Police have got the choke hold…

The picture above is not a choke hold. It is a head lock. The locked guy has his throat in the crook of the locker’s elbow. It does not cause choking or injury. It just holds a guy.

How do I know this? BECAUSE I WAS IN THE 7TH GRADE IN CALIFORNIA PUBLIC SCHOOLS. every male student back then had to take wrestling as part of physical education. This is a common wrestling move. Tens of thousands of California middle schoolers did not die while practicing this.

This is just another case of black DA going after white guy acting reasonably to prevent harm.

I wonder if the dead guy will get a tox screen and if that will be released. I’m guessing finty is in the mix. AGAIN.

It seems also obvious that Leftist prosecutors are trying to stamp out the thousand year old common law principle of the unrestricted right to self defense. Many countries dont have that right. But America does. The Left hates that. It is the basis of our second amendment. Without the God Given right to self preservation, there is no justification for private citizens to be armed and unsupervised.

Classified Document Dumps

A few weeks ago, a young national guardsman decided that in his best judgement, it was acceptable to divulge large amounts of classified information onto the internet, so that he could impress a bunch of total strangers with his access to “the truth”. As always, here are my thoughts on the subject:

1. Didn’t we just have a President of the USA found with classified documents in his home, office, and garage and nothing was done about that?
2. Improperly storing or distributing classified information is a crime. Unless you are above the law, like Clintons, Obamas, and Bidens. If I did what they did, there is no doubt I would be instantly fired and everything I owned would be seized, and then I would be put in a every dark jail for many years.
3. When it comes right down to it, most of what is classified is done so to protect political leaders and generals from embarrassment. We claim it is to safeguard the USA from harm if the information is disclosed, but the vast majority of “SECRET” information is already known to all of our potential adversaries. The people who don’t know that information are our fellow Americans who probably would not like that their government is doing those things.
4. I don’t know what is in those documents because the law forbids me from even searching for it on the internet. The law requires that classified information is still classified, even if it is totally disclosed to the public. Thus, if I see it on my home computer, I am automatically guilty of storing classified information improperly. This is obviously a law that exists to prevent the spread of information after all potential enemies have already seen it.
5. The national and international news companies are all reporting that we don’t need to see the documents because they have already seen it for us and will tell us everything we need to know. And what we need to know is that “most of them were fake anyway”. Really. If that is true (not like professional media would lie about it) then the poor young national guardsman has a pretty rock solid defense in his espionage case: Nothing real was disclosed. It was all faked. Creative writing. Anything that was real was accidental and merely based on guesses and coincidence. Making shit up and posting it to the internet is not illegal. If he is being prosecuted, that is a signal that at least some of it was legit. In any case, this will be a really tough case for a federal prosecutor to handle since the judge, jury, and defense counsel will not be able to view the evidence against the accused. It would have been better tried in a military court and the charges could be really innocuous crimes like dereliction of duty, breaching a safeguard, and, everyone’s favorite, Conduct contrary to good order and discipline.
6. Didn’t Obama pardon the last guy from the Army who did this? Sort of sends the wrong message, doesn’t it?
7. Any of the credentialed journalists who admit they have seen those documents and saved copies on their computers are admitting that they too are guilty of the crime of improperly storing and distributing classified information… the same thing they wanted to put Trump in jail for just a few months ago and crowing how no one was above the law. No one except for credentialed media, evidently.

A few Words about Bud Light scandal

You may have heard recently that a VP of marketing at Anhauser Busch decided that the face of Bud Light for marketing should be full grown man who pretends to be a little girl for internet attention. Condemnation was hard and fast. My thoughts:

1. I notice that no one is defending the product. Bud light is absolute total swill. Colored water with mild beer flavor added. It is disgusting. It will be hard to find people to boycott it since so few people will admit that they drink it in the first place.
2. The VP of marketing. What a great job if you can get it. A young woman with very little experience actually creating products, gets to waltz into a high paid gig in corporate America while people who have been working in that company for decades continue to toil away for much lower pay. What makes her so special? Intelligence? Inventiveness? Her ability to filter terabytes of data to get her finger on the pulse of the beer-buying market? No, no, and no. Like most of corporate America, she got where she is by being connected. Harvard undergraduate and masters in marketing from Wharton. Indicates rich parents. I would hope that all large corporations would cull the board rooms just a bit and eliminate all those high paid positions that contribute nothing.
3. Obama was right. He said, “you didn’t build that”. Modern corporate board members seldom built the companies they run. They have no loyalty to the brand or drive to make it better. They exist like leaches milking the company to fund their own lavish lifestyles and to donate to their own political causes instead of distributing those profits to shareholders. None of the corporate CEOs and board members care about their businesses the way the men who built them did.
4. I just started seeing commercials on Hulu about AB products that are used by manly men who go camping and fight bears for fun. That was a fast turn around.

More Notes on the War in Ukraine

1. We only hear about it when the Biden administration needs a distraction.
2. There is no doubt that hundreds of thousands of real live people have been killed there over reasons that are not clearly understood.
3. Our own national media could not care less. They are engaged in a full-time information campaign to support the Biden administration so they would not say anything critical of ukraine. Everything is about how evil the Russians and Putin are.
4. I would like to direct your attention to a Youtube channel. You should always be highly suspect about what you see on youtube but that channel has some elements I want to point out. He is taking information from official sources on both sides and to the extent that they agree on something, he declares that piece of information to be true. Then he updates a map, on a daily basis. This is the same sort of thing I was doing in Iraq in 2017 so I am familiar with what he is doing. From that, what you can learn is: The Russians are making progress every day on every line of advance. Ukrainian casualties are horrific. Russia has been from the beginning using a strategy of patience and doing as little harm to the infrastructure as possible.
5. If you see and hear words about Russians being war criminals, it is propaganda, not news. Every cheap propagandist since the Greeks has done this. Remember Saddam Hussein’s troops pulling Kuwaiti Babies out of incubators and leaving them to die? It’s the same thing.
6. If you see and hear things about the Russians running out of materials, it is propaganda. The Russians seems to have plenty of everything.
7. If you see and hear things about Russians deserting in large numbers, it is propaganda. Russians are serving their call up terms in full, and then volunteering to stay on as contractors (for more money) in the Wagner units.

8. What you can learn from all of this is that the Biden administration is now fully neo-con and wanting to fight a war against Russia, on the cheap, using Ukraine.

9. There ARE US boots on the ground in Ukraine. The USA is at war and our Congress has not voted on it. Nor have the American people been asked if they would even like to have a war under this president against Russia. In addition, there are not even any publicly discussed war aims that US policy is trying to achieve. The only one I can find is a goal to “generally weaken Russia”. But what has really happened is the USA and NATO have been weakened. Ukraine, all by itself, has cleared the shelves and bunkers of NATO and the USA of most of our stockpiles of munitions and our anemic munitions industry will take 5-10 years of accelerated production just to get back to Obama-levels of stocks on critical munitions like artillery’s and rockets.

10. The USA is considering sending Depleted Uranium (DU) ammunition to Ukraine. Why? because we have a lot of them and they work really well. You know what else they do? They irredeemably poison the landscape forever. This is not about radioactivity. DU has less radioactivity than natural uranium. The fact is, Uranium, in any form is a toxic heavy metal. Why would the Ukrainians agree to use such a thing in their own country? The Russians aren’t even doing that. The Russians understand that some day the war will be over and trade, agriculture and raising babies will resume. Only a raving psychopath would want to throw toxic chemicals all over the farms that will feed their children.

11. One of the worst things happening for us is that we don’t really know what is happening. A Republic operates only because trustworthy people are in charge and the president, any president, was never meant to have this much power. How are “we the People” represented in this process when the national news media, 95% democratic party activists, are now, for some reason, also all neo-cons?

Tales from the Mercedes Stealership

Caveats: Most of you already know that I do my own work on my 2003 4Runner. So this tale is not about me, but was told to me from a trusted source.

A lady I know took her car to the local Mercedes Benz stealership for the sole purpose of getting a new key. The key was promised to her by the stealership that sold her the car, but they insisted that she had to do the legwork of getting it done since it was a competitor’s stealership. No honor among thieves.

Steps:

1. Ask the service manager. He punts and says, you buy the key from the parts department.

2. Parts department says, we only order the metal key blank, then you go to the service department to schedule getting the fob activated. This is an important step because the metal key cannot be used to start the car. The fob IS the key.

3. An hour later, key blank ordered, go back to service department. Different service manager says, Oh, you don’t need an appointment and we can order the key for you from here. But you need to order a fob too. Well, thanks for letting me wait in the parts line for an hour.

4. Oh, look, there are 3 outstanding recalls for that car, we will do those for you when you come in for the key activation. All free.

5. On the day of the activation, she takes the car in, collects the “parts” and meets service manager for the activation. They get started. While she waits, a conga line of alternate service managers approach her one at a time to show her repair estimates for all the other things they think she needs. A total of $6,000 in repairs. The first says, “you need new tires”. The second says “your 100K mile service is due”, The third says, “those brakes are looking pretty thin”. The car had 77K miles on it. The tires were all “passing”, not failing. The brakes had plenty of life left in them. The fourth manager, “you have an oil leak”. She says, “that sounds bad, where is it”? They say, we don’t know, but if you pay us $378 diagnostic fee, we will find out and tell you. Each manager describes the problems as critical safety failures that must be addressed right away or she would die painfully, probably on the way home. Fifth manager, pulls her into an office, “Ma’am, we discovered another critical safety feature and we shouldn’t even let you leave with it like this. Your motor mounts need replacing. Right away. Before we even finish this sentence. or… Death. Painful death”.

6. Since she wasn’t born yesterday, she refused all the managers wanting to service her checking account. Then she goes to pay for the key. $99 for the key blank. $200 for cutting the key blank and activating the fob. $485 for a new fob. This is why you can find people on the internet repairing old fobs instead of buying new ones from Mercedes. The gouge is huge.

7. But wait. There’s more. $65 hazardous waste disposal fee. $2 digital service fee. $19 shop fee. She had them detail what all those were for and got them dropped from her bill. The waste fee was for the oil change she wasn’t getting, but somehow, totally by accident, that fee stayed on her bill. She argued it down to an $8 fee. When she questioned that, she was told the fob came in a plastic package and that was the disposal fee for that. She told them she would take the packaging with her. $0 fee.

This sort of thing infuriates me. For high end cars, like MB, one would expect a certain level of price gouge in return for the quality and expertise in repair. There is also an expectation that the customers will NOT be treated like an old cow on a second hand milking machine. Some reasonable level of superior treatment is expected in return for the big payout of a quality luxury car. This stealership was offering none of that. Long wait times, the conga line of service managers, and the attempt to mark up everything, as well as parts and service departments not even talking to each other about a simple key activation are things you might expect from the Chevy stealership in upstate NY where the stealership owner is related to the local crime family.

I suspect, MB is a victim of their own success as a brand. People who buy such cars, keep them while they are new and shiny, then get a new one. New cars don’t need lots of repairs and service. Quality cars need even less. Stealerships make most of their profits in the service bays, not the sales floor. The MB stealership had all the signs of a business that was starving to death. Fewer employees leading to longer wait times. They didn’t even have a courtesy driver but would “call you an Uber”. But they had 5 different service managers all trying to upsell everything on the car from tires to wiper blades as if they were paid by commission and this was the only big fish who had been in all week.

I have been considering some end of life arrangements of my own. For the 4runner, not for me personally. Eventually, it will need replacement with something newer and once again I will have the “fun” of going into a stealership. Stories like this make me wonder if I just might hold off for another 50K miles.

Amazon Fraud

It seems, on-line retail Titan Amazon is having a problem with people using their platform to commit massive levels of fraud. The cost of that fraud is born in equal parts by the consumers and by Amazon themselves.

How it happens. unscrupulous vendors in the tech sectors repackage older products and make claims about how awesome they are. You can see more about this here.

The video goes into various high tech solutions to combat this scourge on profitability and consumer confidence. But the answer is much simpler than that: Don’t buy anything on Amazon, or Ebay from a Chinese vendor. If the vendor name looks like it was created by AI selecting random name combinations, it was.

I myself do occasionally buy stuff from China, practically everything we consume today is made there. But so far, when you buy from major American retailers, you get that company standing behind their Chinese manufacturing and doing some quality control in the process. But those other companies with Chinese names, unpronounceable name, and random alpha-numeric names, are likely all fraud, all the time. You can skip the step of taking your new products to the landfill and just send them your cash without expecting anything in return. It seems that 70 years of Communism, laid over a foundation of Confucianism, Daoism, and ancestor worship, totally erases any cultural value for fair trade. Making a buck, even by making only a few dollars on each transaction, is the only rule they have now.

What is the point of a GED?

I have been hearing multiple media ads paid for by taxes telling people how wonderful it is for them to go out and get their GED. As you may recall, the General Equivalency Diploma, or GED is how people get a diploma for HS, after they drop out of high school and never return. It is one of the most useless diplomas that exist and not worth anyone paying the school fees to get one. Let me explain.

1. Only the US Military will ever ask if you graduated HS. No other employer cares about that. You can even gain entry to a college and graduate with a PHD without the benefit of a HS diploma. So, there is no value of getting one. Employers want to know if yo ae old enough to work for them and if you have any skills they can use. Complicated jobs, will require higher degrees or certificates.
2. Graduating from HS means nothing. In our society today there is a huge variation between college-bound students and unskilled labor-bound students. There are entire school districts where students are unable to read, write or do basic math. And that is just the students who finish HS. The schools themselves do not offer any sort of minimum achievement that they are attesting to for graduates. No one cares.
3. So, who benefits? Thee are a whole bunch of community colleges out there giving classes at a skill level that should have been covered in public schools. Those colleges make a huge profit from getting as many stupid students in as possible. Smart students go to real colleges. Those colleges don’t care if their students graduate, or if they learn anything while trying. It’s all about getting as much money from them before they drop out, just like they did in HS. And the government pays for the advertising because of all the student loan and grant programs out there for underachieving people. This is free money that those community colleges need and want and to get it, all they have to do is get more HS dropouts to walk in the door.
4. If you, for some reason didn’t finish HS, put it behind you. Move on with your life and go get that next more useful goal instead of chasing after the useless goal of reliving your past.

Made me laugh

If you are an old Trekie, you will understand.

I’m Done

It has never happened before. I was an early adopter of home computing when I bought an Apple 2C way back in 1985. I have had a computer in my home ever since. I have played the game of upgrading and buying new machines to stay on the edge of competency with the latest technology and computing specs for home users.

Then yesterday it happened. For the first time ever, I filled up my Hard Drive.

The disc in question is a 1/2T SSD that hold the operating system. Up to this point I have been putting everything on it even though that computer had an additional 1.5T in HHD space, using two HHDs that this computer inherited from my previous game machines. So, I moved all my documents, records, pictures, movies and Itunes files to a spare drive. That freed up a whopping 100MB. A little investigating led me to find that I also had over 100GB of data for three games I was playing. World of Warships, They are Billions, and Fallout 4.

Moving World of Warships was EASY. Just drag and drop it to the F: drive and adjust the path in the desktop Icon. It worked just fine.

Fallout and Billions are Steam games so I used their utility to move those files to the F: Drive as well. Billions worked fine and restored all the saved games seamlessly as if I had never left.

Fallout was a problem. In addition to the game data files and saved game files I had gazillions of mods, organized in Vortex. Moving all of those was not as easy. The saved game files never made the transition. No telling where they went. They were supposed to be automagically restored from the Steam cloud but that didn’t happen. I knew this could happen when I started this process and I had intended to restart my game progress anyway so that I could take advantage of new looks, new content and better dialogs from over 500 new mods I downloaded as part of a new content collection of mods. It was downloading those mods that “broke the bank” on my primary SSD. The consequence of moving this game to the HDD from the SSD is that cut scenes take three times the time to load. Otherwise, play is the same.

I enjoy the way mods can make an old game shine like new and add new content. It’s like having a whole new game. All that new content was created by smart industrious nerds who find enjoyment creating those mods from scratch and then distributing them for everyone… FOR FREE.

So, I am back in business now. I have never filled a drive before. I thought that only happened to shady people like movie pirates and porn servers.

There is still an unaccountable amount of data on that SSD and I need to discover what is hogging all that space.

Just today I found out that Bethesda, creators of the Fallout franchise, intends to release an update that will incorporate all the fixes they have been avoiding making for ten years. That update will likely be forced on every user through Steam while we sleep and will make all our mods unplayable. If that happens, I will likely see the last of that game. I hope they give me enough time to discover the new parts of my current mod collection.

Decline of Civilization

I’m seeing commercials on Hulu for pre-mixed drinks. Evidently, people are now too stupid to add alcohol to fruit drink or follow a 3-part recipe.