Cool and damp but clear and not cold… I hope. Really nice yesterday as long as you were in the sun.
Got a bunch of stuff yesterday, drove all over town. Picked up D2 from early dismissal, and went out for more.
Today I’ve got my quarterly hobby mini-swapmeet and get together, which will keep me occupied for a few hours this morning. Then I’m driving out to Conroe to pick up some patio furniture. Aluminum chairs and table, definitely not new, but holy cow the stuff is expensive new. Used will be just fine for a while.
I’ll be away from the keyboard but will check in. Keep it to a dull roar…
and stack something.
n
Have fun, Nick!
A beautiful sunny frosty day here. After almost three weeks of miserable rainy weather, a reason to rejoice. Spring is on the way. Spotted a few tips of crocus and daffodils above the earth.
Spouse is glued to the Olympics, and has been fed hash browns (really, tortilla de patatas), strangled eggs and fried mushrooms with bacon and garlic, so I might get some quiet time to attack the disorder in the garage.
First order of business, bring a load of paper and cardboard to the recycling park. Then I will have some space to swing a cat. Next is to gather up the hunting clothes and run them through the washing machine before they are packed away until May or autumn. If I can get the new shelving units assembled, I can get stuff off the floor and out of the way, then I can clean and paint the ceiling, before installing new LED lights. Never a dull moment…
Happy days!
@Denis
I tead your plans for the day and it wore me out.
Need more coffee.
M&M ice cream sandwiches were my Christmas Eve dinner at the hospital in 2001 when my son was born at 26 weeks gestation. I still eat them, but the memory is strong.
Aye, clean and paint the ceiling!
56F and 99%RH. Cool and damp.
Back is screaming at me for all the lifting and moving I did yesterday, so standing behind a table should be fun…
Truck is loaded, some last minute things need to be found, and a certain girl scout and a certain cookie mom need to get loaded up. I'm about to unleash the cute in a room filled with grandparents……. balanced by an innate 'thriftiness'. We'll see which tendency wins that battle.
n
The takeaway meme from the Blasey-Ford testimony at the Kavanaugh hearings: "That could be my daughter/grandaughter!"
It works.
I agree, one case is significantly insufficient
Yesterday, my SIL told me about a friend of his from work was suffering from his 17 year old daughter's Covid death. Parents were separated and wife retained custody of daughter. As adamant anti-vaxxer, wife forbad vaccination; consequently, she certainly did not commit voluntary manslaughter.
Can anybody provide significantly sufficient data showing that a greater percentage of Covid deaths occur in those vaccinated than in those unvaccinated?
as
All levels of government have been dishonest about who is dying "of" vs. "with" as both sides have worked the pandemic for political gain.
Personal anectode can be matched for personal anecdote. My wife's former *fully vaccinated* co-worker at the VA has been on a vent for more than a month in St. Louis after contracting Covid during the holidays, and all of my wife's near misses in catching it have come from *fully vaccinated* providers showing up sick for work claiming "asymptomatic" status while popping 102 the minute the scan hits their forehead.
One provider, two shots with two boosters, has contracted Covid three times.
IRS backlog hits nearly 24 million returns, further imperiling the 2022 tax filing season
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/02/11/irs-returns-backlog/
This is freaking crazy if the irs has 24 million paper returns from 2020 waiting in trucks to be scanned outside its offices while its people sit at home in their jammies.
And the irs is sending out notices of tax insufficiency. My business tax preparer just got his efile suspended by the irs for not filing his 2020 business tax return. But, he filed it !
Moving goalposts.
Plus, if you get sick or die within 14, or 30, days of getting a clot shot, you're "unvaccinated" for statistical purposes.
To answer Cowboy Slim's question, no, we can't give you any numbers because all of the numbers are composed of lie nested within lie.
I still haven't gotten my (sizable) 2020 refund. We got a letter from the IRS to the effect that something had flipped a flag. Nothing since.
Because the withholding tables seem to be "tilted" so that my wife's and my joint return results in thousands of dollars of refund every year, I tried to adjust my withholding form to have less taken out. Nope, HR department wouldn't let me do it. They were scrutinized by the tax people and were subject to big penalties and so they made sure to err always on the side of caution, meaning safe for the HR people and who cares if they screw over the employees. Ditto for my new employer, with the W-4 filled out last month.
I will not disagree with there being government lies.
OTOH, an AP article in the paper today about unvaccinated pregnant women catching Covid and then having stillborn babies. Treated as a new medical issue and no inference that vaxed and unaffected pregnant women have as many; no quantitative, percentage, comparison.
My tax guy has been filing my business million dollar tax return since 1995. Since he cannot e-file, I am a little worried.
A friend of mine is a irs field agent. He is totally discouraged with all the new micro management rules from the top and wants to quit. But he has 20 years in and is afraid to jump.
Good luck calling in to get it fixed
WTAF? 2020? That’s criminal. You won’t get any interest either.
Then there are stories about what Pfizer is hiding with regard to stillborn babies caused by the jabs during their half-a**ed vaccine trials.
No minds are being changed around here.
Ha ha! This will increase Federal productivity:
‘The midterm ads write themselves’: Biden says federal workforce will be getting 600,000 new electric vehicles
What about all the charging infrastructure? Probably cost more than the vehicles. Are the manufacturers going to shit cars out?
@SteveF
If you have IRS refunds from previous tax years, ask your tax attorney about requesting that those funds being applied to the current tax year.
It might not be possible, and if there is a "flag" (yeah, right) that was raised, you would be taking the chance that your refund is less than you think.
"I tried to adjust my withholding form to have less taken out. Nope, HR department wouldn't let me do it. "
I'd definitely ask my tax attorney about that one. Not being one myself I can't say for sure, but I find it unlikely that the law allows the highly-trained tax professionals in your HR department to override your instructions.
The law? And HR departments? HR departments do whatever the CEO tells them to do, and damn the employees. As long as they aren't personally responsible, they'll do anything.
Never make the mistake that an HR department is looking out for the interests of the employees.
Quoted for truth.
I make HR give me any information/insructions in writing. A few times during the past year, they have given me instructions on how to address a Covid issue with employees. The first time, during the teams call, I asked them to send me that info in an email. There was much hand wringing about that. I simply insisted that nothing would be done by me without that email. It finally came. The next time, I still had to request an email confirming the requested actions, but it wasn't met with any audible resistance. I'm sure I'm on a list because of it, but oh well.
Best Buy adopting the car dealers' ADM model…
Best Buy Locks Nvidia RTX GPUs Behind Obscene $200 Paywall
The HR droids do whatever is necessary to be able to keep doing the HR job "working" from home, putting in the dozen or so hours per week between kids' soccer practice and ballet lessons.
No jammies. Yoga pants.
Also, never make the mistake that HR understands your company's labor needs, industry, or product line. The droid that got me fired on the previous previous job was a former Chipotle store/regional manager who spent time in their HR department between management gigs.
The best part? University of the Virgin Islands online degree.
Also, never assume HR can write at a college level with the goal of clear communication.
My severance agreement/offer was howlingly bad with obvious cut-n-paste problems. I read the document but never signed it.
Not that $200 will deter a reseller that much. Doing nothing means that Best Buy either gets out of that market or winds up being another wholesaler for the arbitrage economy like Game Stop.
I've heard of companies working on shipping container bitcoin mining rigs which will be turnkey systems capable of being shipped anywhere in the US where the right power connections are pre-staged and electricity available. The cards will have to come from somewhere.
At the now previous job, I used a tool called Selenium to automate gathering numbers from the web interface on the system we produced. Really slick and capable of scripting the interface of the most complex Hot Skillz-based web sites. I imagine that is the core tech for shopping bots the resellers use.
At least, for now, the bots are just used for graphics cards and Playstation 5. Pray things never get so bad that it becomes a tool for the resellers to go after food.
Tech Executive-1
Campaign Lawyer-1
Law Firm-1
They spied on Trump.
They used U.S. government assets to do so.
https://redstate.com/bonchie/2022/02/12/john-durham-drops-a-shock-and-awe-filing-about-spying-on-donald-trump-n521239
We've known the outline of this for years. Some of us since 2017.
Wake me when there are perp walks.
That will be about the time Hillary is charged for having a private mail server.
Perkins Coie found the ballots in car trunks for Al Franken in 2008 and have been hip-deep in Dem election rigging antics ever since.
Merrick Garland will do nothing. Don’t expect him to go anywhere, even if Biden assumes room temperature, prior to January 20, 2025.
Speaker of the House Donald Trump will hold some hearings next year.
Article refuting 'ballots in car" https://www.minnpost.com/braublog/2008/11/minneapolis-election-director-speaks-ballots-my-car-story-false/
Court decision about recount (long url since it's a PDF link in googles): https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=&ved=2ahUKEwjb1_DWqfv1AhVtqVsKHWkxCAwQFnoECAQQAQ&url=https%3A%2F%2Fmn.gov%2Flaw-library-stat%2Farchive%2Fsupct%2F0906%2FOPA090697-0630.pdf&usg=AOvVaw1J37Eq6jVALiK15PyD9FEJ
I should have put the "car trunk ballots" in quotes.
Google searches will also reveal Perkins Coie’s repeated involvement in challenging tight elections, namely via Mark Elias.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/franken-scores-more-ballo_n_148750
until he got caught
https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/5th-circuit-keeps-sanctions-against-marc-elias-voting-case-2021-06-30/
and encouraged to “spend more time with family”
https://www.reuters.com/legal/legalindustry/elias-departs-perkins-coie-firm-says-will-continue-political-law-practice-2021-08-23/
Of course, they will continue the political law practice.
After the 2000 election in Florida, when the Dems came up short in the legal representation department, prominent firms have been involved with the party starting early in the election cycles, but Perkins Coie is the name that keeps popping up in relation to bad behavior.
Florida. 2000. Kendall Coffey. Everyone in that court room in Tallahassee knew about ol’ Kendall … except the Gore campaign, especially the *Dem* appointee judge.
The incumbent, Coleman, won that election narrowly until ballots kept getting found "by local elections officials" in various precincts in MN until Franken had enough to win. The final tally didn’t come until Spring and Franken was seated in July.
In retrospect, Franken winning that race, taking a Senate seat, and then having to resign in disgrace was a bigger loss for Dems than if Coleman had won.
Does NaN work for Snopes or Politifact? "The claim has a subject-verb number mismatch so we rate it as mostly false."
@SteveF, I was taking a different tack.
Since absence of evidence is not evidence. I wouldn't rate the claim as "false" so much as "unproven". And eminently believable.
NaN's insistence on it being false (and absurd) could be construed as evidence of his prejudices.
I won't ask for a show of hands who would say "Democrats and Democrat law firms would cheat an election if they could" is "absurd". I'd say the Republicans would do it too, but they're so stupid they'd just get caught if they tried.
More that the media and a sizable fraction of all parts of government — boards of election, secretaries of state, prosecutors, judges — would provide cover, certify very questionable results, destroy evidence, decline to investigate, decline to prosecute, decline to find cause to issue injunctions or subpoenas.
There are supportable claims of Democrats cheating every year. These are frequently poo-pooed away or dismissed by playing "what the meaning of 'is' is" games, but there's no honest denial that it happens continually. Democrats with bigger mouths than brains — all of them, to a first approximation — invariably claim that Republicans do it, too, but can't provide evidence other than easily-disproved sore-loser claims (eg, Stacy Abrams) or blatant shit-flinging to taint a Republican's honest win.
One Republican election supervisor (?) did cheat around 2010 or 2012, and got caught, and went to jail. That was all I was able to find in 2016, when I searched for evidence of Republican-favoring fraud.
I lived in Chicago from 1946 until 1962. All voting fraud and theft was dumbocrats.
The most important statistic about Covid deaths is this one; from March 2020 to the end of 2021, there were almost no recorded deaths from influenza.
In reality? All the flu deaths were mis-categorized as Covid.
I'll concede the point about the particular batch which were proven to have not originated in the car trunk, but Franken winning the election required "finding" and certifying the provenance of ~450 votes in batches of 10^1 order of magntiude in places like “behind the machine” which is why the trunk story sticks around.
The law firm was involved in the process and continues to be involved in ethically questionable situations with regard to elections. Marc Elias just got caught.
@Greg Norton
Statistical analysis of Gropey Al's win showed that it was likely that there were more than enough illegal votes by felon's to make up the margin of error ultimately manufactured through "found" votes.
Anyone like to wager that "Law Firm-1" is not Perkins Coie?
I lived in Chicago from 1946 until 1962. All voting fraud and theft was dumbocrats.
— and I lived there from my birth until the mid 80s and "All voting fraud and theft was by dumbocrats" was as true then as it is now. The Daley political machine never went away, it just changed hands. alot like the money in plain envelopes. FFS, there have been memes about crooked elections in Chicago since before there was a word for memes.
"In Chicago, even the dead can vote". "Vote early, vote often."
n
"Gropey Al" was the difference in giving the Dems a fillibuster-proof Senate until Uncle Ted assumed room temperature in August (?). Not that the Dems did anything with that postion, but having the power was important to a lot of people for symbolism if nothing else so Franken was tolerated and supported with extensive resources.
Both times Franken left SNL were under clouds of network exec disapproval over his conduct. The first time was NBC nixing him succeeding Lorne Michaels as producer in the early 80s, and the second time was due to Al being passed over for Weekend Update in favor of Norm McDonald.
"Dem Strategist James Carville: Voters Don’t Care About Jan 6th Probe"
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2022/02/dem-strategist-james-carville-voters-dont-care-jan-6th-probe/
I do not know anyone who cares about the Jan 6 debacle.
It was nothing compared to the many Antifa / BLM fires that I have seen on the news over the last two years.
I care about the political prisoners.
I do not know anyone who cares about anything "Serpenthead" has to say as of late, especially Dems. That must be frustrating to him since he is still fairly active at 77.
Wishing James Carville nothing but good health for many more years to come.
@Lynn – I have a 2 GB spinning metal Seagate in my home server that is acting up after only six weeks. I know you like to track those things.
I'll know more after the Linux smartctl utility finishes a long-term test later tonight.
Commodity drive, granted, but six weeks?!?
Interestingly, it replaced a Seagate which ran flawlessly for four years, two years beyond the warranty.
>> My severance agreement/offer was howlingly bad with obvious cut-n-paste problems. I read the document but never signed it.
Did you collect your severance anyway?
>> I do not know anyone who cares about the Jan 6 debacle.
CNN…otherwise right now it would be Ukraine 24×7.
Jack Reacher a big hit for Amazon, already renewed for Season 2.
https://tvline.com/2022/02/12/why-reacher-was-renewed-season-2-changes-from-book/
>> This feels like trying to discuss nuances of the moon landings with people who claim there is no moon.
We can see the moon…those "moon landings," that's a different story…
It always helps to have the full quote(s) for context, just so you don't have to defend yourself from claims of being a dumbocrat yourself.
"Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence."
Since the subject is Democrat voter fraud in Chicago 1946 to the mid-1980's, the claim is not extraordinary
Did my swapmeet. Sold a few things, covered my entrance and table fee plus a small amount. D2 did land office business with GS cookies. It got everyone there to my table, but didn't result in sales for me. We had 45 people in attendance, about 6 masked. It was a big room and we kept our distance for the most part, like we've been doing for a year now. I'm one the youngest, at 55, and am in pretty good shape considering, so it's not surprising that we've had a few members staying away, and some who prefer to wear an N95 in a group.
Went to Conroe to pick up a used patio set for the lakehouse (which I suppose I should start calling the BOL, here at least.) $40 for a used set of 4 swivel chairs and a table is so much better than the Kilobuck or more for new. If you're gonna have a BOL with a view, you need a patio set. Apparently. Anyway, worth driving there, and I got a few gas cans and a manual meat grinder that def count as preps too.
Got a notice in the mail that I'm up for jury duty again. Joy. I'll answer the online screening honestly but I am hoping for disqualification. There are at least two questions where my answers would get me tossed by the defense, and one by the state…
n
Jury duty here has no online screening, but there is a permanent excuse for age, 70 or 75, if you ask. Most people don't know to ask.
Just ask politely if both sides are okay with the principle of jury nullification.
I have.heard that mentioning jury nullification in some jurisdictions will result in being held in contempt of court. Judges have too much power, and some abuse it.
Here in UK, you are only supposed to be called for Jury Service once. Notwithstanding that, I have been called twice, and attended, both times.
Qualifications for Jury service are – aged between 18 and 70, on the official Register of voters, and not previously called for service (although that last appears to be honoured in the breach at times. Admittedly, it was different Court districts).
So I’m now doubly exempt – age and previous service. You’re not getting me off the voters’ register, unless it’s in a box.
G.
In the matter of voting, I follow RAH's maxim, "If in doubt, vote against. There may be nothing you want to vote for, but there is sure to be something that you want to vote against."
G.