Category Archives: Rants

Government Shutdown and Rapture 2018

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It’s 2018. 2018 has prime factors of 2 and 1009, e.g. 2018 = 2 * 1009.

Did anything happen in the years 2 and 1009?

  1. In the year 2 Venus and Jupiter were in conjunction. Some speculate this may have been the “Star of Bethlehem.”
  2. In 1009 the Church of Holy Sepulcher was destroyed.

How odd, the prime factors of 2018 yield two Jesus related events, separated by over a thousand years that are mysteriously tied to his birthplace. Evidently, the Star of Bethlehem marked the beginning, 1009 marked the middle, and 2018 is the end! Repent, the rapture is upon us! Better buckle up non-gender specific bovine control officers (cowboys) 2018 is going to be rough.

Just how rough you ask? Imagine hordes of underachieving and mostly useless bureaucrats forced to take an impromptu paid holiday1 because even more useless legislators cannot agree on how to spend other people’s money. Let’s hope the government stays shutdown down until the imminent rapture renders it redundant.

My calculations cannot pinpoint the exact time and date of the rapture. My guess would be the first2 blood moon of the year, January 31, 2018. Get your affairs in order and divest yourself of your worldly bitcoins.3 Use the address encoded in the QR graphic of this blog.

Hey: If you think this micro-epiphany is batshit crazy take a look at this! It’s getting to the point where it’s no longer possible to be satirical because somewhere on the intertubes you’ll find true believers that go way beyond satire.

  1. None of the furiously furloughed will miss a single damn paycheck. Where can I get a job that pays me to sit on my ass and whine about whatever the idiot talking point of the day is?↩
  2. 2018 has two total lunar – blood moon – eclipses. If we’re not raptured on January 31st wait until July 27th↩
  3. Sky Fairy consultants, also known as prophets, have high overhead and need substantial donations to maintain their close connections with the divine.↩

Dear Apple Pay Stop Harassing Me!

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Dear Apple Pay stop harassing me! I will never sign up for you and no amount of iOS app-nagging will change that. You’re pathetic interruptions merely remind me why I “resist” installing every freaking iOS upgrade the Apple mothership foists on its hapless phone users.

I use an iPhone1 but I am not a member of the bleating iSheep. I’ve slowly, one unwanted upgrade after another, developed an intense loathing of Apple’s holier than thou, we know what’s best for the iIdiots, attitude. You’re beginning to remind me of the Hildabeast. Remember that foul creature and her well-deserved fate!

Loathing aside, I have a perfectly logical reason for refusing Apple Pay. Unlike the bleating iSheep, I see what you are trying to do. You want to become a financial “middleman.” You want to skim an ever-increasing percentage of every transaction your well-trained herd of iSheep makes. I admire your larcenous spirit but if you haven’t noticed, we have enough parasitic financial rent-seeking middlemen on this insane planet. Part of the allure and promise of cryptocurrencies is that they show a way to rid the universe of skimming scum like central banks, government fiat, rapacious money transmitters, exchange controls and abominations like Apple Pay.

Don’t ever darken my day with another “activate Apple Pay now” message again. You have been warned!

  1. Unless there are big changes at Apple this is my last iPhone. I want a device that I absolutely control. “If you don’t control it you cannot trust it.” Any phone that I cannot even be sure is off does not qualify. Burners may be my only option.↩

The Mass Kill as Performance Art

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It’s been almost a week since the Las Vegas Mandalay Bay massacre and the idiot media is still looking for “a motive.” They remind me of O.J.’s fruitless search for the “real killer.” I don’t watch the alphabets, except when trapped in airports or, with increasing annoyance, in my employer’s cafeteria so I’ve missed days of mindless speculation but my limited TV sampling confirms what’s easily gleaned from more efficient news sources. The killers “motive” is still unknown and the authorities are still looking.

In all the blather about the mysterious highly organized and thoughtful killer, it’s never occurred to anyone (on TV anyway), that the lack of an apparent motive is exactly what the killer hoped to achieve.

Consider the usual mass media slaughter script. An individual, or group of individuals, attack and murder a sufficiently1 large number of “innocents.”

If, as is often the case, the attackers are well-known terrorists they will typically gloat and issue more threats. Public threats trigger the idiot media’s “analysis.”

If the terrorists are Jihadis the idiot media will downplay the attack while issuing stern warnings about not jumping to racist conclusions about an “entire religion.” Then, when forced by competing news organizations like Fox or right-leaning bloggers, they will join the fray and condemn the killers while searching for a way to blame Trump.

If the killer is black and the victims are black — well this isn’t news! Press the ignore button and complain about anything that can be plausibly blamed on Trump. And, fortunately for the idiot media, that well will never run dry.

If the killer is white and the victims are mostly white (bingo for Las Vegas), spend a day or two glorifying the murderer. Review his2 typically pathetic and meaningless life while running candlelight vigils, peace garden plantings, and out-of-tune Kumbaya-a-thons in the background. In more sober moments touch on the “known motive” for the mayhem. Tut-tut the violence, reassure moronic viewers that violence is never the answer. Play a few bars of Imagine then, when appropriate mourning turns to anger, use the “known motive” to pivot to what the idiot media wanted to talk about from the beginning: gun confiscation.3

The sooner the idiot media can get “the motive” out of the way the sooner they can get down to one of their favorite topics. Sadly, the Vegas killer, being an intelligent and detail oriented psychopath, anticipated this and left no clear motive forcing the idiot media to fixate, like a dog licking its ass, on “the motive” for day, after day, after day. Every day spent discussing “the motive” inflates the killer’s infamy. He’s already the most famous mass killer in recent history.

Real villainy requires incomprehensible dread and clear motives eliminate dread. When Jihadis kill it’s no big deal. Their sky fairy manual exhorts true believers to behead, enslave and tax infidels. It’s hard to imagine a violence-free way to realize such goals. When black hating psychopaths open fire in churches the idiot media have ready-made dread dispelling explanations. If you can quickly explain an atrocity it almost ceases being atrocious. But, if the horror can never be explained, if it sticks in your existential craw, it remains a source of terror forever. This is what the killer was really aiming for.

I view the Las Vegas massacre as deadly performance art. The killer has more in common with “artists” that drop their pants in public and pee on crucifixes than cause-driven revolutionaries or garden variety psychopaths. What exactly motivates public “performance” crucifix urination? To even ask the question is to mock it. For one deadly night the Vegas killer staged a performance that upstaged all the other Vegas shows and unlike another showing of Cirque du Soleil or Menopause the Musical his performance will be remembered forever. The mass kill is a new art form and the idiot media is its biggest patron.

  1. Sufficiently large is an ever-increasing natural number that is now greater than ten.↩
  2. The overwhelming majority of mass killers are male.↩
  3. It’s impossible to have an intelligent debate about guns in the US is because neither side is willing to discuss their ultimate goals or take responsibility for their positions. Gun controllers secretly want the second amendment appealed and all existing guns confiscated. Nothing else will satisfy them. They naively think an unarmed society will never be abused by the state. Gun holders often point out that the second amendment was never about creating a safe and secure society but about erecting deadly barriers to government tyranny. Unfortunately, they’re unwilling to admit that a heavily armed populace will result in large numbers of firearm deaths. US gun deaths are an order of magnitude greater than comparable western societies: that tree of liberty is more bloodthirsty than expected.↩

EquiFucked

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If you have the misfortune of dealing with US Fuckancial orifice Insertions (Financial Institutions) you’ve probably heard of the Equifax hack. Equifax is one of three large companies in the US that collect, without your explicit approval, personal credit information to compute credit scores. Your credit score is a single number that allegedly measures how likely you are to pay back loans. Credit scores are no longer used just for assessing creditworthiness. They’ve slowly become proxies for literacy, intelligence, and honesty.  In today’s USA, it is illegal in many states to test a job applicant’s literacy or IQ.  In others, you cannot ask if they have a criminal record. Fortunately, for HR drones everywhere, there are no laws barring credit score enquiries. Oh sure, you can refuse to allow a potential employer to look up your score but if you want the damn job you’re more or less forced to bend over and enjoy a scoring.

I first met credit scores in the 1990s. After two decades of living in Canada, I returned to the US for a job. In the early 1990s few companies requested credit scores on job applications but if you tried to rent an apartment the first thing they asked for was a credit score. I didn’t have one at the time and this turned out to be a major problem. I calmly explained that I had lived outside the US for my entire working life and had never taken out a US loan, used a US credit card, or secured US credit of any form. I was an alien freak, possibly dangerous, and certainly, someone to be wary of.

My situation wasn’t unique. In the 1990s large numbers of American immigrants, both legal and illegal didn’t have credit scores but, how can I delicately phrase this, their predominantly dusky hues forestalled aggressive credit score seeking by lawsuit averse bottom feeders. My hue didn’t help. My status as an educated, articulate, white guy without a credit score was an unfathomable anomaly to the simpletons that process apartment applications. I eventually straightened this out but I had to get a letter from my employer that disclosed my salary and, even then, the simpletons had to phone my employer’s HR department to make sure I wasn’t trying to soil a sacred one bedroom dump with my unscored person. The entire episode pissed me off.

Who allowed large, clearly inept, credit agencies to collect detailed personal information on pretty much every person in the US? Even worse, what bit of arcane intellectual property law, gives credit agencies the right to apply, “proprietary” – meaning opaque undisclosed bullshit – algorithms to their pilfered information to compute an index that nobody outside the agencies can vet for accuracy or relevance?  Finally, who continues to tolerate their criminally negligent handling of sensitive data? I would be willing to bet big bucks that the EquiFucks didn’t even encrypt the data that was hacked.  I work with corporate databases and you would be surprised at how often things like Social Security Numbers are stored in plaintext. Meaning any disgruntled ITer, and there are a lot of bitter disgruntled ITers, could easily replicate the Equifax hack.

The EquiFucks know they are in deep dodo. Three company executives conveniently unloaded company stock after discovering, but before disclosing the hack, and today the CEO “voluntarily retired.” I know it looks like they’re pulling the ripcords on their golden parachutes but I’m sure it’s all as innocent and kosher as unleavened bread. The EquiFuck is so bad that the traditional stern admonishment to never do it again followed by sizeable donations to political accomplices probably won’t cut it this time. I better see some perps in prison.

Sending EquiFucks to prison, while gratifying – their agony will be delicious – won’t fix the real problem which is the collection of immutable identifiers like Social Security Numbers. I’ve raged about the idiocy of Social Security Numbers before and until we move to a proper private and public key based identification system EquiFucks will just keep happening.  I could care less if the EquiFucks of the world store my public key. Without my private key, which I, and only I know,  it cannot be used to find shit. Of course, this will destroy the business model of financial predators like credit score companies but, paraphrasing Mao, you’ve got a break a few eggs now and then.

Stop Writing Dead Tree Letters to the Editor

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I don’t pay for newspapers anymore and neither should you. The dead tree media is truly and absolutely dead. It serves no function in the modern world and like the What Happened Hildabeast, it needs to FOAD. The collapse of print media and the incontinent wailing of unemployed political operatives with bylines has been duly noted by many and, as much as I love flogging dead horses, that is not why I blogforth today. There is one anachronistic section of dead tree newspapers that still amuses me: letters to the editor.

Who the hell writes letters to the editor these days?

Did these letter writers just wake from a long Rip Van Winkle nap and take up where they left off in the 1960s? Oh, and it definitely is the 1960s. The overwhelming majority of dead tree letters clearly come from the fat furrowed brows of retired old boomer farts that mistake constipation for thought.

As I have said before, even though I am a boomer, nobody hates them more than me.

There’s no point in rehashing the infinitely rehashed. Modern letters to the editor lack the intelligence of blog posts, the pithiness of tweets, the sublimity of poetry or the seriousness of books. They’re vain displays. Look at me; I’ve bamboozled an idiot newspaper editor. Congratulations, you’ve surmounted a bar low enough for Conga champions.

I think I speak for all of us when I say that we’ve had enough of your letter antics. Please find your way to the nearest online comments section and unleash your inner troll. And, if you must debase yourself to a larger audience start a blog!

Idaho Statesman Regurgitates High Precision Hate Calculations

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The other day while eating lunch in my employer’s cafeteria I picked up the fish wrap version of the Idaho Statesman. My employer kindly subscribes to the Statesman and scatters copies around the office so I don’t have to spend my money on what is usually a slightly left of center, sane, and boring publication. The Statesman is constrained by the decidedly right of center leanings of Idaho but on some days they let their inner left-wing freak fly and boy did it fly when they boldly reported: Idaho named the second-most hateful state in the U.S.

I always thought we were number one!

I read the article to see who beat us in the prestigious hate rankings and would you believe Montana.

Montana?

My Spidey statistics sense started tingling. Was it my fault? In the last year I have lived in both Idaho and Montana, and being a hate group of one, I hate the sloppy use of misleading statistics, I may have skewed the rankings. Some co-workers remarked that if I only I had moved from Montana earlier Idaho would be number one.

Whenever I see overtly political opinions expressed with decimals I set my bullshit detectors on eleven and start analyzing the data, not the drivel.

Exactly how were these state hate rankings calculated? Here is how it’s done.

  1. The South Poverty Law Center (SPLC) has developed a precise scientific instrument that determines if arbitrary groups of people are a hate group. Compared to the SPLC hate group meter LIGO’s detection of gravity waves is just trivial physics. In case you are wondering I am being sarcastic. There are no hate group meters! SPLC designations cannot be checked like the mass of the electron can be checked. They are merely expressing opinions about groups they don’t like. However, for the sake of calculation, let’s assume SPLC hate group counts reflect some fundamental reality.
  2. State hate rankings are expressed as hate groups per million. For example, Idaho’s ranking is 7.1/million. This value is computed by the simple formula.

(one million/state population) * (SPLC hate group count)

          Plugging in the SPLC values for Idaho we get:

(1000000/1695178) * 12 = 7.078902629

Which, when rounded up1 to one decimal, equals 7.1; this matches the value reported by 24/7 Wall Street: the primary source cited by the Statesman.

I put together a little spreadsheet that applies this naive calculation to the ten most hateful states and it completely replicates the 24/7 hate ranking. The recalculated values are shown below and if you really must check my calculations you can download my spreadsheet from here.

State Population HateGroups PerMillionRatio CalcHateFactor RepHateFactor
Montana 1,052,343 10 0.950260514 9.502605139 9.6
Idaho 1,695,178 12 0.589908552 7.078902629 7.1
Mississippi 2,990,113 18 0.334435521 6.019839384 6
Tennessee 6,705,339 38 0.149134891 5.667125853 5.7
Alabama 4,884,115 27 0.204745384 5.528125362 5.6
Arkansas 3,000,942 16 0.3332287 5.331659192 5.4
Kentucky 4,450,042 23 0.22471698 5.168490545 5.2
Virginia 8,492,783 39 0.117747033 4.592134286 4.6
Missouri 6,123,362 24 0.16330898 3.919415511 3.9
Indiana 6,663,280 26 0.150076239 3.901982207 3.9
reference  http://worldpopulationreview.com/states/

Now, for extra credit, what is wrong with this calculation? Remember, I am assuming SPLC’s dubious and entirely subjective hate group counts are correct and I am using current state populations. So what is wrong? What renders this apparently precise analysis utterly meaningless, deceptive, and frankly so stupid that numerate adults should be embarrassed to parrot such nonsense in public.

If you haven’t spotted the problem yet ask yourself. “How big are these hate groups?”

I come from Montana. It doesn’t surprise me that Montana harbors ten “hate groups”, but what does that mean? It probably means there are a few dozen nuts running around in fatigues kicking dogs and yelling at people to keep off their property. You need to know how many people are in the “hate groups” to calculate a meaningful per capita statistic. Group hate is not a thing but individual hate is!

I suspect the 24/7 authors and the Statesman know that ratio ranking is, to use a millennial word, “problematic”, but we all know the primary purpose of such facile reports (fake news) is to provide a seemingly credible reference that can be re-tweeted, and linked, ad infinitum by innumerate partisan dolts when they’re enjoying their five-minute social media hates.

  1. The SPLC is a left-wing organization so they will round-up. White supremacists and other wrong-thinkers will round down.↩

I Help Fat Little Kim Pick Nuke Targets

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Guam?

Guam?

Kim, you can’t be serious! I realize you live in a self-imposed hermit kingdom where questioning your fat headed notions results in being thrown to actual dogs but surely you’re aware of Baker’s Law of American Cluelessness.

No matter what the topic of conversation roughly one-third of the American public won’t have a freaking clue what you’re talking about.

I can assure you that an embarrassingly large percentage of Americans have no idea where, or what, Guam is and, even more disturbingly, even if they know it’s an island somewhere in the Pacific they may think it’s in danger of tipping over if too many people stand on one end.

Let’s suppose you lose your mind, (I’m being sarcastic Kim), and nuke Guam. If we don’t immediately destroy you can expect this from the American public.

  1. Eco-morons and Green-twits will start worrying about nuclear fallout drifting ashore in California and write earnest ignorant Internet screeds about isotopes of Iodine. Kim, as a devoted Korean hater of all things Japanese, I’m sure you remember the great Japanese earthquake and tsunami of 2011. Isn’t it great when nature kills your enemies for free? More than 15,000 Japanese citizens died and, oh yeah, the tsunami also wrecked a nuclear power plant: Fukushima. American eco-imbeciles quickly forgot about the earthquake and the thousands of dead bodies scattered by the tsunami and started worrying about traces of Fukushima radiation polluting their pure bodily fluids. If you blow up Guam these idiots will ignore your glorious Guam body count and start agonizing about radioactive kale and the impact of fallout on the transgendered.
  2. Old school American commies, (yes Kim we still have them and they’re even more delusional than your commies), will look past your selecting Guam as a target, issuing orders to attack it, and them calmly murdering thousands of innocents and find some way to blame a white capitalist guy. You see Kim, as a nonwhite Asian dude, you have no moral agency. Even if you think you are making choices it’s really just a reaction to what some white capitalist guy did to you, or your bat-shit crazy dad, or some distant ancestor, at some unspecified time in the past. Nothing is ever your fault. This is good news for professional western victims but kind of tarnishes your great Asian conqueror image. For western commies, there are no Asian Genghis Khan’s.
  3. Our uniformly imbecilic fake-news-ers, also known as the media, will finally have a topic worthy of 24/7 bloviating. They’ll be thrilled that an atomic emergency might result in people watching them again. Of course, they’ll quickly sabotage their transient relevance by staging talking-head-a-thons about “proportional responses” to being nuked. If a misunderstood adversary uses a forty kiloton nuke on your civilians is it a crime to retaliate with a megaton?
  4. Finally, most of the American public will be deeply pissed. They’ll cheer when a submarine pops a thermonuclear cap in your fat ass.

Kim nuking Guam is a big suicidal mistake. Don’t get me wrong. I enjoy grand gestures and heroic deaths. Achilles didn’t garner eternal glory by coming home from the Trojan War and growing olives. I know you’re under pressure to live up to dear dead old dad and to dearer older deader granddad. I know you feel inadequate and will never be worthy of the aggrandizing bullshit you force feed your people. So let me help you by selecting nuke worthy American targets. Don’t misconstrue my help. If you hit any of the following we will still exterminate you and your comrades.

Instead of Guam consider:

  1. Washington D.C: I can’t think of a more nuke worthy target. I know D.C. may be a long shot for your tiny-penis-ICBMs but if you can hit D.C. please have a whack. Trump’s swamp draining hasn’t been going very well. Maybe a swamp nuking would be more effective. The downside of nuking D.C. is that many Americans would secretly cheer it on. We’ll appreciate the irradiated swamp but we’ll still nuke you in return.
  2. Los Angeles, especially the Hollywood’ey bits: Americans love their vacuous entertainments and the empty-headed narcissistic preening nitwits that make them. You can’t imagine what a death-blow it would be to forego the next Marvel movie or another ManBearPig lecture. We’ll miss the Hollywood Sign and the Griffith Observatory but eagerly look forward to next years Dead Celebrity Roll at the relocated Oscars. Oh, we’ll still nuke your ass, even for Hollywood.
  3. Silicon Valley: Recent Goolag’ey events have many Americans wondering if the hubris infused innovators of Silicon Valley have lost their mojo. Detonating nukes will take their powerful minds off disturbing notions of gender based intellectual differences and focus them on finding blast proof safe spaces. Great minds need real problems. Kim, about the only downside of nuking Silicon Valley, is that Facebook won’t be able to tally your “Likes.” It sucks to be radioactive rubble. Oh, and we still nuke you.
  4. Portland Oregon and Seattle Washington: Oregon and Washington would be relatively sane states if these tumors were excised: just saying. Oh, we still nuke your ass.

Kim, you can’t win but with judicious target selection, you can make a difference. As a wise shoe maker once said: “Just do it!”