phone use at red lights portends the breakdown of civilized society

In the dozen or so years that I've been moonlighting in traffic engineering, I've noticed a disturbing recent trend.

At signals with enough green time that at least 10-12 cars should make it through the light, say a left turn signal, these days only 6-7 make it through. Do you know why? Let me clue you in.......

Because at red light stops, virtually everybody driving cars immediately jams their fat noses against the faces of their stupid cell phones and forgets they're waiting for a signal to change. The front cars rarely move for a full 3 seconds after the light changes to green, and only then when other cars start honking horns. I've observed, studied, and recorded rush-hour intersections by the hundreds and I see it all the time.

The scientifically orchestrated dynamics of traffic movements as functions of signal timing are breaking down and it is a microcosm of the general breakdown of civil society as we cease existing in the present here and now, and willfully occupy instead a practically imaginary virtual reality in our phones.

If you're one of those self-involved morons whose locus of identity resides externally in a 24/7 connection to your stupid friends, to the point that you can't resist texting them at every red light you come to, cut it out!!! When the light turns green, be ready to drive. 

Hey dumb, entitled fast-food slobs, meet your replacements

Several states have increased their minimum wage to a ridiculous $15/hour and others have gone to $10.10/hour. How is a company like McDonald's, who hires about 1 million entry-level workers a year, going to deal with this? By firing all the morons who stood outside their employer's place of business demanding with picket signs to be paid far more than their piddling jobs washing lettuce is worth to the company, and replacing them permanently with tireless kiosks like the ones in this McD's in Littleton, CO.

Unlike impudent, laze teenagers, kiosks never make mistakes, always come to work on time, never complain or spill anything, and don't exhibit poor attitudes when dealing with customers. These kiosks will pay for themselves in a matter of weeks or months and those millions of teens who could have used the work experience to learn diligence, promptness, responsibility, job skills, and how to dress like an adult, will now have to schlepp for work elsewhere if they bother even to do that.

Screwed by John Roberts, again

So John Roberts very predictably upheld his previous back-stab of the American people, when he today voted with Anthony Kennedy to uphold the legality of state run exchanges. You'd have to be a dope to not know that Roberts would vote to support his previous vote.

Now there is a House bill that would compel the supreme justices and their staffs to sign up for Obamacare and buy their coverage on the exchanges like everybody else. Why not?

Should the supreme justices not have to be burdened by the same laws with which they burden us? I predict the republicans will be too timid to vote for it, but they should.

More gun control

It appears that Obama's relentless stoking of racial resentment by painting all whites as closet racists, or at least the unapologetic benefactors of past racism, and black thugs as noble, oppressed saints, he and the rabidly anti-gun media have finally gotten the story they've been wanting. A white-power maniac used a legally purchased gun to slaughter 9 innocent blacks in church. 

I'm not sure what the executive branch can do toward gun-control, but rest assured the pressure will be applied for far stricter laws, banking on the guilt of white congress-critters who'll cave to him for political purposes. 

The dream perp for the gun-control left.......

The race-grievance industry is one big hustle

I swear you cannot write comedy like this Rachel Dolezal woman.

Apparently in 2002 she sued traditionally black Howard University for discrimination against her as a white woman, by picking black students over her for preferred positions.

My guess is that she saw how many special privileges blacks are afforded in this country and decided to become black to take advantage of them.

Hilariously, as a black woman, she ends up in Spokane heading up the NAACP, where her job is to complain and whine about how UNDER-privileged blacks are in this country.

Heh heh....I can't stop laughing. If this doesn't expose to everybody what a hustle the race-grievance industry is, nothing will.

Clearly Rachel needed a better manual.

By pretending to be black, Rachel Dolezal may ruin it for authentic blacks

The race grievance industry would't be as wildly successful as it is if not for the abyss-like depth of the white-guilt well. And blacks and other minorities have been taught for generations by smug, white liberals that they are unable to make it on their own and need the help of white benefactors to survive. Now it seems, whites have figured out how to take advantage of the race-grievance scam.

Apparently if you want to avail yourself of the panapoly of privileges that our society generously bestows upon minorities, then all you have to do is announce that today, you feel black......oh, and it might help if you kink your hair up and keep a fake tan like black fetishist Rachel Dolezal did to sell her charade.

This does not bode well for programs like affirmative action and governmnet race quotas because if everybody can pretend to be black the way Bruce Jenner pretends to be a chick, then authentic blacks are no longer special.

Remember, if every one is special, no one is special.

Parties for infants are ridiculous

I just drove through my neighborhood and it irritated me to have to navigate a gauntlet of cars carelessly parked on both sides of the street because a family with what I know to be a one year old kid, was throwing it a birthday party.

Here are the current popular occasions for throwing a kid a party:

[the "we're pregnant" conception party]
[the baby shower[
[the big reveal party] where they find out the gender
[the "we had a baby and you didn't" first-week-home party]
[the 1st birthday party]

Look, it's not that hard to get knocked up, pretty much everybody does it sooner or later on purpose or by mistake.Throwing this many parties for a fetus is tranparently about drawing as much attention to yourself as you can and imposing on your resentful, childless friends to give you lots of gifts......OR, compelling the ones to whom you previously had to give multiple gifts, to return the obligatory gesture.

I'm going out on a limb and betting that in 1962-3, my mom didn't make a fuss about any of those gestational non-events, even my 1st BD. Why would she? She had a life outside of mothering me and I sure didn't know the difference.

I said all that to say this, if you couldn't think of a lie fast enough and have to attend one of these kid parties that make you want to stab yourself in the neck with a pencil because interacting with the trauma team at the ER would be more interesting than chatting with other parents about their kids' latest speech milestone or funny thing they did, at least park as close to the grass on the curb as you can so the rest of us can get by. Additionally, no emergency vehicles I've seen are narrow enough to squeeze between the rows of cars the way they were parked.

Here's to kids' parties, poorly anchored bounce houses, and windy days.
Heh heh.....weeeeeeee!!!

Has anybody read the TPA bill going before congress?

Does anybody have the real 411 on the TPA(Trade Promotion Authority) bill that will be voted on today? I heard Paul Ryan swearing to Greta that it'll give Congress veto authority on any deal the executive branch wants to broker, but then I hear Jeff Sessions (R) AL. say the bill gives far too much trade authority to the executive branch, eliminating most legislative oversight. Which is it?

Apparently congress-critters aren't allowed to read the bill except in a locked room by themselves and cannot share copies with their staff prior to the vote. Why the cloak-and-dagger shadiness? That alone makes me think it's a bad idea. 

Plus, if Obama is for it and big businesses are for it (big business has establishment republicans like Ryan in their back pockets) that probably means still more manufacturing jobs going to third-world countries along with increased importation of cheap laborers to this country......both feature prominently in Obama's "fundamental transformation" dreams for America. 

The fact that establishment republicans are fast-tracking this before anybody can read it makes me suspicious. I'd actually like to hear what Trump thinks. Say what you want about him, he would put US interests top priority in any trade deals. 

Law enforcement busts lemonade stands while the border burns down

In Overton, TX, you have to get a permit to serve anything that could grow bacteria at room temperature.....this rule is designed for restaurants, food trucks, etc, but absurdly it includes front-yard lemonade stands. The permit-enforcement officer rolled up on these two girls and basically shut them down because their parents had failed to buy a "peddler's permit" at a price of $150 from the city, plus have the health department inspect the lemonade mixing process, and he saw it as a health hazard.

Yet Texas law enforcement looks the other way as tens of thousands of indigent Mexicans waltz across the border, bringing with them numerous third-world diseases that were once eradicated in the US.

Does this make any sense to anybody? What a silly, kindergarten country we live in.

Too little, too late?

Well, here we go back to iraq. The US is deploying 450 guys to train (and by train of course I mean re-train) the same Iraqi soldiers who were too afraid of ISIS to put up a fight when ISIS said "BOO"!

Does Obama have a plan for when some of these Americans get killed when ISIS inevitably attacks them?

It's too late to train Iraqi's to fight, if you even can. ISIS is moving toward Baghdad while we set up class rooms to teach military theory to people who don't get it.

If we are going to fight ISIS, then bring the full weight of the US military on them at their next parade, which they have regularly, if the news is accurate. Either fight them or don't, there is no goading terrified Iraqi soldiers in the back with a sharp stick. We delivered them from Saddam Hussein, so we are responsible for what happens to them.

I predict that there is nothing we can do to deter ISIS short of a full re-invasion of Iraq and another 10 years running around the desert digging them out of holes. If there's a more effective strategy, I haven't heard it.

Don't get me wrong, I'm against that, but if we're going to engage them on any level, why not go ahead and kill them?

Comedy angle to the New York prison break

It's being reported that the convict on the left may have romanced a female prison worker to help him and his cell mate escape from prison in New York, Shawshank Redemption style.

Apparently Richard Matt is "very well endowed" and reportedly got girls where ever he went......that is when he wans't murdering and dismembering people.

Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced a tip line for help finding these guys. The tip line is.....1-800-GIVE-TIP.

Heh heh, to catch a well-endowed escapee, you call 1-800-GIVE-TIP.

You can't write comedy like that.

If chicken-shit Iraqi's won't fight for their own country, why should we?

It is well known by now that the Iraqi army is comprised of cowards, and it doesn't speak well of US trainers that we spent the last 12 years training and equipping them to be a competent military, yet at the first sign of trouble from ISIS rabble, they drop their weapons and run away. How did we not know that?

It's being reported today that in addition to advanced US weaponry now in the hands of ISIS, they also have taken control of as many as 2,000 Humvee's. So now not only is ISIS well armed, they are highly mobile too.

Way to go US! Why did we leave 2,000 Humvee's for the Iraqi army anyway? Probably for the same reason we invade third-world cesspools every 10 years or so, to get rid of aging ordinance, to field-test new weapons systems, and to keep our defense contractors at home flush with taxpayer money.....money that politicians know will somehow find its way into their re-election campaign chests.

I realize not all politicians are that corrupt and many naively believe that we are doing some good, but other than the time we liberated under-achieving medical students from thugs in Grenada, when has it ever worked out that way? 

Muslims are a gullible bunch

If you cloak evilness and depravity in flowery words, you can fool an awful lot of people into believing that you aren't evil or depraved. Such is the case with Mohammad, the prophet of the pretend religion of Islam.

Islam is less of a religion and more of a warped political ideology cloaked in innocuous religious jargon like Word of God, Prophet, Paradise, Peace, Holy Book, etc., which have fooled hundreds of millions of people into believing it to be a legitimate religion, much in the same way GE hilariously fooled a lot of people in 1962 into thinking the "Turbo Encabulator" was a world-changing invention by cloaking it in high-tech engineering-sounding jargon.

The Turbo-Encabulator was a spoof of engineering much the same way Islam is a spoof of religion.

                             

Alabama embarrassingly attempts to postpone the inevitable

I've long thought that state governments should not be in the business of taxing and sanctioning marriage, which is why I thought it pretty forward when SB377 was introduced, eliminating state licensure of marital unions and making it a legal contract instead.

Then the fine print exposed the real purpose. The language states that "the only requirement to be married in this state shall be for parties who are [[otherwise legally authorized to be married]] to enter into a contract of marriage as provided herein."

Ah, so when the Supreme Court rules later this month that states cannot discriminate when issuing marriage licenses, Alabama will be exempt because it won't be issuing licenses any more, only contracts, and that phrase above in brackets becomes more meaningful..."otherwise legally authorized to be married."

The Alabama state constitution, the most archaic and silly state document in the entire nation, defines marriage as between two people of different genders.

Alabama is pre-preemptively exempting itself from having to issue marriage "contracts" to gay people. It's a semantic difference at most and will be struck down the first time it's challenged, but that'll take some time, time that the state legislators can use to brag to the uneducated rubes who voted for them because they promised to fight gay marriage. 

Why we are postponing the inevitable is beyond my understanding except that we have a backward, 19th-Century legislature staffed with hypocritical red-necks with nicknames in quotations, who think the same way they do about the lack of a state education lottery, somehow they are keeping Alabama morally pristine.

Jen Psaki beclowns herself

Jen Psaki was so miserably inept at her job as State Dept. spokes-babe, Obama promoted her to White House communications director/babe. This weekend after "Gigolo" John Kerry broke his leg riding a bike in Paris and had to abandon the nuke talks with Iran, she tweeted this:

[I would love to see anyone at the hospital try to stop @JohnKerry from negotiating and working while recovering from breaking his leg.]

Because that's what busy hospital staff do when they're not saving lives, preventing Lurch from negotiating with Iran......and by negotiating I mean kissing the Ayatollahs' asses and giving them what they want

Rand Paul gets his way, for now

I've always felt the Patriot Act was a little heavy-handed, vague, and went too far in terms of surveillance and granting authority to the feds that they shouldn't have, based on a simple declaration of by the executive branch.

That said, I'm still not sure how much meta data is actually collected by the NSA on their giant servers which are fully capable of listening to and recording all phone calls made into or out of the US. Some "experts" claim that the only information collected is origination/destination information and that the call itself isn't monitored or recorded, but do I trust the malignant federal intelligence bureaucracy to be honest about that? Absolutely not.

So I'm not sure if last night's suspension of that part of the swiftly passed, scantly debated, and highly suspect Patriot Act was a good thing or not. But until we get attacked again and it can be shown that the suspension of the surveillance part of the Patriot Act was the cause, I choose more privacy from the government over less privacy.