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.

Transformers, extinction review

Oh for freaks sake. This movie is just one long CGI enhanced car chase. The excitement is so pervasive, it just gets boring. Add to that the dad-daughter story and it just gets even more boring. I cant even tell who the good robots are anymore. Just tons of metal flying everywhere and explosions.

If normal background physics were a thing in this movie, millions of people are being killed under collapsing buildings and billions of tons of scrap metal falling from the sky.

GM seems to have bought prime placement rights.

Again, the white guy working for the CIA is the villain. And after making it clear he was doing it for the money, he still gives a speach about doing it all for his country. Pathetic writing.

Chinese industrialists are all hard working honest and productive and completely free of base motives. Just like real life (wink). One might think the producers allowed the Chinese government to review the product first.

Optimus prime… riding a transformer T-Rex. It’s like they aren’t even trying anymore.

Wait. Optimus Prime doesn’t need a space ship to travel? Did the writters get dropped on their collective heads?

Christmas Deer posing.

Twitter Twaddle

I have been watching this with great interest. Here are my thoughts for consideration:

1. What Twitter did in influencing the election was unfair, but not illegal and should have been expected all along. It is perfectly acceptable for people to use their private corporations to benefit causes they support, including political causes. There is no law preventing this nor would any such law be possible. Sort of like why Democrats in the Senate were totally against any Catholics being on the Supreme Court.
2. For elements of the US government, privately, to collude with Twitter, etc in their “influencing the election”, is a blatant violation of law on the part of each and every person who participated.
3. For elements of the US government to take part in an election and attempt to sway it’s outcome is also a clear violation of law. But since if you win the election, you get to enforce the law (or fail to), we get a system where some people are above the law. This has been objectively true since the Obama administration. And in the trump administration, we discovered that nearly all of the high ranking bureaucrats in DC, regardless of administration, are loyal to the Democrats.
4. When you are trying to win public office it is you fault if you do not understand the political and public terrain well enough to understand that your political enemies in Twitter and facebook will actually be working against you.
5. To the Extent that Twitter and Facebook edited information to influence the election, they violated no laws. But the Democratic party and it’s candidates did violate campaign finance laws by not claiming those in kind contributions that amounted to the equivalent of BILLIONS of dollars worth of free advertising. But again, if they win teh election, and have thousands of supporters working at the FEC, DoJ, and FBI, there is no possibility of this law being enfodrced.
6. It is a natural and predictable path that FB and Twitter would use their hidden algorithms to guide the election outcomes. Newspapers have been doing it since print was invented. Radio and TV have been doing it since Marconi.
7. Such “collusion” is unstoppable. No laws will prevent it. This is why it was absurd on its face for the Democrats to go all in on the Russian Collusion story, instead of trying to nail Trump on something that was real and an actual violation of law. Remember, all of the national media covered that story as if it were real. All of them similarly covered over the Biden Laptop story. All of the national media twisted the Ukraine phone call as if it were a crime for Trump to ask Ukraine to investigate corruption, instead of focusing on Biden BEING CORRUPT.
8. To the extent that Twitter and FB users paid for political advertising in targeted time zones and locations and did not get them, this would be a violation of law and contract on the part of FB and Twitter as the deep pockets, but also naming the corporate execs who made the decisions to do that. In Democratic speak, it’s Ok to refuse to bake a cake for the gay couple wedding if you refuse to take the order, but not if you took their deposit and then don’t tell them until the last minute.

I still don’t know why any adult has Twitter.

But since the democrats no longer need voters, it hardly matters how much influence Twitter and FB do.

Commercials: Drugs

Oh geez! Now they are advertizing drugs to treat diseases I’ve never heard of and are so rare I’d likely never hear of if I hadn’t seen that commercial. And even after I have seen it, I don’t remember it because it’s just random letters that stand for arbitrary names.

Vacation: Montana

I am vacationing near Glacier National Park in Montana.

It’s cold out there.

This is a very white state. Everyone is white. Even McDonald’s employees are white. There is also a LOT of wealth here, judging by the mansions everywhere. There are a lot of casinos and canibis stores too. Casino = mini mart with computer betting machines. Finally, not a lot of fat people here.

My Superpower: Invisibility

I have discovered that I am totally invisible to women under 50. But if I enter a women’s bathroom, I suddenly become visible again. What a fickle superpower. How is this any advantage?

EDIT: Pretty damned inconvenient power when I’m trying to get the waitress attention to pay my bill and catch my flight. Seriously. Totally invisible.

Review: Lost in Space… black and white

I’m watching this old series from my childhood. It’s a great series. Lots of old actors playing bit parts long before they were famous.

Kurt Russell at 15 years old, playing a 12 year old, proving his manliness by beating up 10 year old Will Ribinson… and losing.

The Amazon version is terribly high definition in a way the old TV series could never be. You can see every hair and pore on close up faces.

What the F were they thinking sending a single family into space. Who were the young Robinsons supposed to mate with and continue the human race? Aliens?

Kill Smith already. Every single episode he is causing potentially lethal challenges to the family. Push him off a cliff. Smash his head with a rock. I don’t care how much of a pacifist you are. Just look the other way when the military pilot gets in a rage. For the good of the family, Smith MUST die. Exile is not good enough. He just comes back.

Episode where will goes back to Earth. Great episode. Made in the 1966, intending to be decades later, but will goes to a town that is primitive even by 1966 standards. I was alive in 1966. We had dial phones in every home. We didn’t have those edison phones from 1930. Now were we still using wagons with wheels made by the local blacksmith.

I swear. Every single episode. Crisis. Where are the kids? Let’s go find them. More crisis. Probably should rethink that whole, let’s take children into space thing.

Over and over, they learn the lesson of being armed everywhere, and then the very next episode, they are wandering around without their guns. These people learn way too slowly to have reached space travel. Ever.

Traveling man

I’m on vacation. Moving through Dullas airport in Virginia. Observations follow.

On what is supposed to be the busiest air travel day in the year… this place is a ghost town. Seriously. I feel like I’m in a Stephen King movie. One of the crappy movies. Not IT or the Stand.

Funny. A voluntary masked retard is sitting in the restaurant eating. She took her mask off. I’m confused. Does she think the air in the restaurant is safer than the hallway 5 feet away? I understand people caring about their health and wanting permanent mask status. But this one can’t seem to make up her mind about where in the mask spectrum she wants to be.

Edit: moving through Denver now. More of a crowd, but still nothing more than normal traffic. Where are all the people?

Arts and crafts: Fake parts

So… fixed the car last weekend. Then I notice the car is running cooler than normal. In fact it never gets to normal operating temperature. My diagnostics app says coolant temp is 150 and normal is 195. Then I get warning lights and other problems like low idle and transmission heat warnings.

I suspect the thermostat is bad even though it is brand new. It was in the kit of things I replaced last week. I go to toyota and get a new one, $50 (gasket alone was 10). I install it and everything is working fine now.

So I test the old original thermostat and the new one I just installed and then replaced. They are both supposed to be genuine Toyota OEM parts in Toyota boxes.

I put them in a pan of water and turn up the heat.

At 143, they are both still closed tight.

Then at 150, the bad one opens a crack. The sliver of white on the upper edge is the pan showing through.

Here, at 186, the bad thermostat is wide open like a drunk cheerleader on the team bus after the winning game. The “chaste” and pure thermostat, even though she has a lot of years on her, stays closed until her princely 190 temperature arrives.

Here is the older thermostat. Notice it has an 82C marking on it. That is the temperature it is designed to START opening. There are other markings too. This is a genuine Toyota part.

This part also has an 82C marking. And no other markings. This is a counterfeit part.

It used to be that you had to make choices between OEM parts or aftermarket third party vendor parts. You knew the third party parts might be lower quality and definitely lower price. But now, thanking to F-ing China, we all now have to worry about fake parts, pretending to be genuine. And they aren’t anywhere near as good. At least third party parts had the pride to put their own name on it. The Chinese are all about fake, fraud, deceit, and gouging a little bit more to get by. They have no cultural ethics about this. Chinese people should never be trusted about anything important.

Now I need to wonder if the other parts from that kit were also fakes. Changing out the timing belt and water pump may have shortened the life of my engine instead of lengthening it.