“I predict future happiness for Americans if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them.” -Thomas Jefferson

Please have a safe and happy fourth!

Blog Note - Today is not only our nation’s Independence Day; it’s also the third anniversary of this website, sincityq.com.

First Post - July 4th 2005

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“Stupid can be measured by the degree of customer service you don’t get from any business.” -Redoubt

I have to tell you, it has been a very depressing day.

No, it’s not that the world may end at any moment (though it is a distinct possibility). It’s just that the further we move into this age of technology, the further apart the space between the customer and the business.

To wit: We have had several websites hosted by Yahoo for a number of years. In fact, if Yahoo had been a little less anal in 2005, this site may have been hosted by them. But they weren’t into blogs then, and now, they aren’t into allowing long time customers to pay for their websites by the month either.

This site is a monthly pay to our host, Tierhost who, while not perfect, has never crashed and burned for so long that we actually began to pack our bags. But today while trying to set up a new website, we found that Yahoo Webhosting has become obtuse, rude and entirely too big for their tight little panties.

Basically, they demand you pay three months up front for a website that may or may not survive a week.

I like monthly payments. My house note is monthly, the note on the ’07 Chrysler PT Cruiser is monthly, the bills from the hospital are monthly and by all that is holy, God Himself made women monthly!

Screw Yahoo. I hope they suck sewer snot.

Meantime, we are busily looking for a really good webhosting service where we can register a new domain, get our website grounded and do so without having to get all kinds of fecal matter on our screen.

Any ideas? We’re open to them.

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“If it keeps up, man will atrophy all his limbs but the push-button finger.” 
-Frank Lloyd Wright

I guess it’s just part of living in the middle of nowhere. I mean, where else but nowhere does the local TV station call the potential closing of a coffee shop, headline news?

Oh yes, so Starbucks is really popular and trendy. It ranks right up there with… um, bottled water and cell phones.

And speaking of the latter, we went to a local Verizon outlet today to have our cell battery replaced. We signed a two-year contract but the battery failed after eleven and a half months… just shy of the warrantee deadline. (Damn!)

What this means is that the phone with the phaulty battery is less than a year old. But to our surprise, the customer service rep (who could have passed for a really skippy junior high school student) tells us that the phone is obsolete so… they will have to order a replacement that will take a week or better to arrive.

Ahem! Better Half had yours truly remain safely in the car outside… parked far enough away so that the Verizon student-employee inside wouldn’t hear me demand a new phone with a rotary dial instead of the newer technology that can’t maintain 12 months of service without immediately failing from designed obsolescence!

Back to the coffee shop thing, though… you can bet that by the time that your nearest Starbucks’ closes, someone will have invented a new way to deliver massive amounts of caffeine that doesn’t require one to have to actually consume the black goo.

You know, get that same buzz just by sticking your tongue into the nearest electric socket? If you can hack a metro, you should do pretty well with the power current… and there’s none of that after-taste.

That would be worth a headline… and a film at 6 and 11.

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“The cost of living has gone up another dollar a quart.”
 - W. C. Fields

One thing most of us have in common is that we buy our electricity from The Southern Company through their Alabama and Georgia Power fronts. From here, I can tell you that our monthly bill here has risen dramatically… to the tune of a bit over $120 a month.

At first, it just seemed to make sense that we were somehow using more. We do run the A/C and as the summer rolls in and the heat creeps up, the machine has to work harder to meet the demands of the thermostat. But after reviewing our billing for the last three summers, there was still a lot of unexplained bill there. Even taking into account the recent rate increases; there was not sufficient correlation to explain the numbers.

By the way, that $120 per month increase we’ve seen constitutes about a 30% increase over this time last year… and no, we don’t have a leak in our wiring, thank you.

Then there was the little news tidbit from WRBL that told of a Georgia Power customer whose bill jumped from $46 a month to over $400!

Okay, at least I know now that I’m not crazy… or only one to be asking questions.

The article goes on to tell how that the power company explained it all away like this: “A Georgia Power spokesperson says it’s summer and that customers should expect an increase during the summer months and early fall, the peak times for electricity.”

Excuse me, but a jump from $46 to $60 or even $75 might be understandable but from $46 to over $400? And then for the power company rep to simply brush it off like it was normal?

Since we have long since lost any real oversight from our individual state Public Service Commissions, we sincerely hope that WRBL will follow this story up and demand a better answer from the power barons.

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“There are many things that we would throw away if we were not afraid that others might pick them up.” -Oscar Wilde

Just when you thought it was safe to watch TV again…

This time, it is those poor, malnourished and otherwise financially abused actors who may be ready to strike. What that means for us out here in the real world - where there are fewer high-end Mercedes’ and Limousines than yesterday’s Fords and Chevys - is that you may be watching leftovers once again…

Hollywood film producers have made a last-ditch offer to actors in their pay dispute, and warned the entertainment industry is already on de facto strike.
[…]

They said the offer was worth more than $250m (£125m) and addressed actors’ key concerns over revenue from new media.

The Screen Actors Guild (SAG) said the offer did not appear promising.

From “Hollywood actors mull pay offer”
- BBC - 1 July 2008

The potential for another Hollywood walk-out doesn’t do a doggone thing for us here.

These folks are not hold up hungry in some mountain hovel in Appalachia, or trying to balance the cost of a gallon of $4 gas against the commute to earn a meager income. The notion of these screen actors as starving artists just doesn’t manifest itself in reality. Even factoring in those exorbitant west coast expenses… like that of a daily coke habit or the price of a pair of prerequisite diamond-studded sunglasses; trying to imagine actors as being truly needy is simply ridiculous.

Let ‘em strike. I hope they all end up on the inside of a McDonald’s drive-through window.

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“I ask, sir, what is the militia? It is the whole people, except for a few public officials.”
“To disarm the people is the best and most effectual way to enslave them.”
-George Mason

The gun control lobby is burning white hot over the recent SCOTUS ruling that rolled back the Washington DC gun ban, and threatens a number of other big city attempts to disarm its citizens. And in the midst of their rage, they’ve enlisted the Main Scream Media to shout this down as being bad for America. In fact, they’ve even borrowed the popular overseas slogan, ‘Culture of guns’.

Culture of guns?

Completely ignored is the culture that sent a man to the moon, invented the modern automobile, powered flight, discovered many medicines and cures, created electronic communication methods and for all that matters, saved the world from slipping into a 20th century dark-age of fascism.

“Germans who wish to use firearms should join the SS or the SA - ordinary citizens don’t need guns, as their having guns doesn’t serve the State.”
-Heinrich Himmler 

Calling America a culture of guns is not only a form of deceitful propaganda; it purposely neglects the whole of what American culture is really all about. But far worse than even that, it forwards the misconception that people are incapable of thinking and acting of their own volition. It renders us from a mature society responsible for its own behavior into a collection of 300 million zombies who desperately require a controlling nanny state apparatus.

What the gun control lobby has no interest in doing is addressing the root causes of urban violence and lawlessness. There is simply not an ounce of real effort to call into account how popular culture has embraced ignorance and crime as virtues.

If there was ever a situation that absolutely crystallized that old saying about how if guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns, this is it. For all the effort to remove legal gun ownership from the big city environment, there was and is still an abundance of them illegally in the hands of the gangster, criminal element.

In the months and years to come, there will be renewed attacks on the exact wording of the Second Amendment. There will be challenges to our right to own guns based on the momentary interpretation of what may or may not have been the intentions of the Founding Fathers. And depending on whom we choose as our next president, and whom he may install into the SCOTUS, our right to lawfully own firearms could well be in dire peril still.

“Guard with jealous attention the public liberty. Suspect everyone who approaches that jewel. Unfortunately, nothing will preserve it but downright force. Whenever you give up that force, you are inevitably ruined”
-Patrick Henry

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“For most folks, no news is good news; for the press, good news is not news.”
 -Gloria Borger

Welcome to the weekend. News checks in but it doesn’t check out… until Monday.

The 12th Street Rag does have a little piece regarding local power bills, though. Georgia Power followed the example of their Siamese Twin, Alabama Power and jacked their rates to match that of gas prices. And since the individual Public Service Commissions (PSCs) of both states have been reduced to fully owned keepers of the spring-loaded rubber-stamp, you probably shouldn’t expect anything like… um, Public Service from them.

‘Public’ service? What a silly notion!

Here, our power bill jumped well over $100 a month from a series of those bouncy little rate hikes. And coincidentally… or maybe not, that’s just about what our gasoline expense has done as well. Between the electric bill and the cost of regular unleaded, our monthly budget for living has been reduced to third world status.

It’s all quite connected too. The cost of gasoline is directly linked to other things… like hamburger, dish detergent and toilet paper. But on the upside, if you can’t afford to eat, you won’t be washing a lot of dishes or, as it happens, need much of that latter product either.

Oh, and speaking of stupid government tricks, it looks as though someone has decided that we shouldn’t be investing in solar power right now…

Faced with a surge in the number of proposed solar power plants, the federal government has placed a moratorium on new solar projects on public land until it studies their environmental impact, which is expected to take about two years.

From “Citing Need for Assessments, U.S. Freezes Solar Energy Projects”
- New York Times - 27 June 2008

Good to nip that mean old solar power in the bud now… before those same PSCs are called upon, by the public (gasp!), to roll all those rate-hikes back again!

Dang sure can’t have any of that! Solar power… what in the heck were they thinking?

Closer to home, the ants have returned with a spring offensive!

After last year’s humiliating defeat, it had been hoped they wouldn’t try again this year but… they briefly infiltrated the garden with a spring offensive, costing us a few tomatoes and a squash plant. Our counter-surge stopped their advance, though, and turned their lines, routing them from their entrenchments.

A number of prisoners were taken from the melee and after tossing them into a spider web, they were happy to tell us where their HQ was. That led to a successful bombing campaign that destroyed their command and control center.

So, while tomatoes are running about $2+ a pound at the local Winn Dixie, ours cost all of about 2 minutes of time to pick, wash and set on the window sill.

Talk about economic recovery!

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“Nature knows no indecencies; man invents them.” -Mark Twain

Well, there it was for all the nation to see; the reason for crime in America’s great urban jungles was just that simple. The big CBS News headline reads: “Gun-Plagued Cities Decry Handgun Ruling”

Actually, you don’t really need to go any further than the first three words; ‘Gun-Plagued-Cities’.

It sounds like a problem that Egypt may have once had when God and Moses teamed up to lead the Israelites from bondage. You know, those nasty plagues? The water turning to blood, the frogs, the angel of death, etc.

Well, this is the 21st Century US of A and here we have modern cities suffering from a plague of guns. They probably fall from the sky in the dark of night and scurry away down fetid alleyways to wait for some unsuspecting citizen to pass by. Then they jump out and… bang, bang!

Bad guns.

So, how did it happen that these otherwise inanimate objects came to life and began killing people of their own accord?

Maybe God is angry with us. Maybe the Almighty is mad because we legalize indiscriminate killing of the unborn. Perhaps our Creator does have a position on the gay lifestyle that doesn’t include political correctness. It could even be that He doesn’t think much of a war on drugs that victimizes one in every ten Americans sometime in their lifetimes.

But on the other hand, it could just be that it’s a means to an end… a stinky pile of political psychobabble designed to confuse the issue between the human criminal element and an otherwise harmless implement. In the end, it IS far easier to blame guns and write anti-gun laws than to address hard issues that go to the root of gangsterized urban warfare.

Oh, and the media DOES so love a good headline. “Gun-Plagued Cities Decry Handgun Ruling”

Wow, talk about selling newsprint! I think they’re on to something here. Maybe the next time it will read something like: ‘Blog-Plagued Internet Decries First Amendment’.

Bad guns and bad blogs. What is this world coming to?

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