Nom de plume: Rivrdog

"Pox Parties"....WTF?

Local evening nuze last night did a story on parents who fear vaccinations for their children, but somehow went their children to have immunity from common childhood diseases, so they're throwing "pox parties".

At the pox party, a child with active Chicken Pox is introduced to the kids who don't have it, and they play together such that there is sure to be body-fluid exchange (kiss or touch or share food). Another form of the Pox Party is for the parent of the kid with chicken pox to go out and buy a box of lollipops, open each one, and have the infected kid lick them all, then wrap them back up and send them (in this case, via the US Mail, which was a felony) to the parents who wanted their kids to get the chicken pox.

Here's the problem with this sort of "folk doctoring".

First of all, it's completely medically unsupervised. The child who is passing along the pox might have a secondary infection of a horrible kind, and pass that along, as well as the pox.

Second of all, the parents who expose their kids to the (unknown and probably undiagnosed) disease of another kid have no clue what the problems might be when their kid develops the disease. Their kid might be immuno-compromised, and the pox might kill their kid (or maybe the secondary infection will).

Third, the dosage of the agent is completely uncontrolled, and it's medically and morally wrong to give any drug to a patient if you can't control the drug or the dosage. To be fair, I should point out that the use of smoked Medical Marijuana also disregards this rule (to the utter stupidity of the medical Establishment, some of which supports it).

OK,'Dawg, what's YOUR remedy for parents who far vaccinations but want their kid naturally exposed to these kiddy-diseases?

I'm glad you asked, Mister Muse, but I would have told you anyway.

Suck it up, parents, control your irrational fears, and take that kid in for it's shots.

End of story.

Oh wait, not quite the end. The government ought to prosecute those who have violated actual LAWS by deliberately spreading this disease. Yes, send some of those "No vaccinations" mommies to the hoosegow. Especially the ones who work up the Pox Parties, but every parent involved in this cockamamie scheme gets a negative file on them in the Children's Services Division for phsically abusing their kid(s).

This isn't about politics. It's about having the smarts to properly raise kids, and not threaten their very existance with your idiot scheming. If you aren't smart enough to raise a kid without jeopardizing it's existance, you shouldn't be a parent. In THAT respect, the State DOES have an interest in your parenting, a moral interest as well as a legal interest.

Thursday Thuds - #12 - eaten by Typepad

..the entire post of 5 cleverly-crafted Thuds was just destroyed by the blog engine as I tried to post it to the blog. An hour and a half of work down the memory-hole, and I am not in the mood to re-create it.

The blog-engine's autosaving function was inoperative (it works in the background, so you don't know when it's running or not), and aside from the title above, nothing was saved. When I hit the "Save" button after I finished, I got a "505 - bad gateway" error message, and pushing the back button dumped me out of the entire Typepad-wordpress system. This used to happen more frequently, but it hasn't for several years, and I'd gotten out of the habit of saving each paragraph written, since the engine did it for me. Asswipes!

I may re-create some of the Thuds as individual posts in the next couple of days, but right now, I have a Business Plan to write to show my company banker at 3pm...

 

Every CEO, every Chief Engineer

...needs this where they have to look at it the entire time they're in their offices. Not a bad idea for permanent placement on the Employee Bulletin Boards, either.

"A toothpaste factory had a problem: they sometimes shipped empty boxes, without the tube inside. This was due to the way the production line was set up, and people with experience in designing production lines will tell you how difficult it is to have everything happen with timings so precise that every single unit coming out of it is perfect 100% of the time. Small variations in the environment (which can’t be controlled in a cost-effective fashion) mean you must have quality assurance checks smartly distributed across the line so that customers all the way down to the supermarket don’t get hacked off and buy another product instead.
     Understanding how important that was, the CEO of the toothpaste factory got the top people in the company together and they decided to start a new project, in which they would hire an external engineering company to solve their empty boxes problem, as their engineering department was already too stretched to take on any extra effort.
     The project followed the usual process: budget and project sponsor allocated, RFP, third-parties selected, and six months (and $8 million) later they had a fantastic solution — on time, on budget, high quality and everryone in the project had a great time. They solved the problem by using high-tech precision scales that would sound a bell and flash lights whenever a toothpaste box would weigh less than it should. The line would stop, and someone had to walk over and yank the defective box out of it, pressing another button when done to re-start the line.
     A while later, the CEO decides to have a look at the ROI of the project: amazing results! No empty boxes ever shipped out of the factory after the scales were put in place. Very few customer complaints, and they were gaining market share. “That’s some money well spent!”  he says, before looking closely at the other statistics in the report.
It turns out, the number of defects picked up by the scales was 0 after three weeks of production use. It should’ve been picking up at least a dozen a day, so maybe there was something wrong with the report. He filed a bug against it, and after some investigation, the engineers come back saying the report was actually correct. The scales really weren't picking up any defects, because all boxes that got to that point in the conveyor belt were good.
     Puzzled, the CEO travels down to the factory, and walks up to the part of the line where the precision scales were installed.
     A few feet before the scale, there was a $20 desk fan, blowing the empty boxes out of the belt and into a bin.
 
    "Oh, that," says one of the workers ”one of the guys put it there cause he was tired of walking over every time the bell rang."

There's some Latin for that, too: "Quod erat demonstratum, est" (That which was to be demonstrated, was)

Pay-per-view Representatives?

According to Politico, there are, and the ones they list all have (R) after their names.

My first thought on hearing this had something to do with rope, oak tree, congressmen, and how I might write that short assembly manual, but first, I want Politico to directly answer a question:

Are there any Representatives with (D) after their names following this practice?

While I'm wating for my answer (no, I'm NOT holding my breath that Politico will do the fair and balanced thing), let me just say that the RNC needs to be making some phone calls to these jerk-offs, calls containing DIRECT ORDERS to cease the practice on pain of their primary opponents getting the RNC's support, and it needs to be dialing those calls NOW!

Way to go, douchenozzles! You just set back the election hopes of your party by a LONG chalk, unless the answer to my above question turns up some (D)s doing this, in which case, it will simply lower the confidence number of Congress down into new, abysmal, uncharted territory.

BTW, RNC, the other point raised by the Politico article, that there seems to be a strange lack of recess-held public town halls by the GOP congresscritters, needs to be addressed.

Put it this way, if the GOP can't take whatever heat comes from standing in their hustings and having a face-to-face exchange with their constituients, of ALL political persuasions, well, I guess maybe those constituents should find someone else to represent them.

The shoe is definitely on the other foot. I seem to recall that the TEA Party types leveled this charge at the (D)s during the last election campaign, and it was quite effective at turning the Congress over.

Hypocrisy is NEVER in political style, boneheads.

Rivrdog to Obama: What part of "Never Again" do you fail to get?

So Obama kowtows completely to the Paleoswinians, and demands that Israel give back all the lands it took from it's neighbors when they brought several wars to the tiny Jewish state.

I got news for Obama: Israel will not be as polite as I'm being here. Most likely they will give our idiot-in-charge the message of "fuck off, mate". I've got more news for Obama: Israel's got enough nukes and the means to deliver them to turn ALL of the Middle East to glass and make it into a place where off-region Muslims like Obama can only reminisce about because it will glow for centuries, were Obama's new policy to ever be forced on Israel.

To Obama, I say, "Well, dummy, you just ended the Middle East Peace process, and guaranteed the success of the hard-liners of Netanyahu's party."

To the Jews of THIS country, I say, "Are your eyes opened sufficiently now to see that your Democratic Party friends are REALLY the new anti-Semites of the world, and isn't it about time you withdrew your support of that political party?"

Only the most die-hard Friends of the Paleo-thuggians can now prop up Obama.

On a related note, a rumor swept DeeCee today (well before the speech) that Hillary might be about to resign, and if she did, Obama would nominate John F. Kerry as the new Secretary of State. Frankly, I hope Hillary DOES resign. By that act, she would instantly become THE most desireable AND electable Democratic Party candidate for President, since Obama just destroyed what remains of his chances with this speech. The current crop of GOP RINOs would have a hard time fighting off a Hillary '12 candidacy. Don't believe me? Just Google Bing-search Hillary '12...

As for Kerry, I'm reminded of the old country proverb, "no matter which way you turn a turd, there is NO good side to it."

Obama, YOU are the Dummy of the Decade. The contest for that title is now closed. You are the Maroon of the Year, and THAT contest is now closed, as well.

Sic Semper Ignoramus

Brady punks in action - as pirates!

If I read this blog and the comments correctly, Oleg Volk, famous gunblogger and gun photographer, just had a Brady punk steal two of his photos and republish them on a public page (Facebook) without attribution.

Oleg earns his beans from those photos, so this/these punk/punks stole items of value from him. He jacked them up, demanded removal, and they apparently complied (an admission of guilt), but then one of them got snippy in comments and was immediately set upon by Oleg's readers, some of whom are of the opinion that he should sue the Bradys off the face of the earth.

The weak reply of the punk/punks is that Oleg removed one or more of their comments from the blog-post.

Question: since when has removing a comment from a blog-post become a DMCA violation?

Bonus: Quote of the day, attributed to Oleg and his commenter "Jerry":

"Following the incorporation of the [[2nd Amendment]] in the Supreme Court decision [[McDonald vs. Chicago]], and the resulting acknowledgement of the right to keep and bear arms as a “fundamental right” of US citizens, the Brady Campaign subsequently met the definition of a [[hate group]] due to their stated opposition against an established civil right."

The Brady Bunch, a Hate Group. If the shoe fits, Bradys, wear it.

Quote Of The Day

...over at Say Uncle, my #1 read:

From his post, "What if you had a rational debate and no one noticed"

"I don’t read them. I’m afraid the stupid will rub off..."

Put it THIS way: if you blog and you haven't felt like this, youi're abnormal. Sure, I could read FireDogLake, The Daily KOS, etc (no linx to jerks).but then the stupid would rub off, and how much smarter would I be?

My computer is "progressive"! UPDATED!

Egad! I'm afraid I have bought a "progressive" computer. It doesn't want to let me multi-task, even though it has the power to do that.

An example:

This E-Machines EL-1850 box runs on Windoze 7 Home Premium. Of course, everyone beginning with a new Windoze machine knows that you must do a LOT of updates right away, since your O/S changes almost daily, and your machine is probably a few months old when you get it out of the box and plug it in.

With Windoze 7, the smarties at MicroSquish decided to make this updating a leisurely process, so it takes far longer than it would if you dedicated yourself and all your system's resources to that task. You would think that this was done so you could multi-task on some other, important tasks involved with getting the new box off to a good start, wouldn't you?

You would have thought wrong, Festus.

As soon as I booted for the first time, the O/S wanted me to create some back-up disks. That's a good idea, and can be done before you go online, so right at the start is a good place to do it. I, however, was pre-primed to the "update the O/S" mode, so I go online with MSIE (rettttch!) and download Mozilla Firefox 4.0 Beta Six, and install it. While I was at Mozilla, I downloaded their excellent Thunderbird email program.

Now, after getting set up to prowl online, this cat is ready to make those rescue disks, which, since this O/S is just under 11 gigabytes, is going to take a while. During this while, the seemingly-interminable Windoze 7 updating process proceeds apace. I start with a fresh DVD-RW, and get it done before I run out of awake about 0145 this morning. As I go to bed, I insert a second DVD-RW to make the second of three rescue disks, and I hit the pillow. I wake up later to find that it has been completed, and I get ready to make the third disk, but something's awry: the Recovery Management program has closed itself for some strange reason. Actually, the damn box re-booted itself under instructions from Windoze Update while I was asleep, and the re-boot killed the continuity of the Recovery Management program, which has only the one, start-to-finish mode, but I don't know this.

So, I re-open it, only to discover that it has no memory, and doesn't realize that I've already created two out the three required disks. I have to bloody well start over! Erase the disks, and some 30+ minutes later, I'm in the Verify stage for the first disk, which is noisy and lasts for 45 minutes. This is going to be a long morning.

For this, both Microsoft and E-Machines get the Dull Kludge-hammer Award of the year. Kudos to both of you idiots.

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

UPDATE: 100510: 0746 PDT: I should have done the full textbook investigation here. After failing three more tries to make a set of these disks the next day, I went to E-Machines' website, and OF COURSE \apply: 3 facepalms\, they are SELLING the disks ($20/set, plus shipping). OF COURSE these boneheads don't want me to be able to make my own disks. How stupid of ME to think that this was somehow partly MY fault!

OK, that means that I have to take back the Dull Kludge-hammer Award for E-Machines (Microsoft deserves it for this and every other day of their existence however). I now, hereby, award E-Machines the "ARRGGH! Of Course You Feel Robbed, we're Pirates, That's What We Do" award of the week.

Bastards!

\rant off\

Outsourcing Muni government work

Here's a little example of why outsourcing isn't always the best solution. In my city, Gresham, OR, we have a Street Department, like most cities do. That Street Department is responsible for, among other things, sweeping the streets. Gresham has a small fleet of street-sweeping equipment for this purpose.

For some reason, the city has quit using it's own sweeping equipment (maybe because it's old and generates a LOT of dust while sweeping), and hired a private company to do the work (or maybe just leased their trucks, it's hard to say, the operators are not uniformed). We're not on the list for street re-surfacing at Schloss Rivrdog, so it's just a sweeping.

Now, we normally get our street swept MAYBE once a quarter, and two of the sweepings usually coincide with leaf drop in the fall. Imagine my surprise (and joy) to hear a street sweeper operating on my block in the middle of summer! I hurried out to the curb by my RV pad and removed the 12-foot 4X4 that resides in the gutter because the stupid city code won't allow me to have a second driveway apron to access my RV pad from.

The street sweeper came by, carefully driven so that the rotary gutter broom scrubbed the curbing clean of all the scudsy crap that accumulated behind the 4X4. I noted that the sweeper truck was a modern FMC-Wayne, the latest with good dust control and effective muffling of the vacuum turbine. Now THAT makes me feel good about paying my taxes!

Nazzofast, Rivrdog. As I finished cleaning up after mowing my lawn, some 45 minutes after the sweeper had come and gone, I noted that the usual water trail on the macadam of the street from the sweeper had not all evaporated, and in fact, there seemed to be a permanent oil slick on the pavement. Uh-Oh!

Just before sunset, along comes ANOTHER sweeper truck, a different one (not leaking hydraulic fluid). It follows the path of the first truck. Dry sweeping is going to remove an oil slick? I don't think so, Festus.

I chuckled, and had a good night's sleep.

This morning, I arise to hear yet ANOTHER sweeper truck operating on my street. Yep, they are STILL trying to dry-sweep the hydraulic fluid up.

What will this afternoon bring? I can hardly wait.

A note: when I was a Base Special Equipment Mechanic in the Air Guard (1988-1995), I trained extensively to learn to repair/overhaul these rigs. The one I learned on was the Tymco 600, a medium-duty sweeper. Of all the Special Base Equipment I worked on, such as tractors, fire trucks, aircraft de-icers and the like, the sweepers were the most difficult to maintain. The rig was an absolute maze of hydraulic piping and hosing, with probably over 100 compression fittings. It had a HUGE hydraulic reservoir, and if you ever lost that onto the pavement, it counted as a reportable oil spill. The huge seal on the debris body door that was remotely operated to dump the sweepings was especially bad, and a three-ring circus to change out.

Methinks that the outsourcing of street sweeping was not properly thought through OR inspected.... 

If Toyota said this...

Never buy another vehicle from them.

The beleaguered car company has a "maintenance and repair" campaign going on with some vehicles due to a leaky engine oil hose. Here is what they said about the effects of that leaky hose in this AP presser:

"In the latest defect, faulty hoses can cause engine noise and light up the oil pressure light on vehicle dashboards, according to Toyota. In the U.S., the problem also affects the best-selling Camry and two Lexus models."

No, cupcake, that engine noise signals the imminent demise of your entire engine, and that annoying light just told you that you have lost oil pressure to the point that the engine has probably already been damaged. If that falls under the heading of a "maintenance campaign", I'll eat my hat.

Oh, BTW, Toyota fans, that leaky oil has to go somewhere. If you pull your dipstick and actually check the oil, you would know you were losing it, but even simpler, if you look at the pavement that your car's engine room just covered at that parking place you just pulled out of, you would see the oil there, also.

The obvious problem here is the operators of vehicles who would actually let their car run out of oil, when it's not a sudden problem, but a slow seep or drip. If you get to the place where your engine sounds like a R2500 radial aircraft engine starting up, you are dangerous. Sell that car and take the bus.