One year ago today: June 5, 2020, rarely enforced.
Five years ago today: June 5, 2016, La Belle to Alva.
Nine years ago today: June 5, 2012, anti-biotic silver.
Random years ago today: June 5, 2010, Linux: such a promising failure.
I’ve put reading the big old French dictionary on the rack in the reading room. This spot means I will only get to it when I do. Generally, the Latin-like language lets me figure out most definitions. What’s incredible is the extent the book reflects the mood and concerns of the time. There is one line on Liszt, that he was a composer who died. But a quarter-page with illustrations dedicated to types of feathers for your hat and small hand tools to make patterns on the top of hand-churned butter.
. On the back, there is a number, partially obscured here. On the right side is another number, this one was covered with lead paint until I scraped it off. I instantly figured out the scam. The original cards did not have this paint and had no value until the card was activated.
Along the top is contact information to check the card balance, usually using a smart phone, which is really a “somewhat clever” phone. Doing so is sending a signal across the Internet that this card number has been activated. Anyone who went to the display rack of the cards and wrote down the card numbers need only keep checking to see when a card went active. Then, it is tele-shopping time. Mugsy and Lefty agree, “Yuz can’t get much more convienenter dan dat.”
The lead paint is to stop people from X-raying the cards to get the numbers anyway. And who remembers the Lady’s Menu? It was practice in up-scale restaurants that the lady did not trouble her pretty head with baseborn concepts like meal prices. I learned about this in grade-school and in my poverty-stricken youth (a comparative), I found it amusing but never dismissed the idea. I’m opposite of most men in that I ramp up the “dating” aspect of a relationship after the deal is sealed. So of course I noticed that even the swankest joints no longer have these menus.
Here’s where I do a James Burke style loop back to the cash cards just mentioned. In American, credit cards allowed the less-than-upscale to begin encroaching on restaurants above their, well, pay grades. Two AOLS, the worst kind (meaning from Los Angeles) were handed the courtesy menus, and the “lady”, instead of asking for a menu with prices, sued the restaurant. What sort of lawyer would stoop low enough to press such a case?
Enter Gloria Allred, “famous” for publicity stunt cases such as the original discrimination against the Boy Scouts and Sav-On drustores that “segregated” toys into boys and girls sections. Now 80 years old, she was inducted into the Feminist Hall of Fame or whatever it’s called. While her less-than-subtle friends at Wiki strain to point out she had represented a few good causes, this was drowned by her use of the press release as an attack weapon and there is still no word on if she uses the men’s room or lady’s room. While she made headlines by perpetrating all this hogwash, nobody, but nobody, noticed that she was Jewish.
Wait, there’s more. To those with nothing to hide, the police are now going after the identity of anyone who read a news article. There’s even more, they are now deployed theBolaWrap, but of course, this is of no concern to law-abiding strangers nearby.
Trivia. Calling back numbers that display on your “missed calls” directory is an American custom. I did not know that because I very rarely return calls at all, which is the correct behavior when you think about it. Whoa, Ken, I said “when you think” about it. Think. It’s what other people do when you are not looking.
11-color photo printer.
Remember to use BACK ARROW to return to blog.
Nothing on the radio except a legal advice call-in program. Two cases stood out, one is that in Florida, when you divorce, your spouse is automatically taken out of your will. Matters between you are concluded in the settlement. If you think that sounds to quick and easy, you are right. Turns out some guy didn’t take his ex off his life insurance and another guy forgot to change his 401(k). It’s sad when a society gets that way, that a man’s will is a document and not his wishes. Anyway, I had tuned to the show because they were discussing RMD, I thought they were going to define ways to defeat it, but all they did was chat over its meaning.
See this leather rolling suitcase? What a deal, I picked it up for $3. Remind me to tune in next Saturday morning to a seminar on protecting your wealth from the nursing home system. Only in America. The loony left has announced its election equipment has “passed all tests” but nobody knows what that means, especially the people at ABC. They kind of say things hoping there will be no questions and stressing the cost and again the old “no evidence”. If you only look where there is no evidence, that is what you find. I’m going to watch the Trump convention if North Carolina if the bad guys will permit it.
Twitter, one of those companies that, in our computer age, can crack down on frauds and Trump accounts instantly. So it makes one wonder why it took Dorsey and his fellow twits only 15 years to finally shut down the accounts of Nigerian scammers this week. Known as the 419 scam (after the fraud section of the Nigerian criminal code), this scam promises millions for sending them a processing fee, usually around $5,000. It goes back long before the Internet, the telephone, and the mail, way back to 1588.
ADDENDUM
Searching for an alternative to documentaries on youTube, I watched a production that studied the reason why white man has so much “cargo” and other races do not. The Canadian scientist went on to say he wanted to dispel the myth that the non-European races were genetically inferior. He produces a ton of evidence that it was Guns, Germs and Steel, the theory that Europeans had crops, domesticated animals, and ice ages. It’s a compelling case as he points out primitive places like Papua New Guinea lack the animals and grains needed to create cities and civilizations. He insists it is not their own fault they never evolved.
He goes on to say they do farm, but mostly live as hunter gatherers. They have no way of storing food for later. Places like that island, North America, Australia, and the lower half of Africa have no indigenous animals suitable for domestication and thus their inhabitants remained at the aboriginal level. They also lack specialization or any skills above staying alive. All their knowledge is survival based and short term, zero progress in 200 generations. (Yeah, I know. What part of genetically inferior does that boy not understand?)
The major flaw in his arguments is that he overlooks the amount of time these people had to develop. Something like the horse is introduced to Europe and within a couple generations, everybody is riding them. Yet the jungle people he studies have not progressed an iota in four thousand years. Culture only goes so far explaining that. Not one genius, not one inventor, not one philosopher arises ever, and he’s saying that the people themselves have nothing to do with it? For that matter, it was the Europeans who had the disadvantage because so many of their societies retained the ancient practices of burning innovators and great thinkers.
We all started at subsistence level and civilization parallels life—no pain, no gain. Those who put out the effort generally succeed. Those who form tribal-grade societies stay there and it is the tribes, not the environment, that contain the conditions for having no cargo. If you can’t see the connection, maybe you are not looking deeply enough. Or maybe you are just Canadian and refuse to see past anything that does not support the biased viewpoint you are promoting under the mistaken concept that spouting pro-liberal propaganda improves your chances of scoring on the weekend. Well, the guy doesn’t fool me for a second.
Another quirk is the reaction of the natives to the Europeans. Not one leader in the Aztec/Mayan world seems to have stopped and taken a look at the Spanish battle tactics. Kill the horse, and you’ve got the rider. Instead, they worship them as gods, duh, which forms the basis of my theory that they were a race of mental retards. It takes an ingrained lack of mental agility to an entire civilization to panic in the identical manner, as anybody who watches CNN can attest. It happened in many places on the tribal scale in Africa, India, and Australia. But in the Americas, their entire empire collased without killing a single Spanish rider. In the end, swords and horses and all, the Spanish are not that technically advanced. Something about these cultures that stay primitive on a permanent basis, even when exposed to technology, is inferior and you can decide what it is.
