Jasonisms

Maybe one day I'll write something about the rise and fall of Google+, but not today. Today I am merely experiencing the slow gasping death of the beloved and beleaguered social network. Goodbye, my friends. You were are great!

TrumpNation is Dumb And I'm willing to bet, no one who actually watches Fox News saw anything wrong with this text. If it's south of Texas, Arizona and California it must be Mexico, right? It's just another example of how the Faux News station keeps it's viewers ill-informed. In 2012, a Fairleigh Dickinson University survey reported that Fox News viewers were less informed about current events than people who didn't follow the news at all. The survey had asked current events questions like  "Which party has the most seats in the House of Representatives?"  and also asked what source of news people followed. The Fox viewers' current events scores were in the basement. This finding was immediately trumpeted by the liberal media—by Fox, not so much—and has since become known as the Fox News effect. It conjures the image of Fox News as a black hole that sucks facts out of viewers' heads. ~ https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2016/07/21/a-rigoro

#DonaldTrump has not only crossed the lines of democratic and presidential norms, he's moved the lines so far out there as to not be seen. And what's worse, his fans, those in #TrumpNation, love him for it. In their minds it's class, decorum and intelligence that's keeping them from being successful or witnessing the wet dream of the Tea Party and the morons over at Fox News. The problem is that Trump has already crossed lines that a politician with a sincere commitment to democratic norms must never cross. https://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2016/04/09/etrump/JPOQJZK9hUBdBx5rdPkWFK/story.html

I sometimes envy historians. They have the greater chance of uncovering these bits and pieces of history than the rest of us. Prayer-Meeting at Mason, O., Suddenly Broken Up Miss Ada Coleman Appears in an Unusually Striking Costume Special to the Enquirer. Mason, O., July 30.—The good people of the Methodist church here received a shock last night and it is very doubtful if they will soon recover from it. Miss Ada Coleman, one of the belles of Warren County, the daughter of one of the wealthiest farmers in this section, and the organist of the church, marched down the center aisle of the church at 7:30 o’clock last evening, attired in red bloomers of the most fashionable cut. For several weeks an epidemic of bloomers and baseball has engulfed this ordinarily quiet little town. A few days ago Miss Coleman, who is a leader and general favorite among the society belles of the town, appeared on a wheel in the main streets. She wore bloomers of the most pronounced type, red in color an

A couple of things while they're on my mind ...  [1] Spent the past few hours helping a co-worker move. Shall I tell you about the giant cluster-F it was? First, we we're supposed to start at 10AM. At 8:30ish I get a text message to change it to noon. At 11:50 I'm walking up to her place and I get a other text message asking to move it to 2PM. But, I am there ... She told me everything would be packed and all I had to do was help load and unload. Apparently some things were packed, but a vast majority of it was not. They had friends over last night to help but they decided to drink and get high instead. Her house smelled like an ash tray and I was tempted to leave but literally stood out on the balcony so I wouldn't have to smell it while they were "getting ready". We take some stuff down to the UHaul to deliver to a friend's house and go to leave but the boyfriend decides to run through McD's and take her some breakfast so she has food in her s

Let us never forget, the USA was founded on the separation of church and state. Christian Nationals has no foothold here, no matter how much they try. Need more evidence that prayer is divisive? Speaker Turzai, who controls the invocations and couldn’t keep his jaw from dropping during Borowicz’s prayer, has prohibited certain legislators from delivering prayers. Rep. Brian Sims, an atheist, is  excluded  from this opportunity because of his beliefs. When guest chaplains were permitted to deliver prayers in place of legislators, atheists, humanists, and other secular Americans were similarly excluded— unconstitutionally  according to the courts. https://rewire.news/religion-dispatches/2019/03/27/penn-legislators-jaw-dropping-prayer-showcases-americas-christian-nationalism-problem/

A tragedy unfolds for entire ecosystems as humanity unwittingly sets a oendemic off across the globe. There are hundreds of species of chytrid fungi, and most of them are unobtrusive decomposers. But  Bd  is an oddball: It has a fanatical taste for the proteins in amphibian skin. In the early 20th century, human activity—such as trade and war—accidentally spread the fungus around the world. ...... Some amphibians can tolerate Bd, but in many others, it degrades the animals' permeable skin, which they use to breathe and regulate their water levels. Runaway infections trigger a death spiral that ends in cardiac arrest. Not only is Bd lethal, it's also devastatingly effective at spreading. While most pathogens target specific hosts, Bd can infect at least 695 species to varying degrees. It also doesn't kill its victims quickly, which increases the odds that the fungus will spread. Species it doesn't kill, such as the American bullfrog, can act as reservoirs. https:/

In Memoorium I miss you every day, Rufus. 

As usual, when I found myself with an extra moment I opened up Google+ on my phone and began reading stories. After scrolling through what remains of the Plus's active users, I found myself reading a story from NBCNews about #DonaldTrump , America's #GlobalIdiot. Some might call him our President and, yes, he does hold the Executive office, but I'm fairly certain he's an idiot on a global scale more than he's a president. Regardless, this story was about the Jussie Smollett case that kind of threw the country on it's side a couple of weeks ago. The details of the case aren't important, but the gist of the story is this: Jussie Smollett was attacked in downtown Chicago by MAGA-hat wearing people shouting racist and bigoted slanders at him. Then, it turned out the attack might have been staged for publicity. Whether Jussie Smollett is guilty or innocent in this situation is inconsequential to the point I want to make here. Apparently the DOJ and the FBI

I left this morning with the intent of stopping at a wifi hotspot and typing out a blog post, but for the life of me I can't recall what I wanted to write about today. So, you get a life update ... Let's see, what's been going on with me? Well, an organization I know that helps homeless veterans had another veteran with an apartment they thought I might enjoy living in so they made contact with him and he gave me a call. We spoke for a while one night and he kept telling me I sounded "cool." (For the record, I am cool.) We chatted for a while and he seemed amazed that I didn't need to go out drinking every night, that I didn't do drugs and that I was pretty much laid back. We texted back and forth and I guess my first reservations started when he would just send me questions randomly throughout the day like, "Hey, Bro. How the day going?" He knew I had a job, what I did and that I typically left the office and went to the gym. Why was he

Many President's gave had the opportunity to review reports, findings, tell-all books and more before the public seems them, but every other president is not #DonaldTrump. No, that's not a good thing. Donald Trump has shown himself to be more than cavalier with the truth, distanced from reality, a narcissist and an outright liar. Any one of these things would be circumspect with anyone wanting a chance to "change" inaccuracies, but with Donald Trump it could mean re-writing reality to fit the preferred narrative. And this the American public should not stand by and idly allow him to do. Bana-Republic dictators do this, not leaders of the free world (which one could argue the USA no longer is). People with something to hide do this, not persons confident in their innocence. Narcissists do this to shine a positive light on themselves, not self-confident people of sound mind. No, we cannot trust what we #TrumpNation wants us to know. They're renowned liars with a

Of course, there's no mention of MeW actively targeting the Google+ users who need a new home. Users like myself and countless others who we're abandoned by Google when the Alphabet subsidiary decided to shutter their most recent entry into the social networking sphere. MeWe achieved 405% growth in 2018. In 2019 it is already growing twice as fast. MeWe also spent multiple days ranked as the No.1 Trending Social App in the Google Play Store in December 2018. Is this a sign that the tide is finally turning on the big social media giants that dominate today? https://www.androidpit.com/mewe-exceeds-4-million-members

Apparently sane people, even Republicans, are having a hard time dealing with #DonaldTrump and the fiasco that is #TrumpNation where reality is inconvenient, commitment to duty and honor are considered betrayal and a higher purpose is anathema to our idiot president. Among the tensions the officials said have marred the relationship between the president and  Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats : Trump pushed Coats to find evidence that former President Barack Obama wiretapped him; he demanded Coats publicly criticize the U.S. intelligence community as biased; and he accused Coats of being behind leaks of classified information. More recently Trump also fumed to aides after Coats publicly defended the importance of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in countering  Russia's aggression , officials said. https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/mike-pence-talked-dan-coats-out-quitting-trump-administration-n985096

Did the Mueller report exonerate DonaldTrump? Well, it's not that simple. All it said was that there wasn't enough evidence to indict Trump - not that he's innocent. Sort of like when the FBI said there wasn't enough evidence to indict Hillary Clinton over her email "scandal". Many people who have been tracking this probe over the last two years — including former FBI Director James Comey — said in the days leading up to the report, that they were hoping for a verdict that could put to rest the question that’s been hanging over the world since November 2016: whether a foreign power actually worked in partnership with a presidential campaign to win an American election. https://www.politico.com/story/2019/03/24/mueller-report-takeaways-1234097

Anyone still using Facebook doesn't have the right to complain the next time some other company is hacked and their data is stolen. I still have my Facebook account but i rarely use iit. As Facebook teaches society across the world to no longer care about cybersecurity, the world’s companies will recognize that their costly investments in securing their user data may no longer be necessary. After all, why spend vast sums of money protecting your networks and databases when there is no penalty for the theft of user data and users don’t actually care anymore and are happy to continue using your products no matter how many times you expose their most intimate information or even passwords to the world? https://www.forbes.com/sites/kalevleetaru/2019/03/23/facebook-succeeded-in-killing-cybersecurity-like-it-did-privacy/#703906494549

If you've known me for 5 minutes then you know I'm a sucker for maps - even the newer technological marvels. Even though they're not a beautiful as old hand drawn cartography, maps are maps and maps are great. The exploration companies use 3-D seismic imaging to map areas of the Gulf they are interested in. This involves towing high-powered underwater air guns behind a ship. When the guns fire, they create sound waves that travel down and are reflected back up by the sea floor. Lines of underwater microphones pulled along the surface behind the ship record how long it takes the reflected waves to reach them, data that can then be translated into topography. https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2017/05/new-seafloor-map-gulf-of-mexico/ https://www.boem.gov/Gulf-of-Mexico-Deepwater-Bathymetry/

I started using note Firefox and less Chrome recently in an effort to when myself off of Google a little more (the demise of Google+ is hitting me hard). At work, it's Firefox. At home, it's Firefox ... unless I'm on my Chromebook. Then, it's Chrome. Google's Chrome is indeed a memory hog - that's no secret. But what's more concerning is how computer manufacturers are still cheaping out on the RAM they're installing on systems. You have to buy a premium laptop or computer to get a reasonable amount of memory anymore and it's atrocious. To start, open Chrome and press Shift+Esc (or, on a Mac, go to Windows > Task Manager). This will open  Chrome’s own Task Manager , which will give you a more accurate look into how much memory each tab, plugin, and extension is taking up. You can click the top of the “Memory” column to sort it by highest RAM usage to lowest. https://lifehacker.com/why-chrome-uses-so-much-freaking-ram-1702537477

In a other day and age societies would have shunned people carrying a disease or who were otherwise a danger (or burden) on the village. Should we exclude anti-vaxxers from society because they're idiots? Well, if we did that we'd have to exclude the MAGA-hat wearing morons as well. And possibly home schoolers, but that's another discussion. Personally, I'm for excluding people who don't take the implied social contract seriously, but where do we stop? As with anything, once you take that first step you're on a dark path where you're moving from excluding anti-vaxxers to  excluding a specific religion or race. Tribalism is great when you're a part if the dominant tribe, but it's not so great when you're the minority and shouldn't be tolerated. This is America, the Land of the Free. That freedom, however, doesn’t mean “I can do whatever I want, whenever I want.” When we choose to live in a society, there are certain obligations—both moral a

#DonaldTrump's administration has to be the most corrupt this country has ever know. And the shocking part of all of this is the same people who cried for Hillary Clinton to be thrown in prison for her use of a private server are the ones saying it's not a big deal that the Trump Administration is circumventing nearly identical laws. Aside from the Kushners, the House committee said other officials such as the former deputy national security adviser K.T. McFarland and former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon used their personal email accounts to discuss the "transfer of sensitive U.S. nuclear technology to Saudi Arabia." The panel produced a  report last month  alleging that the Trump administration sought to rush the transfer of American nuclear technology to Saudi Arabia in potential violation of the law. https://www.npr.org/2019/03/21/705561586/kushner-used-private-email-to-conduct-official-business-house-committee-says

I work for a company. Let's call it Company H. I have actually worked for this company twice: once in sales and now as an advisor - sort of a min-project manager. This company is a Fortune 100 company and easily makes more than a billion dollars a year. I work at the headquarters and always have. Recently my company has bought up most of it's competition and is the largest company of it's size in the world. We have tentacles in just about every western  nation and serve a very important need. I won't get into that as it will give the company away. Over the years I've had many sales jobs. Some were fun, some were not. Some were lucrative while others ... well, let's just say, not every industry is for every person. Know who you are, your strengths and convert that knowledge into selling to the right people. I'm not what anyone would call a great sales person. I'll easily admit that. In fact, I'm not a huge fan of sales, I just enjoy having dis

Mueller is investigating Russian interference into the 2016 election, but who is investigating whether or not the President of the United States, one Donald J. Trump, is a currently compromised, willing or unwitting, Russian asset? Well, that's a question Congress is finally going to try and answer. #DonaldTrump defends autocrats, adores Putin, sides with the Russian president over the US's own intelligence apparatus and yet he claims to not have any ties to Russia. Don't get me wrong: I love Costco. It's a great store that sells wonderful items at a terrific price and I evangelise them to all who will listen, but guess what? I'm a member. He noted that when it first emerged that Cohen had emailed Putin's office seeking help, Putin's spokesman, Dmitri Pescov, said he never answered the email. But it later emerged in court documents that an assistant to Pescov did respond, emailing Cohen and asking him to call, which he did. "So here we had t

This thing, the Bunny Harvestman, looks like something out of the demented dreams of leftover toy factory. https://youtu.be/483tm-29hE4 Harvestmen are in the same family as the docile daddy longlegs—an arachnid, but not actually a spider. These creatures are not venomous and have been around for 400 million years, before even dinosaurs roamed the earth, writes Kay in a post on the website Rumble. We don’t know why this harvestman has the yellow eyespots and ears that make it look like a mammal head—the actual eyes are below the spots—but it might be to look bigger and more intimidating to predators, writes Kay. https://www.popsci.com/megapixels-harvestmen-dog

Imagine for a moment the devastation that would have erupted had this hit a populated area, or even an area of the ocean. The tidal wave alone would have wiped out coastal communities. According to NASA, that  meteor  weighed about 1,500 tons (1,360 metric tons), had a diameter of about 32 feet (10 meters), and was traveling through the atmosphere at about 71,582 mph (115,200 kilometers per hour) when it exploded. The blast occurred about 15.5 miles (25 km) over the ocean and erupted with an energy equivalent to 173 kilotons of TNT — roughly 10 times the energy of the  atomic bomb that the United States detonated over Hiroshima  during World War II. https://www.livescience.com/65022-sneaky-meteor-evades-detection.html

All day long, every single day, I come up with ideas to blog about. Maybe the ideas are sparked by an errant comment, an interaction or something I read throughout the day and yet, I never seem to remember these ideas when I sit down and try to type. I once tried keeping a notebook (that didn't last long), sending an email to myself (that didn't last long either) and keeping a document in the cloud with snippets of what I wanted to say. Yeah, you guessed it, that didn't last long either. Today, though, we're going to talk about social media. For two very real reasons: Social media pervades each and every aspect of our lives, and I just submitted a proposal to be a Social Media Manager for a local business A lot of people have written about social media over the years. From the first days of websites such as Friendster and Classmates.com, to the revolution that was MySpace and then the behemoth that is Facebook, social media outlets have taken over our culture c

Every once in a while I come to conclusion there is something wrong with me - of how I view and interact with the world and so I have to take action to reaffirm that I"m not weird, I'm just a very small minority of people who think, collect data and extrapolate into something that makes logical sense. I first learned of the Myers-Briggs Personality Types when taking Psychology 101 in college. I tested as a majority INTP and a minority ENTP . Over the years I've learned the amount of sleep and caffeine greatly controls which one of these personality types is in charge on any given day. Some days, like today, I'm a strong INTP while other days, I'm a more socially acceptable ENTP. Why "more socially acceptable"? Because the world is built for extroverts. In retrospect, this explains how I was so frustrated as a child all the time. My mother and brother are strong extroverts, while I just wanted to be left alone. But, I was never alone - I was always

It was Tuesday ... I did something I've never done in my entire life. I went to HR to complain about another employee. Normally, I would have addressed the issue with said employee, but he wasn't my employee. In fact, after working with him for about 90 days, he'd barely said anything to me other than, "Shut the fuck up" and to tell me to not use his garbage can and to stop fidgeting, it annoyed him . For the record, on that particular day I was indeed fidgeting due to an overabundance of caffeine. But this was not that day, this was a different day. This was Tuesday ... However, before I continue, I need to give a little background on this person. He's one of those MAGA-hat wearing camo-covered members of #TrumpNation. He always talks about killing people, threatens to shoot co-workers when he doesn't like what they have to say and refers to just about everyone as a "pussy". In short, he's an asshat. MAGA-Moron The one time I