Category: WTF?

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For a completely different rant…

Yeah i know, I’ve been a little angry lately. I’m trying to get it out of my system and understand why I’m so pissed off.

Let’s just say this, I’ve been dealing with a lot lately and for the foreseeable future things aren’t going to let up.

I’m ignoring my Mother about 2/3 of the time. I feel terrible about it but I really can’t take her asking about people and me having to be the grimm reaper, informing her that they are all dead!

It wouldn’t be so bad once, but having to go through the details every time we talk is a super bummer. She also gets mad because she claims that no one told her…

Uh… Some of the people she’s asking about, have been dead for decades. I’m pretty dang sure it came up at least once between then and today.

She of course refuses to believe she was ever told, preferring to remain the victim.

I was thinking to myself perhaps Jesse and I could use a spa day.

He could run around all day with other dogs under a nice trainer’s supervision and then he could go get a bath, nail trim and brushing.

I on the other hand would be in a nice massage, perhaps a salt scrub, and just absolute zen. Perhaps a nice wine or fruity cocktail.

For those old enough to remember the phrase, “Calgon take me away…” I can tell you I’m so far beyond what Calgon could do, I might as well be in another star system.

I need a place where you drop all your tech into a little basket that’s locked up as two burly musclemen open massive golden doors leading out of a reception area and into a place that looks like the garden the Fey played in in “True Blood”

Probably too much to ask… But it’s a nice fantasy…

I mention all of this to frame my mindset as I walked into a Chase Bank branch today.

My purpose was to pay off a HELOC that had been rendered completely useless the moment Washington Mutual was purchased by JP Morgan Chase.

This was not too long before the house burnt and honestly, that HELOC line of credit would have been really helpful during the rebuild.

We attempted to get an explanation from JP Morgan Chase, as to why the credit line was frozen, and also tired to get them to unlock the line of credit. Our household income was over 100K per year at the time.

Note I said attempted to get answers. We couldn’t, and no-one at Chase seemed to understand we weren’t trying to get a new loan, we weren’t trying to change the terms of the HELOC or anything else. We just wanted to know why the line of credit was inaccessible.

The equity in our home was well over 200K at the time the place burned. Then the housing bubble popped.

Fortunately, we had full replacement insurance house and contents. That meant the housing bubble really didn’t do much to us.

On the one hand, the line of credit would have been helpful, on the other hand It’s possible that we could have been hurt by it.

That being said when we opened the HELOC the bank wanted to give us 200K as a line of credit. I told them, “No, lets do 60K which allows for us to make realistic improvements to the house and not start drowning in debt.”

The bankers at the time looked at me like I was insane. The other half said nothing and later wondered aloud how I’d done the math. Turns out I was right and the HELOC was just perfect. Or WOULD HAVE BEEN had the line of credit not been locked for no reason.

Oh JP Morgan Chase… you’ve made an enemy in me…

We’d accessed the HELOC to make improvements on the house among other things. Those improvements were underway when the place burned. That left us with a mortgage, a 2nd in the form of the HELOC and a smoldering pile of charcoal. (I’m over stating it a bit.)

During the rebuild, the insurance company was putting the place back together based on the plans for the improvements and the original blueprints for the house. Generally speaking, It worked out okay.

Chase however never explained themselves, and never unfroze the credit line. So essentially it was a payment on a useless line of credit that should have been rolled into the first mortgage when Chase sold my mortgage to some fly by night loan servicing firm. But that would have been far too logical.

Chase had through the years really pissed me off, repeatedly.

I constantly had the following problems with Chase.

Web access and their Mobile access only worked about 10% of the time. It was so bad that I’d actually get surprised if I was able to log in and would put off banking because their online access was so shitty.

They’d change passwords on my account for my safety and convenience. Yeah, you read that right, Chase would lock me out of the accounts then change the password then force me to call them to get back in.

They also started asking for some silly assed numeric code or security phrase whenever I called them. Apparently they’d change that one too if I didn’t use it enough. But they wouldn’t tell me they’d made the change.

After 4 consecutive debit card replacements that I couldn’t activate, I gave up. The other half did all the ATM shit with Chase.

Excessive fees improperly charged to the account. Then when we’d call them on those fees they’d say, “Ooops our mistake…” But they never adequately explained why they thought those fees should be billed to our account in the first place.

When Chase sold the mortgage I really questioned why I needed Chase Bank in my life.

I stopped dealing with Chase. The Other half would maintain a balance to pay the mortgage and the 2nd and stash a little money automatically every month in the savings account for Christmas. That was it.

He dealt with them and their bullshit much more than I did.

When he died, I started really looking at all the accounts so nothing went wrong.

As I was looking at the Chase account. I realized since Chase no longer held the mortgage I could move the payment to another bank and close the Chase Checking, and Savings. All I needed to do was transfer the balance of the checking and savings account to the HELOC and all three accounts would be out of my hair.

You’d think this would be easy.

Youd be wrong

It took almost 2 hours and 3 different people to work through all of this, at a BRANCH.

The complexities were over the top. You’d think that anyone in that branch could pull up a current payoff, then do simple subtraction… But No, the balance the representative was getting on his screen was different from the balance on their mobile application which praise Jesus, was working and displaying on my phone. Finally, they converted the checking and savings account cash to a cashiers check then placed a call to figure out what the payoff was. The phone call provided another completely different answer. So what the fuck?

I’m sorry, if all this crap is in your computers, then why isn’t it available? And why was a cashier’s check necessary? Chase had all the funds, it was a matter of applying them. You know… debits / credits, accounting processes, basic banking that you learn from playing Monopoly… They were very very concerned about the payoff balance which was less than $2500. Trust me the amount of interest was less than a cup of coffee.

But… and this really pisses me off.

These motherfuckers added a $65.00 fee to cancel the lein the HELOC placed against the house.

Are you shitting me? These fucks, in addition to getting interest for all the years the HELOC had a hefty balance, decided to twist the knife one last time at payoff?

JP Morgan Chase, I swear to God, I’ll do my level best to pay off any other debts to you, as quickly as possible. and I will never darken your door or do business with you again.

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Great Job you MORONS!!!!

Thanks a million you TQ2+ (Insert random characters, glyphs, and numbers)

We of the LGB community want a fucking divorce, and we want our LGB community back from you.

We spent a shit ton of time and effort to calm down the church folks and the rabid conservatives. Anyone remember the controversy surrounding Anita Bryant?

We worked super hard getting the majority of people to realize that all we wanted was the ability to have all the rights marriage effortlessly conferred. We didn’t want anything more or less than equality and to live with who we loved.

In a very few short years you motherfuckers in the arbitrary, (I’ll be Trans today,) or gender fuck drag community have fucked us all.

In truth, the majority of the world doesn’t give a fuck about how anyone gets their rocks off. The general population doesn’t care that you’re trans or whatever. Most of us just wish you’d deal with your shit and leave the rest of us out of it. We really don’t care, and just wish we didn’t have to hear about it all day, every day, or deal with your bastardization of the language.

Here’s a simple question for you to ponder. What part of, “I don’t give a shit,” don’t you understand?

That’s coming from a gay guy.

Have any of you morons heard the religious right lately? A lot of them who used to be at least tolerant, sound worse than Westboro Baptist Church now. (Look it up, godhatesfags.org)

They’re quoting the book of Revelations about the vomitous abortion you’ve made of the rainbow flag. By extension they’re trying to rally around taking back the rainbow flag in God’s name.

Personally I don’t think we need a flag anymore and you assholes have sure screwed that pooch (No! Not your friend in Puppy Play Drag! Don’t get me started on this…)

When folks start whipping themselves into a frenzy over a deity who doesn’t make his or her intentions clear, you get rabid revival tent preachers claiming that God spoke to them and demanded action from the faithful.

You want to see what that looks like? Look up gay murders or executions in Muslim countries. There are plenty of videos of their faithful tossing Gays off roofs.

Historically, “Thou shalt not Suffer a Witch to live,” Had some serious consequences during the inquisition and / or Salem witch trials! Remember… It’s a short step to, “Thou shalt not suffer a fag to live.”

You got a sampling of it at the Dodgers Game over the weekend. That crowd was mostly pissed off and offended Catholics.

Great job, you’ve set us back 40 years and you’re too selfish and stupid to recognize the danger or the damage you’re causing.

Moreover, you’re going to have the LGB community siding with the conservatives and religious folks in this battle.

Because…

WE THINK YOU’RE WRONG

We’re tired of hearing about your perceived grievances.

At least those of us honest enough to speak our minds are.

We know full well that there’s a bunch of our ultra progressive brothers and sisters who will excommunicate or cancel us.

I say so what? I’m also pretty sure that there are a lot of folks like me, who resent the annoyance of using your pronouns or trying to figure out which bathroom symbols mean “Men’s room”.

Half the time I’m tempted to go behind a building and piss on a wall. This is especially true if I’m a little tipsy.

One of the new symbols looks like some kind of weird clock and I’m not sure what time it’s supposed to indicate. I really resent having something as simple as taking a piss being made complicated with gender ideology bullshit.

The simplest solution is not new and confusing symbology. The solution is a sign that says, “Bathroom”. If there are two doors with the same signage social convention would have people knocking before attempting entry and waiting their turn.

Ain’t it funny how the old or simplest solutions often work the best?

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I personally don’t care that much for Trump…

I literally can’t stand Biden!

Trump v. Biden? I’ll vote Trump every fucking time!

That being said, if either party presents reasonable alternatives to Biden or Trump, I’ll give them due consideration.

One of the things that I’ve always thought we should consider is a politician’s interaction with the public. Trump interacts with the common folk. I’ll bet the Secret Service has a lot of migraines because Trump gets into crowds in public. Trump is confident that people are going to be generally decent. I think that confidence is born out of his belief that things were better while he was president, and the average person knows it. Many people believe that Trump was at least trying to do the right thing even if misguided from time to time and Americans are pretty forgiving.

I look at Biden interacting with people and there is not the same energy. It not just his age, there’s something else. He’s uncomfortable and the crowd is uncomfortable. It’s like he’s forcing himself to be someplace that he doesn’t want to be.

Any politician that is visibly uncomfortable in a crowd of well wishers causes me to have an immediate distrust of them. Perhaps that’s one of the reasons that I personally distrust so many politicians.

I watched the coverage of Trump after his court appearance in Miami. CNN’s Jake Tapper was clearly offended demanding that the control room cut the live feed. I’d suspect a lot of America tuned into conservative video feeds and found those stations were sticking with Trump as he went to the Cuban restaurant.

When the locals embraced Trump and prayed for him I thought, “how kind,” then I thought, “The only time anyone is going to pray over Biden is when he’s in a box. Even then it’s questionable!”

I tuned in again when Trump made his speech in New Jersey.

While I don’t care for Trump, I found that his speech made sense. His words and the points he made were clear. This was refreshing, because the universal translator in my brain blows a fuse every time I try to listen to Biden.

Moreover, I agreed with him. Something is fundamentally wrong in this nation.

One of the most obvious examples of the rot, is a justice system that clearly has two tiers.

If Pence had documents, and Biden had documents, and Hillary had documents (and destroyed them even under subpoena), and Trump had documents, Why is ONLY TRUMP indicted?

Love Trump or hate Trump, if having documents is illegal then ALL of these people should be indicted. Especially since, of them all, Trump is the only one who had the power to declassify documents. It’s written in black and white in the Law

No one is above the law, right??? Isn’t that what the pundits and wags are saying? Isn’t that what the democrat machine is screaming from the rooftops?

We all know what the Democrats really mean is, no one is above the law, (Except Us). That sentiment extends well into the Republican Party too. I suppose a more accurate statement would be, “No one is above the law… (Except we who are the political elite.)”

That’s one of the fundamental problems in this country right now and everyone knows it. There are two tiers of justice. Hell, thinking about it there may be more than two tiers of Justice.

I’m a white guy. If I shoplift, I know for sure that I’m going to be arrested. If I was any other color but white, I’d get a pass.

White people get punished! Everyone else gets some kind of excuse.

Look at that Marine in New York.

A dude gets on the train, obviously not right in the head. He’s telling people he’s gonna kill them, he’s telling people he don’t care if he dies, he’s telling people he don’t care if he goes to jail. He’s saying all this crap in a closed train car that’s moving, there is literally no place to go to escape and of course there’s no police because… New York and defund the police.

So an ex Marine steps up. He didn’t plan to kill that dude, he didn’t plan to do him any harm at all, and he didn’t choke the guy for 15 minutes.

No Marine would waste the energy. If a Marine is gonna kill ya, trust me, it’s going to be over real fast.

Regardless of the fact that the dude was threatening people, or that he had a record of violence, (The Marine couldn’t have known that,) or that the Marine is by definition going to protect women and children. The New York DA decided to indict him saying that he essentially murdered the crazy dude. Let’s think about that. The New York DA whose known for not charging criminals for their behavior decided to charge a white guy who was protecting a train car full of women & children of multiple races. Mr. Penny was also assisted in restraining the crazy person by two other men who happened to be black or brown. They’re not charged as accomplices. No, only the white guy is charged.

I’m sorry that’s racist on its face, and underscores the two tiered nature of justice in this country.

An old rule is something like; You don’t let a rabid dog get a chance to bite someone. I’d say the same rules need to apply to humans.

Threaten people and say you don’t care if you die…

Don’t be surprised if someone stands up and says,

“Your Terms are Acceptable.”

But I guarantee you if the white dude was the one doing the threatening, screaming & hollering in people’s faces, terrorizing them, and a black Marine choked the fool killing him. The black Marine would be a hero, and the mayor would be shaking his hand.

No one would point out that the defund the police movement and the DA’s office in New York is very soft on crime. Or that these factors are responsible for the increasing crime in the first place. Would we apply reasoning and / or logic to the situation or ask how we came to this dire circumstance?

Nah. We’d move on to the next bullshit without missing a beat.

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I don’t have to outrun the Bear, I only have to outrun YOU!

Two Hunters in the woods.
One Hunter turns to the other and asks if they encounter a bear, could they outrun it.
The second and older hunter replies;
I don’t have to outrun the bear, I just have to outrun you.

That old joke passed through my mind during some news coverage about Daniel Penny.

I’m not sure exactly why.

Perhaps it’s because if both hunters worked together they would be able to defeat the bear. But if they break and run then the bear is likely to get at least one of them.

Daniel Penny and two other men stood up to one bear in the subway car. I don’t believe for an instant Mr. Penny thought to kill anyone.

I’ve heard of, and actually seen on one occasion Marines goofing around choking each other out. They seem to consider it kind of harmless play. Indeed, most of the time, in most situations it seems to be harmless. Among Marines.

They’re fit, strong, and in the prime of their lives. (At least they’re supposed to be.) So they’ll lose consciousness, their buddies will draw a dick on their forehead and when they wake up everyone laughs and the recently unconscious guy is handed a beer. It’s a weird bonding, an expression of comradeship and nothing is thought of it.

Or wasn’t back when all my best friends were Marines. Granted, that was a decade or two (or three) ago. Things may have changed and the Marines might have gotten a little more pussified than they used to be.

Everything is going “Woke”. There may have been some recruits that couldn’t cut it, who sued because BOOT was too hard, and their feelings got hurt.

I wasn’t in the military. I broke bones as a teenager and the surgery to fix it disqualified me. I should have gone military. Looking back, I wish I had been able to, I’d like to have been pushed up against my limits. I’d have either gotten a lot out of the experience or I’d have spent my time in the brig or stockade. Whichever, I’d have learned a lot.

I suppose my experience with Marines colors my opinion. Every Marine I knew was goofy, funny, dirty minded, rough & tumble, honorable, kind, and when the shit hit the fan, deadly serious. In an instant, they focused on everyone getting out of the situation in one piece. None of them put up with threats, intimidation, or the strong picking on the weak. In my experience two Marines could hate each other’s guts, but they’d join forces instantly to protect someone who couldn’t protect themselves. It’s like somehow all of this is hardwired into Marine DNA.

I was honored to be counted among them, and honored again when they said I was scrappy in a fight but needed some training, then showed me how to fight better. I appreciated knowing they had my back as I had theirs. There was a rule that a lot of folks didn’t get…  if you ran your mouth in a bar or wherever and deserved an ass whipping you’d get one.

They’d stand by and let you and whoever you offended duke it out, but you weren’t gonna die. They’d make sure your well deserved ass whipping didn’t go too far in either direction. Win or lose, they’d take ya home clean ya up and critique your style while doing it.

It’s a weird mix. I guess it would confuse the hell out of people who’d never hung with any group of military folks. The group dynamic is different from any other group I’ve ever seen. Maybe a large family would come close. You and your brothers might fight like you’re going to kill each other but God help anyone who sucker punched a brother.

I miss those guys a lot.

_____________________________________________

I guess all of this went through my mind as I was processing the news outlet reporting.

One conservative commentator got away with pointing out that the general media wouldn’t have made a big deal about it, if both participants were black, or if the person who died was white and the Marine in question was black. Or if both participants were white.

But because the Marine was white and the person who died was black, the media is in the promised land. Likewise we wouldn’t have all the protests and discussion about homelessness or all the rest. It would be just another white guy dead on the subway… Big Deal!

The problem is The Bear we all have to worry about now is the Bear of the mob, of the preconceived notions, the Bear of our spineless pandering leaders.

We’ve spent the last few years ignoring the mob, and all the stupid reasons for protests or razing of city blocks. We’ve watched politician after politician cave in to bad behavior and tacitly approve of escalating violence. At the same time police forces around the country are bleeding officers from their ranks.

This inevitably will lead to people standing up to defend those who cannot defend themselves, today we call it vigilantism, in centuries past we called it guardians of the community or village. The warriors who stood between the village and marauding hoards.

Woe be unto those who cause a warrior to put down his plow and pick up his sword. They will not survive the encounter. Real warriors value peace, home and hearth above all, but they understand war and the necessity to sometimes fight. When they go to war, they go to win.

New York and other large cities better brace for what’s coming next. If the people don’t feel safe going about their daily lives, Vigilantes will fill the vacuum left by the dismantling of police forces. When prosecution isn’t an option for career criminals in these cities, summary street execution will be. Vendetta will be the norm and innocent people will be caught in the crossfire.

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Interesting I just applied for a job in Rupees

So weird!

I converted my required American salary to INR so that I could apply for the job. What the hell is that about? I wouldn’t have bothered except that the company appears to be legitimate and it was on LinkedIn.

The job is in America so hmmm. I wondered if it was one of those silly HR tests to determine if you pay attention. Of course it’s entirely possible that the person putting the ad up on LinkedIn carelessly specified INR instead of American Dollars.

Who knows these days?

Every company plays games, and HR people seem to have orgasms tormenting folks just trying to find work.

It’s possible it’s just an artifact of an HR person that’s poorly educated.

This is what it’s come to. I’m mostly applying to jobs now, just to rub salt in my wounds. Call it an exotic form of self harm. LOL! I’m still applying only for positions that I’m entirely qualified for. I know that I’m never going to be actually interviewed by a human for any of those positions. So this is nothing more than beating my head against a wall.

It’s a total crack up in a very sick way, that now I’m applying just to attempt to annoy an automated system.

I suppose this is better than me creating a viral bit of code that utterly destroys automated hiring systems.

And yes, the thought has crossed my mind!