Category: BullShit

Posted on

The Storm

So the storm was everything the National Weather Service claimed it would be.

Wind, rain/sleet, and snow. Lots of snow. About 16 inches at my elevation.

The front deck 1/29/2021

It’s not all that unusual to get snows like this here. What is unusual is that we’ve had essentially 3 back to back over the course of a few days.

The street. which was clear down to the pavement on 1/28/2021 and is buried again on 1/29/2021

The problem with our street is that it’s not county maintained. Meaning the residents have to clear it ourselves.

So we all pull out shovels, snow blowers, and one of the neighbors has an ATV with a snow blade on the front. Unfortunately, in the last snow he broke a shear pin and is waiting for the replacement which is on it’s way from MN via the USPS. He’s thinking that he won’t get it until spring.

The snow mound that is my front yard.

So after a full day of working, resting, & working again I can see most of the driveway again. One of the neighbors is at the far end of the street running his snow blower. What usually happens is all the neighbors fire up their snow blowers at the same time and the begin a carefully choreographed series of passes on the street.

That doesn’t begin until driveways are cleared otherwise we end up losing track of the driveways and have to do more work to find ’em and clear ’em. Something you don’t find out until you’ve regularly used a snow blower is, after you’ve blown the snow with a snow blower, it tends to compress into ice. So if you bury someones driveway sometimes the only solution is a pick and standard shovel instead of the traditional snow shovel.

One other really nice thing is that if one of the neighbors is away, and there’s a snow storm those of us who are home clear their driveway so they have a place to park when they get back. It’s not something any of us have talked about or agreed upon. It’s just a nice unwritten rule of kindness.

The other rule is that if the storm was really bad and your driveway isn’t cleared yet, you park in one of the neighbors drives until we get to yours. That rule is also unwritten and one of the nice things about our street.

We also have a common bag of various sized snowblower shear pins, unfortunately, none of us had anything big enough for the neighbors ATV snow blade. Dang IT!!!!

A shot of the house after clearing the road

In the picture above, the dark streaks are where the new guy on the block ingested some of the dirt from my yard. Ooops! No matter, the yard will be fine, but his snow blower was very unhappy for a couple of minutes. This picture isn’t super pretty but it gives a good reference of ground level and the relative depth of the snow.

Fortunately, we haven’t had to contend with snowplayers today. They have a bad habit of turning onto our road then freaking out when the realize 2 important things. 1) It’s a dead end. 2) It’s very narrow and there isn’t anyplace to turn around unless there happens to be an open driveway.

Usually they end up having to back down out onto the wider county maintained road. Which is also full of snowplayers trying to get up that road to its dead end, or it’s full of those who have found out that there is no way through and turned around.

This is why we don’t like snowplayers up in the neighborhoods. There are lots of little roads that dead end. Lots of these people come up here thinking the whole town is a snow/ski area, and they refuse to read signs that are clearly posted saying that a road is a dead end, or following the larger and equally clear signs that point to the designated play areas, and ski resorts.

They get tired of crawling along on the main, and well maintained road and tend to turn onto the first side road they see. Then the police get involved and start running them out of the neighborhoods, writing tickets, and towing vehicles.

Us locals, stop with a smile and present our drivers licenses (to prove our address and get waved on through police checkpoints). Sometimes we’ll provide thermos refills for the officer on duty. Especially if we notice an officer who hasn’t had a break in many hours working in the cold.

I’m afraid that tomorrow (Saturday) will bring a ton of rude, giddy, idiots, which will make all of the neighbors weekends a pain in the ass. We tend to take turns shooing the idiots off our lawns, out of the streets, and out of the reforestation project(s).

Then we spend Monday and Tuesday picking up all the trash. Broken plastic sleds, paper, dirty diapers, gloves, shoes, face masks, and the amazing detritus of human beings.

I am amused by the irony as well. These are the same people who would scream at the top of their lungs against pulling out of the Paris climate accords, but think nothing of trashing a pristine mountain town.

After all, they don’t have to actually clean up the mess. They don’t have to call the forestry service to help sick wildlife. They don’t have to worry about anything do they? It’s someone else’s problem when they drive back down the mountain.

Following are some pictures that illustrate the point really well.

A local creek about 10 miles from home. This picture was taken 15 year ago before the road to the creek was paved.
The same area about 4 years ago.
There is a creek under these uprooted trees. People were climbing the trees and then using their weight to pull them over. Seems the people wanted a bridge so they could cross a creek that has at best 10 inches of water in it during the Summer.
Filthy Humans!

If I sound harsh about people. It’s because I see the kind of wanton destruction and disregard all too many people have for the “Natural” surroundings that I live in and appreciate.

Ironically, lots of these people come to these wilder places to, “Get away from the city,” Unfortunately, they bring all their bad habits with them and just expect it to be magically cleaned up every night.

Before anyone talks to me about Climate change, the Green New Deal, Carbon taxes, or my gas powered car. They better have a simple appreciation of what’s happening every day in their local wilderness.

Cause if they don’t… I’m going to eat them for lunch!

Sorry, I digressed…

I’m not a traditional tree hugging Eco-Warrior. I’m just a guy who likes nature and gets really mad about the hypocrisy of people who are willing to pay stupid taxes and force everyone else to do the same, terrorizing us with dire warnings about Climate Change.

Too many of these people have never in their lives spent a day carrying a big trash bag through a forest picking up other people’s trash. Or tending a trampled sapling, or scrubbing graffiti off of rocks, or looking after an animal that ingested something left behind by a thoughtless person.

I do all of these things, and for the record, I’m not part of any organization. There’s no-one taking pictures. The big garbage bag ends up in my trash or recycling bin which ever is appropriate. I do this because I believe it’s the right thing to do, and should be done for no other reason. I’m the human walking in the forest seeing all the mess. Rather than tut-tut about it, I’ve got two hands, and a backpack with at least one trash bag inside.

Leave no trace. Leave a place better than you found it. That way the next person on the trail can appreciate the beauty and hopefully they’re operating on the same philosophy.

I’m a big believer that until you tend to the local issues you can’t really address the global ones. I also believe that if everyone simply tended to their own local issues, the world would be a lot prettier and healthier.

After all anyone can write a check, or click “Like” and feel smug about it. Put some skin in the game if you’re really serious.

Just my two cents. What I’ve said may not be right. It may not be right for you in particular. But It’s right for me and given that I do have skin in the game I’m not going to apologize if what I’ve said offends anyone.

Posted on

Conspiracy Theorists Huh?

I saw this little gem in a Breitbart post located here. I don’t always agree with Breitbart but I applaud them sticking to their guns and calling ’em like they see ’em.

For the better part of a year, We’ve been told that the COVID-19 rates were increasing at alarming rates. Indeed in some places there have been hospitals that were overwhelmed but this hasn’t necessarily been a nationwide phenomena.

When emergency hospital ships sit idle in harbors waiting for patients that never come, and tent wards costing millions are set up in parks and hospital parking lots then dismantled without ever being used, that suggests that something isn’t as the powers that be, would have us believe.

When I personally know of two emergency room nurses who applied / volunteered to help at the height of the New York hospital overflow and they were turned away with no explanation, I start thinking something smells funny.

When Doctors questioning the efficacy of tests, are silenced, when acclaimed researchers have their papers on the utilization of the PCR test as a diagnostic tool are censored, when nurses send unused tests to labs and have them come back as positive, and citizens who were scheduled to take the test for COVID-19 but missed the appointment were subsequently notified that they’d tested positive…

Well then SOMETHING DOWNRIGHT STINKS!

When everyone who asked questions or disputed the accepted narrative, from medical professionals, to the creator of the PCR test itself, to politicians, or anyone else, is labeled a conspiracy nut, then I suddenly find myself standing at the beach after a red tide. (Picture a beach covered in dead fish rotting in the sun on a still July day!)

Now, it looks like perhaps all those people questioning the PCR testing who have been labeled conspiracy nuts may have been correct.

The WHO (World Health Organization) issued an information notice specifically about the utilization of the PCR test to determine if someone does in fact have COVID-19.

Here is the link to the WHO notice .

The notice basically states that if someone shows a positive result in one test, a second test should be administered. Ideally with a test from a different manufacturer and that observation of the patient’s symptoms, if any should be used as well for a final diagnosis.

Generally speaking, if a person shows positive on one test but has no symptoms then do another test to see if the first test is in error.

Most PCR assays are indicated as an aid for diagnosis, therefore, health care providers must consider any result in combination with timing of sampling, specimen type, assay specifics, clinical observations, patient history, confirmed status of any contacts, and epidemiological information.

WHO Information Notice for IVD Users 2020/05

So from the comment above, they are suggesting a return to good medicine where the Doctor makes the diagnosis, not the lab and not a single hastily administered test.

The WHO also makes reference in the article to the number of iterations the PCR test is allowed to run, when they talk about manually applying the positive threshold. There are a number of reports that speak to iterations in PCR testing. It seems that if you allow PCR to run long enough you’ll always come up with a positive result. In a way that makes sense based on my limited understanding of how this test works.

So what does this mean to the average person on the street?

Well you may have been tested and you may have been exposed to COVID-19 but you may not actually know your status because the testing methodology was flawed.

In fact in the SARs epidemic they also used PCR testing but they used it then, the way they’re saying to use it now.

Funny how the WHO suddenly “remembered” how the testing should be done isn’t it?

Funny how medical professionals were censored for questioning the way testing was being done, isn’t it?

What this is likely to do is reduce substantially the daily number of cases. COVID-19 will fade into the woodwork just like SARs did. It will become a non-issue. If the testing, done appropriately starts coming back with fewer and fewer positives, all this insanity may have been a tempest in a teacup.

Normality will return, and 8 months from now people will be going on about their business with or without having been vaccinated.

But the politicians have learned just how compliant people will be in a “Medical Emergency”.

This is not to say that some people didn’t die from COVID-19 or related issues, they did. But for me it brings into sharp focus that all may not have been as it seems.

Every year thousands of people die from complications related to the Flu. We never paid it much mind, it happened and it was tragic, but generally we accepted Flu as a average thing.

This year, the Flu has been a non-issue and you’d be hard pressed to find any statistics on flu deaths this flu season.

It’s just one of those things that makes me say Hmmm.

Posted on

So Sirius & I are done.

I’ve had  Sirius for more than a decade.

Originally, they were pretty cool and the variety of programming was a delight to listen to.

Then slowly things changed. The “News” Stations got more and more left and I just stopped enjoying the spin that was on everything.

I tried the conservative stations, and they were mostly people screaming all the time.

I settled on the Spa Channel and enjoyed it. It was pretty much the only channel I listened to. LA Freeway traffic is stressful and that channel seemed to be mellow all the time.  Except when Sirius decided to stop playing Spa and play something they thought was important. A George Michael week? Ugh!

As to many of their other stations, I simply wasn’t interested. I don’t like RAP. I couldn’t stand their ideas of a nice Rock & Roll set. Talk radio was like listening to fingernails on a chalkboard, and many of their other “Themed” stations were either annoying or completely mis-named.  No matter what, I always ended up on the Spa channel, and after a while, I stopped even checking out the other stations.

I’d purchased a lifetime subscription for my 1 Series and enjoyed never having to think about the Spa channel being on if I wanted it.

When the car was totaled in 2017 Sirius told me that I couldn’t have the subscription transferred to another car. (More on that later.) 

I went ahead and activated Sirius in the new car, and when I changed to the 440 I transferred that subscription. 

That transfer process was a nightmare and I really thought about pulling the plug more than once during that call.

Late in December 2020, I got an email saying that there was a class action lawsuit regarding Sirius and their lifetime subscriptions. With all the chaos around the election, my life, being unemployed, and oh yeah, my health insurance being cancelled. I never got back to the Sirius email. There is, after all only so much time you can spend on the damn phone before you’re over it!

What I didn’t notice was that the deadline to respond was Jan 12th 2021. Somehow I thought it as the end of January… I missed the deadline of Jan 12th. DAMNIT!

But I got to thinking about the Sirius subscription. 

With fingers crossed, I went to their site and OMG! My id and password actually worked. 

(This was surprising since the last few times I’d tried to log on, I was met with password and user ID issues.  These issues persisted even after multiple password resets. This is part of what made my last phone call to Sirius such a pain in the butt. Well, that and the fact that like so many companies they’ve put their call center in the Philippines so with a static filled connection and sing song English. Having a conversation is a challenge.)

Once I was logged into the page I saw the last bill which looked normal. Then I happened to notice that Sirius had changed the billing cycle from 1 year to quarterly. 

They were clever… They kept the amount the same but increased their profit X 3 with the quarterly billing. Great way to rip off your customers Sirius! 

Obviously, they were counting on the amount being familiar, and people’s short term memory being completely overloaded to hide what they’d done.

Now I’m very interested!

I call their customer service number, (conveniently hidden 3 menu items deep, with a warning popup that said, “Beware of Tiger!”) 

I waited on hold after dealing with the genuine people emulator call routing AI.  After a time, I was connected to a cheerful lady in the Philippines and asked her what gives?

I’m told that I was on some kind of promotion and that this reflected the end of the promotion. Uh Huh… When did the billing cycle change?  No answer. Uh Huh. 

Then I asked about putting my lifetime membership back in place which is what the lawsuit provides for. 

I get a bullshit line about that. In 2017 they claim they weren’t allowing lifetime subscriptions to be moved. I told the little lady I knew that, but that the lawsuit says they will now.  She doesn’t know about that.

She offered to give me a promotional special for a year on the two radios (Portable & Car) of $200. I tell her that since I only listen to one channel it’s still not worth it. And that Apple CarPlay works just fine in my car meaning I don’t have to have Sirius and that I have greater control over the music I want to hear.

She asked if I’d let her check another promotion.  I say sure why not?  She comes back and tells me that I have have both radios for $120 a year.

I think about it, and decide that I just want to not have a subscription at all. I tell her that and that I want the subscription to terminate as of the March 1st billing cycle. She fiddles around a bit more and tells me that she’s sorry she couldn’t keep a valued customer like me. I’m Like Whatever… I obviously wasn’t all that valued a customer.

So come March 1 2021 for the first time in many many years I won’t have Sirius.  Unless of course the court decides I can have my lifetime membership transferred. In that case, I’m calling them back with the case docket number in hand and demanding they re-instate the account.

In reality, I’d pay $60 a year for Sirius in the car. But now it’s a matter of principal.

I’ve said it before, If companies would just provide the service they’ve contracted to provide at a fair price, and not screw around with the billing because they think they can get away with it, they’d have a lot more customers and those customers would be a lot more loyal and happy.

On the plus side, It’s one less online account for me to fart around with.

Update 1/22/2020

I got one of those little “How did we do” surveys fromSiriusXM

When I answered that I was not satisfied, the survey opened a tex block where I could freely type. I do hope that someone who reads this is able to understand the words written on the page. I’m not hopeful. There’s that old adage, if you don’t want to know the truth… Don’t ask the question.

I never got an answer as to who authorized or when they authorized a change to quarterly billing. 

I was told that I couldn’t reactivate that lifetime subscription on my new vehicle because the transfer wasn’t available in 2017,  regardless of the fact that I had a lifetime subscription, and there is currently a class action lawsuit pending about not allowing people transfer those subscriptions to new vehicles. 

Then when I said that for the 2 stations that I listen to (1 in my car and the other on a portable radio in the house) wasn’t worth $423 a year and that I wanted to cancel the account, I’m told that suddenly there’s a discount of 50% and when that wasn’t good enough the yearly cost was reduced again. 

Frankly, if you’d offered your service for a fair price in the first place and been upfront about your billing practices I’d still be a customer. 

However, given that you won’t let me transfer my former lifetime subscription and apparently have no trouble charging outrageous fees for your service it makes me question your business model.

I have Apple CarPlay in my vehicle which works just fine. I have Apple music and can use it throughout my home on all my devices. This ability makes your service redundant and excessively expensive.

For many years now, the few times I’ve called your customer service department it is difficult to understand the representative. In part due to the accent but the greatest part of the problem is static on the line or background noise in the call center’s environment.

The young lady I spoke with, to her credit tried to do the best she could and aside from the noise she was well spoken. My dissatisfaction is in NO WAY with her. 

My dissatisfaction is with SiriusXM’s corporate policies and practices. 

My feeling now is that I will not be purchasing a vehicle where I pay for the SiriusXM option installed. I will also not be turning on the SiriusXM option if it is supplied with a vehicle.

I will continue to seek out Apple CarPlay or some similar option.

I can only imagine that as your satellites age, and you continue to alienate customers that you will find it harder and harder to maintain service. Perhaps that is a good thing and your company will go the way of the dodo.

Posted on

Enough Already!

That’s it! Let’s take all social media platforms down! Yeah I said it!

All podcasts, Twitter, FaceBook, Gab, and all the rest!

I’m sick of seeing yet another self righteous pundit, news organization, or whoever the hell else, BITCHING about people espousing views that they don’t agree with. We’re supposed to be a free country, we’re supposed to have freedom of speech, we’re supposed to respect people whose views are different from our own. RIGHT?

Apparently NOT!

The latest two examples of violation of free speech is this article in Breitbart. Followed by this little gem from The Washington Post.

The Breitbart piece talks about the AP, yeah, you read that right… The Associated Press making the case that Podcasts should be de-platformed due to “incitement” on these podcasts.

The Washington Post article describes Apple being sued in federal court to force Apple to de-platform Telegram. Telegram, don’t ya know is where all the Parler users went after finding out that Parler was going to be screwed over by Amazon Web Services.

Here’s a idea. Shut it all down. Our phone batteries would last longer.

That would have the benefit of keeping all the village idiots in their own villages. If you stop them from talking to each other, you’ll prevent them from gathering steam. You might also have a side benefit that if they never meet, we don’t have to worry about an every increasing number of idiots that we’ll have to put up with and take care of.

Then we have this brilliant Senior News analyst from CNN (Communist News Network) who’s trying to float a balloon about censoring OAN & Newsmax.

Both of which appear to be conservative oriented news broadcasters. I’ve not watched either of them, because by the time I learned about them, I was too disgusted by the way the country was heading after the 2020 election to give a rancid fuck.

This is so similar to the way that the NAZI party came to power I can’t stand it. If they actually taught history in schools today and didn’t sanitize the brutality of various regimes people would know this.

First control the narrative, then control the media, then censor anyone with differing beliefs, cast everyone who doesn’t agree with you as anti-(insert the noun de jour) BLM, ANTIFA, Left, Progressive, Equality, Woman, blah, blah, blah. Then take over the country. Next build the camps, then try the re-education, and finally kill EVERYONE!

But… humanity appears doomed to repeat the horrors of the past.

A couple thousand years from now, in a barren wasteland some guy will find a TESLA buried in the sand. People will oooh and ahhh and decide it’s from Aliens. One curious person in the group will recognize that it was made by humans, be curious about how we fell so far, and the whole process of a civilization crawling out of the muck will start over.

Maybe they’ll get it right the next time.

The fall of America to communism or socialism won’t destroy all civilization. But the pervasive backwards thinking cult of leftism in the world just might.

Posted on

And the hits just keep on coming.

There was this lovely article yesterday on Breitbart. The original article is linked here. I’ve copied the article below.

I submit that this data breach is a direct result of Amazon Web Services negligence. This data wouldn’t have been exposed if they 1) Hadn’t de-platformed Parler. 2) Had provided reasonable notification and time to Parler to remove their data from AWS servers.

I won’t be surprised if the leaked user data ended up on one of The Lincoln Projects communistic hit lists.

Now, I as one of the class of individuals potentially affected by AWS and Twilio’s negligence DEMAND restitution.

I’d like to see a class action lawsuit against AWS and Twilio on the part of the verified members of Parler.

Parler said they verified members for security. Part of the Terms of Service, If I recall correctly, was that if you engaged in unlawful behavior as a verified user, that Parler could and would provide your information to appropriate law enforcement. I personally had no problem with that. It seemed reasonable and correct.

I do have a major problem with my data being scraped and distributed across the internet. It’s one thing to provide information as a law abiding citizen in exchange for access and posting privileges on a site. It’s quite another thing to have my data made public in an age of cancel culture and rabidly communistic behavior on the part of a specific party within our own government.

Parler Suffers Massive Data leak

Recent reports claim that 70 terabytes of user data from social media network Parler have been leaked online.

CyberNews reports that self-drscribed security researchers performed a massive data scrape of the social media network Parler before it was taken offline by Amazon Web Services. The data scrape captured user profile data, user information, and other private and administrative information.

A Twitter user going by @donk_enby announced the scrape, claiming that over a million video URLs had been collected. Twitter itself suffered a massive hack of prominent accounts in 2020.

I am now crawling URLs of all videos uploaded to Parler. Sequentially from latest to oldest. VIDXXX.txt files coming up, 50k chunks, there will be 1.1M URLs total: https://t.co/YUl8CtoeEA

This may include things from deleted/private posts.

— crash override (@donk_enby) January 10, 2021

The Twitter account claims that the posts are linked to accounts that posted them and some of the video and images contain location information. It’s also said to include data from Parler’s “Verified Citizens,” which are users of the network who have verified their identity by uploading photographs of government-issued IDs such as a driver’s license or passport.

The data scrape also appeared to include deleted posts which would mean that Parler kept user data after users attempted to delete it.

a sample of what’s in there pic.twitter.com/5o8CBRrmgc

— crash override (@donk_enby) January 9, 2021

Parler has previously claimed to have over 10 million users but was shut down after google and Apple removed the website’s smartphone apps from their app stores. A short time later, Amazon Web Services announced they would be removing the site’s hosting services, alleging that Parler failed to properly moderate its platform.

Some Reddit users allege that the user data scrape was made possible due to Twilio, an American cloud communications platform that provided Parelr with a phone number verification service and has since cut ties with the company.

In a press release announcing plans to cut ties with the platform, Twilio revealed which services Parler was using which allowed hackers to determine that it was possible to create users and verified accounts without actual verification.

Once the was discovered, they were allegedly able to get behind the login box API that is used for content delivery, allowing them to see which user shad moderator rights and in turn allowing them to reset passwords of existing users. As Twilio was no longer authenticating emails, hackers were able to access admin accounts easily.

Breitbart News has reached out to Parler for comment on this story.

Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship. Follow him on Twitter @LucasNolan or contact via secure email at the address lucasnolan@protonmail.com