Nobody wins here...

Bad enough a person apparently intent on suicide manipulated police into using deadly force, but now the deceased is being turned into a martyr.

Reports of rioting and a burned police car are emanating from the Georgia Tech campus.

Welcome to the "progressive" age, where spin and agenda trump reality or reason.

Dig a little deeper

What's scary about those who want to remove the statues is their real agenda seems to be to rewrite history, and then transform America into something more in line with their sense of mob rule rather than rule of law. Even scarier is that so many people seem willing to just shrug and let it happen.

Battery charger

I'm looking around for a 12 volt automotive type battery charger, and I'm sorely disappointed by most of what I see. I'm looking for something in the 6 to 10 amp charging range. Something that could be used off a simple generator for AC power if need be.

For the most part, chargers today are "automatic" and microprocessor controlled. And if you read online customer reviews, quite a few are units are apparently subject to fail.

To me, microprocessor means you have be careful about what kind of AC power you feed into the unit, or risk blowing a sensitive component. What I want is a charger that will still function reliably with an imperfect power source, an old-school (pre-inverter era) generator.

I'm also skeptical as I review certain "manual" charger options. Again, reviews are mixed, from what I've read. Many fail early, or have defects right out of the box.

Too many tools and devices today are engineered to operate only in a perfect environment.

Reality is, you often have these tools or devices to help cope with adverse or imperfect conditions when status quo "perfection" fails. Design engineers and bean counter manufacturers seem to have forgotten this.

Rethinking politics

Forget the often phony games of Left and Right.

How about thinking of today's Washington DC politics in terms of establishment, insurgencies, and counter insurgencies?

The government power grab that will not die

Via Reason.com;

Today, Bernie Sanders will release a proposal for single-payer health care, co-sponsored by 15 Democrats. To call it a plan is, in some sense, too generous: Although it envisions a sweeping and generous system that would make government the primary payer for nearly all health care in the United States and virtually wipe out employer health coverage in the space of just a few years, it is not really a plan. Instead, it is a legislative fantasy built on a combination of wild overconfidence in government and an almost comical refusal to grapple with costs or trade-offs.

Single payer was the goal all along. Obamacare seems to be the "intermediate step" Obama said would be necessary to get us there. I truly hope some of this madness can be reversed. But alas, we now know Republicans were lying when the promised to roll back Obamacare. Democrats still seem focused on putting all health care under a government umbrella. Nobody in DC really wants to fix anything. The DC health care game is about power, not health care.

Power's out

Irma, or at least what was left of it, came through our North Georgia mountains.

Didn't seem like much of a storm by the time it got here, but it took down power in a bunch of places anyway.

Cranked up the lil' generator just after 6:00 am. I have coffee. I have bacon. I should be good for a while.

Say again?

Some media report "undocumented" workers don't have the means to flee Irma... Anyone else see a touch of irony here?

Trump-free zones

"Rahm Emanuel creates ‘Trump-free zone’ for students at Chicago schools"

As long as he knows there are stupid people who buy this kind of B-S, guys like Rahm will continue to exploit. As cities lose upper and middle class residents, and increasingly cater to lower rungs of society (including illegal aliens needed to prop up population numbers), Rahm's kind of politics will escalate, and not just in Chicago.

Gonna be lots of folks on the road next few days

When his people refused to evacuate ahead of the storm, Toonces took the keys to the Dodge and began heading north on his own...


via GIPHY

Long lines for hurricane supplies

This is madness.

Potential hurricane strike less than a week away, and people swarm stores for stuff they should have had on hand anyway. At the very least, stuff they should have bought and stockpiled around the start of hurricane season.

An old Lefty sees things piling up fast

James Howard Kunstler runs down what he sees as near-term reasons to be very wary in the present times.

Updated Post-Harvey sit-rep

Nine oil refineries remain shut down, seven are in the process of re-start, four are operating at reduced levels. Colonial Pipeline didn't restart gasoline transport ops out of Houston area on Sunday as initially outlooked, Tuesday is the new target.

Rain the forecast for early this week may mean more flooding in Houston.

Here's a link to Sunday's DOE post-Harvey update.

If you want to follow daily updates, you'll find them here.

I don't mind so much that gasoline prices rise following a disaster that impacts production, but it's the potential for outages that concern me. I'm still not sure we won't see wider shortages or outages post-Harvey.