborhood. You'd think Arlington would have lots of wifi but it was just like visiting Pyongyang and looking for a Ford dealership. I was too tired to go wardriving so we kipped without any outside electrons and then moved stuff out of the old house to the new house and then loaded up the truck with all the stuff deemed essential to my continuing existence and that of my sister and then drove 8 hours back. I went for a comfy chair and hassock and the missing bolt to a rifle and came home with a truckload of stuff.

After that kind of a week I took some time off and did some new things but I'm back.

HUMANS AND ZOMBIES

Spotted at the local U.

I particularly liked the bit about free food.