Your Sunday Morning Rotor Noise

A little inadvertent arboreal work:

Somebody got to do a rug dance.

Caturday

Chip:

Because It's Friday

Aussie underground steam

Donald Trump Couldn't Shove His Foot Any Further Into His Mouth With a Hydraulic Ram

Touring the area [flooded by Hurricane Florence] on Wednesday, U.S. President* Donald Trump warned South Carolina that “water is coming your way.”

“Now it looks nice but it’s really the calm before the storm,” he said.

I'm pretty certain that "the calm before the storm" happened the day before the rains and winds came from the hurricane, not afterwards.

In the listing of Stupid Shit Said by Trump, this one is going to take a fairly high rank. Not as high as his repeated pronouncement that the crowd at his inauguration was larger than Obama's, or his claim that neo-Nazis are nice people, but not terribly far behind those.

John Hancock is Watching You (If You Have a Policy With Them)

One of the largest life insurance providers in North America will no longer offer policies that do not include digital fitness tracking.

John Hancock will now sell only "interactive" policies that collect health data through wearable devices such as a smartwatch.

If this is true, then if you are an executive with John Hancock, I respectfully hope that you contract a severe and loathsome disease, one that results in boils on your genitals and pustules on your face, and may you die soon, painfully, and often.

This is a perversion of the namesake of your company, a Founding Father and a patriot, who pledged his life, liberty and sacred honor in the cause of freedom. But now you propose to electronically shackle your policy owners. You dishonor his name. For shame.

Anyone who buys into this is a schmuck and a fool, and that include anyone who uses one of those electronic snitches from Progressive and Allstate.

Stay Classy, Trumpanzees

Prof. Christine Ford, who has accused Judge Kavanaugh of drunkenly assaulting her when he was in Georgetown Prep, has had to move her family because of death threats, most likely from Trumpanzees.

Meanwhile, President* "Grab Them by the Pussy" Trump finds it hard to believe that his nominee could have done things as crass a Trump bragged about.

I've been fortunate in my life not to be sexually assaulted. But I can tell you that my friends who were (and who were conscious at the time) never forget.

Trump may think it's hard to believe. I find it hard to believe that somebody with an established career and a family life would risk blowing all that up with a trumped-up allegation. The letter of support that Kavanaugh got from other women is meaningless, for reasons that should be evident to anyone with a functioning cortex.

I'm pretty sure that you can red all sorts of vile smears and teenaged innuendo. I haven't gone looking for it, because, well, there are enough people as it is who are deserving of having their testicles stomped.

Bloomberg 2020: Oh, Hell, No!

Michael R. Bloomberg is actively considering a campaign for president as a Democrat in 2020, concluding that it would be his only path to the White House...

It used to be that mega-millionaires and billionaires with more money than they knew what to do with bought ranches and farms. Now, instead of running hobby ranches, they're running for the presidency?

What do we then get in 2024; the winning billionaire from 2020 versus Jeff Bezos?

If this country has gotten to the point that the presidency is being held by billionaires, whose main interest is in preserving and increasing their wealth, then the system is rotten beyond reasonable repair.

For one thing, it's pretty clear that the recovery from the Great Recession has been limited mostly to the investor class. Oh, sure, there're jobs again, but wages have been largely stagnant.

One thing that Trump grabbed onto was that the system has failed those who aren't rich. Trump, of course, has done nothing other than work to stamp harder on those who work for a living.

Trump is a symptom of how rotten things have become. So is Bloomberg. Neither one is a cure.

I don't know where we go from here.

iOS 12

iOS 12 was released today.

I’ll wait until 12.1 (or 12.0.5) is released, thanks. More and more, companies are using the consumers as the last line of QA/QC. A lot of the early release Ruger GP-100 .44s went back to the factory for rework, a problem that is, by no means, confined to Ruger alone. I'm starting to note tremors in the Force when it comes to Kimber's revolvers.

Being on the cutting edge isn't all that it's cracked up to be.