Clips removed from gas pumps

The old crackpot is glad to see that California has taken care of it's biggest issue - the latches on gas pumps.

Now that that's out of the way, maybe they focus on more trivial things, like the state budget.

What a pathetic state of affairs and lack of priorities.

AP: Swedish prosecutors defend WikiLeaks about-face

And there's more...

AP: Sweden withdraws warrant for WikiLeaks founder

It just gets more strange.

AP: Sweden seeks WikiLeaks founder arrest in rape case

And so the official smearing begins...

The iPhone 4 is the psycho girlfriend you can't break up with

Okay guys, you know what I'm talking about here. The iPhone 4 is the total psycho girlfriend you can't break up with because she's just so damn beautiful.

First of all, there's the antenna problem. God only knows why Apple allowed it to be released it was known two years prior, as some reports suggest, that Apple knew about the issue. I know, I know. The phone aspect of the iPhone is just a feature. This Apple fanboy has heard it all before.

But, damn, the phone is so comfortable to the touch and smooth to hold.

Then there's issue of spam that for some reason Apple can't seem incorporate a spam filter into the mail program - the same goes for the iPad in that area too. Hundreds of spams a day. Come on Jobsey, not all of can use providers who use good anti-spam technology on their servers. The filter is the best thing - I never see the spam on my iMac.

But damn, that iPhone retina screen is so fine to look at. You just can't stop staring at it.

But is’t so sensitive to the touch that it hangs up on you when you’re talking to someone on the phone feature if the screen gets too close to your face. It can be so sensitive that you don’t even feel yourself touch it and an app or a button or something will activate. That’s a WTF?.

But damn, it’s so smooth to the touch. The iPhone 4 is truly like the psycho girlfriend you can’t break up with.

Stop everything: California has a major crisis on its hands

The State of California has some pretty serious problems. Never mind the $19 billion budget shortfall, furloughed workers, the decaying state of education, illegal immigration or having to do more with less when it comes to emergency services. That’s not the state’s biggest problem, if you were to look at the Capitol buzz. Never mind the fact that Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger said he wouldn’t sign a budget if the legislators won’t send him a responsible plan and make it the next governor’s problem. That’s not a big deal compared to what’s brewing.

Here’s the big concern: gas clips. State administrators want them removed from gas pumps. You know, the clips on gas pumps that keep the pump running so you don’t have to hold the handle in place while your car fills and you can do something else. That’s a pretty big concern in Sacramento because there have been a whopping 10 spills reported over the past year because of the clips not disengaging when a tank filled.

Ten spills. There are around 37 million people in California, and as the Atlantic points out, that’s a 0.000001 percent failure rate. But that’s 0.000001 percent too much, and our protectors in Sacramento are on the case.

Get a life people, and go to work on the state’s real problems. Maybe there are too many people employed by the state if they have to sit around come up with make-work projects like this to have something to do.

Meg Whitman opens her mouth and a fart comes out

Sipping the jitter juice really got the Crackpot worked up when California governor Meg Whitman talked out of both sides of her mouth about the illegal immigrant law in Arizona after parts of it were blocked by a federal judge.

“You know, I’m running for the governor of California, so I had to make a decision,” Whitman said. “Does the Arizona law make sense for California? And I have said no, I don’t think the Arizona law makes sense for California because we have a much bigger state with much bigger geography.”

What kind of bullshit answer is that? The Crackpot can’t seem to quite understand this. Granted, Arizona covers 114,006 square miles, compared to California’s 163,707 square miles, but what Whitman says is that the issue is too big for California law enforcement to handle because of the state’s geography?

Well, just a sweep through the flat Central Valley would really knock down a huge part of the problem in California. That could be a start, Meg. Then move down through Southern California and near the border. Then conduct a few sweeps in Northern California. I don’t it’s that hard of a problem to tackle.

But this comes from the candidate who says she can fix California government but really doesn’t have a plan. This comes from the candidate who makes statements similar to Arnold Schwarzenegger’s when he originally ran for governor. She says that difference between her and Schwarzenegger is that she has business experience. Hmmm. How is that going to help in government when she has to work with people across the aisle? She doesn’t go into any detail there. Unlike a CEO, she can’t say, “You’re fired!” and be queen for a day.

If she becomes the state’s next governor, and she goes in with the attitude that she can fix the state’s issues because has business experience, she’s going to fail just like Schwarzenegger did.

The sad part is that people are going to take her doublespeak, elect her, and wonder what they hell they did and then replace her after four years with someone else who will do the same to them.

On the illegal immigration issue, it doesn’t matter if a person is brown, white, red, yellow or whatever. What is so hard about following the law and doing the things the legal way? I don’t understand. . .

The count matters; the tactics suck

While sipping on a cup of morning gasoline, the Crackpot noticed this story from the AP, wherein a U.S. Census worker decides to trespass onto a private citizen's property and insists on not leaving the property owner alone after being told to leave.

The Crackpot understands that every ten years, the federal government is required to conduct a census under the law, but at the same time where is the line drawn between what the ever-intruding-in-your-life government wants and the privacy from the government the people want to enjoy, especially in a time where there is an anti-government sentiment in the nation.

According to the story, census worker Russell Haas said he was trained to be persistent by the census bureau. Do they train you to trespass and badger? Is that where your tax dollars are going?

"Dude, you have to be in the Census," Haas said, to the property owner, an off-duty police officer, who presented his badge to Haas.

Haas' claim to the property owner is so Atlas Shrugged, and it seems that he should told him, "It's your patriotic duty to comply. It's for the good of the people."

Celeste Jimenez, of the Los Angeles Regional Census Center, said it's important for residents to participate.

"It affects how over $400 billion of federal funding are allocated each year to states for infrastructure and services such as hospitals, job training centers, schools, emergency services," she said.

Well, that's good and all, but the the larger question is how much government needs to be in our lives? Why does it feel that it needs to keep expanding by giving money to these matters? That sounds bad, but everything is underfunded as it is, and no matter how much money is thrown at something, people are going to claim that more is needed for it to work. The government certainly can't manage very effectively the things that are on it's plate, and there redundancies in departments and redundancies between agencies; wars drag on; nonsense spending at our expense.

The Crackpot seems to have digressed here and strayed from the topic. To get back on track, the Crackpot hopes the judge throws the book at Haas to make an example of him. The federal government can't do as it pleases "in the name of the public good." This country's founders gave its citizens the right to privacy from the government.

Now, the Census Bureau showed up with a court order and the resident comply, that would be different, and that's another discussion all together. But in this case, the government overstepped its bounds.

Disclosure

So many things to for the Crackpot to write about. So many things going on. BP. McChrystal. Obama. WikiLeaks. A Nebraskan town’s passage of an illegal immigration law. Cell phone radiation disclosures in a California city. Information. The abundance of it and the purposeful lack of it, and too many things to touch on that would end in a dissertation.

This inspiration for this writing comes from one my favorite crackpots, Dan Carlin, who does the Common Sense podcast. His latest podcast, released on June 21, is was called “Indecent Disclosure” and makes complete sense.

The U.S. Coast Guard and local law enforcement is keeping the press away from the beaches in Louisiana - strange in a land where we’re granted the right of the freedom of the press.

"Journalists struggling to document the impact of the oil rig explosion have repeatedly found themselves turned away from public areas affected by the spill, and not only by BP and its contractors, but by local law enforcement, the Coast Guard and government officials," The New York Times reports, as reported in The Christian Science Monitor.

On top of that, it seems that every time we turn around, we learn something more about how much oil is really gushing out of the well under the Gulf of Mexico. So BP has issues with disclosing what’s really pouring out down there. And it seems that BP CEO Tony Hayward got his life back.

What happened to the Constitution? What happened to the people’s right to know, and more importantly, what’s going on down there that they don’t want you to know? What’s going on down there on the beaches and in the gulf that your government would trample on your rights from the federal to the local level? What could be so secret that they would shit on the oath they take to uphold the laws and the constitution they’re bound to protect and enforce? What would the public think?

Briefly mentioned and falling from the national spotlight was when the voters in the town of Fremont, Nebraska voted to pass a law that banned the hiring or the renting of property to illegal immigrants. Why did this hit the news and disappear so quickly? Is it a topic that just isn’t newsworthy anymore? Have we been over-saturated with Arizona? Don’t know. The only place you seem to see this anymore is Fox News, aka Fox Opinion disguised as news.

Love them or hate them, Wikileaks is important. They reveal things to the public. They reveal the ugly truth that is hidden from the general public, and you get to see some harsh realities of this world.

Earlier this year, Wikileaks released footage it obtained of a U.S. helicopter attack on the enemy in Iraq that turned out to be two journalists that killed them, along with children.

Okay, as horrible as it is, that’s the reality of war. You’re in combat zone, shit can and will happen. It’s kill or be killed. Civilian casualties suck, but they're part of war. What’s important is this truth of war was brought to the public’s attention. This is stuff that the government doesn’t want you to see or know about. Why? They want to process their war, and they want to give you the GI Joe cartoon rose colored glasses version. As members of a “free” and “democratic” society have the right to know what their government is doing and how it’s doing it.

Now, according to the BBC, Wikileaks is preparing to release video from an attack in Afghanistan in 2009 where U.S. forces killed several civilians in a village. These are the harsh realities of war, and until the video is released - hopefully without an editing on Wikileaks’ part so we can see the whole picture and judge for ourselves - we won’t know if the attack was warranted or not.

In California, the city of San Francisco is requiring cellular phone retailers to post the radiation output levels of the phones along side of them. This has raised the hackles of the retailers and the cellular providers. San Francisco is the first city to require this, and the cell industry fears that others jurisdictions may also start to require this, or even the state of California itself. The fear continues along the saying, “As California goes, so goes the rest of nation.”

Other countries - France, Germany, Great Britain and Israel require this. Don't know how this has effected cellular sales in those countries.

What’s wrong with the public having this information? The jury is still out as to if cell phones cause cancer. At best, it’ll force cell phone manufacturers to create phones that omit less radiation. At worst, nothing will change. People will buy cell phones. They are a necessity in our way of life.

Why won’t the FDA or EPA require something like this? Dan Carlin makes the point the federal government doesn’t look out for the people it’s supposed to protect. He’s right. Local jurisdictions are looking out for consumer protection in these matters, such as San Francisco. Hopefully others will follow. What’s the big secret? What are they trying to hide? What do they know that the rest of us don’t. What don’t they want us to know? And why is the federal government so complicit? Why doesn't the federal government concerned about safety if its citizens?

I would like my life back

British Petroleum CEO Tony Hayward wants his life back. Okay, he's a tard to the nth degree, and that's an insult to people with mental disabilities. The Crackpot couldn't believe this one and choked on the swallow of jitter juice when this comment was brought to his attention.

Hayward, who in 2009 earned a salary of £1,045,000, which equals the paltry sum of $1,527,331 USD, and doesn't include his multi-millions in bonuses, has been inconvenienced. It's unfortunate that he has to dedicate so much of his time to working on the massive oil spill mess that his company caused on his watch that has pretty much wrecked the lives of people who make a living in the Gulf of Mexico off the Louisiana coast. It's a crying shame that he has to deal with this thorn in his side when families are grieving over the loss the 11 people who died on the oil rig explosion. Poor Tony. Life must me really rough. The poor limey bastard probably has to put in a full day's day work and maybe even overtime.

While Hayward would like his probably cushy life back, Tom Young, a fisherman from Louisiana's oil-soaked coast said his way of life is over.

"It's the end, the apocalypse and no one outside of these few parishes really cares," Young said in an interview in the the Times Online. "They say they do, but they don't do nothing but talk…Where's the person who says these are real people, real people with families, and they are hurting."

Are the Mexican's at fault for our immigration ills?

While drinking a cup of morning mud, it occurred to the Crackpot while thinking about the Arizona law that has the bleeding hearts so pissed and so many true Americans so happy really isn't about the illegals who come across the border, work in our factories and fields and collect our welfare.

I talk to people, and they're so pissed at the Mexican citizens for being here illegally and taking advantage of our system. They're pissed at Mexican president Felipe Calderón for going off about the law that draws the line that will send his people packing across state lines to California and New Mexico. Maybe Colorado and Utah too.

Now, if we were piss poor and needed opportunity, we certainly couldn't go south. We'd go north - to Canada.

Not too sure what Canada's immigration laws are and how they treat illegals in their borders, but we do know what the Mexican laws are. When Calderón was interviewed by CNN, he said they're deported the first time and jailed the second time.

Sounds like they know how to handle illegals in their land and take advantage of our laws to benefit their people.

So, while our anger is pointed at the Mexican people, it really needs to pointed at our elected leaders - both Democrat and Republican. They're one's who are really to blame - regardless of their political label. They're going to feed you the bullshit you want to hear so they can get elected and reelected, and then they're going to do what they're going to until it's election time again, and there they'll point the finger at their opposition from across the aisle and blame them. They'll scream they're the candidate of change and have been "fighting" for you, and they'll land another term. But since they've been "fighting" for you, and they haven't achieved, maybe they don't really know how to fight - just how to get reelected and give their special interest contributors a great blow job and how to bend you over and make you squeal like a pig. It's all about gratification - just not yours.

Or, if we really want to simplify the problem of our unsecured border to the south, we could always dump 100,000 alligators in the Rio Grande and see what shakes out.

Coach makes players drink from shoe

Okay, this is one of those “What the fuck where they thinking?” things. Some dumb coach at South Tahoe High School in California with a jock mentality had eight players on her softball team drink soda from a shoe who struck out during a game.

Is this something that happens in everyday life, and we just missed it. Where did coach Anneliese Neitling, who apologized after the fact, get off thinking this was acceptable behavior? It makes one question her family values and how she was raised. God only knows what went on her family.

Can you get athlete’s foot in your mouth from drinking from a shoe? Is that possible?

"People learn from mistakes," said Lake Tahoe Unified School District superintendent James Tarwater. "She does a good job pulling the team together, morale-wise and support-wise."

He sounds like a pretty forgiving guy.

School districts are handing out pink slips left and right to teachers and staff because of California’s budget woes. One can wonder if Neitling is on that list now - or maybe hope.

Stupid should hurt.

Read the article.

Goodbye, Sweet America

Today the U.S. Congress stopped by the café. Jesus, what a convoluted mess. It took hours just to serve the bean juice because ordering it was like going through a committee. If they have this much trouble ordering a cup of joe, it’s no wonder they can’t get anything done in that area of 87-square miles surrounded by reality.

Who are these people? Are they best the country has to offer in terms of leadership? While listening to the conversations and bickering, it was easy to see that common sense is hardly present, and, well, maybe it’s time pack our bags and head to Canada or something. Goodbye, Sweet America. You aren’t the America we grew up in.

Beef: It's NOT what's for dinner

ABC News: Report Says Contaminated Meat Is In Supermarkets

It is a frightening picture: beef contaminated with toxic heavy metals, pesticides and antibiotics making its way into the nation's supermarkets.

Phyllis K. Fong, the Agriculture Department's inspector general, looked at how beef is tested for harmful substances.

According to her new report, inspectors charged with checking cattle for disease and meat for contaminants were, "unable to determine if meat has unacceptable levels of... potentially hazardous substances [and do] not test for pesticides... determined to be of high risk."

The inspectors also failed to test beef for 23 pesticides, the report says.

To read the entire article, click here.

Read the FSIS National Residue Program for Cattle report here.

Commentary: What happened to the FDA and protection for consumers? What's the real story here? It looks like the dollar is more important than human life.

In 2008, copper metal, which can cause jaundice, kidney failure and death, was found in beef being imported to Mexico from the U.S., and the Mexican authorities wouldn't allow it in. Why is that Mexican law prohibits this, but U.S. law doesn't?

More importantly, it would take a law, and not good conscience, to make U.S. beef companies not poison their own customers. Where the hell is the government in this? Why doesn't the government care about the health of its citizens? If it does, it doesn't act like it - on various levels, not just with the beef industry. After all, it's going to have to pay to heal the people that'll fall victim to tainted beef now. This whole thing is a giant "Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?"

And then there were the incidents in 2007 and 2008, the that report, issued in March of this year, states, inspectors discovered beef that was loaded with excessive amounts of contaminants far beyond what is acceptable, and yet, they didn't issue a recall. WTF?

But then there's the conditions at the meat packing companies themselves. At the turn of the 20th Century, President Theodore Roosevelt took on the meat companies and had legislation passed that made them get their act together as well as respect their workers, and at one point, working in the meat packing industry was a decent wage earning job with good benefits. A lot of that has fallen by the wayside, and we seem to be back where we were before the turn of the 20th Century in respect to the quality of the potentially lethal disease being put on your plate that tastes so good.

ABA Journal: School District Snapped 56,000 Images on Student Webcams

An upscale suburban Philadelphia school district accused of secretly snapping photos of high school students at home via webcams on their district-issued laptop computers has completed an investigation.

And it apparently supports at least some of the claims made in a federal lawsuit filed by the parents of one sophomore. The district says school officials remotely activated the webcams 146 times, snapping a total of nearly 56,000 images, reports the Philadelphia Inquirer.

While many of the records could not be recovered, images found included photos of students, at least some photos inside their homes and screen shots showing programs or files, investigators state. Most of the time, technicians turned on the webcam when a laptop was reported lost or stolen and then turned it off when the machine was found. In some cases, however, the webcam wasn't turned off and simply kept snapping a new image every 15 minutes, accounting for some 13,000 of the total tally, according to the newspaper.

Read the entire story here.

Commentary: Apparently, George Orwell's 1984 isn't on the required reading list at this Philadelphia high school in the Lower Merion School District. The true crackpots are the people who hatched this idea, and it's really hard to believe that nobody involved this from the beginning didn't raise a question about this - nobody? This is a big Whiskey Tango Foxtrot.

Why couldn't just put a GPS software or device in the computers to see where they were if they were reported lost or stolen.

And what on earth did the school official who contacted the parents of the boy who he thought was popping pills think would happen when he said there were pictures of their son doing this? Did he just think they'ed turn around and thank him for it? If this is the case, then he's a frickin' moron.

The people who oversaw this program need to be held accountable to the fullest extent of the law, and the school district should be sued into bankruptcy. What a bunch of crackpots.

Daily Mail: Women who wear revealing clothing cause earthquakes

Women who wear revealing clothing and behave promiscuously are to blame for earthquakes, a senior Iranian cleric has said.

Hojatoleslam Kazem Sedighi's comments follow a warning by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad that a quake is certain to hit the capital Tehran and that many residents should relocate.

In a prayer sermon, the cleric said: 'Many women who do not dress modestly... lead young men astray, corrupt their chastity and spread adultery in society, which increases earthquakes.'

To read the entire article, click here.

Commentary: Thank God we've got that all cleared up! Not sure what else to say about this. Case closed.