Tag: conspiracy

Government, Politics

You Can’t Handle The Truth

First off I have to confess to liking a good conspiracy theory. I can sport a tinfoil hat with the best of them. And you have to admit that this last week has provided a plethora of deep state, unknown force theories all working to undermine our country. The last few days I haven’t been able to refresh my X/Twitter feed fast enough. Approximately every five minutes I’ve been shouting down the hall to Mrs Troutdog the latest news. “OMG won’t believe this – the shooters cell phone had three phone calls from Vladimir Zelensky!” “You won’t believe this – Biden actually died in Vegas and Obama has been coordinating the plan to dump Kamala and get Newsom elected!” You get the idea. But upon reflection this morning… I don’t think any of this is a “conspiracy”.

While I enjoy intrigue, I’m also a realist. You know, that whole Occam’s razor thing. All things being equal, the simplest explanation is usually correct. The more I think about all the recent happenings, there’s one common thread. Incompetence.

Government generally speaking is incredibly incompetent. Usually laughably so. The incompetence increases the further away you get from local government. By the time you reach the federal government, an inability to manage the simplest of tasks is rampant. Throw in greed, corruption, naked ambition, stupidity, and the bubble of Washington, and you have the perfect recipe for the incompetent blog that characterizes much of government.

This is how California has a high speed rail project that’s been going for 15 years, has built virtually nothing, will cost $150 billion, and isn’t projected to finish for at least another decade. Or how the Biden administration “invested” $7.5 billion on EV chargers and has only built 7 of them. Or how we fucked up the Afghanistan withdrawal. Or the Covid response. At the local level it took my town more than six months to get a dashboard/tracking website up for Covid cases. This was the ENTIRE MISSION OF THE HEALTH DEPARTMENT and they weren’t ready. You had one job, be ready for a pandemic event, and you failed completely. The examples are endless. This is government at its finest.

So now when I reflect upon the (many) events of the last weeks, I’m seeing them through the lens of government. I think it’s a cascading series of events that are trying to be managed by incompetent people. Was it a conspiracy to hide multiple shooters paid for by George Soros at the Trump assassination attempt? No, I suspect it was incompetent DEI leadership, lowered performance standards, and laziness that allowed the typical lone wackjob shooter to nearly succeed. Everything else is a collective rush by everyone to cover their butts. Hide behind lawyers, the DOJ, stall, blame “the ongoing investigation”, throw a few local Barney Fife types under the bus, and by the time Kamala is president it’ll be forgotten. You really think anyone in government is actually capable of keeping a secret? Hell, the Secret Service Directors full statement was just “leaked” to the press before she could give it to congress. Leaking is how Washington works.

The Biden drop-out issue? I think in reality this has been in motion for a while. The DNC simply had no idea what to do. Biden didn’t want to go and nobody wanted Kamala for fear she couldn’t win. Finally with the horrible debate performance, the donors started getting cold feet and that was enough for the big players to pressure Jill and Hunter to convince him to drop out. Everything since then has been nothing more than a scramble to figure out how to message this and how to handle the Kamala scenario. Realistically there was probably no way the DEI wing of the party was going to let the first female VP be passed over. Considering Kamala has been the abortion czar and that’s 1/3 of their party platform, the optics wouldn’t have been great had they removed her.

So that’s it. Stupid, power hungry people, desperate to cover their butts, all jockeying to be in the best position possible when the dust settles. I don’t think it’s any more complicated than that. I mean my god, have you seen the picture of Biden’s speechwriting team? Nothing but college interns and gender studies graduates. It’s frightening to think these are the people shaping the messaging of the most powerful country in the world. It actually goes a long way to explain much of the past four years.

I think it’s time to put away the tinfoil hats and crazy theories about a new world order orchestrated by the UN and the WEF. Obama, Hillary, and Pelosi aren’t pulling any strings behind the scenes other than trying to figure out how to make their stock portfolios grow. The CIA isn’t planning the next Bird Flu pandemic to disrupt the election. And the FBI is too busy working with the DOJ to arrest more of those evil J6’rs to be involved in anything more sinister. So just check those conspiracies at the door and let the process play out. The country likes equilibrium and tends to balance itself out every few elections. It may look a little messy, but I guarantee all will be status quo given a bit of time.

LOL, just kidding. Nothing adds up and there is shit being covered up at the highest levels in all agencies. There’s been a glitch in the Matrix and the system is scrambling to regain control. And the closer we get to the bad orange man regaining the presidency… the more desperate the state will get. Buckle up buttercup, it’s about to get weird.

Government, Politics

Remain Calm, All Is Well

Well that was an unexpected news filled weekend. I would not have had attempted assassination on my bingo card when I woke up Saturday morning. As information slowly starts leaking out, as a registered contrarian, I have to say something doesn’t seem right. I’m reminded of a great scene in the movie Casino. Ace the casino manager confronts Don the slots supervisor after three machines in a row hit a jackpot:

Ace Rothstein : Listen, if you didn’t know you were being scammed you’re too fuckin’ dumb to keep this job, if you did know, you were in on it. Either way, YOU’RE OUT!

Look, I’ve never been in the military or been a police officer, but I was a Boy Scout and a lifeguard which is close enough to have an informed opinion about this. How this shooting occurred is stretching the lines of credulity. So what you want me to believe is that some 20 year old dorky dungeons and dragons player who apparently has zero social media footprint, and lives in his mom’s basement, pulled this off all by himself? That he cased out the location beforehand, knew where the stage and podium would be and the exact time Trump would start speaking? So you’re saying he managed to get to the location carrying a ladder and a rifle a handful of minutes beforehand and there wasn’t one element of security positioned to spot him? Or, maybe that the ladder was prepositioned and there wasn’t any sort of security sweep to notice it? We’re to believe that a sniper team was clearly observing a dude with a rifle on a roof and they did nothing?

Just like the Casino movie quote – either someone else was involved in this, or this is one of the biggest displays of security incompetence we’ve ever witnessed. Knowing that the Biden administration values DEI over merit, I’d like to believe it’s just massive incompetence.

We’re hearing that most of the protective personnel were DHS security and not secret service due to lack of resources. Watching some of the female agents on the stage, well… let’s just say they didn’t appear to be operating as a well oiled machine. I can accept that maybe the secret service resources were stretched thin and this was the B or C team that was deployed to protect Trump. Apparently the secret service is now claiming that perimeter security was the responsibility of local PD. If folks are already starting to cover their butts and point fingers, then yes maybe this was all just due to incompetence. We have untold billions to send to Ukraine, but can’t afford to protect a former president? Yeah, ok.

But… but even the most small town yokel Barney Fife police officer would probably guess that securing rooftops might be a good idea. Or at the bare minimum that maybe an officer or a rent-a-cop security guy should be placed so that someone can’t just walk up to unsecured areas around the former president without being noticed. I have a very hard time believing that not a single person thought about this. Maybe if this was a spur of the moment visit and nobody had time to scope out the area, but this wasn’t a last minute visit. It was a rally planned well in advance. Could the US Secret Service really have screwed up that badly?

The other option is that this was intentional. We’ve done it before. The FBI (who’s now in charge of the investigation) HATES Trump. The CIA would be happy to have Kamala in charge. There’s plenty of motivation for various agencies to make a move to prevent a change to the status quo. Had it been successful, the DOJ and FBI certainly would have slow walked any sort of investigation so Biden or Kamala could be put in place for another term.

I don’t know. I don’t want to believe either scenario. Sadly, I wouldn’t be shocked at either one being true. Government incompetence grows at an exponential rate (feel safe flying these days?) One nutjob getting lucky that the C team benchwarmers happened to be in charge during this trip isn’t completely crazy. However, the deep state hates Trump with the power of a thousand suns. All things being equal, with Biden’s DNC support collapsing last week a Trump win looked more likely which presents an existential crisis for the government power machine. If they thought they could get away with it, I wouldn’t put it past them.

Either way, it’s not a good look for us as a country. Would we rather be completely incompetent or admit to planning hit jobs? We’ll never know the answer because we no longer have a press/media that’s willing to do actual journalism and search for the truth.

If Trump was smart he’d call up Erik Prince today (former CEO of Blackwater) and hire him out to provide private security for himself, family, and whomever his new VP pick will be. It’s clear that the government can no longer be trusted to provide reliable security.

How in the world did we ever get to this point? Indeed, The Fourth Turning is rapidly picking up speed. I don’t think there’s much to do at this point other than grab your popcorn and watch the chaos unfold.

Government, Politics

The Adults Are Back In Charge

The level of incompetence found in this administration is breathtaking. Or it’s calculated evil. I can’t decide which. Before you start shouting about the Illuminati partnering with the WEF to create a new global world order… it’s not. This is a case of snotty, condescending, east coast elites who all went to the best Ivy League schools and are sure they’re the smartest kids in the class. Suddenly they find themselves in power and discover that the cockamamie ideas they bantered about in their dorm rooms when they were making fun of Dan Quayle spelling potato, aren’t working in real life. But just like Disney, rather than admit they were wrong, they decide to double down. And that scares the hell out of me.

Yesterday Secretary of State Antony Blinken reaffirmed that Ukraine will join NATO. National security advisor Jake Sullivan said the same thing last July. So not only are we doing everything humanly possible to prolong the war in Ukraine, we’ve decided that our foreign policy objective is to cross the red line that Putin specifically declared as a path to war. Why?

Why do we continue to push a war that Ukraine has no chance of winning? None. Zero. If you disagree, please explain how Ukraine is going to defeat the entire Russian army – and not just defeat them, but destroy them to the point that Russia will pull back to the original border and Putin will simply apologize and promise to never do it again. Do you really, honestly, think that’s going to happen? Of course not and you know it. So what exactly then is our objective?

At some point, Putin will tire of the stalemate and choose to take decisive action. And then what do we do? This brinksmanship is beyond frightening because of how fast it could escalate to something really bad. Meanwhile, we’re going to vote to send Ukraine another 60 billion dollars (that we don’t have) next week. And, as confirmed by representative Massie, not a single congressperson nor the state department even has the slightest idea how many Ukrainians have been killed in this war. It’s disgusting.

The disastrous Afghanistan withdrawal. The unintended consequences of the open border. Loss of the strategic petroleum reserve. Near total depletion of our military ammunition stockpiles. Nord Stream. China spy balloons. The fragile beginnings of Middle East peace are gone. Iran. Threatening Israel while Hamas still holds US hostages. Red Sea shipping shut down by the Houthis. The hits just keep on coming.

I’m not sure I can come up with anything that looks like foreign police success for this administration. It’s pretty bad when your track record is literally zero after almost four years. At this point, I think you could randomly pick people out of the phone book and they’d do a better job. This administration, and the “deep state” for that matter, has become the living embodiment of the Peter Principle – “people in a hierarchy tend to rise to a level of respective incompetence”. We’re living with a governmental bureaucracy ushered in by the Obama administration. Flotillas of idealistic “hope and change” Ivy League college kids who went straight from school to the Washington machine without any real world experience. Now years later, they’ve risen to the top and are leading us to disaster. At this point I think I’d prefer the evil Klaus Schwab Illuminati scenario – at least it’s explainable.

As Obama famously said, “elections have consequences”. He was more right than he could have imagined. We need to take the sharp objects away from the “adults in charge” soon, before things go really bad.

Cool, Daily Life

Do You Believe In UFOs?

I was listening to a podcast the other day and the subject of UFOs came up. The first thing I learned is that it’s no longer UFO, it’s UAP – Unidentified Aerial Phenomena. Knowing the government they probably spent $28 million dollars to focus test the new name. Anyway, turns out there was a UAP hearing in front of congress this summer and a number of credible people testified that the government has way more info about sightings than they let on. Which got me thinking. Do I believe in UFOs?

I’d say I tend to be in the “no” camp, but I’m not willing to entirely rule them out. Here’s the way I think it breaks down:

Option One They don’t exist, or at least if they do they’ve never visited earth. I find it odd that the only “sightings” tend to be over the ocean and involve primarily the United States. Why don’t we ever hear about encounters and/or investigations in other countries? Wouldn’t aliens be equally interested in, say Japan, Saudi Arabia, or Sweden as they are the US? Also, similar to Bigfoot, for years now we’ve had the entire population of the earth walking around with cameras and video recorders 24×7 (cell phone). How come the only footage we ever see is from military pilots and airplane gun cameras? If we’re being visited I’m pretty sure we’d have captured more video/pics by now.

Option Two Why wouldn’t they exist? It’s pretty unrealistic to think we know everything about everything. For gods sake, we’re still discovering creatures in the ocean we didn’t know existed. To use a size comparison, imagine our Milky Way galaxy as the size of a tiny crumb. The known universe would then be the size of the Empire State Building. It’s estimated the observable universe contains between 200 billion to 2 trillion galaxies. To think we’re the only life form in something that vast is pretty naive. It seems reasonable that there are more advanced beings out there somewhere.

Option Three Not only have we been visited, but the government has an actual UAP crash recovery team and has biologic samples (bodies?) This was asserted during the UAP hearing. There are claims that many of the “sightings” are actually US (or other countries) objects from secret test facilities. I don’t buy this idea at all. I don’t think our government is competent enough to keep that sort of secret. Someone would talk. But then again, there are people who know the truth about the JFK assassination and that’s been kept secret for 60+ years. I will admit that it is odd how secretive the government is about sharing what it knows about UAPs. We have radar tracks and other data collected on sightings by military pilots. Why not share it?

Option Four I find it odd that almost all of the sightings are over the ocean. Many of the video footage we have show the objects rising from or diving into the ocean at speeds that would kill a human. Is there something going on in the ocean that we don’t know about? Maybe China or Russia has some sort of sub based hypersonic drone program? Maybe we do? There has to be a reason most encounters seem to be over the ocean. But… I’m still a skeptic about any government being able to keep that sort of secret.

Bottom line, I’m not sure what I think. I do think life exists out there somewhere. The universe is too vast for only one planet out of billions to have spawned biologics. Do I think life out there has evolved to the point that faster than light travel has been mastered? Doubtful.

How about you? Do you believe in UFOs? Do you think we’ve been visited?

Bonus points if you’ve been abducted and lived to tell the tale!

Daily Life, Government

Do You Have A High Social Score?

Every single aspect of your life is available on-line. Every purchase you’ve ever made. The prescriptions you had filled. Every text message you’ve sent. Your phone calls. Any picture you took with your phone. Every single thing you’ve liked, retweeted, or commented on with Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Your browsing history. It’s all out there in the cloud. Don’t believe me? If you use Google Maps, go have a look at your timeline. Every mile you’ve ever driven, walked, or traveled is there. Every single store or destination you visited. How many minutes and hours you spent driving or walking. It’s a bit disconcerting the first time you see it if you didn’t realize all that info was being harvested.

Your devices are listening to you 24×7, vacuuming up everything that’s said. How do you think those recommendations on YouTube or ads in your Instagram feed get there? All that data is being collected and mined for information about you. Why? Right now, it’s mostly so companies can market and sell to you. That information is collated and sold to anyone who’s willing to pay for it. Increasingly however, that information is being used to authenticate who you are.

I mentioned it previously – Dynamic Knowledge Based Authentication. Companies buy all this personal information about you and then use it to generate authentication questions. It’s presumably more secure than the previous method of Static Knowledge Based Authentication. The static version was the canned questions you’d set up and be asked; what was the name of your first pet, or what city were you born in. The static version has become too easy to hack, so smart dynamic questions are now generated from the massive databases of information collected about you.

As we start to add AI to this huge collection of data gathered about you… systems are soon going to be able to start making judgments about you. They’ll be constantly creating and updating a profile of you. And that, my friends, is the beginning of the end. Here’s a few scenarios I can think of off the top of my head:

  • You go on to OpenTable to make a dinner reservation for tonight. Hmm, not a single restaurant has a table available except for a few one-star, lower end places. That’s odd for a Tuesday night. Not really – your profile indicates you infrequently eat out, most of your clothing purchases are from Costco, and you rarely buy alcohol. Odds are you won’t order drinks, may share a plate, and probably aren’t a big tipper. The algorithm will hold on to that reservation for someone with a better profile.

  • You’re trying to find a new job and haven’t received any interviews, despite applying to at least 50 different job postings. You went to a good school, have a killer resume, and have been a loyal employee for many years. What’s wrong? Well, your profile indicates you might be a problem employee. You travel a lot and seem to be a big shopper – often during work hours. You comment quite a bit on social media and appear to be vocal about your opinions. Based upon your shopping habits, you buy a fair amount of alcohol and there are quite a few pictures of you drinking with friends. You’re not a good risk, despite a solid work history.

  • You have a USPSA shooting match coming up next month, so you go on-line to buy some bulk ammo for practice. For some reason the sale won’t go through. You contact your credit card company, only to find out they’ve cancelled your card for violating their terms of service. You apply to other credit card services, but every single one declines you. You’ve always paid your balance in full every month. What happened? Your profile indicated that you attempted to buy more than what is considered a “safe” amount of ammo. You posted an anti-BLM meme on Facebook at one point, which puts you in a white nationalist category. That, combined with support you’ve expressed on-line for various right-wing politicians and causes, makes you a risk.

  • You suddenly receive a notice that your auto insurance is dropping you for violating their ESG (environmental, social, & environmental) terms of service. As you shop for new insurance, all the rates you’re quoted are at least five times what you were paying before. Why? Your profile shows that your car is more than ten years old and doesn’t meet MPG requirements. You drive more than 15k miles per year and your route data shows that most of your driving time is on high accident routes. Your consumer profile indicates that you may not be performing all the recommended service and maintenance on the vehicle, which increases emissions, reduces performance and increases the chances of an accident. You’re a poor risk.

There are a billion other scenarios you could come up with where an AI generated profile of you might impact the outcome. Does any of this seem outlandish or tin foil hat conspiracy? I don’t think so. I think we’re on the very cusp of this being reality (if it’s not already). As this trove of personal data is increasingly shared in massive databases, and as AI becomes more prevalent… your social credit score is going to dictate your future quality of life.

So, what can you do about it? At this point, not much probably. I think it’s going to happen regardless. Especially since all of it will be put in place “for your own good”. Virtually all of us have been sheep – oblivious to what the technology was doing. I don’t see that changing anytime soon.

If I was a parent of young kids, I’d be thinking about creating and maintaining multiple identities for them. One that’s used for any casual on-line activity (the web, social media, your phone) and one that’s protected. Anything you can do to enable them to enter adulthood with a clean, neutral, social profile. Educate them that everything you do, say, purchase, or interact with will be evaluated and potentially be used against you at some point in the future.

We are no longer a free people. If you want to interact with society, have credit, make purchases, rent a car, or get a job – your profile better conform to whatever is deemed to be acceptable.

Hmmm… this has the making of a good movie screenplay.

Government

It’s A Conspiracy

Over this past Christmas break, we traveled to a warmer climate to visit the in-laws. It was a lovely trip, but spending time with my in-laws is, well, unique. Think the Costanzas from Seinfeld and you’ll have a pretty good picture of the experience. They’re getting older, so things tend to move at a glacial pace. You’d think I’d have figured this out by now, but for some reason I’m always baffled as to why we can’t get out of the house before 2pm. And you have to be back to the house by 4pm so you can take naps before dinner. Anyway, the end result is that I have plenty of time sitting around the pool… waiting.

To fill my time this trip, I read. I actually lost track of how many books I finished (there was a lot of waiting). Part of the reason I read so many books, is that I went down a rabbit hole of conspiracy theories. Now I love me a good conspiracy theory. There’s just something about challenging conventional wisdom that appeals to the Contrarian in me.

But to be a good conspiracy theory, it can’t be too wacky. Chemtrails and birds aren’t real are too far-fetched. No, the theory needs to be outside of mainstream thinking, but have just enough facts rooted in reality to make you go “hmmm”. You don’t want to believe, but something in the narrative is just enough that you begin to doubt what you’ve been told.

I started my journey with the Kennedy assassination. First off, it’s weird that the government won’t declassify anything other than rehashed Warren commission stuff. That by itself is enough to make you go “hmmm”. The more I read, I’d think “no, that couldn’t be”. I’d do a little independent research and sure enough a certain person was verifiably there or involved in some way. It was an awesome trip down a weird rabbit hole. And you know it was a good conspiracy theory when you then start thinking, well if that could have happened, what else could be covered up? Boom. Next thing you know I’m four books into big brother controlling my thoughts and the CCP monitoring my activities through my smart refrigerator. I loved it!

Everyone loves a good conspiracy theory. That’s why we’re so susceptible to ads and YouTube thumbnails that start with “Nobody knows this one trick to…” or “The secret Costco price strategy…” and “Lose weight by eating this little-known food…” We all want to be in on the secret.

But after my multi-day reading frenzy, I don’t know if I want to learn about any more conspiracies. Because if they’re even partially true – it’s disturbing, and kind of depressing. I WANT to believe that the world is fair and that everyone plays by the rules. I want to believe that evil cabals only exist in the movies. Otherwise, it means that us little guys are suckers and just pawns in a game that’s rigged.

I think it’s time for me to step away from the conspiracy theory genre. Maybe I’ll go find a good spy thriller or a whodunit mystery. Meanwhile, you’ll have to excuse me for a bit – I need to cover all the cameras and speakers in my house with black tape. With the research I did, I’m positive I’m now on some sort of government watch-list. Should I suddenly disappear, please know that I have no desire to Epstein or Mcafee myself.

P.S. birds aren’t real

Daily Life, Government

It’s Either One, Or The Other
  • The other day Tucker Carlson went on the air and made some crazy, outlandish, QAnon fueled statement about the Covid vaccines. The high priest of Covid, Dr. Fauci, immediately ran to CNN and expressed confusion as to why Tucker would be pushing conspiracy theories like that. CNN offered a helpful headline stating “Carlson suggested Covid-19 vaccines are not effective”. Except that’s not what he said. He asked a very simple question which you should also be asking. Either the vaccine works and we no longer need to wear masks and keep businesses shut down, or the vaccines don’t really work and so why is the government continuing to push them? It’s a pretty simple binary question. They can’t both be true. So which one is it? Most thinking people realize that vaccines do work. So why is Fauci and everyone in the Whitehouse continuing to wear masks? For god’s sake, Fauci and Biden double mask most of the time. Why? I’ve said it before… it’s an easy answer if you think about it. Mask mandates, social distancing, and keeping schools and businesses shut down can’t be enforced if you allow vaccinated people to be free. Anyone can just say they’re vaccinated and not wear a mask and we have no way to prove that. Oh, wait. What if we had some sort of paper people could carry around proving they’ve been vaccinated? Almost like a passport of some sort. Why do we continue to put up with this crap? This is doublespeak in it’s truest form.
  • Also on Tucker last night was one of his best monologs. I’d highly encourage you to watch it. He raises the question of unequal treatment in police shootings. On Jan 6th Ashli Babbitt was shot in the throat, from behind, by a Capital police officer. She died. She clearly wasn’t an imminent threat to anyone and was actually moving away from the officer who shot her. In the video you see a handful of SWAT officers just standing there, so they clearly weren’t concerned about their safety. The person who recorded the video had his door kicked in several days ago, all electronics seized, and he was arrested. The DOJ announced they’ve cleared the officer in the shooting, no charges will be filed. They still won’t release the officers name. Why? Meanwhile in Minnesota, an officer accidently pulls her service weapon rather than her taser and kills a young black man. Her name and picture are instantly plastered all over the news, mobs are at her house, manslaughter charges are filed, and the predictable riots ensue. Why the unequal treatment? Why is the Capital police officer seemingly exempt from the same treatment as the Minnesota officer? Where are the mainstream journalists asking these questions?
  • (Vice) President Harris has been put in charge of the migrant/border problem. Wait, not the actual current problem but the broader long term problem. Whatever. The good news is that she immediately had a press conference to discuss her plans for addressing the issue. Oh wait, no she hasn’t held a press conference since her appointment as long term border crisis mitigation czar. She did announce that she has no plans to visit our border. But Harris did tell reporters Wednesday that she was “looking forward to traveling, hopefully as my first trip, to the Northern Triangle,” with stops in Mexico and Guatemala planned. She said she would go as soon as possible, depending on restrictions put in place for the pandemic. A responsible leader always follows pandemic restrictions. Since she won’t be traveling abroad, she has some time on her schedule which she filled with a trip to a “woman owned yarn store”. I’ll leave you with a quote from the Washington Post, written by an actual reporter. “When Vice President Harris visited a woman-owned yarn shop in Alexandria last month, she mentioned a little-known fact about herself that left the fiber arts community a bit giddy. The new vice president is a crocheter.” Hold me, I’m swooning. I wish I could say this was satire.
  • The new ginormous motorcycle is due for it’s first 600 mile service. On my old bike I did all my own maintenance. But just like with older cars vs newer ones, this bike has more electronics than the space shuttle. I wouldn’t even know where to start. So, it’s off to the dealership for service. Except that the service department is booked out for a month. Sigh. Yet more evidence that my little town is exploding in population exponentially. I know it’s inevitable and you can’t stop it, but it’s still sad to see.
  • This post has been entirely negative, so I may as well keep up with the theme. I present you instructions on how to disable the robotic police dog that is starting to be used by several departments, including NYPD. Robotic police dogs. What could possibly go wrong?

Song of the day: Marilyn Manson – The Beautiful People (Official Video)

Cool, Government, Politics

News Of The Weird
  • When I was a kid, every once in a while my friends and I would pick up a copy of the Weekly World News. They bill themselves as “The worlds only reliable news”. As kids we knew it was just a silly tabloid with articles containing headlines like “5 things to avoid during an alien abduction“. But also as a kid, something in the back of your brain would wonder if maybe, just maybe, it was true? Reporters couldn’t just make stuff up could they? As a so called “adult” I’ve always been firmly in the skeptical bigfoot camp when it comes to UFO’s. Billions of people on this planet… if aliens have visited we’d know about it. Government isn’t competent enough to keep a secret like that. So imagine my surprise when I saw this article – “Pentagon admits it has been testing wreckage from UFO crashes & findings may ‘change our lives forever”. This comes from 154 pages released by the Defense Intelligence Agency after a three year FOIA request by researcher Anthony Bragalia. Could this be real? I honestly don’t know what to think. If it is, what other secrets has the government managed to keep? It is odd the Kennedy assassination still hasn’t been declassified after all these years. Maybe we really are holding the bodies of aliens from the Roswell UFO crash at Area 51? Could there actually be a Bigfoot type creature running around the pacific northwest? My skeptical roots have been shaken a bit today.
  • Speaking of journalism, I saw an image this morning of the giant 1st Amendment plates being taken down from the former Newseum in Washington DC. It’s an interesting image given the current dissenting speech purge and cancel culture of today. When we visited DC a few years ago I had never heard of the Newseum and only went as an afterthought on the recommendation of a friend. It ended up being in the top three things we saw. Interestingly, the thing I was most looking forward to was the Smithsonian Air and Space museum. That ended up being the most disappointing attraction. Meanwhile a little museum about journalism I’d never heard of became one of my favorites. Sadly it closed down at the end of 2019.
  • Meanwhile, it appears Sen Ted Cruz left with his family to Cancun while the state he represents freezes over because of their decision not to join the East and West power grids. While I don’t begrudge anyone going on a planned vacation with their family, how do you not have any political awareness of how this would look? Not that he could actually do anything about it, but still. More proof that politicians from both sides of the aisle really don’t care about you.
  • The other day former MMA star turned actress Gina Carano was cancelled by Disney for sharing a dissenting opinion from that of woke Hollywood. She’s probably one of those domestic insurrectionists we’ve been hearing about. Anyway, despite the clumsiness of her tweet, there are some parallels to today and 1930’s Germany. This post is worth a read.
  • I broke the law yesterday. Despite being a contrarian, I am a rule follower so this was definitely out of character for me. I’d run an errand and on the way back home I realized the streets were mostly dry. I have not been able to test drive the new motorcycle due to large amounts of fluffy white global warming that have been falling from the sky lately. The bike has not been registered, titled, and does not yet have a license plate. All that went out the window when I saw an opportunity to go for a quick ride. I’m in love. It’s smooth, powerful, and rides like a dream. Super agile for such a big bike. It exceeded all my expectations. It does however have more buttons and switches than the space shuttle. I can easily see myself riding off a cliff as I try to navigate the touch screen display to change riding modes or turn on the heated grips. It’s so complicated, Honda created an online simulator so you can practice while not on the bike. I don’t care. The sound that engine makes when you twist the throttle makes my heart skip a beat. It was worth being a lawbreaker. Spring can’t come soon enough.

Song of the day: George Thorogood – Bad To The Bone – 7/5/1984 – Capitol Theatre (Official)