07:30 – We woke up this morning to find everything covered in white. We got an inch or two of snow overnight, which no one had forecast. Light snow is to continue for the next few hours, with an additional accumulation of maybe an inch. No one knew it was coming, so the city trucks didn’t pre-treat the roads with brine. There aren’t even any plows out so far this morning. The high today is to be right around freezing, so the roads are likely to remain a mess. There’ve already been dozens of accidents reported. Barbara is going into work this morning, driving the Trooper, but she’ll be running late.
Tuesday, 24 February 2015
55 Comments and discussion on "Tuesday, 24 February 2015"
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Dozens of accidents because of 2 inches of snow? Are they driving on slicks?
Drivers here in the Southland usually have little experience driving on slippery roads. Snow tires are unheard of around here. People who learned to drive up North generally instinctively steer into skids to straighten out; drivers here seem to instinctively spin their steering wheels in the wrong direction, so spin-outs are common. Black ice? They’ve heard of it. And most consider 10 miles over the limit to be a prudent speed for driving on ice. And all of them know that their 4X4’s render them invulnerable to snow and ice.
Additionally we don’t have much snow removal equipment. The NE even has garbage trucks with plows. Too costly to have an expensive truck that only gets used once every five years. Best is to just stay home.
Yeah, when I lived in Pennsylvania every government truck from pickup trucks on up had hydraulics on them for plows. Even the school buses and garbage trucks had plows. Even if they’ll be needed very infrequently, the cost of installing hydraulics and buying plows is trivial compared to the direct and indirect costs of not having the roads plowed for lack of equipment.
There were also a lot of individuals who had hydraulics and plows on their pickups. It wasn’t unusual after a heavy snow to see at least one or two people out in their private vehicles plowing neighborhood streets and often older people’s drives.
Not long after I moved here, we had an 18″ snow. My parents lived on the end of a cul-de-sac, so I drove over in my Jeep CJ-7 to make sure they had everything they needed. I didn’t have a plow, so I spent an hour or so driving up and down their street to pack the snow down far enough and wide enough that regular cars could get out to the main drag. Then I spent the rest of the day hauling doctors and nurses between their homes and the hospital.
the cost of installing hydraulics and buying plows is trivial compared to the direct and indirect costs of not having the roads plowed for lack of equipment.
You fail to see the big picture. Most cities, such as Oak Ridge, would rather spend that money on armored assault vehicles, military tactical gear, phone spying equipment, sophisticated night vision systems and other such items. That stuff is much more fun to play with than a snow plow.
“And all of them know that their 4X4’s render them invulnerable to snow and ice.”
Hey, it’s the same deal up here, in a paht of the country where derps oughta know bettuh! The local nooz rags and tee-vee stations have been reporting dozens of accidents likewise, mainly up and down the interstate, for the past two weeks. I gotta say, though, the local town and country plows have been out regularly doing the brine thing and plowing; the interstate not so much.
I now have Winblows 8.1 on the desktop here, with 32GB of RAM and a spinning 1TB hard drive; it’s connected via KVM switch to the old Windoze 8 box, which is now Fedora Design Suite 21, very slick o.s. The remaining desktop is running Ubuntu Studio and my HP Workstation laptop, with a keyboard that lights up, runs PC-BSD 10.1; I’ll probably spring for at least two SSD’s in the next coupla months or so, though. And looking to build a FreeNAS box with multiple SSD’s.
I have not, and will attempt to avoid, installing Google Chrome on here; I got fed up with it after the multiple problems getting rid of that piece of shit safesear.ch and resulting mayhem with the attempts. None of the other browsers were hijacked by it, so I only have FF, SeaMonkey, IE and Safari on here now. And only FF on the Fedora and Ubuntu machines. Watch now; in six months there will be raging problems with FF or sumthin and I’ll have to dump that, too. These things seem to work in cycles; IE 11, for example, seems OK right now.
I was raised in northern Wisconsin. My Dad took all the kids out to learn how to drive on snow and ice. Doughnuts anyone!?
I see SoS “Lurch” is out poking The Bear in the eye by calling them liars on their policy in the Ukraine. Wut a gummint! Let’s blow the Mooslim extremist around the world, but fuck with the nation that could really screw with us. Obola…weakest leader evah! And dumbest. Makes Booooosh look like a genius.
Hey, Mr. OFD. VA Sec Robert “Ronald” McDonald was in the SF! Probably served near you in ‘Nam. lololololo A gummint official caught lying. Say it ain’t so.
Snow is uncommon around here and people don’t have a clue on how to drive in it. They do not salt the roads, they sand them. That’s why you see a lot of twenty year old rust free cars. You see a lot of studded tires because people ski up in the mountains. They chew up the streets and make things worse on anything except ice. We have a Subaru with studless traction tires and, when it snows or is icy, we stay home except in emergencies to avoid the idiots in their 4 wheel drive pickups. The last time there was an “emergency” that would have required the Subaru was in 1987 when our son was born on December 19. There was snow the week before, so we were a little concerned about getting to the hospital.
Last year we got about six inches of snow at our house. We were in China at the time, so we only saw pictures. We had a little ice in late fall this year. It’s been incredibly mild since then. It’s currently 40 degrees and sunny with a predicted high of 56 today. It was nice and sunny yesterday. We got 38.4 KWH of electricity from our solar system. That’s good for February. We get about 50 KWH on a sunny day in July. We use an average of about 1000 KWH per month.
Rick in Portland
“I see SoS “Lurch” is out poking The Bear in the eye by calling them liars on their policy in the Ukraine.”
He’s just doing what he’s told to do; the State Department and DOD rigged up the Ukraine mess like the messes they created in Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Iraq, and Syria. So now there are neo-Nazis in charge of that area and they’re at dagger points with the Russians. We keep poking the Russian bear and Iranian whatever in the eyes constantly for some reason, to no possible good end. We have neo-Trotskyite neocons running our foreign policy in tune with the Likud Party in Israel, which explains a LOT.
If this wasn’t Mirror World, we’d be allied with the Russians and Iranians in hunting down and obliterating hadji terrorists and rogue hadji states. Without being drawn into yet another full-scale Second Generation warfare clusterfuck.
Again, we must examine that same page from the Mr. SteveF playbook; if a nation-state was determined to knock the world and itself way off-balance and cause international and domestic chaos and mayhem, how would ours have gone about it differently?
My guess is that Obama’s IQ is somewhere in the 100 range, plus or minus a few points. Same as his predecessor. Contrast that with Netanyahu, whose IQ puts him in the world-class range. For that matter, I’d guess that Putin is probably a couple sigmas better than Obama.
” Probably served near you in ‘Nam.”
He was a few years after my time there. Looks like he had all the right training but didn’t engage any enemy forces anywhere, but who knows? OFD wasn’t technically in special forces, either, depending on how you define it; USAF spec ops is often included along with the Seals, Delta, Green Berets, etc., but in any case I was just a lowly-ass machine gunner with the 56th Special Operations Wing outta Nakhom Phanom Royal Thai AFB on the Laotian border back then for a few months, and am a life member of the Air Commando Association of America, BFD. Before that, in ‘Nam, I was part of an AF security police detail that provided security, laughably, for Green Berets at Bien Hoa AB northeast of Saigon, now, haha, Ho Chi Minh City.
http://www.aircommando.org/
http://tlc-brotherhood.com/wp/
http://www.vspa.com/
“My guess is that Obama’s IQ is somewhere in the 100 range, plus or minus a few points. Same as his predecessor.”
Thus, more ammo for my hypothesis that he and most of his recent predecessors are/were merely puppets on strings.
The Russians have Prince Vlad; the Israelis have Bibi the War Criminal (OFD’s ex-wife is a cousin); even the Norks have an interesting character. We have nobody.
Biden is certainly a nobody. 🙂
My long-time resident and correspondent in Delaware has personally witnessed Joe’s behavior down there over the years and sez it’s fairly well-known that he’s bipolar. I’ll say this for him, though; despite losing his own first wife and child, he found time to write Mrs. OFD when her first husband was killed, and he had a son serving over in the Sandbox. His wife, Dr. Biden, has also gone out of her way to get help for combat vets.
But that all said, yeah, I’d vote for Nobody as President in the next election. Bring in one of the generals and let’s get things really hopping; invade some more countries, line the highway belts around our major cities with tens of thousands of crucified hadjis, nuke Mecca and Medina, and make Bibi our SecDef and SecState combined. Either we do this and run it like a bonafide RUTHLESS empire, or we get outta the business altogether and mind our own.
There you go. The problem with your two choices is that the first may well happen (well, mostly) but the second just ain’t gonna happen.
The fundamental problem is that western armies (and US forces in particular) have far too few KIA in even larger scale conflicts than they used to. For thousands of years, governments have used wars as convenient ways to cut down the excess population of young men. The efficiency of that peaked from around our Civil War to (particularly) WWI, but it’s been going downhill ever since. Look at the number of rounds fired per KIA in WWI, WWII, Viet Nam, and the Middle East. The number of rounds/KIA keeps skyrocketing.
We’re between a rock and a hard place now. Young men are expensive to a society, and nowadays they’re rapidly becoming superfluous. Young men expect jobs and wives, and then they turn right around and produce more superfluous young men. We don’t have much need any more for raw physical strength or for that matter any of the other kinds of work that men are best suited for. Biologically, the ideal is now maybe 10 women per man, not that women are going to like that idea much.
That’s why I’m surprised that we haven’t had a nuclear war to cut the number of excess men down. Oh, well. If we don’t do it ourselves, I promise there’ll be a plague along any time now to do it for us.
So…what you’re saying is that the ideal pop ratio of CONUS ought to be, given the total number we have now of around 330 million: 33 million men and the rest women. I’ll start lining up the ten women I want right away, time’s a-wasting here.
I have dibs on Amber Marshall, Emily Van Camp, and several others.
Yes, that’s what I’m saying. About 33 million men and the remainder women. That’s my SWAG at the optimum ratio for our current state of technology. It used to be higher, when we needed men’s brute strength, but with that brute strength comes all the problems of “angry young men”, such as violence and crime. That’s why the muslim and old Mormon idea of multiple wives creates an inherently unstable society; too many angry young men who can’t get laid.
Of course, that means a big sacrifice for those of us men who are left (and I plan to be among them). With each of us responsible for ten women, guys like us are going to need viagra. Of course, some of those ten will be too young to have children and some too old, but you get the idea.
I also freely confess that I haven’t spent much time thinking about the problem of angry young women, but I suspect it won’t be severe. Women are naturally somewhere in the middle of the gay->straight continuum, so a high percentage of women would probably focus their sexual attraction on other women except when they needed to be impregnated. Maybe even then.
Of course, modern science can get into play here. There’s no reason why we couldn’t shift the percentage of babies born from something over 50% male to something a bit over 10% male.
Yo, sound like a plan, Doc!
Viagra or Cialis, here we COME!!!
You got your dibs, and I got mine:
Celebs are out; I’ll be researching Lost Wages dancer types and me and MrAtoz can team up and pick them out. I also plan a trip to Iceland, which has the most drop-dead gorgeous dames on Planet Earth, genetic mix of Norse and Irish. So stunning as to make you weep at God’s bounty.
Or the FSM’s, YMMV, of course.
Come to think of it, with modern science we don’t really need men at all to continue the species. In fact, we wouldn’t even need women except for their uteruses (uteri?). And once we’ve developed artificial uteri we won’t need women. Hmmm. I think I’ll have my brain transplanted to a robot. Humans may be obsolete sooner than anyone would believe possible.
Robots would have to be made of some kinda plastic material, or if they’re metal, they’ll rust up in our temperate climate here, amirite?
And if our brains are transplanted, will our personalities be included?
What if we really do have souls? Do those come with the bundle?
Incidentally, the radical environmentalist types apparently want the complete eradication of the human race on this planet; my reply to them is:
You first, homes!
A little play on one of their groups’ names, you see…”Earth First!”
We note that one of their most prominent members, one Bill McKibben, lives across the lake here, over in those Adirondack mountains we can see from multiple windows and the back yahd; on an expensive farm. But he wants the rest of us caged up in those urban high-rises. Fugly circus freak pig Michael Moore also digs this scenario, as he pontificates from his own multi-million-dollar estate; ditto Algore, of course, as he swans about the continent to his various estates in his fleet of jets.
A nasty pox on them all; let’s rid ourselves of these vermin first so they don’t get the chance to transplant their gray matter into robots and thus perpetuate the insanity.
Some of my ten-women allotment here:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/cailisi/3996065341/
http://www.slideshare.net/irfan_hoty/women-of-iceland-by-irfan
You’re welcome to those, as long as I can have Amber and Emily. I do wish that Dorothy Parker had been born a century later than she was, because then she’d be on my list for sure.
She was certainly a hot ticket.
Had they been born later, or me earlier, I might have gone for Florence King and Camille Paglia.
Oh shucks, now I will just be stuck with Lost Wages showgirl athletes and Icelandic women, with whom I have a tiny head start communicating with, having studied a little Old Norse in my time.
Biologically, the ideal is now maybe 10 women per man, not that women are going to like that idea much.
Mein Führer…! I can walk!
On the chance that you don’t have enough idiots on the road down there, we can send you plenty. Do you prefer the geezers who are afraid to drive on the snow but drive anyway, at 10MPH on the highway, the brush punks who’ll zip along at 75 when a sensible highway speed is 40, or the dimwitted women who text while tailgating on slick roads with poor visibility? I see plenty of each every day, so you can have any mix you like.
Calling him a PoS works, too. Ditto for PoS Obama, and that latter PoS doesn’t stand for President of States.
Me neither, technically. I didn’t have the real training, but I got some specialized training and went some places I never was and was told to keep quiet about afterward. Pain in the ass, actually. Most of my best stories have to be interrupted mid-stream with “ah, but I can’t talk about that”. Serious case of disputatius interruptus. I can say a little bit about a few stories, but when pressed for details I can’t legally give them, leaving me looking like a total bullshitter, which is worse than not saying anything when chatting with other vets. Pain in the ass, as I said.
Defaulting to inept empire, Pournelle used to say.
I’ll point out that most women are superfluous, too. Most of them accomplish little except consumption and crapping out more superfluous humans. I agree that a good population for the US would be much lower, but I’d get rid of both men and women. Say a population of 30 million total, roughly evenly balanced, with the 300 million “surplus” being the stupidest 92%.
“… I see plenty of each every day, so you can have any mix you like.”
We have all those and the aforementioned young-men-at-loose-ends, driving mostly pickup trucks but also other vehicles, with baseball caps tilted back from their heads so they look like the rural huckleberry cretins they are, usually with some stubble on their chins, and they floor it everywhere and love to scrub out constantly, in whatever weather or road conditions. I see more women driving dangerously and recklessly now, though, all the time, often, as you say, yakking on cell phones while trying to maneuver their gigantic SUV’s with one hand as they likely sit on a pile of telephone books to see over the wheel.
“Mein Führer…! I can walk!”
Ja, monogamy is dead. Why be tormented all the time by only one woman? Variety is the spice of life, they say.
“On the chance that you don’t have enough idiots on the road down there…”
If you are replying to ME, it is YOU who are “down there.” I am UP HERE, homes. You is down there in the Capital District Banana Belt. I is up here in Little Siberia on the Fucking Lake.
“…but when pressed for details I can’t legally give them…”
That don’t cut no ice with the combat vets group up here at the VA. I do, however, avoid yakking about that shit with anyone else, including Mrs. OFD and other family. I have heard some doozies and the other vets have heard a couple of mine. What the average schmuck Murkan derp doesn’t know would amaze them.
“Defaulting to inept empire, Pournelle used to say.”
Exactly. And doomed to collapse and extinction, but not right away. It took Rome a couple of centuries; us, maybe a few decades.
“Most of them accomplish little except consumption and crapping out more superfluous humans.”
You forgot: bitching a lot, and generating tons of useless, time-consuming, tedious melodrama.
“I agree that a good population for the US would be much lower…”
And for the world. Extreme environmentalists and really extreme right-wingers and the global elites are all agreed: an 80% reduction is due and welcome. Just not including them.
Obolacare -> Obolanet:
http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2015/02/24/obama_exploits_the_ignorance_of_young_people_to_seize_control_of_the_internet
So I am fairly sure that Obola is selling the health insurance system to wall street??? I wonder who he selling the internet to?
I do, however, avoid yakking about that shit with anyone else
I’ve had to kill my self several times for blabbing. Thank God for the Lazarus Pit.
Yah, I know. However, I agreed, with my eyes open and with no coercion, not to discuss classified info without authorization, so I won’t. Period, end of statement. (Well, not quite end of statement: information which was classified solely to cover up a crime would be fair game.) In theory I could talk about it with people who’d been there or otherwise knew about the events, but I haven’t run into any of them since getting off active duty. (I must admit I’ve made no effort at all to track anyone down. And anyway, half or more are probably dead of old age if not military violence. I was usually the youngest in any group I was in; one of the consequences of being commissioned so young was that most of the PFCs were older than I was as a 2LT.)
Had they been born later, or me earlier, I might have gone for Florence King and Camille Paglia.
Both bat for the other team, however.
However, I agreed, with my eyes open and with no coercion, not to discuss classified info without authorization, so I won’t.
I did the same with my time in the USAF. There are things of which I had knowledge and information that I cannot discuss. Although I suspect that most of the information is of no value any more. I would not put it beyond our government to pursue such disclosure by myself or SteveF to their full power.
It actually gets worse. I have an uncle that was a nuclear sub commander. He is not allowed to leave the country without permission of the state department and the military. He also has to report any contact with anyone that carries a foreign passport even if casually. Additionally, any flights he takes that take him out of the country the route must be approved by the state department. There are some countries he is not allowed to visit, land in or fly over. He had been out of the Navy for about 5 years last I talked with him. I don’t know if the restrictions apply for the rest of his life. I suspect so.
Both bat for the other team, however.
I don’t think they have bats, more like a dugout.
“Both bat for the other team, however.”
Not entirely, from what I’ve heard; both are pretty much bisexual. And this was before I had a chance to get to them, of course.
“I wonder who he selling the internet to?”
Probably to Indians and Slovaks; they run the show at IBM’s plantation up here now, and furriners do the security audits, so why not? But maybe the Red Chinese.
“I don’t think they have bats, more like a dugout.”
Good one, Mr. Ray!
“… half or more are probably dead of old age if not military violence. I was usually the youngest in any group I was in…”
Ditto. I’m a baby ‘Nam vet; enlisted at 17 near the tail end of both Indochina Wars. Other ‘Nam vets are usually several or more years older than me and have white hair and beards. Mine is still red.
“I would not put it beyond our government to pursue such disclosure by myself or SteveF to their full power.”
Me, neither.
“I don’t know if the restrictions apply for the rest of his life. I suspect so.”
As do I. And now those restrictions apply to you as well, ’cause he told ya or you found out. I’ve notified the authorities accordingly and shall now get a bonus in my disability checks. So they promised…
I’ve notified the authorities accordingly and shall now get a bonus in my disability checks.
Well, damned. I guess you got even with me for calling you a twerp. Well played. I did not know you were a spy and worked on commission. Now excuse me while I go investigate that noise outside that sounds strangely like a helic
As do I. And now those restrictions apply to you as well, ’cause he told ya or you found out
The oath I took for my “sooper secret” job in San Antonio was till death do us part.
Obola vetoes the Keystone pipeline.
Senate Redumblicans fold on gutting the DHS funding.
Reid squawking it’s not enough.
Redumblicans sitting around with thumbs up their asses.
Wut a country! Redumblicans get a majority in both Houses thanks to us and can’t do shit. Game over, dude, game over.
“…I guess you got even with me for calling you a twerp. Well played. I did not know you were a spy and worked on commission.”
Well, truth be told, I was once a twerp. Skinny as a rail, over six feet tall kid, with glasses, buck teeth and zits. Collected stamps and coins and built model airplanes. But hey, commission is the only way to go! Welcome to the new Stasi World! The New Panopticon!
“…was till death do us part.”
We can arrange that, just as soon as we land this helicopter from Tennessee…
“…Wut a country! Redumblicans get a majority in both Houses thanks to us and can’t do shit.”
Naw. Did anyone here, anyone at all, actually think for even a nanosecond that the new RINO majority would do diddly once they got in down there? Seriously?
Oh but wait: Governor Perry, or Rubio or Walker or somebody will be different…
ROTFLMAO. Game has been over for a long time. We’re still kneeling on the ground looking for our cards, our chips, our cash…and the guys who took us are miles away now…ROTFLTHAO…
…but that practice kneeling will serve us well in the years and decades to come…not to worry…
What’s the story with Net Neutrality? I haven’t really been paying attention…
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/25/technology/path-clears-for-net-neutrality-ahead-of-fcc-vote.html?emc=edit_na_20150224&nlid=54159233&_r=1
“Wut a country! Redumblicans get a majority in both Houses thanks to us and can’t do shit. Game over, dude, game over.”
Well, Obama seems to get a lot of hate here, so if y’all get off your arses and vote against Hillary in 2016 something might happen. The people who stayed home in 2008 and 2012 are partly to blame.
I guess it’s time for me to repost this… I wonder what the robot would say to the stay-at-homes.
A guy goes into a New York bar and there’s a robot bartender.
The robot says, “What will you have?” The guy says, “Martini”.
The robot brings back the best martini ever and says to the man, “What’s your IQ?”
The guy says, “168.”
The robot then proceeds to talk about physics, pure mathematics and medical technology.
The guy leaves, but he’s curious – so, he goes back into the bar.
The robot bartender says, “What will you have?”
The guy says, “Martini.”
Again, the robot makes a great martini gives it to the man and says, “What’s your IQ?”
The guy says “100.”
The robot then starts to talk about Gridiron, Coors Beer and SUVs.
The guy leaves, but having found it very interesting, decides he’ll try it one last time. He goes back into the bar.
The robot says, “What will you have?”
Again the guy says, “Martini” – and the robot brings him another great one.
The robot then says, “What’s your IQ?”
The guy says, “Uh, about 40 …”
The robot leans in real close and says,
“So, you people still happy you voted for Obama?”
As has been said here before countless times, not least by my tiresome self, voting “against” HILLARY!” or Obummer or anyone of that ilk does not guarantee us anybody better, no matter what they blather about and promise during their campaigns.
The era of voting in national (and state) elections so as to have any affect on the preordained outcomes is over. It’s dead. Maybe things are different in Oz or O Kanada but this country is hopeless now. It’s too big and we are ruled by a gang of war criminals, thieves, brigands, pirates, and perverts. Many of them appear to be composites of some late Roman emperors, like Nero, Caligula, Commodus, Domitian, and the like. Only not as bright.
But you’re right; it’s too easy to hate on Obola and HILLARY! That’s deliberate; they’re set up as the evil Bad Guys by tools like the clowns on the Fox Network and FaceCrack and then we’re all supposed to be clued in to their ‘secret’ strategy of voting for the ‘lesser of two evils’ again. Fewer Murkan derps are falling for that rubbish.
I predict another bullshit phony election, with HILLARY! or Granny Warren or somebody running against yet another Bush clan bozo or some RINO gov and then it will end up being about 30% of eligible voters creating yet another dead heat, maybe with more ‘hanging chads’ and SCOTUS involvement or some other freak show they’ve rigged up for us, with the predictable nooz blather from talking heads and the virulent outrage on FaceCrack and Twatter.
All just “…a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury signifying nothing”
We’ll get a “choice” between some progressive asshole like Clinton or Warren and some religious-right would-be theocrat asshole like Cruz or Walker. Some choice. As Tom Petty said, “I can’t decide which is worse.”
There it is.
Ladies and gentlemen, you’ve had the two literary quotes, today, one from Shakey and one from Tom Petty. That should suffice.
You *might* get those choices. Or the Republicans (or even the Democrats) might choose someone worthwhile.
Anyway, we *know* that Obama was about the worst possible candidate (RBT has said so himself) so choosing someone from the other side *might* be better. Couldn’t be worse.
“Or the Republicans (or even the Democrats) might choose someone worthwhile.”
And monkeys might fly out of my ass.
“Couldn’t be worse.”
Oh yes it could.
Dave, do you actually believe what you’re writing?
Absolutely. I have decades on the planet, most of them spent here in North Murka, specifically in CONUS, and have previously been an activist political supporter on working campaigns here. I’ve also met and talked with major political figures in my time and watched and observed and read tons of books and articles. I don’t make up this stuff out of whole cloth, sir.
Maybe, and I hope this is so, things are still working OK with your political systems in the former British colonies of Oz and O Kanada, and best of luck to ya.
But not here, not by a long shot.
Greg, Dave is right. We haven’t had any real choice in elections for at least 25 years and that’s being generous. People who offer the chance of a real difference simply can’t get nominated, let alone elected. The game is rigged. In fact, I decided at least 30 years ago that I didn’t even trust the government to count and report ballots honestly.
The main factors are money and a captive media. A decent fellow like Ron Paul doesn’t stand the chance of the proverbial snowball. And years ago when Pat Buchanan strayed off the RINO reservation, he was blackballed, again, not many years after National Review and the late William F. Cardinal Buckley excommunicated him for alleged anti-Semitism. The established rulers will use any dirty trick or technique to get rid of pesky truth-tellers here, and money is the biggest factor.
Right now the Koch brothers stand to put at least as much dough, if not more, into the coming national campaigns, and we’re talking over a billion here. While on the other side of the spectrum that bastard son of a bitch Bloomberg spends like amounts on his anti-gun hysteria around the country, including here in Vermont.
Dr. Paul, or Patrick don’t have that kind of dough, but people like Lady MacBeth of Little Rock or guys like the Jebster can lay their hands on it pretty easily.
An optimist believes we live in the best of all possible worlds. A pessimist is afraid that is so.
And Miles_Teg just flings poo like a monkey.
Miles is right, believe it or not. You guys are committing political suicide.
I draw a simile from recent experience. I’ve just been hospitalised – nothing serious – just closer supervision of a chronic condition. They asked me if I’d consider “self-harm”. I told them I’d had a cousin who committed suicide, so I’d thought about it in general terms, and I believed that, no matter how bad things may have got, suicide is the one way to guarantee they’ll never get better.
Well, that’s what you are doing. You guys are committing political suicide.
Things may be bad, and improvement may be highly improbable, but there’s a difference between slim chance and no chance. Provided you refuse to vote, you are absolutely ensuring that you will have zero percent chance of making a difference.
I maintain there is zero chance short of divine intervention at this point, Mr. Don.
And rather than committing political suicide, we are holding steady and conserving ammo for a better day.
I should point out, however, once again, that I still do vote in local elections where things still matter, to a point, and I can confront the local pols and hacks face to face. In this state that’s even true, to a point, with our two senators, who I’ve bumped into several times over the years, at supermarkets and the like. Bernie and Patrick, by the way, are taller than you’d think; both easily over six feet. Patrick dresses very nicely, too, usually in a great suit. Bernie not so much.
Nationally? Zero chance. Our votes on that level are like unto pissing up a rope, and simply serve to validate the regime’s depredations while they openly laugh at us. I suspect that is also true to some extent in Oz and O Kanada but it’s sorta like comparing apples and oranges now; we here live in a criminal empire of 330-million.
I’m glad to see that of all the people here that at least one, Don, hasn’t overdosed on the anarcho-libertarian Kool-Aid.
I’m sure OFD would vote for this guy in a flash…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Boss
Sure, tar somebody with the “Kool-Aid” and drug overdose brushes and link them to some nutball candidate, who, though, may have a point that our wunnerful regime here knew more than they let on about the 9/11 capers, probably along the lines of how it knew more than they let on about the Pearl Harbor fiasco.
In other words, if we don’t absolutely buy the standard-issue, pro-voting claptrap that may or may not work OK for people in other countries, we must be loons ourselves. And committing political suicide.
I’d suggest taking a real good look at our Murkan political history since the days of Pharaoh Roosevelt II, when things really started to go down the proverbial toilet here, with particular attention to how our elections are engineered. And avoid the MSM, which parrots the regime’s lines with slavish obeisance.