Nom de plume: Rivrdog

Thursday Thuds, Astrological Edition

Yep, there must be a conjunction that the horoscope didn't report:

The Constellation Ignoramus is in the Seventh House of the Moon, so we may call this Teh Stoopid Rising.

Thud the First: The looney Kimmy is at it again, sort of declaring war, nuclear war, on the USA. What Teh Stoopid Norky apparently doesn't realize is that he is ALREADY at war with the USA. Way back in 1953, when I was playing sandlot baseball with my first mitt, a Rawlings Al Kaline, we ended the Korean War with an Armistice, not a Treaty. We're still under the terms of that armistice, and still technically at a state of war. One B-2 Spirit with a belly full of nuke AGM-86s ends this war. Might be as easy as a B-2 Spirit with a single Small Diameter Bomb detonating on the pillow next to Kimmy in his bed.

Thud the Second: Goes to State Rep Mitch Greenlick (D-33), Oregon. He's a white guy, but has made a political career of being a race pimp, creating a Diversity in Sports Hiring Law for Oregon a few years back, and steamrolling it through the Legislature. The Oregon Ducks just replaced Head Football Coach Chip Kelly, now coaching the Philadelphia Eagles, with Offensive Coordinator Mark Helfrich. Both are white. Someone put the bug in Greenlick's ear that Da Rulz had not been followed, and no person of color had been interviewed before hiring Da White Guy. If Greenlick had paid attention to the local sports press, he would have gotten all these facts, but he decided to shoot off his face anyway, and when caught short on his accusation, he doubled down on Teh Stoopid and bitched that the SPIRIT of the "Diversity" law was not being followed, apparently because a person of color wasn't hired. The law, of course, does NOT mandate hiring people of color, it is only there to see that they are given a chance at the slots that come up. Now Greenlick has to re-double down by holding a Star Chamber hearing on this boneheaded "spirit of the Law" crap. Of course, what he really wants to do is be appointed Diversity Potentate/Caliph for Oregon. Perfect Celestial Alignment of Teh Stoopid. Letter to the Editor sent.

Thud Da Toid: What can I say, it's a toss-up between outgoing Secretary of State Hildebeeste and incoming S.O.S.-Nominee John Effing Kerry. Hillary got ground up, chewed up and spit out by Sen. Rand Paul yesterday, and today, J Effing Kerry got a John McCain blow job. Perfect alignment of McCain's dripping chin with Kerry's belt buckle. GOPes rolled over on the Swift Boat Liar. One can only hope that the Liar will soon embarass himself badly enough to be consigned to the dustbin of history, or maybe better, he will invent his own foreign policy and completely screw up Obama's.

Thud the Fourth: Rocks and Shoals edition. Yep, as long as men go down to the sea in warships, some of them will have to suffer bad navigation/ship-handling, and will wind up on the shoals. Happened here. Ship had just left Subic Bay. Do you suppose all the quarterdeck crew were sober? Pretty cheap drunk in Olongapo...worse news is that the shoal is a world-recognized endangered reef.

Thud the Fifth: We don't have many Thuds in the Art World, but what good can happen to the Paris Ballet Corps now that their Chef de la Danse is a chap named Millepied? That translates directly to "1,000 feet"...(H/T to the RivrSis, my Art Correspondent).

Ah, well. Time and the stars march on, so soon this alignment of Teh Stoopid will be over. Maybe I should go back to bed and wait it out. Fighting off Teh Stoopid Rays is giving me a headache, anyway.

Thursday Thuds, post-Holiday edition

Thud the First: Heard on Fox News yesterday morning at about 10:34 PST: "Survival is the new Prosperity"...referring to the state of small business in the good-ole US of A. Word!

Thud the Second: The New Yawk Stock Exchange soared yestiddy, presumably because of the dreaded "Cliff" being in the rear-view mirror, but, guess what? So did the Gold price (fell back some today, though). Verrrrry interesting. Institutions are still buying gold despite all the supposed bully news from DeeCee? Something does not compute, and my guess is that the Street is very wary of the "fiscal solutions" involved. Also, TCWIC (Tax Cheat What's In Charge) Timmy Geithner now says we've reached the statutory borrowing limit, but, hey, that's okay because he can cook the books for at least two months to keep the downgrade wolf at bay. Of course, if any of us ran the books of any corporation the way he runs the books of the Federal Government, we'd all be in jail...

Thud the Third: The Grand Old Party continues it's collapse into political futility. The best available economic minds (Simpson-Bowles Commission) recommended a Fiscal Cliff solution with a ratio of Revenue enhancement (tax increases) to Spending increase of 1:2.6. The GOP just signed off on a plan with a ratio of 1:41  I forgot how to do mathematical proportion calculations or I would tell you what factor of excess past Simson-Bowles that number is, but it seems to be at least an 800% departure. The GOPes approved of that? Now we all go over a different cliff, and it is such a tall cliff, we will have a LOT of time to consider the error of our ways before we impact the base of that cliff at terminal velocity. The GOPes seem split, but in the entire House, there are only 25 or so true fiscal conservatives, so it's not likely that anything will change with the Speakership of John Boehner (just in: Boehner retained his seat). The TEA party types seem inclined to try to replace all the GOP fiscal wimps with conservative who have spines, but can the TEA party folks get it together again in 2014 like they did in 2010? I'm not putting any money on that outcome.

Thud the Fourth: Last night, Leno tried a zinger on prospective Secretary of State John Effing Kerry. Leno noted that Kerry's face is shaped more like a horse than a human, so he sould be called "Secretariat Kerry". Few laughed, and it immediately occurred to me that Leno missed an opportunity because he was looking at the wrong end of the horse...

Thud the Fifth: As I indicated here, Mad Mayor Bloomberg of New Jack City seems to be trying to seize control of the entire gun-control movement. He made another move in that direction by sitting down with various Civil Rights Deniers and Former Congresswoman Gabby Giffords. My guess is that he is actively recruiting her to be the new poster-girl for gun control. She would, of course, replace Sarah Brady in that role (no links to enemies!).

Thursday Thuds, Christmas Edition

Time for some Christmas Thuds, since they seem to be jumping off the pages of the dead-tree media at your blogger this ayem.

Thud The First: Some PeeCee person just re-wrote the famous Christmasy/Santa Claus story, "Twas the night before Christmas" to make it more PeeCee, and with the ASSistance of the Assinine Academy of Pediatrics and the Assinine Library Association, who plugged the book for her, and her own plunking down of $200K of borrowed money, the "self-published" author Pamela McColl will try to inject PeeCee into Christmas. In her perverted version of the poem, Santa no longer smokes a pipe, and it is noted that he wears artificial (faux) fur trim on his red suit. Apparently nothing is said about his abuse of reindeer, making only eight of them pull a sled that must weigh in the millions of pounds. You're going to fail, McColl, because PeeCee doesn't stretch that far in the wildest dreams of it's perverted progenitors. When you fail, you'll be out on the street, since your home will be repossessed due to you encumbering it with a $200K loan. My tip to you? When you have to panhandle to stay alive in those cold Canadian winters, do it outside a Starbucks, those coffee-swilling yuppies have a lot of money.

Thud the Second: North Korea's missile launch. I'm not worried, and here's why:

• Throw weight. This missile probably can't carry a payload of 300 pounds to full range on it's third stage, and the Norks' nukes weigh a ton or so at least.
• Launch platform. This is our early-60's tech the Norks are using. They have one launch pad, and the erection of a missile for launch takes at least two weeks. Aside from short-range, outdated battlefield missiles which they have unsuccessfully tried to boost to the class of IRBMs, missiles like this current "Long Dong 3" or what ever they call it, are one-off, multistage missiles which they have to build one at a time, giving the US and allies plenty of time to spot preparation and react accordingly.
• For this missile to be an actual threat, the Norks will have to develop a miniature version of a warhead, and such development took the US over 30 years, and we have far better research facilities.
• What's next? The Norks will shoot off a nuke in an underground test, and claim it was a miniature, suitable for placement on the Long Dong 3. That will be bullshit, and needs to be called bullshit when it happens.

Countervailing actions: what we need to do is ask the ChiComs their price to shut this program down. It might be too high, it might be acceptable, who knows? The next thing to do is announce that some of our missiles in our ICBM fields are now targeted and on alert against North Korea. This will drive them batshit, and it's always fun to watch  the current Kimmie go batshit. It's possible that the Norks would build Long Dongs and sell them to Iran. This one is a no-brainer: those missiles get lost at sea in shipment, and lost with extreme prejudice. We have attack submarines and SEALs for that. In the event one makes it overland to Iran through China, we sanction China by refusing to pay interest on all that money they loaned us, and we tell them that ahead of time. Then we take those hundreds of billions saved and build more Navy to counteract the ChiCom's build up of THEIR navy.

Thud the Third: "Doug the Mesothelioma Victim". This ad for some ambulance-chaser law firm has been around for at least 3 years now. Do you suppose Doug is still alive? I've been stuck watching this nauseating commercial for the ambulance-chasing branch of law since Doug first raised his ugly head, and knowing what I know about the progression and spread of lung cancer (Mama died of it in 6 months from detection), I find it doubtful that he could still be alive. So, it is legal for the law-pirates to air that commercial if he is dead? OTOH, maybe Doug wasn't real to start with, but if THAT'S the case, could the ambulance-chaser firm be sued for false advertising? Anyway, Doug is the subject of many blogs, it seems, just search on "Doug Mesothelioma Still Alive". After my search, I noted that he is some sort of a folk hero to a few people. How perverted have we become?

Thud the Fourth: Well, I said here that there would be no dancing in the blood after the Oregon mall shooting. I was wrong. State Senator Ginny "no 2A for you" Burdick of Noath Pote-land just announced that she will introduce a Bill to ban normal capacity magazines. Gosh, since over half of the people in Oregon live within an hour's drive of Washington State, where those magazines won't be banned, and since most folks with gunz have plenty of maggys by now anyway, just what will her Bill come to? She won't succeed in having previous maggys confiscated, we don't do that here and even her fellow (D)onks won't go that far, the best she could hope for is to have sales banned for the future and a prohibition on concealed carry of 10+ maggys. One might also point out to the Wicked Witch of Gun Control that the shooter two days ago had an effective rate of fire that could have been done with a single shot rifle in the hands of a trained person, and a boltie milsurp rifle in the hands of anyone who owns one, or easily a levergun hunting rifle, and there are probably 200,000 of those in this State. So, I have a deal for Mizzz BurDICK: if she'll let me carry any rifle I choose openly, anywhere in the State, or any pistol I own, openly, anywhere, I'll accept her restriction of 10-round magazines. How about it, Senator? Trade you Constitutional Carry for magazine capacity restriction? In case my gunny friends think I'm nutz, go view Joe Huffman's video on shooting rapidly with 10-rounders. Hell, Jerry Miculek demonstrated twelve rounds from a S&W revolver in 2.99 seconds. I've seen training film of the EffBeeEye doing 18 rounds in about 5.xx seconds. A Tommy (Brit soldier) in WW2 demonstrated the "Mad Minute" for King George VI, 60 rounds in one minute, from a boltie Enfield, all shots hitting a 12" X 12" target at 200 yards. Magazine restrictions mean nothing, except that they are an obvious attempt to restrict a Civil Right, which is why they must not be tolerated.

Thud the Fifth: Union thuggery in MI. Unless you watch the Nuze on Fox, you wouldn't have seen the vids of the thuggery in the "Rotunda", a plaza right outside the Capitol in Lansing, MI, since the MSM carefully avoided the subject. If you watch the vids, you ought to be struck by one thing: the amazing lack of the po-po. The Gendarmes were MIA at that riot. Now, I live in the Portland area, and we're no strangers here to hotly-contested left-right street confrontations. The police are always there, and the FIRST demonstrator of ANY political stripe that even utters "fighting words" gets to wear bracelets and visit Da Judge, after wiping the pepper spray from their face. The protracted riot in Lansing had no police even visible, let alone taking any peace-keeping actions. I was a cop for 25 years, and I'm here to say that whatever your political leanings, you have a yearning to keep the peace, that's drummed into you from Day One when you are sworn in. Folks, the Fix was in out there in Lansing, that is the only thing possible. The cops must have been ORDERED to let the union bully-boys have their way, assaulting and threatening women and children, and putting them at risk by tearing down a closed tent with them in it, stomping on that tent from the outside, and using knives to hack pieces out of that flattened, occupied tent off for souvenirs. In my book, that's at least the crime of Recklessly Endangering the Life of Another, in Oregon, a Class A misdemeanor, which might even be a felony because a gang did it and used weapons to do it with. Do a Google Search on "union thug arrests in Lansing" and you will not find one single account of an arrest, yet HD videos of the thugs and thuggery have been available to the police for two days now. Now search on "lansing police press release" and you will see plenty of them, but NONE on the biggest deal the Lansing PD has had in their jurisdiction in years. There was one presser from the Michigan State Police, who were supposedly sending "dozens" of troopers from the Upper Peninsula (a separate land mass from Lower Michigan) down to Lansing to help out, but that presser says nothing about any arrests or even if the deployment ever took place, since it involves a drive of several hundred miles and would have left the Upper Peninsula enforcement level too low. Nope, this entire affair is a national shame, even more so since many of the thugs involved (and shown in the videos) wore apparel identifying a company, presumably theirs, and some others wore union apparel. Tell you what, readers, if I'm a personal injury lawyer licensed to practice in MI, I go to AFP-MI and find those victims, and I start filing lawsuits. In each of those lawsuits, I name the Lansing Police Department as co-defendant.

Enough Thuds for this Holiday season. Enjoy the rest of yours.

 

No Thursday Thuds

...this is a "44 Day", so the only thud will be if I drop something at the reloading bench. Of course, if I do that, I will follow the mechanic's usual sanction: a six-pack to share among all present for the dropped tool event. Gosh, I'd have to drink it all myself...too bad. Make it Terminator Stout, meck-a-neck. Actually, it's a continuation of  "44 Week", because earlier this week I have already loaded some 44 Magnum, mid-range loads with 240 XTP-JHP and 10.0 and 10.2 grains of Unique for chronograph and accuracy trial. Some 44 Special have also rolled off the press, loaded with Xtreme Bullets' 200-gr Copper-Plated Flat-Nose and shoved along by 5.1 and 5.4 grains of Unique. Those are for the charter Arms snubbie.

Note the similarity? I'm thinking of Unique as my go-to powder for all things handgun-caliber, and my Winter load development will reflect this. Last Winter, my 44 development centered on "Skeeter" heavy rifle loads in 44 Magnum, and I was not happy with the results. The Hornady XTP apparently doesn't like speeds in the light-bullet twist of my Marlin 1894C much over 1500-1700 fps, and some of mine approached 1900. They were 6-10 MOA at 100 yards, from a rested rifle, some even keyholed, and two recovered bullets from the berm showed the effects of wiped rifling marks, showing that the bullets jumped the rifling towards the end of the barrel. So, my first cure is to go from the H110 they were loaded with (max load of 23.5 in the 44 maggy) to a hotter Unique, and maybe even to Blue Dot, to get all the pushing done in the first third of the carbine barrel.

We'll see. Could be that the XTP bullet itself is the issue, not the powder. Maybe a gas-checked cast boolit solution here? Buffalo Bore's site says not to use a bullet over 270 grains at all in the Model 1894, the super-slow one-in-38 twist rate doesn't support heavy boolits. If that's the case, I'll melt and recast some of the Oregon Trail True-Shot 310's I got into a 240-gr SWC Lyman mold I have and try those. The Oregon Trail lead is very hard, should work well at 1500-1700 or so.

Thursday Thuds - Post-election special edition

Thud the First: Goes to FEMA. With the Nor-Easter "Athena" hammering the Northeast Coast of the US just a week after Hybrid Storm Sandy paid her call, and the recovery and re-constitution effort from Sandy just getting started there, guess what? FEMA took a "snow day" yesterday! Yep, the EEE-mergency filk our Government is so in love with took the day off to stay warm and dry as about 4 to 6 inches of wet snow pelted down in the damaged area. That rates a resounding F.A.I..L. If you are the nuts of a recovery and reconstitution effort (I have managed in that regard in the military AND in my work as a Deputy Sheriff), you DO NOT take a day off. You stay at your post until the clean-up is done and all affected residents have services restored with which they can carry on basic life. My orders? First Sergeant, put FEMA on the list of agencies which will NOT be brought back in the Second Republic. That is all.

Thud the Second: Goes to the Grand Old Party. Yep, the Republicans, the dear "Rs". I think that it can be safely said that you good 'ol boys fairly well farged this election up, and did it by the numbers! Because I might want to do something else today besides hammer on your sorry asses, here's a bullet-point list of how this failure of yours went down:

• You were too "fair", way back two years ago when the campaign started. You let the nomination process drag on for an eternity, and that overly-long process sapped the patience and reserve of everyone who has adopted your political philosophy. How many "front-runners" did we have? Five or so, one after the other? I don't know about you hosers, but I was bored silly after the first two, eh?
• You failed to set your standard. You never gave any guidance to your nomination prospects as to what was an acceptable version of your politics, and as a result, we had political philosophies ranging from Ghengis Kahn to Karl Marx trying for the brass ring. Especially, we had the religious fundies who are guaranteed losers on a national stage (read the farging polls, idiots).
• You failed to see the threat. When Romney finally DID lock it all up, the opposition had been gifted with a full year to get his number, and they nailed their opposition down: concentrate on his work as a hedge-fund CEO, which requires the closing of some underperforming businesses. Make him look like the evil capitalist, and ignore the fact that he ran several other major entities very successfully, including the Democratik People's Republik of Taxachusetts and the Winter Olympics. You failed to predict these attacks on your man, and you also failed to steer him towards any effective response to the attacks.
• Romney's fail. You, big guy, kept your excellent executive personna hidden until the first debate. Didn't you read anything about Ronald Reagan? After years of economic malaise, Reagan got out his cheerleader suit and successfully raised everyone's hopes for recovery, while painting Carter as a guy who would never lead the USA to recovery. You should have just copied that act, but you remained Mister Starched Collar CEO Guy, and inspired no one, at least until the first debate, by which time it was too late.
• Truth Squad. Where was the GOP Truth Squad? If there was one, it was a shadow of what it should have been. Obama got away with the most outrageous lies. At least when Kerry's Swift Boat lies were exposed, and Dan Rather was exposed for leading that liar's brigade, Bush's folks managed to get it out to the voting public effectively. Not one of Axelrod's or Plouffe's lies was ever successfully refuted, or even exposed as to origin, except in the blogs, and you filk completely failed to use THAT resource.
• Voting strategy. Obama won with barely a one-percent bulge in the popular vote, but with a 10% overage of Electoral College votes. How did THAT happen? Why couldn't you see THAT coming? Instead of concentrating on trying to marginally boost your statewide take in seven states, why didn't you concentrate on taking Obama out of the race in his strongholds, such as Cuyahoga County, OH or Fairfax County, VA? You were scrambling for pebbles in the riverbed while the entire mountain was sliding down to bury you (yeah, yeah, hindsight is always 20-20).
• The abortion nuts. Mitt, you did a masterful job of keeping your controversial Mormon religion out of the spotlight, but some of the idiots carying your banner were not so masterful as to THEIR controversial religion. Akin and Mourdock come to mind with their bonehead ideas on abortion. Look, let's put it this way: the Christian religion is morally flexible enough to forgive the major sin of murder when a life is taken in a just war, or a criminal's life is taken when he is committing serious crime, so why is it wrong to abort a fetus which is only there as a result of the sin of rape? If and when you GOP wallahs take the field of political battle again, you'd better strike the Abortion streamer from your battle colors. Far too few of your followers will stay in the battle with that streamer on your battle-standard.

Okay then, those are the high points of Romney's fail. Personally, I would add to it an aggravating financial team, dunning me for dollars every time I turned around to read my emails, and trying to phone me at all hours of the day and into the night with annoying robo-dialing machines (I was TOTALLY successful, and intercepted every one of these hundreds of calls without answering any of them). This fail of 2012 was epic. A President who had a record of non-performance as bad as Obama's, and a record of dictatorial over-reach as bad as Obama's should have been an easy target. Your failure to end his predation on our society is doubly regrettable, as history is likely now to write your failure down as the last gasp of a constitutional, principled society in the battle to save itself from Socialist mediocracy. America dies, not with a stilled battle-cry on it's lips, but a whine of defeat.

I'm ready for the Second Republic now. Perhaps we'd better see what can now be done to bring the formal end of this First Republic and properly start the Second Republic.

Thurday Thuds, Pre-Election edition 1, and Pick Your Own Thud!

Thud the Foist (love that Joisey, huh?): Seems that this week's unemployment-application numbers are higher than expected. Hmmmm....maybe that's because last week's were lower than expected, so the numbers are just catching up from last week's faked report that gave the Won a "bump" lasting maybe six minutes and forty-three seconds. File this Thud in the Dept of We're Not Stoopid Department (a sub-Department of the Recurring Redundancy Department).

Thudus segundus (Latin): Lance Armstrong. Seems he cheated. Seems everyone in the bike-racing fraternity cheated (if they were in the lead peloton in the races, they cheated). They be pickin' on Lance because he cheated the best, did more with his doped body than the other doper wheelmen. Okay then. If a bike racer cheats and no one knows about it until the science catches up, did he cheat? This is a serious question, because it's NOT illegal, presently, to take an IV before a race (or any sporting event), but it MIGHT be in the future, so does that mean that if you're dehydrated (a killer for serious biking, BTW) and you take an IV today and then win, are you at risk of being stripped of your win later when taking a dextrose IV is banned for some fool reason? You ARE at risk. This whole thing is a crock of unadulterated bike-saddle spooge. It's history revisionism at it's worst. But wait, history revisionism is the way we work now, isn't it? Or else, why would we have saddled the asbestos producers with a levy against their next three generations of investors to pay for a disease that no one knew about 80 years ago? Yep, YOU are revisionists, Mesothelioma ambulance chasers. YOU are the scum of the earth, not Lance Armstrong. Put it this way: history is a tool of the intellect. When you abuse your intellectual tools, your intellectual output will be inferior.

Thud the Thurd: Fine print in warranties: I get my new (purchased 7-25) Toro Model 20334 lawnmower out to cut the lawn one last time yestiddy, and it won't start. It floods when the engine is cranked. Floods badly. The machine has no throttle, per se, or a choke that the operator can manipulate either, it sets it's choke and primes itself with no human intervention, so after fifteen minutes of trying and pulling the plug three times to dry out the cylinder, I load it in the LBT and take it to Home Despot, where I bought it, because the literature that came with it says that "it starts first pull or we fix it for free". Okay, then. I check it in at the Tool Rental and Repair section, and the employee asks me how I have been fueling the machine. I tell him it gets unleaded premium gas, no alcohol. He asks me how old the gas was that I put in, and I replied maybe 3-5 weeks old, it's the best gas money can buy, and the quality of the gas isn't an issue. I lay my meck-a-neck creds on him. He smiles, goes to work on the machine, and I leave. Four hours later, he calls back and says my mower is done, he cleaned out the fuel system and it runs like a watch. I go get it, and pay a $15 labor charge. I ask why, and he points to his summary of work on the computer printout: "customer advised to only use fuel less than one month old". When I get home, I read the warranty, and in the page of fine print, it says that the warranty doesn't apply if I use any fuel older than a month old. Excuse me, ULPNA fuel doesn't even begin to get to the point where it won't run an engine properly for six months, and I can prove that. I fill my boat with it each Fall, and don't run the boat until May of the next year, and it runs just fine. I store my Honda EU2000i generator with that fuel in it, and it starts reliably for at least 6 months on that fuel. Ditto my Ryobi trimmer/blower, ditto my Stihl chainsaw. Weasel-words in warranties, there ought to be a way to make the companies using the weasel-words eat them.

Thud the Fourth: Goes to the Fourth Estate, and especially that part of it that is the "Presidential Debate Commission". How they could pick such an obvious Obama shill as Candy Crowley (or anyone from SeeInIn) is beyond me. The "Town Hall" audience was stuffed with Obama shills also, despite CNN's blandishments that they were ALL undecided voters. This should be the last series of "Presidential Debates" held. It ends here. The only way I could see ever holding another debate is to hold such debates under actual debate rules: the question (just one) is published beforehand and the debate proceeds under these rules.

Thud the Fifth: Today, your blogger graciously allows the Dear Readers to pick their Thud, write it up and publish it in comments. Alternatively, you can email me at perspac-at-yahoo-dot-com and I will write it, attribute the brainwork to you, and publish it. After a suitable interval of waiting, I will elevate the best Thud to star-status in this space!

Thursday Thuds, TeeVee Edition

There's so much wrong with today's TeeVee, that it needs a special Thuds volume to list it all. Not in the mood to pen a whole volume, though, so I will just write a usual five-thud column.

Background. TeeVee is a major part of my life at the moment, because I have suffered some relapses of my back injury, and must sit quietly in a neutral position frequently. So, the old RD sits on his comfy couch, with the right kind of pillows propping me in the right places, with remote (and usually) adult beverage to hand. Just recently, being an Xfinity (fka Comcast Cable) customer, I find I can control everything nicely on the 42" Samsung Smart-TV with my smartphone or tablet, so I do that.

In my home theater, the sounds are amplified by an older, but still good, Dolby 5.1 system, with wall and ceiling speakers and a huge floor-shaking subwoofer, all driven by the last non-digital receiver made, the Pioneer 702. The Samsung TV does a decent job of streaming off of Xfinity's 20mbps Internet service, too.

The Thuds, because after the honorable equipment, honor stops with TeeVee.

Thud the First: TeeVee, of course, is designed to appeal to those who never finished High School. Sure, there are a few exceptions, and I watch all of them. Fox News is designed for High School graduates. I watch that. Jeopardy is designed for thinkers at all levels above the 8th grade, I watch that. I watch some of the Military Channel, mostly for info on advanced weapons systems. I watch a LOT of Sportz, because it shows little of the inanity of the rest of the medium. I watch the occasional travelogue. You can dump the rest of it into the garbage, as far as I'm concerned. The talent shows are entertaining enough, but it's always about the judging, not the contestants or the material/talent they showcase. Why can't they make one without ANY judges, only an MC? Oh, wait! That's a bygone format of the 1950s and everything old is to be reviled, not promoted or reprised with reverence.

Thud the Second: Has to be the Socialist bias of all the news except Fox, and strangely enough, Russia TV, which can present straight news with NO lefty slant (but there is usually a pro-Putin slant). We bloggers are all over the Lefty-Newsy format and content, but even when caught in direct lies (example: the Romnoid "47%" tape, which we now know was heavily edited before presentation as a SCOOP! by Mother Jones News, a lefty TeeVee blog. What it all boils down to, dear readers, is that you write off the TeeVee and print news, and use the Internet blogs for your information, if you have ANY smartz, that is.

Thud the Third: TeeVee thinks we are all victims who want to be led to lawyers. My (absolutely) last resort in conflict resolution would be a lawyer, primarily because I feel that for the most part, they are leeches on our productive society. One of these days, I am going to see Dave, the Mesothelioma Victim's face one time too many and I will have an apoplectic fit and croak on the spot. More than once, I have shut off the TeeVee in disgust after starting to view an ambulance-chaser commercial. There are WAY too many ambulance-chaser commercials, all financed by the hugely corrupt legal system. I suspect that this issue will dog this Republic to it's dying days, which appear to be NOW. Hopefully, in the Second Republic, which I now believe I will live to see, we will finally decide that Free Speech has become, in several respects, a False Icon that we worship to the detriment of our society. Hopefully, there will be a way to stifle the ambulance-chasers.

Thud the Fourth: Years ago, I would have put TeeVee Preachers next, but they are way down the list now, and don't get a spot on my list of Thuds. Next comes Infomercials. Yes, there is info to be had in infomercials, but after you've seen how the MagiK Boolit works, and you decide you can do without one, why should you have to see this on one of your channels for the next two months? The answer of course, is because the TeeVee management couldn't sell the time to anyone else, so they sell it to the infomercial people. Commercials are a necessary part of TeeVee, they pay the cost of bringing us our choices, and in return, they get a minute (or four, now), every 8 minutes, to sell us something. Why can't I pay a premium to Xfinity to opt out of infomercials and see, say, old movies on those channels? For that matter, why hasn't someone come up with a network TeeVee commercial detector that not only kills off the commercials, but substitutes bandwidth in a queue that you have set up? If I'm watching Dancing with the Stars, and I did, last year, and the commercials come on, why can't my computer whisk me to the NFL channel during commercial breaks? Or the Weather Channel (except it carries less weather and more Discovery channel crapple on it now, so I don't watch it much anymore). Gin up this technology for me, TeeVee techno-whizzes, and I'll watch more TeeVee, but in the meanwhile, the Thud you hear is my boot connecting with your wooden head.

Thud the Fifth: "Reality TeeVee", generally. Generally speaking, "Reality" TeeVee is the worst thing to happen to Television since it was invented in the 1920s. Anything makes the grade in "reality" TeeVee, no matter how stupid, no matter how devoid of value, if it's "reality", some TeeVee manager will pay for it, and some idiot will film itand some channel will show it. In the name of "reality", we get TMZ, we get the Kardashians, we got Octomom, we get all sorts of "hold my beer and watch THIS" video. We need exactly NONE of these items on TeeVee, because they all have a negative impact on the culture, that is to say, they Dumb Us Down. Aren't we dumb enough already?

Thuds that got by: Sportz blatherers, award shows (oscars, etc), Rush Limbaugh (glad he's gone, he never learned how to say it briefly) and his ilk on the Left with THEIR bombast, PeeCee kiddy toons, womyn's victim channels, televangelists, day-long charity appeals, public TeeVee pledge breaks, too many Spanish channels (why are there over 150 of them on Xfinity and ONE, each and only French channel and ONE Russian channel?), fifty percent of local news being CRIME news...EVERYTHING qualifying for "Breaking News" both locally and nationally. A murder in Pawtucket, RI is NOT news in Portland OR, so why should we have to listen to ten minutes of coverage? Ditto a police chase in Shaky-town.

There must be more, but I'm about thudded out.

Thursday Thuds, we're still shaking from them

Thud the First: has to be this Administration's complete bungling of the US reaction to the situation in the Middle East, which is obviously our old enemies in Radical Islam stirring up crap again, and they're good at it, you have to hand THAT to them. At least Slick Willy would have fired a few cruise missiles at a few asprin factories by now...but make no mistake, this situation will get worse before it gets better. Are you ready for $120 oil, America? It'll be here shortly, along with the $5 gas that will insure the end of the Obama Regime, so for me, anyway, it's a matter of gritting the teeth and hanging on through the pain, because there's a big reward on the other side, and with Obummer out next year, we can settle those scores in the Middle East.

Thud the Second: As if the Islamic idiocy weren't enough, The Fed is trying mightily to buy the election for Obummer, with all that money that Fed King Ben "Big Bust" Ibn-Bernanke just announced that he'll print (it's now dubbed "QE3-Plus"). His reaction to the debt-to-GDP ratio going from 73% to 104% (so far) in this Administration is to promise to make it even worse. We'll follow the Germans off the fiscal cliff, and there won't be a thud when we hit bottom, because we will be in free fall for so long, we will have forgotten how gravity works by the time we hit bottom. True to form, the Day Traders holler "hoo-ray", and let "their" money stay in the market for ten full minutes instead of the usual three, and the Dow Jones Industrials jumped 200 points today. Guess what else jumped, kiddies? Gold! Gold goes up when the gold traders and the rest of the civilized world loses confidence in the strength of the dollar, and gold put on 2% today, finishing at a 6-month high. Along with that $120 oil, we'll see $2000 gold by Election Day. I can't wait for the Big Lie from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue that high gold is a good thing...

Thud the Third: "Idiot Mike" Bloomberg, who never saw a gun or a can of soda he didn't want to ban, pulled the trigger on his soda-rationing plan today. My guess? SodaStream equipment will sell out by Sunday all over the country. Glad I already have mine, so I can make my soda as sweet or as not-sweet as I want, in 60 flavors, as long as the world's supply of CeeOhTwo holds out, and the enviros tell me every day that supply is going nowhere but up...

Thud the Fourth: Getting more local...Stumptown, led by the Queer Mayor and "Red" Randy Leonard, the Commie Commish, rammed through their fluoridation program this week. It will take just 20,000 signatures to put it on the ballot for next year, where it will be defeated, you read it HERE first. There's something basically wrong with putting medicine in everyone's water. Flouride today, tranquilizers tomorrow to calm the savage beasts? BTW, the proposition, had it been put to a public vote, would have failed out here in the 'burbs, where folks take their Constitutions a bit more seriously, but Hizzoner deliberately crafted his plan so that the wholesale customers for City water had no say at all. That has left the other 5 Mayors in the County mighty cheesed off. No matter, it will be a county-wide vote, and the signatures will be collected outside of the Portland City Limits, just to cheese off hizzoner, who will be out of office by then anyway. He's not running for a second term, knowing that queer pedophilia doesn't sit well this side of Cairo.

Thud the Fifth: Will start at 1720 PDT, on the NFL Channel, as Da Bearz and Da Pack slug it out on the gridiron in what should be a an outstanding "Black and Blue Division" football game. Hope you have the NFL network, I do.

Thursday Thuds, Smoke and Mirrors edition

Thud the First: Slick Willie's dance at the DNC last night. Slick Willie was as slick as ever last night, and the slimmed-down, Former President is again trying to woof us. This time, it isn't about his poor eating habits back then, it's about how he faced such a terrible recession when he came into office, and he solved it, and by Gawd, so can Barack. Except it's a lie: the downturn Slick Willie had to deal with wasn't half as bad as the one Barack faced, to be fair to the POTUS. Also, Slick Willie's Administration climbed out of that lesser downturn because of the Dot-Com bubble expansion, and no other reason. If you factor out the Information Age expansion, or if it hadn't happened, we'd still be in the GHW Bush/Clinton recession. Slick Willie had nothing to do with the business boom of his Presidency, just as he had nothing to do with it's bust, when the Dot-Com bubble burst. The Dot-Com run-up and demise was all about the old fogies on Wall Street being swept away by something new - the Day Traders, who have, to the detriment of our economy, ruled the roost on the Street ever since. 

Thud the Second: The EU's Central Bankers are flashing mirrors at us and trying to blow smoke up our collective hoo-hoos with their "new" plan to "buy" the excessive debt of their constituent Socialist governments. Uh, Fellas: It didn't work here, our TARPS merely threw a cover over the problem which the winds of fiscal uncertainty rapidly blew aside. It won't work in Europe, either, because the same principle is being violated as was violated here: if you are actually "buying" debt, the assets you use to buy it with have to be more solid than the debt you are buying. That can't happen in Europe, where every nation except Germany has a debt-to-income ratio of greater than one. How do you enter the market on the "good faith and credit" of the European Union, when that Supra-Government has consistently deceived everyone about it's debt ratio, and has no credit? Remember next Wednesday, when the German Constitutional Court rules on the legality of Germany's bailing out of Europe? This tells me that the Court has leaked to the ECB that the ruling is going to put Germany out of the bailout game, and so the ECB came up with this idiot, failed scheme to try to cover their asses. It's working in the short run, too: the Day Traders have puffed up the stock markets by a couple of percent.

Thud the Third: (Local display of smoke and mirrors): Just last week, upon the Secretary of State announcing that Measures 82 & 83 had made the ballot, the group behind the effort to have a non-tribal Casino in the Portland area fired their biggest PR gun, and announced the name of the new Casino to be built about 5 miles from me in Wood Village, OR. It will be called "The Grange". Hmmm, that immediately seemed strange to me, since there are active service clubs with that name both locally and nationally, and it is also the name of a past political movement of some note in our past history. Well, the service organizations have sued. Good for them. I hope they win. There ARE indications that the service orgs will be bought off, though, and the name will stick for the casino. The smoke and mirrors effort here is still able to hide the big Eastern money that's behind the casino efforts. This has GOT to be either Trump money or Mafia money. Can any reader help out here?

Thud the Fourth: Actual thuds here, with blows being landed and butts hitting the pavement. Good old Oregon!

Thud the Fifth: Is the sound of the Holy Bicyclists getting stiffed in a conversation about cars and freeway lanes. This is actually amazing, that the Oregonian, which supports the Ghey Mayor's Holy Bicycle Quest, would actually write an article about a transportation issue and NOT put bicycles into the mix.

Thud the Sixth: Is the sound of the Left's most recent efforts at Gun Control hitting the bottom of the shitcan. Since PawPaw does a far better job of reporting on this issue that I ever will, go look at his report.

 

Thursday Thuds, Labor Day Edition

Yep, it's early for Labor Day, but I might just be out for Dove season then...little buggers can make almost 60 mph, and they have only two bites of meat on them, but there are a LOT of them this year. Last week, there were dove and bobwhite quail EVERYWHERE we traveled East of the Cascades. I have the perfect gun for them, an antique L.C. Smith SxS 12, full & modified, and even though it is 97 years old, it has true-steel barrels, not Damascus, and will easily handle the low-base loads I hunt small birds with. In fact, it handles high-brass heavy duck loads just fine as well.

This weekend, I'm off to the High Cascades to attend a wedding. It will be the marriage of my best buddy's step-daughter. I've known her since 1985, and watched her grow up, from a precocious little girl who used to share her Mom's bathtub with my youngest (now Doctor) daughter, after playing outside and getting all muddy. Those were the days when my buddy was courting his second wife, a recent widow.

Heather grew up alongside my Erin, in the same day-care, in the same schools, and they went to the University of Oregon together to learn how to be liberals. Erin came out Cum Laude in Pre-Med and Microbiology, and Heather came out Cum Laude in Architecture. Both stayed on for a fifth year, Erin to get a business major added to her degree, and Heather to get her Diploma in Architecture, which takes graduate-level work.

Erin takes broken people and puts them back together in the ER, and Heather takes the dreams of companies for new office buildings, and breaks them, putting them back together with greater efficiency and better form to promote greater productivity and reduced cost.

Heather is an outdoor person, so she is getting hitched at a High Cascades resort which caters to sportsmen and women in all seasons. Photos may follow. I'm dragging Petey the Pop-Up camper up the mountain to serve as overflow lodging, and I have cooked a Chili for her Chili Contest:

Download TopGun Chili Reader (Open Office)

Download TopGun Chili Reader (PDF)

Without further ado, off to the Thuds.

Thud the First:

NBC News. They announced that they are covering exactly ONE hour of the GOP Convention on three nights. Said something about advertising revenue. OK, then they expect much better revenue from the (D)onk Convention a week later? They admitted that they will be covering much more of that Convention. Can you say In The Tank for Obama? I knew you could. This old fart thinks that if the press is going to shill for a political agenda, they ought to either admit it or quit it. Maybe, in the Second Republic, the next Constitution might actually figure out how to have a free AND non-partisan press.

Thud the Second: The Obama Administration, again. This time, they had their shill claim that Obama has "created more jobs than Ronald Reagan did", and is therefore, better for business. OK, if you buy that stinking pile of manure as the Truth, I have eleven, soon to be twelve bridges that I own here in Portland, and will make you a package deal, very cheap... Lessee here, what was the population of the USA back then as compared to now? What was the definition of a "created job" then as compared to now (hint: today, a "job" is today considered one half of one FTE (full time equivalent) for one month (15 days of work). In other words, seventy hours of work is a full-time job under Obama! This was the definition we were shown in the fine print back when the "shovel-ready" crap was being shoveled our way. I seem to recall, but can't find it, that the old Federal definition of a FTE was 2080 hours of work in a calendar year, and half-time (one half of one FTE) was 1040 hours. At least, that was what the last big Federal Jobs Program, CETA, was based on. Of course, all this begs the questions such as: government jobs vs. private jobs; creating jobs while stifling more than you create (with regulations), etc, etc, ad nauseam.

Thud the Third:

Mittens gets this one. The current best estimate of the GOP's electoral votes has the number at 191, with 79 more needed to guarantee a Romney win. So what does the Stupid Party do? They promise to fit a plank into their platform that calls for an abortion ban. Last time this issue was polled, I seem to recall that well over 60% of voters supported the Roe vs. Wade decision guaranteeing a woman's right to choose to abort or not. This issue is a loser for the GOP, because when push comes to shove in the voting booths in November, GOP voters are going to vote for Mittens whether that plank is there or not, but the tiny number of swing voters, those who are expected to swing this obviously-close election, might just see that plank as a sufficient negative not to pull the GOP lever. The GOP loads up it's gun, once again, and points it right at it's own foot. BTW, that THUD! you hear in November will be the Constitution taking it's last fall.

Thud Three-A, Bonus Thud: With the above turd stinking up it's pocket, it says here that Romney wants to get back to the Economy, stupid. Starting a hormone-fired fight within the GOP over Biblical issues isn't the way to do it, Mittens.

Thud the Fourth: Minor thud here, but wastes of resources gravels my butt. About 6 weeks ago, I sent Mittens a donation of $50. My spouse also sent him some $$$. Together, we get around 3-5 appeals per day in the mail. Mittens won't use window envelopes, so I have to shred the pre-printed forms in each appeal, the appeal letter AND the envelope from each one (my security program has as it's cornerstone that nothing with our names on it goes into the trash).

Thud the Fifth: Dregs of Sass-siety Edition: The porno industry is again facing a delay in filming caused by actors with STDs. This has happened before. In similar news, there is now a reported skin infection which can be gotten in tattoo parlors. Who could have guessed THAT? God may keep you healthy, but the Devil has a large bag of disease to take you, body AND soul. Forget that at your peril.

That will be all, readers. Enjoy your weekend.