November 2013 Archives

My iPhone 5 power button is broken. It happened to one of our iPhone 4s, too, so ... um, Apple, please fix this. Maybe they did with the iPhone 5c/s, but we won't know for some time. But I can no longer simply press the power button to turn the phone off, or hold it down to shut the phone down, and so on. If I press reallllly hard, I might be able to get it to recognize the button.

Yesterday, an app crashed the phone (running iOS 7.0.4), pretty hard. The phone had been acting up for a couple of days, but this app stopped responding, and I could no longer go back to the home screen or any other app. Siri would respond, but I could not get it to open an app. "Open Safari, Siri." "I'm sorry, Pudge, I'm afraid I can't do that." (Paraphrased.)

So I tried to hold down the power button down reallllly hard, so I could slide the phone off. Nothing. I tried to reset with power button and home button, and it took a screen shot, and shortly after ... the screen went blank. The phone wasn't off, the screen was just blank. No backlight. So I backed up the phone with iTunes, and then I figured, well, with no backlight it'll take time to run the battery down, so I'll restore the phone. But I can't do that either, because I have to turn off Find My iPhone first. Which I cannot do because I cannot turn it off by voice and I cannot see the display, even if the phone would let me do it at all.

I tried to connect to it via my laptop, since Personal Hotspot can really bring the battery down, but I had earlier turned it off, and I couldn't turn it back on with Siri. So, "play Tom Petty." It played, and the battery slowly ran down. I was able to connect it to my car stereo and play music through Bluetooth, which would help, but I didn't want to leave the car on.

Later I tried again to reset the phone by holding the power button down reallllly hard, with the home button. Didn't work. Siri activated. I played the music again. I came back later and tried again ... this time, it finally worked, the phone rebooted and I immediately saw the Apple logo.

So much fail. Is it too much to ask for a hole to stick a paper clip in?

In our lifetime, no bigger hater of civil and human rights has ever been elected to Seattle office than Kshama Sawant. Her previous House campaign gives us much of the detail. She opposes private property, seeing our personal income as nothing more than a piggy bank to fund everything from full-time salaries for everyone who refuses to work, to single-payer healthcare and free college for all, and every other handout you could probably think of; she opposes people choosing where to do business and with whom, saying it is "economic terrorism" for Boeing to merely want to put a new plant in a state where it makes more economic sense; and she wants to take "Boeing, Microsoft, and Amazon, into democratic public ownership to be run for public good, not private profit."

Let those words sink in. She would take literally everything great, and created privately by individuals, in Seattle, and destroy it. The greater it is, the more she wants to kill it. As she said, "When things are exquisitely beautiful and rare, they shouldn't be privately owned."

Sayanora, Amazon.

She hates private property, despises freedom of choice, and could not care less about the right to privacy (as she sticks government into more and more parts of our lives). She wants each one of us subjugated entirely by an oppressive government. She is as much a hater of civil and human rights as any local politician in my lifetime, and she was elected citywide by the citizen-residents of Seattle.

That's pretty damned sad. I thought Seattle at least superficially cared about civil and human rights.

I no longer believe that.

Of course, the other possibility is that Seattle voters are just terribly ignorant, not realizing that they were electing such a creature as this. Maybe they thought she was just another green-ish Seattle-style socialist, like many others who have graced the offices of mayor and city council. But she isn't: she is, as colleague Jim Miller has noted, a straight-up Trotskyist communist, a self-proclaimed Marxist, who believes in putting all of us under the government's very heavy thumb.

We don't need to go into how her positions make no sense; for example, she is against an active police enforcement of the law, but that is the only way she could enforce the oppression she wants. (When she needed the police to actively enforce her oppressive laws violating our rights, would she? I have no doubts, personally. Certainly Marx, and especially Trotsky, wouldn't have blinked at the prospect.) It simply suffices to say she wants to oppress us all, very severely.

The good news is that we have saviors here: a mayor and a city council who actually, despite many of their stated anti-capitalist positions, respect the law and civil rights a lot more than Sawant does. Not as much as they should, in my view, but likely enough to render Sawant incapable of violating us nearly to the extent she would like. (Not to mention, of course, that most of what she wants to do would be struck down by state and federal courts as blatantly unconstitutional.)

But that doesn't make her election acceptable to a reasonable people who do respect civil and human rights. And I just hope that she doesn't drive me, and the companies I work for and with, out of the city. There's a lot of economic good left in Seattle, but Sawant will do everything she can to destroy it.