Sick of Those Windows 10 Update Messages?

JR at the Stellarparthenon BBS came up with the following to turn it off:
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\WindowsUpdate]
"DisableOSUpgrade"=dword:00000001
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\GWX]
"DisableGWX"=dword:00000001
I haven't tried it myself, but feel free to try this out.

You past this into a text document, and give it the .reg extension, and it will run when you double click on it.

Who Knew?

Marco Rubio's jokes about Trump's dick size are not a low point in Presidential campaigning. It turns out that it it goes all the way back to Thomas Jefferson:

………

As a matter of fact, Jefferson was well aware of the political salience of the well-timed tiny-dick joke because he used them himself, in the ferocious campaign of 1800.

As the challenger in 1800, his goal was to topple the incumbent. His critique of President John Adams included the accusation that he was "a hideous hermaphroditical character, which has neither the force and firmness of a man, nor the gentleness and sensibility of a woman."

And, of course, old Martin Van Buren campaigned by accusing William Henry Harrison, the hero of Tippecanoe, of being "a man who wore corsets, put cologne on his whiskers, slept on French beds, rode in a British coach, and ate with golden spoons from silver plates." Which is sort of an implied dick joke from a more civilized time. And thus do we discover that, in yet another vital element of being a political candidate, Marco Rubio comes up…well…short.

I loves me some history.

Quote of the Day

But Washington is freaking out about Trump in a way they never did about Bush. Why? Because Bush was their moron, while Trump is his own moron. That's really what it comes down to.

—Matt Taibbi

Read the rest of the article, but this bit is the synthesis of all that the Republicans fear about Trump.

Not a Great Night for Sanders

Right now, he appears to have won Vermont, Colorado, Massachusetts, Minnesota and Oklahoma, and Clinton won Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Tennessee, Texas, and Vairginia.

She also got about twice as many delegates.

Trump won all but four of the states on the 'Phant side, with Cruz winning Texas and Oklahoma, and Rubio winning Minnesota, and Vermont being too close to call.

We are no hearing a clamor for Bernie to leave the race from the pundits, despite the fact that the Democratic side of the Race is closer than the Republican side, and no one is suggesting that other Republicans capitulate to Trump.

I just love our punditocracy works.

As an aside, Sanders is crushing it on fundraising, raising $20 million in January and $42 million in February, and appears to be outpacing Clinton, with a far lower burn rate, so he can continue to run until the convention.

Snark of the Day

Democrats Always Prove the Commies Right

—Fredrik deBoer

Read his whole post, but he has a list of things where his communist friend's predictions proved right:

I’m regularly accused of believing things that I’ve never said and don’t believe. That’s largely a facet of the fact that, on the internet today, arguing with people is really a matter of misrepresenting what they’re saying and then attacking the misrepresentation. One of the most constant of these is that I say “both parties are the same.” I’ve never said that. Ever. In my life. But over time, the claims of friends who do say that have been vindicated over and over again.

By that I mean something very simple: my communist friends who really do say that the two parties are the same make predictions about politics. My Democrat friends do the same. Looking back at the times when the two groups have clashed, the commies have been right literally 100% of the time.

I get accused of being a “Naderite,” though in fact I voted for Gore in the first election I was old enough to vote in. (I’ve come to regret that decision over time.) The Democrats said that left-wing critics of the party would be welcomed into the fold; the commies told me that the Democrats hate the left and always would. The commies were right. The Democrats told me that anti-Iraq war voices would be an important slice of the party in the debates to come. The commies told me Democrats and their representatives in the media would engage in redbaiting eliminationism like we’d never seen before. The commies were right. The Democrats told me that a candidate like Howard Dean, who at the time was running as an explicitly left-wing challenger to the Democrat establishment, would have a great chance at the nomination; my commie friends said that the Democrats and their surrogates in the media would destroy Dean. The commies were right.

He's right, but kind of depressing.

Still, it's a good read.

Debbie Wasserman-Schultz Really Needs to be Fired

Even if you ignore her tenure at the DNC, which is marked by incompetence, careerism, and biased, her history in supporting the most egregious examples of abusive consumer is a reason to force her retirement.

In November, she voted to allow car dealers to discriminate against minorities:

Before Thanksgiving, Florida Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz helped push through congress a bill that would allow automobile dealers and auto finance companies to discriminate against minority and unsophisticated car buyers by charging them more in fees and interest rates.

The Reforming CFPB Indirect Auto Financing Guidance Act that Wasserman Schultz voted for would basically let lenders and dealers ignore Consumer Financial Protection Bureau rules that bar dealers and auto finance companies from charging unsophisticated borrowers who are mostly minorities hundreds of dollars more in excessive interest and fees on car loans regardless if the car buyer has excellent credit.

The National Automobile Dealers Association or NADA is pushing this bill because they realized that after dusting off an old marketing book from Wells Fargo, that their members could easily widen their profit margins by adding stealth fees and charging higher interest rates to unsophisticated minority consumers who are just happy they can own a new car.

The bill is, as Brian O’Connor at the Detroit News points out, “a repulsive layering of racism wrapped in consumer rip-offs wrapped in a layer of lies and stuffed with lots and lots of campaign cash.”

Like an old sub-prime mortgage, the auto finance company sets a minimum interest rate on car loan made through a dealer, and the dealer can then hike the interest rate to 2.5 percentage points or more with the lender kicking in back end points equaling 1% to 3% of the sale price of the car to the dealer and the salesman. This similar to what used to be called Yield Spread Premiums in lending. In other words, NADA wants and what Wasserman Schultz endorses is really ghetto loans for cars.

And now she's tring to hamgstring the CFPB's attempts to regulate the worst practices of the payday lending industry:

One of the benefits of America’s unusually stingy welfare system is that it allows our domestic payday-loan industry to thrive. Since the safety net is too threadbare to catch the working poor when they fall on troubled times, payday lenders are able to charge them exorbitant interest on subsistence loans. Nationally, the average interest rate on a payday loan is a stellar 390 percent.

But Elizabeth Warren’s Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is dead set on sapping all of the dynamism out of the payday-loan industry. The CFPB is about to issue new regulations on payday lenders that are aimed at preventing borrowers from falling into a vicious (or viciously profitable) cycle where they take out high-interest loans just to make the interest payments on their previous high-interest loans. Fortunately, DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz is co-sponsoring a bill that would gut the CFPB’s regulations and allow payday lenders to keep profiting off the desperation of the impoverished.

According to a memo obtained by the Huffington Post, Wasserman Schultz is trying to rally congressional Democrats around a bill that would delay the CFPB’s new rules for two years and nullify those rules in any state that adopts its own payday-lending law, like the DNC chair’s own home state of Florida.

The key thing about such state laws is that they’re likely to be much kinder to the profits of payday lenders than what the CFPB is crafting. In Florida, the average interest rate on a payday loan is still 304 percent, according to Pew Charitable Trusts. What’s more, 76 percent of all payday loans in the state are turned loans — loans taken out to pay back another loan — according to Americans for Financial Reform. Thus, Florida’s law has left the highly profitable vicious cycle of payday borrowing intact.

………

With such brave legislators leading the Democratic Party, it’s difficult to understand how Bernie Sanders can get so mad at the “Establishment.”

H/t Naked Capitalism, where they also note that DWS recently signed onto a letter to the CFPB asking for an exemption for credit unions and banks smaller than $10 billion from consumer protecting regulations.

Seriously.  What is wrong with the Democratic Party?

I kind of understand how one might be tempted to make use of an evil person's evil, but Debbie Wasserman-Schultz is to incompetent that her evil servs no one.

If she were were in a James Thurber novel, the Todal would have Gleeped her by now.^*

Support Tim Canova, who primarying her.

^*The 13 Clocks. Just go read it.

Well, This Explains Why She Married Me

At some point during Lansdowne's production of Little Shop of Horrors, Sharon lost her keys.

That was Saturday night.

She remembered putting them in her coat pocket, but somehow they had fallen out.

For the past 2-1/2 days, she has been frantically retracing her steps, and tearing apart the house and the car in an attempt to find her keys.

She found them today.

They were in her coat pocket.

It appears that she had put them in her zipper pocket so that they would be safer, and then she forgot that she had done so.

This is a fail on par with marrying me.

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