Wednesday, October 26, 2022

DAVE'S VOTER GUIDE FOR ALL ELECTIONS

Elections are coming up again, you know, like that shrimp you ate at lunch that tasted a bit off. 

I have listed here some things for all voters to keep in mind as they head to the polls (or don't head to them). 

This guide is less of a "who and what to vote for" than it is a guide for whether or not you SHOULD vote.


  1. If you get ALL your news from Fox News - DON'T VOTE
  2. If you get ALL your news from MSNBC - DON'T VOTE
  3. If you cannot name one famous economist without using Google - DON'T VOTE
  4. If you have not read a fiction novel in the last year - DON'T VOTE
  5. If you think your political party has good intentions but that other party party has BAD ones - DON'T VOTE
  6. If you don't regularly listen to smart people who understand controversial issues argue about them - DON'T VOTE
  7. If you have more than two bumper stickers on your car - DON'T VOTE
  8. If you meet more than 3 people each day who are "Communists" or "Fascists"  - DON'T VOTE


Tuesday, October 25, 2022

THREE FLYING CARS READY TO ROLL INTO THE SKY

How I've longed since boyhood for the arrival of the flying car. This longing goes back well before Blade Runner or The Jetsons. These have been dangled before us since the Wright Brothers first left the ground. Hell it took about 60 years to figure out that we should put cup holders in the ones we do have. And for that matter why did it take so damned long to make wheels on luggage a standard feature? You kids don’t know the tortures we faced while driving, even into the early 80s. First you had to GUESS how long it would take you to get to the airport to pick up your visiting relative, who left you a message on your answering machine from their house phone when they left Dallas at 7am. You’d likely spill a drink in your lap on the way to the airport where you’d meet Aunt Lucy, hopefully where she said she was going to be hours earlier, and then lug her 55 pound suitcase by its plastic handle all the way to your car from the Delta Terminal. The horror….the horror…

Enter cell phones with interactive maps, cars with built-in cup holders and now finally flying automobiles. 

I’ve seen the photos of these new hybrid gizmos and WOW do they look horrible.  Could we not have taken a page from Tesla and made the first ones look super bitchin so everyone would want one?  At best the good ones look like a Hot Wheel with a Lego wing glued to the top. 

I did get the chance to test drive one for a month and I would like to share my experiences.  

First off, my kids were stressing me out, you’d think they would be happy to look out the window over the Grand Canyon but they would not stop arguing…”Dad she’s coming over to my side.” “Daddy, he’s looking at me funny.” Finally I’m like “You wanna get smacked with this hairbrush? Don’t make me land this car!”  Then of course right after takeoff they both want something to eat. I ripped both mirrors off the sides going through the McDonald's fly-through window. 

And the characters you meet up there in their flying cars.  Saw one guy with a bumper sticker that said, “My other car is right in front of you.”  Cut another guy off over the Rocky Mountains and he went full Air Rage on me, that’s gonna be a problem. 

Oh, trying to parallel park over New Mexico and backed into a 747 heading to New York…I tried to leave a note but it kept blowing away. Also I’ve had some big nasty bugs hit my windshield but this was the first time ever I hit an eagle.

By far the most embarrassing thing that happened was I made a full 6-hour trip across the Pacific Ocean from my house in LA all the way to Honolulu and realized my left-turn signal was on the entire time.

Look I’m sure we will iron out those kinks. Frankly I’d like to skip the part where I have to get a pilot’s license and pay for my own flying Prius. I'd rather just skip right to the SELF flying car. 

Imagine calling Air-Uber, it lands right in your driveway, you get into the limo-like interior and it whisks you off to Las Vegas….no checking your bags, you can take that shampoo bottle on board without the body cavity search, and they drop you right at the valet parking at the hotel. 

I only hope I live to see it!


How lame does this look??

Wednesday, October 19, 2022

Monday, October 17, 2022

THE PRICE OF A MEDICAL DEVICE GOING DOWN?????? WHA???


What's that ya say??

News story says, "For the first time, hearing aids are available for purchase over the counter at retailers across the United States."

That is correct.  In a stunning move, the government actually may have fixed a problem. The people who make hearing aids have been raping the public by pretending these things needed to be issued by prescription at great cost to taxpayers and consumers through higher insurance premiums and reimbursements that basically were in place for far too many years for the purpose of enriching scumbags. 

Now if we will be smart enough to realize that the current entire health insurance industry is the problem and not the solution, we might fix every other problem in that area. 

The big problem...

All transactions are best done directly between the provider of the service and the receiver of the service. I buy a MacBook, the only people involved are me and Apple. Or me and Best Buy. They tell me exactly how much it is, I decide if I want to pay that amount, if I do, exchange is made, no surprises.

In healthcare, between me and the doctor are: 1) the insurance company 2) drug companies and of course 3) The government -- as a provider of its own insurance and through regulation of those previous two things. Three levels of obfuscation, which means that no one working in this model can tell me how much something is going to cost. And that translates to costing many multiples of what it should cost.

When the Obama administration set to dealing with healthcare, they chose, right from the onset, deliberately NOT to deal with the artificially high cost. 

Um what?  Yeah they decided NOT to deal with the ONLY PROBLEM, which was that it costs way more than it should.

Ultimately Obamacare just spread the misery around and solved nothing and created more problems. Some poor people benefitted short term but now the costs have continued to rise to a macabre and comical level. One thing Obamacare completely screwed the pooch on is limiting the insurance companies' profit margin. They were capped at a certain percentage, which any economist who is not a moron will tell you will lead to that company not caring if costs go UP. 

Matter of fact it is BETTER that costs shoot up because, for an insurance company, 10 percent of 10 billion is way better than 10 percent of 2 billion. 

They had NO incentive to keep costs down, and every incentive to let them rise. This is all of course part of the plan to make everything so horrifyingly complex and expensive that everyone involved will just agree to throw the whole thing over to the government to handle. 

Which might be, while horrific and stupid for a country this large, better than the dysfunctional hybrid system we have now.

But that is only a "might be."

Let's face it, we are doomed.

Friday, October 14, 2022

MONKEYS "MAY BE EVOLVING INTO NEW HUMAN-LIKE RACE" STUDY FINDS PRIMATES LEAVING TREES



“Monkeys may be evolving to be human — and it looks like they might get there first.” 

Welly welly well…. Planet of the Apes  may not be so far fetched after all.... 


And it’s all due, naturally, to global warming…

Those of us in the know are aware that the earth has an expiration date, a built-in one that involves our sun and a rather annoying tendency toward exploding in a massive supernova after about 9 billion years of life. That resulting massive blast will be large enough to engulf Mercury, then Venus, then Earth, then the massive bunker that the robot version of Elon Musk will still be living in on Mars. 

All gone.

That is depressing enough but now it looks like humans have paved the way for monkeys to make a giant evolutionary step toward humanity …as a matter of fact they may get there before we do! As the temperatures seem to be rising in their natural habitats, the treetops are providing less and less protection and the monkeys are spending more time walking around on the ground. This warming, we are assured, is a direct result of this climate change business — but don’t feel bad if YOU have used your air conditioning and driven your gas-powered car everywhere or flown on jets, it’s only those OTHER mean anti-science folks doing all the same things you are doing who are the cause.

Since we seem to be the agents of this change for our simian sidekicks, I wonder if the they will ever thank us.  Will they have gratitude for us starting their journey toward affordable but high-quality footwear, back pain, home ownership and complex passwords with letters, numbers and a special character?

This notion set me to some day-dreaming....

Living in a world where the new family that moves in on my block may turn out to be a shrieking clan of howler monkeys. Or maybe a pack of gorillas—great, my self esteem is already lacking due to my less than stellar upper body strength. 

Monkeys in the workplace, having to learn about their culture. Warning: chimps often attack by chewing off the lips of their opponent. It is customary for male chimpanzees to just latch on to the nearest female and start humping her right where they are standing— it’s like Leonardo DiCaprio’s yacht parties, although I hear he does not allow face-chewing ever since the Armie Hammer incident. 

We will have to attend classes at work…phrases like "Monkey See Monkey Do" are now a no-no and might be punishable by suspension, termination — or being promoted to head of the Diversity Equity and Inclusion team at your company.  

Actually I do have a family of chimps on the next block, their kids go to my daughter’s school. I am pretty sure they are conservatives because they were objecting to one of the books in the school library called Bicurious George.

Right-wing monkeys are not the norm, as they are natural Democrats: most of them are non-white and low-income, they are unsheltered with high unemployment and most are vegetarians who experience food insecurity on a daily basis. They also have trouble procuring ID to vote which is why the the Biden Administration as set up thousands of new voter registration sites in the rainforests of Asia and Africa. 

Republicans better take steps now to peel off some of that new demo. I would suggest lobbying gun makers and designers of pickup trucks to start retooling everything to be non opposable-thumb friendly. 

Share this story if you got a chuckle out of it would ya? Thanks.

and check out the original story if you want to, at this link…

NEWS ITEM THAT CANNOT BE PROVEN FOR A FEW BILLION YEARS BUT HEY

Wednesday, September 28, 2022

GAVIN AND THE HOMELESS FACTORY


California Politicians thinking the homeless are just multiplying faster and faster like the chocolates in this classic Lucy episode - but THEY ARE THE ONES MAKING THEM COME OUT FASTER!

I just read an article on how bad the "homeless" problem is in California. I use quotes around that word because it seems most of the people we call homeless are addicts in some form other another. Either they are addicted to a drug, alcohol, or simply addicted to street camping.  And if those people prefer living there, why would we call them homeless.  

They have a home and they like it, and they don’t have to pay any rent or follow any particular rules.

The homeless population has increased greatly each year in California.

The California officials are still making the problem worse without even knowing it. 

First of all they keep saying it is "their" problem, as in government's problem.

This takes away responsibility from the actual street campers. If you are mentally ill, that is the government's problem. 

You're addicted? You just like to party under the stars? That's your problem. And you are making it my problem.

They need to be in jail or we need to have some other incentive to stop that behavior. We used to do it by jailing vagrants and generally frowning on that behavior. 

But Leftists seem to DESPISE making anyone in their victim constituency (which is how they identify now) feel uncomfortable in any way. You have to pay back loans? That's terrible! You have to work at a job you don't love? That's terrible! You have to pay for healthcare or birth control? That's terrible! Someone has a different opinion than you do on some controversial issue? That's terrible!

Look, have you folks running California considered that this attitude of "don't ever blame anyone for anything that has a bad impact on their lives" is actually INCREASING street campers? (only exception is straight white males who are quite literally blamed for every ill of society including this one) 

Yeah. I know. You will never admit it.

Just keep doing what you been doing. Just do it harder....

Speed up that conveyor belt and keep jamming stuff into your shirt and under your hat...

Nice one, California.

Saturday, September 24, 2022

STOP YOUR BACK PAIN - LIKE RIGHT NOW - SERIOUSLY...PROMISE


I have plumbed the depths of despair with chronic shooting leg pains, back pains, watching the clock all day and all night counting the hours till the next pain pill. 

I am 55 now, it started when I was about 25. Maybe a racquetball mishap. I walked with my spine twisted for a few weeks after that but it slowly went away.

Years later it came back, a little worse and would last a little longer each time it came back.

A few years ago it hung around for about six months. I paid 4k out of pocket for non surgical spinal decompression, which seemed to do the trick. I was pain free after about 15 sessions. Strange thing is the guy told me it would be about 15 sessions...and then exactly 15 sessions later, I felt great.  I now think there is a very good chance that that was a placebo cure. I will get to that,

A few things you must know about pain in general, and the spine, and doctors, and the brain.

1) The spine is very strong and resilient and heals quickly.

2) The brain is in charge of all pain the body feels.

3) Bulging discs among people over the age of 30 are almost a given. Everyone has them, yet most people do not have back pain.

4) The Placebo effect is very real and well known to science: you can give someone a tic-tac and tell them it is a powerful pain killer and their pain will go away.

5) The Nocebo effect is also real and well known to science: you can give someone a heavy duty pain killing pill and tell someone that it it is a tic-tac and their pain will NOT go away.

6) Back specialists can take a look at 1000 spinal X-rays and MRIs with all sorts of horrible things in them--bone on bone vertebrae, bulging discs, ruptured discs, lesions -- and these back doctors cannot reliably predict which patients will have pain and which will not. Some with crazy damage have no pain, and someone with a slightly bulging disc has been in a wheelchair for 6 years.

7) Back surgery has a very low success rate. Often people will be fine for a while, then the pain comes back in some other part of their back.

The last time I had back pain it was taking the normal trajectory. I felt I was in for another few months of agony, but when my pain was at its apogee, the highest point in the arc and I knew I had many months to go, I sat in my kitchen, talking to myself, and the pain drained from a 9 down to a zero in perhaps seven seconds. And it did not come back.

Is this to say that back pain is all in your head?  Sort of, the pain is real, it is just a matter of what is causing it.  Your brain may indeed detect that something is off, or there has been some injury and the other knowledge surrounding spinal stuff kicks in and your brain gives you this very real pain.

So now I am gonna ask you to watch this video that John Stossel did on Dr. a John Sarno, who is a back pain specialist with probably the best record of actually curing people of their chronic pain JUST BY TALKING TI THEM.  

Here it is. Go. And continue on down the rabbit hole until your pain just goes away…it really really can happen.  

https://youtu.be/8jQtmSZetJM


A QUICK GUIDE TO NOT GETTING RIPPED OFF BY A DOCTOR

    I recently had some dental work done. I had to get a few wisdom teeth removed. I was in some pain and was not in much of a mood to slow ...