Nom de plume: Rivrdog

Wednesday WTFs

A blog in which I communicate my wonderment to the wider world. Contrary to the popular opinion of my other 36 personalities, I do NOT have a total handle on Life, and there ARE a few puzzlements left to me. Here are a few of them.

WTF, category Irony:

 The Secret Service scandal was discovered when a disagreement on how much a prostitute should charge for her services came to light.  

She was asking for $800.00. The Secret Service Agent offered $30.00.

 

How ironic is it that the only person in Washington willing to cut spending gets fired?

(H/T to the Coyote Kid).

WTF, category The Whole Truth:

  "If you are not legally and morally justified in taking someone's life, you have no business whatsoever pointing a lethal weapon at any part of their body."

What Tam said. Enough said. Via Uncle.

WTF, category Whacky Terbaccy:

Advocates of Whacky Terbaccy legalization (and it's already legal, with a few formalities, under Oregon's loose Medical Marijuana laws) just elected the Top Cop in Oregon, Retired Judge Ellen Rosenblum, to be Oregon AG. I served many a time as a Court Deputy in her court when she was a circuit Judge in my county. Good mind, sharp intuition, but it's a little disturbing that she seems to have been funded in the crucial late stages of her campaign almost entirely by money from the potheads. I'm anti-pothead, myself, having seen the problems firsthand that this minor drug causes (same level of problems as alcohol, really). Additionally, the fact that Socialist George Soros has poured tens of millions of dollars into MJ legalization efforts to further his Stalinist ideas of "social justice" tells me that the biggest downside of more MJ smoked by more people won't just be a shortage of Cheetos, it will likely be a "benevolent" Big Government smiling down on the stoned masses, knowing that stoners can't do much mischief, and when they try, they're easily defeated.

WTF, category Zombie Apocalypse:

I'm puzzled by the national fascination with the subject of Zombies, and the only explanation I can offer to end my puzzlement is that the craze is the result of a backlash against Unicorns, and things like Unicorn Dust (like the Big Government, Unicorn Dust falling on things makes them magically free), Unicorn Farts, which like the Green Faeries of AlGore's invention, are a majikal counter to Glow-bull Warmening.

WTF, category Take Down Guns:

Why aren't ALL sporting carbines made in take-down models? Better late than never for this model, though.

 

Tuesday trespass...

...wherein we show some more examples of how the Left tramples on traditional American values.

Example One: Nanny Medicine. Watching the noon news on Channel eight here in Stumptown, I heard the newsbabe try to explain a new definition of "obese", which, BTW, USED to have the meaning of more than 30 pounds over ideal weight. The "new" definition of "obese" apparently means flabby-looking, because the reporter explained that one can be "obese" AT one's ideal weight. This is nothing more than a blatant attempt to use scare tactics to scare people into being underweight, or becoming gym rats, or both. I reject it.

Example Two: Qualification of Presidents: Obama does not meet the qualification listed in the Constitution because he is NOT a "natural born citizen" as required, then defined in the SCOTUS case Minor v. Happersett. In that case, a "natural born citizen" was defined as, "all children born in a country of parents who were it's citizens". There is no argument that Barack Hussein Obama was not born of parents who were both citizens. There is argument that he was born here. US District Court Judge Anderson of TN  has cited Minor v. Happersett as being on point. Sheriff Arpaio thinks that this is important enough to let superior courts decide whether Obama should even be on ballots across the country. Read about this new angle on the "birther" controversy here. I support Sheriff Joe in his quest to have the truth come out. This Nation could stand the minor constitutional crisis caused by discovering that Obama was never qualified to hold office, at this point, but if Obama wins another term of office, and THEN a court tells him he is not qualified, there is a high potential for a MAJOR Constitutional crisis. A gun sort of crisis, if you know what I mean, Verne.

Example Three: The Fourth Estate as Obama shills. It seems to me that there are rules about this. At what point do the rules get enforced? When is someone going to start accumulating all the minutes and hours of TeeVee time used strictly to re-elect Obama, and the column-miles of newsprint used for the same reason, and decree that said media either have to give equal time to the Romnizer or be classed for tax purposes and purposes of license renewals as political shills?

Example Four: We're not Los Angeles, and don't need their air pollution rules in Oregon. It seems that City of Portland garbage rates are about to rise by almost 10% just so the garbage collectors can buy new trucks that meet the most stringent emissions rules. Those would be Kalifornica's rules, which are written for the extreme example of the Los Angeles Basin airshed, arguably the worst place a large city has been built, on the entire planet. The topography and local micro-climate makes it impossible to get rid of man OR nature-generated air pollution, and rules for emissions were written to consider those facts, but then, those rules have been foisted off on the entire rest of the Nation, which does not need them because the rest of the Nation does not have the airshed problems that Los Angeles has. No matter, the insane Portland City Council, led by the Gay Pedophile Mayor, Sam Adams, brought in the CA rules, and so all the trucks have to be changed out. No matter that the current trucks still have life left, the haulers must buy new ones, and oh, while you're at it, City Council, did you remember to mandate that those trucks use "bio-diesel" fuel at $7.00+ per gallon? That stupid rule, which the City Fleet is, itself, saddled with, would make the perfect capper for this insane additional expense in an already insanely-expensive city.

Example Five: When the history books tell us that Liquor Prohibition failed as a social-control experiment, let's try it all over again! The self-same insane City of Portland, which has forced foodcart entrepreneurs into what used to be called by the Nazis, "lagers" or concentrations, smarted recently when the Oregon Liquor Control Commission, acting on their legal counsel's advice that such establishments, once forced to tie themselves down, had to be treated, for purposes of liquor licensing, as brick-and-mortar restaurants. They issued a liquor license (beer and wine only) to one food cart, in the lager known locally as "Cartlandia", no doubt, after the TV series "Portlandia". So the city is mightily cheese(burgered)ed off, and has filed suit against the State liquor agency. The Rivrdog blog, no real friend of the OLCC, nevertheless sides with them on this one, and hopes their legal beagles turn into legal pitbulls and rip the City a new one.

That's enuff for today. Suffice it to say I do NOT forgive these trespasses.

the FeeBees lose track of one of their own

...and they're beating the bushes VERY hard to find him.

Special Agent, hard worker, no disciplinary problems, un-remarkable home life, appears to have a mid-life crisis and goes AWOL. Takes his gun with him.

Nothing further, except the ferocity with which he is being sought.

Hmmmm, says the suspicious mind, wonder why?

Well, for starters, this Special Agent likely knows about every counter-terror plan on the books, at least on the West Coast.

Of course, there are broad hints, appearing to be official hints, that he may have taken off to say goodbye cruel world. That doesn't fool this old cop. That same thing is said EVERY time a spy or sleuth with important info disappears. After they find him alive, if they do, he will likely be hustled to some hush-hush shrinkhouse to be deprogrammed.

Think the Gulag Archipelago can't happen here?

Think again.

How Bromantic!

The "First Gay President" magazine cover.

H/T to Uncle

Okay then, now the realpolitik: this is a lesson in how not to do politics.

First, take this to the bank: the gay community is not a serious asset for the President. He already had them in his pocket, because, except for the few "Log Cabin" gay rethuglicans, they're already dummycrats. He's not converting anyone with this message. Are there any lazy gays who need energizing? Again, maybe a paltry few, but most I know are VERY politically active for the Left already, so the Obumbler didn't pick up many votes by "energizing" that base, either.

Second, he HAS succeeded in energizing the GOP base with this issue, in a way that the Romnizer could only have had wet dreams about, and there may well be some Christian or Jewish undecided voters who will push the Romnoid button for sure because of this. My guess: far more of those than any pro-gay votes just changed loyalties.

Net loss of votes for Obama? Well, we aren't voting this week (except in the primary in OR, and Obummer is not seriously opposed here), but if the national polls are to be believed, the Wahn just lost 7% to Romniddy. More important, five Democratic Senators runnng for re-election have just spent the weekend distancing themselves from The First Gay President.

Many more gems like that, and Obama will retire 1-20-13. If he does, his first term and his campaign for re-election will become THE textbook case of how NOT to do politics.

Now, which one of his Two Left Feet will Romney trip over this week?

Are YOU a "threat" to those in power?

You might be, just by reading this blog, as a grumpy Major explains here.

Mucked-Up Monday

I arise today at a reasonable hour, and decide to reconcile my checking account, which I haven't done in 12 days. At the 'puter, I click open the Credit Union web page, and note that it has been completely re-designed. Hmmmm...the hairs on the back of my neck start to tingle (I am the RivrDOG, after all!).

I find the log-in tab, and click it. It opens very slowly, and so I insert my account number and click on "Password", which fails to take the password I type. Hmmmm. I change from Chrome to Internet Exploder and try again. No joy.

I go back to Chrome and re-enter everything, but now use the "tab" key to get to the password box, and now it takes my password, but when I click "go", it doesn't go, and I get a FUBAR box from Chrome. Back to Exploder, do the same, get the same result. Go back, do it all over again, this time using the keyboard Enter key to enter instead of mouse-clicking on "go". Still FUBAR.

I started to try to access this account (into which ALL my pension deposits are electronically made, and out of which I pay all bills) @ 0745 local, and it is now 0905, and the CU is actually open, but still no fix. I have been on "hold" on the phone for over and hour, and have no answer, just hold ads. I read blogs for an hour to pass the time while on hold.

It's payday, too, and if this keeps up, I will have been denied almost $7K in incoming funds.

This about rips it with me for this CU. I have done business with them for almost 40 years, but they cheap out on everything. In this case, their mistake is obvious: they changed everything to have the newest and latest web-page, but failed to post their IT guy to 24-hour monitoring of it to make sure all the new server links stayed up and working.

This is also the age of robo-calling, and the farging CU COULD have had a robo-call sent out to all the members to advise them of the outage, but they didn't do THAT, either.

******************************************

The issue got resolved about 0915, 1.5 hours after I discovered it. I had to redial the CU, the hold music went nowhere, and after the staff took their desks for the business day, no one picked up that line. GRRRRRR! After redialing, I get a staff member, and she discovers that in the last five minutes, the system had just come back up.

Tomorrow is the Annual Meeting, so I might just have to drop by the CU and pose a question from the floor to the CEO of why the CU either does not have a 24-7 IT guy, or subscribe to a monitoring service, or have ANY way to report an online banking outage when the office is closed. Saving the members' money is one thing, but when they are so cheap as to make online banking useless with their inattention because they won't pay for some system to monitor and report to the IT manager, then they're saving TOO many shekels.

 

"Tactical" Clothing

Yeah, well...

Tactical. Okay, first prepare the soldier, then put the soldier into tactical clothing. As long as we follow THAT order, we might wind up with a soldier who is tactically prepared. Same for cops, same for we-the-people.

Mind you, I am NOT saying "tactical" is useless, I just think it's oversold, and the danger in that is those folks who feel that it's appropriate to think "tactically" might just stop their tactical preparations when they put on those tactical pants or that tactical vest, shield their eyes with tactical shades, and hide behind/under a tactical head cover.

The real questions always remain, though: can they hit what they shoot at with that Tactical rifle, can they move tactically when they are not shooting, and can they communicate tactically when necessary? If you can't do those Big Three of "tactical", well, then you aren't "tactical", no matter what you wear.

Now, as if to prove my point about "tactical", along comes the "Tactical Kilt". Okay, then, does putting on a lower-body garment with NO knee protection, and little leg protection, REALLY rate as dressing Tactically?

I'm one-eighth Scot, Campbell Clan, but I don't wear the kilt. When I don't need to protect my lower legs from abrasive assault, I wear shorts (no, not those baggy ones, I prefer my shorts SHORT). Generally, though, I find that full-length men's pants are ideal for the active man.

I'm not a kilt kind of guy, so I guess then I don't have to answer THAT question either, do I?

H/T for the kilt link goes to the Hammer-Bone, sometimes known as Two Dogs

Earth Day, 2012

There's some history behind Earth Day, you need to go to the Wiki and read it. You actually only need to read the first paragraph, because it will tell you (between the lines, I'm sure it wasn't written that way on purpose or the Wiki would have been deleted by now). Note in the Wiki that the original Earth Day was all about stewardship of the planet and it's natural environment, which is what it should be about today, but isn't.

Note also, in the Wiki, that the United Nations hijacked Earth Day three years ago. It is now just another tool of that anti-national-sovereignty body, which uses and recommends socialism as it's mechanism to destroy sovereign capitalist governments.

When the UN hijacked Earth Day, they brought in the "Mother Earth" thing. Back when the original Earth Day was proclaimed, the Mother Earth or Mother Nature thing was a joke, as in the margarine commercial. Now it is a religion, and as such, is the only religion the United Nations recognizes (overtly, they recognize Islam under the table).

So, we have had a progression here, a progressive change. It's just another one of the progressive changes that wound up as a socialist tool, but environmentalism went from "conservation", as advanced one hundred years ago by Teddy Roosevelt, to Earth Day (let's ALL save the Planet) in 1970, to today's version (we're acolytes of Gaia, the Earth Goddess).

The only true version is the original. We can use the bounty of nature, but we must conserve it, so there will always be some.

That's what your Rivrdog follows as his outdoor creed. I recycle, too, in fact, devoted yesterday morning to getting the non-curbside recyclables together to take to City Hall, where, once a year, their huge parking lot is used for actual GOOD, and becomes a massive recycling center for the hard-to-recycle items.

If you conserve nature, you've done your duty to the planet. Socialism does not count as doing your duty to the planet, nor does prostrating yourself before the false idol of Gaia.

I knew Ronald Reagan, and you may NOT compare yourself to him, Obama

I knew Ronald Reagan because being stationed in CA during the late 1960s then the late 70s to early 80s, he was the talk of the State. The much-more-respectful MSM reported more accurately on the President then.

Ronald Reagan started out as a union guy, President of the Screen Actor's Guild, but at the time, the "wild-eyed socialists"* in Hollywood were in the minority, not the majority like now. There were a LOT of WW2 veterans calling each other Brother and Sister at Union meetings then, and there was at least SOME respect for the USA amongst the members of SAG.

After his SAG stint, Reagan went on to get elected Lieutenant Governor, then Governor of California, which, at the time really WAS "paradise on earth" (yes, readers, I could easily have been a dope-smoking hippie myself, they were graciously accepted most places then, as somewhat of a side-show, but they were accepted there).

Reagan went on to become President, taking over from Jimmy Carter, who dispite being a Naval Academy graduate, and a small businessman, made a piss-poor President. I had a fellow B52 crew-member who bought a residence in Riverside in '81, and had to pay a 18% mortgage rate (and the rates were FALLING then!), IIRC. I rented, was scared out of the home-buyer's market.

President Reagan's Airborne Command Post used to land at my duty station, March AFB (Now March Air Reserve Base), which was then the headquarters for the Strategic Air Command's Fifteenth Air Force, and it was home to double-Squadron wings of both B52s and KC-135 tankers. The Presidential Airborne Command Post was a brand-new E-4 (Boeing 747), which was outfitted as the President's place to fight a nuke war with the USSR from, even before Air Force One, it was THAT important. I got a VIP tour of the top-secret aircraft, which was later featured (a mock-up of it was featured) in the HBO movie "By Dawn's Early Light".

Gawd, this is digressy, isn't it?

*The point here was supposed to be: I knew Ronald Reagan, I probably knew him better than you do, Presient Obama. He was NOT a "wild-eyed socialist", but YOU ARE. Plus, you're a liar to boot, Obama, and I never knew Reagan to lie. 

Oh, BTW, President Obama, Warren Buffet, who has put up with you to an excessive degree, has just signaled you to quit calling your "tax the producers out of existence" plan the "Buffet Rule". Do the old, sick guy a favor and stop with that nonsense. Don't bother to try to call it the "Reagan Rule", either. Reagan wanted to lower taxes for EVERYONE, not just the dependable sloths who will always vote to get their "free stuff". Oh, and quit smoking that history-revisionist crack-pipe, Mister President. It's not legal yet. If you want it to be, fire Biden from your ticket and put Ron Paul on there.... 

Why we fail

Ever since the "Great Recession" started, my State of Oregon has been two full percentage points behind the national unemployment statistics, which are probably pencil-whipped, add at least 5 percentage points to all such stats you see. Oregonians are in that hole for a variety of reasons, high taxes are probably the one thing keeping most business depressed, but excessive State regulation stacked onto excessive National regulation probably has something to do with it also.

Oregon sucks for business, unless, of course, you are a Hollywood liberal who wants to make a film here, and then the State bends over backward, putting State employees to work in your producer's office to "smooth the way" (BTW, those folks all work for the Governor directly). "Green" also gets huge tax breaks, but if you just want to set up a stamping mill to stamp out a particular piece for say, the auto industry, fuggeddabboudditt.

All of this gives bad impressions to all those Daddy Warbucks types out there, and, like it or not, they have the moolah to actually put business in this state.

What to do.

Well, if you are a liberal like the Governor, you sign up for a class to help you understand the poor business climate.

You go to Portland State U, my alma mater, and there you will find the "Institute for Sustainable Solutions". No, I'm not kidding, they actually TEACH that crap. When I matriculated in 1966, PSU gave a good basic education, more night than day classes to students, many of them Veterans, who wanted to get ahead in life. There were few of these "puff" classes, and certainly no entire Institutes devoted to teaching this sort of puffery. But I digress....

At that prestigious (in Portland, anyway) Institute, they are wondering if those somber measurements of GDP (Gross Domestic Product, the total worth of all good and services sold/consumed in the US) is actually the best way to measure the value of an economy.

Dollars are SOOOOOOO old-fashioned as a measurement, so Twentieth Century, says the Institute.

Let's measure FEEEEEELINGS instead, says the Institute. So, the Institute proposes measuring the GPI ("Genuine Progress Indicator") instead. What is a GPI composed of? 26 things, according to the fishwrap's article on same, but let's examine the name for now.

"Genuine". The word is supposed to mean truthful, real, authentic. What about this measurement gives itself the right to be "genuine"? The article doesn't say. One surmises that they just needed a "G" word to put in front of "Progress" to hide it's association with all things lefty.

"Progress" This one's easy-peasy. PROGRESSive. Get it?

So we have the "Real because we say so, list of progressive things we think indicates satisfaction with life". Yeah, that's a mouthful, but that's what the Institute is trying to cram down our throats as being just as important a measurement as the basic, definable, dollars and cents of the GDP. This GPI is your basic moving target, people. Since there are REAL bean-counters out there who CAN and DO point out when the Feddle Gummint messes with the GDP stats, there is a source of counter-point if those stats get pencil-whipped. This new Indicator has twenty-six indices of what? It comes up with what? The "World Happiness Report" (issued by the Earth Institute, no less). Who gives a flying fark? The followers of Mother Gaia and the cult of Holy Sustainability are those who give a fark. Not we filk who work for a living, or are living off the fruits of working for a living for 46 years like your blogger.

Scary, isn't it?

This is why we fail. This is a "Genuine" guarantee of failure. This is nothing but a way for the Left to claim we all smell like roses when we just stepped into a bucket of crap.

There is truly no hope. There is especially no hope when the Guv'ner sits in this class, lapping up this poison like a kitten lapping up warm milk.