Annals of the Floored & Flabbergasted

Good grief. Take a look at this report on the F-35. I’d heard before that the expensive new fighter jets are generally hated by pilots and not what you’d call a good value for the taxpayer dollar. But it’s much, much worse than I thought.

These things are about to be inflicted on the Valley of We-Do-Mean Sun, as Luke Air Force Base, a beloved boon to the local economy, is a fighter-pilot training base. We’re told the racket they make is magnitudes worse than the F-16’s, whose roar can be heard clear over at my house all the way from the far West Valley. This is one of several reasons I’ve declined my dear friend’s suggestions that I move to newer, more broadly middle-class westside housing closer to her and resisted SDXB’s blandishments to move to Sun City, also under the flight path. At any rate, the noise pollution issue is what originally brought my attention to the new model. It didn’t sound good then, and it sounds a whole lot more dubious now.

Medium.com, the source of this article, is one of several new long-read sorts of sites I’ve recently added to the Web-surfing list. Check out this lighter but right-on post at the same site.

Pro Publica, in my humble opinion, is the emperor of the long-read websites. Funded by philanthropic contributions, Pro Publica’s operators describe it as “an independent, non-profit newsroom that produces investigative journalism in the public interest.” And that they do, with élan. One series won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting, the first such prize ever for stories not published in print, and an earlier story took a 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting, the first such award to an online news organization. More recently, a story broadcast with This American Life won a 2013 Peabody Award. Articles here are well researched, well written, and often eye-opening. Here’s one that’ll get your attention, and if that doesn’t, then this series certainly will…

Longreads is a great and reliable place to find something interesting to read. It aggregates full-length nonfiction articles from a wide variety of publications. Like a good detective story? Here’s one from real life. And in the true crime department, Tara of Streets Ahead Living commented on this article in relation to restrictions placed on purchases of ordinary OTC cold nostrums and nail polish remover.

If you can stand its political slant, Mother Jones runs some excellent investigative pieces — and they don’t seem to mind goring their own oxen, when it’s called for.

PopSci has also become a regular check-in. Posts are short, light, and over-simplified, but often amusing to read or watch.

One that’s pending is called Epic Magazine — it’s expected to publish long-form nonfiction on subjects interesting enough to lure movie options, in hopes of creating a market that will allow writers to make a living wage. So far the proprietors haven’t put much up, but it’s worth keeping an eye on the site.

That used to be the function of the Fourth Estate — cluing the electorate to the boondoggles. Alas, with print  journalism dying on the vine, it gets harder and harder for most Americans to get this kind of information. There’s only so much Frontline can do. Recently, though, web presences like the ones above have stepped in to fill the ever-yawning gap left by the death of the metropolitan daily.

Seek them out. Read them. If you can, support them. And let your elected officials you know what they wish you didn’t know.

😉

Image: The U.S. Navy variant of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, the F-35C. Public domain.

 

Some of us prefer paper and pencil (yea verily, graphite) for making notes and keeping calendars. Consider:

• A pencil does not have to be turned on, rebooted, or turned off.
• Pencils are never updated.
• Once you know how to use a pencil, there’s never a new learning curve to figure out how to keep on using it.
• Pencils never stop working just because the power goes out.
• Pencils cannot be hacked by some jerk in Russia.
• Pencils cannot readily be watched by Big Brother.
• If you lose it, a pencil can be replaced easily and cheaply.
• No one can call you on a pencil while you’re in the middle of lunch or dodging homicidal drivers on the freeway.

The best button on the TV remote is the “Off” button.

PBS’s beg-a-thons are more intrusive than advertising because they take whole shows off the air and replace them with garbage.

I never could understand why PBS imagines people who are affluent enough to donate are fascinated by bloviated lectures and superannuated pop musicians.

A person who would upholster the seat of a dining-room chair in white fabric with satiny-looking fleurs-de-lis either never eats or is crazy as a loon.

Loons get a bad rap as crazies, especially as compared with the jabbering great ape that has taken over the planet.

Subjecting yourself to plastic surgery because you imagine it will make you look younger is amazingly stupid.

The pathetic idea that you must get cosmetic surgery to hide your age so you can get or keep a job reflects a truly ugly loathing for the elderly already widespread and rapidly growing in American culture.

Except in the direst emergencies, cop helicopters should be banned from flying over residential neighborhoods.

Gawker “news” helicopters should be banned, period.

High heels were and still are designed by men who hate women.

Images: Pencil, heels: public domain. Chair: shamelessly ripped off from an estate-sale ad.

It appears that the sweaty star of last year’s garage invasion drama finally copped a plea. Staff from the Maricopa County Attorney’s probation department had to prepare pre-sentence reports on our perp and his pals, which they kindly sent to me. And now we have the full story.

On May 4, 2012, the three creeps knocked over a Cash America Super Pawn store located in the historic but blighted district to the north of my neighborhood. After threatening employees with a gun, they made off with $89,568 worth of jewelry and caused about $500 worth of damage to the display cases they busted apart to get at the loot.

Interesting, isn’t it, that an area hosting several homeless shelters and largely home to the very poor could supply a pawn shop with 90 grand worth of jewelry, isn’t it? Once again: I picked the wrong business…

But moving on: Our boy, one Matthew Jason Avery, 25, was hopped up on meth, heroin, and Percocet at the time he jumped the wall into my backyard and hid in the garage. Clearly, it was  lucky that the commotion in the streets caused me to get up and lock the door between the kitchen in the garage. If he’d entered the house before I managed to get my pistol, I would’ve been in deep trouble. That would have been true even if I did have a gun in hand, because I would have shot him the instant I laid eyes on him, and that would have created a whole different tangle of trouble for me.

The “presumptive” sentence for armed robbery is 10½ to 15 years, followed by a period of probation. Matthew is arguing that the court should reduce this term, since this is supposedly his first criminal exploit. (Yeah, right!) He claims he didn’t have a gun during the robbery — that his colleague Tyshawn Simmons was the one who waved a weapon around — and so the county probation officer is recommending that he receive a shortened sentence on the count of sticking up the pawn shop, plus the presumptive sentence of 3½ years for burglarizing my garage. They also want him to make restitution to Cash America, whenever the value of the stolen property that is not in police custody can be determined. So presumably this guy will get out in three years or so, what with credit for the 239 days he’s already spent in jail waiting for court action.

On the gun issue: the cops sure as hell thought he was armed. After they dragged him off, one of the officers and I searched the garage and the backyard looking for the pistol they were pretty sure he had. We didn’t find it, but…

A few days after Matthew was arrested, the sheriff’s office informed me that he was bailed out of the slam. That evening someone entered my backyard during the night. They left the side gate hanging open, signaling that they’d come a-visiting. Obviously, Matthew came back looking for what he left in the shrubbery, and presumably what he left was a weapon.

Possibly the most disturbing element in all this is that Matthew, the poor little sh!t, was born into this world without one single, forlorn hope. This was a kid who was doomed from the outset.

Raised by his biological mother and abused as a child, he was “home-schooled” until the seventh grade, when he and his parent ended all pretense of educating him. The poor schmuck reads below the sixth-grade level and is incapable of supporting himself.

Not surprisingly, he started using meth at 16 and got into weed and coke at 17. He didn’t develop the heroin habit (so it says here) until he reached the age of 24.

Think of that. A grown man who, thanks to “home-schooling,” does not even have a grade-school education. When something like that happens to a kid, the most likely outcome will be drugs, crime, and violence. An escape from such a fate would be mighty near miraculous.

Oh well.

One last word on the matter, a piece of advice:

If you are ever the “victim” of a crime in which you lose little or nothing and from which you emerge unharmed, the police will ask you if you want to prefer charges against the perp. Tell them “NO.”

The hassle factor involved in being a so-called “victim” of a clown like this is just astonishing. The County’s action against Matthew has gone on for fourteen months. During that time, I’ve been the target of a steady blitz of paper, much of it subpoenas to appear at ever-changing trial dates.

One such subpoena is more threatening than Matthew in the garage, because each of them contains a peremptory order to appear in court at 8:00 a.m. on X, Y, or Z date (never mind whether you have a job, whether your pay will be docked if you don’t show up at work, whether you have small kids or a sick relative to care for, whether you’ve paid for airline or hotel tickets, whether anything else). And each of them informs you, in boldface type, that if you do not show up you will be arrested and jailed.

Every time I turned around, I found another of these aggressively worded subpoenas in the mailbox, each one demanding a reply. Once the sheriff’s office even sent a deputy, who parked his vehicle conspicuously in front of my house and marched up to the door to deliver yet another subpoena — even though I had faithfully replied to every one of the things that yes, yes I would be there.

Every piece of correspondence regarding the case had return addresses from the sheriff’s office, the probation department, the county attorney, and various other agencies that made it look, to anyone who didn’t know what was inside the envelopes, like I was the target of criminal prosecution. And as we know, much of my mail is misdirected to my neighbor Mannie, who lives at the same house number on a road whose street name is almost identical to mine. Can you imagine what Mannie and his wife must think? What the postal carrier must think?

If your perp is unlikely to return and you sustained no substantial harm, the best thing to do is to let it drop.

Here’s something to entertain you, here in our Brave New World: with some question about the survival of Barnes & Noble, loyal B&N customers are beginning to wonder what will become of their Nook e-books if the company goes kaput?

Barnes & Noble has already deep-sixed the color version of the Nook, and some observers think, along with technology expert Jeff Kagan, that “the Nook may become the Betamax of e-books.”

Huh. Think of that.

Therein lies the reason this old troglodyte clings to her wallsful of real, paper-and-ink analogue books. Unless it’s a PDF that you’ve bought and downloaded into your computer and backed up externally, these  e-book things are ephemeral, and you “own” them at someone else’s pleasure. Barnes & Noble selleth and Barnes & Noble taketh away. Ditto Amazon.

A hard-copy book can be eaten by crickets or printed on acidic paper that rots away… but by and large, once it’s bought, paid for, and parked on your bookshelf, no one can barge into your house and grab it away from you.

In the virtual world, however, Amazon can and does do exactly that, as we’ve known since 2009 when it yanked George Orwell’s 1984 off the Kindles of customers who had already paid for it and begun to read it. In 2012, Amazon deleted over 4,000 e-books when one of the largest distributors in the country declined to accept a change in terms of service, and then a little later that year it remotely wiped a customer’s Kindle, “accidentally” revealing that it can erase purchased and paid-for ebooks at will.

And because you don’t own those books at all — you own a license to look at them — all those hundreds and thousands of dollars worth property cannot be passed down to your heirs. If your whole collection of learning and knowledge exists in the form of e-books, you have no right to give them to your children and grandchildren.

Now, it has to be said that about 99.8% of published books could be disappeared without harming the course of humanity’s intellectual progress. But… The potential for censorship — we could call that thought control — is obvious.

And IMHO the potential for thought control already looms way too large in our electronified culture. This morning a member of our business group gave a presentation on the pervasive electronic surveillance the government has slapped on the entire country and probably on most of the rest of the world — how they’re doing it, why they’re doing it, and why it’s way too late to for anyone to do anything about it. It’s scary stuff.

Those of us who blithely fork over our privacy and our rights to corporations and secretive government agencies assume too much in imagining that these entities will always be benign.

So far, though, it’s not too late to buy a real book. Preferably with cash. 😉

Image: Selling the Nook. Tomwsulcer. Public Domain. Photographer warrants identifiable subject has consented to publication of image.