Tag: Bullshit

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As I age…

As I age I notice an accumulation of stupidity and everyone else either ignores it, or flat out doesn’t see it.

I wish I could ignore things and remain blissfully ignorant. 

Some examples:

Tail lights. I’ve recently seen at least two different cars, with all three tail lights flashing at different intervals from each other. There are warnings in movies about flashing light sequences affecting photosensitive individuals. In a movie the person is sitting in a chair. On the road, a photosensitive person might be in the driver’s seat of 2 thousand pounds of vehicle and can do considerably more damage if they react poorly or have a seizure.

F-hN5LJWgAQ59Xq.jpegI’ve noticed the irony of college protestors demanding an Israeli cease fire, but being perfectly happy to beat the living shit out of a Jew with a different opinion. Which is it? Peace or War? 

The Washington Post Censored the Cartoon at right, even though it is a perfect description of truth. WP didn’t want to offend? How does truth offend? WTF?

We literally censored people from the internet who spread “mis-information” about elections, COVID, Vaccines, etc. When Rashida Tlaib spreads mis-information on the steps of the Capital using her position in Congress to magnify her importance and therefore her voice, nobody says shit about it, until the House passes a vote to Censure her. What is said after the Censure vote is in condemnation of the Censure.  That for me is a complete WTF moment. Personally, I think Tlaib should be taken from the capital in chains and tried for Treason. Oh, for the college educated… Censure is very different from Censor. You idiots might want to open a dictionary.

Evidence suggests Joe Biden has apparently lied about his involvement with Hunter’s businesses, and the “Biden Family Business” to the tune of millions of dollars, at minimum it looks like influence pedaling. Nothing much is said or done about it. Donald Trump inflates the values of his properties a tad, gets loans from banks, pays off those loans, making everyone money and harming no-one. Yet he’s in court on fraud charges?

Warner Brothers has decided not to release a completed movie as a tax write off. Let me get this straight, if I build a house and never move into it. I just lock the doors, and never use it, rent it, or sell it. I can write off the entirety of the house on my taxes? How about nobody gets tax write-offs on completed projects until the project actually loses money. That seems a lot more logical doesn’t it? Oh and shouldn’t Warner Brothers executive be sitting in court alongside Trump for fraud? It’s a cinch that they borrowed money to produce that movie. 

The entirety of the UAW strike and its resolution. WTF? I understand wanting higher wages and benefits. But you do realize that a nicely equipped FORD costs almost as much as a top of the line BMW luxury car. A GMC Truck costs more than some models of fully equipped BMW SUVs. So tell me again UAW how you’re going to preserve your jobs building your current line, or when everyone transitions to electric vehicles with fewer parts and higher purchase prices. If I have a choice, I’m going to pick the cheaper vehicle with longer range. Toyota? Kia? Nissan, hello paging common sense, is common sense in the building? There’s no incentive to buy FORD, CHEVY, GMC or Tesla at the prices they’re currently charging. Even if you wanted to buy one of these brands, you can’t order the vehicle exactly to your specification. Go on, try to build one on their websites. You’ll find you can’t have certain engine / trim combinations. For example I found I couldn’t have a truck with nice seats, no chrome,  a V-6 engine, 4×4 transmission in a 2 door with 6 foot bed configuration. They make what I want with a 4 cylinder 2×4 transmission but swap in a V-6 4×4 and NO! You get 4 doors and a 4.5 foot bed. Sorry, that just doesn’t work, I want to carry a full sheet of drywall flat in the bed of a pickup, and be able to drive uphill. This is especially true when the prices are at $40 – $60,000 before options.

Loyalty Reward programs. This is a bit hypocritical of me because I use these programs. Not using them in protest which I should be doing, is punishing myself, not the companies. Why do we need these Loyalty cards? Why not simply sell the goods or services at the discounted a.k.a “REAL” price to everyone all the time regardless of their loyalty? Why is it that on a recent grocery store run I was able to save $45 off the bill, but only had one .50 manufacturers coupon? Is it that the grocery store inflates the price so much they can afford to discount everyone’s bill by 1/4? How about gas stations? Why not give everyone a break on the price and speed up the refueling process along the way, instead of having folks enter loyalty numbers and selecting options of payment and 50 other questions?

Medical Costs. Same generic RX for years. Sometimes it’s $120 other times it’s $90, still other times it’s $50. I’d really like to know, how much does this shit really cost? Perhaps a better question is, “How much on average does it really cost to get medical treatment?” Maybe we should base insurance costs on the average, not how much can we get for removing a splinter in Beverly Hills.  Why can I negotiate 2/3 off on a medical bill? It’s not even negotiation. All I had to do was ask… That suggests that the actual cost of doing business is 1/3 less than advertised.

A better overall question is this;

Why do we put up with these clearly irrational things, and why are these things accepted as “Normal”?

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The epitome of “Useful Idiots”

Queers for Palestine Getty 640x480I saw this photo online. After my brain rebooted, ran full computational, sensor diagnostics, and a data integrity check. I looked at this photo again.

In all honesty I thought my brain, or optical systems were feeding me corrupted information and expected, after running diagnostics, that the image would resolve into something else.

It didn’t. According to self diagnostics, I have also not had a stroke.

Which leaves only one last possibility. The image is real.

It might as well say “Jews for Hitler”, or “Blacks for KKK” Although the last one would be more powerful if the ’N’ word was used. “BLM Pro Police”, “Mandela for Apartheid”, or “Tanks for Tiananmen” makes about as much sense and causes as much cognitive dissonance.

It’s shit like this that makes me think there is no point in attempting to preserve humanity. If people are this stupid and have so much time on their hands that they protest in favor of a bunch of terrorists then I want nothing to do with them. If the majority of the TRANS or  LGBTQ $^*#(mnopwxyzdumbfucks%$⁄€›fl°°= community are this stupid, they absolutely deserve the hate coming at them.

Helpful hint MORONS. The Palestinians and most, if not all, of the Arab world will happily throw you off a building. They’ll be overjoyed to use a crane to slowly lift you off the ground and watch you strangle.

After seeing what the TRANS / LGBTQ $^*#(mnopwxyzdumbfucks%$⁄€›fl°°= community has become and what they’ve done over the past decade. I might be tempted to help the Arab world!

Thank God the TRANS / LGBTQ $^*#(mnopwxyzdumbfucks%$⁄€›fl°°= community won’t reproduce. I don’t think the gene pool could absorb the level of stupidity this sign embodies or the insanity the TRANS / LGBTQ $^*#(mnopwxyzdumbfucks%$⁄€›fl°°= community in general seems to adhere to.

Queers for Palestine MY ASS!

It brings to mind the term “Useful Idiots” and a bit of a smile, in that if you flip ahead in the book about useful idiots you know how they all end up. Sadly you don’t have to flip ahead in the current book, you can instead read a bit of history and see how useful idiots end up, again and again throughout history.

For goodness sake, if you can’t read, (since reading and math now are racist, and we’re giving High School diplomas to people with no demonstrated proficiency in basic skills these days,) you can learn about it by watching a movie. Two movies strike me right off the bat. The Mummy Returns, and The Lord of the Rings The Two Towers

I like the scene in The Mummy Returns when the useful idiot screams “Save Me Lord,” to the resurrected mummy and the mummy replies, “Why?” It’s a perfect end to a useful idiot. His usefulness was at an end, he’d become more of a liability than a benefit so the mummy he’d worshiped kicked him to the curb. Or was it the Ancient Egyptian version of Hell?

It’s not just the TRANS / LGBTQ $^*#(mnopwxyzdumbfucks%$⁄€›fl°°= community. They just happened to be the poster children for stupidity this morning.

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Good Golly! I Hate Passwords!

Ihate Passwords 2Got a message this morning on my phone, maybe from my phone, that I confirmed on my computer.

Some Passwords Compromised! 

I’ve seen the message before, and like most folks I ignored it!

For some reason, this morning I actually looked at the message and the passwords that it claimed were compromised.

A lot of the compromised passwords have come about because I’ve merged the other half’s passwords into my passwords. It makes keeping things running a lot easier to have it all on one computer rather than bouncing between two machines.

The list was long… Some of it was easy to negotiate because there were duplicate logins. Once those were sorted out, then it was down to the business of changing compromised passwords. And here’s where things just go right off the damn rails!

I log into a site. Figure out where the hell the site has hidden change password. Account, Profiles, Client Access, security, or whatever other clever euphemism the company chose to use. It’s mildly annoying but navigable. 

I get to the change password option and things get super annoying! Enter the old password, then enter the new desired password, twice. 

“WRONG! You didn’t include the right kinds of characters, or the right number of special characters, or not enough upper case characters, or numeric characters, the password isn’t as long as War and Peace, that password is too long, 4 characters in the entered password have been used before on this account, or, or, or, or…”

The annoying thing about this is there is almost never any description of what these assholes want, prior to making the first mistake.

I’ve gotten to the point that I’ll hit the submit button just to generate the error that describes what format is necessary for a password.

Because I’m so often annoyed by this irritating bullshit, I use the internal password generator provided by Apple. The down side to this is sometimes even the Apple system can’t generate something useable, but it stores what it generates almost instantly. Meaning that if the generated password is rejected, you may have a bad password stored in the autofill system and then you get to fight with both the password manager AND the asinine website.

This is how I end up with passwords or pass phrases that would make Marines blush.

This morning I was entirely surprised when I ended up in one of these circular password situations and resorted to using an obscenity.

Low and behold, the website told me that such words were offensive and couldn’t be used as passwords.

WTF?

Who the hell are you to tell me what words I can and can’t use for passwords? Furthermore what does it matter? The passwords aren’t supposed to be stored on the site in plain text. They’re supposed to be encrypted. No human is supposed to be able to read the passwords and therefore no human risks being offended. Are we dealing with computers now being offended?

I’d rail and complain except I find myself caring less & less. This particular vendor, service provider, will not matter to me soon. Once I’m out of California I’ll be purging a ton of passwords, and phone numbers from my systems.

I’m actually looking forward to that. I’m looking forward to having a new phone number and a new address. 

I’m also rethinking the whole web access thing, across the board. I’d prefer to have everything mailed to my address. I’d like to get things in my mailbox. Maybe , I’ll be able to step back 50 years. I might start writing checks and mailing them to utilities. Then I won’t have to deal with passwords, PINS, and poorly designed websites.

Who knows? I might even have the Sunday paper tossed on my porch instead of reading it on my pad.

Is this a function of age? Or is this my rejection of increasing complexity to do the simplest things?

Perhaps it’s both!

There’s a lot to be said for de-computerization. You’d have to really know me or be looking at that sentence through my eyes to grasp the full irony.

I wonder if the Amish would be willing to teach me how to live simply?

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On Palestinian Refugees…

No Thanks!

We already have a Palestinian!Talib

This one is quite enough.

If Egypt refuses to allow Palestinians into their country, there’s a reason.

Could it be that Egypt knows that the majority of the Palestinians are radicalized and will probably launch attacks on Israel from their soil?

Could the Egyptians be smart enough to realize that they don’t want to give Israel any reason to attack them? Egypt and Israel have had wars, so it’s not that the Egyptians are all that worried about it, but maybe they’re not ready to engage in war again. Maybe they like peace more than they want to destroy Israel.

It doesn’t matter why… What matters is that Egypt knows something about the Palestinians and consider it too high a risk, or too many mouths to feed.

Now that it’s come out some of the missiles the Palestinians fired into Israel were made from water pipes that Israel gave to the Palestinians to irrigate their fields. I personally am suspicious of everything the Palestinians say. That goes for any Palestinian anywhere.

Obviously Hamas had help, while not every Palestinian is a fighter in Hamas… It’s clear a substantial number of them were helping Hamas.

By the way, this occupation narrative where people say Israel was occupying Gaza… It’s bullshit! The Israeli settlers left a long assed time ago. They left fields, greenhouses, and infrastructure.

The Palestinians and Hamas chose to do some seriously fucked up shit because like many parasites they always want more and will continue taking more and more until they’ve destroyed their benefactor.

The Palestinians and Hamas could have turned Gaza into a fantastic tourist destination with a booming economy. They could have fed and educated their population. They could have become a 21st success. Israel would have helped them do it!

The Israelis would have loved to have a stable, peaceful, productive, Gaza.

But Palestinians chose flat out evil. They chose to leave their people hungry, thirsty, and destitute. Hamas chose to use their people as human shields.

I’m pretty damn sure a martyr for Allah would choose to be alive instead of blown to bits for a cause they weren’t sure they supported, instigated by a bunch of assholes living it up in Qatar on money that could have been used to improve living conditions in Palestinian lands.

With that kind of mentality, we don’t need any Palestinian refugees at all! Hell, we don’t know who’s in our country right now, we don’t need to add any more assholes to the mix.

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There are times…

IMG 2882When I’m very thankful for the Dog.

Sometimes, he’s an absolute pain in my ass!  Other times, I catch a glimpse of the world through his eyes and see beauty.

This morning was one of those mornings.

I did laundry yesterday. As part of that process I changed the bedsheets from the summer lightweight cotton to the winter flannel. 

It’s been cold enough here at night that I have run the heater a few times. I hate getting up to a house that’s 55°F. 

I was even able to pack the last summer sheet set, into its original package. That was cool.

There’s another chore that I need to do. I’ve got to match up the sheet sets. I think I lost one if not two top sheets back in January. That wouldn’t be bad except that they were from the king size sets, not the queen size sets that I thought they were. It doesn’t matter a lot because when the time comes and I move, I’m getting rid of the king sized bed and going to a queen. At that time I’ll buy new sets for a new life. Hey, I’m trying to put a positive spin on it. But in the mean time… I’ve got mismatched sets of sheets that I need to sort out and dispose of, to minimize confusion and frustration.

Anyhow, flannel sheets in place, I went on with the day doing just usual puttering around. I haven’t been sleeping well and my head has not been “in the game” for much of anything lately. 

Bedtime rolled around and I crawled into a nice warm bed. I’ve recently instituted a moratorium on bedside alarms on Sunday. Meaning, I’ll sleep if possible until something wakes me up or until I wake up naturally. This morning, I woke up completely naturally. The dog was curled up on the foot of the bed and there was silence. I sat up, looked at the phone next to the bed and it was after 8am. Sweet! I slept straight through the night. 

I got up, peed, and by the time I was done the dog was ready to do his morning rounds. I let him out, poured myself a cup of coffee, and pulled on some sweats. After a few minutes enjoying my coffee the dog is at the door. I let him in, he heads for his equivalent of morning coffee.

He’s asking for his morning Greenie. 

I give it to him, he starts to trot toward the back door again. “Fine,” I say, opening the door. He heads out trotting to his usual spot (The spot where Greenies are consumed,)  Then he turns back and sits at the door looking at me. He’s still got the Greenie in his mouth.

Because the behavior is “odd” for him I open the door and step out onto the deck to see if something is wrong. 

The dog starts tossing the Greenie at me then playing keep away. I set my coffee on a nearby outdoor table and engage in the game. He’s wagging his tail and challenging me, we’re having fun.

Then he’s a little too rough picking up the Greenie to toss it at me and bites it in half. Game over! Now it’s time to eat it.

I’m standing out on the deck, the morning chill is being displaced by the sun and I’m struck by how pretty the day is.

In fact it’s a spectacular day. Not too cold, it’s clear and crisp and quiet. That’s one of the things that really strikes me… The silence. 

We’ve been living in a construction zone for most of the Summer. There’s been heavy equipment running from 7am to 4 pm every week day and some weekends. It’s annoying because of the dust.

I haven’t been able to paint the trim or the stairs of the house, and now it’s getting too cold at night to do the painting especially the back stairs and deck because they’re in shadow much of the day.

But the noise is also a factor even when the equipment is at the far end of the wash, the sound reverberates right back up the canyon, and it’s constant. Dumptrucks driving 25 or 30 feet from your front door all day long create a wall of noise that you can’t escape. The dust blowing off their loads, and being kicked up by their passing is quite possibly bad for us.

In the height of Summer we tend to have our windows open, most folks here don’t have air conditioning. So we’ve been living with never ending dust to the point that every morning stepping into the shower I can feel the grit under my feet. I vacuum every day and I simply gave up dusting. What’s the point? I have to rinse every dish or pot before using it, or leave everything in the dish washer. 

But breathing all this dust can’t be good for us. Not to mention the possibility of Valley Fever. The sides of the wash are populated by thousands, if not millions of rodents. Valley Fever comes from rodent poop, it’s usually something a person gets if they’ve been out clearing land and kick up a lot of dust. Folks weed whacking without a mask, or using leaf blowers commonly get it.

IMG 2886It’s not the county workers fault, they’re doing what they’ve been told to do. They get paid by the flood control district and even the supervisors think they’re doing the right thing. Although I contend that had they done what had been done in the 1920’s that lasted 70 to 80 years, everyone would have been better off and the county would have saved a shit ton of money.

Not that the county gives a damn about saving money or using it wisely. I have no reason to believe that the County of San Bernardino will take any more responsibility for health issues they’ve caused in this neighborhood than they will for the private roads they’ve damaged, the environment they’ve destroyed, or the degraded quality of life issues their poorly designed and executed “Flood Control Project” has caused.

As I think about it, enjoying my coffee and the beautiful morning on my back deck. I think that I should probably write a complaint letter to the County describing all of this, I suspect that OSHA would shut this down if the neighborhood was a worksite. But since we’re a neighborhood I doubt there are any regulations. Nonetheless I should get a letter on file so that if I develop some disease caused by breathing granite dust I can point to them as responsible.

In the mean time… I’m going to sit here enjoying my home for the first time in 4 months. I’m glad the dog dragged my ass outside this morning. He’s snoozing in the sun occasionally raising his head to survey the world.

Have a happy Sunday.