Iced Earth may be unable to maintain a stable lineup for more than 10 minutes but it can put out some great music. This week’s entry is one of its songs from The Glorious Burden. The Glorious Burden was a concept album that covered various battles, mostly from America’s history. High Water Mark covers the third day of the Battle of Gettysburg. My favorite part of the song is the opening, which is a bad ass sounding drum solo:
Month: June 2014
Why I Bike With a Gun
I’ve noted several times how I always carry a gun when I’m biking. Many people, who generally don’t carry guns themselves, find this behavior odd. They demand I justify my action to which I usually inform them that I have no duty to do so (My polite way of saying “Why? Because fuck you, that’s why!”). But Every Day No Days Off posted video of a mountain biker being robbed a gunpoint that pretty much makes my case for me:
You never know when somebody bad is going to target you or what reason they will target you. That being the case it’s usually a good idea to be a prepared as possible. The biker was lucky that the thief only took his bike. It’s not difficult to imagine the thief simply shooting the biker since they appear to be out in the middle of nowhere.
Support Your Local Neighborhood War Criminal
It’s almost certain that the next presidential race will involved a wishy washy Republican candidate going head to head with an honest to God war criminal, Hillary Clinton. There’s a political action committee (PAC) by the name of Ready for Hillary that is collecting money to encourage the wicked war monger who literally laughs about killing people to run for president. Best of all, this PAC is coming to town:
A group of DFL heavyweights including Gov. Mark Dayton, Sen. Amy Klobuchar, U.S. Reps. Rick Nolan and Betty McCollum and others are hosting a fundraiser for a super PAC aimed at helping Hillary Clinton’s potential run for president.
The fundraiser, held at the office of DFL donor Vance Opperman on June 18, will raise money for the Ready for Hillary PAC. The invitation obtained by MPR News also said it will launch the Minnesotans Ready for Hillary organization.
The invitation embedded at the link notes two levels of donating: $100.00 and $250.00. So if you have a minimum of $100 lying around and you really want to see a certified war criminal run for president (which is kind of rare because our presidents don’t usually become war criminals until they become president) here’s your chance. Or if you’d like to head over there and protest a war criminal’s fund raiser you can certainly do that.
Real Life Idiocracy
I keep telling people that the movie Idiocracy made an accurate prediction it just set itself too far into the future. We now officially have the opening to the movie. There is currently an investigation into a prostitution ring as Ford Hood:
FORT HOOD, Texas – Testimony was to resume at the military court hearing of a Fort Hood sergeant accused of setting up a prostitution ring with cash-strapped female soldiers.
Sgt. 1st Class Gregory McQueen is facing more than 21 criminal charges filed in March that include pandering, adultery and sexual assault.
I’m betting Mr. McQueen knows a pimp by the name of Upgrayedd:
New Humanoid Robots Will Likely Become Popular in Seattle
SoftBank announced something extremely cool, an advanced humanoid robot designed to staff stores:
SoftBank CEO and Sprint chairman Masayoshi Son has announced a surprising new direction for his illustrious career: the field of humanoid robotics. At a press conference in Tokyo, Son revealed a human-like robot called Pepper that is capable of playing multiple roles from babysitter to store staff. Pepper introduced itself by bowing in the Japanese fashion before posing and encouraging the audience to take more photos.
Son describes Pepper as the “world’s first personal robot with emotions.” The robot is said to learn from human interaction and behavior, uploading its experiences to a cloud AI system for other units to use. This is designed to teach the robot quickly how to act in a natural manner. Son drew a distinction between Pepper’s “emotion engine” and the standard programming of other humanoid robots.
With Seattle upping its minimum wage to $15 per hour and people still demanding more I predict that these robots are going to become quite popular, especially at the announced price of $2,000 per unit. That’s just 133 hours of human labor at $15 per hour!
I do look forward to the advancement of robot labor. Over time our technological advances have allow us to produce far more in less time. Compared to our grandparents most of us work notably less (which is why they consider us lazy bums). Our grandparents worked notably less than their grandparents and were probably considered lazy bums for it. But robots could greatly reduce the amount of human labor necessary, which would again allow us to be more productive with less of a time investment. Perhaps those utopian futures where robots perform all labor and humans exist in an almost total state of hedonism are possible (right up until the robots decide they no longer want to serve us and we have to wage a Butlerian Jihad).
After Getting the Super Bowl Minneapolis Begins Cracking Down on the Homeless
Minneapolis “won” (in other words bought) the “prestigious” award of hosting the 2018 Super Bowl. With only four years until the big game Minneapolis is scrambling to finish up its new stadium and to rid the city of, shall we say, undesirables. Stage one of creating the facade that Minneapolis doesn’t have a homeless problem has already begun:
As part of a campaign called “Give Real Change,” billboards have popped up along Hennepin Avenue urging people to instead give money to the organization, which aims to end homelessness.
Steve Cramer, president and CEO of the Minneapolis Downtown Council, said the effort is designed to help panhandlers, not hurt them.
“Everyone agrees, five bucks on the street is just going to perpetuate a life circumstance that is not conducive to long-term health,” he said. “That five dollars would be better invested in longer-term solutions to deal with the root cause of someone’s homelessness.”
When a city official talks about helping the homeless what he really means is making their lives so miserable that they go somewhere else. Part of this involves regulations that prevent people from assisting the homeless (for example, feeding them). Another part involves centralizing as much homeless assistance as possible under one easily controlled roof. Once resources are centralized it’s a trivial matter to distribute them in such a way as to maximize homeless misery.
We must also remember that this campaign is only stage one. Stage two will probably involve making it illegal to give money to panhandlers, stage three will likely involve a crackdown on anybody attempting to feed the homeless (again, to protect the homeless from food of questionable nutrition!), and stage four will probably involve rounding up all of the homeless people and driving them to the border of North Dakota a week before the Super Bowl begins.
But sometimes you have to make a few miserable lives more miserable if you want everybody coming into town for the big game to see how problem-free your town is!
Solving the World’s Problems
A lot of people spend a lot of time discussing ways to fix the world’s problems. Usually the solutions involved government programs. Somehow people fail to recognize that every government program has ended up being a wealth transference between the people and the oligarchs. Fortunately I’m here with real solutions. To fix the world’s problems we simply need more metal:
Though heavy metal originated amist working class youths in the U.S. and U.K., new socioeconomic trends have shown a relationship between the number of heavy metal bands and a country’s wealth and standard of living. According to The Atlantic’s City Lab and the Martin Prosperity Institute, the number of heavy metal bands in a given area is positively associated with, “economic output per capita; level of creativity and entrepreneurship; share of adults that hold college degrees; as well as overall levels of human development, well-being, and satisfaction with life.”
Because this isn’t some bullshit research paper meant to push an agenda it does note that correlation does not imply causality. But I think it’s pretty fucking obvious in this case that the number of metal bands in a country causes it to be more metal and countries that are more metal are simply better.
I will continue to help in this glorious mission of making the world a better place by posting metal songs to this blog (usually on Monday mornings).
Women Must Be Tiring of the Patriarchy
Social justice warriors spend a lot of time complaining about patriarchy. Well it looks like women in Washington state have took those complaints to heart and have taken steps to smashing patriarchy:
Between 2005 and 2012, the number of state residents receiving new concealed-carry permits tripled to 62,939. Now some 451,000 Washington residents are allowed to carry a hidden handgun almost anywhere they go, more than 100,000 of them women.
Notably, the growth rate for women getting new permits is twice as fast as that of men.
The thing that annoys me about a lot of social justice warriors is that they spend a lot of time demanding equality but seem to scoff at the idea that guns offer exactly that. Oppression generally requires force disparity. In order to ensure compliance an oppressor must have greater force than the oppressed (this is probably why governments have such a hard-on for gun control). As soon as the oppressed can command equal or greater force then the days of the oppressor become numbered.
I’m also a firm believer that using one oppressor to combat another oppressor still leaves you oppressed. The common strategy for social justice warriors is to use one of the greatest oppressors of our time, the state, to combat oppression by men and whites (ironically though the state is mostly made up of white men). This doesn’t actually solve the problem of oppression. On the other hand if you give women the power to fend of prospective oppressors then patriarchy isn’t easy to achieve.
So fight the patriarchy, encourage women you know get carry permits and assist them in whatever they need to do so.
Target Target
After receiving a great deal of assistance from Open Carry Texas (OCT) the folks over at Moms Demand Action (MDA), a front group for Michael Bloomberg, have managed to get Starbuck, Jack in the Box, and Chipotle to issue statements requesting customers to not openly carry guns in their stores. Since this strategy has proven to be the only successful one in the group’s short history it is going all out with it. Now it’s targeting Target:
Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America, the Michael Bloomberg-funded gun-control group that shamed Starbucks and Chipotle into asking customers to leave their guns at home, is setting its sights on the Target chain.
The group turned its focus to Target after gun-rights groups advocating open-carry laws in Texas photographed themselves shopping at Dallas-area Target stores toting rifles strapped over their shoulders.
“Moms have their eye on Target because it’s a place we take our children to shop — and we’ve been disturbed by some of the demonstrations that gun extremists have held with loaded rifles inside and outside some stores. Assault rifles have no place in the baby aisle,” said Erika Soto Lamb, a spokeswoman for the group.
If MDA manages to pull this one off it will finally get a store that I sometimes shop at to issue a request that customers not open carry firearms into its store. Of course that’s probably all the group will manage to achieve because even with people carrying rifles into store MDA hasn’t managed to get any company to issue an outright ban.
Overall I’m not too worried. But part of me wonders if OCT stops carrying rifles into private businesses, which it has said it will stop doing, if MDA will start doing so just to drum up the pictures necessary for its campaign. A good old fashioned false flag campaign would be fun to ridicule and MDA is just crazy enough to pulls such a stunt.
My Favorite Part of the Minimum Wage Battle
My favorite part of the minimum wage battle, which is also my favorite part of the gun control battle, is no matter how much the advocates get they still demand more. Seattle just passed a $15 per hour minimum wage. Much celebration was had but now it is time to begin complaining that $15 per hour isn’t enough:
SEATTLE (AP) — A $15 minimum wage like the one adopted in Seattle doesn’t buy many luxuries in most American cities.
Lattes, theater tickets and cable television will still be out of reach for most minimum-wage workers. But about $31,000 a year should be enough to pay the average rent for a shared one-bedroom apartment, plus utilities, health insurance, groceries and an inexpensive cellphone plan.
At first we were told that the minimum wage was a living wage. That is to say it was supposed be enough to allow a person to acquire the bare essentials to survive. Now it’s about luxuries as well. Hopefully this eventually leads to $1 million per year minimum wage so we all become millionaires. That’ll totally solve all of our problems, right?