ricketyclick

Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the United States House of Representative, represents these San Franciscans, attending the “Up Your Alley” street political demonstration. This is not a private party on private property, closed off from the public, but a public event, officially sanctioned by the SF city government. Budweiser is a sponsor, although their presence is much reduced after last year’s Folsom Street Fair.

The given link goes to a content-warning page, rather than directly to the photos.Take that warning very seriously, but click through, blurred or unblurred, and take a quick look.

These are the folk who put Pelosi in office, that she is beholden to.

We’re supposed to be tolerant of “gays”, because, hey, there’s not enough love in the world, is there? And who are we to deny it wherever it blossoms?

Do you see anything here suggestive or supportive of stable, long-term loving relationships?

Gay Marriage? See anybody here you’d trust to so much as sell you diapers, much less raise children of their own?

I regularly see charity panhandlers here in Houston, soliciting for “AIDS Awareness”. Do you really believe that these people are not intimately, personally aware of AIDS and its risks? Seriously, folks, how much do think the government needs to spend to make this kind of behavior even remotely “safe”? And why should I pay for it?

I’m told that one of the pictures shows a hepatitis testing station; I don’t want to go looking for it. Gosh, I don’t remember seeing one of those at the last gun show I attended. (Although perhaps a cholesterol testing station wouldn’t be totally out of place….) I’m struggling to imagine behavior this careless being tolerated at a gun show. I’m struggling to imagine the kinds of restrictions placed on personal behavior at gun shows  being enforced here. Tell me again, who are the dangerous, irresponsible ones?

Oh, yeah: I dare you to try to get a permit to hold an open-air gun show on the streets of SF. Or here in Houston, for that matter. Go ahead. I dare you.

And yes, which public event supports an activity explicitly protected by the Constitution? What’s that you say? There’s a “penumbra” around the First Amendment right to assembly that permits public fornication, but the Second Amendment doesn’t really mean what it says about a “right of the people” and “shall not be infringed”? You know what, asshole? Piss off. But in private, please.

And again, don’t you dare, don’t you fucking dare, try to lecture me about how angry I get here.

By the way, I still support these guys. I still say that, barring felony records, even the people in Zombie’s photo have the right to keep and bear arms.

These pictures are courtesy of the anonymous Zombie Time, who devotes a lot of time photographing leftist, socialist, Democratic, homosexual, and antiwar public demonstrations in the SF area, and putting the pictures up for all to see.

For instance, here’s Zombie’s photo essay on the Code Pink demonstrations and vandalism at the Berkeley Marine Recruiting Station, officially sanctioned by the Berkeley city government. The Marines, by the way, were recently denied a permit to film one of their drill teams for a recruiting video in the Bay area. Do you really think the Marines would be more disruptive, more dangerous, more in violation of American ideals, than Up Your Alley?

Mike at Cold Fury excerpts two great articles contrasting the fascination of the socialist left with tyranny,  and what happens when you really do speak truth to power.

Excerpting his excerpts, here’s a whiff of Ralph Peters:

The extreme left loves to pretend it stands for freedom. It never has and never will. From the Reign of Terror in Paris onward, its core agenda has been the tyranny of egomaniacal intellectuals. The hard left hates an open debate - especially these days, when it’s out of new ideas.

The truly outrageous aspect of such comparisons is that the American left, with its Stalin-redux willingness to rearrange history, neglects to mention that, outside of Japan, all of the 20th century’s great totalitarian regimes had roots on the political left.

[Note: Japan's regime arose from a true imperialism, not capitalism or libertarianism.]

And a good strong snort of Christopher Hitchens, himself a leftist who seems to be waking up:

The simplest way of phrasing it is to say that Solzhenitsyn lived “as if.” Barely deigning to notice the sniggering, pick-nose bullies who followed him and harassed him, he carried on “as if” he were a free citizen, “as if” he had the right to study his own country’s history, “as if” there were such a thing as human dignity.

Read the whole things, all three of them.

I’ll be updating for as long as Reliant Energy, Comcast, and the elements allow.

18:50 OK, then. Yeah, it rained some. Yeah, there’s some leaves on the ground, so we evidently had some wind while I napped this afternoon. Yeah, some neighborhoods lost power. Mostly, though, this was a practice exercise, a drill for emergency procedures. Good. Everybody has fresh batteries, fresh bottled water, well-stocked pantries. We’re ready if/when a real storm or other disaster hits.

Nothing, however, nothing to justify the intense news coverage.

10:45 Hm, the second band, now approaching, seems wider and heavier than the first, and is getting heavier.

10:37 Edouard continues to non-eventuate. There’s two main rainbands; I’m currently in the quiet zone between them. The first one was moderately heavy, light gusting winds.

I had to go out as the first one went over to, yes, clean my gutters. I have to have gutters to keep the water away from the house, particularly the back patio, but they clog repeatedly through the season. Yes, I should have cleaned them yesterday.

A year or two after mine went up, leaf-shedding covers became popular. My sister and parents have them; they seem to work. I’m looking at a retro-fit, because I’m tired of looking out my kitchen window and seeing a waterfall, and having to go out in the rain to clean them. It doesn’t help that I always forget that if I just wait half an hour, the rain will let up, as just happened.

09:00 Non-event so far. Light rain, no significant wind, no lightning. Current radar is yellow over my area, and the red bands fade out as they approach.

Here’s my favorite radar, which presents a synopsis of the storm’s history.

07:05 Eduoard makes landfall, per KHOU. We’re on the “dirty side”, which, oddly, is the west side.

06:45 I woke up at about 6:30. It has just started raining; the ground is just getting wet, and water hasn’t started coming out of the house gutters yet. It’s calm and muggy.

Yeah, yeah, Edouard, baby, if you want center stage, you have to make your cue. You’re late.

And, cripes, man: you aren’t following your designated path, but The Big Too Easy is right on target:

Well, OK, “Freud” would be the next one, but of course, wrong sex alternation.

Damn you all who failed to follow Lord Obama’s advice to keep your tires properly inflated and thus avert global warming and Hurricane Edouard!

You sexist pigs, don’t you know women and children will be hardest hit? Particularly the ones with darker skins, you racist bastards?

Don’t you wish St. O was already in the Oval Office, pre-emptively sending necessary storm aid directly to your front door?

So, anyway, it’s probably gonna start blowin’ and rainin’ pretty darn hard sometime late tonight, or early tomorrow morning; center should make landfall early Tuesday afternoon. Unless something completely freakish happens, we’ll probably see 5-10″ of rain here.

Per Kim Du Toit, re a headline that came out just before Mr. E started to get himself organized:

Texas plagued by heat, drought, water parasite, wildfires

So… everything’s normal, then.

I guess we don’t have to worry about that now.

Ann Althouse has issued the Sandwich Manifesto:

But the original intent of the sandwich is clear: To take messy food and make it neat and convenient. You want a substantial meal, but you want to have it on a plate over to the side, so you can continue doing something else. You want to be able to reach over without paying attention, pick it up in one hand, and easily take a bite and put it down again. You shouldn’t have to use your fingers to poke stray pieces in before you pick it up. No sauce should drip out.

Generally I agree, particularly when the sandwich is needlessly stuffed so thick it can’t possibly be eaten. I like Jason’s Deli Reuben the Great, for instance, but they put enough corned beef and kraut in it for three sandwiches, which upsets the balance of flavor with the bread, cheese, and russian dressing.

Sometimes, though, as with the Hamdog below, the most you can ask the bread to do is to hold everything together long enough to get it into your mouth, while reveling in the savage pleasure of gobbling your food with your bare hands.

“Sure, most hot dogs will kill you slowly with their high levels of fat, salt, cholesterol, sodium, and cancer-inducing nitrites. But if you want to expedite the process, take a bite of these deadly dogs.”

The Ham Dog looks pretty tasty:

Yes, that’s a hot dog wrapped in hamburger and covered with chili and cheese. I think I’d use a bun-sized kielbasa instead of a plain dog, but the idea is good.

On a related note, for breakfast yesterday, I had bacon and eggs with onions&red peppers and bread fried in the grease. I think for lunch, I’m just going to have fried onions and peppers.

These were leftovers from the bacon & onions & peppers I charcoal-grilled with an Angus burger the night before. Next time I’ll take a picture.

From Eliezer Yudkowsky at the very challenging and stimulating Overcoming Bias:

This fallacy gets its name from an ancient sci-fi TV show, which I never saw myself, but was reported to me by a reputable source (some guy at an SF convention).  Anyone knows the exact reference, do leave a comment.

So the good guys are battling the evil aliens.  Occasionally, the good guys have to fly through an asteroid belt.  As we all know, asteroid belts are as crowded as a New York parking lot, so their ship has to carefully dodge the asteroids.  The evil aliens, though, can fly right through the asteroid belt because they have amazing technology that dematerializes their ships, and lets them pass through the asteroids.

Eventually, the good guys capture an evil alien ship, and go exploring inside it.  The captain of the good guys finds the alien bridge, and on the bridge is a lever.  “Ah,” says the captain, “this must be the lever that makes the ship dematerialize!”  So he pries up the control lever and carries it back to his ship, after which his ship can also dematerialize.

And from there, Yudkowsky goes on to discuss the quicksand foundations of psychology and Artificial Intelligence. Well worth the time and skull sweat.

One mild demurrer: If you look over at my Categories, you’ll see that I deride psychology as “Witch Doctoring”. This is in response to claims that psychology is in any way a science; it is not, because it lacks underlying mechanisms and testable hypotheses.

However, it’s easy to ridicule the field in hindsight, without viewing it in its historical context.

Imagine, to use the opening metaphor, that you live on a ship, have been raised on a ship, where nobody has ever been in the bridge; indeed, no one even knows the bridge exists. The ship simply flies around the universe, completely out of control. The origins of the ship, and the technology and science underlying its operation, have been forgotten so long ago, no one even remembers the ideas of technology and science. It is not unreasonable that all sorts of bizarre superstitions should arise as to how to direct the flight of the ship.

Then one day an ignorant, superstitious, but curious savage, fellow by the name of Freud, finds this rusted-shut hatch….

Sounds like a great idea for a science fiction story, eh? The idea of a colonial ship carrying crew and passengers who have forgotten their origins is indeed a popular one, although I don’t recall this particular issue being explored.

A couple of the best examples are Alfred Bester’s novel The Stars My Destination, and Gene Wolf’s tetralogy Book of the Long Sun (Actually, a long cycle of novels). There’s another novel (which I read in high school, so pre-1972) about a militaristic religion, with enforcers based on the Spanish Inquisition, deliberately set up to control the population of a colony ship; damned if I can remember its title or author, though. Then there’s The Starlost, a disasterous TV series disowned by its creator, Harlan Ellison.

Update:

• Raffle tickets are five bucks each. Call FBMG at 801-571-1160 to order.
• Paypal arrangements in the works.
• Raffle winners to be announced on 4 October.

Go here for pictures and more information as it becomes available.

My penis is not big enough or stiff enough to use in self-defense, and accordingly, I must accept my pathetic weakling status and own guns to compensate.

Preferably the biggest, longest, loudest, blackest guns I can get, right?

If someone asks whether I think they should buy a gun, I say, ‘Do you care if it’s pink?’ If you have a good and legitimate reason to own and carry a gun as a tool…then it shouldn’t matter if it’s pink.

If you’re buying it for machismo reasons, as a penis extender - which some people do - then you won’t want to own a pink gun. If it matters that it’s pink, don’t buy it.

As I responded at the time:

So long as it’s pink, it can be any gun I want, any caliber, any magazine capacity, any rate of fire? (By your analogy, the bigger the better, yes?) Carried open or concealed? (You wouldn’t want me to “open carry” my penis, would you?) No training, licensing, or registration required? (I know some folks think all males should be registered at birth as sex offenders, but you’re not that sexist, are you?)

All that in trade for some pink Duracoat?

Woo hoo! I’m ready, baby!

Well, hey boy howdy, how about a pink gun for a pink cause: Breast Cancer!

…We decided to take a Stag 15 and paint it pink, then raffle it off for Breast Cancer Research.  I took the gun back to my smith (www.gundoctor.wordpress.com) and told him what we were doing. He volunteered to do the Duracoating, but said that if he was going to do it, he was going to make it nice.  Turns out Joe’s family has been through this too.

Is that gun pink enough for you, you filthy little gun-fearing pants-shitting coward?

Or is that pink ribbon right there in front of the trigger still not speaking enough truth to my penis?