Month: February 2024

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Well There’s my problem!

I was reading… Scanning headlines as I often do and a headline caught my attention.

The Headline was something like Russia sanctions nuclear weapons in Belarus. I thought “Great!” A few less nuclear weapons in the world is probably a good thing.

Then I read the article a little further, and found that Russia was allowing weapons to be deployed in Belarus. 

Hmmm. 

But we impose sanctions on Iran to keep them from doing shit that nobody likes.

To the dictionary Boy Blunder!!!

Oh hell no!

This word has no fucking meaning at all does it?

As a Noun it could be a penalty or permission, as a verb it’s the same.

Why does this word even exist?

No wonder there are pallets of cash and uranium being moved around to our enemies. 

They wrote the agreements using a word that is as two faced as Janus. (Look it up…)

I don’t want to hear this word being bandied about by journalist, politicians, or anyone else ever again! I’m putting this word in my official “Weasel Word collection”. This collection is my personal list of words not to use, and words that when others use them are red flags that the person is lying to my face.

I was looking for references to Russia threatening to Nuke Berlin, DC, and a couple of other cities if the west really threw in to ensure Ukraine won the war.

This seemed to me to be something of interest. While I’d caught the headline, I didn’t have time or inclination to read something that would very probably depress me. 

Then happily, I remembered that I am a child of the 1960’s. I grew up living under the imminent threat of nuclear annihilation during the Cold War. 

Nukes! Smooks! Bring it on bitches!!!! I remember how to duck and cover!

Although I must admit I might be inclined to send Putin a box of chocolates if he nuked DC.

That would solve a number of problems at once. Crime… Homelessness… Shitty Government…

Ahh there’s the piece…

Russia Will Drop ‘Entire Arsenal’ on London, Washington if it Doesn’t Win Ukraine War

It’s a Breitbart piece. It looks like Medvedev was saber rattling for the folks at home. I wondered why none of the talking heads were breathlessly telling us this was a result of Tucker Carlson interviewing Putin. 

Apparently they didn’t believe the threat was credible. 

The media and others say Tucker Carlson is now a traitor… Yawn. He’s the puppet of Putin… Sigh. He’s a useful idiot to Putin… Whatever.

There was a time when a real journalist would interview Jesus and then Satan just to present both sides of the story. Carlson in my opinion did what any decent journalist would have done. He seized an opportunity to go directly to the source.

We’ve heard all kinds of stuff from Zelensky, personally I wanted to hear from Putin in his own words.

Putin may possibly be a bit crazy, but he’s not senile and infirm like our president. 

The Russian guards in dress uniforms looked a bit odd. It was like they didn’t want to risk eye contact with Putin but still needed to watch over him. They looked uncomfortable performing their task. I wonder if that’s a traditional holdover from the days of the Tsar. There’s something in my memory about not meeting the eye of the emperor or king because mere commoners weren’t equal to the emperor.

I’ll have to look it up, refresh my memory.

Anyway that’s enough randomness for this morning. Time to get breakfast, then walk the K9. Spring is around the corner and Im planning on talking to the realtor mid March.

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How can people not see the problem here?

Arthur F. Engoron.I’m very, very, confused about this whole Trump affair in New York.

The Judge found Trump Guilty of a crime for which there were no victims, in fact the supposed Victims testified in court they’d be pleased as punch for the Trump organization to victimize them some more.

The “Fraudulent” business dealings in question provided  the City and State of New York substantial tax revenue and Wall Street investors via their proxies (The Banks) profited.

I’m not seeing the criminality here.

Having worked in mortgage banking for a while during my career, I know that no bank takes at face value what the person or company applying for the loan claims the property is worth. Banks always review and independently verify the property value.

I’m not seeing where the fraud is,

If I have a penny that’s got some unique property and you want that penny. If you offer me $100 for that penny, then the penny has a current value of $100. If someone else offers $200 for the penny, The current value of the penny is $200. If you really want the penny and you go to a bank for a loan, The Bank and you may come to an agreement wherein the bank agrees to the value of the Penny and is willing to loan you $200.

Now you can pay me up to  $300 for the penny. I agree to sell you the penny for $300. I pay the income tax on the $300. You pay the Sales Tax on the $300. Nothing has changed about the penny but its value is now $300. You pay the Bank interest on the $200 they loaned you and the bank pays income tax on that interest. 

In addition, the bank pays its employees, You pay a guard to protect your Penny. The bank employees and your guard buy gas, and groceries, and lattes at Starbucks. Through it all the state and city derive tax revenue all from the sale of one unique  Penny.

Leticia James.This in a very simplistic fashion is what Donald Trump is “Guilty” of in New York.

I don’t see the crime Trump committed.

What I do see is an egregious miscarriage of Justice. I see breath taking corruption. I feel Shame, that our vaunted justice system has been degraded and dragged through the mud.

Lady justice lies naked, beaten, and bloodied. She’s been brutally raped by New York Attorney General Letitia James, and New York Judge Arthur Engoron.

(As an aside, I can’t think of too many things more horrible than being raped by Arthur Engoron. Damn! That visual is gonna give me nightmares.)

The miscarriage of justice doesn’t end there. The way Engoron wrote his order forces Trump to post into a New York Court system account 387 million dollars before Trump can appeal to a higher court. Further, Trump cannot leverage or sell  his real estate holdings in New York to obtain the cash bond to file the appeal, and  locks Trump out of using banks in New York to obtain a loan.

Honestly, this looks like the State of New York confiscating property to prevent the defendant from filing an appeal. In other words The City and State of New York is effectively denying a defendant their right to appeal. Leticia James is talking about taking Trumps Buildings. If she were to do this, then the State and City of New York will be committing outright THEFT! Not that the Democrats in New York give a shit. They won’t give a shit until their Condos and apartments are seized.

But it’s worse, it’s more disgusting.  The law requires that interest be charged on the unpaid bond daily until the bond is secured. So Trump must cough up something like 400 million dollars now, and that number keeps going up.

Kathy Hochul.This is an obscenity that is stomach turning. I don’t give a shit about Trump. I give a shit about the justice system being so corrupt that the accused never has a chance.

What is playing out before our eyes is the very Nazi, Communist, system that our grandfathers and fathers fought to stop in World War II, Korea, Vietnam, and the Cold War.

The heart break is that so many people are in a joyful tizzy that Trump is on the hook and completely missing that this shit could happen to them.

It gets even more disgusting when you realize that if Engoron’s ruling stands. Trump and his companies can’t do business in New York for 3 years. Meaning that they can’t liquidate their properties to exit New York and they must remain to be Financially Raped by the State of New York. Liquidation of assets is doing business. So they can’t move, they can’t conduct business, and they still have to pay the tax burden on the properties they can’t get rid of.

This is similar to some of the stuff I believe we fought a revolution against the King of England about.

Governor Kathy Hochul of New York went on television to assure other corporations and businesses that they had nothing to worry about. Trump was a special case.  Every businessman or corporation should be asking the question, “When do I become a special case?”

If any of these businesses have a lick of sense they’d better be looking for the door out of New York. I guarantee there will not be enough “Snake Pliskins” to help them escape from New York later.

The Truckers, while I’m glad to see them refusing to deliver to NYC, are unfortunately missing the point. Many of these Truckers are independent small business owners. They too get loans for trucks, and trailers. They also are likely to “Exaggerate” the worth of their business, property, or vehicles to secure a loan to advance their business. 

What New York has done is a direct threat to them all. Especially any of these truckers operating out of a state that thinks like New York. What happens if one of these guys makes a politician or a judge angry? 

Kathy Hochul’s reassurances notwithstanding to the people of New York… This new legal tool, and that’s exactly what it is, being successfully used on Trump, means it will be used again and again to drive anyone who questions authority into debtor’s prison. (Remember those? England under King George had a lot of them and emptied them onto boats to settle the colonies.)

Do you know anyone who could afford to pay even $500,000 to post a bond without being able to leverage their property or work with a bank in the state in which they reside? You realize that banks have rules imposed by the US Government that make opening an account in another state very difficult, much less depositing cash or getting a loan. 

These independent truckers shouldn’t be carrying water for Donald Trump.

They should be screaming bloody murder about the way the justice system has been perverted in New York and their platform should be to make sure nothing like this happens in any other state.

It’s not too far a step from having to buy an appeal, to just buying an appellate judge to rule in your favor.

I know, there are a lot of you reading this and saying “That Can’t Happen! WWDucat you’re out of your mind!”

Okay, over the past 4 years how much that “Couldn’t Happen” or “Couldn’t be True” has happened or been proven?

I never in my whole life imagined that I’d see a criminal case where the Defendant was found guilty with no Victims. I never believed that the Justice system could be weaponized with legislators of a state reconfiguring the statute of limitations to be able to try one man. I Never thought it was possible for a man to be tried for a sexual assault in a public place that didn’t happen, be found innocent, then be tried again and found guilty because he said he didn’t know the person and he believed she was clearly ill. 

Oh, and just to be clear, the woman in question has a history of false accusations of sexual assault. She couldn’t remember the exact date, she says she didn’t cry out in a public place with people not 20 feet away, she claimed she was too shocked to do anything but take it.

Uh huh, RIGHT! I’ve actually been the guy who opened the door to a female friend 1/2 hour after she’d been raped. I can’t in any way imagine any unimpaired woman just accepting being raped. That’s doubly true if the woman is in a freaking Macy’s. My friend was raped in her own apartment and the place looked like a bomb went off. She apparently fought like a demon and lost only because he beat her unconscious. So based on my knowledge of my friend, nah… Trump probably wasn’t ever in the same building with E Jean Carrol until the first bullshit trial.

Before I leave this particular aspect of Trumps NYC legal issues, I want to point something else out. Every single woman should be pissed as hell at E Jean Carrol and New York City, because now any woman claiming to have been raped by a well to do or wealthy man will be treated with suspicion and derision. “Oh don’t listen to her, she’s just trying to pull an E Jean Carrol on me because she’s mad at me for some reason or another. You know how women are…”

Trump spoke the truth and got fined 87 million dollars because the nut job had her feelings hurt.

So all of these “Can’t Happen” things have happened in the past 2 years who’s to say the “Can’t Happen” stuff won’t keep happening?

Trump might be the lightening rod. 

Trump is not the issue. The issue is the clear, persistent, and unchecked corruption evident in every single branch and level of our government.

If the people and I mean all the people of this country do not unite against this corruption regardless of their political party or personal hatred of Trump, the United States of America is done.

We The People must not be cowed into submission due to fear of our corrupt government.

Update:

Praise Jesus!

Not 10 minutes after I wrote this piece and scheduled it for publication, I flipped on the TV and there was an interview with a truck driver from Louisiana who gets it.

Thank God for us Southern Men!

He said and I’m paraphrasing,  Lets forget Trump, don’t matter if you call him President, Criminal, or what ever. If these people can do it to Trump, they can do it to any one of us.

DAMN! I’m not fucking alone! My People, crazy as some of us may be, aren’t stupid sheep! I’ve always been proud of my Southern Roots, but today my heart is bursting with Southern Pride.

The truckers are apparently going to boycott delivery of goods to NYC. 

That’s likely to be interesting. What happens when the criminals, the illegals, and the dumbass liberals all go hungry in a city where the police force has been decimated?

Good Golly, I’m gonna have to make sure I’ve got Popcorn and Beer. This is likely to be really fucking entertaining!

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You know, I don’t think DirecTV gets it.

I saw an ad for DirecTV today. The ad is selling the ability to stream DirecTV content via the internet.

You can see what I’m talking about at directv.com

Their big selling point is that you don’t have to have a dish on your roof. Uh… big deal! Their little dish is the least of the problems with them.

First and foremost in my mind is that I’d still be locked into one of their bullshit programming packages that forces me to pay for channels that I will never be interested in or watch. BET? Uh Nope! Zero Interest! I think I flipped through once a decade ago and needed subtitles to understand the language being used.

All I could think of, was the scene from Airplane where Barbara Billingsly says, “Excuse me stewardess, I speak Jive.”

I looked at their cheapest package which ends up being around 85.00 a month because you have to rent their box and the channel lineup was for shit! Oh they include SyFy, but SyFy doesn’t show Science Fiction anymore. It’s all reality shows and honestly stupid shit.

I can stream local channels without DirecTV. Heck I can and have been streaming local TV channels from places that I think I’d like to live. It’s great to listen to their news and see what’s happening. The human interest stories tell me about the communities. The crime reporting (or lack thereof) give me information about the safety of the area. There’s also a fair amount of information to be gleaned from the political reporting on their local level and how they report on national news.

So why do I need DirecTV? Oh, right I need to rent their box, plug it into my internet, and then buy a nearly $200 package per month to “Experience” all they have to offer. But wait… I already pay $80 a month for internet… So NOW you’re talking $280. For that, I get all their channels, a fair number of which I am not ever going to tune into.

I don’t speak Spanish, so I’ll never use the Spanish channels. I don’t speak Ebonic, so I’ll never watch the BET offerings. I’m not a Catholic and honestly have never enjoyed televangelists. If I’m gonna go to church, I’m going to get up, get dressed, and actually go to a church. So all the church channels are off the plate.

If you start talking about the “Premium” channels… HBO, Showtime, Max, Disney, and all those channels aren’t gong to do much for me because generally speaking they all play the same thing at different times of the day. I can also order those channels through the internet directly, and once again I don’t have to have DirecTV’s box. I’d have to do the math, but I think I can have them on a subscription basis for less as well.

CNN is included on all the packages and MTV is apparently still around. CNN I will not watch, and MTV? Haven’t even thought about that channel for at least 20 years.

I might be interested if I could pick and choose my channel lineup. Let me construct my own package of channels in blocks of 10. Charge a fair price and have a Premium Block where the HBO, Showtime, etc live.

Make it easy for the consumer to change the selections, make it web based, or better yet ON the DEVICE the user has to rent, so no-one has to listen to crappy English from a call center 1/2 way around the world who will inevitably screw things up worse each time the consumer calls about their service.

10 Channels cost X.
20 Channels cost Y
30 Channels costs Z
Premium block of 5 or 10 costs some higher price 

Make the cost per block predictable and easy to select.

Then DirecTV streaming service might have a chance in hell of surviving.

I could see myself easily with the 4 or 5 local channels, the local PBS stations, WGN, and TCM and that would about fill out my first block of 10. 

The point is, suddenly the viewers via their selection of channels implement a merit based system. Neilson would know which channels and what shows work instantly.  Hollywood could then create entertainment that actually entertained instead of throwing crap against the wall to see what sticks.

It will never happen.

What’s sad is DirecTV just trying to reboot the same tired old paradigm of the cable days and thinking that’s innovation.

I have to ask why they’re doing this now? I can only imagine that their current satellites are running out of fuel and will soon be unable to maintain orbit, or their relative positions in orbit, both critically necessary to maintain coverage.

The cost to launch new satellites is prohibitive and If memory serves, they’ve lost a few on launch recently. Some of the oldest units have probably become non functional or DirecTV has been forced to de-orbit them prior to failure, to burn up in the atmosphere or crash into the ocean so they don’t crash down on populated areas.

Eventually, the constellation of DirecTV satellites will become too thin to provide coverage. I think this is a “Hail Mary” move. DirecTV is trying to do a sort of “Bait & Switch” on consumers. They’ll get everyone who is already using their services to switch to their “Faster more reliable” service.

“New!!! Improved! Now with zero downtime due to weather conditions or blockage of the dish.”

Because so few people understand how so much of our technology actually works they’ll keep writing the check instead of thinking it through and looking for alternatives.

There’s very few channels that can’t be streamed. Most newer smart TV’s have the applications built in. Or An Apple TV, Roku, Xbox, FireStick,  or PlayStation can be loaded with the appropriate applications to access the streams.

Why do I need DirecTV again?

Don’t fall for it, Don’t subsidize shitty programming that you’ll never watch because of a crappy bundling scheme on the part of Cable or Satellite providers.

Show them you’ve got a brain!