Time to PUMP (part of) YOU UP!

 It is with shame that I admit to letting my body go to hell over the previous few months.  I got off my exercise schedule and honestly, just didn't give a shit about much of anything.  However, I recently rediscovered my motivation; a chubby dude with spindly arms isn't a good look.  Time to do something about that!  I'm still rebuilding my endurance, but have rediscovered my body's complete lack of harmony, when it comes to building muscle.  I'm blessed that seemingly one pushup will result in my shoulders gaining definition and bulk.  Where I'm not so blessed are my biceps.  If I built myself to the point I could curl a Buick, my biceps would still be "meh" and that, like oh so many things, pisses me off.  It's quite frustrating to repeatedly pick heavy shit up, then put it down, only to see negligible results.

At least Netflix has added a bunch of new content that will make me forget I'm on a treadmill.  As further confirmation I'm fucking old, I got super excited that 'In the Line of Fire' and 'Shooter' recently became available.  Yes, I've seen both of them a hundred times, but they still do the trick.  

What I find interesting is how my life experiences have provided additional 'little shit I notice' in each movie.  'Shooter' is about a sniper and I've learned a ton about long distance shooting since the last time I watched it.  And one of the first scenes of the Eastwood movie takes place at the Old Ebbitt Grill, which had become my favorite breakfast spot in DC.  They have a dish called Eggs Chesapeake that's the absolute bomb.  It's a riff on eggs benedict, but skips the Canadian bacon for an amazeballs crab cake and the Hollandaise is flavored with Old Bay.  I highly recommend stopping by, if you're in DC.  I know I won't be stopping by any fucking time soon.

Seems this entry followed my typical structure; begin with something I'm pissed about and finish with a dig on Kansas.  My work here is done. 

Marketing Excellence - Cam Girls

 Over the past few months, I've popped on and off one of the cam sites, for a bit of entertainment.  I'm rarely in a room for more than a minute, so it really is a short diversion.  Because I'm a freak, I like to find electrical outlets on the set of those girls who state their location to be the US, but have heavy Eastern European accents.  You can't fake infrastructure and if you were in NYC, you wouldn't have a round, three pronged plug.  I also note other trends I see, because that's what I do.  Yes, I'm really fucked up.

Anyway, back to the marketing excellence.  It's no surprise that a majority of the girls are from Eastern Europe as they have a whole industry around cam sites, with entire multi-suite studio facilities.  So, while many obfuscate their location with "Europe" or "around the corner", many do list their actual location.  There are typically several girls who list Russia as their location. That is until recently.  It hit me that if I were a cam girl and wanted to maximize my tips or at least not get hammered at the moment, I'd make damned sure my location wasn't Russia or even better, I'd list it as Ukraine.  "This poor girl is stuck in a war zone, I'll tip generously."  So, I went on a cam site today, searching for such trends (again, I'm a freak).  I tallied up the number of women from the first two pages (there were 59 pages total!!!) who had either Russia or Ukraine as their location.  Of 180 girls, 15 were now from Ukraine and only 1 from Russia.  I'd been subconsciously maintaining a view of who was from Ukraine, as tensions increased and while I don't have hard data, I know damned well there weren't a third that many before this week.  In fact, there's one who I've watched in the past, who I know damned well isn't from there.  On the flip side, there were significantly more from Russia a week ago, versus today.  

If that isn't excellence in marketing, I don't know what is!

Suck My Magenta

 Fuck Brother and every other printer manufacturer.  Fuck their mothers, brothers, sisters, and pet goldfish.  They're whores and aren't worth the ammo I'd use to wipe them out, then piss on their corpses.  What has me beyond pissed is how sleazy these fuckers are, when it comes to extracting ongoing revenue from their hardware sales.  

Yesterday, I was getting a few things in order and needed to print a page of ammo labels.  The last few times I printed something, I'd gotten a low ink warning on two of the three colors, which I promptly ignored, because a) fucking print my shit and b) I almost never print in color and when I do, said color is only on a bit of text in an otherwise black and white document.  Back to the labels, I received a warning that I was totally out of magenta.  Again, fuck you, I want black and white.  Except despite having an almost full black ink cartridge, it refused to print in black and white.  I tried all sorts of settings changes and nothing worked.  What I did discover was the color setting was on 'vivid color' or some shit like that, and I remembered that HP got nailed for this exact thing several years ago; draining the color cartridges even when printing in black and white.  Needless to say, I changed the settings to B/W, but I still had to order cartridges.  In a defiant "Fuck You" gesture, I got non-factory knock off units, because fuck Brother.   

I'm a Beacon of Light and Other Shit

Earlier today, someone said to me, "You've restored my faith in humanity."  Do I have to wear flowing robes now and take a vow of celibacy, yet secretly sleep with my cute female followers?  

Anyway, what precipitated the comment happened while I was in the local megamart's self checkout.  My dog was almost out of treats and I wouldn't be resupplied by Amazon until Tuesday, necessitating an unscheduled run.  But the POS machine wouldn't let me scan my items.  After cursing at it, I actually read the screen, which said I should take my cash from the appropriate tray.  After I cursed at it again, I looked down and saw a $20 bill in said tray, which the previous shopper had overlooked (because it's hard to remember you said you wanted cash back after 12 seconds elapse).  I grabbed the cash and receipt and summoned the attendant.  I handed it to her, explaining what happened as well as providing a description of the gentleman with the memory issues.  

It was then that the gentleman at the machine next to mine made the comment about my restoring humanity and shit.  The comment struck me, so I thought I'd share with my favorite internet strangers.

Penzey's Spices Hates Gun Owners

 If you're a cooking enthusiast, you're probably familiar with Penzey's Spices.  Because of their high quality, they've been my exclusive go to for such things for over two decades.  That is until the owner of the company, Bill Penzey, essentially told me he doesn't want further business from me or anyone else in the firearm community.  This began with one of his recent newsletters, which as usual, contained a mix of 'buy this shit' and social commentary.  He tends to lean to the left, but his rhetoric has been mostly innocuous; not that I opened many of them.  However, when a recent newsletter titled "Guns Are Dumb" hit my inbox, you know damned well I opened it.  I've pasted the commentary portion of the newsletter at the bottom, but the TL;DR is only hunters and law enforcement should have guns.  Others aren't responsible enough to have them and should rely on their kitchen cutlery for defense.

The dude signs his newsletters, with his email address, so I sent him a note indicating how I thought he was being condescending and that I found his views both uninformed and frankly asinine.  Bill reads his email and responded less than 20 minutes later doubling down on one of his talking points as well as being an even greater ass hat.  Copy paste:

“Responsible Gun owner” is an oxymoron and NRA propaganda. There is nothing responsible about bringing an item into your home that will increase the chance of violent death for you and your family members five-fold. But you are indeed free to invent absurd realities where your gun makes you that special hero. Pew-pew. 

I believe what he was trying to convey was "I'm an even greater ass hat than you thought and don't want any business from the firearms community or anyone else who recognizes how much of a douche I am.  Can you please spread that message for me?"  

Yes sir!  I've already started taking care of that for you because I aim (no pun intended) to please.

Fucking dickhead.

The Newsletter
And guns are dumb. Yes, hunting, and ranching, and law enforcement, but even then there are substantial risks. But owning a gun as though it is some sort of safety accessory is stupid. It’s like spending hundreds of dollars to add a self-destruct button to your life. At any moment, all it takes is one pull of the trigger, and just like that all the goodness in your life can be gone, never to return. Guns are dumb.

We should all feel safe, and as humans, long before we had cooking we had weapons. But if you ever need a weapon, just look around you, they are everywhere. These days the kitchen of every American home rivals the arsenal of a good-sized medieval village. And who even needs the pointy things when you have cast iron? But guns are different. They try to sell you on the idea that guns give you control, yet with one pull of the trigger whatever happens next will forever be in someone else’s hands.
With yesterday’s verdict in Kenosha there were many headlines. Some spoke of freedom, and self-defense, and innocence, but once you pull the trigger there is no going back to what you were before. There is no return to innocence. Bring a gun into your home and it’s far less likely to take the life of a stranger in self-defense than it is to kill someone you love through accident, suicide, or your anger. A lot of the time someone wanting to own a gun is a pretty good sign that they’re the kind of person who shouldn’t have one. Guns are dumb.
I know that for many of you yesterday’s verdict and the joy it sent through the pro-gun crowd brought a sense of goodness slipping away. I get that. For me, in times like these I find cooking brings perspective. Once I came to see cooking as what it is, an act of kindness, the news lost much of its power to bring me down.
Even though the news presents itself as having its finger on the pulse of where we are at, it in reality shows little more than the couple dozen most out of the ordinary events that took place in the past day. Much of the news is horribly unkind. But to see cooking as kindness is to understand that for each and every event horrible enough to make the national news there are hundreds of thousands of acts of kindness happening in kitchens all across the country every day. Even on the worst of days there is so much more goodness. Please try to see it if you can.
If you are a hunter or if your job requires a gun, sure. But if you have a gun out of a sense of safety get rid of it asap. It is nothing more than a self-destruct button for the goodness in your life and in the lives of those you love. Guns are dumb.

Anti Abortion Head Explodes - Film at 11

 I can stop prodding the right wing loonies any time I want to.  I don't have a problem.  Oh fuck it, don't judge me for putting the fun back into fundamentalist!

Today, we talk about abortion (not a laugh riot, I know) and how to make a supposed pro-lifer's head  explode.  Note: that's the last time I use the term 'pro-life' to refer to those who oppose abortion, because it's not true and wrongly portrays those with opposing views as not being pro-life.  Not that it should matter, but I'm an advocate of making safe abortions available to women.  That shouldn't be interpreted as applauding every abortion that takes place or considering it to be a method of birth control, like condoms.  I shared this, along with other points of view, when the dipshits tried to pigeonhole me into a party.  I guess I shouldn't have been surprised when the room went full Christian fundamentalist and barraged me with messages about killing babies.  And what fun would it be without some good old fashioned misogyny, generalizing women who got abortions as 'road whores' who'd fuck anyone.  Fun crowd.  The best part was that they screamed accountability for the 'whores', but assumed the men wouldn't be around to face 'personal accountability'.  WTELF?  

Once they'd worked themselves into a lather (with some assistance on my part), I posed a question that resulted in several heads exploding.  You can preach personal accountability all you want, but the reality of the situation is many of those unwanted children will be treated as such.  Abuse and neglect will occur, resulting in some being criminals and murderers.  This assertion has been confirmed via multiple studies that have found a distinct and significant correlation between Roe v Wade and a decrease in crime.  There was a significant decrease in crime roughly fifteen years after the court decision.  Sticking with the theme of murder, they found a 30% decrease in homicides directly attributable to the court case.  Now you've got a dilemma.  Do you a) allow abortions to take place, making society safer as a whole or b) ban them, knowing it'll cause a 30%  increase in murders as a result? (in addition to the number of women who die by having unsafe abortions and kids subjected to toxic upbringing)  Please choose one.

Which option was most frequently chosen?  Trick question, despite my prodding and even calling them scared little girls for doing so, no one would answer.  Instead, as with every question I've posed about how the right would fix a problem (i.e. homelessness), there was a wave of how Democrats suck and have fucked things up.  Full of hatred, but no solutions.  New slogan for the Republican party.

I also poked the bear by pointing out the massive self-owns by the far right, with their 'my body, my choice' signs and how that concept seems to only apply to vaccinations, not women's bodies.  In the end, they proved what many of us already know to be true; most ardent anti abortionists consider every life to be sacred until it comes out of the womb and outlawing abortion is really about controlling women.  Finally, I understand there are those who have a genuine religious belief that abortion is murder, but making them illegal has consequences you can't ignore.  

Did you know that one of the first instances of medical tourism was around abortion?  There were several reputable clinics in Mexico, that women would go to.  Hang out on the beach and have an abortion, while you're there.

Bill Gates Created The Plandemic - Not

 While I'm debunking stupid conspiracies, I might as well cover one I did last night, for my dear friends on the precision rifle board.  There's a huge hatred for Bill Gates amongst the crazies, which came bubbling up while I was online.  It began with a random post about how Gates has investments in various Big Pharma companies, to which I replied "so what?  The man diversifies his portfolio and drug makers are almost universally winners."  This degenerated into a Gates hate fest, including a bunch of other unsubstantiated claims about how he's using insider information to profit from the pandemic.  When I asked why the disdain for the guy, I received a "if you don't know why Gates is evil, we're not going to tell you" diatribe.   Add another data point confirming these people have zero facts from which to argue.  And talk about paranoid!  I was accused of being a government agent attempting to entrap the crazies.  There's a term for that, but I refuse to give it the light of day here.  Hell, they even tried their bullshit conspiracy nonsense with two doctors on the board, calling them liars.

In any case, the following picture was posted, claiming that Gates' intent was to depopulate the planet through vaccines.  In case you can't read it, the actual quote from him was, "The world today has 6.8 billion people. That’s headed up to about nine billion. Now, if we do a really great job on new vaccines, health care, reproductive health services, we could lower that by, perhaps, 10 or 15 percent. But there, we see an increase of about 1.3."  

For those of us with brains, it's clear he's talking about decreasing population growth, via the means quoted.  More on that later.  I guess if you don't understand the English language, you could interpret that statement as a desire to depopulate, using vaccines.  You'd not consider the reproductive health services to be germane to his statement, because that doesn't fit your narrative.  That's exactly what the Sovereign Independent, a now defunct newspaper known for spreading baseless conspiracy theories, did in 2011.  

A little side trip.  When I asked whether the poster had validated that information, or if anyone enjoyed their subscription to the paper, I received a response that frankly shocked me.  It was "here is why i believe it...because reuters says it isn' true..", along with a link to where they debunked it.  Seriously, what the ever living fuck???

And now, we come to the validation part of our game, where I bring it all home.  Slowing population growth and decreasing infant and child mortality was at the forefront for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, as stated in its first annual newsletter, back in 2009.  Here's the portion of that letter, that pertains to the discussion:

When Melinda and I first started our giving, in the late 1990s, our focus was on reproductive health rather than childhood deaths. We felt that giving mothers the tools to limit their family size to what they wanted would have a catalytic effect by reducing population growth and making it easier to feed, educate, and provide jobs for the children who were born.

We were surprised when we saw a newspaper article in 1998 showing that only a few diseases cause most childhood deaths and showing how little money was being invested in creating and providing vaccines for these diseases. A chart in the article showed that a particular type of diarrheal disease—rotavirus—was killing over 400,000 children per year. How could a disease we had never heard of get so little attention and kill this many children? We sent the article to my father and asked him to look into how we could help.

A surprising but critical fact we learned was that reducing the number of deaths actually reduces population growth. Chart 3 shows the strong connection between infant mortality rates and fertility rates. Contrary to the Malthusian view that population will grow to the limit of however many kids can be fed, in fact parents choose to have enough kids to give them a high chance that several will survive to support them as they grow old. As the number of kids who survive to adulthood goes up, parents can achieve this goal without having as many children.

To summarize, the claim from the rag newspaper is complete bullshit and they knew it.  Likewise, anyone with half a brain cell can reach the same conclusion, without a great deal of effort.  There's already a number of articles out there that do the legwork for you.  Thanks to Snopes for posting the associated links, so I didn't have much legwork to do.  

It's a piece of cake to either validate or trash this shit, but some idiots can't be bothered, particularly when said shit aligns with their narrative.  Besides, it eats into their conspiracy mongering time.  Speaking of validation, while no one on the board admitted I was right (shocking!), the anti Gates rhetoric ceased after my post.  Oh, and before the loons accuse me of being  a Gates fanboy, I don't give two shits about the dude.  But I won't hate someone for being that person.