OF COURSE THE DEATH PENALTY IS A DETERRENT

Always found the assertion that the death penalty is not a deterrent for murder to be spectacularly stupid. 

If you think the death penalty is not a deterrent for murder then why would prison be a deterrent? I mean obviously we should not bother to put people in jail if it is not a deterrent.

There is also the faction of people who say they cannot support the death penalty because we can never be sure we are not executing an innocent person.

To which I say: then why put anyone in prison of we can't ever be 100 percent sure of their guilt? I guess they are willing to deprive someone of their freedom without that 100 percent track record but not their life. Okay that makes some sort of sense I suppose.

Hell, I am deterred from parking in front of my house on street sweeper day with the threat of a 40 dollar ticket. Don't tell me deterrents don't work.

Amusing Anecdotes from a Regular Day

I coined a phrase years ago—at least I never heard it uttered by anyone else.  Have you ever heard of check-dar?  It’s kind of like gaydar, which is very handy both if you are looking for a hookup at a monster truck rally and don’t want to rile up some “fag hatin” hillbilly, or if you don’t want to accidentally set up that guy you work with who is actually gay but you were not aware of it, with some lady. No, check-dar is something I have have been afflicted with. 

Symptoms? Well, my body seems to gravitate toward any grocery store line where the person in front of me is writing a check.  It’s some mystical power that I know not whence it came. Thankfully due to the the advent of credit cards and debit cards and other money exchanging apps, I only get a rare flare-up of my checkdar. Today was a doozy. Got behind a woman who had perhaps six to eight times the number of items one should be gunning for in the Express Checkout Lane, then she had divided up her stuff into two or maybe three different transactions….perhaps she was buying stuff for a neighbor who wisely did not want to go to the store with her, then she whipped out her checkbook to pay. 

She was also a coupon enthusiast and had many laid out on the checkout stand, which of course, after being rung up, caused some sort of problem with the receipt that the manager had to come over and solve. This seemed to take double or triple the time that I have ever had to spend getting some issue resolved at the checkout stand. She dared not look up to make eye contact with the one, now two, now three, now four people who were stacking up behind her.  Heck just a look over at us to say, sorry guys, would be a nice gesture…I find that that eases the tension whenever I am that guy. But nope. She stared straight ahead…like I do when I am passing that homeless veteran guy just outside the exit door. 

Then I’m driving to pick up my daughter who just texted me to give me more info as to when she will be downstairs where I can collect her. As part of those Bluetooth features, my car shows messages on the dashboard touch screen. I heard the ding and I took my eyes off the road to read a message that told me that I could not read the text message while the vehicle is moving. Really….Really? 

Really….

This message appearing on my screen while the vehicle was moving told me that I could not read messages while in motion - a message that was obviously the idea of some lawyer. I kind of feel like lawyers have been ruining life more often lately than they used to. Years ago when my daughters were little tykes, we bought these car seats as required by law. I think I counted thirteen rather frightening warning labels on each of these things. Dare I strap my precious little ones into these risky contraptions? Can you imagine if cars were invented last week and we consulted lawyers on whether we should allow anyone who had achieved the age of 16 years to drive these things anywhere they want, these things that could get up to 140 miles per hour in some cases? With just a round wheel that lets you point them any old way you want? Or how about skiing and snowboarding… listen, we’d like people to pay us to let them ride up a steep mountain in a chair suspended on a cable…will they be strapped in? Oh his no, they have to be able to lift up the flimsy lap bar so they can then slide down a slipper snowy hill with boards strapped to their feet. Won’t that make it be hard to stand up with boards strapped to your feet? Oh, no, we also give them five foot long poles with spikes on the end, to steady themselves, so problem solved! 

And these people were in charge of COVID policy for two years….

And after yesterday's election I see they are STILL in charge.

Nice one.

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

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??

DEAD SLAPPENING - HILARIOUS

My 13-year old daughter came up with this one... 

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.

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