Guard Dog

Pig leads police officers on 45-minute pursuit before capture

When Struggling Restaurant Tried to Sell Bourbon for $20K, Anonymous Veteran Buys It for Twice the Price Most expensive bottle of booze I've ever heard of

So stealing this one!

I finally watched all of Picard season 1. The first two episodes I was intrigued. By episode 4 I was really into it. Episode 8 I was really curious about the finale. Then came episode 9 & 10 and They blew it. Do you realize they managed to get every single bad TV trope into the last two episodes? That whole ending could not have been more f----d if it was a cheap Bourbon Street whore the day after Fleet Week. It's a real problem in modern entertainment IMO. They can build suspense. They can get a good plot going. But they just can't end it well. They can get the plane off the ground, have a nice flight but just can't seem to bring it in for a landing. Which is pretty damned important you know.

The LA times thinks having testicles makes you more vulnerable. https://www.latimes.com/science/story/2020-04-18/do-testicles-make-men-more-vulnerable-to-coronavirus So. Just how badly do you want to avoid this virus???

I would be nice to hold on to USVI and American Samoa too. Easy access to beautiful places. The Mariana islands are pretty much uninhabited. Puerto Rico does not neem to know what they want to do. ASAIK there has never been a big push in Guam for a status change.

Puerto Rico libertad tiene They can leave at any time.

Poop

Trump takes credit for success and assigns blame for failure: https://www.wsj.com/articles/trump-assails-critics-of-his-coronavirus-response-as-he-focuses-on-reopening-u-s-11587149080 Well, what do you know? He's very "Presidential" after all.

Dogs are awesome. https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/coronavirus-dogs-being-trained-diagnose-21885979

I caught a catfish. That is unusual. I put him back. I love fried catfish, but I would not eat a wild one. Farm raised only. You are what you eat and you know what THEY eat!

First of all the association of the police and military as having anything to do with each other is EXACTLY the problem. The military makes a terrible police force. And when the police become the military the citizens become the enemy. Yes I shamelessly stole that line from a movie but t is true. And I said the profession is contemptible, not everyone in it. It's common here to think the majority of police are honest and conscientious civil servants and it's the minority are the heavy handed sadists who think the piece of plastic on their shirt make them a superior human being. I believe the reverse is true. The problem with the entire institution is they have incentivised to cite and arrest. It's a myth that they have "quotas" to meet. But a cop that is not arresting people or writing citations (which come with heavy fines) is thought to not be productive. So what happens when do one is doing anything wrong? The story I linked demonstrated either a lack of understanding of the law or the complete disregard of it in the furtherance of a political aim. And an absolute willingness to use force which makes either reason all the more inexcusable. Police are, at best, a necessary evil. But an evil no doubt.

More good stuff from the land of the "free": https://reason.com/2020/04/17/a-teenager-posted-about-her-covid-19-infection-on-instagram-a-deputy-threatened-to-arrest-her-if-she-didnt-delete-it/ It annoys me in times like this when people lionize the police. I think the whole profession is actually pretty contemptible. It seems to attract the very kind of people who are unsuited to wield any kind of authority. They say power corrupts. I think it's more accurate to say it attracts the corruptible and those with deficient character.

I have a conference call at 9. After that I am going to walk down to the river with the pups for some fishing and communing with nature. If I actually catch anything it's going in the pan tonight with grits & hush puppies.

Yes and in all that history no such system ever existed. First of all, I would NEVER trust the US government with all that money. Second of all the USA is ungovernable on the micro level that kind of system requires. Now if an individual state wanted to do something like that, THAT might work. On a national level here? It. Will. Never. Happen. Plus when tax rates were that high there were literally thousands of different taxes that did not exist then but DO exist now. It WILL wreck the economy. You fellow citizens are NOT entitled to every dollar you earn.

What happened to the USSR has a lot more to do with incompetence. Almost the first thing the Bolsheviks did was find everyone who knew how to run a country and shot them. Things did not improve from there for a very, very long time. The problem with socialism, and I already know you agree, is the absence of incentive. An entire country run by people who don't know what they are doing and don't really give a f--k if it works or not just as long as it's perceived to be working. The problem with farming and agri-business in the US is something I'm just now starting to get an idea of. More and more in my day job I'm working on studies for irrigation system installation and their use and effect on the water table. Plus I'm dealing with a number of small and large farm businesses in my real estate ventures. The US government and it's aversion to free trade has a huge role in this. There are other problems too, including poor business decisions by private farmers. The biggest problem on this one particular topic however is one of economic philosophy. You can have a unregulated economy and you will be fine. Everyone will accommodate themselves to it's rules. You can have a regulated economy like Maedhros & I were discussing. And you'll be fine. But PICK one and STICK with it! The US government's relationships with business, consumers, and banking and investing has been schizophrenic to say the least.

Sure, same as yours, the EU member nations, Japan, Greenland and Mexico and a few others. All of them did the same thing at the same time. Don't care. I didn't vote for Obama, don't get a vote in any other country. I have 0 responsibility for it. Don't blame me I voted for Johnson. Of course Venezuela was falling apart well before Maduro and the 2014 fiasco that led to sanctions so no, they don't get a pass for f----g their own people over. It's what governments do. And the more power they get the harder they f--k them.

Not really socialist though are they? Businesses are private, land ownership is private, natural resources belong to the land they sit on. You can own property, own a business, own a multi-billion dollar corporation and get rich selling cell handsets and base stations to the world. What the Scandinavian countries have is a really high tax rate that is used to fund a social welfare system that is very beneficial to a small and mostly homogeneous country and population that is mostly centered in one area. Nothing at all like Venezuela or the USSR or their ilk is it? In fact it's fair to say they are EXACTLY like the US except they pay a little more in tax and get better value for it am I right? Sort of like a mini-USA only no Wal-Mart. Hey, they are happy with it and I'm happy for them. Of course that does not exactly work in a huge, heterogeneous, and exceeding complex country like the US where one part of the country is so different from another they might as well be different peoples. Or where the tax rate is already over 38% for the people who pay taxes and they are getting nothing like that because and enormous military, bloated bureaucracy, entitlements, and aging population, numerous population centers with a huge diversity of challenges, etc. I could go on. Americans look at other countries and wonder "why can't we do that?". The answer is "Because we are different, have different problems, a different culture, and are just different." If things weren't the same they'd be different.

In other news. Remember when Bernie Sanders was praising Mauduro and saying the "American Dream" was more likely to be realized in Venezuela? Well, Venezuela, the country with the worlds largest oil reserves, has run out of gasoline: https://www.greenwichtime.com/news/article/Oil-rich-Venezuela-is-running-out-of-gas-15204464.php Hooray socialism! I remember when the Soviet Union was the worlds largest producer AND importer of wheat and there still wasn't enough bread to go around.

The motto of the whole world is "gimmie gimmie gimmie" and people get mad when you say no. But China, much like the USSR back in it's day is pretty niggardly with it's aid. So that brings back to why the heads of state seem to fall all over themselves to kiss up to dictators and repressive governments. They have large militaries and usually take threatening postures. There is the wrong headed idea that you need to be nice and befriend bullies and bad actors. Ninety years later people still make the same errors.

It seems to me the best form of government is repressive authoritarian. The more human rights abuses the better. Slavery? Good. Mass murder? Better! The world will just fall all over themselves to kiss your ass and make you happy. But Republican or Parliamentary Democracy? Not only will the world hate you but they will pitch a fit when you stop funding the lipstick they buy to properly kiss the tyrants asses. Past time this BS stopped. But it won't.

Ad here is another reason the WHO is a pile of steaming male bovine feces. In the article I posted on the start of the CPBL season they pointed out that the WHO has excluded Taiwan from it's "services" at the insistence of China. F--k the WHO. Not another dollar... ever!

The first regular season baseball game of 2020 has taken place. The CPBL in Taiwan started it's season in front cardboard cut out fans and robots. (hey it's Taiwan after all!). https://www.breitbart.com/national-security/2020/04/14/taiwan-robot-fans-cheer-worlds-first-baseball-game-since-pandemic/

Now that is a shame about Sun Power. You are right of course. Complex products are a sum of components whose origin is impossible to know. The only power tools for example that I know are manufactured in the US are Porter Cable and it's a safe bet at least some of the components are Chinese. What can you do? But it IS not difficult to choose not to buy finished products from China. And it is not difficult to find alternatives. Whatever you might think of the wisdom of such an idea, it is a choice everyone can make. And it is a choice that, if enough people make it, can hurt China. It's like deciding to not drink Coca Cola. They will probably be fine and YOU might be better off. At the very least your teeth will be. But enough people see the example and follow it CC is hurt in the long run. After all how do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time. Individual actions are all that is left to us in the end. They are not significant in and of themselves unless you can persuade others to join you. But before you can persuade them to do a thing you have to inform them of the course of action. That is what discussion like that are for. I voted for Gary Johnson. That did not make him President. But it did lead to interesting discussion that, just maybe, made some folks see a different perspective. Plus I was OK with the guy in the mirror after making that choice and that is important to me. It's logical and maybe even wise to look up at an insurmountable mountain and flatly state "it cannot be climbed". But if you move from hand hold to foot hold to hand hold to foot hold you might even reach the summit. Or not. Sometimes the climb is all there is.

@Gromnir I have not knowingly bought a product made in China in the last 5 years. What set me off was all the pet products they exported with contaminants in it. And the moldy drywall. I am actually very circumspect about that kind of thing. And all of my produce and preserves are either dried, frozen or canned in 16 oz mason jars. I bought 1k of them several years ago. Glass with steel tops. Don't know where the tops came from but the glass jars were made in Silver Spring MD. Just speaking of my solar system. The batteries were made in Vietnam and the inverters came from Taiwan (aka good China). The cables all came from Beldan and were made in either Rochester NY or Ontario. Then panels themselves came from Sun Power and were manufactured just down the road from you in San Jose. It IS possible to do this. But it means doing a little homework about what you buy and where it came from. Like I told Gorth, if your personal ethics demand you abstain from rewarding business with China then you do it. The last thing I bought that I know came from China was my Kindle. I won't buy another if that does not change.