Author Archives: BZ

A brief tech update:

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BZ As Druid

BZ’s Druid cowl and analog sword

My wife and I have a pact.

She stays away from plants, because she has what some call the proverbial Black Thumb.  Most plants she touches die.  I handle the plants at the homes.

Conversely, I am the family Druid, the Luddite.  I am as tech-savvy as a pair of worn socks in your dresser drawer.  I stay away from the technology and let her handle the bulk of it.

Recently, for example — on WordPress, which powers this blog — I uploaded one single, solitary plugin.  I’ve loaded plugins before on WordPress but this plugin somehow crashed my entire blog about two weeks ago.  I couldn’t even access the dashboard in order to discover which plugin was responsible.

Luckily, my tech guru is Robert, who is the I.T. expert for the blog consortium of myself, Texas Fred, American & Proud, The Right Handed Cowboy and The O Word.

Robert was able to suss out the problem, un-crash everything, and bring my blog back up.  God bless him.  But absent his intervention, my digital world would have remained shattered.

That said, I’ve had — like most all of you, I suspect — damned near thousands of computers to date.  And today I updated the one at my wife’s house in Ghetto Centrale.

Right now I’m typing my last post, for a while, on my Sony Vaio 15″ laptop.  It’s been a great machine, not a hiccup to it, ever, with a great keyboard.  I really like its keyboard, illuminated as it is in white, with a crisp strike, and very responsive.  But it’s no Toshiba all-in-one, like the 25″ screen I have at the cabin in the Sierra Nevadas.  It’s a remarkably sharp touchscreen with no cables or wires or confusion.  It has a wireless keyboard and a wireless mouse.  I, however, dislike touching screens because I have to reach.  And you have to clean the screen.

Samsung-dp700a3d-a01usToday, as a replacement for the Sony Vaio, I purchased a 27″ Samsung Series 7, with an Intel® Core™ i7 processor, 10 gigs of RAM and 2 TB hard drive.  Another all-in-one with a power cord and that’s it.

This will be my new confuser down here in Ghetto Centrale, at my wife’s house.

One niggling little problem: it has Windows 8 loaded.  And, from what I’ve seen, I don’t like Windows 8.  You cannot get any new PC without Windows 8.  But apparently you can revert back to something similar to Windows 7 and the desktop with the START.

For shite’s sake, I don’t want to re-learn some new OS every damned 6 months.

Thoughts, anyone, on my purchases or Windows or PCs or Macs or desktops or all-in-ones or tablets or anything else digital?

BZ

 

 

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This new building, the highest in the EU? Just a wee little problem. . .

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Intempo Building, Spain, No Elevators“And the architects are not returning calls.”

From TheBlaze.com:

A 47-Story High-Rise Has a Tall Problem: They Forgot the Elevators

At 47 stories, the In Tempo skyscraper in Spain is set to be the tallest residential building in the European Union.

But anyone living on floors 21 through 47 has a problem: to get any higher than the 20th floor, you have to take the stairs.

Oopsie.

Builders are likely more than a little red-faced after discovering that the 650-foot luxury high-rise under construction in the resort city of Benidorm is missing a crucial element — an elevator that goes all the way to the top of the building. Imagine the difficulty you would have trying to move into your apartment on any floor between 21 and 47.

But wait; it gets better.

They won’t be able to retrofit.

BZ

 

 

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For Friday: Whittle’s State of the Union — on firearms — 2013

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From the simply-too-logical Bill Whittle:

I must apologize, up front, for the common sense and the facts and the logic.  I further apologize for not immediately sparking, lighting and ramping up the jejune flames of emotion and illogic.

Leftists would have us stop with the logic, stop with the statistics, stop with the common sense.  If something “feels” innately good, well, then, it simply must be good according to primeval emotions.

But emotions didn’t build fire, and emotions didn’t discover the wheel.  Necessity and survival did.  As did the piles and piles and piles of dead bodies required to discover these things through trial and error.

Let there be no mistake: Mr Whittle speaks for me.

And let there be no further mistake: the Fornicalia Department of Justice (DOJ), under current Governor Jerry Brown, who is a Leftist abortion-on-toast that immediately disbanded the BNE (because CNOA opposed Brown as governor) and, having fired numerous DOJ agents, is once again re-hiring 40 said personnel in order to specifically target firearms enforcement and firearms confiscation in the state.  Let my DOJ readers weigh in.

Fornicalia AG Kamala Harris is another Leftist apologist for Leftists, a despiser of law enforcement, and a sniveling jackanape-of-a-disciple of Barack Hussein Obama due to philosophy and shared melanin counts — may he ascend towards godhood.  Little g.  Kamala Harris: no death penalty for a dead SFPD officer, eh wot?  Good for you.  Time to take a stand against law enforcement.

All: prove to me that this is incorrect or improperly reported.

The Second Amendment exists to prevent tyranny.  It exists to prevent people from, at its base, government.

BZ

 

 

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Obama administration using housing department in effort to diversify neighborhoods

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Social EngineeringFrom FoxNews.com:

In a move some claim is tantamount to social engineering, the Department of Housing and Urban Development is imposing a new rule that would allow the feds to track diversity in America’s neighborhoods and then push policies to change those it deems discriminatory. 

The policy is called, “Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing.” It will require HUD to gather data on segregation and discrimination in every single neighborhood and try to remedy it.

HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan unveiled the federal rule at the NAACP convention in July.

What?  “Social engineering” in the Obama Administration?  I find that simply difficult to believe.

Data from this discrimination database would be used with zoning laws, housing finance policy, infrastructure planning and transportation to alleviate alleged discrimination and segregation.

Please note the operative word in the above sentence: “alleged.”

And sanity weighs in for just a brief moment:

“This is just the latest of a series of attempts by HUD to social engineer the American people,” said Ed Pinto, of the American Enterprise Institute. “It started with public housing and urban renewal, which failed spectacularly back in the 50’s and 60’s. They tried it again in the 90’s when they wanted to transform house finance, do away with down payments, and the result was millions of foreclosures and financial collapse.”

Some fear the rule will open the floodgates to lawsuits by HUD —  a weapon the department has already used  in places like Westchester County, N.Y., where mayors and attorneys representing several towns, like Cortlandt, are writing HUD to protest burdensome fair housing mandates that go far beyond those agreed to in a 2009 settlement with HUD.

Wait.  This wouldn’t punish people like, say, the ADA has punished businesses small and large for years, becoming the proverbial cash cow for tort lawyers — would it?

Potentially the most disturbing paragraph in the entire article:

Also troublesome to critics is that the HUD secretary, in announcing this proposed rule, blamed poverty on zip codes – rather than other socio-economic factors that studies have shown contribute to poverty.

Right.  Zip codes are to blame.

BZ

 

 

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USDA Sets Goal to Serve 166 Million Gov’t Subsidized Meals to Kids This Summer

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Feeding The Welfare BearsJust what we need: children with their own EBT cards.  Start them early, the government says.  From CNSNews.com:

(CNSNews.com)
With a record 101 million Americans receiving food aid from the federal government, the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) wants more kids to be on dole for food during the summer months.

Why stop there?  Why just the summer?

“As part of its ongoing commitment to improving access to healthy food for low income children, USDA has set a goal of serving 5 million more meals to eligible children this summer,” the agency said on Aug. 1.

One of the ways the government will achieve this aim is by giving children subsidies on EBT cards. The USDA released an evaluation report on testing “new methods” to provide food to children in the summer, specifically through the Summer Electronic Benefits Transfer for Children (SEBTC) program.

“As part of its efforts to end child hunger, [the Food and Nutrition Service] FNS is studying alternative approaches to providing food assistance to children in the summer months,” the USDA said.

Last summer, 66,772 children received subsidies via an EBT card from the program, which was run in eight states and two Indian tribes. Eligible households received up to $60 per month, per child.

Excellent.  Let’s get children into the habit of relying, absolutely, on the federal government.

Why is it that you can’t lawfully feed bears in federal reserves and parks?  That’s right, because it would tend to create dependence and remove the bear’s ability to hunt for its own food.

BZ

 

 

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