I’m just a simple user; not a designer. And each and every “improvement” seems to come with added complexity.
To me, a technological “improvement” means ease of operation. I long to go back several revisions of Microsoft Word and Outlook. I swear; each and every function I once achieved with one or two clicks of the mouse, now takes nine. I’ve even documented a bug or two, which, when challenged on, my better half smiles and walks away.
This weekend we were forced to replace the home’s telephones. (The free market is fabulous. Most Americans can afford a few “telephones.”) The lines kept crackling. It turns out the noise was not the fault of the old, trusted telephones, answering and fax machines.
The upshot of the improved technology: Whereas I was once able to press a single button, and by so doing activate the answering message; I now must click through a whole process to get the same result.
I am told that this added complexity and inconvenience is due to cheap innards. Extant hardware must be made to carry as much programming as possible. Designing for customer comfort is secondary to the price of the components.
Ultimately, each time I accidentally click to update my browser or any other of the things I use to function online, I dread the complexity that will ensue.
Some things are best kept simple. Technology is one such thing.
“The concept of a society is based on the quality of its mercy, of its sense of fair play, its sense of justice,” goes that memorable line from the film “Midnight Express” (which surely represented Hollywood at its heyday). The protagonist’s protest against his inhuman and inhumane Turkish jailers was a plea against a merciless authority.
The kind the US and its surrogates (“NATO”) around the world endorse as democratic.
The demonstrating “activists” might want to consider giving old Hosni a sponge bath and reinstating him, rather than condeming an old man to life in prison (or death there, whatever comes first).
Since the ousting of Mubarak, reports BBC News, “Foreign direct investment has reversed from $6.4bn (£4bn) flowing into the country in 2010 to $500m leaving it last year. Tourism, a major revenue generator for the country, has also dropped by a third.”
Celia Savage, who likes to blow things up on her property or in the forest clearing, was arrested for telling an agent of Police State USA that she liked to “Blow things up. …” especially “toilets in the woods.”
She did nothing wrong, other than blow her mouth off to an officer of the police state. She was not caught in any criminal act, as far as I can tell. There was no plausible cause to search her home. But they did. Based on what they found during that raid, Savage is being “held on federal weapons, explosives and drug charges, and has been denied bond.”
Savage’s Facebook profile, which is also still on the web, lists “explosives” as an interest, her political orientation as “anarchist” and her status as “Push to test. Release to detonate.”
“I despise all law enforcement and any governing authority,” she says in her “about Celia” section.
Had the Georgia resident offered her skills to Uncle Sam’s fighting force, she’d be in the clear, especially if she blew off some “toweled” heads, or peed on them.
What next? Question her likely many Facebook Friends? Perhaps Savage is my friend and I don’t know it?
A secret Missouri State police report, “entitled ‘The Modern Militia Movement,’ and dated February 20, 2009,” is warning about subversives like … me [and YOU].
One of the incriminating telltale signs the Missouri Information Analysis Center (MIAC) is on the look out for are Ron Paul stickers.
I have one on my car. It reads: “Don’t blame me, I supported Ron Paul.”
The MIAC has cultivated an ensnaring network of snitches and spies”—consisting of local, state and federal agencies, as well as the public sector and private entities”—all instructed to keep their eyes peeled for “paraphernalia” associated with the patriot movement. Flags, for example. Guilty again. A magisterial “Don’t Tread On Me” flag snakes across the front page of this website, where my seditious work is stored. The Gadsden flag appears on every other page too. I can’t get enough of “that funky snake,” as my website developer calls the critter.
Indeed, this early American symbol represents some of the values I cherish and champion. The Stars and Stripes stands in stark contrast to the “modest motto” the rattler embodies. Beloved of Republicans, especially, the American flag has ceased to symbolize the ideals of individual and national sovereignty, but stands, rather, for arrogance and imperialism, at home and abroad. …
READ MORE about what could incriminate us in Police State USA.
“Had a rare video surfaced in which a black toddler was being brutalized by agents of the Transportation Security Administration, President Barack Obama would have enough solidarity, and some to spare. ‘If he had a son, he’d look like the boy whose breeches were breached by adults who should know better.’
I don’t wish the homegrown terrorists of the TSA to become equal-opportunity offenders; I want Congress to call off these attack dogs, now.
Still, I am unconvinced that when they travel, black women, tots, and geriatrics are subjected to the same invasive searches as are whites.
My own experience this month was uneventful. I was spared the rogering I’ve endured in the past, thanks, I believe, to the advice of WND’s Commentary Editor: wear loose clothing. A young TSA agent waved me by.
I did see a tall and handsome TSA worker working-over a little old man (aged 80, perhaps). The agent was black; his victim Caucasian. It looked as though the former was examining the hunched old man’s colostomy bag. It took the agent forever. He appeared to be enjoying himself.
I lingered as long as I could, to bear witness. The cruel ordeal was still underway when I left the scene, some 15 minutes later.
Dare I say it? The girl who—no doubt by fluke—did not violate my constitutional, fourth-amendment rights to be free of “unreasonable searches and seizures” was Caucasian.
A previous flying experience saw me subjected to—what are the odds?—the ministrations of a large African-American woman, who summoned me with a crooked finger for a pat down. In no time at all, her giant digits were on my chest and between my legs.
Amassed online is a critical mass of images in which TSA workers, often minorities, are feeling up and humiliating the most vulnerable members of white America—kids, old men and women, often infirm and incapacitated.
Twenty one and a half percent of TSA employees are black, and 13.1 percent Latino. At 10.5 percent and 10 percent respectively, the equivalent representation of aggrieved groups in the private sector merely mirrors their numbers in the larger population (serving, no doubt, to keep litigation at bay).
Moreover, like most federal agencies, the TSA is known to provide sheltered employment to a segment of the population which Sibel Edmonds, a courageous whistle blower, has described as “low-level, incompetent, scandalous, molesting, abusive, and in some cases criminal people who have been creating one scandal after another.”
TSA action is immortalized in countless YouTube clips. …”
If you’d like to feature this column, WND’s longest-standing, exclusive libertarian column, in or on your publication (paper or pixels), contact ilana@ilanamercer.com.
UPDATE I: The serious Japanese are Laughing (and it takes a lot to make them chuckle):
UPDATE II (June 2): To the repulsive David B, in Comments:
My rational, sane readers know my writing as the kind that cleaves to reality, is objective, and objectivist. Aesthetics, art, music: These are aspects of the culture that I comment on at length. This is nothing new. I’ve commented on my idea of female beauty and manliness. These, like my concept of what constitutes good music, are absolute. These assessments exist irrespective of what I find sexually attractive or politically desirable. I thought Jackie Kennedy was spectacular as a woman. Does that mean I am attracted to her? Does that imply I’m a Democrat? What nonsense. The Don Draper character in “Mad Men” is good looking, objectively speaking. Does that mean I want to jump his bones? Iman the model in lovely. And black.
Crass, stupid racialists see the world through their narrow prism of politics and race. They are postmodernists, in this sense, reducing objective reality to subjective likes and dislikes that serve their personal ego-related and political needs.
I’ll repeat the reality I observed at the Newark airport recently: The black gentleman I observed assaulting the helpless, ancient white man was tall, fit, well-groomed and good-looking (in the sense that he could have obtained employment with a modeling agency). Do these objective observations mean I was attracted to him? How stupid can you be?
Did I despise him for his actions? You bet.
His actions, more than anything else about him, condemned him as a man and human being.
