Tag: Things that totally suck

Executioner’s Song

Crime

Every time I rethink my position on the death penalty — i.e. that maybe I should reconsider my support thereof — I somehow stumble across a story like this one:

A convicted killer who had already murdered one girlfriend was left free to kill a second following a catalogue of police and probation service blunders, a jury has ruled.
Paul O’Hara, 48, was on life licence after serving 15 years for killing a former partner when he met businesswoman Cherylee Shennan.
They began a relationship but within weeks manipulative O’Hara, who had been diagnosed with psychopathic traits in prison, began controlling and beating the 40-year-old mother of one.
Over the following months police missed several chances to stop the ‘high-risk violent predator’.
When unprepared and unarmed officers did finally go to Miss Shennan’s home, O’Hara attacked them before stabbing his girlfriend to death.

So basically, this murderous asswipe was out on parole when he killed Victim #2.

Everyone who favors the abolition of execution for murder is all “O noes, what about the innocent people wrongly convicted?” when in fact they should be all “O noes, what about the innocent people killed by assholes wrongly freed?”

It’s bullshit.  Anyone convicted of murder should be locked away forever while the appeals process grinds on, then executed.  There should be NO parole (or “life licence” — what a crock of shit) for convicted murderers, ever.

Unless, maybe, we go all Hammurabi and if a parole board releases a murderer who then goes on to murder someone else, then the members of the parole board responsible should also face life imprisonment (or execution — a.k.a. Full Hammurabi) for having allowed Murder #2.

And while I’m still in a charitable mood, why hasn’t convicted cop-killer Wesley Cook (alias  Mumia Abu-Jamar) been executed yet?

Old-Fashioned? Me?

Beauty, Modernism

I am often accused of being an old-fashioned man.  This, despite the fact that I’m using a keyboard to enter my thoughts into a digital medium via a thing called the Internet.  And hey, I prefer brass cartridges over muzzle-loading, so I’m not that  old-fashioned (unlike some of my Readers, who believe that this brass thing is just a passing fad).

If you want to know what gets me going, however, consider the following pics, and guess why I tend to prefer tradition over modernity.  We’ll open with the modern ones:

Interior design:

Cars:

Handguns:

Women:

Men’s appearance:

Foods:

And you all know about my preferences in architecture:

So yeah, I guess I am old-fashioned.  Feel free to envy me.

VD Is Not Victory

Military

Used to be that “VD” used to mean “Victory Day” — i.e. the day the war ended — but that doesn’t seem to be the case anymore, does it?

According to a report released earlier this year by the Armed Forces Health Surveillance Branch, incidence rates of chlamydia in service men and women more than doubled from 2013 to 2018, gonorrhea infection rates also doubled for men and rose by 33 percent for women, and diagnoses of syphilis were nearly three times the number just 10 years ago.

Of course, the brass is always ready with a “DUH!” statement:

In a press release Wednesday, Defense Department officials said the increases can mean negative consequences for military readiness.

Ya think?

Then again, maybe the higher incidence of disease in our modern Armed Forces is, as the article puts it, just a parallel of the population as a whole.

Of course, the pox (of whatever flavor) is a perennial problem for any  of the armed forces, whether invading armies, fighter jocks [sic]  or dockside navies, as whores have always known that randy young soldiers of whatever branch are a prime target, so to speak, for their eager little cashboxes.   And everyone, especially the military brass, knows it.

I recall reading somewhere that the British army sent to Spain and Portugal to oppose Napoleon’s Grand Army suffered infection rates of around 35%, but maybe that’s a feature of Spanish- and Portuguese totties, not to mention the ineffectual / non-existing prophylactics of the time.

And even the Edwardian-era U.S. Expeditionary Force sent to France in WWI became a walking pox factory, despite the Puritanic nature of American society at the time.  As the song put it, “How Ya Gonna Keep ’em Down on the Farm (After They’ve Seen Paree)?”  (Translation:  now that they’ve experienced the French flavor of booze and debauchery, they’re not going to listen to us when we tell them to be sober and chaste back home.”)

My favorite line, though, is that of the late Spike Milligan who, in recounting his artillery unit’s preparations for the invasion of North Africa in 1942, pointed out that each soldier was issued a single condom prior to landing.  Milligan’s comment:  “One? One?  They must have been expecting a short war.”

‘Twas ever thus.  The distinctly modern take on the increased poxiness of our modern Armed Forces is that it seems to be about the same for both male and female soldiers — which equality no doubt pleases Teh Feministicals greatly, but which I for one find ineffably sad.

More Of Those Things

Drive Time, Technology

I know that “keyless entry” systems are all the thing with cars these days, but forgive me if I’m just a little skeptical about their security:

Some new cars on the market are vulnerable to keyless thefts, tests have revealed.
Latest security ratings for seven models you can buy in showrooms today have been released by Thatcham Research, an independent automotive research centre.
Of the seven vehicles reviewed, four were found to offer ‘poor’ resistance to relay crimes that have spiraled in the last few years.

Actually, most cars offering this feature are vulnerable to being hacked by relay devices (available on amazon.com, of course).  And if you don’t know how a relay device works, you need to disable your keyless system and go back to using a car key.

I of course have no desire ever to activate  any keyless system when I come to replace the Tiguan, so none of the above will apply to me.  And should my choice of car not have deactivation as an option, that choice will shift to another which does, or doesn’t even have the infernal system in the first place.

I am all for progress, by the way, if it represents actual progress and not just a nod to “convenience” (i.e. laziness).  For example, I have always applauded the shift from front-stuffing muzzle-loaders to the brass cartridge — but should some techo-genius come up with an “electronically-activated triggering mechanism” to replace it, I’ll probably shoot him.

With a bullet launched from a brass cartridge case, most likely one of these:

Not Known At This Address

Technology

A little while ago, Reader Sam D. had this thought about Amazon’s Alexa:

“Why would anyone WANT his own personal Stasi agent in his home, AND be paying for it?”

Indeed.  Somebody remind me again why I’m not wired into the Internet Of Things:

If you’re a Google user, you probably noticed some trouble last night when trying to access Google-owned services. Last night, Google reported several issues with its Cloud Platform, which made several Google sites slow or inoperable. Because of this, many of Google’s sites and services–including Gmail, G Suite, and YouTube–were slow or completely down for users in the U.S. and Europe.
However, the Google Cloud outage also affected third-party apps and services that use Google Cloud space for hosting. Affected third-party apps and services include Discord, Snapchat, and even Apple’s iCloud services.
But an especially annoying side effect of Google Cloud’s downtime was that Nest-branded smart home products for some users just failed to work. According to reports from Twitter, many people were unable to use their Nest thermostats, Nest smart locks, and Nest cameras during the downtime. This essentially meant that because of a cloud storage outage, people were prevented from getting inside their homes, using their AC, and monitoring their babies.

Don’t think you can escape this bullshit by jumping in your car and getting out of town, either:

Governments are collecting lots of data on the people using roads, trains and buses, and without proper oversight, that information could easily be misused.

(I’ve often wondered, by the way, if my movements are being studied by way of my phone location software.  As I drive for Uber, I bet it’s interesting reading:  “He goes to the airport three or four times a day and never seems to drive back… WTF?”)  And speaking of which:

I wonder why they bother to warn us anymore.

And then there’s this:

Sleep Number, one company that makes beds that can track heart rate, respiration and movement, said it collects more than 8 billion biometric data points every night, gathered each second and sent via an app through the internet to the company’s servers.
“This gives us the intelligence to be able to continue to feed our algorithms,” CEO Shelly Ibach told attendees at a Fortune Brainstorm Health conference in San Diego last month.
Analyzing all that personal data, Ibach continued, not only helps consumers learn more about their health, but also aids the company’s efforts to make a better product.
Still, consumer privacy advocates are increasingly raising concerns about the fate of personal health information — which is potentially valuable to companies that collect and sell it — gathered through a growing number of internet-connected devices.

What I’d like to do is hack into this system, and publish a Wanking Hard Incidence Ranking Report (WHIRR!) for every member of Congress.

Maybe then someone  would take this loss of privacy thing seriously.

Not An Improvement

Modernism

If London is trying to make itself into some kind of copy of Manhattan, it’s looking like a roaring success — if, that is, you’re going for the “soulless, impersonal, could-be-any-city” look.

Of course, I think it looked better back when I were a nipper:

That looks like London.  The other looks like shit.