I gotta go buy a 9/16 impact socket.

On the day before Christmas.

I’d sooner gouge my nads off with a spoon.

I hate crowds of people. Pushing, shoving rude Christmas shoppers are an order of magnitude worse.

So the fiberglass rope gasket on my woodstove came free last night from where I had glued it to the door. This is a really really Bad Thing, as without the gasket there is no way to control the air going to the fire….with the predictable results.

Yes, the house gets too hot and the stove glows like a crucible fresh out of kiln.

So I go to the auto parts store today for a tube of hi-temp silicone as a temporary fix. (the real fix entails peeling the rest of the gasket off, possibly damaging it and then chiseling.grinding the remaining cement off and then redoing the gasket and waiting 3 days for the cement to dry.) and ask ’em where the hi temp Permatex is?

“We got 3 kinds of hi temp silicone, what do you need it for?” dude says, trying to be helpful.

(I need the copper Permatex, as that is good for like 700F)

“Got a high speed muffler bearing that’s leaking.” I reply. The girl behind the counter is looking at me with wide eyes…

“Leaking from the front or the back?” he deadpanned

She looks suspicious, but as he replied so quickly, she’s not sure if this is bullshit or not…..

“Leaking from both ends, but more the front than the back” I answer…

She blinks hard and looks at him, eyes wider yet.

“Use the black Permatex” he says.

Then I smiled and asked for the Copper stuff.

I explained that I was fixing a seal on a woodstove and I needed the highest temp possible.

Young lady looks much more relaxed as she realizes that the back and forth was the bullshit that she thought it was, but wasn’t sure until now….

Via Wirecutter:

America owes President Barack Obama an enormous debt of gratitude for showing how truly dangerous the federal government can be when our Constitution’s checks and balances start failing. With the active collusion of congressional Democrats, President Obama’s presidency has been one long series of body blows to the separation of powers that has protected our democracy since the founding. The results have been stark. Never has a president trampled so much on the prerogatives of Congress. Obama’s executive orders, suspending parts of our immigration laws and even his own prized Obamacare, have been sheer usurpations, going far beyond even the breathtaking delegations of legislative authority granted by the brief Democratic supermajority in Congress in 2009–10.

Read the rest a the link

Maybe now that we have an Alpha Male in the big seat again…..

If you made this movie today, there’d be about 200 groups of people that would scream because they were “offended”.

You fat bastard?

I mean, c’mon, alGore, it is supposed to be -12 F tonight. Normal low is like, 24F…..Plus 24 F, that is.

Luckily I am burning wood in a non-catalytic woodstove and the indoor temp is +73F.

I just hope the outdoor cat, Harold, is OK. He won’t come into the garage to be safe. But he’s like that. He’ll likely show up tomorrow afternoon looking for food.

and:

So Facebook is gonna crack down on “Fake News”
 (No, this isn’t “Fake News” Seriously. )

Using, among others, Snopes and ABC News  and AP as sources to verify and/or vet the suspect stories.

‘Cause we know the Media always get things right…

Right?

(and notice that the overreaction was….extreme)….3 cop cars? “Hustle the child from the room”? .

Now go “Hug your puppy”.

An Oceanside couple expecting a United Parcel Service delivery of a toy plane instead got a surprise — a package containing an assault rifle.






Joel Berman said he opened the keyboard-sized case Wednesday night in front of his wife and 6-year-old granddaughter, wondering how it could be the Kohl’s toy, meant for the son of a friend.


An Oceanside couple expecting a United Parcel Service delivery of a toy plane instead got a surprise — a package containing an assault rifle.


Joel Berman said he opened the keyboard-sized case Wednesday night in front of his wife and 6-year-old granddaughter, wondering how it could be the Kohl’s toy, meant for the son of a friend.


“Her mouth popped open,” said Berman, 66. “It definitely was not a toy gun. . . . We had to explain to her Santa delivered the wrong thing.”
Cradled in foam was a semi-automatic rifle with a sophisticated scope, a stand, an ammo clip and a copy of an Arizona man’s driver’s license and his concealed-weapons permit, Berman said.


The UPS label, which had Kohl’s in Ohio as the sender, had been pasted over another UPS label from the Arizona resident to a gunsmith in upstate Woodbourne.


“I have a receipt from the UPS driver showing . . . 3.4 pounds as the weight of the package, but it was 51 pounds,” Joel Berman, a trade-magazine publisher, said. “It’s funny, but at the same time, it’s sad.


“This could have been delivered to a home that had either someone with ill intentions who would have loved to have something like this. Or it could have been delivered to a home with kids.”


They shuffled their granddaughter to another room and she immediately hugged her new puppy, Berman said.


The couple called 911 — the operator told him “Oh my God” — and three patrol cars arrived within minutes.


Nassau police said they will get the rifle to the upstate gunsmith.

Read the rest at the link.

Note: I don’t think this was what people think of when we say an “Assault Rifle”….  more likely a “Sniper Rifle”…..looks like a Barrett to me.

I’d a just kept my mouth shut and waited to see if anyone asked…..

So you are sleeping in your home.

Men break down your door.

Then a Flash-Bang goes off. You assume the worst…that someone is breaking in to try to kill you…(valid, actually, read the article)

You shoot the first three that you see (before you run dry) because you think you are being attacked at night.

Turns out they were police officers on a no knock warrant. But you don’t know that at the time.

When you find out it was police, you surrender and cooperate.

They still charge you with attempted murder.

And a jury chooses to decline to find you guilty years later.

Inept “SWAT” boys are what caused this….and good shooting by Mr Rosas.

If I ever meet him I’ll buy him a beer.

I hope I can do half as well in the same circumstances.

Because, of course, it Just Can’t Be that half of America rejected Hillary…..

Here is something to make you think:


“Anonymous allegations that Russian government hackers interfered with the US elections are “evidence-free,” several retired intelligence professionals argued in an open letter. Any hack would have been noticed by the NSA, which has stayed silent, they say. Last Friday, the New York Times and the Washington Post cited anonymous sources claiming the CIA believed Russia was behind hackers who exposed emails and documents from the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and Hillary Clinton’s campaign chair John Podesta, with the intent of aiding the campaign of Donald Trump. Several Democratic senators have called for a special investigation into the allegations, while Trump dismissed it as a “conspiracy theory.”


“Reading our short memo could save the Senate from endemic partisanship, expense and unnecessary delay,” wrote the former CIA and NSA spies, part of the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS), adding that “harder evidence of a technical nature points to an inside leak, not hacking– by Russians or anyone else.”

So people who know don’t think

And yet. despite the complaints about “Fake News” (which has been perpetrated by the left ever since the GWB memo(Remember “fake but accurate?)) the meme persists that the “russians” hacked the election….and the left BELIEVES it.

The media is pushing the “Hack the election” meme by filling the airwaves with stories about hacking areas like the military and such (even going back to 2008!) for stories to demonstrate how the “Russians” have been going through our mail (and manipulating public opinion) with impunity…
And they have been influencing our public opinion for nearly as long as I have been alive….certainly since the Vietnam era.