Brushfires: It Isn't Just The Government, Stupid

 h/t Peter

If this is global warming, all I ask is a bag of marshmallows and a stout roasting spike.

As Bayou Renaissance Man noted, some other bloggers have offered explanations for the current fire situation hereabouts. Without questioning their bona fides on the topic, we have lived in the exact area in question our entire life (save for a few transitory changes of address required by Uncle Sam), and from time before Reagan was governor, let alone president. In our youth, we and some friends sat on our house roof and watched the hillsides gloriously aflame in all four cardinal directions at the same time, and watched 150' tall flames overtop those same hillsides. This is not a novel phenomenon, and we possess a wee bit more precise and firsthand handle on the situation, and a great deal more historical context than most.

While decades of flagrantly incompetent Democommunist government (but we repeat ourself) hereabouts has an undeniable share of the blame in the raging wildfires hereabouts, trying to portray the current fiasco solely, or even majorly, as government's fault is like trying to blame baseball bats for causing home runs.

Government's role in this is mainly as a symptom, not a root cause.

As we pointed out in comments to an earlier post on BRM, insurance companies abandoning coverage in Califrutopia was a net plus, not a terrible thing, because they were otherwise being forced to subsidize (on the backs of ordinary policyholders) rich, entitled idiots building mansions inches away from literal tons of fireload, in brush-choked wind-tunnel canyons that burn regularly for not years, not decades, not centuries, but for millennia, since Hammurabi himself was in diapers. 

Having seen this phenomenon first-hand for half a century myself, my argument was simple:

Let the insurance companies allow the entitled idiots' homes to burn, with no coverage possible.

Then we'll have fewer entitled jackholes (you guess the missing word there), overwhelmingly - but not entirely - the exact same dancing monkeys in music, film, and television, on either side of the cameras and microphones whose serial idiocy you all rightfully loudly decry and castigate on these same blogs 24/7/265, buying or building homes in those same brush-clogged wind-tunnel canyons, which burn every 5-10 years with the predictability of the seasons, who like having brush and oak trees inches from their multi-million-dollar estates "because it looks pretty", who won't let cities use eminent domain to widen the narrow streets enough to permit emergency vehicles to access those streets even during minor emergencies, let alone brush fires the size of some cities, who elect more government idiots to oppose brush-clearing and controlled burns, simultaneously funding dope-smoking tree-hugging eco-lunatard hippies who oppose brush clearing and controlled burns because they think humans are the parasites who must be eliminated, nor ever vote for any politicians or measures that would fund sufficient infrastructure to make sure there's even water flowing out of the hydrants at the top of those canyons, like for example fixing the 10,000 water main breaks in L.A. unrepaired since the Northridge Earthquake thirty years ago - which is why random sinkholes keep cropping up all over Los Angeles - to use when you need it (like for the semi-annual brushfires that have happened here since Fr. Junipero Serra and Spanish conquistadors first arrived on the scene, and found out the local Indian name for the current San Fernando Valley was "The Valley that Smokes" because of perennial lightning-caused brushfires since time out of mind, thousands of years before Columbus' arrival on Hispaniola). Newsflash, Common-Core grads: there was smog over the Greater L.A. Basin and the adjoining valleys 200 years before the first car or gas station arrived here. You could look it up. History: still a thing.

These are the same entitled Leftard idiots who won't broom out the homeless, who camp in those same canyons smoking meth, and which drug-addicted losers are too tweaked out to notice that 50MPH gust during the regular Santa Ana winds just blew their hillside campfire into a raging inferno, causing five out of every ten fires, going back decades.

Hear me, God! Let those fires rage out of control and burn unrestricted, and weed out the surplus of morons (mostly deported or imported here from 49 other states and 85 other countries), and if possible, ship more morons into the fire zones while the flames rage out of control, to preclude having to deal with them after it's all over, with their upturned palms looking for government relief largely shaken down from the peons in this state and 49 others whom they moved to those canyon mansion to escape.

If we were governor for a day, the aerial tankers would be dropping napalm and aviation gasoline by the ton around the clock for the entire day, until the problem self-corrected, and the hillsides looked like Hiroshima on August 7th, 1945.

Oh, and the inevitable survivors of this disaster? No points for guessing who'll be back grifting next spring, when the scrubbed-bare hillsides turn into raging mudslides and flooding, crying to anyone who'll listen about how terrible is their lot in life, rather than having to attend mandatory public struggle sessions to own up to their stupid life choices and cranio-rectal impaction issues.

Never have so many delusional entitled morons so richly deserved to have been crapped upon from a great height by the Flying Fickle Finger Of Fate.

Even if you could wave a magic wand and instantly make the entirety of government in Califrutopia go away, you wouldn't fix the problem. For the same reason you could kill all the horses in the world, and years later you'd still have hundreds of millions of horses' asses.

You want to fix California? Bite the bullet: this is going to hurt.

Leave the government alone.

Because as always, politics is downstream from culture.

Just take back all your toothless banjo-playing kinfolk who weren't born here but have come in and f**ked the state up royally for the last 40 years, and deport the 15M illegal aliens your congressweasels and senators have not only ignored, but even encouraged (Lindsay Grahamnesty, Marco ScrewYoubio, call your offices), until they started being bussed into your towns and cities, and the government hereabouts will take care of itself. Just like it did without any further input from you for 130 years. The rest of the country has used this state as a giant demographic and economic tampon to catch all the outflow from the other 49 for nearly 50 years, and now you're all aghast about the toxic shock.

Own your own goddam mess. Admitting that is the first step to solving the problem.

If you'd stop sh*tting and pissing in our gene pool hereabouts, you'd be amazed how fast it would resemble a swimming pool instead of the nation's septic tank. Oh, and those carpetbaggers you bitch about? They weren't Californians when they moved here, and they still aren't now that they've moved on to piss and sh*t in your pool. Best wishes dealing with your own states purpling up because of them. Tag, you're it.

And in the short-term, please, let the entitled @$$holes' mansions burn to the ground. Ideally with them locked inside. And not a penny of relief funds for those grifters that survive. Tough love, we beseech you.

At best, it'll build some character, and at worst, it might kill metric fucktons of them. Or at least, induce them to move back home where they came from, and where they belong.

Win-win.

Life Now Is Closer to Naked And Afraid Than My Fair Lady

h/t Irish

Feral Irishman, in the above link, posted a podcaster's commentary about the sartorial shortcomings of modern folk.

Au contraire, mes amis.

Have you noticed how no one's holding a gun to your head? That you are entirely free to be a beacon of sartorial splendor every day of your life, and provide a positive counter-example, instead of being Nagging Nelly and worrying about Other People?

There's a colloquial name for that nowadays. It rhymes with "Karen".

What's that, you say? This is all news to you? Color me shocked.

Wear a suit and tie, or a dress for the women, every day of your life, if that's what turns your crank. Show the poor, ignorant boobs what class looks like without opening your mouth or uttering a single word. [Hint: It's never behaving like a scold and a shrew. In fact, the definition of a gentleman is "someone who never discomforts others in any social setting." Here's a cluebat for you: find us the clip of Cary Grant berating anyone else, onscreen or off, for their appearance. We'll wait over here while you work on that.]

I get where you're coming from, and generally dress well as the mood strikes. Whether I do or not, that's my business. But expecting that from everyone else? As if. You're totally out of touch with the why behind that being such a delusionally unreasonable expectation.

People are showing up at the airport in crocs and pajamas, and it's a wonder. Because they know they're going to have to take off their shoes and belt, as if they were inmates, and one time in five be subjected to exactly an inmate's cavity search. (The way you could tell life had gone completely off the rails was when the response of so-called American "leadership" to 9/11 was to violate everyone's personal rights here, instead of blowing entire terrorist countries off the map by the megaton over there, both just because we could, and because it was the correct response to what they had coming. If we'd wiped Mecca and Medina off the map and turned them to smoldering glass monuments to 6th century stupidity on 9/12/01, we wouldn't have had another problem with an entire hemisphere of the world from that day to this.) More to the point here, we wouldn't be reduced to convicts waiting for the gracious permission of the boxcar guards at the TSA telling us when we could put our shoes on.

Frankly, those shiftless, worthless, brainless m*****f****rs are lucky I don't show up with my flying clothes in a paper sack, wearing naught but tear away diapers, and swilling a jug of Metamucil after downing three Ex-Lax bars, and begging for them to ask me to step into secondary screening. They'd never do that a second time, I assure you. And I'd get dressed right there in public, just to shame them even more afterwards. I'm past the point in life where I give a damn about the decorum they think they can enforce, after humiliating and embarrassing (literally) entire planeloads of innocent passengers by the hour, every day for 23 years. But if I gave a sh*t, they'd be the ones I'd give it to. Hopefully while they had their gloved hand checking my prostate, and missing the memo about the explosive I was about to issue from my nether regions.

So tell me, O Great Sartorial Overlord, what is the proper attire for anal rape under color of authority? Inquiring minds want to know.

And then when I get on the airplane, the attire should be either a flight suit, or sweats.

Anything that would permit comfort on cattlecar flights, where the airlines use everything but livestock chutes and cattle prods to load passengers.

If we're going to play "Remember when...?", let's start with calling a spade a spade: they're not "flight attendants", they're stewards and stewardesses. (Hot tip for the self-important flying cocktail waitresses: cruise lines still employ stewards, who don't feel demeaned by that title, but then they have to have learned customer service from someone other than retired Auschwitz camp guards, unlike the sweaty fat-assed water buffaloes hired to hand out tiny soda cans and handful-of-peanuts bags on modern flights.)

Remember when the men working on flights weren't one step from flaming RuPaul drag queens, and the women were hired for both their demeanor and their appearance, and they didn't look like thrice-divorced future box wine cat ladies working at the DMV or WalMart checkout line? And the seats actually were built for someone besides an anorexic emo teen, and didn't leave you feeling like you'd been folded into a torture device and unable to walk after enduring a single cross-country flight?

So maybe if they hadn't stupidly endowed snotty fat-asses with godlike powers and told them they were "flight crew", and instead reminded them they were there for customer service, not Flying Karen Law Enforcement, maybe they wouldn't find themselves facing down drunken slobs at 30,000 feet every day. When you treat people like inmates, they'll meet your expectations, every single time. Every flight longer than 30 minutes is a modern recreation of the Stanford Experiment. Every. Single. Time. (Word to your mother, Airlines: That experiment wasn't supposed to be a guidebook.) If you're not doing that, and they're still behaving like assholes, most passengers would not only be fine with you descending to 10,000 feet to throw them off the plane, they'd actually help. But more often than not, you had it coming, and they like seeing you f***ers get what you deserve.

But if you airborne SS troopers with delusions of grandeur are going to treat passengers like a load of Jews getting off at Treblinka, you're goddamned lucky we don't rise up and kill all of you, every time, on every flight, and leave your dead carcasses jamming up the toilets for the next flight. Don't think that happy accident is going to continue forever with 50:1 odds against you, every single day. You're lucky passengers don't get on in tyvek jumpsuits and fling their shit at you by the hour, just for the way both you and your airlines treat them.

And the DMV? Insolence at your own taxpayer expense, and a work ethic that makes lazy people look like efficiency examples fit to build the pyramids or the Transcontinental Railroad. Let's be fair, most of the midwit 80-IQ employees working at the DMV have already maxxed out in vivid real-life the Peter Principle, and administering eye tests and snapping bad photographs is what it looks like when the fetal alcohol syndrome children of life have finally been promoted beyond their level of competence.

Anyone who doesn't bring a machete and a gun to the DMV, and/or a pillow and sleeping bag, is the soul of compassion and foolish optimism in a real-life version of Dante's Inferno: "Abandon All Hope, Ye Who Enter Here".

Just spit-balling, but I'm pretty sure the dress code for that experience should be that of Michael Myers in any edition of the Halloween film franchise. Ideally, with a similar bodycount of DMV employees. The rest of us would cheer. And if 200 people walked into any DMV dressed that way on a day other than Halloween, the increase in productivity would be palpable. Hear me, God.

And you're bitching about sunglasses at night? Srsly? I've got three things to answer that:

The Blues Brothers.

Joel in Risky Business.

The Secret Service. (Back before they were incompetent boobs.)

If you still can't figure it out, as Charlie Sheen told Jennifer Grey in Ferris Bueller's Day Off, your problem is you.

 And you want me to dress for work??? It is to laugh.

Work stopped being serious business in all but a few professions when Shaneequa, who couldn't pass a basic typing exam because she couldn't find half the letters, let alone spell a word, got promoted two levels above everyone actually competent, and displays the managerial acumen of any member of a headhunter tribe from New Guinea.

When the corporate (or is it coprophiliac? I get the two so easily confused because of their similarity) overlords start treating work seriously, and hiring serious people, and paying serious salaries, that will be the time for getting dressed up for it.

When you hire DIE assclowns, put them in charge, and pay peanuts, expect your employees to act - and dress - like monkeys. Any day anyone in Cubicleville doesn't show up wearing just a shirt and no pants, like any chimpanzee in TV or film ever, it's a victory for holding the line.

Go price a suit, then look at what those employees are paid, and you're goddamned lucky they don't show up looking like The Beverly Hillbillies, nor start acting like the gorillas in Planet Of The Apes.

If you're going to have expectations about other people's kids, you'd better start treating them like human beings instead of circus acts.

Until then? Count your blessings they haven't reverted to throwing their feces instead of eating a daily shit sandwich at the unending indignities of modern life.

Don't even start with me about retail. A cast of millennial 20-nothings glued to their IdiotPhones like lab rats to the crack feeder, who know less about their shop's wares than retards, or the child labor in the Turd World who made them, whether it's fast food or high-end electronics. Stupid shiftless employees are the reason BezosMart has made Jeffie a billionaire, gobbling up retail market share like a wolf turned loose in a rabbit hutch. The correct attire for patronizing a retail establishment is as the Employee Motivation Supervisor on a slave galley. Including the cat o' nine tails, generously applied.

The proper attire for most businesses now should be clown outfits, with floppy shoes and greasepaint. Or a galley slave's loincloth. Both with behavior and body odor to match. People at both ends of the social transaction have simply reverted to the level of interaction provided. And where they haven't, yet, it's mostly a pity, upheld solely by social inertia, and the grace of a merciful deity.

You want to dress up anyways? Goodie for you. Go ahead on. No one's holding you back. I can even link for you half a dozen excellent YouTube channels and blogs to help you get it right.

You want everyone else to do that too? Well, fire the TSA, end body cavity searches as routine, put back normal-dimensioned human-sized seats on airlines, revoke flying Karen cocktail waitresses' godlilke vindictive powers and teach them to treat passengers like guests instead of livestock, and start treating businesses like business, instead of the clown show it is currently, and then you can issue dress codes again. 

But frankly, most of the people nominally running things and splendidly turned out are damned lucky they aren't being turned over roasting spits by their so-called underlings.

Tell the class how that worked out for TPTB around 1789 in Paris.

An Open Letter to Target (formerly Dayton-Hudson) Corp. re : Le Boutique Targét

Attention: Target Corporate Retail Merchandise Manager

{CC: Store Mgr./Merchandise Mgrs.:

Store #XXXX

Store #XXXX

Store #XXXX

Store #XXXX

Store #XXXX

Store #XXXX

Store #XXXX}

Dear silver-medal discount retail kings,

I take virtual pen in hand because it seems you - individually and/or collectively - need a wake-up call about the state of your business.

I write, not about your atrocious corporate policy of grooming children and sexualizing them at an early age with your dreadful LGBTEIEIO agenda, nor even to chide you for the fact that most of your establishments look perpetually as if they had just been pillaged by swarms of Vikings and Visigoths rampaging through the aisles mounted on herds of wildebeests and rhinocerii fed on a diet of methamphetamine and PCP. No, this is about nothing so controversial nor obvious.

And before we get to the crux of the matter, let me start off with a compliment. Your Mondo Llama line of acrylic paints, the entire rainbow of 63 of them (not counting the chalk shades) are simply excellent, and a superb value for the money, providing all the quality necessary for a host of artistic endeavors for less than $2/bottle, when one doesn't need to spend nor obtain commercial artist-quality tubes of the pricier stuff. I frankly couldn't be happier with the product line, and bonus for you, it's one of your store-brand lines.

Having said that, I'm not writing to criticize you now, but rather to offer my heartfelt condolences.

I offer them for what must be a constant source of despair at every level, for the simply abysmal level of illiterate, color-blind, downright stupid and lazy so-called associates you must be forced to hire to stock your shelves.

Is someone holding a gun to your personnel managers' heads when you hire such a shiftless bunch of incompetent retards? Should we call the police? Is it a federal law we need to raise the hue and cry about which requires you to employ such an all-around bunch of lackadaisical doofusii, and entrust them the incredibly complex task of - horrors! - putting things on the shelves where they belong??

Tell us how we can help you; we're here for you.

I ask because - just spit balling here, not telling such a huge corporation how to run their business, mind you - I have a wee suspicion that if you could somehow put the right colors of paint where they're supposed to go, you'd, y'know, SELL MORE OF THEM. Crazy, right? Let me know if I'm wildly out of line there with such rampant speculation.

I can only commiserate with you because not only are the plainly visible colors of the Mondo Llama paint bottles not an actual clue for the people who're entrusted every week with stocking them in the right spots, but because the names of each color are written in English on both the shelves, and the bottle tops. Almost like if someone could read English, let alone look at the flipping colors of paint inside, they could actually work out which bottles go in which place on the store shelves. Every. Single. Time. Mirabile dictu!

Do your employees need an emotional support animal to help them discern colors? Would putting a giant See-N-Spell on all store shelves help them to get all 63 colors in the right places? I'm baffled.

I just wanted to let you know that, to the extent the colors are correctly located in the stores I CC'ed in on this communication, it's because I take about 2 minutes whenever I'm in one of those stores to straighten them out. You're welcome. I have a leg up on your employees, obviously, because I'm neither color-blind nor illiterate. Just in case you wanted me to check my non-retard not-colorblind privilege.

The pity for you is, you can't seem to be able to motivate any of your $15/hr. employees to spend less than a dollar's worth of your company time to do the same thing. That'd be...work! Icky!

Yeah, I suppose it's a little OCD. And I know, many of your other customers "help" you by putting things on shelves all over the store when they're too lazy to walk them back where they got them, but this isn't that. I know, because I continuously find three bottles of paint with your pick labels attached to the lot, all the same color, and all mis-located. At every store. Every time I drop in. Because that's how your flunkies stock them.

Maybe you could think about doing an Ishihara Color Blindness Test before you hire people. You could still hire the ones that are color-blind, and get some ADA cred and points; and then, just not ask them to sort items by color. You're on your own what to do about the ones who can't read (maybe remedial English classes for the Common Core high school grads?), and the lazy doofuses.

Apparently, to Target employees, any color of blue is
interchangeable with every other color of blue.
And if you can read the number in this test, it's also
evidently the average Target employee IQ.

Why do I get worked up about the fact that you have thousands of employees stocking your shelves who can't read, can't see colors, and/or don't give a damn? (Worst case for you, all of the above.)

Well, it's like this: Back in the day, when Van Halen (they're a rock band; maybe you've heard of them? You sell their albums...) used to have an infamous clause (#126) in their voluminous tour contract that there would be bowls of M&Ms backstage. But absolutely NO brown ones.

And if they saw a brown M&M, it was a breach of contract, and they could cancel the entire show, for cause, with full compensation owed.

Not because they hated brown M&Ms. Not because they were divas. But because they wanted to make sure, with tons of equipment, electricity, and pyrotechnics going off on a huge show, to ensure the safety of the band, their roadies, and their fans, they wanted a quick test of whether the concert promoters had read the contract and were following the rules.

It was a bellwether; a canary-in-the-coal-mine, if you will, to see if the people they were entrusting their safety to were doing their jobs.

And that's how I feel about the paint in your craft aisle. If you can't hire people that can get something that simple and basic right, how can you be expected to get anything right that's harder than that??

You guys have exactly three jobs: Stock the shelves, open the doors, and ring up the sales. (And let's get serious: you've tried to outsource that last one to your customers for years, and now you're shocked that one's blown up in your faces.) And if you now can't stock the shelves either, you won't have to worry about opening the doors for much longer either.

QED

So I feel for you, both individually and corporately. Not to mention for your stockholders.

Waaaaaay back in the misty past, like many youngsters embarking on gainful employment, I started out in retail too. At a place called Sears, Roebuck, and Co. Maybe some of the older folks there remember them? At the time I worked there, they really were "where America shopped". They parlayed catalog sales into the premier retail establishment in the country. But they had technological myopia: they couldn't see the internet as the logical extension of their catalog, and you and everyone else ate their lunch, metaphorically.

You folks, with hundreds (1956, at last count) of stores in all 50 states seem to have lost sight of the idea that you're running actual brick-and-mortar stores. And that it's your bread and butter. You get the online aspect; but if your master plan is to be a smaller version of Bezos-mart, with less selection, you're well on your way to becoming the next Sears story.

I feel even sorrier for you when I consider how it got this way. Because as I learned from masters of the craft in the military, you only get the compliance with orders you inspect for.

So this means you not only have incompetent, slovenly, or outright incapable employees, you have nearly 2000 store managers and merchandise managers who frankly don't give a flying fig about this. If they even know about it, because they never check. You'll have to decide for yourselves whether their apathy or their ignorance is worse. And you're paying them for this!

At least your hired flunkies aren't so stupid or incompetent (...yet) they put the paint bottles in the candy or cake frosting aisle, but that's a pretty low bar, don't you think?

I'm not a stock market guy, but if I was, or even if I was invested in it, I think I'd be shorting your stock.

Maybe I've got it wrong. Maybe things are great at the other 1949 stores, and it's just every store within 5 miles of me that can't pull off such a simple task. Ever. Any day in the last several years. Anytime I've checked.

But, like I said, I'm not criticizing you. You do whatever you think best.

I just feel sad that you're paying huge numbers of people (and soon, even starting them out here in Califrutopia at $20/hr minimum!) to be so utterly incapable of doing the most basic function in retail: putting things on the store shelves. And they keep getting it wrong every day, and no one in charge - all hired by you - notices or cares.

But now, we can both live in hope: Me, that anyone in your entire corporation important enough to make a change cares enough to start running your business like a business instead of thinking it's going to run itself; and you, that if they did, I'd drop dead from utter shock.

Adventures In Retail

 

Five minute trip for two items.

"Five passengers set sail that day for a three hour tour,

A three hour tour..."

Sandpaper? No problem. In my hands in 30 seconds. So where are the hand sanding blocks?

Nose ring with hair a lovely shade of cerulean blue:

"Can I help you?"

Me: Do you have sanding blocks?

NRWHALSOCB: *Blinks*

Almost like I was speaking Latin or something, or asked her for a walrus-tooth ivory file handle with brass trim.

Me: Y'know, blocks to hold the sandpaper...? They've been a thing for like...ever.

NRWHALSOCB: Points to overpriced shitty self-destructing blocks of not-sandpaper.

Me: No, not those. The solid blocks that hold these sheets of sandpaper in my hand.

NRWHALSOCB: "Oh! Those are on Aisle 10-Aisles-Across-The-Store!"

Me: (Internally: Because WHY would you want to keep the sanding blocks right next to the actual sandpaper? But Fucktard Depot, so whatever...)

Externally: "Thanks very much!"

Ten more minutes of fruitlessly searching That Aisle, The Aisles On Both Sides Of It, And Two Other Places where Random Stock F*cktards MAY have pegged it: Nada. Zip. Bupkus.

So, over to Customer Service.

Five more minutes, while three other employees see me standing there, and offer no help whatsoever.

Finally get the attention of CS Clerk. "How can I help you?"

Me: Two questions: 1) Do you know what a sanding block is?

"No. But I can look it up."

Half credit. Maybe. No point asking where it is as the second question, when you don't know what it is. WhereTF do they hire these people? County Jail Work-Release?? Short Bus Dropout Want Ads???

CSC finds not-the-item, just like NRWHALSOCB Paint Chick, who clearly got that job because she could push the buttons on the paint mixer.

Me: "No, I need the blocks that hold the sandpaper."

CSC: Scrolls down, finds the exact item.

Me: "That's it!"

CSC: "We don't stock that in the store."

Because why-the-f*ck would I or anyone else want to be able to use the $50 worth of assorted sandpapers I purchased the very same day I bought them?!? That's crazy talk right there, amirite? Fucking brilliant, Random Purchasing @$$holes of Retail Hellishness and zero f*cking clue about actual hardware or shop projects.

Half hour wasted, and still only halfway to having what I want in hand.

Drive across town to Lowe's.

Who, without any help from the studio audience, have the exact rubber block that's been around almost since Joseph of Nazareth was making cabinetry. Which I find in 25 seconds. It's also the only one they have. Because why would you ever want to stock more than one item with a price of $5?

I grab it, rush to the register, and I'm out the door 25 minutes faster than at F*cktard Depot, with exactly what I wanted in the first place.

Tomorrow, I'm heading over to the local hardware store that's been in business continually since power tools were called hammers, screwdrivers, and hand saws. And I'ma buy two more of the things, because the next time I want a new one, I'll by-God have it sitting handy next to the sandpaper. They'll probably have three different brands of them, including two or three with the price stickers on them from when they bought a case of them in 1964.

Side note: The Army, despite lowering recruitment standards to anyone with a pulse, even without a high school diploma or GED, is going to have a tough time getting recruits, because as far as I can see, F*cktard Depot has already hoovered up all the sub-80 IQ dimwit high school dropouts for miles around.

Retail isn't that hard. Retail with Retards is.

I haven't had this much fun shopping at Fucktard Depot since I tried to find a sharpening puck for hand tools, another formerly common item that's been around for damned near forever.

UPDATE: Mom & Pop Hardware had three full pegs of the blocks. Two of them went home with me today, so we won't be re-living that problem anytime soon. 

Oh, and for the inevitable Moron Contingent, I'm sanding irregularly-shaped items, not flat surfaces, and wood blocks don't work well for that. Stupid people need this explained to them apparently, so award yourself a dunce cap if you didn't grok that the rubber blocks have more "give" than does the block of wood you're using for a head. But thanks for playing. Apparently the post wasn't explicit enough in expressing how I feel about getting "help" from ignorant idiots who don't know what they're talking about.

If You Can't Do The Job Right, Quit, Or Kill Yourselves

 

MPD, circa 2021.

Go to Divemedic's blog.

Read that entire post, and watch the videos. He tells this in exquisite detail.

This is not "bad tactics", however. It's institutional insanity.

This is where the former judicial system of the Royal Navy should take precedence:

Those officers - the entire convoy - should be rounded up, fired en masse, and horse-whipped to bloody shreds for no less than 24 hours apiece, regardless of whether they die at any point, with the punishers - from their own department, no less - working in batches lest they tire (defaulters and shirkers to be placed in with the culprits), in the city square in front of the courthouse, televised live citywide, with every off-duty officer in that county, and the families and children of the culprits, including any child over the age of 5, mandatorily present to witness the event until it's over. Any survivors to be subsequently pilloried in front of City Hall for 30 days and nights, untreated and unguarded.

Then the entire surviving MPD left afterwards should be required to knock at the door of every residence, and sincerely and personally apologize to every citizen of the city, until they're done.

And the chief of police and every officer in their direct chain of command should be sentenced to 20 years for corruption, attempted murder, and criminal conspiracy, pour encourager les autres.

But as they won't be, every officer in the MPD that dies "in the line of duty" for the next century has it coming. 

"A few bad apples" my aching ass. Fire them all, and start the prosecutions, for cause. Citizens there should be given full carte blanche to shoot at the MPD on sight, without prior warning, and all such incidents excused under all state and federal laws.

The MPD cure of "law enforcement" is worse than the disease of "crime". They're the problem, not the solution. And it didn't start yesterday, or last year.

This is why you defund the police: anarchy is a better government than Gestapo tyranny. And all but the most delusional and deranged copsuckers know it, not just here in the wake of multiple incidents, but in formerly polite and proper Canuckistan, after seeing the Mounties trampling unarmed grannies for sport, and down under in Ozshwitz, after watching their local gauleiters use the Oz polizei to throw people into COVID konzentrationslagers because they were Vaxx Juden.

If beating the hell out of random citizens trying to protect their businesses while the police go out shooting random people on "hunting trips" rather than arresting actual rioters is how your local fuzz respond during city-wide riots, the best thing you can do for public safety, and your own well-being, is shoot them all in the face, on sight. More and more, the worst of them are all but begging for exactly that sort of response, from Joe Average. Eventually, that's exactly what they're going to start getting.

A weak second-best would be to fire the entire department for cause, and start from scratch, trained by the state police under transparent full outside scrutiny, for the next 25 years, and only turn them loose when they get to where they can do it themselves without having their hands held, and without ever again getting accused of turning lose Brute Squads with official sanction.

Nazi Germany was not supposed to be an instruction manual.

Masterpiece Theater

 

When someone nails an essay to your door, you're
about to have a very bad day.

I haven't read any of Larry Correia's books (AFAIK), and I don't visit his blog, but I know from previous comments that a number of readers here do. My previous inattention may have been an oversight.

I say that, because for some reason which I cannot recall, I happened to drop by there the other day, and scrolled down to this post from Feb. 22:

Who Needs High School English When You Can Have Social Justice Instead?

Bearing in mind who's telling you this, and our own bona fide credentials in this sport, in case you are one of the ten or so people in the English-speaking world who apparently hasn't read what appears there, hie thee thenceward, in order to witness quite simply one of the most beautiful and masterful rants in the English language, from someone who is clearly a maestro of the genre.

He simultaneously deconstructs the offending indoctrination, defends the teaching of our mother tongue, and plays whack-a-mole like a ten-armed Kali with a bag of sledgehammers on every silly ass notion and retarded argument in a performance the like of which has not been seen since Michael York debuted as D'Artagnan in  The Three Musketeers.

★★★★★ Five stars. Highly recommended. (Correia's rant, and the movie.)

Cannonballing Into The Stupid Pool

 

This is what a cannonball dive looks like in a swimming pool.
To see what it looks like into a septic tank, read the linked
Daily Mail article, or the chuckleheaded "study" it's based on.

479th time in the last 2 years: 

Cloth face masks do not, nor were they ever intended to protect the wearer from other people's germs. This has only been common knowledge since about 1870 or so, so we can totally understand how the baby ducks who did the Bristol "study", the Daily Mail, or anything-but-random* fuckwits on the internet may not have heard about it after only about 150 years of common medical usage.

Dumbfuck Pop Quiz: given the works of Louis Pasteur,
Ignaz Semmelweis, and Joseph Lister, are the
masks being worn by the surgery staff intended to
 a) keep their germs out of the patient, or
b) to keep the patient's germs out of the surgical team?
Grading will be on a scale of Pass/Fucktard.

Cloth face masks are there to keep your snot in your bubble, and preventing it from flying outward at 200-300mph every time you cough or sneeze, and entering anyone else's piehole.

If anyone out there still cannot grasp this basic reality, you are literally too fucking stupid to have internet access without adult supervision, and a baby monitor should be in place on you, to make sure you remember how to breathe without being prompted by a punch to the solar plexus 12-20 times per minute.

If any of this is news to you, you're making Emperor Poopypants' mental abilities look like Stephen F. (for "Fucking") Hawking by comparison.

 

And with this latest "study" determining, yet again, that wet streets cause rain, we remind those who still haven't read it to peruse the -AFAIK- only recent study to actually test the effectiveness of cloth masks to prevent snot blasted viral loads from travelling OUT, rather than the recockulous idea that they're worn to stop viral particles from getting IN, is this one.

TL;DR?

(Ask me how I knew.)

Measuring from 6' away, wearing no mask, while coughing and sneezing, delivered  between 10² and 10³ viral particles from people with actual Kung Flu to a viral collector. (For Common Core Grads, that means 100 to 1000 individual virus particles flew that far. You're welcome.)

Conducting the same test under the same conditions, with any variety of face covering, reduced the number of viral particles hitting the collector to 10°. (Common Core grads: that would be a total of one.) Not two. Not three. Not 11. Not 100. Not 1000. Just one.

I apologize for throwing this much math at people, but that means a cloth mask is between 99% and 99.9% effective at keeping your COVID viral snotstorm in your piehole, and out of everyone else's, at a range of 6'.

Don't believe me: Take off your shoes and socks, or get a calculator, and Do. The. Math.

If anyone out there is still too stupid to grasp the utter worthlessness of the alleged "study" that triggered this rant for use as anything other than lining your cat's litter box, bird's cage, or wiping your own ass when the outhouse runs out of Charmin, I would suggest cutting lead paint chips out of your diet, and cutting back to something less than two jugs of moonshine per night.

And before anyone attempts to kneejerk regurgitate "masks don't work" in Comments, define "mask", and define "work", before you climb onto the diving board over the septic tank for the next cannonball.

_____

OTOH, for COVID news you can actually use and profit from, I suggest going to Herschel's summary of Kung Flu revelatory notes you might have seen at Peter's BRM  blog, WRSA, and elsewhere, all in one handy post.  Read it while you knead bread dough by hand, or clean your firearms, and perhaps as you knot a handy length of rope into a serviceable noose.

UPDATE: And today, one day later, Burning Platform* (which name should be changed to Burning Horseshit if this is the best he can do), published rent-seeking jackass Steve Kirsch's asinine look at a study which noted that increasing mask compliance that showed a 9% decrease in infection, and an 11% decrease in symptoms, from a 30% increase in mask-wearing, shows that "masks don't do anything". 

Leaving that level of retardation to fend for itself, what was wholly overlooked was that the final compliance rate change was from 13% to 42%, meaning the entire study was conducted amongst people where 58% of them never masked at all. Imagine studying the effects of kevlar vests in a 10' x 10' room where 58 out of 100 people drop live hand grenades with the pins pulled, and then telling me that obviously, kevlar has no effect on stopping fragments among the 42 people in that room who had one on.

This is a level of "science" grasp last seen from Sir Bedevere in Quest For the Holy Grail: "That, my liege, is how we know the earth to be banana-shaped."

What this demonstrates is that, exactly as my father frequently suggested whilst reading the newspaper, that "Shit'll do for brains, in a pinch."

*[Sorry to point and use WP marking rounds, but our patience for this level of dipshittery and bag-of-hammers stupidity has worn through the boot and all the way to the raw blister. You Were Fucking Wrong. If this could have been you, we suggest you try turning up the dial on your computer marked "brightness". It can't hurt, at this point.]

Change The Branch of Service Name to United States @$$ Clowns

 

It was brought to my notice that in yesterday's post, in some people's minds, my "picking" on a humble E4 in the Air Farce, due to her lowly rank and status, and her being subject to almost everyone higher than herself, constituted an egregious case of "blaming the victim".

Au contraire, pussies.

When last I attended Uncle's Summer School For Wayward Teenagers, my camp counselors took pains to impress upon a young lad-like Aesop a few wee salient points of military business.

Starting, about 3 seconds after my feet hit the footprints, with the observation that I and my fellow inmates were all fully and happily under the bosom of this quaint bit of legal arcana known as the  UCMJ, including this little bit of military jurisprudence:

"Though not specifically mentioned in this chapter, all disorders and neglects to the prejudice of good order and discipline in the armed forces, all conduct of a nature to bring discredit upon the armed forces, and crimes and offenses not capital, of which persons subject to this chapter may be guilty, shall be taken cognizance of by a general, special, or summary court-martial, according to the nature and degree of the offense, and shall be punished at the discretion of that court." - 10 U.S. Code §934, AKA Article 134 of the Uniform Code Of Military Justice (1951-present) {emphasis mine - A.}

They also rammed home the novel observation that the UCMJ wasn't like the Pirate's Code (really just guidelines, rather than an actual code) but was rather something which they really rather considered the,... y'know, actual enacted law of the Republic governing all military conduct for every swinging Richard and Lucy (mind you, this was back in the hoary days of yore when there were only two genders, by act of Congress) present for duty in every branch of the US military in all branches, plus at least three service academies, for all ranks from E-1 to O-10, inclusive.

Crazy, right?

So the first thing young private Aesop, let alone one at the exalted rank of Lance Corporal (what one would call an E-3 in my branch of an actual military service, as contrasted with the Air Farce) would have observed, rather than wearing the offending jackassically retarded fenestrated face diaper, would have been something like the following:

"Staff Sergeant, as a long-serving member of a military band, my ability to appear in the uniform prescribed at the time and place specified has been noted and rewarded by two prior promotions, so my military appearance and discipline are not a question at issue in what I'm about to say. ["Rieben, pay attention now, this is the way to gripe."] Clearly, asking me to wear a mask with a gaping hole where my piehole lies is not a lawful military order, seeing as it makes me look like a total jackass, makes this unit look like jackasses, and therefore makes you, our officers, our entire band, and our entire branch of service look like jackasses, under the provisions of Uniform Code of Military Justice found in Article 134 and enacted in 1951, I must therefore bring it to your attention, and must, in strict and full obedience to the regulations which govern my conduct and that of the entire military, under the laws of the United States of America, expressly refuse to wear any such jackassical fenestrated face diaper at any public performance of our unit.

Of course, should you and any or all members of my chain of command exercise your option to dispute my contention and cite me for failure to follow this order, and charge me for violations of the UCMJ in this refusal, I look forward to making my case at a court martial, with the full public airing and attention this matter deserves, and I submit myself wholeheartedly to any such further exercise of military justice and discipline."

That's how you do it.

And that would have been the first and last time the matter was ever heard of again, because if there's one thing NCOs and officers in the military dislike, it's shining the sun-like spotlight of attention on their own fuck-ups and shortcomings, and having their noses rubbed in their own piss, literally and figuratively, just before the rolled-up newspaper of senior command attention is thwacked smartly upon their noses or asses.

They could transfer me to the band in McMurdo Sound Antarctica (even if that made me the entire ensemble); they could recategorize my MOS as a shit-barrel combustion specialist; but they could not take away my rank, pay, or privileges, let alone my self-respect, by forcing me to knuckle under to such a jackassically beclowning uniform requirement as they did with Senior Airman Kissass Shitforbrains, and the entire Air Farce Bonehead Bugling Twat Detachment, as seen above.

"No one can make you feel inferior without your consent." - Eleanor Roosevelt

I would furthermore note, for the edification and enlightenment of those to whom the experience of military service is as foreign to them as Chinese calculus and Vogon poetry, that during that selfsame Summer Camp, lo these many summers ago, they also inculcated rather forcefully, the following military traits that have been considered a wee bit important down to the rank of E-1 basic trainee shit-gargler, in every branch and military, going back to the Greek phalanx.

I will list them, and then score my response's score, with SrA SFB for contrast immediately afterwards, on a scale of 0-10:

                            Aesop        SrA SFB

Bearing                 10                0

Courage                10                0

Decisiveness        10                0

Dependability        10                0

Endurance            10                0

Enthusiasm            10                0

Initiative                10                0

Integrity                10                0

Justice                    10                0

Judgement            10                0

Knowledge            10                0

Loyalty                    10                0

Tact                        10                0

Unselfishness        10                0

That's the difference between being a lackwit kissass automaton, and being the kind of service member who puts the country, the unit, the mission, and their fellow service members, ahead of themselves, and doesn't just "go along to get along".

In a perfect world, Sr. Airman Kissass Shitforbrains would have been charged under Article 134, and knocked back a stripe, for her conduct in subjecting herself, her unit, and the entire Air Farce to further ridicule and contempt (as if they're short of @$$clowns already).

Every NCO in her chain of command, up to Sgt Major of the Air Farce, would be reduced an escalating number of stripes, from 2 to all of them, at each ascending step of the pyramid, for failure to note the problem.

Every commissioned officer from her detachment commander to General of the Air Farce would similarly receive a minimum one grade demotion apiece, and be awarded a permanent letter of being ignorant career-polishing ass-kissing fuck-ups, in their respective Officer's Qualification Records. Requests to immediately resign their commissions would be entertained with alacrity.

And then they and SecAF and SecDef would be dragged before a special hearing of the House Armed Services Committe for a public spanking with a rolled-up newspaper, and sentenced to fifteen days wearing a red clown nose and floppy clown shoes daily, to drive the point well-home.

As it is, they wear those now 24/7/365/forever, and it's hard to imagine a bigger bunch of unmilitary @$$clowns in American history than the current bunch of brasshole fuck-ups.

If you're keeping score at home, the example of this ding-a-ling is every bit as egregious as the Navy sending out seagoing rustbuckets, and crashing into slower civilian ships, and the Army graduating open communists from West Point, failing to execute deserters and traitors in time of war, and marching male ROTC cadets around in red high heels (and not a single one of them having the balls to openly defy and ridicule their derelict command staff for doing it).

This exact happy horseshit is how you get drowning recruits in a swamp at midnight, My Lai massacres, Tailhook, and Abu Ghraib shenanigans. And it needs a good week-long dick-kicking, with steel-toed boots, every time it's observed, until the pain hurts everyone at every level from the offending unit to the senior service member commanding, with every step they take, until they feel it in their bones, and remember it until the day they die.

In Caesar's legions, they'd have been executed at swordpoint in front of massed ranks, or flogged with cat o' nine tails, pour encourager les autres.

And given the opportunity, the veterans of the Air Farce from when it was the Air Force, who served honorably, and with valor and distinction, in multiple of our country's wars, would doubtless like to do no less to SrA SFB and the entire Air Farce posse, top to bottom, until blood ran hip deep through their wing of the Five-Sided Puzzle palace, and on bases around the world.

Sixth Circus Reasserts The Rule Of Decree By Fiat

h/t WRSA

It's not hard to find a couple of stupid people in Appalachia,
if you look in the right place.

Who needs the law when you've got an agenda? Certainly not the Sixth Circus.

For the most masterful deconstructionist rant of the recockulous overturn of the unconstitutional vaxx mandates I've seen, I direct you to bad cattitude, before whose efforts I stand awestruck, and deliver a richly deserved Slow Clap.

This is masterclass on fisking judicial activism, kids.

RTWT

Possible silver lining? Other than the two braindead black-robed assclowns who overturned the stay on OSHA's mandate, the rest of the Sixth Circus has apparently voted to hear the case en banc, with a view to overturning it, and reinstating the original nationwide stay, by majority vote.

If that happens, Emperor Poopypants' judicial record will drop to 1-3, and he won't make the playoffs even as a wild card.

Remedial Lecture: Talking Turkey

There have been some objections raised to the last few posts. Some legitimate, and some asinine. I won't call out names or assign categories to anyone. I appreciate you all. Generally.

Don't be the exception.

What part of "Kindly wake the fuck up, pull your heads out of your asses, and pay attention" that goes unstated in all this didn't come through your own personal 1MC? Would a chalk talk or crayon-illustrated lecture have helped at some point? Are you accessing the internet via satellite, from a deserted tropical island with a population of 1? Were you dropped on your head as an infant, with an alcoholic birth mother, and fed and raised on a diet of lead paint chips?

Just asking.

I'm going to break this down personally, and then generically. We'll see if the penny ever drops for you. There will be pictures. Because as drill instructors patiently explained time and again, there are no stupid questions, only stupid people.

1) There are something above 100+M people fully vaccinated in this country. It may be substantially higher than even that. The VAERS data is self-reported adverse affects. The number of actual adverse effects is probably 20 times higher than the number actually reported to VAERS. There is no mandatory requirement for anyone to report anything, and yes, anyone can submit a report. That's a feature, not a bug, in normal times, among people with average IQ.

Listen to Casey.

2) If you're going to throw out the VAERS data on the basis that the enormous number of reported sudden deaths, permanent disabilities, etc., are only to the sickest, who would have stroked out and died anyways, show your work. That means, Gentle Readers, if all you've got is pulling that excuse out of your underpants, because you have zero actual data, Shut The Fuck Up, and Sit Your Ass Back Down, In The Corner, With Your Dunce Cap Firmly Affixed To Your Head. The smart people are having a class you evidently don't wish to attend.

3) "But Aesop, there is no data to bring forth, because no one's made even a cursory effort to investigate a trail of dead and maimed bodies stacked FIFTEEN TIMES higher than 9/11, and OVER TWICE AS HIGH AS THE LAST TWO U.S. WARS COMBINED." Congratulations, you may take off your Dunce Cap, return to your seat, and rejoin the class already in progress. That little nag is exactly the problem, for a group of vaccines with more adverse deaths and permanent disabilities reported upon receiving it than pretty much every vaccine in human history, as long as records have been kept of them, combined.

4) Getting personal, I'm looking at potentially losing my job in a couple of weeks. On the face, a minor inconvenience. I've quit, been furloughed, downsized, and outright fired before, so this wouldn't ordinarily be anything more than an inconvenience. Typically, anytime since 2000, one lasting maybe a day. But not this time.

5) My idiot governor, who I just heartily voted to recall, but whom I expect will survive such attempt, after winning somewhere between 147% and 218% of the registered voters' votes in this latest sham election, has arrogated medical expertise, and decreed that every health care worker in the state shall be vaccinated. Which means if I lose my job at Ghetto General Hospital, I can't skip over to Callous Bastard Health Corp, or Nail The Doors Shut HMO and start work tomorrow. Not anywhere in 57 counties from Oregon to the Mexican border.

6) My original plan for that eventuality was to apply for work in Las Vegas, or Phoenix, a mere 400 miles away, and three or four nights out of seven, still be sleeping in my own bed right here, without a hiccup. Chances of getting hired either city, with my skills and experience, normally? It'd take about 15 minutes' time.

7) But then, Senile Gropey Dopey Joe told Gov. Gabbin' Nuisance , "Hold My Beer!", and announced the Califrutopian-stupid mandate would now be applied everywhere, coast-to-coast, for every health care worker, at any facility receiving Medicare or Medicaid federal funds (HINT: That's EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THEM, IN THE NATION), and extended that mandate to every federal employee, and every employee of any company or corporation with more than 100 workers. Military, cops, firemen, doctors, nurses, techs, engineers, truck drivers, plumbers, clerks, janitors, waitresses, and people who work at McDonald's and Starbucks, nationwide, for the entire 80M or so unvaxxed. No exceptions. No exemptions. Get the vaxx, of get f**ked, because Uncle sez so. AS IF he, or anyone, even an actual elected president, had any such right to say so.

8) And I can't fly commercial. I'm not supposed to cross state lines. And they're talking about denying me permission to shop, even to buy groceries, or do anything else in public, with the dwindling money I'm no longer allowed to earn, anywhere, nationwide. And that's true now for every one of the unvaxxed and intransigent, or will be very, very soon.

9) In short, 80M people, most of whose bank accounts are rather severely drawn down after the last 18 months of economic devastation, are supposed to either submit to vaxx-rape, or stay home and quietly starve, after being evicted, or sitting in a home with no water, no power, no gas, no heat or A/C, after having anything they owe a payment on repossessed, as they and their families starve quietly, meekly, and submissively, while waiting for eviction for non-payment of property taxes, or living under a shopping cart by the overpass.

No points for figuring out what I'll actually be doing, if all other options are precluded.

And just like in this picture, it's going to be a group effort.

10) Because we need to protect those precious people vaccinated one, two, three times and more, from people like me, completely uninfected and untouched by the virus or the vaccines. Because science, bitchez.

11) And those 80M will next be, ...what? Rounded up and put in quarantine camps for the uninfected, to make the rest of you feel better about yourselves, like in Oz? Fed and tended in a modern-day Theresienstadt, until such time as it becomes too costly for government largesse, or simply inconvenient, and no one's looking, so let's give them all a nice shower, and a dirt nap?

"Oh Noes!!!! The American government would NEVER round up American citizens and put them in distant concentration camps, and mistreat them, purely out of hatred and for convenience's sake!!!"

America's BTDT. Pull the other one; it's got bells on it.

12) And faced with this exact prospect kicking off anew in a few days, I'm supposed to give a flying fuck that something I quite light-heartedly suggested, if actually carried out, might injure or inconvenience some Fainting Nancy, cause them to rush for their smelling salts, or wet their sphincter-bunched panties??? And they might, what, fire me and take away my employment, my profession, my ability to provide for myself, my home, my entire life?!?!?!? Is that what I and 80M of my friends and neighbors should be afraid of happening if we do anything to rock the boat at this point, beyond writing a sternly-worded note of protest to the editor of the local fishwrap? SRSLY, FUCKWITS?

13) Because an all-out civil war of existential existence between the two sides in this country, with rivers of blood, and mountains of skulls, will be LESS inconvenient to the general population than uncivil disobedience, intended to let TPTB know that they're fucking with the wrong people, before we have to start shooting those motherfuckers in the face, and then going after their families, to end their DNA in perpetuity, Carthage-style? Because that's the "B" plan right now, guaran-damn-teed.

There's but one response to that level of clueless shitheadedness and blubbering tearful "think of the CHILDREN!" level of reasoning skills:

I hope that clears up any confusion.