Umm…Win!

When I bought Buddy the Jeep, the seat back of the driver’s seat was off-kilter by a few degrees. Don’t know why or how, but since he’s a two-door, it didn’t matter. I just folded the rear seats forward and that braced it up.

Fast forward to two weeks ago when it finally gave up the ghost.

I started hitting Craig’sList looking for seats and finally found one I though reasonably priced ($40). Per my usual M.O., I waited a week before even contacting the guy, so as to make sure they’re ready to deal. He was.

An old Jeeper with a 92 four door, swapped these seats out to replace them with some leather ones he happened upon (more comfy and easier to clean after a day on the trail). During our negotiations I discovered that he needed room made in his garage and seeing as how he hadn’t had any other takers I offered to take the whole set off his hands (have I mentioned that I get free disposal of trash via my employer).

That was yesterday. This morning was the install.

Two screws and four bolts out and lift for removal. Reverse for install.

However, the win arrived in that I not only found $1.42 in coinage under the seat, but also a $35 Draw-Tite one piece ballmount hitch with a $10 2-1/4in ball installed.

I don’t know what the kid I bought Buddy from was pulling with that, or if he even was. The scratches on the ball look as though they’re from bouncing around under the seat because they’re not circular and the 2×2 insert has no scratches on it at all. Also, he gave me a different hitch with it with a 1-7/8in ball, so he may not have even known it was under there (he said that he bought Buddy a friend of the family, the original owners).

$46.42 – $40 = $6.42 of win.

Oh, and the ball mount is now installed on Bull.

All of which more than makes up for the new passenger seat that doesn’t fold forward (because it is out of a four door). I guess I now have a tall coupe.

As for keeping the seats clean during trailed days, I recently got gifted a set of Cabelas RealTree covers, so I’m set. No leather necessary.

Posted in Kewel!, Life in the Atomic Age | 2 Comments

Since his Justice Department is letting people go

I’m sure that pardons for these two will be in the offing

For three decades, accused spies Walter Kendall Myers and his wife shuffled secrets to their Cuban contacts in such fear of being caught, authorities say, that he memorized top-secret documents rather than bring them into their home.

Their downfall came simply and swiftly, lured by a stranger who offered Myers a cigar.

Obama administration officials say Kendall Myers had access to highly sensitive material while working for the State Department’s intelligence arm, and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton has ordered a damage assessment of what the couple may have revealed. Their methods of communicating with the Cubans included Morse code on shortwave radio, changing shopping carts at the grocery store and a face-to-face meeting with President Fidel Castro himself, court documents say.

David Kris, assistant attorney general for national security, described the couple’s alleged spying for the communist government as “incredibly serious.”

State Department officials say Kendall Myers had been under investigation for three years, since before he retired in 2007.

Hired under Carter. Warnings from their supervisors were ignored under Clinton. It took five years under Bush to get them put on  the list to actively investigate.

Foggy Bottom is very likely crawling with these types.

But don’t plug that info into current world events too often. Ammo is just too expensive right now.

Posted in Evil walks the earth | 2 Comments

RNS Quote of the Day: 06/08/09

The left’s current “best argument” for why health care insurers are talking with the feds about health care costs is that the insurers don’t want to have to “compete” with the super-awesome government plan.

They’re right.

But for the wrong reasons.

The government doesn’t compete.  You don’t negotiate with the government.  When the government wants you to do something, you either do it or you are punished with fees, fines, taxes and even imprisonment.  You either do it, or they’ll make you do it.  So yes, the private health care industry is scared for their profits, but only because they know there’s no way to compete with government.  The government gets to make all the rules.  The government doesn’t have to turn a profit.  The government doesn’t even really have to worry all that much about customer satisfaction.  These companies don’t want to compete with the government because they know they’ll lose.

And that’s actually what the liberals want.  They don’t want us to have choices on health care.  They want us all dependent on big government for health care, because then our dependence can be used as leverage to manipulate just about every aspect of our lives.

As expensive and imperfect as our health care industry is now, we’re better off with that than we are with big government driving all of our options out of the market, running up more spending and debt for the taxpayers along the way.

Rob at SayAnything

Sadly, it is only the leftists of questionable intellectual prowess who are whining about there not being a “single-payer” option currently on the table.

The smarter ones are quite happey with the “nose under the tent” currently on paper because they know that one more “progressive” presidency and they’ll have everything they want.

Posted in Quote of the Day | 1 Comment

Addicted to Outrage

They’ve got their jones to feed, so they went looking.

They found these at FNC

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And now their jones is fed.

Posted in Too Stupid to Live | Leave a comment

Can they keep him?

I’m sure his management style will fit right in.

The mayor of New Orleans, Louisiana, has been quarantined in China after possible exposure to the H1N1 virus, his office said Sunday.

Mayor Ray Nagin, who traveled to China on an economic development trip, flew on a plane that carried a passenger being treated for symptoms suspected to be from the virus, commonly known as the swine flu virus, the mayor’s office said in a statement.

Nagin, his wife and a member of his security detail have been quarantined in Shanghai, China, though all three are symptom free, the statement said.

Maybe he got while feeding at the trough of taxpayer dollars?

Posted in Useful Idiots | 1 Comment

Early Snark

I enjoy well-written reviews — chiefly of books (although I keep several volumes of Roger Ebert’s movie reviews just because they’re models of the short essay form so damned much fun to read). Here’s a great and funny review:

This book is an embarrassment to its participants. In advance of the Summit of the Americas, the U.S. Information Agency had the bright idea of convening a conclave of cultural leaders from across the hemisphere. The “conversation” dedicated to the “new moment in the Americas” began at a dinner, hosted by Al Gore, where, “to the astonishment of the participants, Gore organized the chairs, in encounter group style, in tight circles in the living room.” Gustavo Gutierrez, “father of Latin American liberation theology and, at times, a stern critic of the United States, gave the blessing over dinner.” The misnamed Latin American debt crisis was “actually something far more profound and significant. In that period the entire political and economic structure inherited from Spanish colonialism finally collapsed.” Orlando Patterson speaks of “regional cosmoses.” Octavio Paz could not attend but “nevertheless remained a towering intellectual presence at the meeting.” … Richard Rodriguez recycles excerpts from his 1992 Days of Obligation and muses how he ended up conceiving of himself as “a pocho” in the United States, “reflecting the tragic nature of life.” Stanley Crouch ends lyrically with the “boiling gumbo pot” that is the “transcending power… of the affirmative, miscegenated heat necessary to melt down the iron suits of history.”

What a weekend of self-important, portentious waffling must have ensued if this slender, poorly produced, badly edited, and often ludicrous volume is any reflection. Will intellectuals never learn?

–Review by Kenneth Maxwell in the July/August 1995 issue of FOREIGN AFFAIRS, p. 145-6, of A New Moment in the Americas, edited by Robert S. Leiken. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 1995, 130 pp. $19.95.

Posted in Academia and Other Nonsense, Uncategorized | Leave a comment

100 Congressional Democrats Indicted for Corruption?

Could be coming soon….

Posted in Order of the imperial upraised middle finger. | 4 Comments

I think he’s right

The problem here is not that China has a shortage of women. The problem is that China has a shortage of women.

In a society with a healthy respect for the rule of law and the rights of the individual, a scarce commodity commands a high price but does not incite violence. In a society with no such respect, a scarce commodity is a target. The fact that China can’t deal productively with it’s female shortage says more about China than it does about female shortages.

Put another way, a peaceful culture deals with its problems peacefully while a violent culture deals with its problems violently. We’re not hearing about the horrific lot of chattel females in Alaska, despite their gender imbalance.

— Gabriel McCall, in a comment to this fascinating post about the unintended consequences of China’s one-child policy in a culture that favors boys over girls. Emphasis mine.

It’s been sad for me to realize as I’ve aged that the ideal of human universality taught in my youth was a myth. Culture matters.

Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment

From the same thread

This gem:

Although there does seem to be some evidence of a growing trend in Russia. In addition to a surplus female population (alluded to in a post above), Russian men are just off the charts in terms of chronic alcoholism, physical abuse, crime, disappearing for months at a time and pretty much anything else that would be considered deal-breaker material for any would-be female paramour.

I have a friend living in Russia right now. He did very poorly with women here, but over there they are literally lining up for him. He also notes that there is a fast growing phenomenon of women over 30 (or under but lacking the requisite beauty to ever hope to be a mail order bride or member of some mafia concubine) partnering up with another woman in a quasi-homosexual relationship. It’s not about sexual desires per se, but simply a recognition that we need to go through life with a partner and the men – at least the ones who haven’t managed to kill themselves or get shipped off to some Siberian work camp – are simply not cutting it.

—Commenter “DCP.” Perhaps yet another demonstration of how amazingly quickly humans, the most adaptable of animals, will adapt to changing circumstances.

Posted in Uncategorized | 3 Comments

RNS Quote of the Day: 06/06/09

65 Years Ago Today
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We have sent men and women from the armed forces of the United States to other parts of the world throughout the past century to put down oppression. We defeated Fascism. We defeated Communism. We saved Europe in World War I and World War II. We were willing to do it, glad to do it. We went to Korea. We went to Vietnam. All in the interest of preserving the rights of people.

And when all those conflicts were over, what did we do? Did we stay and conquer? Did we say “Okay, we defeated Germany. Now Germany belongs to us? We defeated Japan, so Japan belongs to us”? No. What did we do? We built them up. We gave them democratic systems which they have embraced totally to their soul. And did we ask for any land? No, the only land we ever asked for was enough land to bury our dead. And that is the kind of nation we are.

Colin Powell answering the Archbishop of Canturbury’s accusations of American Imperialism in Iraq

65 years ago today

Posted in Heroes, Comrades and Brothers, Quote of the Day, Too Stupid to Live, Uncategorized | 2 Comments