How the hell is Daylight Saving Time still a thing?

March 10, 2018 / / No Comments

Why doesn’t the rest of the country do what Florida has done? (Gods, who would have ever thought I’d say THAT?)

The sunshine state voted to move to Daylight Saving Time and stay there. Unless the federal government steps in and forces it to, Florida won’t fall back to standard time in a few months, it’ll stay on standard time year round.

The time change is stupid, silly, and pointless. Let’s do away with it. Either stay on DST or standard time, but do away with this idiocy.

“Last Week Tonight” with John Oliver explained it best:

Don’t blame NBC News for the Oprah tweet.

January 8, 2018 / / No Comments

This morning I heard a radio talk show host griping about “NBC News” tweeting an “endorsement” of Oprah Winfrey for president.

That is incorrect. It was NOT NBC News that tweeted it, it was NBC, the network.

The third-party live tweeter working for NBC during the telecast was wrong to not include context referencing Seth Meyer’s joke. And the network was right to delete and apologize for the misunderstanding. But it was NOT NBC News‘ tweet.

That’s how fake news really works: slipping in that it was the news division, and then going on a hellfire and brimstone crusade against “the news media” over it.

I realize we’re living in a fact-free world now, but it still matters.

Dick Gordon, American astronaut, RIP

November 8, 2017 / / No Comments

Another American hero is gone, the likes of which I despair of seeing in the rest of my lifetime.

Dick Gordon

Richard “Dick” Gordon, an Apollo-era NASA astronaut who became the fourth American to walk in space and one of 24 humans to fly to the moon, died on Monday, November6 at the age of 88.

The command module pilot had a lonely job on moon missions: He stayed in the CM while the two other astronauts descended to and walked on the moon.

Whenever the spacecraft orbited around the far side while astronauts were on the surface, the CMP would become, for a few minutes, the most cut-off, loneliest human being in the universe.

It might not have been as glamorous as walking on the moon, but it was heroism nonetheless.

During turbulent times, America was once able to soar to the moon, if ever so briefly. Now, we can’t seem to gather the courage, will, and ability to compromise to fix health care, tackle gun deaths and help those in poverty, the way other countries with fewer resources have done.

I miss America.

If we just ignore the neo-Nazis and white supremacists, will they go away?

August 19, 2017 / / 1 Comment

Charlottesville Nazis

Some are advising people to not counter-protest when Nazis and white supremacists demonstrate or have a rally. Some are advising people to not pay attention to them or give them any more publicity. Let them shout into the “empty air,” as Tina Fey put it.

I understand the sentiment, I really do. If we were dealing with any other kind of loud-mouthed troublemakers, that is absolutely the right response.

But what about when Nazis start running for office? Do we speak up then or stay quiet so as not to give them undue attention?

What about when they start taking over local and state governments? Do we speak up then?

What about when they take over the national government?

It’ll be very easy to stay quiet then because the punishment for counter-protesting or speaking out will be jail… or worse. Make no mistake. Just as Hitler’s ultimate goals were quite evident years before he took over Germany, so the goals of the white supremacist movement are clear now: The elimination of non-white people from the United States “permanently.” If you’re listening, that’s what they’re saying, and I have no doubt they’re telling the truth about that.

When this kind of barbarism raises its ugly head, it can be truly said, “Those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it.” We’re not even a hundred years away from the last example.

I do not advocate for counter-violence. Ultimately, that serves the goals of the white supremacist movement. They copy the tactics of Nazi thugs in the 20s and 30s who sought to provoke violence to justify brutal retaliation.

I do, however, advocate wholeheartedly showing up, speaking out, raising our voices. Do not be intimidated into either silence OR counter-violence.

Your headphones are spying on you, lawsuit alleges

April 20, 2017 / / No Comments

A customer is suing Bose. Kyle Zak claims the audio company is using its headphones to spy on us.

The proposed class-action suit claims Bose uses its wireless headphones and Bose Connect app to collect private data and sell it to third parties. Zak says Bose is violating the U.S. Wiretap Act by “secretly collecting, transmitting, and disclosing its customers’ private music and audio selections to third parties, including a data mining company.”

Two things about this lawsuit bother me.

One, Zak’s claim trips my BS detector – just a little bit. On the other hand, smart TVs have been caught recording and storing our conversations, so headphones spying on us isn’t outside the realm of possibility.

But the bigger problem is this: Social media and internet providers already gather this information and now, thanks to a new law, are free to sell it to whomever they wish without your permission. Going after Bose is a moot point.

We live in paranoid times. But one need not fear the CIA or NSA as much as marketing agencies. They already know far more about you than national intelligence. Big Brother isn’t working nearly as hard to root out dissent as big corporations are violating every last vestige of our privacy to show us targeted ads.

I am, however, keeping a close eye on my Keurig from now on.

Now’s the time to support print journalism

January 29, 2017 / / No Comments

Print and broadcast journalism is more important than ever, especially in these chaotic times. But broadcast journalism depends on print media for serious, in-depth stories that are able to get a lot more room to breathe on the page than on a short TV report.

That’s why now is the time to support print journalism, and the way to do it is with money. I’ve dumped a couple of my music subscription services and signed on with The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the online edition of The Los Angeles Times.

I could drone on about why print journalism is so important, but I think John Oliver did a much better job. Also, it’s in video form, so you don’t have to strain your eyes looking at lots of words.

Standoff between China and the US over seized underwater drone

December 17, 2016 / / No Comments

UPDATE: The Pentagon says China has agreed to return the underwater drone. The original post is below.

China has seized a US underwater drone and the standoff is escalating. The US says the drone was a scientific research vessel, the Chinese say it was spying on their submarines in Chinese waters. It’s another in a series of escalating actions China is taking.

Is this because of Donald Trump accepting a phone call from the president of Taiwan and his increasing anti-China rhetoric? Maybe. And it’s interesting to note that a retired Chinese admiral, speaking at a conference sponsored by a state-run newspaper, called out the president-elect by name:

“If Trump and the American government dare to take actions to challenge the bottom line of China’s policy and core interests, we must drop any expectations about him and give him a bloody nose.”

More from the New York Times:

According to a Pentagon account, a Chinese Navy vessel that was shadowing the Bowditch — a common practice in the South China Sea — pulled up not far from the vessel. It then dispatched a small boat to seize the drone as the American crew was recovering it from the water, the Pentagon said. The Pentagon described the vehicle as an unclassified “ocean glider” system used to gather military oceanographic data such as salinity, water temperature and sound speed.

An American naval expert did not disagree with Mr. Wu’s notion of what the Americans were probably doing. “Warfare and surveillance in the age of drones has not yet developed an agreed-upon set of rules,” said Lyle J. Goldstein, associate professor at the China Maritime Studies Institute at the U.S. Naval War College, in Rhode Island.

“This is increasingly a major problem as both China and the U.S. are deploying ever more air and naval drones into the contested waters and airspace of the Western Pacific,” he said.

The seizure was possibly another demonstration by Beijing that it can irritate the United States in a gray zone, just under the threshold of actual hostilities, Mr. Goldstein said. He said it was a time for “cooler heads to prevail,” to halt a cycle of escalation that “cannot end well for either side.”