Tag: General

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Finally!

18 months or longer after the news broke of Hunter Biden’s laptop, the DOJ has actually done their job. They’re investigating the laptop and Hunter Biden.

One could assume that there’s now enough pressure to force the DOJ to take action.

I suspect darker motives.

We went from, “The Laptop is Russian disinformation,” and memory holing the information contained on it.

To, “The laptop appears to really be Hunter’s.”

To, “Hunter is being investigated for tax fraud.”

To actually investigating the data on the laptop that appears to implicate Joe Biden being somehow involved in Hunter’s business dealings.

In part, this investigation may have been caused by hackers busting into Hunter’s cloud accounts and then spreading the information around. But I think it’s more than that.

I think that Joe has outlived his usefulness and now the laptop serves as a convenient way to dispose of Joe.

This will allow the appearance of the Democratic Party actually doing something constructive. They’ll have the opportunity to say to the American people, “See we don’t tolerate corruption,” while elevating Kamala to the Presidency.

The timing is nice. If they pull this off before the midterms they might be able to win back some of the voters they’re losing, and pull their asses out of the fire. They’ll also be able to parlay dumping Joe over corruption charges into some legitimacy for the Jan 6th committee.

Think about it. “If we dumped Joe, and he was from our party. Of course our investigation into Trump and the insurrection is legitimate. We wouldn’t lie to you.”

Uh Huh.

It’s what I’d do. Put a woman of color into the Oval Office. You win the female voters, the pro abortion voters, and theoretically the person of color votes all at the same time.

The Republicans can still be painted as evil, and the “Red Wave” hits the rocks before it really starts. The Democratic Party retains their power while maintaining a sock puppet in office who is remarkably even less popular than Joe.

Joe gets to retire. Hunter goes to jail, then is released after a few months to house arrest. Trump is mired in court cases, a little blood is spilled to appease the American People and at least in theory, all is right with the world.

Keep telling the people via CNN and other news media that the Democratic Party is strong, and takes action running up to the mid terms and there will be voters that buy it.

It’s actually pretty clever.

That being said, given the way this administration has handled the simplest of things. I doubt they or the Democratic Party have the ability to pull it off seamlessly. So the cleverness will be lost in the cluster fuck that would define the attempt.

The enemies of our country must be rubbing their hands together with absolute joy in anticipation of Kamala Harris potentially being President given her abject failure in almost every diplomatic encounter she’s had.

Well, at this point only time will tell. In the mean time, I suspect the screwing will continue and we’re all on our backs with our legs in the air.

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Huzzah!

After 24 hours without power. We have electricity again.

The scheduled outage was only supposed to be for 12 hours.

We’re going through the Fridge and the Freezer to see just how much this cost us.

It’s funny, the worst day of the fire, we only lost power for 4 hours. The repairs left us without power for 24 hours. Obviously there was some way they were getting power to us.

Couldn’t they have replaced the poles, and lines that burned, while keeping the power on, then turned everything off for a few hours to make the final connections?

Just one of those questions that flits through my mind…

I’d already pulled the emergency solar panels out of the basement this morning. They’ve been charging my battery pack all morning. The battery pack got us through, keeping the phones and other essentials charged, but they were nearing empty this morning. I figured I’d grab all the solar energy I could, as soon as the sun came up.

The packs made it to about 50% charge using the panels. Pretty good now that I think about it. I’ll top them off using their adapters.

Still holding off restarting the server. The electric company has teased us before. I’m also leaving the solar panels handy for the same reason.

Ahhh, that first cup of coffee in the morning…

Now off to continue the battle with Federal Express. Big surprise, their website still shows the tracking number with “Delivery Estimate Pending”

But I’m going to finish a second cup of coffee before I pick up the phone!

The fire is over 80% contained, the last I checked. So perhaps we dodged a bullet this time around. Reports say no injuries, (to people, animals, or livestock,) no loss of buildings.

Those fire crews can come by my place anytime. I’ll pour them a glass of my best bourbon. If I can find some at the store I’ll cook ‘em steaks.

That’s the report from the mountain.

One plus to all of this…

I’ve been blissfully unaware of much of the news. I’d rather conserve power than doom scroll.

Did one of the networks really switch to golf while the Jan 6th hearings were being televised? WOW!

I wonder what the ratings are.

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Random Stuff

Power is off, The electric company is replacing poles and lines that were burned in the fire.

Looks like it’s going to be a long outage. On the plus side we had internet for about 12 hours! Whoo Hooo. With the power down, now we don’t.

I’ve still got 5G on the phone. That’s a serious improvement from the 1 bar of LTE that I’ve had since Saturday.

Saw an article in Apple News this morning, about a pet store in Thousand Oaks, CA where the owner has made addendum to their pet adoption policy. Part of the adoption questionnaire asks about gun ownership, gun control, membership in the NRA etc. They will refuse to allow you to adopt a pet if you don’t agree with their views on the matter.

They go so far as to say if you’re a member of the NRA and lie to us on this form we’ll prosecute you for fraud. Because we will find out…

That seems a bit improbable, but whatever.

I applaud the owner for taking a stand. I think it’s partially incorrect, especially the part about the NRA. Then again that organization has been demonized for so long, then plagued with their own scandals… I supposed it makes sense that a liberal couldn’t help but see the NRA as a boogyman.

It will be interesting to see if the owner’s stance has any impact on their business, positive or negative.

I think they may find that their traffic will drop because some folks, regardless of their gun ownership or views on gun control, will look at these rules as an infringement on their privacy. That alone may be enough to drive business away. There are a lot of shelters, and breeders to select from.

Inadvertently this pet adoption place may add to the number of pets that eventually need homes if folks go the breeder route.

Nonetheless, This business owner’s policy is clearly stated and they have the right to refuse to do business with anyone they choose. (Unless it’s a member of some specially protected group.) It’s probably a good thing they’re a pet adoption business not a baker of wedding cakes…

So I support their right. I also compliment them on putting their money where their mouth is.

The insanity over the FedEx package that’s missing continues.

Yesterday I spoke with someone who seemed to think I should go back to the store where I handed the package to a person acting as their agent, who scanned the package while I watched, and start searching the place.

Frankly this rebooted my brain. This FedEx corporate moron was suggesting that I essentially perform an illegal search of a place of business where I was not an employee, nor was I law enforcement, nor was I that business owner.

When I asked the person very specifically if that was what he was suggesting he decided to back down on that completely unreasonable request.

I’m still blown away that a FedEx corporate employee would tell a customer that, the Customer should go search the premises of one of their Agent locations.

This however is demonstrative of the lack of training on the part of FedEx and may provide insight into why FedEx has become so damn unreliable.

I wonder if that’s why there are so many private bonded carriers operating in LA, Orange County, and San Diego. I was surprised recently when some documents were delivered to me via courier instead of UPS or FedEx. It was pleasant but the first time that’s happened.

I’ve got the BMW… Perhaps I could get a nice tailored suit and become “The Transporter” What are the rules? “No Names, Never open the package,” seems pretty easy to me. Gas prices on the other hand… hmmm.

Speaking of gas prices. I paid 6.79 a gallon recently. Amazing! Not in a good way. The only reason I’m not bitching up a storm about it, is that It had been more than a month since I’d last purchased gas. I figured, ehh, if I amortize it over the time since I last filled up it’s a big deal, but not world ending.

I was tinkering with going on a road trip just to blow the cobwebs out of the car and my brain. But I’m thinking that would be excessively extravagant.

I’d still like to do a road trip. I suppose if I drove straight to the California border then filled up in another state a road trip might be more reasonable.

I caught another article on Apple News I think it was originally printed in The Wall Street Journal, (I’m not too sure about that,) that reported a record number of Californians were taking up residence in Mexico. Apparently, the real estate market south of the border is booming.

Some of the reasons cited were, lower cost of living, lower cost of real estate, lower gas prices, lower food prices, and better quality of life.

One person interviewed for the article said that his family had saved 50% per month on their living expenses from their previous living arrangements in California.

He still commutes to San Diego daily for work, but in terms of better quality of life for his family, he said it was a reasonable trade off.

I’ll admit that when I first moved to San Diego, I considered renting a place south of the border. At the time I could have gotten a 2 bedroom 1 bath condo for $800 a month. The place was 2nd floor, 4 blocks from the beach, you could even see the ocean from the lanai.

Instead I settled for a 1 bedroom 1 bath for $1500 a month in Escondido. It was a choice that was about avoiding San Diego traffic. Had I done the Mexico condo, I’d have to drive through the nightmare of downtown San Diego morning and evening. In the end, I worked a goofy schedule which would have made the Mexico option viable… But that’s another story entirely.

In a twist of unintended irony. The article mentioned that with so many Californians going south of the border. It was pricing Mexican citizens out of the housing market and contributing to rising prices in other things.

Free market capitalism can be a stone bitch! I suppose the Mexican government hasn’t gone “Woke” yet and started regulating for the greater good.

For shits and giggles, I watched Atlas Shrugged I, II, & III last night. These movies are adaptations of Ayn Rand’s book of the same title. The production quality is good. The disconnect with different actors playing the key parts is a bit disconcerting moving from one movie to the other but it’s easy to get over. I prefer Grant Bowler’s portrayal of Hank Reardon over the other two actors. Not that the other actors didn’t do good jobs with the character, I simply liked Bowler the best.

I know, there are lots of people who say that Atlas Shrugged is a Republican propaganda piece and that it has no merit in today’s world. Blah Blah Blah.

To them I’d say, “Turn off your bias, read the book or watch the movies and then tell me you don’t see some parallels between what happened in the story and what our government is becoming.”

Lots of regulation, ever expanding government, lofty idealistically admirable yet unachievable goals, do nothing committees, hearings which produce nothing and go nowhere, politicians making decisions without due consideration of the effects those decisions will have. Shaming of the wealthy for their achievements, etc. etc. etc.

I’ve read some biographical information about Ayn Rand, in some cases it’s said she was just writing fiction. In other cases it’s said she based the fiction of Atlas Shrugged on things she remembered from her childhood in Russia. Still other say she was prescient.

I don’t know which, if any of these conclusions are true. What I do see is, at best life is imitating art. At worst whatever madness led Russia to communism and all the horrors that we now know happened in soviet Russia, may well have taken hold in American politics.

Perhaps it was never a matter of IF it could happen, instead it was only a matter of When.

I know I’d like to be spirited away to “Atlantis”, by someone like John Gault.