Chronicling the depravities of the State.
Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.
But cold weather? Yeah, they’re going to bitch out:
USPS announced Tuesday afternoon they are suspending mail deliveries Wednesday in Minnesota, western Wisconsin, Iowa and western Illinois. Pickups from businesses, residences and collection boxes are also suspended.
If for some inexplicable reason you own an Apple device and haven’t already disabled FaceTime, you should do so now:
Users have discovered a bug in Apple’s FaceTime video-calling application that allows you to hear audio from a person you’re calling before they accept the call—a critical bug that could potentially be used as a tool by malicious users to invade the privacy of others.
You don’t want a caller to hear you bitching them out for being inconsiderate by calling you instead of having the decency to send a text message.
This story is an illustration of how not to handle a fender bender:
Following the fender bender, Kamrowski stopped in the left lane and got out of his Ford F-150 pickup truck to exchange insurance information with Fitzgerald, according to police.
Fitzgerald, 37, of Ashland, Massachusetts, stayed inside of his white 2016 Infinity QX70 SUV, authorities said.
“That encounter became adversarial,” police said in a statement.
At some point, Kamrowski of Framingham, Massachusetts, reached into Fitzgerald’s vehicle and snatched a water bottle and then stood in front of Fitzgerald’s SUV, police said.
Ideally, after a collision, both parties get out of their vehicle and cordially exchange insurance information and let their respective companies deal with the situation from there. However, ideal situations are almost as rare as honest politicians. If you find yourself in a collision and the other party won’t exit their vehicle, don’t approach. But if you can’t stop yourself from doing that, at least don’t reach into the vehicle. Record the other driver’s license plate number, the make and model of their vehicle (if you can determine it), and identifying characteristics of their car (color, bumper stickers, etc.) and person. If the driver flees, you have a good description to give to the police. If they don’t, they’ll have to get out of their vehicle eventually.
Let’s pretend for a moment that you’re an idiot though and couldn’t restrain yourself form approaching and reaching into the car. At least don’t do this:
“Fitzgerald then began driving towards Kamrowski, who subsequently jumped on the hood of Fitzgerald’s vehicle,” according to the statement from police.
The box of his F-150 would have been a better place to go (or, better yet, back into the cab). But if do jump on the hood, do it only long enough to jump off the vehicle in a safer direction. If you decided to overstay your welcome (and your welcome will be approximately zero seconds), you could end up going for a ride:
With Kamrowski clinging to the hood, Fitzgerald headed west on the turnpike, accelerating and stopping in an apparent herky-jerky attempt to shake Kamrowski, police said. Fitzgerald’s Infinity hit speeds of up to 70 mph as it traveled about three miles on the highway with Kamrowski holding on, police said.
Now you get to ask yourself a question, is the driver panicked and working from their fight or flight state of mind or are they purposely trying to kill you? It’s a pointless question because the answer is irrelevant to your situation. But asking it might distract you from the fact that you’re probably going to die because of your poor decisions.
Fortunately for Kamrowski, a good Samaritan managed to end the situation before he died:
Several motorists tried unsuccessfully to get Fitzgerald to stop, police said. When Fitzgerald eventually got bogged down in traffic, a motorist with a permit to carry a concealed weapon approached Fitzgerald and ordered him out of the SUV at gunpoint just as troopers arrived on the scene, according to the police statement.
But that’s not something you can bet your life on. Moreover, you’re probably still going to jail:
Fitzgerald was charged with assault with a dangerous weapon on a person over 60, negligent operation of a motor vehicle and leaving the scene of a property damage accident.
Kamrowski was arrested on suspicion of disorderly conduct and malicious damage to a motor vehicle.
In summary, don’t be either Kamrowsky or Fitzgerald. Especially don’t be Kamrowsky though because he put is life in danger (Fitzgerald, on the other hand, was at least smart enough to stay in his vehicle and thus maintained a significant advantage in the deadly situation they both worked to create).
Never underestimate a bureaucracies absolutism when it comes to following its own rules:
As the plane was preparing to take off for a second time and depart from the Great White North, the aircraft ran into a mechanical issue. Natalie Noonan, a United Airlines spokeswoman, told Global News that the door of the aircraft wouldn’t shut because it had likely frozen in the frigid temperatures.
However, because the airport had no customs officers on duty overnight, passengers were unable to leave the plane.
[…]
As the hours ticked away, temperatures continued to drop, sinking to as cold as -26 degrees Fahrenheit around 8 a.m. AST in Goose Bay, according to Weather Underground data.
I’m sure United Airlines is relieved to not be the source of the problem. However, I’m doubting the passengers sitting on a plane with a door that wouldn’t close in subzero weather were seeing the wisdom of barring them from deplaning because a bureaucrat wasn’t present to process their papers.
The problem with kids today is that they never had to participate in the Krypteia.
Here’s something to amuse you, an opinion article written by a Transportation Security Agency (TSA) schmuck who thinks ordering people to throw away bottles of water and touching children is a tough job.
Though we’re just enforcing the rules that keep the public safe, most people treat us as the jerks who take away their nail clippers.
That’s because you are jerks who take away nail clippers.
Longtime readers know that my opinion of Rand Paul isn’t high but my opinion of intellectually dishonest people is even lower. The story that Rand Paul has decided to go to Canada to receive medical treatment has been spreading like wildfire in socialist circles. A proponent of capitalism is going to a country with socialized medicine in order to receive treatment seems like a great demonstration of hypocrisy after all. However, the socialists sharing this story have forgotten one major fact: although Canada is a land of socialized medicine, a handful of private facilities still exist. This minor detail is important because it turns out that Rand Paul is going to one of those private facilities:
Those who chuckled at this supposed irony missed a major detail, even though it was noted in the press coverage: Paul’s surgery will take place at the Shouldice Hernia Hospital in Thornhill, Ontario. The clinic is private, and run for profit; The Toronto Star’s Daniel Dale, who is from Thornhill, notes that it was “grandfathered in to Ontario’s socialized health system.”
Instead of demonstrating Rand Paul’s hypocrisy, this story demonstrates one of my pet peeves: biased nuance. When you criticize the actions of an individual those who consider themselves on the same side as that individual will analyze your criticism with a fine-tooth comb in the hopes of finding a detail that calls your criticism into doubt. That same level of concern isn’t take for criticisms made against perceived opponents.
If you see a criticism of somebody you perceive to be an opponent, do a little digging before you share that story with your ideological circlejerk. It’ll save you from looking like a fool when somebody on that individual’s “side” analyzes the criticism and finds details putting it into doubt.
Nobody could credibly accuse me of being a Luddite but there are a lot of products that cause me to tilt my head and say what the fuck. Nike released a video of basketball players adjusting a pair of self-lacing shoes with a smartphone app. The shoes themselves are blurred out like genitals in a Japanese porno but the point is made clearly enough: Nike has self-lacing shoes that interface with smartphone.
My initial reaction was to assume that this product was the epitome of laziness. But then I thought about it and decided that digging out my smartphone, unlocking it, opening an app, and tapping a button actually requires more work than manually tying shoes. So I’m left to assume that these shoes are aimed at people who a) want to add the risk of being unable to lace up their shoes in the morning because they forgot to put them on the charger the night before and b) want the thrill of adding more hazardous materials to landfills when they toss out their battery equipped shoes.
One of the worst arguments that gun control advocates make is that individuals should rely on “professionals” (by which they mean police) for protection. The reason this is one of the worst arguments is because it makes a lot of assumptions that don’t play out in reality. One of those assumptions is that the police can respond immediately. Jayme Closs’s case has been making headlines for a couple of days now in part because it had a happier outcome than most people were expecting. She was found alive after she escaped her capture. However, there was a 15 to 20 minute period where everybody was likely on pins and needles:
Douglas County sheriff’s deputies arrived roughly 15 to 20 minutes later.
15 to 20 minutes is a long time to wait when a kidnapper who has already murdered two people may be looking for his escaped victim. Unfortunately, 15 to 20 minute response times are pretty typical in rural areas due to the distances between places. Fortunately, the people who were protecting Jayme were armed:
“So, they got in the house, and I loaded a gun and got ready and was standing at the door waiting until the police showed up, because (Jayme) said she didn’t know when he was coming back. When she was sitting on my couch, I couldn’t believe it. I just said to her: ‘I am so happy to see you,’ because I thought she was dead.”
Had her kidnapper found her and had the people protecting her not been armed, there would have been very little that they could have done to stop him from taking his victim back. That kind of bureaucratically enforced helplessness is not a future I find appealing especially when the proponents of said future can’t offer a realistic alternative for personal protection.
A recent report released by the American Psychological Association (APA) has been making the rounds and stirring up outrage. Why? Because it more or less argues that traits commonly associated with the Western concept of masculinity are bad:
The main thrust of the subsequent research is that traditional masculinity—marked by stoicism, competitiveness, dominance and aggression—is, on the whole, harmful.
My gripe with this claim is the same gripe I have with most claims made in controversial debates: everything is placed on a binary scale of good and evil.
It’s true that any one of these traits can be unproductive. For example, getting aggressive because you perceive that some guy across the bar is looking at your funny isn’t productive. However, us humans have these traits so they must serve some kind of purpose, right?
If you subscribe to the idea that humanity was created by a higher power, then you likely accept that we were given these traits for a reason. Likewise, if you subscribe to the idea that humanity is the product of millions of years of natural selection, then you’re probably open to the idea that these traits serve some evolutionary purpose. Either way you look at it, these traits obviously have some benefits.
I find that most of the people who criticize stoicism don’t actually understand stoicism (this can really be said about most critics of most things). Stoicism doesn’t teach that humans should be emotionless automatons. It teaches that humans shouldn’t be slaves to their emotions. Not making rash decisions based on the whims of your feelings is actually a pretty solid foundation upon which to build a personal philosophy in my opinion (another aspect of stoicism is to treat others fairly and that all individuals are equal, which are other points that I think make a good foundation for a personal philosophy).
Without competitiveness humans likely wouldn’t strive to achieve great things. Look at the Space Race. The United States put a man on the moon to show up the Soviets, who put the first artificial satellite and man into orbit to show up the United States. All of those satellites currently orbiting the Earth that enable satellite television, the Global Positioning System, and global communications are the byproduct of competitiveness.
You might not expect a self-proclaimed anarchist to say anything positive about dominance but even it can serve a valuable purpose. Consider the scenario where somebody gets shot. All too often this scenario can result it onlookers doing nothing other than recording the aftermath and uploading it to YouTube. When this happens, the person who was shot often dies. However, if a single person decides to dominate the situation, the outcome often changes. All it takes in those situations if for a single individual to point to a specific person and say in a commanding voice, “You, call 911,” to get medical personnel on site. Dominance is an important trait in crisis situations because if nobody takes charge, more often than not, no coordinated effort is made to deal with the aftermath in a productive way.
Aggression is also a valuable trait unless you enjoy being steamrolled constantly. If somebody tries to coerce you into doing something you’d rather not do, getting aggressive is often the best way to convince that person to strong arm somebody else. For example, if an individual is attempting to kidnap you, fighting back fiercely might convince them that you’re more trouble than you’re worth.
So all of these traits, on a whole, are not harmful. They can be harmful in excess but that is true of all human traits. But recognizing that requires breaking away from the binary thinking that dominates thinking here in the United States (and, really, most of the world).