Free Republic

I took my 2017 Expedition in for a water pump replacement. $1500. The truck has four pages of features I’ll never use. It’s so complex that I don’t want to change something as simple as a water pump. Changing the transmission filter cost $750. There’s no dip stick so you have to capture the fluid, measure it, and put back in the same amount. Ridiculous. Oh, and it has all kinds of satellite enabled features. Why? It has an “infotainment” system. I want to go from one place to another. I don’t need or want entertainment and if I did, I’m sure my phone could provide it. Vehicles are so out of touch with what I, the market, want it’s ridiculous. OH, I paid $17000 for something that cost five times that when new. Someone took one hell of a beating on it. When the first big item fails, I’ll junk it.

I looked at a Mavrick. The only model with a naturally aspirated engine is a hybrid. I’m not buying anything with a lithium battery. It has three cooling systems, the engine, the battery controller and the battery. That’s three times the failure rate. And, again, I can’t work on it.

My next truck will be at least a twenty-year-old model, and I’ll rebuild whatever it needs. I’ll spring for a new interior.

“Why even tell our intelligence officials?”

Jimmy Carter was asked why he had done something while at a Washington dinner party. He said, “Well, we know from Muhammar’s brother-in-law that xxx” Kadafi’s brother-in-law was a top Israeli source. The man was arrested that night and tortured to death. Following that incident Israel stopped providing the provenance of the information they supplied. It’s not that the CIA can’t be trusted, it’s that the people the CIA must supply information to, politicians like Nancy I-hired-a-Chinese-spy-as-my-driver Pelosi can’t be trusted.

To your question, the Israelis get information from the US. To maintain that channel, they periodically lubricate it with information of their own.

Marvin the paranoid robot.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eh-W8QDVA9s

I’m thinking that at her age and build an outfit a bit less clingy and Vegas show girl would be more flattering. Something looser with an open jacket, perhaps. ‘Cause, damn girl, you look wildly unattractive.

“It was a power trip for the doctor.”

My father had given written and verbal instructions that he wasn’t to get extreme medical care. Despite this, as each family member showed up the doctor pressed them to sign papers to give our now unconscious father an arterial stent. None of the visitors had any power of attorney. Each of them had spoken with dad and knew his wishes. The doctor withdrew the intravenous liquid and sounded and looked like a petulant child when he said, “Well, if you won’t authorize my treatment, he can’t have liquids either.” There was a childish head-wiggle that went with this statement. I was astonished an adult would sound and act like this.

Fortunately, dad died before suffering more under this man’s “care.”

When you go into the hospital, your primary doctor is no longer involved in your care. When we told the primary what had happened, she said she would have intervened. She was aware that the hospital’s doctor was, in her words, “a real prick.” I guess hospitals have to keep people like that because there appears to be a shortage of doctors. At what point, though, is the doctor’s behavior criminal?

If I recall, he was ran joint command. I’m sure if I’m wrong I’ll get lots of replies.

I’m trying to visualize how this kind of insanity might have looked if it was in a different age. Prior to WWII there were social rules in the British army. Learning dressage (fancy horse riding) was a must. Okay, crazy and out of touch with the world in 1939 but it was tradition, so can probably be forgiven as an absolute MUST for some ranks. Another thing was, that if an officer got divorced, he was forced to resign his commission. An officer, a general I think, fighting in the jungle under General Stilwell, received an urgent message that his wife had filed for divorce and his resignation was required. He handed the message to General Stilwell who said he’d take care of it. Apparently, Stilwell penned a blistering reply essentially saying, kiss my butt, but in proper language. The regulation was changed.

In the near future the trans stupidity is going to make bell bottom pants and Nehru jackets look normal and stylish. The sexual mutilation surgeries, which would have resulted in prison sentences for doctors maybe just ten years ago will be viewed like lobotomies are today.

There’s a book titled, “The Madness of Crowds” which chronicles similar incredible insanity over the centuries. But even compared to some of that crazyness, the Tampons for men and trans idiocy will stand out as “Damn! What were they thinking?” Even eating Tide Pods seems rational in comparison.

“Haven’t thought about pagers in a long time. “

I’m guessing it’s a combination infrastructure and cost issue. The bandwidth for a pager is going to be nil. We’re spoiled here because we have great infrastructure and cell phone cost is probably about $60 per month with lots of data as well. Sixty dollars per month to the average American is probably pocket change. I don’t know what the cost of a minute of talk-time is in Bahrain, but it might be like cell service in the very beginning here, which was about twenty-five cents per minute.

“It would be interesting to be a fly on the wall at the human resources departments at the pager manufacturer offices today.”

The last time the Mossad did this, and it’s at least twenty years ago, they intercepted a load of pagers. They reprogrammed them so the Mossad had control. Those pagers were being used to detonate bombs. What they did was periodically ping them. If they were attached to a bomb, they detonated the bomb. They got at least one bomb factory and a bunch of bomb techs.

The next time the Mossad dis something like this was when they sent a cell phone, back when they were Motorola bricks as a gift. Then they called it and asked to speak to the target. When he came online, they triggered a bomb.

These terrorist organizations were amazingly sophisticated back in the day. That’s because they went to school under the KGB. The training was apparently first rate. It’s apparent now, though that a lot of organizational learning and contemporary training is lacking.

The purpose of lots of policies and tools is to degrade something over time. Meaning that it isn’t possible to kill it all at once. For example, the sanctions on Russia were not intended to end the Russian economy. Many news outlets expressed disappointment that the economy seems just fine. The intention, like the slow degradation of the terrorist’s institutional knowledge, was to have a cumulative, compounding effect over time. Israel’s playing the long game. My money is on the Mossad.

I have thirty-plus years’ experience of dealing with government employees across all levels of government and many offices. My impression is that if you could graph general competence then thirty years ago the average person, I dealt with was about like the average employee anywhere. But over time the “competence” meaning their ability to understand and to do their assigned job has been steadily going down. I suspect a lot of issues. Hiring for skin color or sex. Hiring because they are vets or some special category the agency is incentivized to hire. Also, they did away with IQ tests and competency exams. I would have thought that high priority jobs like Secret Service agents would maintain high standards. But laws passed by congress to do this or that with labor have a global effect. At this point how do you get from total incompetence back to competence? Laws forcing “discrimination” meaning discriminating against competent people because they don’t meet the other incentives like color, sex, religion, etc. would need to change. Can you imagine the outcry?

The flip side of the coin is that the people needed to create the Leftist Utopia aren’t competent to do that job. They think they’re the most amazing people in existence and they’ll tell you that. Remember Obama telling people he was the smartest guy in the room, and he could do all their jobs better than they could? Yep, enough people reported he said that multiple times that I believe he believes it. That’s the Dunning Krugger effect writ large. That’s the typical Lefty I see in government.

God gives. God takes. Thank God for small favors.

This is relevant, I swear. The way terrorist organizations recruit suicide bombers is well known. They select a vulnerable individual; social outcast, someone with a antisocial view, someone with little family, etc. They make that person feel important. They listen to what he says and support and encourage him to speak his thoughts and they hang onto every word. They keep him close while plugging into his brain the right psychological motivations. They pump him up with whatever is required to motivate him to go through with the assignment. They generally are not far away from where the “incident” will be committed, as emotional support and to ensure he goes through with it. They apply social pressure. Especially intellectually challenged people are easy pickings. That doesn’t mean stupid people. It can be people who are emotionally drawn to the Left. I’ve known many Left people who have advanced degrees and are amazing in their fields. But they don’t have the sense to come in out of the rain. Their world is unicorns and rainbows. Women can be men if they declare they are men. That sort of person.

I already have a low opinion of the “average” voter. But if this election is close, that opinion goes into the negative regions. It was astounding to me that Obama got elected twice. But Vice President Giggles is orders of magnitude worse. She’s not just a bad politician, but worse than Obama on every possible scale. She has all of Hillary’s worse qualities with forty percent less charm. If it’s close, how far away can the apocalypse be?

The dealerships are under contract to carry the inventory costs of X number of cars. So, if they sell, say, twenty percent of their inventory, it will be replaced by twenty-percent worth of new inventory. The manufacturer can’t reduce the build rate because they’re under contract with the UAW. They pay the workers whether the workers are building product or not. (Generally. Contracts vary.)

All these contracts are based on the business picture before the government got in and royally screwed everyone with the lockdowns and rules, regulations and COVID payments that skewed the long-term survival picture of dealers and automakers. For example, the government gave amazing tax breaks if you bought a hundred-thousand-dollar car. The first year you could take $100,000 off your taxable profits, then $80,000, then something lower the third year. All the while you were only making payments on the truck or car. This idiocy moved forward demand, also massively increasing the cost of every vehicle sold. A total fubar to both build and demand side. Then the impact all this had on financing was even worse. The default rate means banks won’t finance a purchase now like they did. People don’t have twenty thousand dollars to put down on a car. Most cars lose that much in depreciation just driving off the lot.

The car dealership has very limited room as they’re under contract. They might be able to adjust fees and add-ons but that’s where they actually make money. Lowered purchase MSRP is up to the manufacturer. If the manufacturer changes the price it may impact their stock price which could start a cascading self destruction. The market is much more complicated than the average person realizes.

When I lived in St. Pete, Fl. in the eighties there was a refugee living in an apartment near me. There was a pond, and the pond was full of Muscovy ducks. He went door to door and asked if anyone owned the ducks. Nobody did. So, over a period of time, he captured, processed and ate the ducks. One day a resident duck feeder saw him capture one. Oh. MY. GOD! You’d have thought he was capturing and eating children. He was forced to move away as the resulting bruhaha was so disconcerting he felt threatened. People drove from miles around to yell at the DUCK MURDERER.

BTW, there used to be duck disposal people. But they all got out of the business when an elderly duck feeder attacked an animal removal specialist, and the old man died of a heart attack. The service company was sued by the relatives of the old man. Insurance was then required and removing ducks became unprofitable.

The trick to duck removal is to wait until early in the morning and then use just one shot from a .22, quickly dispose of the body and say, “what noise?” (Not that I took up duck disposal. Just sayin’ that if I had disposed of those nasty ba$tards that’s how I would have done it.)

I read a doctoral dissertation that studied, I think thirty assassinations throughout history to see if the assassin’s political objectives were obtained. The answer across the bord was no. There were lots of reasons why the assassin’s plans didn’t work but my takeaway was the logic of kill this guy and something “good” happens was flawed in so many unexpected ways that such simplistic thinking was fantasy thought.

WWII was like tornado weather. Tornados are an effect of a large high-pressure region next to a large low-pressure region. A tornado can erupt anywhere on the contact line. Whether the tornado is labeled Hitler, or Trump doesn’t matter. If there’s no Hitler and no Trump but two large differing pressure zones against one another, you will get the tornado regardless of what you name it.

This was a situation where good, qualified politicians wanted to stay as far away from the fallout from the Harris campaign as they could. Being a VP candidate under Harris would be like Albert Einstein being the janitor for a high school math teacher. Not a career building experience.

I hated my first job. I realized if I took on credit card debt, bought a car, or bought a house, I’d be locked into Hell. I lived below my means. While my coworkers bought awesome cars, I drove the twenty-year-old junker I’d used while in college. (I splurged on new tires.) While they bought houses, I lived in an apartment featuring a hollow core closet door for a front door. (It also had two prostitutes living next door.)

Years later when I worked for a big international defense company, I lived each day knowing they might try to force me to sign my name to a fraudulent certificate of compliance. I had a year’s living expenses saved. When the time came, they hit the Quality Manager instead, and he almost went to prison. And he got fired when the government found the fraud.

What I’m saying is, we build our own chains. I made mine from paper mâché and library paste.

A “grown” man reduced to tears by a screaming woman is not a “mature” man. This mature man would say, “Enjoy the rest of your day.” She’d never see me again.

Anyone who thinks there’s some “reasonable” solution to the issues created by Hamas does not understand Hamas. The only solution they will except is a final solution. Somehow Israel has to live with people who want to kill them all without fighting back like they’re in a fight for their lives. How do you resolve that? I think the world should just walk away. No more payments. If Hamas wants food, water, power, medicine, they’ll have to negotiate for it. The world is not helping the situation by supplying Hamas with sustenance. The world’s help means Hamas does not have to compromise. Every dollar to Hamas will be spent killing Israelis.