What Do You Mean I Can't?

The people who feed us the news are always quoting people or organizations that are in opposition to whatever is being proposed.

If there were only one person in the entire world in opposition, the media will find him, interview him and quote him at us.

At this point I will impress you with my knowledge of the Bible by pecking out from Deuteronomy 15: “The poor will always be with you, but you will not always have me”.

Please allow me to play off of this quote and state, “The opposition will always be with us so we ought to do what they want”.

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What If the Law of the Land Was That We Hung People For Minor Crimes?

Proposal: A group gets organized and proposes that we ought not hang people for Minor Crimes.

Opposition: Comes from the Rope Manufacturers of America. Their articulate Spokesman says, "Are we potted plants? We make rope! This crazy proposal of yours could cost us our jobs! We have families to feed! We ought to be doing the exact opposite. We ought to expand beyond Minor Crimes to Very Minor Crimes. A good example is Jay Walkers. These people are trying to commit suicide anyway. We ought to help them get to be what they want to be...Dead."

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The Law of the Land Is We Have To Stop For Red Lights

Proposal: A group gets organized and proposes we Stop Stopping for Red Lights because it is antiquated and unnecessary.

Opposition: Their articulate spokesman says, "There are so many reasons why Stopping for Red Lights ought to be done away with it is hard to list them all but consider the most logical ones...

Ø What if the driver is in a hurry?

Ø What if no one is coming?

Ø What if the driver has not even looked to see if someone is coming?

Ø What if the driver is texting?

Ø What if the driver is simply not paying attention to his driving?

Ø What if the driver’s phone just rang, and while reaching to answer it, he knocked it on the floor in front of the front passenger seat. Does the law really expect him not to go after his phone?"

Pretty compelling arguments, if I do say so myself.

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The Law of the Land Is We Can’t Farm On Land We Do Not Own

Proposal: A group gets organized and proposes it is not right that a person who wants to grow crops that people want to buy ought not be allowed to grow those crops on any piece of land he darn well pleases.

Opposition: Their articulate spokesman says, "Why should the people who want to buy what the farmer who does not own the land wants to grow be prevented from getting what they want? Why should the grower be restricted by arbitrary lines that he can’t even see that were drawn a long time ago by someone he has never even met?"

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This just might be my Silliest bit of Foolishness yet. Maybe I ought to run for Congress. I would fit right in with this kind of Silly Thinking.

Would I kid u?

Smartfella

The Fetal Position Is Looking Better and Better

I continue to wonder about the wonders that have been brought to us by the Internet. We are constantly being warned about dangers that are lurking out there if we dare to go out there. Ergo the Fetal Position is looking better and better.

I am a believer in the benefits that come from Malwarebytes. I think it is a good product and I subscribe to their Premium Version and Premium Anything is something I don’t do very often because Free is a lot cheaper.

However, Malwarebytes is warning me about so many things that I am starting to worry. It makes me feel like, if “they” are really out to get me, “they” are going to really get me and even Malwarebytes is not going to be able to keep me safe.

Here is what the latest Malwarebytes Newsletter is warning me about…

• Juice Jacking…If I use a Public Charging Station (in airports, malls, hotels, etc.) to charge my phone, I could also be opening up a pathway to...
  >>>Stealing any and all of my data from my phone.
  >>>Installing malware onto my phone which could gather more and varied data, such as GPS locations, purchases made, social media interactions, photos, call logs, and other ongoing processes.
• Sextortion Scammers…The attacker behind these campaigns will use whatever information is available on the target to get the target to believe that the attacker does indeed have incriminating sexual information on them and things do downhill from there. Many times the attacker has nothing.
• Smart Doorbells…Have developed these kinds of problems…
  >>>Susceptible to invasion of privacy issues.
  >>>May also be lacking the necessary cyber security defenses to work as promised.
• Disney+…Disney+ is the new video-streaming service to rival Netflix and Amazon Prime. It debuted to much fanfare and racked up 10 million subscribers within a single day of launch. Unfortunately, it wasn’t the kind of splash the majority of users expected…
  >>>Immediately it had Connection and Performance Concerns.
  >>>Soon that was followed by reports of hacked accounts being stolen and sold on the dark web.

Oh my gosh! I just received a warning from Malwarebytes that the bad guys have come up with a Fetal Position Penetrator. 

I need to go back to college so I can crawl into one of their many secure Safe Places.

Would I kid u?

Smartfella

My Boycotts Are Not Working

Fella Boycott #1…

I refuse to pay $6 (minimum) for a bag of popcorn in movie theatres! Popcorn used to cost me $.05 a bag when I was a child. I say to myself, “Self, I agree that inflation has driven up the cost of that $.05 bag up to $.10 but I refuse to be ripped off like this! I’m going to make the Movie Theatres of the Good Ole USofA sit up and take note of my money not being in their coffers. They are going to be forced to reduce the price of their Pop Corn to a more reasonable $.15 a bag!”

Result of Fella’s Boycott of Pop Corn…

I read in this morning’s newspaper that AMC Entertainment Movie Holdings, Inc. sells 25 Million Pounds of Pop corn a Year and overall their 3^rd Quarter Food and Beverage Sales were up 9% over last year.

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Fella Boycott #2…

I Don’t Do Facebook! I don’t have a Facebook Account! I Don’t Do Facebook!

Results of Fella’s Boycott of Facebook…

I read in this morning’s newspaper that Facebook is More Valuable than General Electric, AT&T and Citigroup COMBINED!

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Fella Boycott #3…

This is the boycott that I did not know I was boycotting.

I have been boycotting eating what my newspaper calls, “A Food Sensation of the Decade”.

I now realize I have been boycotting the Croissant-Donut Hybrid called a Cronut.

Results of Fella’s Boycott of the Cronut…

I’m not sure this can be actually categorized as a boycott because, while I was boycotting the Cronut, I did not know what a Cronut was and I’m still not sure what it is.

I could Google Cronut but I’m boycotting Google because they track everything we do. I search with Duck Duck Go because they do not track everything we do.

I am certain that my efforts to teach Google a lesson they will never forget is certain to bring Google to its knees any day now…Or will my efforts do that?

While I am refusing to Google Cronut please do not ask me why I don’t Duck Duck Go Cronut. I don’t have a good answer.

Maybe I’m too confused. I'm confused? That does not sound like me…Or does it?

Would I kid u?

Smartfella

One Of Us Ain’t Too Smart

In the above Subject of this Foolishness…Or Is It? who is the “One” and who are the “Us”?

First of all I must explain a few things and I warn you this Blog Posting is going to get confusing but the confusion is not my fault. The confusion emanates from the world we now live in and it’s getting more confusing every day.

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First Of All … Am I Smart?

I play around a lot in my blog about my being smart because I keep referring to myself as The Smartfella (here’s where the confusion starts).

When I started blogging about 15 years ago I had this silly mindset that I was going to be Anonymous (that’s when I learned how spell “anonymous”).

I had this vision that I was going to be known all over the world because of my ability to see the foolishness in the world around me and sharing what I saw with the world…anonymously.

I decided my anonymous name would be Smart-Aleck. Carrying on with this silly thinking I decided that, since my name was Alex, I was going to give away my secret identity from the get-go, so I changed to Smartfella.

It’s as simple as that. This explanation proves I’m not that smart.

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Now starts today’s Blog Posting. Up until this point you have actually been reading the Preamble to Today’s Blog Posting.

I am not going to try and explain (because I can’t) what I am going to quote from the Wall Street Journal below. I will promise you that what you will read in quotation marks are exact quotes and you can figure it out…Or can u?

The article is entitled, “Why Are College Students So Afraid of Me?”

First Quote:

“Few things upset American college students more than being told they aren’t oppressed. I recently spoke at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Mass. I argued that American undergraduates are among the most privileged individuals in history by virtue of their unfettered access to knowledge. Far from being discriminated against, students are surrounded by well-meaning faculty who want all of them to succeed.

About 15 minutes into my talk, as I was discussing Renaissance humanism, a majority of the audience in the packed auditorium stood up and started chanting: “My oppression is not a delusion!” The chanters then declared that my sexism, racism and homophobia weren’t welcome on campus. “You are not welcome,” they added, as if I didn’t know.

The protesters drowned out my response before filing slowly out of the room, still loudly announcing their victimhood and leaving dozens of seats empty that could have been filled by students who had been turned away for lack of space. (The protesters had hoped to occupy the entire auditorium before vacating it, so no one else could hear me speak.)”

Second Quote:

“The maudlin self-pity on display at Holy Cross doesn’t arise spontaneously. It is actively cultivated by adults on campus. A few days before the Holy Cross protest, faculty and administrators at Bucknell University in Lewisburg, Pa., convened a therapeutic “scholars” panel to take place during another talk of mine. The goal was to inoculate the university against the violence that I allegedly represented.

Bucknell’s interpersonal violence prevention coordinator; the director of its Women’s Resource Center; the interim associate provost for diversity, equity, and inclusion; a women’s and gender studies professor; and an economics professor discussed rape culture, trauma and racism. Students and faculty were then invited to join in painting “self-care” rocks.”

Third Quote:

“The claim that American universities, and the U.S. in general, are defined by white supremacy is the one unifying idea on college campuses today, in the absence of a shared curriculum dedicated to civilization’s greatest works. And that idea is spreading. School systems across the country are training teachers and administrators that colorblind standards and the work ethic are instruments of white privilege. Any private institution without proportional representation of minorities and females is vulnerable to attack, since bigotry is the only allowable explanation for the lack of sex and race “diversity.”

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That’s it. If you think I am going to say I understand what these students are so upset about, stop thinking I do because I don’t.

In fact I can hear Jack Nicholson shouting at today’s college students as I peck this closing out… “You can’t handle the truth!”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wtpOtFIEkbs

Would I kid u?

Smartfella

It’s Awful Out There...Or is it?

We say we are feeling depressed. Simply stated we just feel things are not going right. We explain our frustration this way…

• Our computer is running slow.
• We have too many leftovers in our refrigerator.
• We just found out that that new piece of furniture we ordered on the Internet is going to take 5 whole days to get to us.

Yea that’s tough all right. Sometimes we just want to scream. That’s about as frustrating and tough as anyone can stand…Or is it?

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Let’s step back for a bit. Let’s look around and see if anyone has it as hard as we have.

Below are the first 3 paragraphs of an article in the Wall Street Journal…

“Marine commando Randy Hoffman’s plane took off from Kabul, climbed over the jagged mountains and turned toward home.

Somewhere down there was his tent, a piece of canvas stretched across a pit he had carved into a high-altitude ridge. Randy had spent most of the previous 2½ years in the mountains along the Pakistan border, turning Afghan villagers into soldiers.

Rugs covered the tent’s dirt floor. He had a wood stove for heat and collected catalogs of farm equipment and RVs to remind him of home in Indiana. A metal thermos stored the goat’s milk and cucumber drink delivered each morning by the mountain men who fought alongside him. He and the Afghans would sit on a dirt bench, talking about poetry, faith and honor, and how to make it through the next day alive.”

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Go back and read the last 9 words of the above excerpt. Does that make our Slow Computer and our Abundant Supply of Leftovers and 5 Days Delivery Wait Time seem not too important?

Would I kid u?

Smartfella

Lagniappe: Col. Randy Hoffman served seven combat tours in Afghanistan, six of them highly classified missions, and one stint in Iraq.

Mujebar, Go Outside and Fix Telephone Wire #33 From The Left

Here is a picture of the chaos that is communication wires over a street in India...

Would I kid u?

Smartfella

It’s Discouraging. You Make An Irrefutable Statement and All Too Often There Is A “Yea But” Guy At The Ready To Refute The Irrefutable.

How many times do we see someone on your television make a perfectly logical statement of what could happen if some other action were taken and someone else will pop up and contradict them by saying something like, “I know of a time when that did not happen”.

Here are a few examples…

Ø Teenagers should not try to walk on that guard railing along the edge of the Grand Canyon.
>>>This is contradicted by someone saying that they once saw a teenager do that very thing and he did not fall over the edge.

Ø You better not throw that bomb into that crowd of people because when it explodes it will kill a lot of them.
>>>This is countered by someone saying that you can’t make that statement because the bomb might have a defective fuse and not explode.

Ø If you jump off that 9 story building, you will die.
>>>Here is where Mr. Smarty Pants steps in to ask, how can you say that with such an air of conviction? One time I was looking out of a 5^th floor window of a 9 floor building when a guy who had jumped off of the roof passed my window and he was in good shape as he went by.

Many times the Logical Statement Maker will become flummoxed and abandon the logical point they were trying to make.

Politicians just live for these Gotcha Moments.

Logical Thinkers Everywhere, there is hope. I don’t mean our Illogical World will see your Irrefutable Logic and start agreeing with you. What I mean is there is always the slight change that Mr. Smarty Pants will get confused and on any particular day he will go looking for you where you did not go and you will be able to make your Perfectly Logical Statement and he will not be there to say, “Yea but…”.

Would I kid u?

Smartfella

We Don’t Need To Know Everything

There are several reasons why are we all so Smart, but after all the smoke clears, we are still Pretty Darn Dumb.

How can I dare say such a thing? It’s easy. We used to know things because we read about what we wanted to know about, we did research about what we wanted to know about and we studied about what we wanted to know about. In other words we actively took actions that resulted in making our collective and individual selves Smarter.

Today we don’t have to do anything to become “smart” (note the quotation marks on the word smart) because we have Google, Bing, Duck Duck Go, Wikipedia and such to Look It Up.

In other words, we don’t know anything. We just Look It Up and then we FaGetAbout what we just Looked Up because we don’t have to clutter our minds with the Looked Up Information because, if we ever need it again, we can Look It Up…again.

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Today I was stumbling about the Internet and I saw a link with a picture of Walt Disney in it. Below his beloved picture were these words…

Respected Historical Figures Who Were Actually Terrible People

I thought to myself, “Self, why do they (whoever they are) have to go out of their way to make people we respect sound like terrible people?”

I did click on the link and the promo for the link started. 

Terrible Walt was first and he was followed by Mother Teresa and that’s when I closed out the link.

Do I have to know the bad or evil or perversion or nastiness about everyone? I’ve decided I don’t. I’m content to just continuing to wallow in my “ignorance” (note the quotation marks on the word ignorance).

Would I kid u?

Smartfella

Lagniappe: If you want to be “smarter” than Smartfella you can copy and paste “Respected Historical Figures Who Were Actually Terrible People” into a browser and have at it. If you do watch the whole clip, you may consider yourself smarter than I am but will you be better for it?

Lagniappe Another: Before I got out of the site completely I looked around and found other similar links I don’t want to know about…

• 10 Geniuses Who Were Shockingly Horrible People
• 12 Insane DESCENDANTS of Famous People
• 10 Famous Historical Figures Who Were Perverts
• 10 More Historically Important Perverts
• Respected Musicians Who Were Actually Terrible People
• Respected Writers Who Were Actually Terrible People
• Geniuses Who Were Actually Terrible People
• 12 Actors Who Treat Fellow Cast Members Like Trash

The Internet is a wonderful thing…Or is it?

We Used To Sing, California Here I Come. Now We Sing, California I Ain't Coming.

California Is At It Again

This Blog Posting was actually mostly written last year. I have unsuccessfully tried to get an update to all of this Foolishness but I can’t find updated information. However, based on how slow our legal system oozes it way through our lives, I feel fairly certain that this Craziness is still oozing.

Coffee may be bad for you:

• A Los Angeles Superior Court ruled against Starbucks and 90 Other Cafes and Gas Stations, penalizing them because they couldn’t definitively prove that coffee doesn’t cause cancer.>How does one prove a negative? Someone accuses you of being a bad person. You counter that you are not a bad person. They counter your counter by saying, “Prove it”.
• In addition to slapping a cancer warning on each cup of coffee they will sell in the future, the companies may have to pay millions in civil penalties and lawsuit settlements.
• At issue is a chemical called Acrylamide, which is created when coffee beans are roasted.
• It’s also common in other foods, including bread, cookies, cereals, potato chips and French fries.>Why aren’t these other evil products being attacked by California?
• Under California’s 1986 Safe Drinking Water and Toxic Enforcement Act, better known as Proposition 65, Acrylamide is listed as a likely human carcinogen.
• Notice Prop 65 does not say Acrylamide is a Human Carcinogen but only a likely Human Carcinogen and that’s all that is needed to extract ungodly sums of money from the victims of Our Court System and the State of California.
• California’s cancer list relies heavily on junk science and with Acrylamide the evidence is questionable at best.
• These tentative concerns derive mainly from studies that examined its effects on lab animals, not humans.
• The American Cancer Society says the doses of Acrylamide given to rats and mice have been as much as 1,000 to 10,000 times higher than the levels people might be exposed to in foods and for humans “there are currently no cancer types for which there is a clearly increased risk related to Acrylamide”.
• The evidence is so scant that even the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer admitted in 2016 that there was “no conclusive evidence for a carcinogenic effect of drinking coffee” and its review of more than 1,000 studies turned up evidence that coffee may actually reduce the risk of some types of cancer.
• The World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer is the same alarmist outfit that thinks everything from red meat to working the night shift causes cancer.
• However feeble the evidence, Proposition 65 encourages trial lawyers and their front groups to sue on behalf of the state by offering them a cut of the civil penalties.
• Last year these types of cases yielded $25.6 million in settlements, and more than three-fourths of that sum went to the lawyers.
• A very famous (infamous?) trial lawyer brought the case against Starbucks and 90 other cafes and gas stations.
• He is working on behalf of something called the Council for Education and Research on Toxics.
• This is the same “nonprofit” and attorney also sued McDonald's and Burger King over Acrylamide in 2002.
• The Starbucks shakedown was easy in part because under Proposition 65 the co-defendants bore the burden of proof.
• The 7-Eleven chain decided to settle, paying $900,000.
• For the remaining defendants, the trial lawyer is now seeking civil penalties as high as $2,500 per person for each “exposure” since 2002.
• This will add up to a huge sum of money in a state with roughly 40 million residents.

This ought to be that point where the judge says to the Trial Lawyer some or all of the following...

Counselor, the amount of money you are asking for is an unmitigated waste of the court’s time! Do you understand how much money $2,500 times every cup of coffee sold by these California businesses in the last 16 years is? This court does not even know how that final sum would be determined! If you not nuts, you are certainly stupid! Get the hell out of my courtroom!

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Did you hear it? I did. I heard the other shoe drop.

The state of California is penalizing businesses because they couldn’t definitively prove that coffee doesn't cause cancer.

Below are the guts of one of many articles that can be found that not only say coffee is good for us but we ought to drink many cups a day to increase our chances of living a healthier life.

(CNN)…

Yes, go ahead and grab that cup of coffee, or two, or more. New research suggests that doing so may improve your health and help you live longer...

• In a new observational study involving close to 20,000 individuals, people who consumed at least four cups of coffee daily had a 64% lower risk of early death compared to those who never or rarely consumed coffee.
• The reduction in risk was more significant once people reached the age of 45, suggesting that it may be even more beneficial to consume coffee as we get older.
• These findings echo the recent results of another large observational study, which found that coffee drinkers appear to live longer, regardless of whether they consume regular or decaf coffee. 
• Coffee has also been shown to reduce the risk of many diseases, including Type 2 Diabetes, Liver Disease, Colorectal Cancer, Alzheimer's and Skin Cancer.
• In recent years it has come to light that Coffee is loaded with antiioxidents. Many are naturally occurring antioxidants found in the coffee bean, while others are created during the roasting process. It's these compounds that science links with positive effects in reducing the risk of several diseases.
• Some of the compounds commonly found in coffee "have been related to Better Insulin Sensitivity, Better Liver Function and Reduced Chronic Inflamation", said V. Wendy Setiawan an associate professor of preventive medicine at the Keck School of Medicine of USC and the lead author of one of the recent studies on coffee consumption and longevity.

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Our courts are out of control. Are we on the verge of having a lawyer contend in court something along these lines?...

Your honor, everyone on that plane was killed in that horrible crash. My client was not on that plane but he could have been and, if he had been, he would have been killed with all the rest of the passengers that were killed. If he had been killed, his wife would be a widow and his 6 children would be fatherless through no fault of his or their own. The sadness they would have experienced is hard to imagine.

I am therefore compelled to ask this court for more money than $2,500 times every cup of coffee sold by those California businesses in the last 16 years discussed in Fella’s silly blog posting.

Would I kid u?

Smartfella

Lagniappe: This comes from a fed up Californian on April 16, 2018…

“Regarding your editorial “Attack of the Killer Cappuccino” (March 31): I intend to bring a class-action lawsuit against the Council for Education and Research on Toxics citing the scientific fact that stress causes cancer. The council is causing me severe, debilitating anxiety with its cancer warning about coffee. Judge Elihu Berle’s decision makes me extremely stressed out as well, so he (they, or she, to use the correct gender pronoun since I don’t want to be arrested for using the incorrect gender pronoun in California) must be sued also. Anybody with me? After all, the council can’t prove that it is not responsible for causing cancer.”

Go East Young Man

“Washington is not a place to live in. The rents are high, the food is bad, the dust is disgusting and the morals are deplorable. Go West, young man, go West and grow up with the country.”

— Horace Greeley

How things have changed. Now California is shoving people back to the East. Horace is still right about Washington but there is a lot of East between California and Washington and California Businesses are heading East in bunches.

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The business consulting firm Spectrum Location Solutions recently estimated that 660 California companies have moved 765 facilities out of California since 2017.

(Read the above paragraph again.)

This includes 10 corporations that have moved their headquarters out of San Francisco.

Discount brokerage firm Charles Schwab was founded in San Francisco in 1973 but it just announced it is relocating its corporate headquarters from San Francisco to lower-cost-and-low-tax Texas.

Schwab has many Good Business Reasons for making this move. Thinking from a Business Point of View can you quibble with any of these reasons?…

• Schwab will pay much lower taxes in Texas.
• The Lone Star State imposes a 0.75% Franchise Tax on Business Margins (total revenue minus compensation), which is substantially less than the Corporate Tax Rates in California (8.84%).
• The city of San Francisco also imposes a 0.38% Payroll Tax and a 0.6% Gross Receipts Tax on Financial Service Companies.
• Texas has no Individual Income Tax, while the top rate on Income and Capital Gains in California is 13.3%.
• The Lone Star State’s Housing and Energy Costs are substantially lower.
• The Average Monthly Rent in San Francisco is $3,870 compared to $1,200 in Dallas. This means Schwab workers and executives can have a Higher Standard of Living, and More After-Tax Income, at the same salaries.

Up until now the State of California has combated the loss of tax revenue caused by all these companies leaving because of High Taxes and High Regulations by raising the Taxes and Increasing the Regulatory Burden on the companies that have not left.

The Governor has said raising the Taxes and Increasing the Regulatory Burden on his remaining businesses is the only logical course of action he can take.

When a reporter questioned this “Logical Course of Action” the Governor looked at him with complete disdain and said, You are being silly. I can’t tax companies that have left the State. I can only tax Companies that have not left the State and by golly I’m going to make them sorry that they are stupid enough to have their businesses in my State!

Yep. That ought to fix the problem…Or will it?

Would I kid u?

Smartfella