Category: BullShit

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Wait! Is this for real?

A young man named Cayler Ellingson was run down by a drunken 41 year old over Politics?

Cayler Ellingson was 18 years old!

Shannon Brandt, the 41 year old driving the vehicle told police that he ran the young man down because Cayler was a supposed to be part of a Republican Extremist Group

There is so damn much wrong with this scenario. This happened in South Dakota. A 41 year old (even drunk) is supposed to have better common sense. Older ‘adults’ are supposed to protect youngsters not kill them over something as stupid as politics. Brandts confession to the police parrots Joe Biden’s recent Der Führer speech. Ellingson’s mother is reported to have known Brandt but the young man didn’t know him. 

This developed over some kind of unspecified political argument. Brandt didn’t use a gun, he used a car so I guess gun control is working, oh wait South Dakota is very light on gun control aren’t they?

The information from the New York Post is thin but the article is linked here. There are some other equally light stories floating around. They’ll be memory holed by the end of the week, I’m convinced of that. I think there is a lot more to this story than has been reported thus far. I sincerely question if we’ll ever have the whole story.

Biden has said nothing about it yet. Maybe he should try to mumble through some kind of comment. I doubt he will.

After all, a good democrat voter simply took out the “trash” Biden identified embodied by an 18 year old. This insanity should be laid squarely at the Biden administration’s feet. Equally culpable is the media who have banged on about this minimal threat of widespread MAGA Fascists lurking in every corner of the United States.

Is this where we’re heading? Silencing or killing one group of people who happen to have a different opinion than another group? If we fear our neighbors and are unable to speak freely to each other about differing opinions then we are not Americans anymore.  I don’t know what we are at that point but it’s not a country I want to live in.

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Hmm, I guess the FBI has gone green.

My pillow 720x405

I was, on one level amused, and another level shocked, to read that Mike Lindell, (The My Pillow Guy) was served a warrant by the FBI for his phone in a Hardees drive through.

On the one hand it’s ludicrous the the FBI is following Mr. Lindell around during a hunting trip waiting for a opportunity to serve a warrant. That they should choose to do so in a Hardees Drive through is laughable.

Mr. Lindell explained to the FBI that his phone runs five businesses and also controls his hearing aids. I know the latter to be a real thing, having known several folks whose hearing aids were controlled through their phones and one of which had the audio picked up and reprocessed through his phone’s microphone prior to the sound being sent to his particular hearing aids.

Mr Lindell notified the FBI that he did not own a computer and that all of his business was conducted through the phone and that effectively they would be stopping him from conducting business. It’s been reported that he was not able to make a backup of the phone prior to its seizure.

This whole thing strikes me as “Odd”.

Why does the FBI want his phone? If they can get a warrant for his phone, they could as easily get a warrant to present to the cellphone provider for his call logs. Why take the phone? If they were after his email or messaging do they honestly think that he’d have messages from 2 years ago when Trump was contesting the election?

I don’t know about Mr. Lindell but I never have messages older than a month or two on my phone. Similarly my call logs are purged regularly. Even my email is never more than a month or two old.  Why have old ephemeral data sitting on my phone forever? It’s pointless and a waste of space. 

This leads me to conclude the FBI did this in the hopes that Mr. Lindell’s phone might have some data that would be of interest to them. This warrant, like others the FBI has recently served seems to target a phone among other things. It seems like this tactic is nothing more than harassment and / or intimidation. 

Gee Sorry FBI… I’m not going to give you my password. I’m going to the first computer terminal I can lay hands on, log in, and command the phone to wipe itself remotely. Then I’ll go buy another phone.

I seriously doubt that you’ll return my phone to me in a reasonable timeframe, even then, it’s likely you’ll have infected it with spyware of various types so that you can effectively illegally wiretap me.

If however you were to specifically ask for a particular set of documents or documents regarding a specific subject, I’d turn them over to you. I see no need to allow you to invade all of my personal matters, photographs, or whatever at your whim during some kind of fishing expedition.

I see no need to make your job easy. I will exercise my 4th amendment right to be secure in my papers and possessions against illegal search & seizure. 

Mr. Lindell apparently spoke with his attorney who advised him to hand the FBI his phone.

Which then left Mr. Lindell in a potential safety hazard depending on how his hearing aids reacted to not having the control software of the phone nearby. The friend I mentioned earlier said his hearing aids shut down completely if he got too far from the phone. 

I’m not even sure what Mr. Lindell is supposed to have done. Other than continuing to believe that the 2020 election was “Stolen”. He’s chosen to bring law suits to prove the point and accused Dominion of contributing to falsifying the election. Hey he can spend his money any way he wants to. He has a First Amendment Right to free speech. 

Since when is it a crime to express your opinion, demand answers, and if it comes to it, prove yourself a fool. In a court of law?

Stacy Abrams has been saying the same exact thing for years about her LOSS in Georgia.

Could it be that Lindell perhaps was in contact with the Nefarious, Satanic, Hitleresq, bane on all human existence, the Pestilence, the Orange Horror, the Anti-Christ, known as Former President Donald Trump?

Duh! We all know there were probably calls. SO FUCKING WHAT? 

We all know this is about the bullshit Jan 6th “Insurrection” 

FYI no insurrection in the last 200 years has been carried out without the insurrectionists having a shit ton of guns, explosives, or weapons of some kind.

Even if the weapons were nothing more than torches and pitchforks the ensuing violence left 100s of people from both sides dead in the streets.

Funny, I didn’t see any pitchforks or torches on January 6th. The only person on record that died that day was Ashli Babbitt and she was shot by a capital police officer that has been reprimanded more than once for carless gun handling. (Really dude… Leaving your gun in the mens room?)

The officer that died the day after, died of a stroke. He didn’t have his head bashed in with a fire extinguisher as had been reported. 

For the last fucking time… January 6th was not an insurrection, it was a rowdy crowd that got out of hand and devolved into a riot. A riot that was mostly peaceful if one applies the standards of the previous “Summer of Love”

I am sick to fucking death hearing the over emotional reporting, and endlessly repetitive questioning by the January 6th committee. Especially since there is nothing remotely like a rebuttal. allowed. I don’t like my tax dollars wasted by a bunch of posturing junior high school theater wannabes.

Untitled design 10I’d give those congressional morons a piece of my mind. I’m absolutely certain that their contempt of Congress couldn’t hold a candle to the white hot rage and utter contempt I feel toward them…

ALL of Congress! That little (R) next to your name, Senator or House member, whatever your name is, ain’t gonna protect you. You’re all corrupt as hell. None of you speak for the people you’re supposed to represent.

In my view you’re all liars, grifters, thieves, and scum. The only one of you that has the slightest modicum of my respect is Rand Paul. At least he’s calling out that liar Fauci and trying to hold the little Troll’s feet to the fire. Where are the rest of you? Why aren’t you standing up and screaming “ENOUGH”? 

Bought and paid for, every stinking one of you!

All of this has lead me to think that perhaps the FBI really wants phones. Perhaps their budget has been cut and they can’t afford to supply their agents with these devices?

I have 3 or 4 old cellphones lying around here, I’m sure that most people have at least one or two lying around their homes. The American people would be more than willing to drop off their old cellphones at local FBI offices.

That way the FBI would have plenty of phones to use and we’d all be going “Green” allowing the FBI to recycle those old phones for us.

This also makes me think that everybody should have two phones. One that can be handed to the FBI, and the other to actually use. Think of it like a bribe.

I sincerely hope that since the FBI has been turned into a weapon, when the other party gets control… and they will at some point, I hope they turn the full force of the FBI loose on the Democrat party. The wailing and gnashing of teeth would be epic. Hell, I might get cable just to watch the raids on Democrats. I’d make popcorn, pour myself a drink and laugh my ass off.

The FBI is a scary joke. They have power, they’re drunk with it and have become dangerous. 

They were supposed to be about justice and now they’re about political gain. 

Sadly, I don’t think we can trust our government and certainly not the Department of Justice anymore.

My Dad was right. Every 50 or 100 years, we should turn off the Government, fire everyone, dump all the laws, and reboot the system starting with founding principles.

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I’m over it! 3 months and not 1 usable watt generated.

The other half decided to have solar panels installed on the roof.

Panels

Their reasoning was that Edison and PGE were trying to work out some B.S. where they would no longer have to buy any excess Kilowatts from homeowners whose solar panels generated power in excess of their usage during the day.

To my way of thinking this is blatant theft. Even if Edison or PG&E wanted to put free panels on my roof, I’d still charge them space rental based on SqFt. I’m sure we could work out some arrangement where they paid for the usage of my roof space in electricity. That being said I’m equally sure they’d find a way to make the power so expensive that the space rental would be negligible.

Simultaneously, Edison has been raising rates and re jiggering their Tier rates such that the only time you’re not paying the most expensive Tier is early in the morning and very late at night. Basically it’s like they’re doing everything in their power to screw their customers.

This is happening throughout the year but it’s especially annoying because the only high usage appliances we have are the refrigerator, the A/C unit, dishwasher, and the washer. The Fridge we can’t do too much about. The A/C is rarely on, the washer and dishwasher are only used with full loads.

More often than not we hand wash the dishes.

Every single light in this house is LED, or fluorescent. The lights are only on in the room we occupy. Even our ceiling fans are EneryStar Compliant at the highest level we could purchase. We’ve dialed our power consumption down to bare minimum and yet the Electric bill kept going up. I was all set to put padlocks on all the external wall sockets because we were wondering if someone was stealing power from the house. It wasn’t until I started running comparisons between bills that I realized that wasn’t happening. Our power consumption is very constant and predictable.

Our path lights and even the exterior Christmas lights, (In season) are solar powered.

I’d sort of given up on Solar panels on the house because snow on those panels in the wintertime coupled with the general overcast would make the panels useless for 3 to 4 months a year. The other half pointed out that much of the rest of the year, if we could put enough panels on the roof we’d bank the excess power during the Summer and possibly not have to pay much of an electric bill during the Winter.

I saw the merit of this logic and agreed that panels could potentially do us some good. Because the panels were installed prior to the date Edison and PG&E were going to implement their nefarious plan, we got in under the wire and will be banking our excess and Edison will have to pay us prevailing rates according to their own Tier schedule.

So we went ahead with the installation. The panels were installed in June.  Edison will have to pay us prevailing rates according to their own Tier schedule. You can bet your ass, we’ll be calling them out on any discrepancies or delinquent credits or payments. After all essentially, we’re an independent power company now…

You’d think all of this would be great. It would if everything was actually connected. Here we are in September and the panels are still not producing power for household use. The panels have the potential and god knows they’re getting tons of light during the day but this installation and interconnect to our house circuits is still not complete.

Some electricians were out today to install a subpanel.

Now we find that we’re going to have to wait 3 to 4 weeks for Edison to get off their asses and inspect / approve the actual connection. Before we can turn the damn things on.

That’s annoying, so is the hole in the exterior wall where these connections were added.

Apparently, the installation company is going to send out carpenters to patch the hole and pretty things up. Great! More waiting!

By the time these panels are online, it’s going to be Winter. So they’ll do very little good. Perhaps we’ll start to see a return on the investment by Spring of 2023, if we’re lucky. At this rate, I’m beginning to think we’re not going to have these things online until next Summer.

I don’t want to install backup batteries until we know the panels are working as expected and that the power distribution is so automatic that we don’t notice the changeover from Solar to Edison at night. Only then will I consider backup batteries, so that when the inevitable rolling blackouts hit California, we’ll be able to keep running. I’m looking at UPS (Uninterruptible Power System) systems now for the more delicate electronics.

I just saw the guy up the street Tesla on the back of a tow truck again. That has become at least a monthly event. I think it’s being towed to a charging station.  If he follows the normal routine, the car will be driving back up to the guy’s house in a couple of hours.

I don’t know why the car doesn’t charge at his house, but obviously something isn’t working right. Perhaps he should consider buying a new house in a new neighborhood where the power infrastructure can handle his car? His house was built in the 1950s it may be that the place just can’t handle to power requirements. Alternatively, he could just go buy a gas powered vehicle.

Perhaps I could point out that I’ve got some solar panels on the roof that aren’t doing anybody any good? Nah, I’d probably have to have the electricians back out to install another panel specifically for his car. God knows what kind of inspection process that would entail.

Then there’s the risk of his Tesla deciding to ignite some of its batteries in my driveway. Yeah, not interested.

The really weird thing about having solar panels up here is that people are always asking if our house is off the grid. When I say “no, we don’t have the battery backup option and are still reliant on Edison when the sun goes down,” I get this blank look.

Then I have to explain that the panels only generate power they don’t store it. This is usually followed by a blank look and them repeating the question. I’m constantly astounded at how little people understand about simple science.

The next person who puts me through this I’m going to clamp jumper cables to their nipples and connect ‘em to the solar panels. At least that would be a test proving that the panels are actually working. Yeah, I still don’t know if they’re working.

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Funny, I don’t feel any better!

President Joe Biden gave a speech last night.

Normally, I dutifully ignore his speeches because they are often full of inaccuracies and hyperbole. This is true of most speeches any President, Premier, Prime Minister, Potentate, Dictator, or whatever may make.

I would have ignored the Biden Speech as well. Except that all the sudden my phone started buzzing with News Alerts. Those too I would have ignored, except for this image.

GettyImages 1242872745

Upon seeing this image, I pulled up the entire speech and sat through all 29 grueling minutes.

I was very annoyed at the fact that I had to keep adjusting the volume on the TV to hear him. One second, he’s whispering and the next he’s bellowing. (I feel really sorry for the sound crew. They must have been losing their minds too.)

On the one hand The President was saying some things I actually agree with. We should all be working together, political violence is wrong.

Okay, I thought, “I agree with you.”

Then The President veered into his MAGA, Semi-Fascist, rhetoric and he totally lost me.

The President wanted us to know that he doesn’t hate all Republicans. He came close to sounding like the racist who proudly tells someone he has Black Friends. The President wanted us to know he knows America’s heart. That didn’t quite ring true because he is clearly not listening to an increasing number of Americans of all stripes who say they think the country is heading in the wrong direction, (If polls are to be believed.)

I’m a visual kind of guy.

As The President and The First Lady walked out to the podium the lighting was a basic white reflecting off Independence Hall. Then as The President started talking the lighting changes to a somber angry red. This isn’t a color scheme that’s uplifting, it’s dark, brooding, and forbidding.

I found the whole image profoundly disturbing. Perhaps this is because in my visual memory are images of Adolf Hitler giving fiery speeches decrying the evil of the Juden against a background of Nazi flags.

Adolf Hitler speaking at the Lustgarten Berlin 1938

There was something really off about The President’s speech painting Independence Hall in that somber red flanked by Marines.

Perhaps it’s just that I’m old enough that we studied Hitler and Nazism in depth, in Social Studies. Let me say, Hitler was a fantastic orator. The cadence of the words in his speeches was mesmerizing even if you didn’t understand German.

Apologies for this image of Hitler’s back, there are very few surviving color images from that time. This one came to mind but the first one I thought of was him at a podium with the Nazi flag behind him. I can’t locate that image online right now.

The more The President spoke about the threats to Democracy and the danger of MAGA Republicans. The more I felt like I’d heard speeches like this before. Thankfully President Biden isn’t the orator that Hitler or other despots were.

But by the end of his speech I was profoundly uncomfortable. I didn’t sleep well last night at all.

I’m not a MAGA Republican. That being said, Hillary versus Trump was the first time I’d never cast a vote for President.

Two questionable choices isn’t a choice. Voting for bad or worse isn’t a viable option for the future of our nation.

In 2020, presented with Trump versus Biden. I voted for Trump. It was a simple choice because Biden was such a poor candidate, and Trump was the “Devil” we knew.

By that time, Trump had survived an impeachment, the Steele Dossier had been disproven, and claims of Russian Collusion were falling apart too. Trump is definitely not a saint, but by 2020 it had become fairly obvious that something more was afoot. The man called it as he saw it, sometimes he called it wrong but at least he spoke plainly. He didn’t take any bullshit.

By 2020 we’d seen the hypocrisy of many in Congress and the double standards were being exposed. The economy was running well, at least until COVID, yet even in the face of COVID, I think people were still pretty positive given the circumstances.

Does that make me a MAGA?

I don’t think so.

I am in favor of an America first agenda. I don’t think rabid nationalism is the solution, but I have no problem thinking of my nation first. I don’t see that as a crime, or particularly selfish. We shouldn’t be feeding our enemies when people in our own country are homeless and hungry.

I’ve always appreciated the wisdom of the airline flight safety briefing.

“In the event of cabin depressurization, secure your oxygen mask before helping others.”

That concept of securing my own well being so that I have the strength and capacity to help others is just plain common sense.

The more President Biden spoke, the more my mind played tricks on me. In my mind’s eye I saw the background of speech altering. By the time The President finished speaking…

Biden Speech Altered 1

This is what was in my mind’s eye. Perhaps that’s why I didn’t sleep well. I couldn’t shake the image.

The Marines standing in the background was completely un-necessary and I took it as an implied threat. Recently President Biden has said essentially, if you’re worried about giving up your AR-15s or other guns you shouldn’t because we have F-15s and your guns aren’t going to be much use against them.

He couched that in more florid terms but that’s what his statements have boiled down to in my head.

Marines standing behind The President comes across as a threat. Those Marines didn’t appear to be armed, they were too far from The President to afford much in the way of protection. The construction of the stage, walkway, and position of the podium itself precluded either of those Marines from taking action if The President was threatened.

They were Window Dressing.

The choice of location for this speech was also disturbing. Independence Hall, the place where our Founding Fathers debated and approved both, The Declaration of Independence and The Constitution is a place that has very special meaning.

President Biden has said publicly that The Constitution is not absolute. During his speech, he singled out a group of Americans that simply disagree with he and his party. Mind you this is a group of people exercising their First Amendment right to free speech and that includes their right to disagree.

Somehow, The President’s speech and his earlier comments about The Constitution made it seem like he was intentionally defiling Independence Hall.

I want to believe that wasn’t his intention. I want to believe that his handlers and “Show Runners” just didn’t think about it in that light.

Nonetheless, it still feels like somehow The President diminished the revered status of the site last night.

As a conservative leaning Libertarian this President concerns me greatly.

This speech left a very bad taste in my mouth and I suspect that it had the same effect on millions of other people who generally speaking, are middle of the road politically.

The President may have created more MAGA Semi-Fascists last night than he intimidated.

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The so called Student Debt Forgiveness isn’t forgiveness.

On the one hand I have to say that some of the lending practices are predatory.

How can they not have been? You’ve got kids graduating from High School, without much in the way of financial knowledge. I’ve known kids who couldn’t balance their checkbook. In some cases they don’t understand how credit cards can suck you down the tube if you’re not paying attentions to interest rates.

For a High School graduate to show up on a college campus, someplace they’ve been told all their lives they have to attend, and seeing how much it’s going to cost, then being offered a loan that pays for it all. This is perhaps predatory by its nature.

Maybe the 101 classes for a new college student should be basic money management and understanding how compound interest works. Those classes should be attended before they’ve committed to anything.

Then with the student armed with real world useful information they can make an informed decision about taking out the loan and perhaps this would inform the student’s choice of major.

All that being said, this Federal Loan Forgiveness isn’t forgiveness.

Loan forgiveness would be the lender says “We’re reducing your existing loan by 10,000” and the lender would take the loss.

This situation our Government is going to pay 10,000 to the lenders. Where does that money come from, from the American Taxpayers.

What this means is that folks who’ve paid their loans off, and folks that went to trade schools, and folks who just went to work out of High School will in fact, be paying for college. Not for themselves, but for other people that made poor or uninformed decisions.

At its core, this is indentured servitude.

Taxpayers are being forced to work for someone else.

I was reminded of the quote from Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged.

“I swear by my life and my love of it that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.”

– Ayn Rand

This one also sprung to mind;

“The moral justification of capitalism is man’s right to exist for his own sake, neither sacrificing himself to others nor sacrificing others to himself.”

– Ayn Rand

This is not to imply that I’m heartless. Although, I can be.

The question that springs to my mind is; “Would people respond well to a stranger walking into their home and simply taking one of their possessions?”

I’d suggest that most people would react poorly. I believe that most people would get angry even if the person “Needed” the item.

Yet we’re expected to accept precisely this proposition via our taxation process. As if the taxation process somehow changes the basic wrongness of theft. Taxation like this is just theft with extra steps.

I’ve always been skeptical of those who’ve expressed the concept that Taxation is theft. But in light of this loan forgiveness plan coming out of the Biden Administration, I’m rethinking my former skepticism.