Aaron Adams’s Blowhard Blog

The troubleshooting utility AppleJack has returned. The developers had a little difficulty adapting it for the new things under the hood in Leopard, but their work is now your reward. AppleJack is a shell script intended to be run in single-user mode to simplify some troubleshooting and maintenance tasks, should your Mac begin behaving badly. I strongly recommend it for every Mac user. And thanks to the developers for sticking with a project so many of us find useful.

Now that the Vice Presidential candidates have been announced, I’d like to point out some interesting election trends that have occurred since the 1952 election, the last election where two new candidates were nominated by both parties.

• Of the last 14 Republican tickets, 11 have included a candidate with the name Nixon or Bush. Nixon appears in 5 of 14, a Bush in 6 of 14.
   
• The last Senator elected to the Presidency was John Kennedy. Senators have lost 8 of the last 14 elections. A Senator will be elected in 2008 for the first time in 48 years.
   
• After 1952, a sitting President or Vice President has been at least one party’s candidate every election year, ending with 2008.
   
• Since 1952, 5 Presidents have been elected to two terms. Of those, 4 were Republicans. The last Democrat before Clinton was FDR.
     
• Election winners tend to be Presidents, Vice Presidents, or state Governors. Southern states seem to have an advantage: Carter (Georgia), Clinton (Arkansas), and Bush (Texas). Reagan (California) is the exception. Of new Presidents in office, Governors have been elected 4 of the last 5 times.

Did I miss anything ? Leave your analysis of the data in the comments section.

Attention Dayton haters: According to this article from Fox News, John McCain will be announcing his Vice Presidential nominee tomorrow at the Nutter Center, just a few hundred yards from where I’ll be. This is the second time I know of that a Presidential candidate has introduced his running mate in Dayton, Ohio, the first time being when James M. Cox announced his Democrat running mate at the Montgomery Country Fairgrounds, the Nutter Center of its day, in 1920. That running mate was Franklin D. Roosevelt. I’m no McCainiac, but I do like the idea that Dayton, allegedly a dying city, is involved in this year’s Presidential contest.

I know I’ve been on a jag about sex crimes as of late, which is a departure from the technical and semi-personal nature this blog had when I started it. However, of all the issues that occupy our minds at this moment, I find this one to be especially galling because of the hysteria that surrounds it, and my own determination not to let myself or others I care about get snared in the sex crimes dragnet, especially when we’re not criminals.

Today’s indignity is brought to you by Chuck Goolsbee, who points out this article, from which I quote:

At a Harlan, Kentucky, grocery store last week, perennial gubernatorial candidate Otis “Bullman” Hensley encountered a woman with her two nieces, ages 11 and 13. He offered to trade a “fattening hog” for the girls, a variation on an old Appalachian joke meant as a compliment. The woman evidently didn’t get it. A.P. reports that “the family obtained a warrant for Hensley’s arrest from the local prosecutor, claiming the comment was intended to entice the children into illegal sexual activity.”

Huh? I have read this a dozen times and for the life of me, I cannot figure out how trading a fat hog for your kids is sexually perverse. Maybe not funny, maybe not exactly a compliment, maybe not what you want to hear, and certainly not sexual.

“In Kentucky, … citizens can obtain arrest warrants simply by filing a complaint with local prosecutors,” and ”no investigation is necessary for police to make an arrest when the charge involves an alleged sexual offense.” 

Yep. No criminal investigation necessary, no explicit sexual comment necessary. All you have to do is say something that someone insane interprets as sexual, independent of whether it actually is sexual, have them complain, and you’re charged with a sex crime. Charged is different than convicted, but it is still a gross perversion of justice and only serves to prevent legitimate speech without substantively preventing sex crimes.

Had enough yet?

From Fox News today:

Sex Offenders Try to Block Laws Allowing Them to Be ID’d Online

A couple of tidbits I found interesting:

The plaintiffs claim the law is broad enough now to apply to a wide range of offenses ranging from child molestation to rape to theft of a pornographic magazine from a store.

Unreal! And unacceptable.

One plaintiff, identified as Doe 2 in court documents, said neither he nor his attorney at the time understood that lifetime supervision would apply after he pleaded guilty in 2001 to a sex offense, or that he would continue to be banned from going to parks or schools.

He said that during an acrimonious divorce his ex-wife accused him of sexually assaulting her 14-year-old daughter. He faced five felony charges but pleaded guilty to one count of attempted lewdness with a minor under 14, and was sentenced to 5 years probation.

“I never touched my stepdaughter or any other child inappropriately,” he said in the affidavit, which says he took a plea deal to spare his children the embarrassment of a trial. “I was not told that there would be any restrictions on me whatsoever after I was done with probation.”

The anger I feel towards the evil - and I use that word purposely - people who enact and enforce these laws inevitably turns into sadness for their victims. All that is required for evil to triumph is for good people to do nothing, and we’re doing nothing.

I can see where this is all headed in the long term, can’t you?

“Those fags across the street sure do seem to have their limp-wristed friends over a lot. Who the hell knows what kind of sickening sexual perversion they’re up to inside that house? I better let the police know because if one of them so much as looks at my kid the wrong way, I’m gonna have the sex offender patrol on their ass to make their lives miserable and move them the hell out of my neighborhood. Hey, if you don’t like it, don’t be gay. This is a neighborhood for families and normal people, not perverts. Perverts need to be tracked and set straight in order to protect the children.”

“That guy who just moved in a couple of doors down seems weird. He’s gotta be what, 35? And I don’t think he has a girlfriend. I’ll bet a dollar he’s some kind of queer or child molester. I’d better let the cops know just in case he tries to pull anything fishy with my kid. This is about protecting the children. That’s society’s primary responsiblilty.”

I know for a fact these attitudes and lines of thinking exist because I hear them spoken out loud on a frequent basis.

What if, unholiest of all unholies, you’re gay and a smoker. The universe might implode around you. My rational mind cannot imagine the torture and humiliation gay smokers will be subject to just before their legally-imposed deaths in the name of inoffensiveness and protecting the children in our future nanny state utopia.

I’m not kidding. I’m not exaggerating. I’m not employing hyperbole. I hope I don’t live long enough to see things deteriorate to this point, but I do hope a record of my blog exists long enough to prove me right, even though the clean-lunged, sexually pure society of future pussies will read it as heresy.