I understand that people have a hard time with the concept that we get to decide what is news and what isn’t, and what is fair and what isn’t.

– the managing editor of a local fishwrap

I don’t feel like Googling the Seattle P-I’s readership and advertising numbers. I’m guessing they’re down, just like every other fishwrap across this great land. That kind of conceited arrogance might just may be be one of the reasons why.

What’s the rumpus, you might ask? The P-I decided not to run a picture, provided by the FBI, of a couple of swarthy dudes who’d been fingered as running some odd sort of surveillance on ferry operations in and around Seattletown. Which, I am given to understand, ferry ops are a pretty important part of the Seattletown economy.

Via Vanderleun…

Confederate Yankee: Misfire: AP’s Bogus Ammo Shortage Story

According to two spokesmen for the world’s largest ammunition manufacturer, which runs the military’s ammunition manufacturing plant and separately, is a major supplier of law enforcement ammunition, it is a massive and unexpected increase in law enforcement ammunition demand that is causing delays in law enforcement ammunition delays, not the war.

Once again, a media organization with target fixation seems to have widely missed the mark.

This kinda relates another post about mediots and press bias.

It also kinda backs up my original contention, in a minor way, that we don’t need a full-auto AR in every squad car, nor do we need Expert Marksmen manning them. After all, those are my tax dollars they’re blasting away with there.

Via WILLisms…

More Storms Slam Flooded Midwest

Guess who was in Chicago when the Storm of the Century of the Month hit? Guess who spent $300 on cabs and hotels rather than spend the night at Midway? Guess who realizes it wasn’t worth it, having only gotten 4 hours of sleep, since he had to be back at the airport at 6am?

Needless to say, I’m whipped.

UPDATE: My penny-ante problems, solved by a 2½ plane flight ain’t nothing.

The flood authorities reckon that 4 feet of water will be in my little one story house by breakfast time. The house will be a total loss – not even worth rebuilding. At any rate, it will be uninhabitable for weeks.

Damn.

I find it incredible that 4′ of water makes a house a total loss.

That gun got donated to the Texas Rangers Hall of Fame.

H. B. “Butch” Purvis of Mertzon, Texas, has donated an important artifact used by Texas Ranger Captain Hardy B. Purvis and Texas Ranger L. Hardy Purvis.
The Texas Ranger Hall of Fame is very grateful to Mr. Purvis for giving this one of a kind artifact – an 1928 Thompson Submachine Gun with accessories and Police case — to future generations.

I’m such a redneck that there is no way, no how I’d have given that hardware away to anybody but family. However, the sentimentalist in me notes that Butch probably considers the Rangers family.

I hope he kept the inheritable rights to shoot it whenever he wants, though…full-auto Thompsons shouldn’t get locked behind glass just to stare at.

Digression time: last week, I went to have a samwich for lunch, and there was a table of Rangers there. Every one carried a 1911 in what I’ve come to call the Ranger rig…beautifully tooled scabbard on one side and a double-mag carrier on the other, on a standard 2″ belt. Two of them had standard grips, one had nice zebrawoods, and the last had a Ranger star embedded in his. Pretty impressive to a gun-nut. It still bums me that open-carry isn’t legal no mo’.

Thanks to Big Dick Stanley for prompting this spurious posting…

So, is Sean Hannity a certified journalist reporter type? That is to say, does anybody out there turn on Sean Hannity’s radio show (or teevee show, or internet tubes junction) in order to find out how Hurricane Dean went, how much pork bellies rose or fell today, how the coal-mine rescue is going, if West Nile virus is ravaging your neighborhood, if the shuttle made it home safely or not?

Or would you turn on Sean Hannity to get some high-dudgeon conservative red-meat aural filler?

Or would you turn on Sean Hannity because commercial radio sucks, and you can’t find a CD you’ve not listened to 1 gajillion times already?

In other words, is anybody out there as confused as Tom about Sean Hannity’s (and his Limbaugh-spawned cohorts) role is in whatever you want to call the public space these days?

I’m kinda interested in hearing not about dogma or press bias or other such red herrings…mainly, do you understand that there are entertainers and there are “just the facts, maam” reporters? Do you know the difference between the two? Is that distinction something that exists purely in my Podunk, Texas mind?

This was the first music I heard this morning — it was on one of those Jack or Bob or Pete stations, and I was immediately transported to 1976 and seeing BOC for free on the steps of the Cotton Bowl for free at some KZEW shindig. They weren’t much about the melody at that time.

Now they’re just a hipster joke about cowbell.

Ammunition Shortage Squeezes Police

Lookie here — every cop in America doesn’t need to become an Expert Marksman with the full-auto AR-15 on the taxpayer dime. Train ‘em up on the bog-standard pump-action room broom, and you’ve got 99% of the situations covered. The other 1%, they can pay for themselves, if they’re so inclined. Many are, anyway.

Or call out SWAT. God knows we’ve pumped enough into that black hole over the last six years — they’re so desperate to justify their existence, they’re knocking over poker rooms and appearing on teevee shows.

Heh, heh…a static music video.

The fake RHCP version isn’t so bad:

It’s the perfect song for today:

A couple months ago I did a Google search of a guy I had once worked with. A Wiki entry on him appeared high in the search, so I clicked on it and discovered he was among a long list of Mexican bullfighters, along with a mutual friend of ours with whom we once worked.

So, the question of the Day of the Month is this: what do you want your fake Wiki entry to encompass?

First thing that jumped to mind for me, thanks to Banjo’s invocation of bullfighters, was Mexican rasslin star, as I love those fetishistic masks dearly, and I have a nice pot belly to hang over the waistband of my tights, and the boots are pretty cool, too, if a lot of damn work to lace up.

Then I thought of all the things I’ve really wanted to be over the years: cattleman with my own brand, suave CIA agent doing foreign duty, smoke-jumper putting out forest fires with my bare hands, battle-hardened SpecOps badass with a sniper’s eagle eye, old-school stock-car race-car driver, coder extraordinaire who turned the internet tubes into something worthwile.

But I think, on the bottom line, I’m pretty damn thrilled to be where I am and who I am doing what I do. It’s really pretty fun, even if I get into blue funks and bloody moods over picayune crap. So my fake Wikipedia entry would end up as a martini-sipping, piano-playing lounge lizard covered up with delicious dolls from the very early 60s right before rock-n-roll tidal-waved his ass out to the big empty sea.

Which, speaking of RnR, I’ve come to appreciate you a whole lot more since you left the building, Elvis.

TCB, baby…I get it now.

…but could some web hippie out there pull together a blog aggregator dealio that doesn’t include blogs by people being paid by magazines & newspapers? All I really want out of a blog is regular every-day dudes and dudettes. Once they make it to the big time, they’re just another one of the a-holes in the media, and everything goes downhill from there.

Not that I don’t want my peeps to profit from their talents, you see, but that’s a completely different market — call it the airplane market, or the Manhattan subway market, or the shiny-clay-coated-paper-in-the-mailbox market. For my tastes in pixel-slinging time-wasting, I want the real, self-published shizznit, not another tweedy dork in the overgrown media backyard.

Good stuff:

While we often read about economies of scale, we probably should pay more attention to the diseconomies of scale.

When a solid sphere doubles its radius, its surface area increases 300% while its mass goes up 700%. The same ratio seems to affect organizations. As they grow, the center becomes more remote from the surface-the part that actually is in contact with customers, competitors, and new technology. The gravitational pull of the increased mass draws more and more efforts inward where they focus on internal processes, procedures, rules, expenses, and politics.

Internal forces soon overwhelm the organization’s ability to respond intelligently to external events. As Jack Welch puts it, the company “has its face toward the CEO and its ass toward the customer.” An odd posture to be sure since as Peter Drucker has preached for a half-century “the only profit center is a customer whose check hasn’t bounced.”

“ass towards the customer” happens way more rapidly and often than people might believe, or even believe possible. No matter what I do or where I go, I try my damnedest to keep the customer front and center. I fail, sometimes, and it’s rare that I don’t regret it.

LA Times Op-Ed writer is fucking amazed to find that free markets work.

In the name of sovereignty, China’s leaders for a long time have gotten away with suppressing their own citizens while ignoring the get-gloriously-rich-quick corruption that has thrived in the absence of the rule of law. But, thanks to globalization, China’s export reliance on the U.S. market has imported the political demands of the U.S. consumer into the equation. Americans won’t hesitate to cut the import lifeline and shift away from Chinese products that might poison their children or kill their pets.

Unlike organized labor or human rights groups, consumers don’t have to mobilize to effect change; they only have to stop spending. And their bargaining agents — Wal-Mart, Target, Toys R Us — have immensely more clout than the AFL-CIO and Amnesty International in fostering change in China.

Ironically, the United States’ “most favored nation” trade treatment for China (and its later entry into the World Trade Organization), which labor and human rights groups so virulently opposed in the past, has become a Trojan horse. China’s future is now so linked to the American consumer that Beijing will be forced to curb corruption and strengthen regulation through the rule of law or face the certain doom of its export-led growth.

Tens of thousands of laissez-faire capitalists have pointed this out time and time and time again, over and over and over. I just wonder if this journalista dude will get that it works in all markets, all over the world, all the time.

This also explains why China isn’t about to be going and selling all those T-Bills they “own.” We’re their biggest market. You simply don’t screw your customers just for the pleasure of screwing them.

And, from the cheap seats here, this is about all the diplomacy you ever really need. Cash for goods. Everybody wins. Simplisme, no?

Tailgatin, Texas-style.

Karl Rove retires, and Don Imus returns. Does either one really matter? No…just garbage to fill up the internet tubes.

An odd coincidence occurs. Alan Sullivan links John Robb’s super-scary Urban Warfare article. I comment MS-13 won’t last 15 minutes in America if they tried to pull the shit that Robb projects upon them in his article. I hear today that MS-13 is partly responsible for the executions of three college students in Newark. Newark is a sanctuary city, where illegal aliens are guaranteed freedom from harassment and enforcement. Funny how that works…I guess Newark is susceptible to Urban Warfare and systempunkts and the rest of the 5GW horseapples Robb peddles in his new book (there’s always a new book, isn’t there? Funny how that works, huh?). Probably all the other sanctuary cities are susceptible, too. That’s just me thinking out loud, so it probably doesn’t mean anything…you’re most likely all safe from harrassment and execution-style murders.

In other unrelated news, Texas becomes a castle doctrine state in 17 days. Personally, I won’t say that I’m pushing it a little bit by legally vehicular-packing regularly, but you know…I’ve kind of pushed it a little bit for a lot longer than there have been laws saying I’ve got to let the governer and the po-po know that I’ve availed myself of the God-given right to RKBA. When the old-school castle doctrine comes to be law, my truck gun will most likely be a Ruger Super Blackhawk in a nice holster and an extra shell pouch. That’s probably a dumb decision, since 600 rd. semis are so cheap. But I’m sentimental.

Anyhoo…there’s the grindstone, and I’ve got to get me nose upon it.

Edited to fix a link that made this post read like it was written by someone even dumber than me.