Get a "Stupid Phone'', CTFD, & Quit Wasting Time

So argues this article in Technology Review quoting from research into tech's disruption and distraction of everyday life. That idea is worth consideration too.

 I was a late adopter to smart phones mainly for those very causes too, as well as the costs for the device, a plan, device insurance, and a decent Otter Box case to protect it.  I thought I would go with the emerging trend of doing it all (telephone, email, taking pictures & video, text messages, social media, & email) on a phone and do TV, movies, games, and etc. on a WiFi-connected home Xbox. Sounded good, but it wasn't that simple though.

Every time  I had to create a document, store personal data, and the rest of the daily stuff that requires a decent screen and a touch type keyboard to do comfortably and well, I had to beat it down to the nearest public library or borrow a laptop from someone, both of which became major pains in the ass. So I broke down and bought a new laptop during the after Christmas sales back in January. But I kept my smart phone though. Now I'm wondering if I can do without a smart phone, and go back to a cheap, simple, flip phone. The perfect solution, one that is both simple and inexpensive, is proving to be quite elusive and the tendency to over-think the whole optimization of digital life problem is just as elusive. At least it is for me.

Google Glass has been about the closest any single device has come to "doing it all" and that set up was pricey as hell and is now been discontinued to boot. Such is life in the digital age. I remember when years ago when I had a cellphone, a pager, and a PDA and a desktop iMac and that setup seemed complicated & unwieldy. Now look at me. No progress has been made here.Or has it?

The USA Cannot Balkanize?

So says Mark Yuray at the Social Matters blog. Well it can and it might. To be fair Yuray says that the USA isn't sufficiently aggrieved and enmiserated to fall apart yet. Sovietologists said that same line about the USSR in the late 1980's too. I'm sure some said the same thing about the US in 1860 as well, and well look how that all turned out.

As I pointed out more than two years ago, despite widespread and increasing societal tension, the United States is simply not polarized enough to actually Balkanize or collapse into civil war. North America is becoming increasingly diverse and increasingly non-European, but diversity alone is not enough to drive a civil war or other major political rupture. For that, you need not just diversity, but concentrated diversity, and America’s diversity is deliberately diffused throughout the entire country. - See more at: http://www.socialmatter.net/2016/04/22/the-u-s-a-cannot-balkanize/#sthash.n44Cl2og.dpuf

As I pointed out more than two years ago, despite widespread and increasing societal tension, the United States is simply not polarized enough to actually Balkanize or collapse into civil war. North America is becoming increasingly diverse and increasingly non-European, but diversity alone is not enough to drive a civil war or other major political rupture. For that, you need not just diversity, but concentrated diversity, and America’s diversity is deliberately diffused throughout the entire country. - See more at: http://www.socialmatter.net/2016/04/22/the-u-s-a-cannot-balkanize/#sthash.n44Cl2og.dpuf

As I pointed out more than two years ago, despite widespread and increasing societal tension, the United States is simply not polarized enough to actually Balkanize or collapse into civil war. North America is becoming increasingly diverse and increasingly non-European, but diversity alone is not enough to drive a civil war or other major political rupture. For that, you need not just diversity, but concentrated diversity, and America’s diversity is deliberately diffused throughout the entire country. - See more at: http://www.socialmatter.net/2016/04/22/the-u-s-a-cannot-balkanize/#sthash.n44Cl2og.dpuf

As I pointed out more than two years ago, despite widespread and increasing societal tension, the United States is simply not polarized enough to actually Balkanize or collapse into civil war. North America is becoming increasingly diverse and increasingly non-European, but diversity alone is not enough to drive a civil war or other major political rupture. For that, you need not just diversity, but concentrated diversity, and America’s diversity is deliberately diffused throughout the entire country. - See more at: http://www.socialmatter.net/2016/04/22/the-u-s-a-cannot-balkanize/#sthash.n44Cl2og.dpuf

As I pointed out more than two years ago, despite widespread and increasing societal tension, the United States is simply not polarized enough to actually Balkanize or collapse into civil war. North America is becoming increasingly diverse and increasingly non-European, but diversity alone is not enough to drive a civil war or other major political rupture. For that, you need not just diversity, but concentrated diversity, and America’s diversity is deliberately diffused throughout the entire country. - See more at: http://www.socialmatter.net/2016/04/22/the-u-s-a-cannot-balkanize/#sthash.n44Cl2og.dpuf

As I pointed out more than two years ago, despite widespread and increasing societal tension, the United States is simply not polarized enough to actually Balkanize or collapse into civil war. North America is becoming increasingly diverse and increasingly non-European, but diversity alone is not enough to drive a civil war or other major political rupture. For that, you need not just diversity, but concentrated diversity, and America’s diversity is deliberately diffused throughout the entire country. - See more at: http://www.socialmatter.net/2016/04/22/the-u-s-a-cannot-balkanize/#sthash.n44Cl2og.dpuf

As I pointed out more than two years ago, despite widespread and increasing societal tension, the United States is simply not polarized enough to actually Balkanize or collapse into civil war. North America is becoming increasingly diverse and increasingly non-European, but diversity alone is not enough to drive a civil war or other major political rupture. For that, you need not just diversity, but concentrated diversity, and America’s diversity is deliberately diffused throughout the entire country. - See more at: http://www.socialmatter.net/2016/04/22/the-u-s-a-cannot-balkanize/#sthash.n44Cl2og.dpuf

As I pointed out more than two years ago, despite widespread and increasing societal tension, the United States is simply not polarized enough to actually Balkanize or collapse into civil war. North America is becoming increasingly diverse and increasingly non-European, but diversity alone is not enough to drive a civil war or other major political rupture. For that, you need not just diversity, but concentrated diversity, and America’s diversity is deliberately diffused throughout the entire country. - See more at: http://www.socialmatter.net/2016/04/22/the-u-s-a-cannot-balkanize/#sthash.n44Cl2og.dpuf

As I pointed out more than two years ago, despite widespread and increasing societal tension, the United States is simply not polarized enough to actually Balkanize or collapse into civil war. North America is becoming increasingly diverse and increasingly non-European, but diversity alone is not enough to drive a civil war or other major political rupture. For that, you need not just diversity, but concentrated diversity, and America’s diversity is deliberately diffused throughout the entire country. - See more at: http://www.socialmatter.net/2016/04/22/the-u-s-a-cannot-balkanize/#sthash.n44Cl2og.dpuf

As I pointed out more than two years ago, despite widespread and increasing societal tension, the United States is simply not polarized enough to actually Balkanize or collapse into civil war. North America is becoming increasingly diverse and increasingly non-European, but diversity alone is not enough to drive a civil war or other major political rupture. For that, you need not just diversity, but concentrated diversity, and America’s diversity is deliberately diffused throughout the entire country. - See more at: http://www.socialmatter.net/2016/04/22/the-u-s-a-cannot-balkanize/#sthash.n44Cl2og.dpuf

As I pointed out more than two years ago, despite widespread and increasing societal tension, the United States is simply not polarized enough to actually Balkanize or collapse into civil war. North America is becoming increasingly diverse and increasingly non-European, but diversity alone is not enough to drive a civil war or other major political rupture. For that, you need not just diversity, but concentrated diversity, and America’s diversity is deliberately diffused throughout the entire country. - See more at: http://www.socialmatter.net/2016/04/22/the-u-s-a-cannot-balkanize/#sthash.n44Cl2og.dpuf

Where's Your Constitution Now?

Where's Your Constitution Now? - 28 Sherman
"Your government does not work for you. We might as well move to formal global government now and rule the other nations as proper provinces with the same benefits and legal protection as in America. That is what this ruling means. Your American elected officials need to represent transient or illegal individuals in your country. How ridiculous does it reach for a low. Does an individual on a student visa need representation? A tourist visa need representation? Where does it end. It doesn't."

It's coming...

"No joke: 500k food stamp recipients to lose benefits on April 1." - JamesLaFond.com

"This will not be Yomaggedon, but a baby step toward eventual welfare-cutting measures that must eventually happen as the economy continues along its course, and will, in the end, spark more aggressive looting behavior. Do note that once looting occurs across a community, the looters discover how powerless the police are, and will continue looting activity at lower intensity indefinitely, which has happened in Baltimore, where much shoplifting is now indistinguishable from small scale looting."

 

Party Realignment and White Conciousness in 2016

"This year’s election may not realign the parties," says pundit John B. Judis in the WaPo,"but it could be one of Key’s 'critical' contests. Trump has disrupted the GOP coalition of downscale Reagan Democrats and the Republican business class. Similarly, Sanders’s support suggests a growing Democratic division over the party’s subservience to Wall Street and Silicon Valley on economic issues."

Yeah, well maybe so Mr. Judis, but the vagaries of democracy aside, the real news here is that a lot of American White people are gaining racial consciousness about 10-15 years sooner than the elites figured we would. 

Cat Ladies and Autistes

"Small useless pets," says Chateau Heartiste,  "like indoor cats are child substitutes. There’s no flim-flamming away that obvious conclusion under a fog of try-hard White Knight rhetoric. The cat provides the single in the city cock carouseler the outlet for her maternal nurturing instinct (however weak) that a real child of her own can’t, because she hasn’t gotten pregnant in the fifteen years she’s been on the Pill." Ouch.

I am not a PUA or MGTOW sort myself, but I do read Heartiste regularly because of his brutally honest insights about the sexual landscape of modern society. The Right Stuff's website podcast The Daily Shoah has in turn a hilarious satire of CH called Chateau Autiste which lampoons CH and so what goes around comes around. I love both.

In Re Ann Althouse the SWPL

I quit reading Ann Althouses's blog about a year ago because of the lameness of her SWPL bullshit, which while well researched and compelling at times, is still lefty SWPL bullshit after all. When I was setting up my new notebook PC last week I decided to give Althouse another look and saw that while she now moderates her commenters better (so that every post doesn't immediately devolve into a flame war), her writing is more obnoxiously SWPLy than ever.

'Yes," says Althouse, "I still read the NYT. Get over it, people. I read the NYT. I also read another thing a lot of you don't want me reading: The New Yorker." Yeah, okay, well I read the NYT and the New Yorker too, but with an eye toward doing opposition research or out of sheer boredom more than anything else. Before I took my hiatus from Althouse I already thought that she relied on the East Coast print media way too much for my comfort, but now she's kinda off the scale.

As well, one of her son's wants to increase the following for his blog and so she quotes him very liberally, and he seems to be a young lefty SWPL and so in doing so Althouse skews her writing to agree with him a lot, perhaps? I dunno I have never read his stuff except for what Althouse quotes in her blog, so that's just conjecture.

 I became acquainted with Althouse's blog way back in the day when the now defunct PC Magazine published a list of the 100 Best Blogs, blogs then being the big new thing in media, and I liked what she wrote both because of its cultural literacy and her bona fides as a University of Wisconsin law professor, her debut coming at a time when the Dan Rathers of this world dismissed bloggers as fat, basement-dwelling, losers in their pajamas whose writing was of no consequence. I hope junior gets his readership up so that Althouse can get her groove back, or failing that, I can go back to ignoring her.