Taxation is Theft

Pigs Fly department:

A federal grand jury will hear evidence that 9/11 was a controlled demolition.

This is huge, whether you believe the assertion or not. Because of the JFK Effect, I'm somewhat skeptical of the outcome, but movement is great. 

Both buildings came down in what looked like controlled demolition. One of the major news network reporters stated that it looked like controlled demolition, once. And never again. Then there was the rather inconvenient fact of Building 7, barely damaged, coming down in its own footprint too.

I guess this is the necessary first step to legally drill holes in the official story of what happened on 9/11. If it was controlled demolition, there's the question of who pushed the button, then who ordered the button pushed. Regardless of the ruling, one of the people involved has a name that rhymes with Rick Haney.

• I know you're losing sleep, wondering what's going on with my work phone.... two weeks after issue, the phone works, but the work configuration is still foobed. At this rate, the phone will be properly configured the week after I retire.

Speaking of Ancient Astronaut Theorists, there is proof from a semi-reliable source (NASA) that UFOs popped by to check in when our space missions were going on. Would you classify a NASA astronaut a reliable witness?

Things heard on missions:

"We have a bogey at 10 o'clock."

"We still have the alien spacecraft under surveillance."

The second one was even more interesting because the feed was being monitored by ham radio enthusiasts (the frequency is known and wide open). At the end of the sentence, audio went dead, as the transmission went to the encrypted feed. As for video, there are anomalies on moon footage and all sorts of interruptions on the space shuttle feed, as Odd Stuff appeared.  ymmv

• A man entering Singapore was found to have a suspicious bulge in his pants, which turned out to be kittens.
• Sir, your penis is moving and swatting itself. 
• Expect this to be on Twitter before you get home.

Christian Mare, serving a 40 year sentence for child pornography, was beaten to death in prison. He obviously slipped in the shower and hit his head repeatedly on the plumbing until he died.

• Odds are your phone provider is selling your location data (at very least).

Dear lefty:

• Why is there never a parking spot near my house?
• Because you touch yourself.

Parents just don't understand
Some of us have had to introduce our parents to cell phones. While this is about as much fun as beating yourself to death with a spoon, someone has to do it, and you feel sorry for the poor guy at the phone store.

• No, Mom, text messaging doesn't require a 'Dear Son' or a 'Love, Mom.'
• Yes, hit the little phone picture to dial. Yes, you have to dial a one first, just like the phone on the wall. Yes, you can use it in the car. Yes, you can call long distance to Aunt Sadie in Florida for no extra cost. Yes. Yes. Still yes.
• You can even put your doctor appointments in the calendar. Yes, there's a calendar - push the little calendar picture.
• Just because you text or call does not mean I'm going to pick up the phone.

I give up... "Just hit that button and ask Siri or Cortana. No, you can't call me; I don't have a phone anymore."

The funny and evil part about this is that people having an iDevice works for me for once. "Sorry, I don't know how to do that stuff on an iDevice. Call one of your children who have one."

Maybe sic-ing them on the guy at the phone store isn't such a bad idea after all...

• the Additive Suicide Principle of cell phones states that if you put one phone on top of another, the top phone will go rocketing to the floor as soon as you stop looking at them.

My personal recommendation of concerts arrived today. Keep in mind that I only attend instrumental guitar and classic rock shows...

Kiss - if I want to see too much makeup, I'll turn on the tv

Mariah Carey - speaking of Golden Globes...

Billy Joel - half of a classic rock, but yuck.

Tyler Perry's Madea - huh? Like top 10 radio, it's not music.

Bluegrass - that's close to classic rock, right?

Hootie and the Blowfish - we've all been holding our breath for a reunion

Backtreet Boys - backdoor boys? Killer guitar instrumentals

Disney Junior Dance Party - future meltdowns of America

Buckethead: be fair - it's instrumental guitar (with a KFC bucket on his head)

Piff the Magic Dragon - because they'll get sued if they use "Puff"

Other stuff I learned from watching police shows: 

• Without exception, no one has their license or I.D. on them.
• It's ok to blame your grandmother for the joint if it's her car you're driving.
• When drunk, people always admit to having 2 drinks.
• You must use your turn signal for two full seconds before changing lanes. Or you'll be pulled over, and naturally, searched for drugs.

Dear lefty:

• Which men's designer jeans do I wear to the feminist supporter protest?
• How did you become such a snotty, virtue-signalling utter bastard?

More adware posing as games, TV, and remote control simulator apps in Google Play. Trend Micro spotted this, not Google.

More Evil Villain News: Microsoft was sued in Finland and ordered to pay a Finnish man 1,100 Finnish Herring (1548 Canadian Pucks) for pushing a Win10 update, without permission, which broke his pc. There is another suit pending.

• The aliens have their own Comedy Channel in the ships: our weather forecast.

The Key(board) to All Phone Grief

I tend to get aggravated when I use my phone. What pisses me off isn't necessarily what pisses you off. Stuff like bad cells, dropped calls, dropped phones, and dropping phones in the toilet are points of contention, but not mine. The single largest point of annoyance with my phone is input. The keyboard. It drives me mad. No matter how hard I try, how careful I am, how quickly or slowly I type, it never comes out right. I wind up screaming at the phone, calling it things I usually reserve for spouses and family members. After about a day of this, you don't want to see an allegedly grown man cry. It's pitiful, like my attempts at being polite in social situations.

I've tried manual typing, using one or both hands, different keyboards, changing key size, asking the dog to type, and the swipey keyboards. I get the same result regardless, just like my pitiful pleas for sex. I'll grant that my brain wiring is a touch off (no, really?), rendering me a dyslexic typist, but I can tell when I've typed something backwards (unless the A.D.D. is active, in which case I only read some of the first sent of a paragraph). The only thing I haven't tried, besides asking my wife to type for me, is voice input. I know if I tried talking to the phone (as opposed to yelling at it), I'd probably develop a case of dyslexic speech. ALthough it's almost impossible to speel words incorrectly when saying them, I'd find a way. Plus you remember my warnings about speech input - Google and the others keep every word you say, 'to improve service.'

The method that works best, best being relative, is swipey. One advantage is that they learn from you over time, making typing faster and easier. Except mine. My keyboard has some sort of learning disorder, where it allows me to make the same mistakes over and over again, like my life. There are certain words it refused to spell, mainly my saltier vocabulary. I have to type them one letter at a time, then tell the little bastard to remember the word. It's a good thing the blog software has a spell checker, or this blog would be even more horrid. If it had a grammar checker, it would have died years ago, like dehumidifiers in PA.

Dear lefty.....

UK Spying

The UK government has voted itself a new spying bill that's positively draconian in scope. Nicknamed the Snooper's Charter, it requires providers to keep your browsing history for a year. The information will be available, without a warrant, to the Usual Suspects, plus such important State Security entities as the Gambling Commission.

While this is another step in the lack of privacy landslide in the UK, the US and other countries would be well-served to keep their eyes on its progress. The UK seems to be a testing ground of sorts for Bad Anti-Privacy Laws.

That said, this article features some really good information for everyone to protect their communications, like Signal messenger, Tor, and VPNs. Even if you're not planning to take security seriously, read it and familiarize yourself with the situation.

• In case you were kept awake at night, wondering what is the cause for male homosexuality, your answer is here. [Hint: ghosts]

I realize 2016 isn't over yet, but this headline is in the running for best of the year: Are White People Promoting Homosexuality as a Means of Undermining the Black Struggle?

• Speaking of 2016, and I wish we weren't, we bid farewell to some larger than life people in their fields: Greg Lake and John Glenn. Remember the good old days, when rock stars would die of drug overdoses? Now it's cancer. Emerson, Lake and Palmer: and then there was one.

With the rise in Utter Nonsense that is Fake News, remember this: Fake News is anything that particular person does not want you to read. The irony of Hillary warning about Fake News is strong: her administration fed Fake News to the media. In spite of this, Trump won.

• This morning I asked the dog that since he's so smart, why doesn't he let himself outside and back in. He replied that he's so smart he has us do it for him.  Can't argue.

Do you have a Netgear R6400, R7000, R8000 (go check - I'll wait). If you do, turn it the hell off and replace it or wait til Netgear releases a fix. The article linked will tell you how to check to see if your router is vulnerable. The routers look like little spaceships from some new space-horror movie, with lots of antennae.

• Important Stuff you missed over the weekend: nothing.

Remember the Colonial Theater? It's the place where The Blob was filmed. It's been totally redone and is a delightful place to see a movie or concert. They just let me know that if I'm 70 or older, my IRA distributions can benefit the theater, but only tax-deferred gifts of up to $100,000. Drat - if I were only 70 or older...

• I need to stop this entry right now for a very important bulletin: the Opera browser was split off into another one called Vivaldi. In the latest version, you can now select themes! But wait... as if that weren't enough, you can schedule the time for the theme to change! Vivaldi works on most operating systems, for your convenience.

I received an email, asking to evaluate a course I took. They asked fifteen minutes of my time. In acknowledging my time, they said that every tenth evaluator would win a t-shirt with their logo.  I was never a math star, but with their courses starting at $300, I'm thinking of holding out for maybe a t-shirt AND some pocket lint.

• Kentucky Fried Chicken, hereafter referred to as KFC (or WTF), has admitted that their Colonel's Club has suffered a breach, 'possibly' exposing 1.2 million customers' details. WHAT? Did any of us know that there's a Colonel's Club at KFC? A loyalty program for greasy, heart attack inducing deep fried grease bits? No wonder this country's in trouble.

Speaking of the Irrepressibly Stupid, the UN has declared Wonder Woman as the ambassador for empowering women. As if that weren't Stupid enough, feminist outrage stepped right in, within microseconds, and demanded a stop be put to this travesty for a few reasons: she is a fictional character who wears thigh high boots and exposed cleavage (because Mother Teresa was unavailable for the position), she is too white, closely associated with the American flag, and "not culturally sensitive." This proves that the UN is a ridiculous, useless organization (in case we didn't already know this) and that feminists are a ridiculous parody of themselves (in case we didn't already know this). Perhaps we should all get together, at KFC, and find common ground.

I learned some Good Stuff growing up. My mother did a pretty good job. In grade school, I noticed some of my friends really didn't like black people. This was confusing and low-class to us, even in our mostly white neighborhood. It occurred to me that - hey... racism is learned. I also saw a small amount of antisemitism, also flowing down, but nowhere near as prevalent as the racism. The few Jewish kids in the 'hood were sometimes harangued by the parents of their friends, although it didn't seem to be a problem in school.

Fast forward to The Online Age, where everyone you don't like is Literally Hitler. As a merrymaker, I have seen comics do really funny things with Hitler, especially Monty Python (who could make cardboard hilarious). There were a few features of his that invited poking and I do like to poke.

Everything online is obviously a reflection of Real Life<tm>, to some degree; so I see a lot of Hitler references, 99.9% of them intended to beat down someone's speech or point. With the Hitler references are the Jew references. At first they were kinda funny. Then no so much. After a while I realized that there were groups of people who really, seriously did not like Jews, blaming them for everything from retail sales issues to a secret plot to ruin the world. The 'watchdog' agency, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), may have done some good in the past but right now they're a ridiculous parody of themselves, pointing their finger and screaming "ANTISEMITE" at everything and everyone. Kinda like the Black Lives Matter and the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Recently I've run into some really bad examples of humanity online. They don't necessarily leap out, screaming, "JEWS! JEWS! JEWS DID IT!" but they're pretty close. It's a bit unnerving being around these people, even online. I see a lot more of this than overt racism, but it might be the places I visit.

Also popping up is the White Genocide movement. These guys are also a bit different. They seem to feel that movements to let foreigners in the country is white genocide. I think. They'll be the first to say White Lives Matter (all lives matter, even the Stupid). I'm sure they have a few points in their favor but I haven't studied the platform.

My first instinct is to block these people or not visit these sites. But Howard Stern, bastion of civility, taught everyone a lesson. One of his recurring guests was the KKK Guy. Howard kept him front and center and took a lot of heat for it. In my mind, Howard exposed his enemy and kept him front and center, where millions of people could see what he was up to and realize that, yes, this ugliness still exists.  So I no longer block any of this nonsense, preferring to see it for what it is. While the ADL has become a ridiculous parody of itself, I suppose some of it bears watching (by all of us).  And of course, this will be blamed on Trump, as if he personally gave out licenses to these folks. Regardless, we enjoy free speech and I'll fight for anyone's right to it.

Watch where you hang out, virtually or in Real Life<tm>.