to vote for Dianne Feinstein? This ignorant wench should be dipped in honey and left for the bears.

This week, she decided to let slip that American Predator drones may be based in Pakistan. Remember these are the aircraft that are being used to strike targets inside Pakistan.

True or not, it’s caused quite an uproar with our semi-ally Pakistan. We’re trying to prop up that government because it’s better than the alternative. We may or may not be basing aircraft in the country that we are using to strike at targets in Pakistan. And of course, these airstrikes are very unpopular in Pakistan.

So of course, you announce your belief that we’re hitting Pakistan with aircraft based in Pakistan during an open session of your congressional committee. And then you seem shocked that Pakistan and its populace might have a problem with this.

Nothing like throwing a hand grenade in a hen house. Especially if you’re a twit from the Bay Area who should have been strangled at birth in order to save us all this trouble.

Well, finally got the time and the correct part, so I took a few minutes to put the new throttle position sensor on the truck. After getting everything put back together, the truck fired up and ran no problem.

I can’t say it’s fixed, because it still has a pretty bad power steering fluid leak, but that should be pretty easy to fix. But then again, nothing is easy.

I work on motors and such by a rule that I learned from a mechanic I knew in the Army. “No equipment is right. There are only three states for equipment to be in: broken, fixed, and !*#%’d”.

Right now, the truck is still in the ‘broken’ category due to the leak, but she runs. Eventually she’ll be fixed.

Saw this at the Survival Blog on how little time it takes to acquire goods now than it did in our ancestor’s time.

The author discusses how much less time and effort it takes to make the money to purchase some grain than it would if he had to grow it himself. He also talks about how dependent we are on powered tools and equipment to produce what we need and want.

I work in IT, and from where I stand, computers are the ultimate labor saving device. What it used to take an accountant days to do in ledgers is done in a spreadsheet in minutes. Timetables for shipping and trains used to be done by hand and took months to work out properly. Now we can schedule airlines and trains on-demand every day.

I watched some video on the news tonight about the economy, and they showed the line at an automobile factory. Even in the parts that aren’t fully automated, they were using motorized tools to lift, place, and weld the cars together. Even 50 years ago, this would have mostly been done with hand tools and non-powered lifting equipment.

On the other side of the coin, when I was a child I watched our local newspaper in Smalltown, North Dakota, literally cranked out on a hand-powered press that used metal type that was set by hand. My grandmother’s attic and garage were stuffed with 100 year old hand, garden, and farm tools. All she needed was a couple of horses or oxen, and she could have run a farm in the same way her father did at the turn of the 20th century.

I think we lose something when we fail to realize just how easy our life is today when compared to the past. A message to family in California is delivered instantly, where it would have taken over a week only 20 years ago. I can fly to San Fransisco in the space of an afternoon, where it took months to get there before the Trans-Continental Railroad was complete, and it still took a couple of weeks then.

If I want to construct something for the house, on the rare occasion that I don’t just buy it, I use power tools and store bought lumber. The shelves I built in the baby’s room would have taken a couple of weeks to make if I’d had to go out to the woods, select and fell a tree, make the lumber by hand, and then construct and trim the shelves using hand tools.

While I’m not planning on the economy or our society to collapse completely, I enjoy learning how to do things by hand. I just can’t imagine trying to keep up our standard of living if I had to grow/trap/hunt all of our food and process it, then find time to gather materials and construct everything we need.

Here’s another winner reported by the Washington Post via Dvorak:

A 4th grade teacher in Ohio was busted recently for prostitution. She allegedly used a school computer to set up a rendesvous via email, and took sick time to go to her illicit second job. She then got busted by the county sheriff’s office.

I know teachers don’t make a fraction of what they deserve. They do a very important job, work long and weird hours, and usually have a hard time making ends meet. But come on!

She’s been an educator for 13 years. I find it hard to believe that she couldn’t find a second job doing something a little more legal.

And the school is having to bring in counselors to explain what’s going on to her young students. No ten-year-old needs to learn that their beloved teacher has been prostituting herself out in between grading math tests and preparing for the big social studies project.

Saw this at iFeminists, and had to read the article.

A Japanese company has put together a video game where the protagonist gets points for stalking and raping women. The opening scenes apparently involves the stalking and assault on a woman and her two teenage daughters.

What exactly is wrong with people? Doesn’t Amazon have people to take a good hard look at the products they sell? It took complaints from consumers to get them to drop the game from their offerings. One wonders how many copies of the game were sold before it was pulled.

I’ve played some pretty graphic video games over the years, but this crosses a pretty wide, bright line. And if this dreck is selling in Japan, I have to wonder what’s going on in the Japanese collective psyche that something like this would be allowed on store shelves.

that the first half of “Full Metal Jacket” is a comedy.

If they’re a veteran, they probably do, but we always get weird looks when we’re giggling like fiends for the first 45 minutes or so of the movie.

Someone actually did a study to find out why a kiss feels so good.

And I wouldn’t be surprised if they didn’t get a nice fat grant to do this.

Hey brainiacs, kisses feel good because your lips are attached to an attractive someone of the opposite sex.

There, now give me most of your grant check.

Southern California, after burning to the ground last summer and fall, is having problems with mudslides now that actual measurable rain is falling. Boo Freaking Hoo.

To paraphrase Sam Kinison “You see this, this is sand. You know what it’s gonna be in a thousand years? It’s gonna be sand! You live in the desert! Get your kids, get your S!@#$!, we’re making one trip!”

Southern California is the edge of the Mojave Desert. People weren’t meant to live in that area in any real concentrations. The native vegetation in that area is adapted to live in semi-arid conditions and will burst into flame if you shine a flashlight at it when it’s in its dormant, dry period. And we all know how well sandy soil holds together when the vegetation is sparse and charred and you dump a few inches of rain on it in a couple of days. Add to that the fact that occasionally the earth will quake itself into a frenzy underneath the very rocks and sand that make up the landscape, and I quickly remember why I’ve always called SoCal “The Land That God Forgot”.

Why do I keep being bothered when these blithering idiots get burned, rained, mudded, or blown out of their homes? “Oh, my house got washed away after I rebuilt it when my creosote bushes and eucolyptus trees burned it down last summer.” Cry me a river and move somewhere sane, like Nebraska.

about what this article was for.

The headline is “Afghan Dogs Reunited With U.S. Soldiers Returning From Deployment“. At first glance through my no-sleep, no-caffeine eyes this morning, I honestly thought they meant that some trooper had been reunited with the “Deployment 10” females that he had cozied up to sometime after his 6th month at a remote base in Afghanistan, and now feels a deep sense of shame about after getting back to the real world and seeing what a good looking woman actually resembles.

Turns out it’s actually about the efforts to bring a couple of actual canines to the US after they were adopted by a soldier during deployment.

My bad. Lord, I need some coffee.

Over the weekend, an electrical outage at a pumping station caused the relase of almost 50000 gallons of sewage into a creek here in Louisville.

Hey, things happen. I’m not condemning anyone for a mechanical/electrical breakdown.

However, I’m not pleased by the response to it:

“Schardein says crews responded quickly to the call after, notice came in
over a central communication system between all treatment plants and pumping
stations. He says, “we got the warning on our computer screen about
3:15. We had a crew acted by 5 a.m.”

So it took an hour and a half for someone to notice there was a problem, get a crew out to the site and get some sort of power going to get the discharge of effluvium to stop?

Pretty bad if you think about what that spill is doing to the people who live in that area. Yes, they say they don’t smell anything, and I’m sure that MSD is doing everything they can to contain and clean up the mess. But an hour and a half to get on-site and do something when raw sewage is spilling into a neighborhood and a creek?

Glad to see my utility bill money is going towards something constructive.