Posts published in “Bond”

So Kevin Spacey's "gay"? I'm not. So what? I like his movies. I'll still watch them, plus whatever else he comes up with. Weinstein is far more creepy, but he made some damned good movies, too, and I will continue to watch them as well.

Most artists have some weird antennae. Trust me, I dated a red-headed Ayn Rand-freak oil-painter and am worse for the suffering but wiser for the experience. (A friend warned me at the time: "Red-heads are defective units. Run.")

What bothers moi is that the accusers are coming out (pardon the pun) 30 years after their alleged lurid encounters and ensuing successful careers.

At which point do you side-line your personal integrity to further your professional life, then whine about it three decades later when it becomes fashionable? Or is doing so just another step closer to greater stardom? Where were you, at the time it happened, ethically? Prolly just about as sleazy as the man or woman who groped you.

Did you say "No" then be a part of it anyway, because you abandoned your conscience to advance a career? I'm sorry, Victims, but you sold your soul right then and there.
None of us, man nor woman, gay nor straight, is blameless. We've all copped a feel or brushed a kiss at some point in life, especially during our horny teens and twenties.

If we were even gently rebuffed, however, that was the time to back away. Consent had its own consequences, hopefully pleasurable. I don't think it takes an IQ much above 75 to tell the difference between consent and rejection.

If you can reject your own conscience, the compromise is on your karma.

The only happy note I take from all this is that most of the perverts appear to be Democrats. Maybe the Victims should change panties. Oh, I mean, parties

On this day, September 13 in 1939, in Flint, Michigan, was born a person who changed my life and those of countless others – all for the better.

His name was Robert Dwayne Hopper. Bob Hopper was the most brilliant person ever to haunt the Silver Valley. He was a fighter and a philosopher, and a writer, and always a student. His curiosity about things universal and local was insatiable, as was his appetite for literature new and old. His mind was a sponge.

Not often do you meet a mine-owner who can discuss the delicate differences between Plato and Socrates, wax rhapsodic about “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” and “I Heard the Owl Call my Name,” then turn to the flaws in Nietzche’s outlook, all the while diagnosing a stubborn Diesel engine. He lent me a few of his books. Each page of every one was annotated by him in tiny print, underscored, and usually ending in a question mark which would send him off to another book or research.

Did I tell you Bob Hopper was a mine-owner? More like a mine-rescuer. He was living in Seattle, having traveled most of the West and Alaska as a prospector, trucker, and scrap-dealer. He received a flyer one day advertising an auction of some of bankrupt Bunker Hill’s assets: Bobcats, iron, timber and such. They were scrapping the place. He dashed to Kellogg as fast as he could, then asked himself, “What happens to the mine? The Bunker Hill Mine was to me, even as a kid in Flint, Michigan, the shining city on the hill.”

The EPA was in the process of demolishing the Bunker Hill smelters, but the mine was in limbo. EPA took it for granted that it was theirs, but neglected to bid on it. Hopper, being a lot smarter than any bureaucrat, submitted a bid for $10 and COVC and acquired title. In the ensuing decades, the EPA tried to wrest it from him, at one point even drafting a seizure plan, and fined him for every step he took. His opposition was local, too. His first welcome was from a water district employee, now mayor of Kellogg, who cut off his water supply – not just by closing a valve, but by ripping out pipe.

Ironically, it was Bob Hopper who scrambled around to pay all the un-paid bills, ranging from the pension fund to the bar-tabs in uptown Kellogg, left deadbeat by the mine’s former owners.

It seemed Hopper had no local friends, but in fact he did. Lovon Fausett and Bill Calhoun, two of the mining district’s very brightest bulbs, were his close friends. I was invited into their inner circle and every Thursday we had lunch at the Broken Wheel in Kellogg. One day the trio ordered Spam for lunch. “I’ll have the Spam,” Lovon said. “I’ll have the Spam,” said Calhoun. Hopper concurred, but he wanted his fried.

Bob Hopper was lied to and shat upon by the EPA on a daily basis. They used every ruse in the book to deprive him of his private property rights and his mine. But he fought back. One determined man against 15,376 federal employees, each of whom make more money in a month than Bob took from the mine in a year. They even stole some of his private land from him.

I don’t wish to portray Robert Hopper as a victim, although it could be played that way. The Spokane-based Spokesman-Review newspaper berated him on a regular basis for not rolling over and playing dead, fed by “leaks” from EPA Region X, who at one point tried to tie him to the Mafia. His probate disproved that, but what a cruel thing for those bastards to do.

I’d rather remember him as a guy way ahead of the curve. He was not some Silicon Valley asshole who thought he had all the answers. He was living in excruicating physical pain, which he never talked about even to his closest friends, trying to save a mine and fight off the federal criminals. When the EPA started to really beat on him, they went to federal court, and pro se, Robert won.

So, my dear departed friend Robert Hopper, I give thanks for your friendship and for saving the Bunker Hill. I’ve still got your number on speed-dial. Can’t believe it’s been six years since you left us. Yet I still feel you’re here.

Tramadol?

Rhymes with damnit-all. I want to meet the creator of this newest opioid in Hell and slit his/her throat wide open. Two days of that shit was enough.
All I was looking for was a way to alleviate my intermittent back pain as arthritis encroaches. I don't care for the effects of opiates so scratch me off as a junkie. But this Tramadol crap will double-you up in so much pain, you’ll forget why you took it.

I'd take aspirin but it's hard on the stomach-lining and exacerbates the sillicic crystals that fill up our joints and cause us such pain.

Unadulterated codeine fills the bill just fine and I don't "need it" every day. Hell, in Canada you can buy it OTC, and I don't hear of a rampant codeine problem there.
Here, in the U.S., its prescription puts you and your doc on the DEA watch-list.

Why can't we just abolish the DEA entirely, grow Oriental poppies and some weed in the back yard, and if we need a little pain relief, there they are without all of Big Pharma's help. Oh, wait, you can't patent a plant. Thus is an industry born.
I am particularly unamused by licensed physicians treating 90-year-old patients who are in agony with pain with "pain management," their reasoning being that they wouldn't want their geriatric patients to get hooked on something that actually worked.

"Just say No" - one of Nancy Reagan's greatest contributions to the dementia underlying the War on Drugs and empowering the Drug Enforcement Agency with more weaponry and thug-power than the CIA could imagine in its wettest of dreams - tell that to an addict, or somebody in severe pain.

She and Ronnie launched the largest black market since the Brits blew up China 100 years ago in order for Europe to recoup its losses in their rent-serving thousand-year-old trading agreements, hooking young Chinese on powerful opiates to regain the silver China had been paid for its advanced technologies.

(The US was no innocent bystander, either. We didn't build our famed fleet of Clipper Ships for dead-head runs to the Orient. They hauled refined opium to China and returned fully-loaded with confiscated silver and a modicum of tea. Spend some time in China and look at the villages and monuments we Americans torched and wrecked.)
After a brief shelling exchange in Canton Harbour where the Royal Navy demolished China's shore batteries, the Empress sought a truce with England: Quit bringing refined opium into our ports and selling to our youth and quit stupefying them, and we'll give you Hong Kong.

So yeah, the opium argument swings both ways. It can be, like fire, incredibly harmful or incredibly helpful. But there is a huge middle-ground about these naturally occurring plants. Are the consequences of a lost relationship with Mexico and the hundreds of thousands of annual deaths worth it? Just as importantly, are our lost liberties to the DEA, the USDA and all else worth it?

My solution is simple: outlaw refineries and put Big Pharma out of business. When our civilian military are done with that, abolish them, too.

Ah, the first day of winter. . .

Yesterday's June solstice having yesterday passed, the days are now getting shorter and shorter -- first slowly, then increasingly and noticeably shorter as the autumnal equinox arrives in September.

Yes, days are quite rapidly becoming shorter and before long, the leaves will begin to turn and "termination dust" (a term Alaskans use to describe the descending snow-line in the Chugach Mountains) will become visible.

So enjoy these long days for the brief period of time we have left.

If there is a bright spot, it is that days themselves are longer by by a full 1.7 milliseconds than they were a century ago, this being the result of those big sluggish bodies of water we call oceans, which are slowing down the Earth's rotation as they respond to gravitational pulls from the moon and other celestial bodies.

My guess is that in another century or two, all those idiotic windmills we're putting up to generate expensive electricity will have slowed the planet's rotation even more, making for yet longer days as they impose drag on our atmospheric ocean.

At any rate, have a nice day and start digging those Christmas decorations out. You have but milliseconds left.

A simply "Amazon" coda to my recent Sirius/XM Radio and DirecTV tortures: My constant companion, an Amazon Kindle paper-white e-reader, finally gave up the ghost. Early symptoms were longer charging times and more frequent needs to be charged up.

Went through all the usual diagnostics but TBT, the batteries in these things are pretty well shot after five years even in airplane mode with the power-hungry wi-fi shut off.

Finally, it would only work for a minute or two away from its power cable.

What to do? I was in the middle of a pretty good book, so ordered and quickly received a refurbished replacement. Now, what to do with the old Kindle? It needs a new battery but is otherwise in babied shape.

So I called Amazon, which unlike Sudden-Link, Sirius and DirecTV among most service providers, is pretty good at quickly answering the phone in English. My intention was donate the dead-battery Kindle, certain they have some program to re-hab these things and then give them to perhaps disadvantaged school-kids.

The website the young man directed me to had no such option, and insofar as the thing was so far out of warranty, getting any monetary remuneration was out of the question. I just wanted to know how to give the thing away, have Amazon replace the spent battery in the hopes it might end up, working like new, in the hands of some needy person.

No joy.

This took a good half-hour's time, chewing through the Kindle website and being bounced back and forth to its warranty return page. That was enough time for me. So into the trash it goes. Too bad, and a waste. Of course, we treat our elderly the same way, when they could be put to good use. Guess it's a cultural thing. So, Mr. Bezos, hop on your private jet and go raise money for rich Democrat politicians.

Damn those needy schoolkids, anyway.

I am on my now second hour of being on hold attempting to reach Sirius-XM Radio to cancel one of my two radio subscriptions. You cannot do it from their website, even if you are are registered there, which I am.

At the end of the first hour a bi-ped came on the line, we spoke briefly, and she said she needed to transfer me to accounting so the pre-paid radio subscription I'm cancelling would be credited to the still-active radio's account.

I begged, "No, not another hour on hold?!"

Oh, no, she said, it will just take a minute or two. Now I'm back to their pre-recorded noise, saying my wait time was not two, but approximately 75 minutes.

I've long since just put my cell on speaker-phone, made another pot of coffee, made and consumed breakfast, taken a leak and answered the morning's emails.

Thank goodness for unlimited cell minutes and the phone's being plugged into its charger or it would be dead and I would be broke.

Sirius-XM is not alone in this chicanery. Oh, hang on, just got a live, Malaysian-speaking person.

Even during my efforts to cancel one of the two radios, she is trying to sell me a car radio. (I do not listen to car music; I would rather hear how the bearings and rocker-arms are doing, thank-you very much, but I do not go into this with her in my native tongue or hers.)

OK, ostensibly that is done, down to a single radio and the pre-paid service for the other credited onto the account.

As I was saying before being interrupted by an actual transaction, this is not an indignity exclusively inflicted by Sirius-XM Radio. Try to shed yourself of cable or satellite TV service sometime. Log on, click "Manage My Account," and just try to find the disconnect option. It ain't there. "Manage My Account" merely means, in either case, "How can we charge you more for yet more shit you don't want?"

I don't blame the 50-cent-per-day Malaysian girl on the other end of the line, sitting in a boiler-room and probably grateful having to deal with frustrated, pissed-off Americans instead of being sold into the sex trade by her parents. No, I blame the Brussels-based fat-cats who own these companies and subject their workers and their subscribers to this crap.

In the case of the DirecTV, it was simply a question of paying the reduced $77/month rate just to watch the Spokane TV network-affiliate stations for an hour once or twice a week and indirectly subsidising the brainless prattling of Scott Pelley and Judy Woodruff. And now that the Seahawks are even considering signing Colin Kaepernick, my interest in the NFL is circling the drain.

Stepping back to the larger view, these obviously are the gasps of a dying technology. If people were beating down the door for your service, you would not try to sweat the patience out of your departing customers in the hopes they'll give up and figure it's better to bag the hold button and pay that nearly $1,000 a year for something you can do without.
I must give the Malaysian girl credit for this morning's best laugh, though.
She asked, from her script, what part of their service I liked best.

Whatever the outcome of today's too-close-to-call voting, there will be one decisive (and deserving) loser: the main-stream media, or the press as we used to call it.

One of the most common of all those Wikileaks hacks has been the obvious and obscenely incestual relationship between the Democratic Party machine and the corporate media. It is far more grotesque a thing than any of the contemptible things Donald Trump has said or that Bill Clinton has actually done.

As a marginally Republican print reporter in newsrooms large and small across this country, that incest was always obvious to me. Being in the minority, I could not expect to loudly object and keep the paycheck rolling in at the same time.

But now it's out there. The "new media" grew out of this great divide. The "new media" has certainly produced its batch of kooks, but they are, on balance, no kookier than Dana Milbank or Bob Schieffer or Judy Woodruff -- or the editorial board of the New York Times.

Be it Trump (who likely wins the popular vote) or Billary (who looks to win the electoral college) comes out on top, the loser certainly will be the 3-network, two-newspaper media that has been carving our political culture for the past 75 years.

There was, perhaps, a consensus that they could be trusted -- not to be balanced but least conscious of their prejudices and diligent in their search for some sense of truth.

Truth's a hard thing for anyone who is not a physicist to grasp, and their own professional duty is scepticism.

Try covering a murder trial sometime. By the time the prosecution's done, you're persuaded the guy in the dock did it, and viciously. Then, after the defence is done, you're sure he was in church in another state, teaching Sunday School.

Reporters used to be conscious of their own limitations in this regard, in finagling some sense of truth out of a steaming pile of bullshit. Not, for three decades, have they considered such their civic duty. I blame the prissy wannabes of Nixon and Woodstein.

I hope the Wikileaks reports have made a credible closing argument to the jury.

It was the bottom of the second inning of the second game of the National League playoffs, Cubbies v. the Dodgers. Adrian Gonzalez slammed in a single-run homer, the only run of the entire nine innings.

This, Mike and me, we learned afterwards. While Gonzalez worked his magic, we were gazing at the Suddenlink blue screen of death in Mike’s living room. Error No. XXXXXX, please wait a few moments for the channel to return. At 1715 and 1730, Suddendeath repeated its message. Please, just wait a moment.

Cell phone calls ensued.

We were informed that Customer Service was closed for the weekend. Tried Suddenlink tech support, which reported after numerous pushed buttons that Mike was not subscribed to the channel – which he’d been watching all season and is paying for.

Anyone, and I mean everyone, who is a subscriber to Suddenlink, nee Cebridge, nee Cablevision, is a blithering idiot. As the blue screen of death refreshed itself with yet another blue screen of death, Mike demanded, over the telephone, a name and an address to whom he could lodge a complaint, and promised a call to the Better Business Bureau as well.

They gave him an address, no personal name, just a P.O. box in Houston. Mike will no doubt write a nasty letter to them, but good bloody luck. It will not get to the right person.

When the Zanettis created Cablevision, which began with a big receiving antenna up top of Burke to catch the four channel signals issuing intermittent service from the stations in Spokane it was a Good Thing. They wired-up those of us down in the gulches, it was a local operation and a noble enterprise. God bless ‘em. We finally got TV here in the mining camp.

Suddenlink is neither local nor noble anymore. The Zanettis sold their co-ax-wired system years ago. There is, such as it is, still an office in Osburn, about 5 miles west of Wallace, where reside a few trucks whose main duty (this, honest to God, from one of their own servicemen) is to disconnect pissed-off customers who have gone to a dish or Frontier’s (nee Verizon’s) DSL.

When Cebridge/Suddenlink was the only game in town, I was getting download speeds slower than dial-up. Not always, but frequently enough that I had their techy supporters on speed-dial.

When Verizon, now Frontier, started offering DSL as competition to Suddendeath, I snatched the deal and with the odd (semi-annual, at worst) outage, they’ve not let me down. Happiest day of my life was when I called up Cebridge/Suddenlink) and said, “Get your shit out of my house and don’t waste a stamp asking me back onto your system, no matter the discounts. I wouldn’t take your service again for free.” Some guy in California yawned and said, OK.

Anyone who feels loyalty to Suddenlink because of the Zanettis’ pioneering efforts to stream visual media into this mining camp needs to have their head held underwater until the bubbles stop.

I marvel at the stupidity of the Wallace powers-that-be who continue to enable Suddendeath’s screw-job on the city. When my friend, who is connected to this user-unfriendly city-mandated system, needs to do a major download or upgrade, she brings the computers home rather than wait all night on no salary.

Mike’s letter to Houston will never get to its intended source, because Suddenlink’s American corporate P.O. box is actually in St. Louis, not the Houston address he was given.

And writing St. Louis won’t do any good, either. Cebridge/Suddenlink is in reality a European company and headquartered in Belgium and Switzerland under the aegis of the Altice Group LLC.

Having endured Suddenlink’s voice-mail hell, Mike and I repaired to the Metals Saloon and watched the remainder of the game on satellite. A couple of hits, no runs and no errors, but the Rainier was in handy supply and Tracey’s service was as always, superb. Which is a helluva lot more than you can say about Suddendeath.

Think you’re dealing with a local company? Wait. I can still see your bubbles. Keep thinking. Don’t ya love globalism?