San Diego Local Order of Bloggers

The week in review with Bill Katz, the editor of Urgent Agenda

Silvio Canto, Jr.
12/3/2024 2:00:00 PM

    

Artistic Lizards

K T Cat
12/3/2024 6:48:54 AM

Tim made a few good points about my AI art illustration from yesterday's post on frilled lizards with annoying pet peeves. Replying to him is actually worth a blog post, methinks.Tim: it looks like the AI art has let you down again. I'm sure you specifically asked for a Frilled Lizard, but the one that it gave you is clearly an iguana. Well, at least it is giving you a fairly consistent "grumpy old man" these days (even if his hands do look like they were mangled in a horrible accident).Tim made a larger point about the content of the post, illustrated with a link to a cartoon that is worthy of another blog post, perhaps tomorrow. Anyway, dealing with the issue of AI art, it certainly has come a long way in the year or[...]

Pet Peeves And Frilled Lizards

K T Cat
12/2/2024 3:32:09 PM

We all have them, you know.Pet peeves, not frilled lizards. I mean some of us might have a frilled lizard or two running about the house, but most of us don't. Some of us might even have named one our lizards Peeve so we might have a Pet Peeve Frilled Lizard. It's hard to say.Hmm. I seem to have lost my train of thought. Ah, there it is.While each of us have peeves, pet or otherwise, we also have tics or habits that can be annoying. It dawned on me that when a pet peeve in one person meets an annoying tic in another, it turns into a frilled lizard.Frilled lizards, if you didn't know, are reptiles that, when threatened, can puff up flaps of skin on their necks to make themselves appear much larger than they really are. If your[...]

Nailed it

W.C. Varones
11/7/2024 9:00:03 AM

July 5:   

QE has permanently ruined bonds for investors

W.C. Varones
9/25/2024 11:13:58 AM

You used to earn an interest rate roughly inline with nominal GDP growth, even slightly better.Since the Fed started manipulating interest rates with QE, you're behind nominal GDP growth by 2.4% per year.   

Bezos vs Burnham - Robber Baron vs Managers

B-Daddy
1/26/2022 8:32:44 PM
 Well not really; and not just because Burnham isn't a household name. James Burnham authored key insights on "managerialism" and predicted its eventual triumph over capitalism in his 1941 book "The Managerial Revolution," summarized here, but skip ahead 5 minutes (this is a great podcast). George Orwell provided this summary in 1943.Capitalism is disappearing, but Socialism is not replacing it. What is now arising is a new kind of planned, centralized society which will be neither capitalist nor, in any accepted sense of the word, democratic. The rulers of this new society will be the people who effectively control the means of production: that is, business executives, technicians, bureaucrats and soldiers,[...]

Defunding Minneapolis

B-Daddy
6/8/2020 10:05:46 PM

Which would be the result of actually implementing this whole #DefundThePolice nonsense.  To catch you up:From The Guardian:The Minneapolis city council has pledged to disband the citys police department and replace it with a new system of public safety, a historic move that comes as calls to defund law enforcement are sweeping the US.  Speaking at a community rally on Sunday, a veto-proof majority of council members declared their intent to dismantle and abolish the embattled police agency responsible for George Floyds death and build an alternative model of community-led safety. The decision is a direct response to the massive protests that have taken over American cities in the last two weeks, and is a[...]

Natural Born Citizen Definition

Doo Doo Econ
1/19/2016 6:08:58 PM

    Once again Americans are facing questions about the definition of a Natural Born Citizen (NBC).This is the simple and indisputable definition: Two citizens who have a child, naturally create a new citizen. This is a Natural Born Citizen.There is absolutely no expert either legal or historical who will argue to the contrary. They may argue to include additional citizens, but this is the core of the definition.Two people who have a child in a location, have a citizen who is native to that land. This is a Native Born Citizen. Thus, terms like "Native American" which imply a location and not an allegiance to a country.A person can be both Natural Born and Native Born, or in the United States we also have Naturalized[...]

Obama Fuels Eternal Islamic War on America

Doo Doo Econ
8/5/2015 5:00:00 AM

                Do you remember the headlines when Obama apparently declared America a Muslim country on French television?    Taken from an Islamic perspective this statement is dangerous. It sounds as if the President of the United States sees America is a Muslim nation. When you consider translations, this may presented to the masses as exactly that, American President Hussein (an exclusively Islamic name)  Obama declares America to be Islamic. Thus America would be "al-Islam", or territory which may never be ceded to non-Muslims.Semantics, right? Over-reaction, right?Except, this is a long standing meme from not only the President, but also his staffers.   [...]

And Where a Salon Scribe Gets a Tad Out of His Swim Lane

Dean
11/11/2015 9:22:09 AM
Over the weekend, Salon writer, DAVID MASCIOTRA, caused quite a dust-up on social media with his own salute to the troops ahead of Veterans Day . Here is the headline, followed by the sub-headline and then followed by the first paragraph of the piece:You dont protect my freedom: Our childish insistence on calling soldiers heroes deadens real democracyIt's been 70 years since we fought a war about freedom. Forced troop worship and compulsory patriotism must endPut a man in uniform, preferably a white man, give him a gun, and Americans will worship him. It is a particularly childish trait, of a childlike culture, that insists on anointing all active military members and police officers as heroes.If you desire, you can read it[...]

Football rules changes...? You've come to the right place

Dean
1/31/2015 2:04:56 PM

    Theres no denying that over the last few decades most all on-field rules changes made by the NFL have been exercises in increasing offense and scoring. This has created an arms race in a sense where the pendulum swings back and forth between the NFL offenses and NFL defenses whereby the offenses get aided by rules changes and the defenses counter with a combination of innovative schemes and superior athletes. To wit, for years, its been conventional wisdom that the best athletes in the world were in the NBA. Now days, we would add NFL defensive backs and possibly outside linebackers/rush ends into that mix (you dont think dudes like Richard Sherman, Darrelle Revis and J.J. Watt can ball a little?).But[...]

Brown U. and Claremont McKenna College Join U. Chicago in Defending Free Speech

Mike LaChance
It's about time someone did, right? The College Fix reports. Brown University, Claremont McKenna College join U. Chicago in defending of free speech Two universities have joined the University of Chicago in defending the importance of free speech and of students being exposed to different points of view. As noted by Reasons Robby Soave, Claremont []The post Brown U. and Claremont McKenna College Join U. Chicago in Defending Free Speech first appeared on College Insurrection.

College Students Need Classes on How to Be Adults

Looks like many students are not prepared to be adults. The Daily Beast reports. College Students Need Remedial Classes in How to Be Adults Is 18 years enough time to prepare for the stresses of being an adult? For Americas increasingly fragile college studentsthousands of whom are returning to campus in the next two weeksthe []The post College Students Need Classes on How to Be Adults first appeared on College Insurrection.

Rumble Sues California Over AB 2655, the Security Act Masked as Deep-Fake Protection 

Leslie Eastman

Elon Musk's X and Satire Site Babylon Bee have also filed lawsuits against the California measure signed by Gov. Newsom, who was angered over an AI parody video.The post Rumble Sues California Over AB 2655, the Security Act Masked as Deep-Fake Protection first appeared on Legal Insurrection.

Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic Issues Final Report: Likely Emerged From Wuhan Lab 

Leslie Eastman

Among the conclusions: Pandemic began with the lab leak, Biden's HHS obstructed investigation, and NIHs procedures for "overseeing potentially dangerous research are deficient, unreliable, and pose a serious threat to both public health and national security."The post Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic Issues Final Report: Likely Emerged From Wuhan Lab first appeared on Legal Insurrection.