Category Archives: Misc

Poor, poor Elon…

Well…I laughed my butt off the other day when I read that ole elon’s 56 billion dollar pay package at Tesla was voided by a judge in response to a suit from a shareholder that owns about 9 shares of Tesla…you may ask “how the hell did elon get the board to approve such an egregious package?” that’s pretty easy..appoint a bunch of cronies to be on the board who just rubber stamp anything elon wants…and now he has to return the money to the company…and one thing to remember that this was the largest pay package in the history of business here in the US…and it was found that the cronies on the board didn’t negotiate at all or protect the company in the negotiations but conferred with elon to figure out how to steal the money…I think it’s just a case of an entitled billionaire rigging the system with little regard for the other investors or the people who work at Tesla…again, ignoring rules that they don’t like and think don’t apply to them as all the damn billionaires do…poor, poor elon…geez…

We need media not controlled by billionaires..

Well…do you ever miss just reading a good newspaper? When I was growing up, even in the medium sized town of Grand Rapids, we had two full fledged newspapers that we staffed for local, national, and world news and only cost a quarter with the huge Sunday was only 50 cents…and both papers were worth the money and supported hundreds of good jobs for both reporters and production staff…that began to change when venture capital, supported by billionaires started buying papers across the country and the need for huge profit to pay them back started the inevitable slide that is still happening today…cripes, back then we even had a little paper called the “Suburban Life” that reported on life in Ada, Lowell, and all of the other small villages around GR…but now? They don’t even print the Grand Rapids Press here anymore and the Sunday paper is now 5 dollars and it is about the thickness that the daily paper used to be…sure not worth it so I don’t buy it anymore…how the hell did the paper support hundred of jobs for 70+ years and now it’s essentially gone…it’s the billionaires, folks hoovering up all the cash in this country…but there is a movement starting to have taxes fund local newspapers across the country in areas where the news in print, tv, and radio is either owned by right wing billionaires or doesn’t even exist anymore…I for one would chip in for an independent newspaper here in Muskegon that actually paid reporters and printed objective, truthful news along with an opinion page that would be clearly titled as opinion…just like it used to be before the billionaires wrecked the whole thing…geez…

Can’t we agree that killing children is wrong?

Well…with the terrorism on both sides in the Hamas/Israeli war, can’t we agree that killing children is wrong? So far, there have been at least 3,000 children killed by the Israeli attacks in Gaza and there have been some Israeli children killed, too…but this is not tit for tat…children should be off limits to any kind of warfare…for that matter any civilian should be off limits and what Hamas did in their attacks when they killed almost 2,000 people in Israel were unconscionable and there is no justification for it…but Israel attacking civilians, hospitals, and infrastructure in Gaza is no better…and I hate the Hamas cheerleaders across the world saying that the Jewish people deserved the attacks…and it is nothing more than antisemitism…something I’ve never been able to understand at all…this hate is just bullshit and I’m tired of how much there is of it in the world…children are children and I don’t care if they are Palestinian or Jewish or American…killing them is just wrong…geez…

Scraping the bottom of the barrel..

Well…haven’t talked about the illegal Russian invasion of Ukraine in a while so, with what was reported this morning, I thought I’d just do a shorty on it…the amount of equipment that Russia has lost is just staggering…I mean almost 3,000 tanks, thousands of artillery pieces, thousands of armored fighting vehicles…you get the point, they have been bleeding equipment almost on a daily basis…just yesterday they lost 8 tanks…and with the sanctions in place, the Russians really can’t replace them with the semi modern tanks they were sending…they really don’t have a modern tank that can match the Leopard 2′s or the M1 Abrams that we are sending them in the near future…so what is Russia’s response? They start sending even older tanks that they had in storage in Siberia or someplace like that…just today photos were posted of tanks that were made in the 40′s…late 40′s I guess but at least designed in the late 40′s….by comparison, if we sent tanks of that generation, we’d have to dig some Shermans out of museums to go that far back….where do you get parts for something that old? I do know that one Leopard or Abrams could take on 30 or 40 of those old relics and come away unscathed…remember that in the Iraq war, not one Abrams was lost to the same tanks the Russians are using in Ukraine…so the ones they scraped off the bottom of the barrel are really not going to do much….but, hey…keep sending them, they will make great scrap metal….

We need more trains…

Well…I think this may be a political one…or it has a political component to it…one of the things that has struck me since I started watching a lot of British tv is the fact that they have such a cool rail network…I mean you can get on the underground in mid London and changing only one train, you can be in the North of Scotland later that same day…and you don’t need a car for any of it…and every town in the whole country is less than 5 miles from a rail station…now, I think it would be really cool if I could walk the 4 blocks down to the railroad tracks and jump on a train to GR or anywhere else in Michigan or the country…as it stands now, I’d have to drive an 80 mile round trip to GR to get on the train to anywhere and it really only stops a few places and shares the rails with freight that always takes precedent to passenger trains….and on the continent of Europe, you can get on a train that goes over 200 miles per hour and gets you places faster than the total time it takes to fly the same route…why can’t we have that here? I would love to be able to take a train around the country without having a reservation…you just show up at the station and get on the next train that comes through…and there are many trains every day no the one every couple of weeks…I think the US just doesn’t have the political will for mass transit and that sucks…wouldn’t it be cool to be able to get on a train downtown and go to Traverse City for the day? Or Detroit…where you could see a Tigers of Red Wings game and then just ride home instead of driving 3 hours…that would be cool…oh, well…

RIP David Crosby

Well…damn, David Crosby died this afternoon…have been a huge fan of his since his days in the Byrds and of course Crosby, Stills, and Nash and CSNY…one of my favorite songs of his is “Long Time Gone” from “Four Way Street” a unique voice who has been on my personal soundtrack since I was a kid…RIP David…

RIP Jeff Beck

Well…it just came over Mastodon that Jeff Beck has died at 78…contracted bacterial meningitis a  few days ago and now he’s gone…he was from that class of British guitar players like Jimmy Page and Pete Townsend and even played with Jimmy in the Yardbirds for a spell…I was never that big of a fan but I did see a 2014 concert from Japan that was really great a couple of years ago…RIP, Jeff.

The Peripheral…

Well…haven’t talked about tv in a while but with “The Peripheral” showing up on Plex, I thought I’d do a shorty about it. I’m on the 3rd episode out of 8 and so far, it’s keeping me interested…more than that, it’s quite interesting with gamers, gun battles, time travel and lots of twists and turns…the story is set in 2033 and the main protagonists being a brother and sister who live in a small town down south and are using virtual reality for a standard shooter game when the show starts but then a new piece of equipment arrives from somewhere that allows them to project themselves to London in 2100 where the sister gets involved in intrigue there so there are a few story lines running at once…and her brother is an ex Marine who has electronic implants that allow him to communicate with others in his squad and they band together to fight off killers from the future who drive invisible cars…yep, it’s kind of weird but I like weird shows…the reviews weren’t too good but I decided to give it  a try anyway and I’m glad I did…can’t wait to watch another one tonight…

Signed up for Mastodon today…

Well…as you all probably know, Elon Musk bought twitter and is doing his best to destroy it by letting racist right wing bullshit to flood the site…and firing almost everyone who worked there…including all of the content moderators who made sure there wasn’t the fascist crap that dominates some sites out there…so lots of the people I follow have been searching for a new social media site that won’t allow the right wing bullshit to pollute it…and lots of them have migrated to Mastodon so I signed up for an account earlier today and that’s why I’m late getting to this one today…damn, the last thing I wanted to do was to learn how to run a new platform but the deterioration that I saw in twitter left me no choice…and with ole elon today blocking anyone who disagrees with him…and that means any one on the left who criticizes his repub cronies…so I guess I’ll dig deep and learn a new site…maybe it will give me something to do…who knows? At the very least, I don’t want to support anything elon anymore…we don’t need more billionaire assholes ruining this country…

A little music…

Well…not sure if I’m getting tired of my playlists in the mp3 player, but I’ve been reminded lately of how good playing entire albums can be…so that’s what I’ve been doing on the bike lately and one thing that came out of that is the clear evolution of the band Genesis from “Trick of the Tale” to “We Can’t Dance” that I had not really noticed before…ToT really is more related to their earlier work but WCD is more just a Phil Collins album that Rutherford and Banks play on…but that’s not to say it’s not a good one but the topics are more personal than on ToT and it has lots of ballads on it that are clearly Phil’s work…and love songs and I don’t remember any of those in their earlier work…I just think their earlier stuff was more prog rock than the pop it turned into on WCD…about the same as comparing Pink Floyd’s early works like “Atom Heart Mother” or “Meddle” to “Dark Side of the Moon” or “Wish You Were Here”…they also show a clear evolution from the really experimental stuff they were doing to start their careers…but they avoided going all the way to pop and I am thankful for that….just a few thoughts that came to me on  the bike today…and it’s kind of filler since I haven’t come up with a topic in politics yet…but I will keep trying…