Anyone but me find the “shop locally” push an overly alarmist campaign?  I’d like to propose that all shopping is local.  I may buy any number of things online from enterprises that may or may not have local store presences, but I suspect that all those goods are delivered by someone with a job who is local.  I suspect that person represents lots of other people local to me and local to others that have jobs. Don’t they count?

How many components or support mechanisms are there local to me that went into some portion of the creation, marketing, support, delivery, etc. of the product I bought from the evil, online enterprise?  I paid with financial services that have a local presence and last time I was in my bank they paid their employees.  Don’t these people count?

I guess I’m supposed to be sorry that the local mom-n-pop bookstore is going by the way-side (seriously, where are these mythical realms?), but am not going to shed any more tears over this than the loss of my local mom-n-pop hobby store or printing store or… name your own thing here.  If you can’t compete, you don’t get to play for long.  This is a rule of life and capitalism mirrors life most closely which is why it works better than other systems.

I love that one enterprising person decided to take on Amazon’s app approach with an app of their own.  Great response if you want to compete, you have to compete, not beg for the pity and charity of your supposed customers.  That may work once or near the holidays, but is not going to keep you in business even mid-term, let alone long term.

Don’t get me wrong, if you have a “local” store that you love and gives you fabulous overall value for your money, sweet.  Keep going and spending your money.  However, don’t be guilted into caving to corporate charity.  You’re not doing the business a favor, merely slowly prolonging the inevitable.  Better the business be confronted with reality sooner than later and make the necessary adjustments which may well include changing businesses.  UPS and FedEx outlets are local too, remember.

Not too much to quibble with here except for #2, “Train Users in Best Practices”.  Why?  Why what?, you may ask.  Why is this in the top 5 and certainly if it is a top 5 item, why is it #2?

How much training do users need to be safe on the internet?  Other studies have shown that high percentages of IT professionals and even IT Security professionals get hacked.  Are they not going to be the trainers of the less savvy?  If they are vulnerable are they qualified to be trainers?

How many articles, local and national news broadcasts, radio discussions and gazillions of online articles do users have to see to know:

1. They should change their password
2. They shouldn’t use the same password everywhere
3. They shouldn’t open attachments at all or at least not from anyone they don’t know and expect an attachment from
4. Clicking links in emails is baaaaad
5. etc., etc., blah, blah…  I can’t type out anymore I’m nodding off thinking through all the “common-sense” items

I’ve never regretted rebuffing the many offers / attempts to get me to move to the left coast in my life.

via VDHs Private Papers:: Jerry Brown, Modern Sisyphus.

Remember all this whenever the moronic left decries any candidate as “unqualified”.  Sarah Palin’s career dwarfs Obama’s union-sympathizing, May-day, community organizing resume, yet she was the one targeted as unqualified and gaffe prone.  Laughable if it weren’t so tragic.

Barack Hussein Obama is definitely the least qualified person to hold the office of President of the U.S.A and very likely the least qualified to even get his party’s nomination.  Heck, even the one thing one might have argued he stood a chance to accomplish, a reduction in race tensions, he’s actually multiplied.  So much for the great unifier.  Here’s hoping that the real unification will be the American people in November 2010 and 2012 making their voices heard loud and clear…  screw socialism and better dead than red!

Hmmm…. good to know the companies that embrace fallacy.  Screw ‘em!  I’m on a purchase hold from Apple and all the others on this Obamanation campaign against the evidence (or lack thereof).   There is NO GLOBAL WARMING!!!!  Any fool willing to look at the evidence can see this.  Any other stance is motivated by some other motivation, probably to back political correctness, that should be rejected as the fallacious, fascist position that it is.  Even the iTablet, should it prove real and substantial , is now off my purchase list till Apple returns from the opiate of californication fog in which it now finds itself.

Never Forget

Never Forget

Never Forget

Never Forget

Never Forget

That’s right you Islama-Fascist punks, we remember and we’re still here!  If we truly were the great-satan, then you’d already be buried under feet of irradiated glass.  You want to continue on in the 14th century?  Fine.  Just keep it to yourselves.

As for you apologists out there that want to figure out what we did to make them mad, give it a rest.  They hate us because we are the big dog and while they were once a powerful, technologically advanced culture and still have tremendous resources and riches, they are now reduced to near invisibility in the grand scheme.  All the aid and assistance they have provided has resulted in resentment, not respect.  The problem is theirs, not ours.  Whatever pains they now suffer for the serious error in judgment of a few of their least human members are on their heads alone.  Like spoiled children, perhaps chastisement is the only response that will result in peace and mutual respect if not exactly mutual understanding.

Rebuild the towers!  Let them know we are not bowed, broken or humbled by their pitiful tantrum of rage.  Never forget and yes, it is OK to be enraged at evil!  Don’t let anyone talk you out of feeling righteous indignation and anger.

God bless those that lost loved ones on this date in 2001.

God bless our troops for showing the resolve of the American people through both the stick and the carrot.  Come home safe and of clean conscience for killing the enemy.  My eternal thanks for your sacrifice!

http://www.victorhanson.com/articles/hanson080209.html

Superb article, ignore anything I’ve typed here and go read this post from Mr. Hanson.  No, really, go on, I’ll wait.

Good stuff, eh?  Troubling that those that don’t fall over in a swoon over our current President are presumed to have only one possible reason… his race.  Really ticks me off.  There are plenty of people of many races for whom I would gladly vote, not because they are that race, but because of their beliefs, values and hence, character.  Isn’t that what Martin Luther King, Jr. expressed as the realization of his “I Have a Dream” speech?

I don’t despise Obama because of his race, I despise him as I did Clinton and Carter, because of their hideous world-view that socialism is the direction America should go.  Now we can argue about who wanted to make the most changes the fastest in this discredited and proven destructive direction, but 2/3 were plain ol’ white guys and I despised them equally as much as Obama.  I do think he may be the most dangerous as so many conservative, supposed leaders remain cowed to point out that the Emperor wears no clothes because that would be racist. 

Nuts to that!  A wannabe socialist dictator should be opposed and given no quarter just because someone might call us a rude name.  Oh and guess what, I equally despise Nancy Pelosi and Steny Hoyer and they are plain ol’ white people.  Obama would probably consider them “typical white people” like his grandmother.  I don’t despise them because of their color.  Heck, I couldn’t pick them out of a lineup as I don’t watch news, but I know what they believe and therefore they are my enemy.  Nothing to do with race, theirs or Obama’s.

Saw this article on a super smart guy researching whether or not Abraham Lincoln may have suffered from a rare disease.  The part that got me going was the opening sentence, “Did John Wilkes Booth shoot a dying man?”.  Wouldn’t it have been actually more newsworthy if John Wilkes Booth had shot a non-dying man?  Is everyone else in on some piece of history I missed, principally that in some way Lincoln was otherwise immortal except for Mr. Booth’s magic bullet?

That said, would this have been the same magic bullet that ricocheted around so devastatingly through JFK’s limo in Dallas?  Was the bullet also silver?  Were Lincoln and JFK related by the fact they were secretly werewolves or some other such immortal creature with an Achilles heel weakness to magic bullets?

This would be a fun book / screenplay / comic to write.  Could write it into the Underworld universe for the next movie, which might then actually be interesting, or just take it into a stand-alone fictional effort.  Unless of course it isn’t fictional and Lincoln wasn’t in fact dying when Booth shot him, but would have lived forever which would have been cool, cuz I’d still vote for him.

Make a great day, I gotta get back to work.

Originally published April 14, 2008

OK, so this is the last example of the day and nothing against Rafe, his post is just the last straw over the last couple days, where I’ve heard that how fast a browser opens really, really matters to the reviewer / commentator.  Seriously?  How often are people opening and closing their browsers that speed of launch is any kind of a measuring stick for the quality of a browser?  The only time I’m launching a browser is at some point after I boot my PC and then never shut down the browser until the PC does so at shutdown.  Nearly everything I do anymore occurs in a browser or is destined to be submitted, emailed, stored, etc. through the browser.  Why close it?

Rant off…

Some rants will be more serious than others.  This one’s not so serious, use your browsers any stupid way you want <grin>.

Originally published March 19, 2008