Drumwaster's Rants

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Recent entries

I lost track
Fucking Unions
Real American Hero
I just sent Fox News a question….
Three weeks warning
In your own humble opinion
More thought provocation
Not dead…..still kicking…..
The R-Word
Another weird question

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Sunday, May 11, 2008

I lost track

Of how many different cross-generational relations there are in our family.

There are:

  • 1 Great-Grandmother
  • 2 Grandmothers
  • 5 Mothers
  • 7 Sisters
  • 8 Daughters
  • 7 Granddaughters, and
  • 4 Great-Granddaughters

And that doesn’t include any of the in-laws. Or anyone who is no longer with us on this mortal coil…

Love your Mothers, people. You won’t have them forever.

{I miss you, Mom.}

Posted by Drumwaster at 04:46 PM | (0) Comments |

Thursday, May 08, 2008

Fucking Unions

A few hundred years ago, unions may have (I emphasize, MAY HAVE) done beneficial things on behalf of the employee.

Since that time, though, they have become nothing more than corrupt methods for organized thugs to get paid for doing nothing but leeching from an economic system that would be performing much better without the drag chute of work disruptions.

Simple economic fact, folks: the market for unskilled labor will ALWAYS pay less than the market for skilled and trained labor. Why? Because you can hire anyone to push a broom and be assured that the job will be done adequately, but you cannot hire some Joe Stumblebum off the street to run a company successfully (id est, to show a profit under rapidly changing market conditions).

One story on the morning news out of L.A. is a group of janitors from their Union out protesting and on strike for more pay. What are they thinking? They are JANITORS - the indoor equivalent of ditch diggers. If they want more money, then I have a suggestion: GET A BETTER JOB. Get that diploma. Get some college courses under your belt. Get some job experience. Learn a trade that is more important to the economy than pushing a mop around a tile floor, and you will make more money.

That is how our system works. I started out working as a newspaper delivery boy. I stepped up to grocery bagger at the local Albertson’s, then to retail sales at the mall. I worked hard, kept my eyes open and my mouth shut, and “et what was give me”. I strove to be more valuable to my employer than the weekly cost of my paycheck cost him, because that is how one gains job security. With every job I had (and I went through a whole bunch of them), I learned something that would help me in future jobs. Now I run my own business (and not too shabbily, if I may say so myself), and have to measure the work of others.

The employers who are currently suffering without janitors for a few days ought to fire the lot, and hire the first group of people to apply as replacements.

Like I said, there isn’t a whole lot you need to know to be a janitor. Even I could do it.

Posted by Drumwaster at 05:32 AM | (3) Comments |

Wednesday, May 07, 2008

Real American Hero

No, this isn’t a beer commercial. This is about the kind of split-second thinking and fast action that saves lives; the kind that defines true selflessness and bravery in the face of one’s own imminent peril.

I can say no more about this man, since no words of mine will do him more honor than he has done himself.

With an out-of-control car bearing down, Joseph Richardson grabbed his 4-year-old daughter and held her up out of harm’s way.

It was his last act—and one that apparently saved his daughter’s life.

Richardson, a 39-year-old father of three, was killed Monday evening by the car, driven by a man who police say was drunk.

The car pinned Richardson and his daughter Kaniyah against a wrought iron fence at 95th Street and Wentworth, police said.

Kaniyah survived and was listed in critical but stable condition Tuesday evening at Comer Children’s Hospital, where a spokeswoman said she was doing well.

Nothing more needs to be said. Except for this:

The driver of the car, Angelo Thomas, 32, ... was charged with two felony counts of aggravated driving under the influence, police said. He was also cited with driving without a valid license or insurance.

I’m sure a Felony Murder charge isn’t out of the question under these circumstances. Our prayers are with Mr. Richardson’s friends and family in these devastating times.

(h/t The Line Is Here)

Posted by Drumwaster at 10:35 AM | (3) Comments |

Tuesday, May 06, 2008

I just sent Fox News a question….

Here’s what I sent:

With the war in Iraq going well, McCain has not separated himself from that part of the Bush Presidency….in fact, he’s said that he’s an architect of the ‘Surge’.  What other parts of the Bush terms (for example, the tax cuts) will he also carry with him into the campaign?  And, with the weakness of the Democrats in Congress (Pelosi, Reid, etc.), will Clinton or Obama need to distance themselves from them?

Sincerely,

John

Columbus, Ohio

Drumwaster,com

It’s part of a larger conversation they are having about McCain trying to separate himself from GWB....you can go to Fox News and catch Shep Smith and the Gang dissecting the last of the big Tuesday primaries. 

I submitted the question at 8:05 PM

Update (8:24):  Fox said CBS called Indiana for Hillary...she’s ahead by 11 with 41% counted, so that’s probably a pretty safe bet.  She’s getting doubled-up in North Carolina right now, but that’s not necessarily a surprise, is it?  Is it also a big surprise that 20-50 year old African-Americans aren’t put off by Wright? 

Update (8:47):  No answer to my erudite question as of yet.  Surprise that Shep Smith said Iraq is going poorly.  What?

Posted by John Cross at 05:07 PM | (1) Comments |

Monday, May 05, 2008

Three weeks warning

Three weeks from today marks the beginning of this year’s Patriot’s Journey. As always, the only requirement to participate is post one positive thing on your blog about the United States or her citizens every day from Memorial Day to Independence Day (this year, that will be from May 25 to July 4 - a total of 41 days). Participation is entirely voluntary.

If you wish to join in, just drop a note to me via e-mail or post a comment, and you should include your site’s URL, so that we can get the list distributed to all parties before we kick it off this year.

If you spread the word, maybe we can get more than a handful of participants.

But, in any case, this is your official notification.

Posted by Drumwaster at 05:32 AM | (1) Comments |

Saturday, May 03, 2008

In your own humble opinion

What would you say is the greatest single achievement of Mankind? The Great Wall of China? The Internet? The Printing Press? Philosophy? The ability to laugh at ourselves? Democracy? Landing on the moon? Mathematics? The Golden Rule?

Conversely, how about the most embarrassing? Religious warfare? Pee Wee Herman? ”Santa Claus Conquers the Martians”? Recycling? Politics?

In yet another part of our ongoing series about pointless information, I can tell you one thing that has happened in the universe that would never have happened without our intervention - refrigeration. Before humanity came along, there was nothing in the universe that was colder than the temperature of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) - at about 2.7 degrees Kelvin (-454.81 Fahrenheit). We have managed to lower temperatures under lab conditions at MIT to about one-half of one billionth of a degree (0.5 nanoKelvin/500 picoKelvin) above Absolute Zero.

Trust me, that’s cooooooold. 

Posted by Drumwaster at 04:19 PM | (11) Comments |

Thursday, May 01, 2008

More thought provocation

Imagine, if you will, a time and place where you are considered famous for one reason or another.

(Okay, for a good reason - something you can brag about at your school reunion, rather than trying to live it down. Be happy I gave you that much. While infamy isn’t as good as fame, it’s heaps better than obscurity, and this is my scenario.)

Imagine that someone made a museum showcase about your life. Something along the lines of a Presidential Library, with photos, letters, journals, detailed information about your life, the whole kit, including the caboodle.

What would you want them to prominently display?

What would you want them to bury in the National Archives with a “Do Not Open Until Xmas 3008” label?

Share your good stuff with us. “Joy shared is doubled; sorrow shared is halved.”

Posted by Drumwaster at 07:03 PM | (0) Comments |

Wednesday, April 30, 2008

Not dead…..still kicking…..

...but so busy, I haven’t had time to breathe.  Not a lick. 

I’ll have to share with you what I’ve been doing....that project from hell you’ve heard so much about?  Yeah, I found it. 

But what piqued me was this article on Ye Olde Drumwaster’s Rants, and I have a name to add to the list. 

Andrew Sullivan.  The man’s in love. 

And that’s all I need to say. 

Posted by John Cross at 05:01 PM | (3) Comments |

The R-Word

There is an old joke among economists that states: “A recession is when your neighbor loses his job. A depression is when you lose your job.”

Look, people, let’s get it straight.

This is NOT a recession.

Recession is a specific term that defines an economy that has CONTRACTED. Shrunken. Gotten SMALLER.

That means that the economy has to actually have NEGATIVE GROWTH in order to start worrying.

This does NOT mean that just because the rate of growth is slowing down (to having GROWN a mere 0.7% in the first quarter of 2008 - which means a 2.5-3.0% growth rate for the year) that people should start whining that things are collapsing, or even staying-the-same-freaking-size.

It doesn’t become a recession until our economy actually starts moving in the other direction. It also doesn’t matter how bad your own personal situation might be, because the plural of “anecdote” is not “data”. We’re talking about the national economy.

So just because the rate of growth has slowed down doesn’t mean we’re suddenly driving in reverse.

Update: The DJIA closed down a few points today, but even so, it is up 4.6% for the month of April - the highest one-month gain in a year.

Worst economy since Hoover again… tongue rolleye

5 million jobs created, income up 19% since Bush took office, and Chicken Littles are still being listened to.

Posted by Drumwaster at 11:02 AM | (2) Comments |

Monday, April 28, 2008

Another weird question

Things that are “taboo” are things that society frowns upon, irrespective of the legality or morality of the act. The very word ”taboo” means:

1. proscribed by society as improper or unacceptable: taboo words.
2. (among the Polynesians and other peoples of the South Pacific) separated or set apart as sacred; forbidden for general use; placed under a prohibition or ban.

This implies that discussion of sacred things are also considered taboo. Such as the discussion as to whether Jesus died a virgin. Or whether Mohammed was nothing more than a pedophile goat farmer with delusions of Godhood.

But this brings me to my question.

What is the most ill-considered taboo in society today? I’m not talking about Muslim culture where a woman isn’t allowed to leave home without a male escort, or Esquimaux culture where it is considered rude to refuse to sleep with your host’s wife. I mean current Western (American) culture. Such as allowing high levels of violence on Saturday morning cartoons but forbidding the word “fuck” or a bare breast except on cable TV.

What is your personal fave among the weirdest taboos of our culture?

Posted by Drumwaster at 06:42 PM | (10) Comments |

Sunday, April 27, 2008

Democrats on Race

No, this isn’t about B. Hussein, it’s about a baffling phenomenon - Blacks in America voting Democrat.

There is not only no good reason to do so, there are LOTS of reasons why not. Outside the Wire has put together an incredible list of historical data, ranging from the 1858 Lincoln-Douglas debates all the way into the mid-1990s.

Next time a Democrat talks about race, feel free to refer them to this list

Posted by Drumwaster at 07:17 PM | (1) Comments |

Completely pointless information

** An ongoing series **

Everyone has heard of “Pi”, that odd number defined as the ratio between a circle’s diameter and its circumference. It is usually represented by the Greek letter, Π.

There have been many different attempts at accurately determining the value of this irrational number (irrational simply means that it cannot be expressed as a whole number fraction), ranging from the attempts (in both the Old Testament and the Indiana State Legislature) to state that pi is exactly equal to 3 to the most modern attempts using high-powered computers.

But I was directed to this program the other day, and it managed to come up with pi allegedly accurate to within 32 million places (actually 33,554,432 - 2 raised to the 25th power) in just a smidgen over 48 minutes.

Now we move into the useless information part…

Just to save the front page I have tucked the first 16K (16,384) decimal places of Π below the fold, in case anyone was interested.

To give you an idea of how fine a distinction this is, if we were to postulate a circle with a radius equal to 1 Astronomical Unit (A.U. - the average distance between the Earth and the Sun; roughly 92,955,825 miles), you would only need to take the division down to less than 24 decimal places to define an irregularity the size of an atom. 13 would be enough to reduce the uncertainty to less than an inch.


Posted by Drumwaster at 03:21 PM | (1) Comments |

Al Sharpton: Civil Unrest Is Great!

This guy is an idiot.

One of America’s favorite dumbasses is at it again, this time because a black guy was acting suspicious and got shot by cops who were doing their job. To make his point, he wants blacks in New York to tear-up the city and make it look like Los Angeles during the Rodney King riots. Proof:

Hundreds of angry people marched through Harlem on Saturday after the Rev. Al Sharpton promised to “close this city down” to protest the acquittals of three police detectives in the 50-shot barrage that killed a groom on his wedding day and wounded two friends.

“We strategically know how to stop the city so people stand still and realize that you do not have the right to shoot down unarmed, innocent civilians,” Sharpton told an overflow crowd of several hundred people at his National Action Network office in the historically black Manhattan neighborhood. “This city is going to deal with the blood of Sean Bell.”

Sharpton was joined by the family of 23-year-old Sean Bell - a black man - and a friend of Bell who was wounded in the 2006 shooting outside a Queens strip club. Two of the three officers charged were also black.

The rally at Sharpton’s office was followed by a 20-block march down Malcolm X Boulevard and then across 125th Street, Harlem’s main business thoroughfare, where some bystanders yelled out “Kill the police!”

Fifty of the marchers carried white placards bearing big black numbers for each of the police bullets fired at Bell and his friends.

Sharpton urged people to return for a meeting this coming week “to plan the day that we will close this city down” with the kind of “massive civil disobedience” once led by Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

“They never accused Sean Bell of doing anything. Then why is he dead?” Sharpton asked, his voice roaring with anger. Authorities “have shown now that they will not hold police accountable. Well, guess what? If you won’t, we will!”

Nothing says quality leadership in the black community like a good-for-nothing “reverend” calling for a full-blown riot to burn down the city.

Posted by Helo at 10:00 AM | (4) Comments |

Friday, April 25, 2008

Obama’s “former” pastor

Says hate-filled statements were “taken out of context”.

Yeah, because I can understand how his assertions that the US Government is responsible for loosing the AIDS virus on Black People could be made better if put in context. And that “chickens coming home to roost” sermon the Sunday following the 9/11 attacks? I’d love to know what kind of context this would need to be less “I Hate America"-fied…

Most enjoyable is the statement where Wright admits that Obamalama is “a politician”, saying what he “needs to say” (wink, wink, nudge, nudge, saynomore), while he says “things of God”. (Funny, I don’t remember AIDS appearing in the Bible anywhere, no matter which version I check. Maybe he’s using Nancy Pelosi’s favorite version.)

Posted by Drumwaster at 07:02 AM | (2) Comments |

Thursday, April 24, 2008

Weird inquiry

I need some imagination, so I thought I would borrow some of yours for awhile.

How would one go about creating an experiment to measure the speed of gravity?

A quick primer on gravity: Gravity is the influence of one body on another body, resulting in a mutual attraction, the force of which is directly proportional to the product of the masses of the two bodies under discussion and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between. Just like stars emit radiation in multiple frequency bandwidths (including the visible spectrum), every atom of mass in the universe attracts every other atom of mass, influencing that second atom’s motion through the cosmos.

A two-body system is stable and predictable, with both bodies orbiting a common center-of-mass. (For the Earth-Moon system, that point lies approximately 1000 miles below the surface of the planet directly beneath the moon at any given moment.) But when you add a third body into the system, it almost inevitably degenerates into chaotic orbits sooner or later. (Chaotic in this sense meaning “unable to accurately predict”.)

Now, admitting that a given body attracts another body to a specific and measurable degree is no big deal, because that is easily proven.

Measuring the speed of light is a simple thing. Bounce a beam of light from point A to point B, measure the distance and divide by the time it took to travel that distance.

But how does one bounce a beam of gravity?

Posted by Drumwaster at 07:37 PM | (9) Comments |
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