Month: February 2013

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This makes me wonder…

woodward… How many more lies the Obama administration is selling and just how compromised the media is when it comes to the Obama White House.

This morning I caught a couple of Tweets about Bob Woodward being under attack from the Media and one tweet said he’d been threatened by the White House over a story.

I thought Whoa!!!! Something is up.

In this case Woodward is at the center of a journalistic feeding frenzy of his so called colleagues.Woodward is famous for breaking the Watergate story and I’ve always enjoyed his writing, so I started trying to track down what the whole story is.

Mr. Woodward’s crime is that he pointed out, the Emperor has no clothes.

He caught the White House red handed in a bald lie. Then he published what he found.

In this case contrary to the White House spin, Which has been saying  that Congress and specifically the Republicans are responsible for the upcoming sequester

According to Woodward, the truth is that the Sequester was suggested and approved by the Obama administration.

This isn’t the first time Mr. Woodward has caught the White House in a lie… I seem to recall President Nixon resigning as a direct result of a Woodward story. At least Mr. Woodward is non partisan!

The whole article from The Washington Post is Here.

An interesting analysis of the feeding frenzy and comments from the “Balanced Media” can be found on Breitbart Here.

The upcoming cuts, according to Breitbart represent only 2% of the Federal budget.

Yet the Federal government is asking it’s employees to take furlough days that will account for a loss in their paychecks of as much as 5%.

I’m a “whats good for the goose is good for the gander kind of guy” and think if the Government expects their employees to accept a 5% cut in pay, then the government shouldn’t be bitching about a lousy 2% loss in theirs.

It’s a foregone conclusion that the people furloughed are folks can least afford a 5% pay cut.

They’ll be used as poster children demonstrating the evil that the bastard Republicans have caused. It will be the secretaries, clerks, phone operators, and maintenance people.

The management and the politicians themselves will not be losing at all.

Why would the furloughs be concentrated in those areas? So that the American people have the false impression that the sequester really is doing something that’s hurting average Americans.

I’d bet you that 2% of the Federal budget is toilet paper and office supplies. ( I might lose that bet but I wouldn’t be surprised with all the waste in govt. if the cost was that high. I’m sure they’re using $10 rolls of TP in Congress.)

Unfortunately, the story has become Woodward, instead of the lies and misrepresentations from the White House.

According to this NPR piece  Woodward has described a contentious conversation he had with a White House aide wherein the aide yelled at Woodward for a half hour, then followed up with an “Apology” email that said, “You’ll regret staking out that claim”.

Woodward said, “I mean, it makes me very uncomfortable to have the White House telling reporters, you’re going to regret doing something that you believe in,”.

And he’s right.

It may be overstating it to say that this was a direct threat from the White House with the full backing of the President.

But in times like these, when the President can make you a terrorist by simply calling you a terrorist, and when your travel can be impeded because your name or someone with a similar name appears on a no-fly list.

Woodward’s discomfort may have more basis in fact than paranoia.

I think it’s very unfortunate that the real story has been eclipsed by the sidebar.

On the positive side of the scale is that we clearly can see just how deep the color yellow of “Yellow journalism” in America has become.

I find myself asking if this had been a Bush Administration gaffe… Had Mr. Woodward caught former President Bush in a similar lie, would Mr. Woodward have been a hero?

Sadly, I think the answer is that he’d have been a media darling.

President Obama and his administration are just as likely to lie, misrepresent, and abuse power as any other administration.

The old saying, “Power corrupts…” is just as applicable to a Black President as it is to a White one.

I  often find myself asking, Is President Obama getting special treatment because of racism? Is the media still laboring under some misguided guilt that an African American needs “Special” treatment?

If the people who are supposed to be the publics watchdogs are in fact spinning the news, if they’re reporting only one side of the Obama Presidency – that President Obama can do no wrong… We lose objectivity.

With that loss of objectivity we also lose our ability to question, formulate, or even express differing opinions.

It’s ironic as hell that the first amendment could in fact be undone by the very people operating most under it’s protections. Bundled in that irony is that journalists will devour their own for exercising freedom of speech.

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Bad habits

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I used to smoke. 

Yeah, I was a smoker. I was the evil puffing bastard everyone has come to hate! I put your children at risk! According to the nanny state I should have been taken out and shot.

Not to put me out of my misery but out of yours.

I quit years ago and I still miss it.

Now theres an un-PC admission in this day & age!

I’m glad I quit and everything, but I liked the nicotine rush! I also liked that it killed my appetite and it was a lot easier to stay skinny.

The health benefits outweighed the desire to smoke and so I was able to leave it, albeit with regret in my past.

I quit because my best friend asked me one day how it was that I could justify going to the gym 4 days a week and still smoke when I came out of the gym?

It was a good question and as usual his logic was completely irrefutable.

I quit that day…

I still miss it.

I miss smoking when I’m drinking at a bar. You can’t smoke at bars in California anymore but I still miss it.

I miss smoking after sex. I miss the ashtray on my belly, the red cherry of my cigarette glowing in the darkness and me thinking quietly about what I’d just done and knowing that I was going to do it again when I stubbed out my smoke. I miss having my arm wrapped around my partner, their head on my shoulder while I smoked that in between fuck cigarette.

I doubt I’m the only man who feels that way.

I miss getting up from my desk and walking outside to have a smoke and bitch with my co-workers about the boss or the latest political fuck-up in the company.

I smoked because I enjoyed the taste, and the hit. Not because I was lured into it by unscrupulous corporations. (Their ads were enticing, who didn’t want to be the Marlboro Man?)  I knew damn well what I was doing.

My Dad smoked. It killed him, you’d think that I wouldn’t wax lovingly about cigarettes.

I didn’t start smoking until I was 18. Near the end of my smoking days, I was doing almost a pack a day.

The nicotine was one thing. I think I was self medicating a bit. Nicotine acts as a stimulant and because it’s a stimulant it has a very specific effect on persons who happen to have been treated in their childhood with drugs like Ritalin.

The child may have outgrown the reasons they were put on Ritalin but their bodies will always have an affinity for stimulants in general.

I’ve known more than one smoker who had been on Ritalin in their childhood, of those more than a few who really liked pharmaceutical grade stimulants. 

Interesting thing is that if their Doctor was smart and recognized certain traits they’d end up back on Ritalin and suddenly they’d stop smoking.

But sure… Ritalin is completely safe for your unruly child, we’ve been using it for 50 years on kids just like yours… (with no or generally undocumented, unproven ill effects.)

Moving on…

I recently had the opportunity to try one of those e-cigarettes. For those of you that don’t know, these are things that look like cigarettes and that provide a nice flavor and optionally a selectable hit of nicotine without the tar, and other nasty chemicals associated with combustion in a “real” cigarette.

It was nice…

Not exactly like smoking a cigarette, but it was pleasant.

Since then, I’ve done a lot of reading and investigation The jury is out about the negative effects of these devices.

About the only consistent thing is that they’re less unhealthy than a cigarette. The “Smoke” is essentially water vapor, there’s no smell, but there is a good taste (at least in the one I tried). You can choose the nicotine leveNewImagel and they’re also a lot cheaper than cigarettes. 

I’m not sure that I’m ready to start up with one of these things all the time but I do like the option.

The only problem I could see is that unlike a real cigarette you don’t know when you’re done. 

I’d smoke a real cigarette in about 10 -15 minutes if I wasn’t in a hurry. These e-cigs don’t burn down so you could find yourself completely losing track of time if you weren’t paying attention.

For someone like me that really enjoyed smoking even when I quit… these things might be a neat option. I could also see how they might assist in quitting for some people.

But I suspect that there will be a larger number of folks who switch over to this option. At least until the government starts to regulate them and drives the prices up to normal cigarette levels.

There’s also the fact that cigarettes used to be, and e-cigs still are cheaper than a monthly prescription of Ritalin.

I don’t know if that’s still the case. I haven’t looked into Ritalin in a very long time.

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Simple Things

I hate alarms.

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Chirps, and beeps from Alarm clocks to alarm systems will put me in a really nasty mood. I can’t count how many alarm clocks I’ve destroyed half awake because they freaked me out.Car alarms, beeps from UPS devices saying that they’re running when that should be obvious since you’re sitting in a lab that has suddenly gone pitch black.

My irritation level rises if I’m in a room full of people with smart phones chirping, whining, dinging, booping, or whatever. All of these noises represent something that needs attention.

FYI an incessantly ringing telephone won’t be answered… It will be ripped out of the wall! If it’s a cell phone, or a cordless phone, it’s battery will be ripped out. In those cases it’s pure dumb luck if the unit ever works again.

The ONE and ONLY time a fire alarm went off because of a real emergency, it went off as I and my family were already evacuating our burning home.

In point of fact it went off, further terrifying a dog who then panicked slipped her collar and ran into a bedroom where she died because we couldn’t get to her without losing our lives too.

The alarms in question over the years had gone off from the slightest whiff of smoke from the stove but for some reason waited until the flames were roaring across the ceiling before they went off, when they were really needed.

For me fire Alarms are a particular nemesis. I hate the things!

I hated being in corporate America when the company tested fire alarms. I’ve never understood the need for fire alarms to be so loud, with a frequency so piercing that they cause physical pain. 

I’ve actually experienced temporary partial deafness from having to move down a long narrow hallway with hard floors and walls where the fire alarms were positioned every 30 or 40 feet.

The echo was deafening, painful and pushed me from pissed off to ready to rip someones throat out. I can remember screaming “MOVE YOU DUMB FUCKS!” at the top of my lungs because I wanted nothing more than to get out of the gauntlet of pain as quickly as possible. That comment landed me in the HR department because I’d been mean calling my co-workers dumb fucks. 

By the way that incident happened while my fingers were firmly in both ears and I was still in excruciating pain. It felt like ice picks being driven through my head. I was partially deaf for days after. The HR bitch didn’t believe that I’d been physically hurt by the noise. I’m sure that I could have made a case today under OSHA rules. But back then… it was the cost of having a job.

(I just checked. Apparently sustained 85db is sufficient to cause hearing damage over an 8 hour day, which just so happens to be the db level of all three of the smoke alarms in my house.

It appears that in a commercial situation the db level can be higher. 100dbA can cause permanent damage after just 15 minutes per day, and 120db or higher can cause immediate damage.

I’m guessing that my reaction is a completely defensive reaction. I’ve always assumed that if something hurt it was probably damaging, Apparently, I’m somewhat correct. )

I have on more than one occasion leapt straight up and ripped an errant fire alarm off a ceiling of my home. By errant I mean one that has decided to go off because there was a spill on the stove or grease spatter in the oven. Even after being ripped off the ceiling the damn thing wouldn’t shut up. So in those cases I disemboweled the device to make it shut the hell up. There is something satisfying about hearing the death wheeze of a machine that’s pissed me off.

With all this in mind, can you imagine how fraught with peril running the self cleaning cycle of my oven is?

I mean you’re going to have smoke! Even with all the doors and windows open your’e still going to have smoke accumulating along the ceiling for at least a short time.

The house I live in now, has 3 smoke detectors in a nice straight line, they’re spread out over about 12 feet. One in the master bedroom, one in the hall and one in the guest room. Oddly there’s not one in the living room, however this means that these detectors are all less than 20 feet from the kitchen.

It’s a safe bet that when one of these smoke detectors goes off, they all go off, usually with a lovely 1/2 second delay so that the full painful, piercing,reflected sound is present. This will put me from zero to crazy pissed off in just about the half second they all decide to go off.

I’ve actually left the kitchen with something potentially dangerous smoldering on a burner to shut these damn machines up.

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Why? Because with the sound causing the kind of pain they do I can’t think of anything except making the hateful noise stop.

Well today, I’m cleaning the oven. 

I tried scrubbing it so that I didn’t have to run the self cleaning cycle.

But at some point, someone must have cooked something in the oven that fucking exploded. That same person didn’t bother to clean up their mess or tell anyone that they’d made a mess in the first place. I’m not naming names or anything…

What this all leads to is that in order to run the self cleaning cycle, I had to take certain precautions. 

1) open all doors and windows (it’s 45F… I can put on a jacket for 3 hours)

2) Remove all smoke detectors and put them in a safe place.

3) Deal with the monitored house alarm smoke detector.

Number 3 is a bit of a sticky wicket. You can’t just pull it off the ceiling, that will cause it to go off and then the Alarm panel will be bitching for the next 3 hours “BEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEP! FIRE FIRE FIRE BEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEP!”

Long before you figure out that the panel can’t be shut up… the Fire Department has driven onto your lawn.

This is bad.

So I called the alarm people and asked them how to put the panel into maintenance mode so that the smoke alarm wouldn’t go off, summon the fire department, and most of all wouldn’t scream for 3 solid hours.

Guess what? 

You can’t!

Oh, you can tell the alarm people not to call the fire department. But you can’t tell the alarm something simple like 

“I’m the Human, I know whats going on and you don’t so shut the hell up and let me finish what I’ve got to do here.”

I told the alarm people that I considered this a serious design flaw.

“Yeah, I’m really big on the human having control because as the human in the equation I have the ability to reason and evaluate the situation.“

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Until a machine can think, I will aways believe that a human should have the ultimate control. And yes… that includes even the control computers in a nuclear power plant.

I also believe that any human over-rides should require some challenges, The human, no matter how smart or well intentioned should be forced to think through their decision to over-ride automation.

That being said… this human over-rode the automation in a remarkably simple fashion.

It always makes me laugh when Star Treks Mr. Scotts words are true.

“The more they overthink the plumbing, the easier it is to stop up the drain.“

If I can’t take the device off the ceiling… I can at least prevent the smoke from getting to the device.

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Only after I’d taped the bag in place did it occur to me I could have used a CD cover.

I’ll do that next time.

I’d have used one of those spray on foam oven cleaners but the instructions to the oven said not to.

Now the question is will I have to repaint the ceiling where the scotch tape was holding the plastic bag in place?

Well, we shall see in another hour.

I guess the thing that makes me crazy is that you can’t do the simplest of things anymore without it turning into a furball.

I miss the good old days when mom would burn something in the kitchen and we just had to open the windows.

I’m going to put on a heavier jacket. the sun is dropping behind the mountain and with it the temperature.

And by the way… I will be putting the hated fire alarms back up. Yeah, they’re a pain in the ass but one that I’m willing to put up with for the sake of having a little warning (hopefully) in case of a real fire.