All This Has Happened Before and Will Happen Again

A relative of Boston Dynamics’ Cheetah robot, which last year managed to outpace the world’s fastest man Usain Bolt on a treadmill, is now able to run outdoors untethered. Named the WildCat, the outdoor runner is funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), and is being developed for military use.

Of course it’s being developed for military use.

Do today’s engineers only read halfway through the warning stories of science fiction? I mean, it seems like they get to the “gee whiz that’s cool!” part of the book and then walk away to create this shit without reading the part where gee whiz technology obliterates mankind.

“Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.” ~ Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam, Dune

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You Know You’re Getting Old When…

…you hear a certain song and find yourself thinking, “Gawd, life was so much simpler then.”

I have iTunes on shuffle today, and Meco’s Empire Strikes Back came on a little while ago. Yeah, you know Meco did the infamous disco Star Wars, but did you know he followed up three years later with Empire as well? No, of course you didn’t. It never got the kind of club or air play that Star Wars did. I’m fortunate in that Steve gave me copy for my birthday the year it came out.

It wasn’t one of Meco’s better works, although it stands up pretty well in more of a jazz-fusion sort of way than outright disco after all these years.

At the risk of running off the rail completely, did you know he also did The Wizard of Oz…released on yellow-brick-road colored vinyl?

Yeah, good times. Wizard  is probably his most straightforward interpretation of all the movie soundtrack stores he attempted to discofy. I actually count the entire album in my Top 100 dance tunes.

But I digress, again.

As I was listening to Empire today, I couldn’t help think back to that summer of 1980 when Steve and I were working as messengers for Lewis & Roca in downtown Phoenix. Back then, the worst thing I had to worry about was whether or not the air conditioning in my truck would blow up, leaving me stranded somewhere—and what I was going to wear out dancing on any given Saturday night. We (and most of the rest of the world) were blissfully unaware of the shit storm that was to descend upon the world in the form of AIDS, Ronald Regan, George Bush (Senior and Junior), and Dick Cheney. (The impotent right wing was braying that Jimmy Carter was surely the anti-christ.) MTV wasn’t even yet a glint in anyone’s eye, and computers still occupied entire rooms. The most high-tech thing I owned was an analog turntable that had digital speed and pitch readouts and was controlled by integrated circuits! CD players were still a couple years out, and having an in-dash cassette player in your car was considered hot stuff.

It kind of makes you pause and consider how much life has changed during the last 30 years.

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Word.

From Driftglass:

They really aren’t that complicated.

Because.  There. Is.  No.  Tea.  Party.

As we Liberals have said many, many, many times before—as we were saying immediately after they appeared on the national scene and were slobberingly embraced by the national media as a Totally New Awesome Shiny Object—the Tea Party is nothing more than the same, cranky, white pig-ignorant GOP base voters who have been flinging the United States off of one cliff after another for most of my adult lifetime.

The same, old (very old) coalition of bigots, fundies and assorted other proudly ignorant meatsticks (tarted up for the cameras with a drizzle of “intellectuals” and think-tank manikins and a sprinkle of a few self-loathing minorities) that have been the bedrock of the GOP since Nixon—a mob of lobotomized shouters who cheered for every treason and catastrophe of the Bush on at 120 decibels right up until he started to lose.

After which they started to become exponentially more publicly unhinged.

Then came the Black President, after which they lost their shit completely and forever.

But of course, Serious People in Polite Society are never supposed to recognize such things, so instead of doubling over in laughing when millions of Republican meatsticks put on tricorner hats and hied their fat asses down to the local Ramada Inn to rally in favor of everyone pretending they’d out for a short beer for the last 20 years or so…the Mainstream Media went right along with the scam.

As one reviled, loser wrote back in 2009, while Very Serious people like David Brooks were ooh-ing over all of these newly minted “independents” that were suddenly abroad in the land, the word “Independent” had lost any meaning at all

Nobody knows what “independents” want, because “independent” as a modern political category is a textbook example of what Kurt Vonnegut defined in “Cat’s Cradle” as a “granfalloon”:

“…a proud and meaningless association of human beings”

Because “independent” can mean any-damn-thing, or nothing at all.

As the same, reviled loser wrote back in 2009 as the protobaggers were figuring out where to order Gadsden Flags in bulk:

And based on simple observation, guess who appears to be the largest group of late-blooming independents?

Those fucknozzles who, after giving Dubya the longest tongue bath in modern political history while calling everyone else a traitor, started gagging on the sheer tonnage of bullshit their creepy idolatry of George W. Bush was requiring them to swallow and obediently regurgitate every fucking day, that’s who.

Most newly minted “independents” seem to be little more than Republicans who are fleeing the scene of their crime, but at the same time still desperately want believe in the inerrant wisdom of Rush Limbaugh. They are completely incapable of facing the horrifying reality that that they have gotten every single major political opinion and decision of their adult lives completely wrong, so instead they double-down on their hatred of women and/or gays and/or brown people and/or Liberals, and blame them for the miserable fuckpit their leaders and their policies have made of their live and futures.

Like German soldiers after the fall of Berlin, they have stopped running away from the catastrophe they created only long enough to burn their uniforms.

But they fool no one.

Except, apparently, David Fucking Brooks.

Actually, I got that last bit wrong: turns out they fooled a whole lot of wealthy, influential people in the press because so many people in the press got to be and wealthy, influential by being just such colossal fools.

All of which is made geomentrically more depressing when I go back to my archives and note that, yep, I sure as shit predicted this exact phenomenon 2006 during the height of the Age of Boosh:

… In five years, having voted for Bush will have become the parachute pants of this decade. 

It will become the “Oh my GOD. What the fuck was I thinking?” shameful secret people will occasionally and elliptically allude to by piping up with, “well, he did good after 9/11” as schoolchildren are taught what a disaster on every front and by every measure he was, and as adults who now have to pay and pay dearly for the myriad lies and crimes and follies of George W. Bush recount his Top 100 Fuckups and bitterly laugh and laugh and laugh.

As I said, Teabaggers really aren’t that complicated.  They only made to appear so by their collaborators in the national media who categorically refuse to call them out by their real name.

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See This, BSA? This is Why No One Likes You

Douchebags.

From ARS Technica:

In August, a small Oakland-based kids’ group called the Hacker Scouts received a letter from none other than the Boy Scouts of America. The letter insisted—to the group leaders’ disbelief—that the term “scouts” is trademarked to the BSA via a 1919 Congressional charter (the charter extends to select other groups, like the Girl Scouts, as well). The BSA demanded that Hacker Scouts change its name or face legal ramifications.

At the time, Hacker Scouts said it would decide how to respond “based on advice from our lawyers and our own sense of duty.”

But last week, the BSA sent a second letter to the Hacker Scouts leaders. As Hacker Scouts cofounder Samantha Matalone Cook wrote on the group’s site: “[W]e have received another letter from the BSA refusing to compromise or consider a licensing agreement and reaffirming their demand that we change our name or they will take legal action.”

As Hacker Scouts Director of Guild Development and co-founder Garratt Gallagher told Ars in an e-mail, the group has decided to change its name rather than face litigation. “Hacker Scouts is focusing its efforts on its primary mission: educating kids,” wrote Gallagher.

(more)

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In a Nut Shell

Can I burn down your house?

No

Just the 2nd floor?

No

Garage?

No

Let’s talk about what I can burn down.

No

YOU AREN’T COMPROMISING!

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Pig People on the March

Bill Kristol thinks Republicans should carry the shutdown fight on for a couple weeks.

“It’s not going to be the end of the world, honestly, even if you’re on nutrition assistance from the federal government,” Kristol added. “I believe that no one is going to starve in Arkansas because of the shutdown.”

How about you go without food for a couple weeks, asshole?

I think we’re way beyond time for pitchforks and guillotines in this country.

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