Nom de plume: Rivrdog

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.

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.

 

Jobs, the REAL question

In honor of Joe Huffman, who taught me to ask the One Big Question...Joe's a bit busy this weekend, so I'll iterate what he would say if someone asked him the One Big Question which has formed in my mind.

Simple question, that.

It seems that we are about to decide the policy direction of our Nation based on one little word, "Jobs", but has ANYONE stopped to ask what a "Job" actually is, how it is properly defined, how the statistics about "Jobs" are actually derived, and whether ANYONE ever checks those statistics for accuracy?

I might not be an economist, but I have dealt, to some degree, with the idea of budgeting. In budgeting, we have a concept called "Full Time Equivalent". At any sizable organization, public or private, that employs people, there is a standard definition of what it costs to have one person perform work, and that is the FTE.

Basically, the FTE is what one "standard" person draws as a wage, together with the value of that person's economic benefits (vacation days, health insurance, etc), over a period of 2,080 hours (one standard working year of 52 forty-hour weeks). My FTE, just before I retired from copping, was just over $90,0000. That was a wage of $28.56/hr, plus annual benefits running to just over $30K.

So, for full-time employees, the costs are fairly easy to break down. The tricky part is how to measure less-than-full-time work.

That's NOT tricky if fractions or decimals of an FTE are used. The average US wage (Median wage, to be accurate) last year was $26,364. Just search on "average US wage", and you will get all sorts of sites which display the statistic, and tell you how it was derived.

Why then, does the Government "play" with the figure so loosely? Here's an example of "playing". With "Job Creation" now the measure of whether a candidate "has it in him" to be President, why haven't we demanded, and gotten, a precise definition of what One Created Job actually is?

Here's what "One Created Job" ought to be: One FTE, measured against the last, accurate US Median Wage, projected as if that job lasted one year. A couple of years ago, when the "stimulus" was the big topic of discussion inside the Beltway, and "shovel-ready jobs" were being "created", I remember reading that the Obama Administration was claiming One Created Job for every job opening that lasted 15 days or more. Of course, that's crap. No two-week job ought to ever be compared to a full-time position.

Since we all have calculators, let's do the math. Taking $26,000 as the annual wage in question, and adding in, say, $10K in benefits, we have an FTE for those "shovel-ready" jobs of $36,000, or $3K/month. If those jobs only last, say, 3 months each, then each one is 0.25 FTE, and the base earning is only $9K for each job. Did YOU ever see those jobs listed that way? I didn't. That same Obama Administration (and, likely the Bush II Administration before it) claimed Christmas Seasonal workers as "created jobs" every Fall, despite the fact that those jobs never last past the middle of January, and are less than .25 FTE each. Same thing with Summer Seasonals, etc

The Government (and candidates to run it) lies, and our entire National future is being decided by this particular brand of lie.

Let's ALL go activist on the political process here, and demand that ANYONE who uses Job Creation in any sort of political statement be REQUIRED to prove out how many actual FTEs he/she is referring to, and what the actual dollar figure of that FTE actually is.

Can we do that, people? I think we can, and I expect THAT sharp saber, if universally used, would deflate a LOT of political hot-air balloons, if not ALL of them.

You have your assignments. Attend political rallies, and at the right moment, shout the One Big Question at the candidate(s): "Sir, what is YOUR definition of a Job"? I guarantee that the pretenders will NOT be ready to answer you, so YOU be ready to repeat your question.

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.... 

"Green" lies

...but I'm redundant. Sorry.

Just got an item I ordered on the 'Net, a ZTS MBT-1 battery tester. This is an industrial-duty unit which actually runs a programmed test-by-pulse-load on the battery, then calculates how much of it's life is left. It is the only such tester, an expensive item, but vital when you cannot afford to go out into the field with weak batteries (and some are weak right out of the bulk-packs).

I ordered the tester from 1000bulbs.com, an outfit I've used before.

The package arrived from Garland, TX in three days, very fast. It was in a box of about a cubic foot volume. Opening it, the box turned out to be full to the brim with plastic-foam peanuts, an old and discredited packing material. They are the bane of landfills, since they cannot be recycled, and the slightest breeze blows them afar when the garbage truck tips it's load.

The tester, of course, was wrapped in the usual plastic "armor-hide" blister-pack, which is also not recyclable.

So, inside of a cardboard box bragging how green and recycled/recyclable it is, were two products known for being non-recyclable.

Is that a lie?

You bet.

"Green" is a brag, not a fact. Never was, never will be.

Government Motors' business plan

Design junk, build junk, invest in junk car companies overseas.

And, you cannot divest: as a taxpayer, you own 25% of this company.

Calling all legal beagles

I have a question for you:

Can the US Supreme Court ever take up any case "on their own motion"? Some lower courts can and do take up matters, even political matters, on their own motion, and issue rulings as a result of argument that Court hears.

Just wondering, because it seems that a thorough investigation in Keyna turned up not only eyewitnesses who have direct knowledge that Mrs Soetoro had her child Barack in a hospital there, but seem to have turned up a Kenyan birth certificate for him as well. That birth certificate contains the usual footprint on it, and has been certified by a British official as genuine. It seems, according to the eyewitnesses, that Mrs. Soetoro flew to Hawaii three days after giving birth, then registered Barack as having been born in Hawaii.

Sheriff Joe Arpaio's recent look at the HA "birth certificate" did not include this information from east Africa.

So, the question devolves to the SCOTUS then, which Court would have to decide the issue anyway, and decide it before the election, hopefully. The only way I see that happening is if the Court took the matter under advisement on it's own motion. From a forensic point of view, if the Court found that the Keynan birth certificate was believeable as a registered document, it could order Barack Obama to provide a copy of his footprint, and that would settle everything. If the footprint on the document matched that on the Keynan birth certificate, then the course is clear, and President Biden takes over immediately (and probably pardons Obama immediately). Of course, the SCOTUS would then have to decide what happens to all the legislation and Executive Orders that bear Obama's signature, and THAT mess could take some time to sort out.

Oh, and if you haven't guessed, no, in fact I DO NOT consider the appellations of "Birther" to be a pejorative as the Left wants you to believe. The cop in me see this as a mater of forensic science and law, nothing more. As a matter of science and law, impartial findings are expected, even if the matter is highly charged, politically.

Not sure yet about PeeCee? Need more time to decide?

You ARE sure now, and no, you won't need a second more to decide after reading this article.

PeeCee rises to the top of the list of "what went wrong with the U.S.A." (note the proper use of past tense, kiddies).

Download Reaststobetterunderstandpregnanttroops'exerciseconcerns

here it is in .PDF format, in case you can't open the .docx

Download Reaststobetterunderstandpregnanttroops'exerciseconcerns

We had just a smidgin of PeeCee when I was in the military in my last few years. If some troop had brought his/her commander a concern about insensitive remarks being made regarding pregnant WAF's exercising, the commander would have (1) Passed the word (meaning he would have instructed his subordinates to see to it that such insensitivity did not happen again) (2) Maybe, just maybe, issued a memo containing an order that such insensitivity violated such-and-such General Orders, USAF regulations or whatever, and NCOs and officers were to insure that such violations did not continue, and the Commander reserved the right to put the offenders through the Article 15 (of the UCMJ - non-judicial punishment) if they were caught.

Previous to my last years in the military, of course, the military simply discharged from service most of those female members who got pregnant. President Clinton ended that policy, IIRC.

You PeeCee types can argue all you want about "fairness" in the military. This old airman's take on it is that if "fairness" was needed in the military, the Base Supply Section would issue it as part of each troop's personal Service Issue.

That is all.

Squadron, 'Ten HUT! DISMISSED!

Note: Yes, this IS, in fact, an "Obamanation", because he IS, in fact, the Commander in Chief...

H/T to the Coyote Kid, a retired USAF E-8 (and former Gyrene, also).

Wednesday WTFs

The headlines can be self-answering questions.

WTF: Why is Michelle Obama complaining about always being portrayed as "that angry black woman"? My guess is stated in an old African proverb: "the leopard can't change it's spots". In ghetto-speak: "you bees what you is". Seriously, even when she practices, such as for set-piece TV interviews with the lefty press, she can't seem to project sweetness and light, no matter how hard she might try. Why am I the Greatest Curmudgeon of All Time? 'Nuff said.

WTF: Why do we find John Edwards so particularly loathesome? No, we DO NOT need science, and I suspect the linked article was written to give Edwards some "victim status" by saying that he physically can't hold his mouth right. John Edwards is particularly loathesome because he is a smarmy, crooked, immoral liar, and an ambulance-chasing lawyer to boot. Case closed.

WTF: Yes, Virginia, there IS a covert war going on against the Mad Mullahs of Iran. It is a GOOD war, a MORAL war, the best than can be fought the best substitute for turning the place into glass. However, there may be more to the story. Iran HAS, in the past, offed their own key people in their nuke program when it began to appear to the Mad Mullahs that they were about to defect or they were becoming religiously unreliable (couldn't tell Halal from Haram).

WTF: Bully for Ford for designing an automobile that is so efficient, but to call it "100 MPG" is bullshit. There is NO such thing as as a "miles-per-gallon" measurement to electricity, that is strictly an advertising gimmick. The electricity use in an electric hybrid car should be stated in "kilowatts per mile" or some such actual statement of the consumption of ELECTRIC power when the car is operating on it's battery. If there were any truth in car sales, and there never has been, gas/electric hybrids would carry two ratings, one for operation on the gas engine, and one for operation on the battery. In most hybrids, the cars can combine power from both sources, but that is difficult to measure and impossible to state accurately without differential equations to solve (and I can't, can you?). The simple approach would just be to say that the car gets (x) mpg on gas and will go (y) distance on battery. Even that measurement would lack total accuracy, but that's OK by the marketing divisions. The Chevy Volt is STILL being advertised as going 40 miles on it's battery, but in real life, no one goes much more than 25 miles before the generator-engine cuts in. That's a 40% difference, but Chevy, a division of Government Motors, takes after it's parent, the US Government, and is encouraged to lie. It's a "green" thing, and the rulz say that it's OK to lie about "green".