From my friend Pres.

Although I’m still capable of writing some excellent rants, when I go back and read some of my stuff when I first started this blog, I seem to have mellowed. Maybe because I’ve gotten older. Maybe because I’ve retired and don’t have to put up with some of the corporate bullshit that is endemic with large corporations like having to attend annual Diversity (All Hail Diversity!) classes or having to function within a bureaucracy and work for and around stupid people.

A person I know started work for a large corporation a few years back and told me she now understands some of the crap I had to put up with when I worked for IBM. Don’t get me wrong, IBM was very very good to me but large corporations like IBM put up many road blocks to productivity one of them being “valuing Diversity (All Hail Diversity!)”.

Many hours were wasted by bullshit programs, like periodic quality programs that management swears will not be like the previous quality programs. This time they really mean it. Six Sigma. Five Ups. Market Driven Quality. All of it a colossal waste of time. All the reorganizations to reflect the latest theories from management schools derived by people who have never managed anything. It is really very simple. Hire the best people, tell them what you want them to do, give them the tools they need, and get out of the way and let them do their jobs. In my 31.5 years at IBM I worked for three managers who understood that.

I’m getting tired of the stupidity of my fellow citizens, citizens who elected an unqualified empty suit to president because of the color of his skin. “Diversity (All Hail Diversity!) and white guilt has been hammered into the American populace for so long it was easy to present a black dude who could effectively (to some people – he has no effect on me – I hate watching his head jerk back and forth like he’s watching a tennis match) read words, written by others, off a TelePrompTer and convince the voters that he was qualified to be president and it was high time we elected a black dude to prove we weren’t racist. And the LSM propaganda arm of the Dimocrat Party did such a good job covering for him even going so far as taking his side in one of the debates and ganging up on Mittens (Thank you you fat tub of goo, Candy Crawley) even though she was wrong. And Mittens allowed it. He should have jumped right into her shit and said he was debating Obungler and not her.

Dumb voters. One of my IBM buddies told me the day of the 2012 election that he voted for Oblunder because he “kept us out of a depression”. This guy was one of my mentors when I was in the Mattel Office Products Division of IBM. I used to think he was smart. I retired at 58. He’s 68 and is still working but not at IBM. Turns out he’s not as smart as I once thought he was.

Anyway, I saw this post at Daily Pundit which pretty much captures my mood.

And that post bored me blind. Most of what I’m posting these days bores me blind. Our entire public square is consumed with “controversies” that serve only to mask several obvious truths. I’m going to make a list of those, and I could probably simply provide a link to the list for 99% of the “news stories” likely to pop up over the next few years.
1. Television and print journalism are horribly biased to the left. Duh.
2. There is a Ruling Class, consisting of very rich people and corporations, who, in toto, rule America via political surrogates, generally through oligarchic families. Duh.
3. The Ruling Class has a political party, call it the Ruling Party, which is made up of politicians financially and otherwise indebted to the Ruling Class who do their bidding. Duh.
4. George W. Bush was not a great President, and he was a terrible failure in the War on Muslim terrorism – including in Iraq. Duh.
5. Barack Obama is a radical leftist, verging on full Marxist, who is pushing a destructive, anti-American agenda as hard as he can – and, thanks to cooperation from both wings of the Ruling Party, pushing it quite successfully. Duh.
6. Republican and Democrat establishments have far more in common with each other, and are far more comfortable with each other, than either are with their bases. Although the GOP establishment is more comfortable with the Democrat base than with its own. Duh.
7. We have not “won” a real war since WWII, because our Ruling Class has chosen not to win any of the wars that have come after. Duh.
8. The United States government has become, effectively, a tyranny – with the consent of ignorant, stupid, frightened voters whom it would embarrass the Founders and Framers to represent. Duh.
9. A minority-majority of Americans – that is, a majority of voters, but a minority of all Americans – has discovered that it can vote to itself other people’s money – either through direct taxation/confiscation, or through borrowing, or through the creation of fiat money – and is in the process of guaranteeing that American will eventually collapse into bankruptcy. Duh.
10. However bad you think things are now, they are going to get worse – a lot worse, and that worsening is going to directly affect you. Duh.
None of this is anything new. I’ve been writing and saying, in one form or another, these same things, over and over, for years now. Every new year proves them more and more accurate. But eventually, having repeated myself dozens of times, I grow bored. Sorry. It’s just the name of the game. Pointing out that the sky is blue, the sun rises in the east, and that the media is biased toward the left (along with almost all of the Ruling Class) just gets old after a while.

I could have written this exact post. I feel the same way. I’m gonna keep fighting the same fight and writing the same things for as long as I can but sometimes it is boring writing obvious truths. It is so sad to see the United States of America commit suicide due to a biased media, stupid voters, moochers, looters, leeches, parasites, and craven politicians who care more about personal power than they do about this country. But it is so hard to write about this stuff every day and still see things getting worse.

If Obumbler had been white there is no way he would have been elected. That’s obvious. With his record after four years there is no way that he should have been reelected. That should be obvious, but when you have dumb voters, a candidate afraid to really fight and unable to fight against Obummercare since it was modeled after Mittenscare, and a biased media, you get another four years of a SCoaMF. And we see the results of that two years later.

I still feel that within the next thirty years this country will become a socialist dictatorship. Oboner is showing just how easy it will be, just like Sulla did at Rome. Fortunately for me, I won’t see it. It is sad enough watching the beginning of the end.

This has been sent to me by many readers.

Click on images to enlarge.

Makes perfect sense to me.

Jug Hussein Ears Downgrade channeled his inner Gephardt the other day when he talked about “lottery winners” AKA “the rich” being “asked” AKA demanded to pay their “fair share” AKA more and more of their money to “invest” AKA waste money on poverty programs. Yannow the top 1% pay over 1/3 of the taxes in this country. I think it’s closer to 40% while making less than 20% of the income. As for this “life’s lottery” bullshit? Yeah. I really won life’s lottery didn’t I?

As I’ve written many times on this blog, this lottery winner and his sister grew up poor in a dysfunctional household with an alcoholic father and a mother who had to go to work to help support the family. My father wanted to go into business for himself and he and Mom refinanced the house so he could buy a service station, unfortunately, he bought a bar instead. He told my mother, “You can’t drink and make money with a bar.” He proved that statement.

Both my sister and I worked odd jobs growing up. She was the smart one who worked hard in school and won a four year scholarship to college. I flunked out of junior college. I joined the Navy to avoid the draft and learned electronics. I went to college for three years but dropped out. I did get a job with IBM.

I started with the Mattel Office Products Division and after 4.5 years, a friend pulled some strings and got me into the Field Engineering Division. I went from fixing typewriters to fixing large mainframes and the stuff connected to them. I worked 5.5 years on third shift to make more money and to get trained on more stuff. In a previous post I wrote about how that training got me hired as an instructor.

I was doing OK until I really hit the lottery jackpot and broke my back. Did I sit back and whine about how hard it was? Nope. I worked harder. I didn’t want anyone saying the only reason I had a job was because of Diversity (All Hail Diversity!). I worked with too many of those people and I didn’t want to be one of them. I outworked my peers and took every opportunity offered to me. I couldn’t work in hardware so I taught myself programming. I did a good enough job that I could teach programming. There were a lot of 60 hour weeks for this lottery winner and times when I was working two full time jobs delivering as many teach days as full time instructors while maintaining all of the operating systems I supported which was a full time job in itself. For part of that time, I worked for a manager who knew what I did and awarded me accordingly with good ratings and good raises. He even moved me into a higher paid job category which got me two pay raises in one year, one of 12% and another of 7% when they reevaluated the category.

During this time, I always paid myself first by saving and investing my money. IBM had a good employee stock purchase plan where one could take 10% of his pay and purchase IBM stock at 15% off the market price. This was a return on investment of 17.6%. Free money. When IBM started a 401-K plan, I participated in that to the maximum amount.

So I’m sorry Obungler, I am sick and tired of you calling SRFs like me lottery winners, people who have worked their asses off to get to where they are. I made it to 31.5 years at IBM by making sacrifices (5.5 years of third shift destroyed one of my personal relationships), working my ass off (many 60 hour weeks on salary so no overtime, coming in weekends), seizing opportunities, and making myself a valuable employee. I retired on my terms. I could have worked longer and after I left, I could have gone back to work as a contractor doing my old job. The CDSM© who hated me and was happy to see me go turned around and offered me my job back the year after I left and then again two years after I left. The contractor he hired to replace me couldn’t do my job. Nothing was handed to me unlike you who have been handed stuff all his life. If anyone is a lottery winner, it’s you. You are prolly the most unqualified man to ever hold the office of president. Sarah Palin was more qualified to be president than you. She had run a town and a state. All you had ever run was your mouth so I wish you would just STFU about lottery winners and how people “didn’t build that.”

Yannow who wrote sumpin about this topic better than I have? Thomas Sowell Here’s the start.

In a recent panel discussion on poverty at Georgetown University, President Barack Obama gave another demonstration of his mastery of rhetoric — and disregard of reality.

One of the ways of fighting poverty, he proposed, was to “ask from society’s lottery winners” that they make a “modest investment” in government programs to help the poor.

Since free speech is guaranteed to everyone by the First Amendment to the Constitution, there is nothing to prevent anybody from asking anything from anybody else. But the federal government does not just “ask” for money. It takes the money it wants in taxes, usually before the people who have earned it see their paychecks.

Now read the rest.

From many readers.

As I was perusing the Atlanta Urinal and Constipation I cam across the following article about this colossal waste of money for a trip back to the early 20th Century. Alas, only subscribers to the AJC can view the entire article but I’ll post it all here with comments.

After almost five months of official Atlanta Streetcar operation, city officials are exploring route expansion to the Beltline. But storefronts boarded up and covered by newsprint along the route are their own news story on the economic-development promise.

It may be that the promises are simply slow to be fulfilled. Nevertheless, looking ahead to Streetcar promises should require looking back on past promises.

Promises made, promises broken. This is Atlanta city gummint after all.

Deadlines: The streetcar was originally scheduled to begin operating in May 2013. Service began on December 30, 2014, inconveniencing commuters and businesses along the route far longer than expected.

An example was coming upon some underground utility cables as they were digging. Who would have expected that to happen?

Construction: The 2.7-mile project was at least $28 million over its initial capital budget of $72 million, of which $47 million was a federal grant. The last official cost estimate, back in 2013, was $98 million. Expect that to go up: AT&T recently became the first utility of 15 affected by construction to sue the city, seeking reimbursement of $5.7 million for equipment relocation costs.

Those are the underground utility cables I mentioned. Cost overruns? I’m shocked! So now it’s gonna turn out to be at least a $98 million waste of money. Look for it to pass the $100 million mark.

Operations: Annual operating cost estimates started out in 2010 at $1.7 million. In 2014, the estimate was $3.2 million; at last count in February 2015, it was $4.8 million. The city also expects to spend more than $1 million on a new office, “dedicated to amassing federal transit funding.

It just keeps getting better and better doesn’t it.

Hours: The city initially proposed running the streetcar no later than 11 p.m. any night. Now, the service runs to 1 a.m. Fridays and Saturdays. As the song goes, “Nothing good happens after midnight,” and empty beer bottles strewn along the route may be testament to that.

Anyone considering riding the streetcar after dark is an idiot, especially if that person is white. Is it raaaaaacist if it’s true?

Ridership: In the federal grant request, estimated weekday ridership was 2,600. In its first six weeks of operation, the city reported ridership of 102,000, or 18 percent lower than projections. After Mayor Kasim Reed announced the ride will be free the entire first year, officials say ridership is 20 percent higher than expected.

Originally, it was only gonna be free for the first four months but Reed figgered out the only way to maintain any type of ridership, after the novelty of going back 100 years in time wore off, was to make it free for the entire year.

Traffic: The plan was to, “prioritize the corridor’s use away from automobile traffic,” the city said. Fifty-seven percent of the households in proximity of the streetcar don’t even own an automobile. But it appears the city is indeed prioritizing auto traffic “away:” The slow-moving vehicle traps cars that share the route; unfamiliar street markings force vehicles to back up for streetcar turns, no easy task anytime, let alone in rush-hour traffic; and traffic lights in the corridor are painfully unsynchronized.

In other words, they made things worse. But it’s a streetcar! Streetcars are good! That’s why we abandoned them 60 years ago and tore up all the tracks. What’s next? Horse drawn carriages?

As one who took the time to drive (28 minutes), ride (35 minutes ) and walk (43 minutes) the entire 2.7-mile route Wednesday last week — around mid-morning to give it a fighting chance — the verdict: uninspiring, uncomfortable and unlikely to succeed.

$98 million down the drain. And it will be even more since it will need subsidies to continue operation and then there will be the cost of junking all the streetcars, tearing up the tracks, and repaving the streets.

Why? The 35-minute ride is not only uninspiring but scary in some stretches. There was no visible police presence along Auburn Avenue, where pedestrians and tourists encounter stretches of buildings boarded up, graffiti, empty beer bottles and the occasional catcall. A friend reported witnessing a mugging in broad daylight at one stop; derelicts already are sleeping at some stops – in broad daylight.

One rider, a seasoned military veteran who took his wife on the streetcar out of curiosity over the weekend, said he will never do it again.

“It was a 20-minute wait. Then the driver couldn’t make the turn at the end to go back because of cars in the way. It crept forward because of the cars in front.”

He said nervous tourists watched rowdy passengers misbehave as the crowded streetcar made its way along “dilapidated” Auburn Avenue. “Even though there was an [Downtown] Ambassador on board, he did nothing to stop bad behavior and expletives on the crowded car.”

Just imagine that after dark. Welcome to Atlanta for “an African-American experience”. That’s what former mayor and crook Bill Campbell said about the Olympics. He said people were coming to the Atlanta Olympics for an “African-American experience”. Boarded up buildings, grafitti, muggings, empty beer bottles, and foul language. Let’s ride the streetcar!

The streetcar will always be taxpayers’ albatross. It’s a ride you take once because you’re curious, many times because it’s free. As humorist Will Rogers said, “If you find yourself in a hole, stop digging.”

As the military veteran tourist said, more recently, “I don’t see how this is going to last. It’s free now; no one is going to pay to be this uncomfortable.”

Yep! Next year it will cost a dollar to ride this piece of crap. And just think, Atlanta is planning for more of these white elephants. I’m glad I live in the suburbs and not in the city.

Just like Cynthia McCommie learned her hatred of Jews from her daddy, Billy McKinney (he went on TV right before she lost the election saying the reason she was losing “was Jews, J E W S, Jews.”), Dominque Sharpton learned how to be a shakedown artist from her daddy, Al Tawana Brawley Crown Heights Riots Freddie’s Fashion Mart Arson “Greek Homos” Sharpton. Yep. She’s suing New York City for $5 million. Thanks to Joe for the link.

She learned at the feet of a master.

Shakedown artist Al Sharpton’s eldest child wants $5 million from city taxpayers after she fell in the street and sprained her ankle, court rec­ords show.

Dominique Sharpton, 28, says she was “severely injured, bruised and wounded” when she stumbled over uneven pavement at the corner of Broome Street and Broadway downtown last year, according to a lawsuit.

Currently on vacation in Bali, the membership director for her gadfly dad’s National Action Network claims she “still suffers and will continue to suffer for some time physical pain and bodily injuries,” according to the suit filed against the city departments of Transportation and Environmental Protection.

“I sprained my ankle real bad lol,” she wrote in a post to Instagram after the Oct. 2 fall.

She’s got to pay for that Bali vacation somehow doesn’t she?

She was pictured in a walking boot in the weeks following the tumble, but by December, Dominique was good to go for NAN’s Justice for All march in Washington, DC, and for a New Year’s Eve jaunt to Miami Beach.

And despite claiming “permanent physical pain” in a breathless notice of claim, there are social-media shots of her in high heels, and another of her climbing a ladder to decorate a Christmas tree.

I read a comment somewhere else that said maybe she can use the $5 million to pay the $4.5 million her daddy owes in back taxes. Do you think he’s gonna have to pay the back taxes or go to jail for failure to do so? Are you kidding? He’ll skate just like he has all of his life. He was supposed to pay Steve Pagones $300 thousand as a result of a civil suit against him for defamation of character as a result of the Tawana Brawley hoax. He pleaded poverty and other people stepped up to pay the settlement. One of them was Johnny Cochran.

His daughter is just following in his footsteps. Like daddy, like daughter. She’s gonna inherit the family business. I wonder if she’s gonna get her own show on MSDNC?

Thomas sent me another Pearls pun.

Click on image to enlarge.

Chickenfoot!

Sammy Hagar is 67 years old! Freakin’ amazing!

Here’s a little Mozart. When I was in Class Piano learning scales, our teacher, Mrs. Dees, sat down at the piano and said, “This is one of the reasons we learn scales and played the first few measures of the Sonata in C Major. So, here it is transcribed for guitar. Mozart loved him some scales.

Here it is on the instrument it was composed for.