Anyone remember the hue and cry when the Taliban dynamited the Buddhas of Bamiyan in Afghanistan in 2001?

Yeah, that is the same way I feel about you folks who want to tear down monuments here in the US just because you disagree with what YOU think they stand for. 


Not just statues of Confederate Generals, but monuments to just plain old soldiers who ft for their homes. Few of them over had the wherewithal to own a slave. Just poor folks fighting for their homeland.

Yet you want to destroy ’em because to you, all things Confederate mean slave to your ignorant uneducated mind. Because some jackass whose knowledge you cannot judge says so.

I’m not from the South. Born and raised in the midwest. Yet your actions anger and disgust me.

Feel free to find someone from your culture’s past that is worth raising a monument to. Gather enough donations and have a statue cast or a sculpture made. I will support space in a park for that, if you can find a figure worthy and can raise the cash.

(Hint: That is how those statues and monuments got there….people paid for ’em and donated them to the city or the park).

Otherwise you are no better than those seventh century savages in Afghanistan.

READ

Think.

Learn

Slippery Slope and all that.

You fuck with it, you won’t like how it ends. Your kids will like it even less. 

So a bunch of folks from the Charlottesville rally couldn’t just go home. Antifa, anti Fascist, anti Nazi….

That peaceful and law abiding group took to the streets of Durham and pulled a monument to Confederate soldiers down.

Vandalism.

And, oddly, no police officer saw nothin’, even though this took place at the courthouse.
No arrests were made.
Can I pull down statues of MLK and Malcolm X because I disagree with what they stood for? (Hint, I dislike Malcolm X but respect the REAL MLK, not what the current legend of him is….and I wouldn’t be that disrespectful any monument).

But if we are gonna have open season on monuments that some folks dislike…..

In related news:

Illinois hates Illinois nazis

And just because:

If James A Fields is in custody, who deleted his Facebook account and Twitter feed?

I mean, do they have internet access in the Jailhouse? 

Did the Feds recruit him too?

Seems that they had him all the way…

Man accused of trying to detonate bomb filled van in OKC

Apparently they’ve been egging him on for months….

Wonder how many man hours they spent and how many dollars it cost? 

Innit interesting that the Left and the Media (but I repeat myself) are all calling on TheDonald to repudiate the White Supremacist message….

But no one ever demanded that Barry the O repudiate the Antifa or Black Lives Matter actions? (Hint: He didn’t….ever.)

I repudiate the message the White Supremacist assholes disseminate.

I don’t agree with their actions.

Clear enough? 

When Black people get together and preach hate towards cops and whites, the politicians are silent. They are, oddly, even silent when there is violence and vandalism.

Yet when whites get together (such as in Charlotte VA) and protest, the politicians can’t wait to trample each other to condemn such free speech.

Look: I dislike hate speech, from any source. But if we are gonna condemn such speech, then let us condemn ALL such speech. I do think that speech is a protected right, and if you are  I don’t like it, then that is too bad. Even “Hate” speech is a protected right.

But if we are gonna condemn some “hate” speech, then let’s be consistent, and condemn all speech wherein some portion of our population complains about and wishes death or damage to another portion.

If you were silent when the Antifa protests turned violent, then you have no reason to speak now, unless you are a hypocrite. 

in 1981, IBM introduced it’s first true PC (personal Computer). There had been others before it, but this one became a standard….and began the revolution that led to the hardware you are likely reading this page on today.

Open standards let this machine have lots of third party support,in both hardware and software, leading to a revolution in computing in offices and, eventually, homes. …which led to the expansion of the DarpaNet and eventually the internet and WorldWideWeb…..

They were expensive: $1,565 (in 1981 dollars…$4200 dollars today) would got you 16K of RAM, a 4.77 MHz CPU, and DOS 1.0….and  cassette port. The single sided 5.25 inch floppy disk drive was optional, as was the 1 meg hard drive (available later).

This was the first step towards the world we know today…

So, I got 3k miles on the new truck. Dodge Ram with the big Cummins diesel.

At 3k, I thought I’d change the oil and filter. Get the gasket edges and other shit that is trapped in the filter and all the assembly lube and other contaminants out of the crankcase and such. Fresh clean oil and a new filter make for a happy engine and all that….

I get 3 gallons of synthetic oil. (yeah, that is a lot of oil, but it is only changed every 15000 miles) a filter and the Geno’s oil filter cap off tool….because the idiots at Dodge made no arrangements for an easy oil filter change. (On my old Dodge Truck, an ’03, one slid under the truck, used a filter wrench like this and simply turned the oil filter off the truck….it dropped right down after being unscrewed. Nothing in the way… Took less than 30 seconds.

On this new truck, one must get to the oil filter from the wheeelwell and drop the filter to the A-arm, then put the cap on it, rotate it 90 degrees, and pull it out. Then fill the new filter, put the cap on it, put it back in the little space in the wheelwell, turn it upright, remove the cap, carefully put it up to the filter housing and screw it in. You can only see the bottom third of the filter so the replacement is all by feel.

Now this is difficult, but not hard.
Unless the oil filter was out on about 4 turns too tightly at the factory….likely by a gorilla. I had to use 2 oil filter wrenches to get it to turn that first two turns. And the filter was wrinkling enough that I was worried that it was gonna tear.

We won’t talk about the fact that I had to use a wrench on a wrench to get the oil plug to turn the first turn. Again, factory torqued to  “11”. It was so tight that the plug  was distorting the steel oil pan before it finally turned. (I was wondering if it was gonna tear out of the pan, actually).

On would think that the engineers could do better. The alternative is removing the entire air cleaner (8 bolts, 2 clips and some push in fasteners, plus two large hose clamps). One would have thought that for a $65,000 truck they could do a remote oil filter or something.

Now that I have done it, the filter is correctly tightened, and the oil pan plug is properly snug. Neither are OVERtightened. It won’t be so bad next time. But a bit of decent engineering could ahve made it less bad.

I do have to say that the Geno’s Garage tool is pretty nice, and a solution to a problem that shouldn’t be there in the first place.