The author of the Hostility Blog thinks that the local power company(Nevada Energy) has raised the frequency of the power coming in to our homes from 60hz to 90hz, so the meters will run faster and they can charge more for the same amount of power. –He thinks he’s being charged for 3k every time he uses 1k.

According to a mutual friend, the man is a systems administrator and programmer for a local finance company. He does his job well. Keeping the network up and making whatever changes are needed to the program. Proving that he’s not stupid.

Why then does he believe what anyone can disprove with an O-scope you ask?

Because, through the use of his superior intellect and phenomenal reasoning capabilities, he has managed to prove, using logic well beyond the ability of the common man to understand, that his power bill on his poorly insulated mobile home is “too high.” Therefore the power company, the source of all evil, has implemented a nefarious scheme to overload our circuits, burn out our motors and make our meters spin faster in order to collect three times as much money as they are entitled to. –It couldn’t be a rate increase or lack of insulation making his bill higher and it couldn’t possibly be happening to him alone, so it must be some kind of a conspiracy.

The human race: Providing endless hours of entertainment to logical people everywhere, since the beginning of time.

This is an excerpt from Doug Hanchard’s blog titled:
How did Congress pass extension of U.S. Patriot Act? Ask your doctor

And then the roof caved in, H.R. 3961 – Medicare Physician Payment Reform Act of 2009 -was going through the House. Everyone in the House knew about the expiry of the existing extensions of the Patriot Act and thus was slipped as amendments to H.R. 3961. It was either that or watch H.R. 3961 face an uphill battle getting passed on the floor. According to the record, here is how the extension came to the floor as an amendment to H.R. 3961;

I won’t go in to the rest of the details, but I would advise you to read his entire post.

The problem I have with the process is the inherent deceit and dishonesty that our so called representatives use without hesitation, and without any sign of remorse that their bill is so unpopular that it can’t be passed on it’s own merit.

The patriot act is a violation of everything I would consider patriotic. It denies us rights, it assumes guilt and is abused by the police state.

Yes I used the phrase “POLICE STATE.” What else would you call it when an American citizen can be thrown in prison simply because someone didn’t like his name? What else would you call it when the police, in their myriad uniforms, have no oversight?

When the investigatory agencies find a violation of the law by various and sundry police agencies and can’t find a way to bury it, they announce it publicly. And by God they’ll step up and say the law has been violated again if it doesn’t stop.

The law has no teeth; after all, how do you punish an entire agency?

On top of everything else, the NSA / AT&T debacle shows that even if it can be proven that the law has been deliberately violated and names can be provided, the Whitehouse will protect that agency or company. This is done in the name of “national security.”

We have a constitution and a bill of rights that are supposed to protect our freedoms. –Instead they are twisted, ignored or made exception to, because some politician or group of politicians has an agenda.

The bills congress passes are not for our benefit. They are to feed the egos, further the agendas or profit the friends of those in power. And most importantly, they are there to control the peasants.

Reprinted from RCNevada:

An Australian man was justifiably sacked(fired) for repeated safety violations. But because of his lack of education and the unlikely prospect of his finding another job, the valid sacking was invalidated and the company was forced to rehire him with compensation.

www.theaustralian.com.au –The nation’s industrial umpire has ruled that a long-term employee who was legitimately sacked for repeated safety breaches must be reinstated and paid compensation because of his poor education and poor job prospects.

It would appear that in land down under being judged too dumb to find another job is the perfect form of job security.

Reprinted from RCNevada:

If you think that concerns over Google Buzz and privacy are over blown here are some excerpts from fugitivus via Gizmodo:

Fuck You, Google:
I can’t block these people, because I never made a Google profile or Buzz profile, due to privacy concerns (apparently and resoundingly founded!).

Fuck you, Google. My privacy concerns are not trite. They are linked to my actual physical safety, and I will now have to spend the next few days maintaining that safety by continually knocking down followers as they pop up. A few days is how long I expect it will take before you either knock this shit off, or I delete every Google account I have ever had and use Bing out of fucking spite.

Fuck you, Google. You have destroyed over ten years of my goodwill and adoration, just so you could try and out-MySpace MySpace.

Thanks to Google’s completely self absorbed, “fuck your privacy” attitude, fugitivus now requires a login to view.

WTF ever happened to “don’t be evil?” —Oh yeah, they dropped that.
How about a new one: Greed over good.

Did you know that if you use a Gmail account Buzz is automatically active?
If you don’t use Buzz and want to make sure they don’t share your contacts anyway, log in to your gmail account and look at the very bottom of the email page, where, in microscopic print, you will find a link to “turn off Buzz.” —Click that, and hopefully it will stop Google from sharing your contacts.

Are you getting on in years and have a few pounds you need to lose? Does your doctor bug you about the ol’ spare tire, that seems to have come out of nowhere? –Well maybe you shouldn’t worry so much.

According to a study done by the University of Western Australia and published in the Journal of the American Geriatric Society, being a little overweight may actually extend your life.

The university team tracked the number of deaths over 10 years among volunteers who were aged 70 – 75 at the start of the study.

It found that those with a BMI which classed them as overweight, but not obese, not only had the lowest overall risk of dying, they also had the lowest risk of dying from specific diseases: cardiovascular disease, cancer and chronic respiratory disease.

The study also showed that being seriously under weight did as much to shorten a person’s life as being obese.

The long and the short of the study is:
As long as you aren’t too overweight, and you get enough exercise, your can outlive that annoying person with the perfect figure who keeps telling you that they can eat anything they want and never gain an ounce.

Live long, prosper and enjoy that bagel with real cream cheese.

Click for larger image.

www.justicewithpeace.org/

Johnson & Johnson has expanded their recall of over-the-counter drugs. That makes the second recall in less than a month.

The list now includes certain batches of regular and extra-strength Tylenol, children’s Tylenol, eight-hour Tylenol, Tylenol arthritis, Tylenol PM, children’s Motrin, Motrin IB, Benadryl Rolaids, Simply Sleep, and St. Joseph’s aspirin.

Caplet and geltab products sold in the Americas, the United Arab Emirates, and Fiji were also recalled.

The recall is because of a moldy smell that has reportedly made a handful of customers ill.

Johnson & Johnson says the smell originated in a plant in Puerto Rico and that cause of the problem was a chemical used in the treatment of wooden shipping pallets.

The company has stopped using these contaminated pallets and has asked their suppliers to do the same.

Johnson & Johnson has asked these other companies to stop. Not refused to accept anything shipped on these pallets. Proving that the bottom line with anything Johnson & Johnson -or any other big company- does is their bottom line.

The PR damage is important, but the 70 customers affected is such a minute number that losing them and paying to settle the inevitable lawsuit won’t even appear in their annual report to the stockholders.

Meanwhile the FDA has criticized the Johnson & Johnson for a slow investigation, saying the company has known about this problem since 2008.

This statement from the company tells what it takes to get them to do something: “McNeil Consumer Healthcare has received an FDA form 483 dated Jan. 8, 2010, and is actively working with the FDA to address their concerns.”

For more on the recall click here.

The British Government thinks they can pay for bringing fast internet to rural GB by putting a yearly tax on fixed phone lines.

BBC online:
The government’s controversial broadband tax has been given the green light by chancellor Alistair Darling in his pre-Budget report.

The £6-a-year levy will be imposed on all households with a fixed line phone.

The money made will be put into a fund to ensure rural areas of the UK do not miss out on super-fast broadband services.

The money is earmarked for the 30% of homes that experts think will be by-passed by commercial fast broadband plans.

It is estimated that the broadband tax would raise about £170m a year, which is a wee bit short of the estimate of £5bn needed to provide super-fast fibre services to every UK home.

Currently BT is committed to rolling out next-generation broadband to about 40% of the UK with Virgin Media offering speeds of up to 50Mbps to about half of UK homes.

The tax wont pay the bills, but they can always raise it after the elections, and the advertised speed of the fibre is mostly advertising hype.

Anyone who’s ever dealt with internet service providers knows that the rates will always go up, and the maximum advertised speed has very little to do with what real people get, or for that matter, can afford.

Here in Las Vegas, Cox offers a maximum speed of 50Mbps down/5Mbps up, with up to 55Mbps “burst” using PowerBoost®, but the cost is currently $119.00 per month. You need to be a hardcore gamer or a downloader of very large files to justify the cost.

Fortunately, the actual speed of high-speed internet doesn’t really matter to someone like me who doesn’t play games or download large files.

Even 3 Mbps beats the hell out of dialup with it’s 56k advertised speed and it’s less than 50k real life speed.

President Obama said that the intelligence had “failed to connect the dots” in the case of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab. The man who “allegedly” tried to blow-up the Northwest flight Christmas day.

“Failed to connect the dots” my ass, with the amount of intel being collected the dots are so close together that the page is black.

What happened, and will continue to happen, is the bureaucrats will shuffle papers, the intelligence people will write reports saying what their supervisor, who’s final report will be geared to please the politicians, wants them to say, the politicians will make speeches and the people on the ground will continue to be automatons. Shuffling bureaucracies and area of responsibility won’t change anything.

The problem is amazingly simple: There was a report floating around that al-Queda was planning an attack on the US during the holidays and a Nigerian was involved. This man’s father went to the US Embassy and told them his son was radicalized with ties to al-Queda and had talked of “sacrificing himself.”. Some mid-level bureaucrat at the embassy dutifully wrote it all down and sent this information on up the food chain where Abdulmutallab was put on a generic terrorist list along with a half a million other names.

As I understand it, this man boarded an international flight in Amsterdam without any luggage. –Who the hell flies across the Atlantic with nothing but a passport and a pair of loaded underwear? Wouldn’t that make you stop and wonder, just a little?

Back in 2007 they deployed full body scanners in Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport. They also have iris scanners and all kinds of other security. –All of which failed.

The equipment didn’t fail. those people who’s job it is to be on the front lines failed.

The man at the embassy in Nigeria that handled the case either wasn’t informed or more likely did it all on autopilot. –Maybe there are so many extremists with ties to al-Queda wanting to sacrifice themselves in Nigeria that this didn’t raise any alarms, or perhaps this is a common way for parents to get embassy personnel to help them find wayward children. –My bet is that he’s just putting in his time.

In the airport they process so many passengers that everything is done automatically. Nobody thinks. They just stand around waiting for something they can see. Like maybe a Browning 50 cal. tucked into somebody’s carry-on bag.

We don’t need more intelligence gathering, we need more common sense.

Back in the day when this airport insanity first started and you couldn’t bring liquids on board because they might be explosive, I watch as security tossed bottle after bottle in trash cans right behind them.

I don’t know about you, but if I think something is going to explod,e I am not about to toss it anywhere near me. Neither are those security personnel who were collecting anything liquid. They were simply going through the motions. They knew none of it was likely to do anything worse than possibly stain someone’s clothes. But the rules are the rules, and somebody in charge, who also had no clue, told them to do it

The system is broken and it has so little to do with intelligence that to say the dots weren’t connected is laughable.

It’s the TSA hiring hundreds of people and putting them to work without the proper training for the job they’re being asked to do.

It’s the bureaucrats protecting their turf.

It’s a dog and pony show as opposed to real change.

It’s an intelligence Czar who can’t get the CIA, NSA or FBI to share data.

It’s disparate computer systems. –Even within the individual agencies.

But mostly it’s the people on the ground failing to do their jobs.

If the guy at the embassy had said “hey I think we may have something here” instead of filling out forms.

If the people farther up the food chain had done anything other that file the report and put his name on a generic list.

If the airline had required something less than a history of blowing himself up to put his name on a cautionary list.

And most importantly, if the airport screeners had used that fancy equipment or had paused long enough to think that a man with no luggage might warrant a second look.

–We wouldn’t have had to rely on a failed detonator and fast thinking passengers to save lives..

The owner of Sheri’s Cabaret, 2580 S. Highland Drive, filed for Chapter 11 reorganization last month and has proposed to reorganize by temporarily lowering its mortgage payments to two banks.

Sheri’s generates $20,000 to $26,000 per week in gross income and that it has 17 employees.

The dancers are independent contractors, who pay the club to work there, so are not counted among the employees, or as part of the club’s operating expenses, but do contribute to the company’s gross income.

A long time ago when Downtown Las Vegas started dying in a major way, and the city was making all that noise about how Neonopolis was going to make everything better, a man that ran the topless joint put the problem in simple terms. He said that “if tits and beer won’t bring them in, nothing will.”

Now we have an abundance of take-em-off joints, a shortage of tourists and the unemployment rate is officially almost 13%. (If I recall correctly this number only counts people receiving unemployment)

The tourists who are left go primarily to the big joints and the strip club’s bread and butter, the blue collar worker with his freshly cashed paycheck, is gone for the time being.

Las Vegas lives off discretionary funds. People have to have extra money or credit to come here. Now more and more the money is spent on frivolous things like food or rent, and their credit cards are maxed with no more automatic increases in their credit line.

For what it’s worth:
I don’t know about the thousands of warm bodies CES is supposed to bring to town, but the big complaint about COMDEX was that the guys never left the convention, and when they did they were not only cheap, they were lousy tippers. So they while may have helped the hotel’s bottom line and made the politicians happy, but they never did much for the working stiffs. –I suspect this will be true for CES as well.
(The AVN on the other hand should help the strip clubs and the outcall dancers.)