The two rulings are not a big surprise considering who is on the bench. The downstream repercussions of the Hobby Lobby ruling will be interesting to see played out, however.

In particular, if no insurance company wants to offer a plan that excludes every imaginable type of "contraception", then what would happen? Will Hobby Lobby take them to court to force them to offer a plan that meets their particular belief system?

http://xkcd.com/1386/

I use mine as an ashtray. What do you guys do with yours?

You're not privileged at all...

On this week's Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee , Sarah Jessica Parker uses the phrase "that's not politic." I guess I don't get out enough in wealthy leftoid circles to know that "politically correct" has been reduced to one word, and that is the context that she used it.

It was on the tail of her gem that there used to be signs in NYC that said "No Irish, No Entertainers, No Jews, No ..." Which is another new one on me. Her rendition of the "No Irish, No Negroes, Need Apply/Served Here/etc." now includes "entertainers."

While looking for a reference to, well anything that could be called research, related to this "No" sign, I found this interesting paper by Richard J. Jensen from 12/12/2004:

"No Irish Need Apply":
A Myth of Victimization
Abstract (the whole article at the link)

Irish Catholics in America have a vibrant memory of humiliating job discrimination, which featured omnipresent signs proclaiming "Help Wanted--No Irish Need Apply!" No one has ever seen one of these NINA signs because they were extremely rare or nonexistent. The market for female household workers occasionally specified religion or nationality. Newspaper ads for women sometimes did include NINA, but Irish women nevertheless dominated the market for domestics because they provided a reliable supply of an essential service. Newspaper ads for men with NINA were exceedingly rare. The slogan was commonplace in upper class London by 1820; in 1862 in London there was a song, "No Irish Need Apply," purportedly by a maid looking for work. The song reached America and was modified to depict a man recently arrived in America who sees a NINA ad and confronts and beats up the culprit. The song was an immediate hit, and is the source of the myth. Evidence from the job market shows no significant discrimination against the Irish--on the contrary, employers eagerly sought them out. Some Americans feared the Irish because of their religion, their use of violence, and their threat to democratic elections. By the Civil War these fears had subsided and there were no efforts to exclude Irish immigrants. The Irish worked in gangs in job sites they could control by force. The NINA slogan told them they had to stick together against the Protestant Enemy, in terms of jobs and politics. The NINA myth justified physical assaults, and persisted because it aided ethnic solidarity. After 1940 the solidarity faded away, yet NINA remained as a powerful memory.

As mentioned in the paper, certainly the occasional mention was made. One could read the NYT classifieds every day for 20 years in the 19th century and find the reference perhaps twice. The NINA signs appeared in England, but did not seem to make it across the pond in any numbers that could be called prolific.

And now, an actress wishes to add entertainers to the myth.

I say let President Bush decide in about two and a half years from now.

Apparently someone in my friends list has a bunch of points to blow off. Somebody who knows how to game the system by not posting for a few days. I know that trick too. It works every time, being automated and all. But I like being a motormouth between gigs. I just might leave this account for all to see the abuse and just make another.. You'll know if it happens

I see you...

Stossel's show was irritating tonight. The topic was Conservatism vs. Libertarianism. As a Libertarian, Stossel misrepresented Conservatism, and various Conservatives were on appealing to the same things Lefties appeal to; the greater good, majority norms.

Stossel said he used to be a Liberal, so that explains enough of an inability to think straight about things to be able to be a Libertarian. But it's shocking how Conservatives seem blithely unaware that effectively saying it's okay to legislate morality, means then the other side can legislate its morality on us. (And where we're only for it in certain cases, the Left is for doing it all but a few cases. I.e. it's a patently dangerous idea, and used vastly more against us than in what we favor.)

I might journal about some of the topics later (maybe if I can find a refresher of my memory of it on youtube), but the show spurred a chain of thinking on a particular topic that led me to the following.

Let's say I'm a landlord, and I'm also bigoted against homosexuals (which I am, but not in the following way), and refused to rent to them. Most people would say the government should step in and force me to rent to them. I.e. Despite homosexuals offending my sensibilities, I should be forced to associate with them anyways. Because otherwise they could potentially have a hard time finding a rental place to live.

Now let's say that instead I'm a landlord, and I don't refuse to rent to them, but I'm a very outspoken disparager of them in the region, and the homosexual community knows it. And let's say the homosexual community represents a significant %-age of the region. What if I'm having trouble keeping the complex full all the time? Should the government force some homosexuals to live in my complex and pay me rent, despite my offending their sensibilities?

And what about quotas. Lefties say that if a community is 10% Black, then roughly 10% of the programming jobs in that community must be filled with Blacks. Else there's racial inequities.

Well janitorial jobs, at least around here, seem to be disproportionately filled by Hispanics. Should the government tell Black people in that area that 10% of them need to switch careers into the custodial arts?

It seems like either quotas are a good idea or they aren't. And it seems like if it's good to force association between parties when one desires not to do so, then it's good.

If it's one thing I can respect Libertarians for, it's at least they're consistent*

*Well, except for their being pro-choice, which flies squarely in the face of being for individual rights.

President Barack "Lawnchair" Obama forces striking Philadelphia Transit Workers Back to Work. While he didn't go so far as to fire them, he did break up the strike for at least the next 1-4 months.

...

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My employer pretty-well insisted that I get a certification. They went so far as to pay for the training and the first exam attempt.

To that end, I'm working on GCUX through SANS. So far, so good. It's pretty interesting.

From what I'm reading about how to prepare for the exam itself, it would be to my benefit to prepare a thorough index- something in the area of 30-50 pages long. O_O

Does anyone have any experience with that sort of thing? How does one know what should be in the index and what should not?

It started with the ability to show a network logo watermark. Networks would show a translucent version of their logo in the bottom corner for a few seconds, after resuming from a commerical break. Evidently someone who makes tons of money thought it was important that you be reminded where you're seeing the currently airing content.

I didn't mind that, at all. Stupid, but not really obnoxious. Then they moved onto the phase where they left that up all the time. I took me a while to train my brain to tune that out. Until I was able to, it annoyed the hell out of me.

Then they moved on to the next phase, of colored-in/opaque logos, that they leave up all the time. I.e. blocking part of the content (in that corner), all the time.

Then came promos for other shows on the network, after coming back from an ad break, that took up much or all of the bottom portion of what you're fucking trying to watch. I.e. all the commercials played, the movie has resumed, and you're trying to get back into it, and then here comes an overlay commercial, while the movie is still going. Sometimes it's animated, so basically you miss part of the movie they're showing.

So last night I'm flipping thru, and FX is showing some Ice Age or other cartoon animals movie (not at all my cup of tea, so I don't really know). Now I don't know if it had just come back from break or not, but it popped up an ad for the sequel to whatever it was, evidently now playing in theaters or coming soon.

I.e. they've taken the overlays from just promos for the network, to content-related adverts. I don't have for example a "smart TV", so maybe this has already started in other things.

I used to look forward to progress. When it meant a better picture, or more hp at an affordable price point, or easier and more advanced programming ways.

It's like standard of living is a bell curve. As technologies and advancement of capabilities has increased, our standard of living increased. But ever increasing capabilities doesn't seem to equal better quality of living, forever. My DVD player says "operation not permited by disc". WTF? Cars now have gadgetry to wrench the steering wheel from you or press the brakes behind your back. My dad can't go to a favorite finance site anymore, because it watched a few of his clicks and now doesn't show him general news but only the things relating the few topics it last remembers him clicking on. (I could try deleting cookies, as long as it's not fingerprinting him in other ways.)

So I don't think it's just old-fogeyism. I just like things that are better, not worse. And when you start running out of ways to make things better, I guess it's human nature to just keep on going, because the capabilities do. Didn't we used to be thinkers, or is that just another faulty assumption, about how the world works, of mine from childhood?

p.s. I have the flu, and feel miserable so I'm probably more babbling here than my normal level of babbling on.

...the more they stay the same. I think.

A little over a year ago, I wrote about how I stopped playing WoW and took up ST:TOR. Now, I don't even play that.

Things have been a bit hectic at my house- My wife's computer died (constant, unpredictable reboots and a corrupted hard drive), so she's taken to playing WoW on my system. She raids often, now that she's found a guild that does that sort of thing in the morning. My sleeping period has me getting up late morning. By then, I have an errand or two to do before I start getting ready for work. Rinse, repeat.

I need a vacation.

I forgot it was silly season. Mind you, it is the off-year one, the Winter Olympics to Superbowl Tuesday's buffet of awesomeness, so one really cares, including me.

Still, though, props to Brat for achieving trivia question notoriety. It's almost a shame his votes (should he actually make it to Congress) will be in line with his party waaaaaaaaaaay more often than not.

And congrats to the Democrats as well. Always nice when the other team commits an unforced error.

Right across the canal

Yup

OKAY, this ain't new to me, but sometimes it drives me to a new level of nuts. This "food desert" crap is pretty much peak bureaucrat bullshit. Back in 2009, the USDA came up with a map that was allegedly going to show where poor people had trouble finding "good" food. If they would have bothered to use factors that are easily available to the federal government, they might have come up with a useful product.

Instead, for the "good" food part they used, exclusively, supermarket locations. The industry definition, and the definition the USDA used is grocers that have all of the general grocery departments that do $2 million or more in annual sales within one mile of the "low income" folks described below. So if you have a neighborhood with Asian, Hispanic, and Indian markets (like the first food desert I examined) they are still deemed as "low access" to food. The added some other levels, like 1/2 mile from a supermarket, since 2009.

Another factor they used was "vehicle access" and it comes from census data. The running lie is that it is 500 people OR 1/3 of a census tract reporting no vehicle access. It ignores free services, like the TWO we have in Knoxville, that will pick up the poor and take them to the grocery store (or dialysis, or many other things). In this county, even the poorest of the poor has vehicle access for the necessities and they do not need to wait for the regular city bus either.

Yet another factor is the poverty measure. If a census tract has >20% households at the poverty level OR the average household income is
When you stick to the 1 mile map of 2009 the neighborhoods you expect were on the map. Areas with government housing complexes, poverty, and few grocers. But all sorts of other places showed up too, like the entire campus of the University of Tennessee, all the dorms, all the frat houses, the Agricultural campus, everything. Which pretty much makes the map cast too big a net and become nearly useless.

Then comes along the first lady in 2010 who decided the way to fix this issue was to "partner" with large grocers (supermarket owners) to bring more supermarkets to the poor. The White House announced that it was directing $400 million per year at the president's wife's project.

Here in Knoxville, the local equivalent of the Daily Worker, known as Metro Pulse, reported the 2011 version of the map. It showed what I described above, college campus census tracts appeared as destitute as the projects.

Something happened between 2011 and 2013. The map changed here and a good chunk of the tracts with public housing projects dropped off. The tracts still numbered 20, but new ones popped up. One was a bit west of where I live. in 2012 a Trader Joe's opened there, and by 2013 it was a food desert. Even more odd, one of Michelle Obama's food desert partners converted part of their store to a grocery.

Also in 2012, the city of Knoxville decided to throw $1.5 million dollars at a developer for the "University Commons" project. Developers are supposed to be developing all on their own and the good ones know how to buy land with their own money, and build stuff that will turn a profit. The ones that build crap that becomes and empty hulk in a few years get $1.5 million dollars from the city.

Their project includes a Publix, in the food desert, pretty close to the new sorority mansion compound.

What about all of this compassionate government crap and the housing projects? No new stores there, and I am pretty sure the residents didn't get any wealthier either. However, they are not in a food desert anymore, so no new Publix for them. No, the city had to raise our property tax to bribe a developer into building a Publix for sorority girls.

It gets even better than that! A charter school wants to open and locate in the low income area I was talking about (Western Heights), but the teacher's union wants to block it. The charter school does not get any more money per student than a regular government school, they just don't have the bureaucrat overhead of the local government schools, plus the local school board still sticks their collective nose into every crack in the place anyway. The teacher demonstration I recorded yesterday on Market Square Mall was indeed the whitest gathering of people I've ever seen in this town. Whiter than #FFFFFF. By the way, that demonstration was in another food desert, surrounded by fancy pants eateries and expensive condos.

Pissed me off so much I have not been able to narrate the latest video hardly anybody is going to see anyway.

In other news, I start a new job tomorrow.

Slashdot has become almost a go-to for finding new anti-government conspiracy theories. Yet only yesterday I heard for the first time that there are Sandy Hook Truthers who believe that the 2012 massacre never actually happened. Really, this conspiracy theory isn't any more crazy than some of the ones that are popular here, and it connects just as well to the POTUS.