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COACHELLA, Calif. – When Cesar Garcia pulled the letter out of his mailbox, he immediately recognized the name of the law firm on the envelope – Silver & Wright. Eighteen months ago, they had dragged him to court, called him a criminal, cost him thousands of dollars and made his life hell. What did they want now?

Garcia opened the letter, prepared for the worst, but was still shocked by what he found inside.

The law firm had sent him a bill for $26,000.

When he protested, the price climbed to $31,000.

[...]

Garcia’s case may sound strange, but in the low-income cities of the eastern Coachella Valley, it is not. Empowered by the city councils in Coachella and Indio, the law firm Silver & Wright has repeatedly filed criminal charges against residents and businesses for public nuisance crimes – like overgrown weeds, a junk-filled yard or selling popsicles without a business license – then billed them thousands of dollars to recoup expenses. Coachella leaders said this week they will reconsider the criminal prosecutions strategy, but the change only came after defense attorneys challenged the city in court, saying the privatized prosecutors are forcing exorbitant costs on unsuspecting residents.

“Fixing his house was just a side effect. Collecting this money was always their goal,” said attorney Shaun Sullivan, who represents Garcia in a lawsuit seeking to erase his $31,000 bill from Silver & Wright.

Through an extensive review of public records, The Desert Sun has identified 18 cases in which Indio and Coachella charged defendants more than $122,000 in “prosecution fees” since the cities hired Silver & Wright as prosecutors a few years ago. With the addition of code enforcement fees, administration fees, abatement fees, litigation fees and appeal fees, the total price tag rises to more than $200,000.

Here's a sample of some of the cases:

For example, a Coachella family with a busted garage door and an overgrown yard filled with trash and junk was billed $18,500.

An Indio man who sold parking on his land without a business license was billed $3,200.

And an Indio woman who strung a Halloween decoration across the street in front of her home – then pleaded guilty to a crime no more serious than a speeding ticket at her first court appearance – was billed $2,700.

Each of the examples above contested their billing in court. The amount billed then went up to $25,200, $5,100, and $4,200 respectively.

There are some other features of note. The two cities in question are unusual for taking these sorts of cases, called "nuisance property abatement" routinely to criminal court. The other cities in the area take cases to civil court because it is lower cost for the city.

We have new law passed to enable the business model:

Indio contracted Silver & Wright in 2014, then Coachella followed in 2015. Within a year of hiring the firm, both city councils created new nuisance property ordinances empowering the cities to seek prosecution fees without needing approval from a judge. Then Silver & Wright started taking east valley property owners to criminal court.

And the bills for these prosecution fees come six months later, after the window for withdrawing the plea deal has expired. It's quite the operation.

Whereas I have zero faith that the West has any capability, much less will, to solve its problems.

I believe my reply is instructive:

Let's take a tour of the problems that the West not only has the capability or will to solve, but actually has done so:

1. Wars -solved.
2. Pollution - solved.
3. Poverty - partially solved. Note the current economic systems of the West have also partially solved poverty in China as well through global trade.
4. Habitat destruction - partially solved with conservation and setting aside green space and wilderness.
5. Population growth - solved.
6. Mass education -solved.
7. Mass, global communication - solved.
8. Global trade system - solved.
9. Authoritarian clowns telling you what to do - partially solved for now.
10. Feeding the world - solved for now.

While I won't discuss all of these, I want to discuss the first three: wars, pollution, and poverty, the last along with population growth because the two problems are intertwined. These are the most stereotyped and the most often wrong when discussing problems and solutions.

So let's start with the problem of wars. Everyone knows that wars continue to happen. We even have a rather bloody one going on in Syria right now. Here, I claim that wars are "solved", yet we still have them. What gives? The first observation here is that wars are between multiple parties, states or significant sub-state actors (guerillas, paramilitary groups, terrorists, freedom fighters, etc). A single entity can't fix all wars. If party A and party B want to fight, party C is limited in what they can do to keep the two parties from fighting, even if they have legal police power over one or both groups. So a solution to war is merely the cessation of war between parties, not the ability of a third party to prevent war.

The key is to look at the developed world countries and conflicts since the end of the Second World War. If one looks at the list of the top 16 (all those with a Human Development Index of above 0.900), one sees that these countries, while often in conflict, particularly the US and UK, are never in conflict with each other. The only real conflict with any sort of involvement between these countries is the paramilitary activity in Northern Ireland which involved the UK directly and had significant private support from Ireland and the US citizens (though zero official support).

Otherwise, conflicts reduce to fishing boats bumping each other on the high seas and fall far short of any serious definition of war.

The lower tier (HDI between 0.800 and 0.899) still show remarkably low levels of conflict between members. Russia (as the controlling state of the USSR) has been in military conflict with other members (putting down revolt in Hungary in 1968, for example). Argentina with the UK in the Falkland War. In excess of a billion people, yet with only a handful of minor wars to point to.

Yes, these developed world countries often wage a fair bit of war, but not on those in the same economic class. This indicates a way to solve in the real sense, war. Elevate all countries to developed world status.

It's also worth noting that the number of deaths from wars has gone down over the past few decades globally as well. Everyone is partially benefiting from fewer and less bloody wars, not just the rich countries.

Moving on, let's consider pollution. It's long been a trite cliche to speak of pollution as if it's just as bad as it's ever been (particularly when complaining that no one will do anything about the environmental cause du jour until it's too late). For example, here's a study of ambient levels of smog components in Los Angeles air from 1960 through to near present (2014 I believe). Ozone (O3) and nitrogen oxides ("NOx") dropped by a factor of four over the time period despite an increase in fuel use of a factor of three! That's an order of magnitude drop in pollution per unit of fuel (and keep in mind that vehicles became moderately more fuel efficient over this time period even with SUVs in the mix). More complex organics, volatile hydrocarbons (VOC) and peroxyacyl nitrates (PAN) dropped much faster with at least two orders of magnitude drop in concentrations of each.

There has been many environmental regulations over the decades, and these have had an effect. There's no more rivers catching on fire in Ohio. There's no more killer smogs in London. Yet it is frequent to see people to speak as if these problems were still among us, undiminished. You know, because we never solve problems.

The final one, poverty is the biggest problem of all, for not only does it cause immense suffering on its own, but it is a driver for many other social problems, most particularly overpopulation and a low regard for human life.

While I've hinted before at myopic interpretations of these problem, it's far more pronounced here both with the introduction of deceptive measures of poverty that both don't measure poverty and measure relative quantities that can never really go away. For example, there's a lot of talk of wealth and income inequality rather than more legitimate measures of absolute poverty (which actually measure a problem!). And sometimes those measures are used deceptively (such as a recent story which The convenient aspects of inequality is that it can never go away, and there's no obvious level which is good or bad. Then you get the conflations with real poverty even though it doesn't even remotely measure that (keep also in mind a tendency to declare that poverty is routinely declared to be people with the lowest percentage of wealth).

Let's take a cursory look at how inequality gets abused:

What I think is wrong with society is that, while I'm just barely on the comfortable side of the wealth divide, the gap is growing at a crazy pace. Prices I learned growing up in the 1970s have mostly inflated 10x, as has my income, meanwhile the bottom end of the income scale (virtually anyone below me on the job-value ladder) has only grown maybe 3-4x, it's pretty sad for the majority of the population.

Reality:

What evidence exists for this? I grant that there is wealth inequality and it has appeared to grow somewhat over the past 40 years. But there is no "crazy pace" to it. For example, we have a Pew Study that shows by their measure, the Middle Class shrinking from 61% in 1971 to 50% in 2015. Roughly, 20% shrinkage in 44 years. That's your "crazy pace". Even worse for your narrative, the upper classes grew more than the lower ones as a fraction of total population. So two thirds of the fraction that were no longer middle class were now upper class.

A particularly dishonest metric claiming an increase in global wealth inequality can be found in this story.

Wealth inequality stands at its highest since the turn of the 20th century - the so-called 'Gilded Age' - as the proportion of capital held by the world's 1,542 dollar billionaires swells yet higher.

The problems with that? 1) not actually measuring wealth inequality. What of the wealth of the 7.4 billion people who aren't billionaires? 2) downplayed that most of the increase in wealth (+17%) can be explained by the pool of billionaires increasing by 10% (145 new billionaires)! 3) Ignores that billionaire wealth is not equal value to those who aren't billionaires and thus, their wealth is exaggerated. Can't eat credit default swaps or even sell them easily for market price. But it made for a great tale of the "second" Gilded Age.

Here's another example from a linked essay rationalizing why the USSR didn't work in typical Marxist fashion:

The United States enacted an income tax in 1913, falling mainly on rentier income, not on the working population. Capital gains (the main source of rising wealth today) were taxed at the same rate as other income. But the vested interests campaigned to reverse this spirit, slashing capital gains taxes and making tax policy much more regressive. The result is that today, most wealth is not gained by capital investment for profits. Instead, asset-price gains have been financed by a debt-leveraged inflation of real estate, stock and bond prices.

Many middle-class families owe most of their net worth to rising prices for their homes. But by far the lion’s share of the real estate and stock market gains have accrued to just One Percent of the population. And while bank credit has enabled buyers to bid up housing prices, the price has been to siphon off more and more of labor’s income to pay mortgage loans or rents. As a result, finance today is what is has been throughout history: the main force polarizing economies between debtors and creditors.

So first paragraph is a work of art that slams the wealthy for having inordinate gains revenue (which simultaneously downplaying the wealth as mere "debt-leveraged inflation"). So why should we care about gains inequality? Who wants more "debt-leveraged inflation"? Yet it is portrayed as a bad thing even though the argument is sheer nonsense.

And then the author whines about how unfair it is that people actually have to borrow money for a house rather than just have one given to them on a silver platter.

Related to that is the common observation that the wealthiest X people have far more wealth than the poorest Y fraction of the population. As indicated here, there's a couple of enormous flaws with that thinking.

To see the problem, here's another version of the same number: the combined wealth of my two nephews is already more than the bottom 30 percent of the world combined. And they don't have jobs, or inheritances. They just have a piggy bank and no debt.

[...]

The chart [2014 regional wealth distribution, Credit Suisse] shows China has basically no one in the bottom 10 percent of the global wealth distribution. At the same time, if you dig into the country-by-country data (page 107 in the Databook), it shows that America has more than 7 percent of the world's poorest inhabitants — second only to India. That is, to put it lightly, nuts.

Anyway, let me trot out some counterexamples for your consideration. First, let's consider those living in extreme poverty. The fraction of people who live in such extreme poverty (here, using the metric of at most $1.90 per day in "international $", adjusted both for standard of living price changes between countries and inflation) has been declining ever since 1820, the start of the graph in the link (that's almost 200 years of such decline). The absolute number of people in such extreme poverty has been declining, despite population growth heavily biased towards the poorest of the world, since 1970! It currently is around 700 million after peaking at 2.2 billion. Over the same time period, the fraction of people living in extreme poverty dropped from just over 60% in 1970 to under 10% in 2015.

Then there's my favorite example of reduction of global income equality. Over a twenty year period (1988-2008), two thirds of humanity (that's everyone in the world) saw at least a 30% increase in their income with the median increasing by over 60%. While the richest got richer, that still means a decline in overall wealth inequality due to the nearing of developed world and developing world incomes.

I'll note that poverty is a huge correlation with population growth (the other big factor being the fraction of women not in the workforce). In 1970, the global population growth rate was 2.1% per year. It has now dropped to 1.1% per year with the developed world showing negative rates before immigration (among everyone who is not first or second generation immigrants).

To summarize, there has long been a narrative about humanity that emphasizes our inability to solve problems. This narrative is grossly in error with the developed world demonstrating a number of solved or partially solved problems in war, environmental problems, and poverty and overpopulation. These solutions have come to the point that extreme poverty, which until 1980 was the usual condition of most of humanity, now afflicts less than a tenth. We are in the midst of the biggest improvement of the human condition ever.

Yet the games continue. This enormous boon is concealed between a web of selective statistics. Critics peer intently at various dubious versions of wealth inequality (often while simultaneously downplaying the value of the wealth they are comparing) because absolute measures of poverty don't give the right answers any more. Would-be environmentalists complain because poisons are poisons (look at the replies which ignore dosage and proper usage) while completely ignoring whether current regulation solves the problems they claim to care about and whether the role of the poison is necessary.

And for some people, it no longer matters how many people die in wars any more. Wars are equally bad no matter how many die. Very convenient for the peacenik who needs a cause that never goes away.

My view is that part of the problem is that we have a case of bad ideology which needs to invent exaggerated or even fake problems in order to act out showing concern. Partly, it's that we're going to worry, even if we don't enough to worry about. Whatever the case, I think it would be nice here to wake up and see what's being done right rather than bumble on into some idiotic and dreadful societal theater because of the Chicken Littles of the world.

So, I'm running a Debian knockoff. Did a distro upgrade, primarily because Liquorix kernel is barfing all over Jessie. The distro upgrade went alright, and some irritating quirks in the system were cured. I wasn't expecting that - how long has it been since a system ran noticeably better after an upgrade? Stuff is mostly incremental, and unnoticeable these days.

After booting to the new system, I attempt to install Liquorix again, and it barfs again. I do get a message this time, leaving me hopeful - I need a couple specific packages to satisfy Liquorix kernel. So, apt-get update, then apt-get upgrade. Those packages and a half dozen related are installed. But, apt-get barfs now. /var/apt/ is now locked. So, the only thing to do is dpkg --reconfigure -a

Not possible. My file system is read only now.

I didn't document stuff, so I can't reconstruct all the steps I took, but EVERYTHING failed. I read at least a dozen different pages, trying to figure out how to fix my fs. fsck was being entirely uncooperative, no matter which DVD/USB I booted to. So, screw it - I guess I'll have to install something. Look around the net a bit, think, look at the ISO's I already have downloaded, and decide on Manjaro. Write it to a USB, try again to recover my files system, and fail. I change my mind about installing Manjaro. I decide on Siduction - write that to USB, boot up, and again, decide to try recovering my file system (one more time) before proceeding with installation.

And, the file system is fixed. There were no errors or anything on the part of fsck. It found errors on my root file system, and fixed them. Simple as that.

Obviously, the system was recoverable. It's recovered. It can't get any more obvious than that, can it? So, why did all those rescue disk images, and various distribution ISO's all fail? For a few moments, I wanted to point at systemd as the culprit, but Siduction runs on systemd. So, what is different between Siduction, and everything else I was working with?

I might imagine that Siduction is the distro most similar to the installed system - but that gets me nowhere. None of the administration tools are "different" from one distro to another. I might imagine that one (or more) of my DVD's or USB's was improperly burnt. But, ALL OF THEM???

I might also presume that my SSD is getting ready to barf. Possibly, there is some kind of error going on in the "hard drive" that affected me a dozen times, but didn't trigger on (roughly) the 13th attempt to fix the system?

Or, maybe we're just experiencing an especially heavy cosmic ray storm? Phhhttt - I give up. I've got my system back. Unless it barfs on me again, I'll blame those cosmic rays, or gremlins. If it does barf, I'll stick a new SSD in, install Siduction, and hope it's not some other bit of hardware that caused the problem.

And, maybe I'll just give up on the Liquorix kernal. That's where all of this nonsense started.

An early draft of former FBI Director James Comey's statement closing out the Hillary Clinton email case accused the former secretary of State of having been "grossly negligent" in handling classified information, newly reported memos to Congress show.

The tough language was changed to the much softer accusation that Clinton had been "extremely careless" in her handling of classified information when Comey announced in July 2016 there would be no charges against her.

The change is significant, since federal law states that gross negligence in handling the nation's intelligence can be punished criminally with prison time or fines.

[...]

The draft, written weeks before the announcement of no charges, was described by multiple sources who saw the document both before and after it was sent to the Senate Judiciary Committee this past weekend.

"There is evidence to support a conclusion that Secretary Clinton, and others, used the email server in a manner that was grossly negligent with respect to the handling of classified information," reads the statement, one of Comey's earliest drafts from May 2, 2016.

The sources who had seen the early draft, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the media, said the draft statement was subsequently changed in red-line edits on or around June 10 to conclude that the handling of 110 emails containing classified information that were transmitted by Clinton and her aides over her insecure personal email server was "extremely careless."

So... former FBI Director Comey apparently did at one point use the legally significant phrase "grossly negligent" which then somehow morphed to the legally insignificant phrase, "extremely careless" after draft changes by the Senate Judiciary Committee to Comey's statement. I wonder if Clinton apologists care any more.

A while back I discovered that they’re selling photographic film again, so I bought a package of three rolls of 35mm Kodak color film. Not sure what I’ll photograph, but the Minolta 35 mm SLR takes a hell of a lot better pictures than my phone. Actually, than any phone—and any digital camera.
        I got home, set the film aside (it’s a lot more expensive than the last time I used film) and looked for my camera, which hadn’t been used for a couple of decades.
        I couldn’t find it. I was sure I’d put it in the middle drawer of my dresser, but no matter how much I rummaged I couldn’t find it. And damn it, I’d paid eighteen dollars for the film and didn’t keep the receipt. That was a few days ago.
        So yesterday I decided to look again, maybe it was in a different drawer? I looked through all of them, and finally rummaged through the one I’d looked in earlier. And I found a small case with a zipper, and there was a camera inside.
        An old sixteen millimeter, the kind you used flash cubes with. Looking more, I found another camera. It was a cheapo as well. And then at the back of the bottom of the drawer, there it was. My old camera, the SLR (I have another 35mm but it’s not nearly as good).
        Checking it out I wondered if I could remember how to use it. On the bottom was a screwed in battery cover. I opened it and stuck the battery in my pocket, since after half a century that battery’s certainly more than dead.
        So I want back to Walgreen’s for a new battery.
        They don’t make them any more. It’s a mercury battery, and they no longer sell anything with mercury in it. And it’s a strange 1.6 volts, the new ones are 1.3 or 1.5, which is going to make my light meter inaccurate. I’ll have to experiment to find out how to adjust it... that is, if I can get it to work at all. It’s thinner than the old battery, and I don’t think the polarity is marked. And it’s thinner, so I’ll probably have to use aluminum foil as a spacer to make it connect. That means I’ll have a burrito from La Bamba for lunch tomorrow, because they wrap them in foil. I’m not buying a whole roll for a square inch of foil!
***
        Two days later as I was eating my burrito I remembered that film changed sometime in the 1980s, with the film speeds changing from ASA to ISO, so I put off opening the battery until I could do a little research. I found that the camera’s built-in light meter wouldn’t work; conversion was more complex than converting Fahrenheit to Celcius. So now I’m going to have to schlep all the way over to the west side of town, or all the way up to the north side.
        And then I thought of the other camera—the one we call a “phone”. It could probably be used as a light meter, so it looks like I have a little more research.
        So I downloaded two or three photographic light meters, all of which were completely incomprehensible and none of which came with instructions.
        So it looks like my only recourse is to go to the camera store and buy a light meter. I googled, and everything was either on the far north side of town or the far west side. One listed was Best Buy, and since I’d decided to hook my TV to the network I needed a cable and went there.
        They had the short cable I needed, and lots of camera supplies, but no light meters. It’s probably because cameras had built-in light meters for the last half century, but film changed from ASA to ISO three decades ago or so, so it would no longer work even if they still made batteries for it.
        So I asked the guy for directions to the camera shop, got in the car and looked at Google Maps, and couldn’t find the damned place! When I got home I looked it up again, have a better idea of where it is, and will have to go back out there, but I’m calling first.
        I should have called. I found it on the map, drove out there, and found the hard to find camera store.
        Their cheapest light meter was over $250! That’s way, way too much. The store guy explained that it was because so few people are shooting film now, and new cameras have built-in light meters so they only made really fancy ones. It made sense, but of course I was disappointed. Not sure what to do now, I’m not paying that much for a light meter! I only paid fifteen bucks for one when I was a teenager.
        Then, on my way out, I saw something that cheered me greatly—a small blackboard with a notice that they could digitize VCR tape! It’s worth twenty five bucks to me to get that tape of my kids when they were kids digitized.
        But I still don’t know what to do about that light meter. Guess I’ll have to check Google Play again and try all the light meter apps. I’m not very hopeful...
        Any ideas?

Recently I've been reading up on PE files as I was curious about some things, for instance how demo scene prods can be 4KB when "hello world" programs are larger than that coming out of any compiler. I found that GoLink can link something with a 512-byte header, minimum 512-byte code section, and then another minimum 512-byte section for jump tables and imports if there are any imports (of course normally there are some). (There's also a tool called Crinkler, but I haven't looked into it yet.)

I happened across a number of references to Win32s, but not a lot of detail on it. It seems that MS axed it pretty quick when Win95 came along, and the only tools that targetted it were some ancient versions of Visual C. It was explained that Win32s required a PE file to have a relocation table to be able to even load it. Then I found out that GoLink will generate a reloc table if you specify a base address on the command line (even if it's the same address as the default 0x400000). For the sake of nostalgia I had to try making something that would run in Win3.1, which I had never bothered with before.

First I would have to install Win3.1 and Win32s on something. I was going to use the HP Vectra 486, but when I went to power it on I remembered I had borrowed the super long power cord that reaches the outlet on the other side of the room for something else. So instead I whipped out my Gateway Solo 2200. Booted Win98, got the Win3.1 installation files, and installed (only 7MB of stuff, doesn't take very long). It turns out the Win3.1 won't boot on top of Win98 DOS. So I dug up a copy of DOS 6.0, renamed its MSDOS.SYS and IO.SYS to MSDOS.DOS and IO.DOS, and enabled the option in Win98's MSDOS.SYS to display "previous version of MS-DOS" on the startup menu. Then I could start Win3.1, and run the Win32s installer.

After that I could run a test program which was supposed to display a bitmap. It opened a window (oooh), and then disappeared (hmmm). I tried displaying text only. That seemed to work. I tried displaying a bitmap by calling setpixel a zillion times, and slowly made a black rectangle before the window disappeared. GoLink doesn't run under Win3.1 so every time I wanted to test something I had to copy it from another computer over RS232. As it happens, the Gateway's battery started getting low, as the magic smoke had come out of the old Radio Shack AC adaptor brick which had been powering it. So I ended my experiment there.

Later I was looking at some example win32 programs and noticed that their window procedure would take all the parameters from the stack and push them on the stack again to CALL DefWindowProc, and would return immediately afterward. They're the same parameters in the same order. Why not JMP to DefWindowProc? I disassembled some other random programs to see if they did the same thing, not all of them did. VLC had this interesting bit of opcode salad:

MOV EBP,DWORD PTR SS:[ESP+48H]
MOV EDX,DWORD PTR SS:[ESP+3CH]
MOV ECX,DWORD PTR SS:[ESP+40H]
MOV DWORD PTR SS:[ESP+60H],EBP
MOV EAX,DWORD PTR SS:[ESP+44H]
MOV EBX,DWORD PTR SS:[ESP+4CH]
MOV DWORD PTR SS:[ESP+6CH],EDX
MOV ESI,DWORD PTR SS:[ESP+50H]
MOV EDI,DWORD PTR SS:[ESP+54H]
MOV DWORD PTR SS:[ESP+68H],ECX
MOV EBP,DWORD PTR SS:[ESP+58H]
MOV DWORD PTR SS:[ESP+64H],EAX
ADD ESP, 5CH
JMP 62F01490

I like how the compiler staggered their stores and register usage to avoid pipeline stalls, heehee.

Some shit you just can't make up. I'd say more but I'm too busy laughing.

Just what is this abomination, "nom nom?" Where has it come from and why is it on my television? "Yum yum," surely?

One doesn't say, "Goody goody nom nom." When was that last time that you declared that meal was, "Nommy?"

Yummy. Food is yummy. When one eats one goes, "Yum yum."

All the cops and newspapers are searching for a motive in the horrific mass murder in Las Vegas last week. No connection to any terrorist groups, no indication at all that it would happen, and the newspapers are all asking “Why??”

        The answer is simple and I can’t figure out why nobody else can figure it out.

        For well over a century the line between fame and infamy has been blurred. The eighteenth century James Gang were murdering thieves, but still well regarded. The reason was the hated Pinkertons, hired by banks who were also not well liked. The Pinkertons did some horrific things themselves, like killing an innocent fifteen year old mentally challanged boy. The Pinkertons’ infamy caused the James gang to be famous despite their foul deeds.

        In the 1930s there was Bonnie and Clyde, also murderous thieves, but the people they murdered and stole from were bankers, who were hated more than anyone in the country, having taken away people’s homes, crashing in 1928 to 1930 leaving the country in poverty.

        By the twenty first century, actually before, the words “infamy” and “infamous” have almost disappeared. We think of Mark David Chapman, the man who shot John Lennon in the back four times, killing him in 1980 not as infamous, but famous.
        It’s simple. The mass murderer last week did it to become “famous”. Because he knew full well that the media would release his name, and by all accounts he wanted everyone to know he was the perpetrator.

        The media should stop printing the names of these monsters. But they wont; I a href=" All the cops and newspapers are searching for a motive in the horrific mass murder in Las Vegas last week. No connection to any terrorist groups, no indication at all that it would happen, and the newspapers are all asking “Why??”

        The answer is simple and I can’t figure out why nobody else can figure it out.

        For well over a century the line between fame and infamy has been blurred. The eighteenth century James Gang were murdering thieves, but still well regarded. The reason was the hated Pinkertons, hired by banks who were also not well liked. The Pinkertons did some horrific things themselves, like killing an innocent fifteen year old mentally challanged boy. The Pinkertons’ infamy caused the James gang to be famous despite their foul deeds.

        In the 1930s there was Bonnie and Clyde, also murderous thieves, but the people they murdered and stole from were bankers, who were hated more than anyone in the country, having taken away people’s homes, crashing in 1928 to 1930 leaving the country in poverty.

        By the twenty first century, actually before, the words “infamy” and “infamous” have almost disappeared. We think of Mark David Chapman, the man who shot John Lennon in the back four times, killing him in 1980 not as infamous, but famous.
        It’s simple. The mass murderer last week did it to become “famous”. Because he knew full well that the media would release his name, and by all accounts he wanted everyone to know he was the perpetrator.

        The media should stop printing the names of these monsters. But they wont; I wrote about this two decades ago and nobody listened. Nobody will now, either. I wrote about this two decades ago and nobody listened. Nobody will now, either.

I linked the article but something is going wrong with this page; neither links nor italics are working today. The article is in Random Scribblings titled is Quake a killer – or are the mass news media killers?

I'll try to link it in a comment.

Of course I had to go see it on opening night. Mind you, I did not have high hopes. That was a good thing.

The movie itself, were it a standalone bit of film, wasn't bad at all. Neither was it remotely worthy of the Bladerunner name though. It's like it was written and directed by someone who watched and enjoyed the original many times but wasn't quite bright enough to understand why it was so awesome. You won't see any Baysplosions but neither will you see any well-crafted subtlety. It may not have been Highlander II but it was most definitely not The Empire Strikes Back either.

My advice, get good and drunk before you go see it if you really feel you must. You won't miss any nuance from your impaired cognitive abilities, I promise.

[Edit for testing something]
Looks fine to me...