My view of the world

AB 478 passed the Senate.
Nobody voted against it because Babs said she was “protecting the military”.

Bullshit!!!!!
The President signed a bill back in November of last year that included an amendment that capped interest to active military to 36% including any and all fees.
There’s no way that that many people, who are so “concerned” could possibly, not have known, that this had been passed.

So tell me again, how dear, sweet, Babs is protecting anyone with her 40% cap.
This was a blatant lie, and political maneuvering at its’ worst, designed to push her agenda through, without anyone having to explain why they voted the way they did.

The bill itself looks like nothing more than a child’s hissie fit. The big boys refused to negotiate with her a year ago, so she won’t budge and is willing to do whatever it takes to get her way.

Does anyone up that way ever tell the truth???

Oh, never mind, that’s just wishful thinking.
The last time a politician in this state, and probably any other state, tried to do anything in a upright, straight forward, honest manner, they were laughed out of the legislature.

No I don’t like Barbara Buckley, but I prefer her to those people who played along rather than take a political risk and stand up to her.

A Rocky Start for Nevada’s New Governor:
This is the headline that appeared in the NYT today, which states:
Life these days for Gov. Jim Gibbons of Nevada might kindly be described as suboptimal.

It would appear that the NYT is jealous that Little Jimmy never mentioned them in any of his conspiracy statements, and are going to keep running him as the joke of the month until he does.

What can I say?

I leave you with everybody’s favorite quote.
“liberal, tree-hugging, Birkenstock-wearing, hippie, tie-dyed liberals”

I was catching up on the Pioneer Loan Center blog when I read the item about why Babs has been able to push this bill through.
They are trying to protect our military and their families, a commendable idea, but totally useless, because Congress already dealt with the problem, and federal law trumps state law.

It seems that the Nevada State Legislature doesn’t have enough toadies to research any bill they decide to enact.

I’m quite certain that in the case of the section referring to the military, someone read and old article on how some other state had done this, and rather than spend a few minutes searching online for military interest limits, they proved once again that they are incapable of original thought, and simply took someone else’s idea, and ran with it.

Heaven forbid, they should research anything they propose. This and a general lack of common sense are among the reasons that our legal system is such a mess.

Did you know that, while we are forced to wait for an Attorney General’s opinion on so many things, the opinion given is just that, merely an opinion, that carries no more actual weight in court than the opinion of the average street person.

On an entirely different subject. It seems that the Pioneer Loan Pawnshop took in a fake Rolex, Submariner.
This link will take you to some pictures and a short piece on how to spot a fake on their website.
If I had been taken like that, I’m not sure I’d admit it.

Two men, one with Texas ID, have taken at least 7 shops here in town with these fakes, and are probably still at large.
In a world filled with gold plate, gold filled, completely fake, low carat stamped 14k, and faux watches being advertised all over the net and in thousands of unsolicited emails, people in that line of work would be up to date on such things.

Such is the price of carelessness.

I just purchased a Compaq laptop for a bit over $400 at Fry’s.
As it turns out, these loss leaders don’t make the salesman any money, in fact, the salesman said that they come out of their commission. This sounds about right for any big corporation.

As I started it up I knew it would take forever because the machine only has a half gig of memory and is running Vista.
this is bad enough, but HP also installs more, JUNK SOFTWARE, than any machine I’ve seen. On top of that, you have to listen to that self agrandizing bullshit from HP that you cannot avoid, and you cannot turn the sound off.
Arrogant Bastards.

I know I’m over reacting, but have you got any idea how well this already slow machine runs when you’re stuck with no options except Vista? Glaciers move faster.

Now I get to spend the next couple of hours, undoing the mess they have created by installing, without my permission, all that crap software.

Might I remind people like HP/Compaq that these machines belong to us, not to them. And by including all this crapware, they may be making more money, but they are not making friends.
The automatically run this and install that, does nothing for the end user, it only does something for the companies and their bottom line.

As someone I know put it; When dealing with large companies, remember, there is no honor, only greed and arrogance

Well, your ISP now provides the feds access to the latest wiretap equipment. Your ISP was forced to install and activate said wiretap equipment by May 14, 2007.
Remember all those illegal wiretaps, courtesy of King George and the NSA.
Ask AT&T about that, oh nevermind they haven’t got the immunity our King asked for as yet, so they ain’t talking.
According to the NYT, then AG John Ashcroft and FBI Director Robert Mueller III both threatened to resign back in 2004 over the use of illegal wiretaps.
A guy named Gonzales was counsel to King George at the time.

The feds wiretaped the hell out of Las Vegas because of a plot by Al Queda, that never existed.
It turned out that during the process of translation and interpretation, some agent dropped the ball. And probably got promoted for the fuck up.

They say that Law enforcement will still have to get court orders to use this equipment, but when you consider that they still have letters being issued that give them access to our data, but cannot be acknowledged or challenged.
Considering that good King George is asking for legal immunity for anyone who helped the NSA, and other dot.gov’s, tap our phones at the behest of the Whitehouse.
And giving carefull consideration to the stripping of our rights in recent years by a Whitehouse that continually tries to rule by fiat, not by law.
I think that this new equipment, combined with the FBI’s vacuum cleaner software that has replaced carnivour, should be cause us to be more than merely concerned.

Orwell was way to optimistic.

The Nevada Senate committee on Commerce and Labor heard testimony yesterday on AB478, which is designed to limit title loans.
Babs wants to limit interest to 40% including all fees. She also wants to limit the term of the loan to no more than 7 months, at which time the customer is forced to pay off the loan or the lender is forced to make the choice between repossession and write off.

Koster’s and Dollar Loan brought in some high priced help and dear ole Babs proved once again that she’s nothing more than your basic ideologue who shoots from the hip and is not concerned with facts.

The matter is still in discussion.

I call Barbara Buckley, “Babs” as a term of endearment, not any sort of sarcasm. Really, would I lie?
Just because she’s unbelievably arrogant, with an egocentric view of the world, and a total inability to hear anybody else’s opinion that does not mirror her own.

I read Rags blog about the US and Iran and the potential war.
The part that bothered me was evidently the same thing that bothered him. It was the quote from Barbara Bush and the conscious effort not to deal with reality. This appears to be endemic in the whitehouse.

In Al Jazeera; There was the reported death of the man who is/was alegedly the top man for Al Queda in Iraq, that was immediately denied.
And a voice recording that was reportedly his appeared on a website, saying that any reports of fighting between the Jihadists and the Sunni are all lies.
The propaganda machines rev up to speed, and each so called news agencys each choose whichever version suits their agenda.

Reporters are being jailed for insulting Islam and an author is jailed for insulting Turkishness.

This from Pravda; What is it with the US Secretaries of State?
The Bush regime has certainly had its problems with its Secretaries of State. The first one, Colin Powell, lied through his teeth at the United Nations Security Council and this one, Condoleeza Rice, has an acute case of chronic insolence where Russia is concerned. Every so often, Condoleezza Rice has an attack of fury, which seems more like a temper tantrum from some spoilt six-year-old brat in need of a good hiding

Russia develops new generation strategic bomber

When Putin leaves, his course will be continued

War in Iraq enters its fifth year. Bush pleads for more patience

The reason for quoting foreign sources is to show what the rest of the world thinks.

The Knight Ridder news agency openly questioned the excuses for this latest war, but they weren’t picked up by the NYT or the Washington post so nobody listened.
Now Knight Ridder is part of the McClatchy Group, hopefully they will continue to question any and all major decisions.
Their Washington Bureau is online here.

There is a greater level of reporting on almost any subject than ever before, but there are more and more, so called news agencies, with an agenda. How can we tell the honest reporting and from politics or simply picking up what someone else wrote.

Google has redone their page rank algorithm and this page rank 5 is now a 4.
The pr4s I sometimes write for, or administer, are all universally pr3s, but my pr0s are now all pr3s.

Fortunately the search engine results placement doesn’t seem to have gotten any worse.
They say that pr represents the popularity of the site, but sep is what matters to anyone who’s selling something or simply wants to be on the first page for a given search term.

It would be my best guess that pr figures into Google sales and self promotion, and sep applies to those of us who don’t rely on Google to be, the be all, end all, of our web existence.

Almost everybody I’ve spoken to, who happens to worry about such things, has taken it in the shorts.

That’s life, as long as they treated everybody equally it’s cool, if they favored only the big sites with thousands and thousands of links, I won’t look surprised, if we find out that they favored the sites they personally like and screwed the rest of us, there’s nothing we can do but suck it up and deal with it.

Since there’s nothing a mere mortal can do about it, and since my head hurts anyway, I don’t think I’ll do any more work for an hour or two, and instead I think I’ll go over to Old Dude’s site and see if he’s found another boat for sale that looks as good as the Salamanda.