Rounding up the chicks

Well, not ours, who are safely in a crib in the bathroom. “A bathroom full of meat; life is good!” my wife said this morning.
And life is apparently good for Dan Cathy. Quoth Allahpundit, “Somewhere, a Burger King ad man’s toying with the idea of having “The King”declare himself “100% pro-life.””  Apparently, a Wendy’s franchise owner in North Carolina decided to stand with Chick-fil-A (for principle or for money, I don’t know and it doesn’t much matter) , and got his butt kicked by corporate,

On Catholic Answers last night, the host (a sub I think, not Patrick Coffin) was joking with Fr. Serpa about “picking chicken out of our teeth” and commenting on how well-mannered and pleasant the folks in line were.

Well, not everyone. This douchebag seems to have earned himself his 15 minutes of Internet fame. And this lady (his victim) deserves a promotion. Heck, if I were single and 30 years younger, I’d interview her for a position as “wife”.

For those wondering: no, I didn’t participate. I hate lines, and the local stores aren’t particularly convenient to me. But we’ll be going out of our way soon.

UPDATE: the douche has a name (Adam Smith!), and is the CFO of a catheter company (no I’m not making either fact up!)

UPDATE 2: Make that WAS the CFO of a catheter company.

Religious liberty rally post-mortem.

We were off Saturday in the pickemup truck, pickemupping a new used washer, and we had on a rebroadcast of Friday’s rally for religious freedom (Cleveland version), which I couldn’t go to without screwing Stephen. Most of what I heard was boilerplate, until I heard somebody talking about how the bishops had been working for “a fair and equitable health care system”, and I turned the radio off in disgust.

Here are my observations:
1. You don’t get to cite natural rights in defense of religious freedom and at the same time advocate the violation of the natural right of man to retain the fruit of his labor. You don’t get to choose between natural rights; you’re all-in, or you’re out, or as Ken Kesey would have put it, you’re on the bus or off the bus. You may disagree whether something is in fact a natural right, but you’d best have a good argument. One that I’ve heard about material wealth is that everything comes from God anyway. True, but irrelevant; if it’s OK for the armed mob called the State to take God’s stuff, then it’s OK for me too, 7th Commandment be damned. I have to support the bishops’ position in this, not only in unity with the Church, but because some liberty is better than no liberty, but the fact remains that a lot of the bishops were in support of “health care reform”, and they really need to apologize publicly for the extent to which they supported socialized medicine and called the Obamacare abortion into being (an act I don’t expect to happen any time before their particular judgement). The simple fact is that one does not merely have a religious right not to pay for sin; one has a right to not pay for anything. There is no moral obligation to provide health insurance, or to buy anything else. there’s a moral obligation to treat your employees right, which in this society could be stretched to include health care, but that’s an obligation between you and God, and the state has no place in it, unless you’re really a theocrat.

2. There were too few people, and I do feel some guilt for not being there. 1000 or so is not peanuts; it’s enough to get you noticed by the press. But it’s not enough to induce fear, which is the only language the government knows. These are the folks who can shrug off hundreds of thousands of pro-life marchers in DC. If all the ambulatory Catholics of Cleveland and half the committed Protestants filled Public Square, and that was repeated at each rally, the powers that be would get nervous.

3. Kresta complained that the press was getting the message of the rally wrong, saying it was about the HHS mandate instead of religious freedom. Reporters report what they see, and based on the signs and the speeches, they were exactly right in what they reported. I’m not sure the message could have been controlled, even by the most organized movement, without draining the blood from it; it’s this specific act that makes folks angry. Yes, the bigger principle has to be articulated (though as I pointed out above, there are big principles that the Church just isn’t going to touch). But abstractions don’t fill the streets.

Somebody invited Barnhardt, and they got what they expected.

25 years ago

…about this time, I was at Refrigeration Research in Brighton MI, the place where I used to work, trying to peddle some junk-bond-based mutual funds for First Investors, the place I was working for at the time. I don’t recall if I found out there, or when I got back to the car. I hadn’t paid much attention up until then; people had been going into space, mostly successfully, most of my life, and it was no big deal anymore. Sure, there was all that “first teacher in space” hoopla, but I’d grown up being unimpressed by teachers, and saw no reason I should be impressed then. So when it happened, I sorta went “Oh shit…that’s really sad”, but  it never occurred to be to write a Challenger memorial piece.

At the time it was (and became more so) All About Christa.  If you ask the man on the street who was on the Challenger, the list will begin (if it begins at all) and end with McAuliffe (unless you’re an Akronite, in which case you might remember Judith Resnik). At the time, we sensed there was something wrong with that, which is where the jokes all came from.

What were Christa McAuliffe’s last words? “Gee, what does THIS button do?”

Did you know Christa McAuliffe had blue eyes? One blew here, one blew over there.

The tragedy wasn’t in the lives lost, unless they were friends or family. How many times have we lost 7 or more military at a time? We don’t commemorate that 25 years later. The tragedy was that it ended our belief in technological miracles. We learned that NASA was just as screwed up as any other part of government, that private engineers could say there was a problem but the suits upstairs would reliably bend over for the state. That loss of innocence is worth remembering and mourning today.

Assange moves to London safe house

…or big house, or something.

The WikiLeaks fight is basically pathetic. Cut off the domain name? Use the numbers. Somehow block the numbers? Get a new domain under a different name. Cut off the Paypal account, cancel the Mastercard service? Use something else. It’s like ACORN; destroy the brand, and the same cockroaches will start something else. These folks aren’t sheep; strike the shepherd, and they’ll raise up a new one. There’s basically no way to keep information off the Net without destroying the Net. And it’s a little late for that now. Bradley Manning? Rosenberg him. But there’s not a lot that can legally be done about Assange.

And why is the press using the word “rape” to describe the etiquette violation Assange is wanted for in Sweden? We know what rape is, which is why when we discuss 16-does-15, we call it “statutory rape” — like “open marriage”, the modifier is an admission that the noun doesn’t really apply. They’re filling out minds with violent scenes, with guns to the head and ripped clothes, and that’s not what happened at all. It’s the same mentality that calls the tax structure of the last decade “the Bush tax cuts” instead of “repeal of the Clinton tax hikes”, as if there is some normal and sacred level of taxation. Yes, it was stupid for Assange to fall for the trap. As Don Juan Matus might have said (but didn’t), “A warrior keeps it in his pants.” But it’s not rape just because the little head did the thinking.

SuddenLink, my hero

For most of the past year, we’ve used Sprint 3G wireless. We’ve not been entirely happy with it. It’s not much faster than dialup, for 3x more. We were told that the fact that cell phone service sucks at our house had no relationship to 3G. That’s not true. And we were limited to 5G of download, with overages charged at a fairly stiff rate. One month we went over by about 3 G, and instead of being charged 60% more, we were charged over 3x as much. Why did we get it? Because nobody would sell us DSL or cable Internet. It was that or satellite, which had some of the same problems. We had all kinds of companies who claimed that they serviced our area, but when you got to the address, it was, “No, we can’t do you.” When pressed, they would give some technical answer about distances from boxes, which begged the question: why not our street? We could see cable stakes on the side roads of our block. And as the township goes, this is a fairly urban little patch, with minimal frontage.

Well, I’ve been the one to do the harassment, but since Rusty is unemployed, a Farmville addict, and thus has time and motivation, she decided to contact more people in the neighborhood. And she got to Jeff Wells, 2 doors down, who said, “I have Internet”. “Duh, with who?” Suddenlink, our cable TV provider. So she called them, and asked about service, and got the same runaround. “Uh, but you’ve got a customer 150 feet away from us.”  ”Er, um, we’ll send a tech out tomorrow.”

Which is how we find ourselves with 6 mps unlimited Internet. It’s faster than work… tested at 6.43 mps this morning as opposed to 4.74 on the work machine (same kind of imac). I haven’t had the time to test it much…I did system updating last night and played with Internet radio this AM, both things I could never do before. And I had to go out and buy a wireless router so Rusty could play (the cable modem comes in at my desk), and we wanted fast, so it wasn’t cheap…even though Micro Center was having a sale. And I’ll probably have to pay through the nose to get out of my Sprint contract.

Here are the villians:

Sprint: for selling a lousy product

Verizon, and their successor Frontier, our local phone co., for not selling anything at all.

ATT, ditto

CenturyTel I can’t really diss, because they never pretended to sell to us. But they serve a guy a mile down our road, across the county line, so they could have served us.

And last but not least: SuddenLink. Yes, they just gave us this beautiful connection, which I am duly grateful for. But they wouldn’t until I had spent big money on a Sprint wireless modem. They haven’t given us any paperwork about our account…all we know is what it will cost us. No instructions, features, etc. I suppose that’s all online.  But what kind of an industry is it where you have to beg and grovel to be their customer? We’ve been trying to get broadband for 4 years. Where were they?

WJB III wins friends and influences people, chapter 97403

Facebook is a wonderful thing; it causes friends of a mutual friend to meet each other, sometimes at high velocity without seatbelts.

Sorry, [redacted], you can’t do that [because I unfriended him first -JAQ]

Hey, if it had been me on your thread beating on your friends, you’d be within your rights. But you came onto my thread, looking for a challenge, and a challenge found you. You might turn a search engine to “Billy Beck” some day; you’ve encountered an Internet legend. I’m not inclined toward censorship, or flushing things down the memory hole. And you’ve shown yourself to be allied to those who are so inclined.  It’s probably best that we don’t interact politically.

On Mon, Oct 4, 2010 at 5:17 PM, [redacted] wrote:

Jeff:
I don’t need insults from some two-bit whack-job on Face-Book. You will delete the string that he and I have gotten into or you will be “de-friended”.

I respect you as a fellow musician in this town, and although I might disagree with your political views, I have until now, understood these views, as mistakened as they may be. You have been at least civil, but to endorse your buddy today negates that perception.

I will not tolerate being called a “commie” by some punk who doesn’t even know who I am.  I’m fucking serious.

Thanking you in advance for your time and consideration, I remain-

Very Truly Yours,

A damned shame… a decent chap overall, and an excellent tenor. But really, what did he expect, and what did he think I was made of? He’s not the first person I’ve blown off when they commanded me to change a Net post.

And remember, those “commies” own us already, as China holds most of our debt.

Billy Beck: Hokay, then. You’re all set. Good luck.

That was the place where a wise man would have stopped.

UPDATE:  [redacted] wanted to make nice, asked me to lunch to talk. And hey, I was cool with that; I was really not upset with the guy at all. But then he called me back, saying “I’ve got a lot of musical contacts in this town; I’ve gotten a program or two cancelled.” and talking all worried that “that nutjob” was going to show up to lunch. I’m seeing a guy go into full meltdown over a stranger on the Internet calling him a “Commie”….act as if he were being bullied, and respond by bullying himself. I’m sorry, but that’s not psychological health. And I’ve really got to worry about this guy…for his sake and for mine.

I’m putting this out there so that, if I end up dead in an alley somewhere, y’all can have the cops subpoena my Facebook account.

Tourists on the Robert E. Lee Plantation

We ate a light brekkie for “free” (TANSTAAFB) and took off to town. Our first goal was Arlington, and we got there, but couldn’t find a way in. Instead, we visited the Pentagon and the Pentagon Memorial. The idea was fairly clever, but Rusty basically found it kind of ugly, and was fascinated more by the planes flying in, way too low over the Pentagon. But I knew she wanted in, so I kept going, and found a pedestrian gate open, at Area Section 51. So we saw newly-potted guys, and Civil War guys (a lot of civilians from then, in Section 27; whuzzup with that?), including one guy who bought the farm on my -92nd birthday. Rusty took lots of pictures of stones of female veterans.

Then off to downtown. We found spendy street parking and went to the Smithsonian American History museum.I found a lot of the exhibits kind of lightweight, and since Rusty is not the sort to do things sequentially and read everything, I didn’t get as much out of it as I could have. We both enjoyed Julia Child’s kitchen, and kind of grooved on the Choate house. She got many pics of me in the musical instruments, but failed in her attemps to photograph the Ruby Slippers. But then on 3 E, I went into the bathroom, didn’t hear Rusty say where she was going, and we lost each other…which was compounded by cell phone malfunction. We finally got together but decided to call it a day for sight-seeing and went back to the room to mellow.

Cleans up pretty well

Rusty teaching a wild plant class at a Coast to Coast AM meetup

Bristol and Levi

Look, I’m all for forgiveness, family unity, all those Christian virtues. So why can’t I stop screaming, “NO, Bristol! DON’T DO IT!” This boychild did his best to hurt you and your family (even if he hurt himself much worse); what makes you think he won’t do it again? Maybe Levi has grown up, maybe you two can pull this glorious thing off with God’s help, and live happily ever after. Or maybe not.  Your parents can watch out for you better than I can, so if they’re cool with this, all I can do is pray.

Stalking the blue-eyed Threeper

I came home from work Friday being very disturbed after reading this. As it turned out, it was a bit of a false alarm, and Jennifer III handled it well overall…including letting karma handle the neo-Nazi punks. Beck apparently pinged it and deleted it, since the ping leads to blankness and there’s nothing else there.

For me, it was one of those “the eyes of Sauron are upon us” moments. Me, I’m just a lil old news aggregator with opinions, trying to take care of me and mine in a world where the ground is writhing with leeches. I am not currently any kind of threat to Fedgov, but I think the wrong thoughts…which makes me wonder if I should keep more of those thoughts private, or at least pseudonymous. Maybe y’all would like more pretty farm pictures or music posts. Or then again, maybe not.