Tag: Bullshit

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Wheee! Here we go!

California has jumped into the fray trying to remove Donald Trump from the ballot.

The Lieutenant Governor Eleni Kounalakis has written a letter to the Secretary of State asking that every legal option be explored to remove Donald Trump from the ballot.

Totally expected!

What caught my attention was this;

“The constitution is clear: you must be 40 years old and not be an insurrectionist,” Kounalakis wrote in the letter.

The problem with that statement leapt out at me from my memory of my High School American history class.

The Constitution is indeed very clear.

Article II, Section 1, Clause 5:

No Person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President; neither shall any Person be eligible to that Office who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty five Years, and been fourteen Years a Resident within the United States.

It took me less than a minute to pull up the passage. Turns out I was wrong. I thought the minimum age was Thirty Six, not Thirty Five. I throw myself on my readers mercy for being a year off. It’s been 45 years since I was in school. Some data degradation in subjects not commonly used may have occurred.

That being said, I’m also not a politician, lawyer, or Lieutenant Governor of California. It concerns me when someone who is a career politician makes fundamental mistakes that I, with my High School history education from a flyover state, say, What????

I know, I know, people make mistakes. Jamal Bowman made a mistake pulling the fire alarm in the capital. Uh huh, right…

More concerning is that these supposedly well educated, politicians who misquote The Constitution. apparently have never actually read The Constitution or understood what they read.

Far be it for a hayseed redneck like myself to teach them anything. But here’s a hint. Get a real dictionary. You know, one of those big assed unabridged heavy books. Then get yourself a printed copy of The Constitution and the amendments. Not a summary, not a cliff notes version, you’ll need the whole thing.

Now, open the dictionary and look up every single word of The Constitution. Using the dictionary skills you were supposed to have obtained in Elementary School, Junior High School, High School, or College, read the definition for each word, including the older definitions of the word. Then you’ll have a shot at understanding The Constitution.

If your unabridged dictionary has dated definitions, then you can use the definitions that were contemporaneous with common speech at the time The Constitution was written.

The reason it’s important to read The Constitution being mindful of the meanings of the words in their temporal context is easily illustrated thus.

Faggots shall be allowed in small numbers within domiciles and public spaces but shall not be congregated in great numbers near fireplaces, or forges.

That sentence isn’t talking about homosexual men being allowed in homes in small numbers. The sentence is talking about bundles of sticks being stored so as not to be a fire hazard.

A hayseed like me shouldn’t have to tell you educated elites this. But you’ve demonstrated time and again that you apparently missed something in school.

Almost daily, I am thankful for my flyover state education.

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I’m really starting to question the Smart house…

Way back when Nest produced their first thermostats I bought one. Our contractor installed thermostat was the cheapest piece of shit they could install, and honestly it didn’t fucking work.

We’d set the temp, the Thermostat was say it heated the house but a normal thermometer told us that the house was colder than when we’d started.

In the winter this presented a problem for the instruments (Harps, Guitars,) anything with strings. The people weren’t exactly happy either!

So at some point I got pissed and plunked down $300 for a Nest learning thermostat. In the beginning it was great and I highly recommended a unit to anyone and everyone. Then fucking Google bought Nest.

At first there didn’t seem to be too much of a problem. My programming of the thermostat held true and the unit adjusted to our changing schedules. It did what it was supposed to do and for a good 10 years the house was warm when we got home. I know the system was working the way I’d intended because if I was home sick with a cold or whatever, I’d have to override the thermostat during the day. I also saw the difference in the Gas bill in Winter and the A/C bill in summer.

Google got ever more invasive. Google wants to deprecate the Nest application login and force you to make a Google account. I’ve moved as far away from Google as possible and don’t even have gmail accounts anymore. That means I’m resisting.

Every time I log into the Nest Application or the Nest Website. Google has a shit fit! “Don’t you want to create a Google log in? Don’t you want to enable 90 factor log in security? “ On and on and on…

NO! I don’t want any of your shit Google! Just let me get to the actual control part of the damn application!

Lately, my thermostat is being reprogrammed without my consent.

62°F at night is too damn cold! Even with blankets and flannel sheets, I’m not sleeping well. I do sleep soundly if I’m in my sleeping bag that’s rated to 0°F. I shouldn’t have to sleep in a sleeping bag… IN MY OWN FUCKING HOUSE!

During the day if I’m home the temp is set to 66°F in the winter. That’s still a bit too cold but I’m willing to put up with it because I live in terror of the damn natural gas bill. Southern California Gas royally fucked everyone last year. Of course their executives still got their bonuses for incompetence. That’s another story!

I have specifically told the Nest Thermostat that I don’t want it learning. I don’t want it making adjustments, I want it to maintain my set temps within the schedule I’ve created and I want it to go to the lower temps when it figures out I’m not home.

Dirt Fucking Simple!

But… Somewhere, deep in the bowels of Google, some little Indian programmer fuck is deciding via programming that I don’t know what I’m doing and they know better what I need.

Every time they send a software update my schedule gets “Fine Tuned”. It used to be that having your temps set to 68° F or lower was considered worthy of a little environment leaf. Now the leaf doesn’t show up until you dial the temp down to 65°F. Nighttime temps of 63°F used to be “efficient” and worthy of the leaf. Now it’s 62°F.  The Nest “Fine Tuning” routine “adjusts” whatever your schedule is, to having the leaf indicator on.

If you scheduled 68°F during the evening… “Well you’re a moron! Let Google set your temp for you. There 65°F aren’t you happy? Gee sorry about that asthmatic child developing pneumonia. We’re about saving the environment, a little collateral damage is acceptable.“

I don’t care about the leafs, I care about not having my hands turn blue, or shivering in my bed all night.

Were I not thinking about selling this house and moving, I’d be shopping for a new thermostat. I have reprogrammed my schedule according to my needs 4 times in the past 3 months. If you see a little yellow/gold gear with a leaf at the bottom of your Nest thermostat display, guess what? You’ve been fine tuned! 

“We hope you like being cold living above the snowline. You’re welcome! Sincerely Google.“

My problem is this. I bought the fucking machine, I installed the fucking machine, I expect the fucking machine to obey my wishes, not the wishes of some asshole I’ve never met who doesn’t live my life, who has decided that they’re my better!

I may start shopping for a new thermostat anyway. I’d go for one of the really old units with a mercury switch and piece of coiled metal that reacted to temperature. Unfortunately, you can’t get mercury switches anymore. 

Mercury is bad dontchaknow even if it’s sealed in a glass ampule that never, or only rarely sees the light of day.

There are some old school thermostats like that in houses in this little town. Those scary dangerous mercury ampules have been in service for 70 years firing up heaters and haven’t hurt anyone yet.

This bullshit with the thermostat has made me seriously start rethinking the smart house concept entirely.

So long as the devices in my home are controlled only by me we got no problem and I like the convenience. But when they start disobeying, or someone remotely overrides my settings we got a serious problem.

That’s why after the house burned, we didn’t sign up for Edisons Power Savings thing again. The A/C Compressor of the old house, Edison could kill remotely.  We were going to drop out of that program. The house burning down simply spared us the annoyance.

That previous summer, Edison shut down the A/C while we were at work several days in a row. The interior temps of the house exceeded 100° F and caused $50-$60 worth of harp strings to snap each day. It also caused a meltdown on a RAID array that contained all our data. The RAID array did a thermal shutdown but the damage was already done. (It was a shitty manufacturer and while it was supposed to shut down prior to damage, it didn’t.)

At the time I remember wondering how it could be better for the grid, to have all the home A/C compressors in Southern California running at the same time for 2 or 3 hours.  That’s what it took to bring the temps in everyone’s homes down to something livable again after work. It wasn’t good for the grid. But it was great for the Electric company executives who were making more money than ever, and bitching about the strain on the electrical grid to justify rate increases to the PUC.

When / If I move. I’m going to be considering very carefully how smart I make things. 

While I like having the lights come on when I get home, I could do that with a motion detector. I like having lights come on at a particular time, but I could do that with a timer. I like being able to turn the lights off at night with a word, but I could do that with The Clapper .

Do I really need the maintenance headache of smart lightbulbs, ceiling fans, thermostats, and security cameras?

Thinking about it, I had most of this back in the ‘80s. 

It was done with the BSR X-10 system. And I had one!

Nobody could screw with the BSR unit via the internet. (The internet existed but wasn’t offered to the Public yet.) If someone was messing around with your lights and things it was an accident. They’d set their box to the same base code as yours and it was easily handled.

I suppose it’s another case of the old way is the best way.

Just how smart does my house need to be to make me happy?

The answer to that question may be, “My house needs a lobotomy.”

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Well There’s your problem!!!

Watching Harvard President Claudine Gay testifying before congress was one of the most disturbing things I’ve seen in a while.

Gay is a political scientist and should have been a politician. It’s rare that I see someone so unbelievable slimy, obviously duplicitous, and plain revolting. Listening to this vile cunt answering (with non answers) produced a visceral reaction that left me disappointed when a bolt of lightning from on high, didn’t fry her scummy ass.

Nothing pisses me off more in these hearings than hearing someone refuse to answer a yes or no question, with some long assed bullshit bunch of words.

Fuck! I’d bet if I asked this Harvard diversity hire if she was in fact black, she wouldn’t just answer the question.

Elise Stefanik wasn’t having any of this bullshit either. We all know nothing will be done though.

The other Presidents of higher educational campuses were no better.

I’m not sure that any of our Universities can be saved.

It’s absolutely obvious that these places are not about education.

Harvard, Yale, UPenn, and MIT no longer produce well rounded, educated lawyers, economists, or scientists.

Since God chose not to strike these people dead, I can only assume Hell’s admissions line is full.

I caught another clip showing the UPenn and MIT presidents responding with slimy weasel words instead of just answering directly.

God I miss plain speech!

I think speaking plainly is a lot more healthy than sliming your way around an uncomfortable subject. It’s like just grabbing ahold of a nasty splinter in your foot and yanking it out so you’re done with it, versus someone playing with the splinter because they “Don’t want to hurt you”. In the first case you get on with your day and by sundown you’ve forgotten you had a splinter. In the second case the splinter is still in your foot only now it’s starting to get infected.

Safe spaces, hate speech rules or laws, and intimidating folks into silence do not help us, or serve the greater good. There are people who will always hate each other. Better that it’s out in the open because then the hated know when and where to carry a gun.

If Harvard, Yale, UPenn, & MIT are anti-Semitic then fine. Tell all your Jewish students, refund them their current semesters fees, and housing and let them call it DONE. Then they can move on to a school that is not anti-semitic, finish getting their degrees, and get on with their lives.

 

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Hmmm. Interesting, and they wonder why we don’t trust them…

REVW0406So this cold is annoying enough that I was thinking about getting some over the counter cold remedy. Then I thought about it and seemed to recall seeing something about the FDA doing a study on cold medications and discovering problems with them.

Off to the internet, Boy Wonder! CBS Reports this

Ahh, there it is:

Advisers to the Food and Drug Administration voted unanimously on Tuesday against the effectiveness of the ingredient found in popular versions of Sudafed, Allegra, Dayquil, and other medications sold on pharmacy shelves.

“Modern studies, when well-conducted, are not showing any improvement in congestion with phenylephrine,” said Dr. Mark Dykewicz, an allergy specialist at the Saint Louis University School of Medicine.

So here’s the deal, these medications use phenylephrine. They used to use pseudoephedrine. Pseudoephedrine worked but was taken out of the normal OTC medications because it was possible to convert it into Meth.

Phenylephrine was grandfathered into use without much in the way of testing for efficacy by the FDA. It should be noted that there are tons of drugs, and products that are grandfathered like this all the time. Some of these grandfathered products are later found to be, at best ineffective, and at worse harmful.

The cold medications appear to be simply useless if they’re not using Pseudoephedrine. But it does beg the question, how many other medically approved products are nothing more than Placebos or as it was said in the past “Snake Oil”. Placebos have their place in clinical testing, because they provide a baseline to determine if a drug under test is doing anything.

In the past, purveyors of  Snake Oil may have been tarred and feathered and run out of town, if they weren’t hung for hurting and swindling people. The FDA was created to provide a measure of safety to the public because of the prevalence of snake oil and quacks.

Yet here we are, the FDA having been complicit in cold remedies that don’t work, a.k.a. FRAUD! The cost of a box of these cold remedies is /was  $10 to $15 and were sold to millions of people. The fraud generated billions for drug manufacturers.

I’d like to have my money back! I looks like I’m due a refund from 1980 forward??? I’d have to find when Pseudoephedrine was swapped out.

On the plus side, we all got over our colds pretty much naturally! This also might explain the apparent conflicting data between the folks who swear by natural remedies versus Doctors recommending OTC remedies. It’s possible that the natural remedies actually performed better because these remedies survived and were handed down based on centuries of accumulated observational data.

The OTC cold remedies on the other hand were not thoroughly tested and no better than sugar pills.

I wonder about the collateral damage during COVID-19. Most people would have initially thought COVID was a cold, they would have gone to their ineffective OTC cold/flu medication. Their symptoms would have gotten worse until they were hospitalized. Then, they would have been given more ineffective treatments because the treatments that actually worked, (as shown time and again in other countries,) were forbidden. By… guess who, The FDA!

I guess my point is why should I or anyone trust the CDC or the FDA at this point? They’re not protecting us from medical quackery, or big Pharma selling snake oil.

Why should I trust a doctor, or a hospital?

Bottom line is this.

If a Doctor or a medical person can not explain something to you, or can’t produce test information showing the efficacy of a treatment, drug, or vaccine.

DON’T FUCKING TAKE IT!

Perhaps I’m being overly harsh. However as we keep finding more out about COVID, and the vaccines, and how it really looks like the medical establishment is covering up something truly evil. We shouldn’t give the medical profession the blind trust that we gave them in the past.

It’s really strange that a tattoo / body piercing shop might be a safer place than a hospital, laboratory,  or doctors office, when it comes to having needles stuck in your skin.

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On the plus side…

Screenshot 2023 11 13 at 8 05 22 AMIn Wauwatosa, WI there won’t be any Palestinian flags flying in city buildings.

This is true for at least the Christmas season. You see, a memo from a Wisconsin deputy city administrator discouraged employees from putting up “religious decorations” in “red and green colors” for the holidays in public buildings in order to be “inclusive.”

You have to love ill thought out edicts with unintended consequences!

Since Red and Green are used in Christmas Decorations. Or so the theory goes, Christmas is offensive to some people and can’t be celebrated. Red and Green are also used in the Palestinian Flag, Most African Flags, and of course the flag of Italy.

So tell me again, how this is inclusive???

What this deputy city administrator really wanted to say was, “Hey Christians Fuck you and your Christmas Trees, traditions, and decorations,”  She just didn’t have the guts to say it out loud or in print.

This was directed at employees decorating their cubicles. With “Open Office” floor plans it’s likely that the cubicles are visible from public areas and are therefore considered public areas.

The last place I worked, we could decorate the hell out of the place for Halloween. But we couldn’t do elaborate decorations for Christmas. It was the same thinking… We had Jews, Muslims, Atheists, and people from every religious persuasion in the building. Christmas decorations could offend those other people so they were muted.

The funniest thing was that the practitioners of Wicca were the happiest folks in the building because everyone went wild over Halloween. That being the only holiday that wasn’t frowned upon. Even the Fourth of July was frowned upon because there were workers from other countries in the building.

I’ll grant you, this is a small thing. But it’s another annoyance, and I think an attempt to wipe Christianity and possibly American values, from America. 

I really miss the elaborate decorations in malls at Christmas. When I was a child shopping with my parents, the decorations made the time of year magical. As an adult myself, shopping for family and friends, the decorations made me smile and actually enjoy being trampled, in over crowded Southern California malls.

Over time, those beautiful elaborate decorations became muted, and watered down, the last time I was in a favored mall the decorations seemed “phoned in”. There was no joy in them, and many were obviously shop worn, not having been replaced for many years.

I think this trend is not inclusive at all.

Inclusion would be, “Hi, come on in, join us in our fun and revelry. Let’s brighten up this dark time of year. You don’t have to believe in my religion to participate, you’re welcome all the same. Where are you from? How can I make you feel welcome?”

This “inclusivity” is actually exclusion. It eliminates a situation where respectful questions get asked, and people smile at each other more. A time when people share favorite foods, family recipes, and sweets, enjoying it all together and putting aside differences.

This inverted “Inclusion” spawns nothing but low level resentment and demonstrates that some are apparently MORE included than others. Some are more important because they can’t have any possibility of their feelings being hurt.

Honestly, that’s the birth of resenting “Snowflakes”. If you’re so weak in your beliefs, culture, sexuality, or whatever, that you have to be protected at the expense of everyone else’s method of going about their lives…

You’re going to be disliked. Not because of your beliefs, but because you disrupt and prevent others from pursuing happiness in their way.

It begs the question, why is group X,Y, or Z more important than all the rest of us? How do they rate and why?

I wonder if some people seeking answers to those kind of questions find themselves harboring resentment that blossoms into hatred. In their search for inclusion do these folks join hate groups that they would never have considered had they not been excluded by “Inclusion”.

It’s just a theory. I honestly hope I’m wrong. I do wonder though, if we stripped away all the sophistry and spoke what we really felt and thought without fear, would a majority of us admit we felt excluded from society by the never ending inclusivity movement? It’s just a thought.

Merry Christmas to Wauwatosa, WI.

To anyone working for the city of Wauwatosa, WI who might be proud of their African, Italian, or Palestinian heritage… Y’all will need to put the flags in your cubicles away until after Jan 1st!