Sunday, October 8, 2017

A Little Bit of This, A Little Bit of That

First, I hope if you're interested in following some quality writing on the Las Vegas massacre that you're reading the Raconteur Report, who has done some really good reporting on it.  I think a worthwhile read for everyone is yesterday's post on a Plea to Stop the Derp.  It's simply too full of weapons-grade snark to quote pieces of.  So just a couple of lines:
1) "I can't believe he got all that crap up to a 32nd floor suite"

That's because you're an idiot, or unfamiliar with Vegas, firearms, and about 48 other facts that many people find to be common knowledge.

We know now Paddock checked in on September 25th, giving him only six f***ing days to get a $#!^load of guns and ammunition to the 32d floor from his car. Seriously, anyone who thinks he carried them out in the open, and up 32 flights of stairs, on his back, is a fucktard. If that includes you, step away from the keyboard.

In Vegas, like many hotels, there are these things called luggage carts:
There's more.  I suspect most of you have seen it since everyone seems to be recommending the blog, but go read if you haven't.


During the power outages from Irma, we ran for a little while on APC Uninterruptible Power Supplies.  One of them seemed to start giving off the unmistakable odor of burning electronics, so it was powered down and sent into a secure isolation facility (the shop).  After running off the battery for a few hours, the smell returned.  I took it apart and started a few days worth of testing the batteries (it seems I spend a lot of my spare time testing and reconditioning batteries).  To discharge these batteries, I ran my AC inverter and a 60W bulb.  I recharged them with my storage and AGM charger.  There will likely be a few cycles to 50% capacity and then recharging, in an effort to recondition them, but they look like old gell cell batteries whose internal resistance is getting too high.  I'll know better after a few more days.



I got an ad from Home Depot in today's email .  In itself, that's hardly unusual.  It was when I clicked on the sale link that it got a little surprising.
Huh.  I would have guessed that Home Depot would localize their ads to the cities or states where people register as living and not just send a national ad.  By coincidence, I was at the local HD store today and I didn't see a single snow shovel, show blower, salt spreader or bag of salt on display. 

I'll take the chance I can extend my record of never needing one for a while longer.  Like the rest of my life. 


18 comments:

  1. I've stayed at the Mandalay. There are no luggage carts - you have to engage a valet at the main entrance and the valet will bring the stuff up. And expect a tip.

    HOWEVER, I've used my own cart to carry stuff from my car, past the restaurant row, across the casino, and onto the elevators. There are security guards in front of the elevators who ask to see your card key. But no one said a peep about my harbor freight cart with luggage, coats, cooler, etc on it. BTW, it's a helluva long walk. And there are license plate readers in the garage too.

    IMO, an X-ray station seems eminently do-able at the Mandalay and its sister property, the Delano. Everyone passes thru one area, the machine can identify massive quantities of weaponry pretty easily, and the perp would be easily captured.

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  2. On the other hand, some of us don't need a lumber yard on stilts full of plywood for those tropical depressions y'all seem to have every so often.
    :)
    Q

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    1. Ah-ha, we only have them occasionally.

      It snows every year. :P

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  3. I'll probably need one or two of those items, SiG :-) When I got home from my visit to the east coast and with you and Mrs. Graybeard, I faced four feet of snow (drifted to five in places) up my steep half-mile of "driveway" Required a tractor with an 8' blade (and $500) almost six hours to plow to me, and then plow to my house. Had I not been gone for six weeks, I could have managed with my quad and its small blade, but - oh, well.

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  4. We replaced our aging snowblower last year and got a couple of snowfalls in Philly that were enough to give it a workout. One fall was slush and the machine moved it OK, and the other one was dry and fluffy and the machine worked great.
    On the other hand it won't hurt my feelings if the machine sits in the shed all winter!

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  5. Whatcha need ta do is print out that page of the ad, take it down to yer local Orange Box, and ask them to show you where they are in their store...
    }:-]

    Then when you're through with the first one, find another in a different area of the store and start over. You'll eventually get a manager who will at least give HQ appropriate shiite for pulling that crap.

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  6. I don't know Aesop, but my first encounter with him/his thoughts was on Mr. Grant's blog, where Aesop posted several (in my opinion) truly horrific/vile endorsements of state-sanctioned slaughter and cleansing of "undesirable" elements.

    Suffice to say, this guy is apparently opposed to "jackbooted thugs" just until he feels they're on *his* side, slaughtering people *he* thinks are (quote) "wastes of skin". I thought, at the time, that he was just a run-of-the-mill, totalitarian, pseudonymous internet troll, so I didn't bother to engage him or expend the effort to debunk and refute his bullsh!t. Learning that he's a pro-2nd-Amendment advocate (or portrays himself as one) just makes his perspective on the "drug war" that much more repulsive and inexplicably contradictory.

    He believes that we need to "Simply fight a war on drugs *as* a war on drugs. No more, no less." and (in that vein) stated:

    "Or instead of gainsaying the proposition, show me how the legalization of everything argument will work, in practice.
    Tell me how everyone having ready access to opiates like heroin and fentanyl, and everything else, will make society safer, more productive, and better, because people have shown over the last century that they can be trusted with that kind of liberty."

    He hates jackbooted thugs, and tyranny, but believes that it's the government's job to decide whether citizens can be "trusted" with liberty.

     I don't know what he is, but he's no friend of liberty. Anyone who thinks that the government has any business involving itself in decisions between myself and my physician, regarding my medical needs...yeah. Not a friend of liberty, in any way, shape, or form.

    And anyone who lacks the knowledge or intelligence to realize that the British Empire had no laws related to cocaine or opiate use/sale even at the very *height* of its power (one source:http://www.victorianweb.org/victorian/science/addiction/addiction2.html), and yet somehow still created an indisputably great civilization...and that the US lacked such laws at its founding, yet still the founding fathers managed to create the greatest nation in the history of the world...is just too freaking stupid or wilfully ignorant for words.

    Not to mention the cognitive dissonance involved in failing to recognize that *making something illegal doesn't mean it becomes inaccessible* doesn't just apply to guns. Pardon the blasphemy, but Jesus.

    He knows that gun confiscation will lead to a second civil war, but he advocates giving the government the power to *literally* wage "war" against the citizenry; because it's different when it's drugs. And because he's confident that the power to treat citizens as enemy combatants won't be abused. Because reasons. And the stupidity doesn't even begin to end there.

    I'm going to link to an archive of the post where he made these...comments, because I don't want to irritate Mr. Grant by linking his posts without permission, especially in this context.  It's easy enough to get to the original anyway. Please pardon the rant, sir.

    The post in question: http://archive.is/pdmzW

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    1. PS: the closest he came to saying something sensible was this bit: "...Tell me who wants to be the next 10 dealers after the first 10 get it in the neck.
      My society is down ten wastes of skin.

      If, despite that, you have an endless conga-line supply of dealers waiting in the wings, drugs aren't your notional society's biggest problem, are they?"

      Specifically, the "...drugs aren't your notional society's biggest problem, are they?" bit. Because he came *this close* to realizing the inherent...foolishness...of his position.

      No, Aesop, drugs *aren't* that "notional" society's "biggest problem" and they aren't *our* society's "biggest problem" either. That's why dealers go to prison, spend years getting anally raped, then get out and start dealing again. That's why even the freaking *Cartels* can't stop people from dealing without their permission, no matter the horrors they perpetrate against people, and the families of people, who defy them.

      Again, sorry about the rant, Mr. Graybeard.

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    2. The problem is not the dealers. They are merely meeting demand. The problem is the users. I have no interest in letting a meth head do surgery on me. I have no interest in letting a meth head work on the brake system in my car. I have no interest in letting a meth head flip my hamburger at Mickey D's. THEY are the damnable swill that are causing the real problems. Remove THEM, and your rapes and robberies go down drastically. And oh, by the way, the drug dealers disappear. If there's no market, there are no dealers.

      But we can't have that now, can we? After all, many of the West's "leaders" are big time drug users.

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    3. Yes other countries in the past have succeeded even with access to terrible drugs. But they didn't pay them $50K a year to push out babies on welfare. You cannot give welfare to 50 million people for very long before your country goes tits up and drowns in it's debt. IF on the other hand we treat the drug problem the way the British or Chines di in the 17th century and allow them to suffer all the consequences of their habit "maybe" legalization of drugs will work. Let them kill themselves and if they show themselves in polite society while high throw them in jail. BUT we aren't going to do that and you know it. We are going to allow them to give drugs to your 13 year old daughter and get her pregnant. Then she will become a welfare mother doing drugs and doing drug users to get drugs and raising the next generation of drug users and your government will tax you into poverty to reward them for it. SO; YES, drugs will destroy our nation and likely will destroy your kids and grand kids too. But no worries let's just make them all legal...

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    4. Bibliotecha Servare - no need to apologize. I don't "know" Aesop either, but within the last month or two I posted a couple of columns on my thoughts trying to make sense of the opioid crisis that's a regular news headline, eventually coming to the conclusions I did. He commented here - might have been the first time he was here or commented, but I don't know. Then I went to read some things he posted and thought he was interesting enough to go back to.

      I haven't read the links you've posted yet, but will tomorrow.

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  7. Heh:
    http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-vegas-shooting-20171009-story.html
    Just "Heh."

    As I said before, with the LVMPD and the FBI and BATFE leading the "investigation", I am certain that we will get the full and honest truth. Because, after all, those organizations are surely honest and open...

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    1. "Police have said that Paddock fired 200 rounds into the hallway."

      And hit the guard once? But didn't hit anyone else in an adjoining room?

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    2. This is the level of "truth" that we are going to get from "Law Enforcement" regarding this event. Quite frankly, I find the "derp" to be FAR more credible than anything which will come from "official sources". And not just in this matter. The stench is overwhelming.

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  8. We don't have to guess what life would be like in the USA with full drug legalization -- we know, because all drugs were legal in the US prior to the Harrison narcotics act of 1914. Back then there were same percentage of addicts as today, except addicts had more functional lives. The police weren't imprisoning them, and police chasing didn't raise the street price. See Scott Bieser's comic book called The Drug War Carol under www.adrugwarcarol.com on archive.org:

    http://web.archive.org/web/20040204234656/http://adrugwarcarol.com:80/index.html

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    1. Also they did not have fentanyl and the drug pushers didn't actively try to addict 13 year old girls so that they could prostitute them. The drug culture today is NOT your fathers drug culture. WAKE UP!

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    2. the drug pushers didn't actively try to addict 13 year old girls so that they could prostitute them

      Of course they did. Fiction TV show Deadwood pointed out that lots of the sex workers in the American wild west started out as drug-addicted runaway children from terrible home situations. I am not defending this behavior, I am saying that War On Druggies is worse than what it pretends to be helping. Government can't even keep drugs out of its own prisons, what even-more controlled environment do you propose instead? The Matrix? Humans in wombs plugged into virtual reality?

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