Bronco Bomber reminds me a lot of Tony Romo. Romo, the Dallas Cowboys’ quarter back is either loved or hated by fans. There is no middle ground. Bad throws. Poor decisions. Many many games lost in “clutch” situations. But… BUT once in a blue moon, Romo will pull out a truly miraculous play. The commentators will ooh and aww for the days. Apologists will say, “Yeah, but did you see him on that impossible 3rd and long against the Giants?” That one play. That’s all it takes to distract the small minded from the years and years of epic sucktitude.

Yeah, Bronco Bomber is exactly like that. And just this week, the Bomber has pulled out one of his best and most spectacular plays. And it’s worked like a charm… at least on the small minded, doe-eyed, sound-bite driven, 140-characters-or-less, 15-seconds-of-fame, Lamestream suckers.

Do 5 minutes of real truth hunting (like I did) and you see what a colossal disaster this is!

First, for the first time in American history, we have negotiated with terrorist. There is a myriad of reasons why we have never done this, too many to discuss right now.

Second, it was a very very bad bargain. We traded a five-man terrorist dream team for one America-hating, looney-bin Army deserter.

“WHAT? Noooo. That can’t be right.”

Read it for yourself:

“I am ashamed to be an American. And the title of US soldier is just the lie of fools,” he concluded. “I am sorry for everything. The horror that is America is disgusting.“

These are the words of the “Hero POW” Bronco just “liberated.”

And, as if that wasn’t enough, this is his equally nutty father’s reply to that very quote:

Bob Bergdahl responded in an email: “OBEY YOUR CONSCIENCE!”

Attaboy, Dad. You raised your boy up right, didn’t ya. “Do whatever you want to, kid. Never mind that you committed to the Army. Never mind that millions were spent to train you, to keep you safe, to equip you with nothing but the best. Never mind that dozens or even hundreds of real patriots will put their lives on the line to rescue your sorry butt from the Taliban. Never mind all that. You just put down your weapon and walk away from your post into the starry Afghan night. I’m sure it will all work out.”

One night, after finishing a guard-duty shift, Bowe Bergdahl asked his team leader whether there would be a problem if he left camp with his rifle and night-vision goggles — to which the team leader replied “yes.” [editor: Understatement of the century!]

Bergdahl then returned to his bunker, picked up a knife, water, his diary and a camera, and left camp.

And guess what? It DID all work out thanks to our dear and glorious Bronco Bomber. Yaaaaay.

Read the full article and decide for yourself.

So, this 14-year-old girl in Florida met a cute guy on Facebook. They lived in the same neighborhood. Without telling anyone, she met up with him at a local gas station.

The “guy” was a 44-year-old sex trafficker. In the short time she was with him, he raped her, then brought her to a hotel to “sell” her body for $200.

Thank God, her first “customer” was an undercover cop. She was freed and the man arrested BEFORE her parents even knew she was missing!

Please please please, chi’ren. Don’t be stupid. It can kill you. (Or worse.)

Read the full news article here: Florida police save 14-year-old girl from sex trafficking

As I write this, it’s Saturday morning; the Saturday after “Black Friday” 2013. It’s very quiet in the house. Tammy is working on her 12th hour of sleep. I could only manage nine.

Yesterday, I woke up at 2:50 AM, ten minutes before the alarm went off. (I know! Madness!) What, on God’s green Earth, could get me out of bed at such an ungodly hour? Free stuff, of course!

Cabela’s, the outdoor “big-box” store, had a pretty nifty Black Friday deal. (And it really was Black Friday!! Not Gray Thursday. *grumble*) The first 600 people in the store (which opened at 5 AM) would get one free gift. Some (probably most) would get gift cards or a few other low value trinkets. But a few (probably one per store) would get a new GoPro camera! So was that my reason for breaking the universal laws of sleep? Well, no. Not really.

I knew my chances were slim. (I consider the lottery a tax on people who are bad at math.) More than the chance for free booty, my motivation was memories. We have a few really good Black Friday stories that we still tell years later. (Particularly the time I “bumped into” the kid stealing quarters from the mall fountain, giving him and his expensive sneakers a bath he’ll never forget.)

Tammy loves the excitement of Black Friday. We both also loves to quietly mock the crazed loons who lose all perspective of reality when offered a 10% discount on some junk TV that, for the other 364 days a year, they wouldn’t give a second look.

“Wait, what? Say that again? 10%? No way, man! My uncle camped out for two days to get that wicked awesome big screen. He saved over $300!”

Really?! Well, I’ve got some really painful questions for your uncle. What was the real regular price on that “awesome” TV? Do you know? Really? I’m guessing not.

Let’s have a look, shall we?

Best Buy’s big deal yesterday was this Samsung 55″ TV. I’m confident that link won’t work in a day or so, so here’s what it looks like:

“You save” $300. That’s pretty sweet. Not nearly sweet enough for me to camp out in a mall parking lot. But still.

So here’s what I did. I took the model number from that ad and put it in Google. You won’t believe what I found. Target sells the same TV and has a Black Friday deal on it. Target is a whopping two dollars cheaper, But, through some mathematical magic, at Target, you “save” $702. Huh?!

What the what?! You have to look close, but if you do, you’ll see that Target’s “regular price” is $1599.99, a full $400 more. Do you really think that Target regularly sells the exact same TV for $400 more than Best Buy? I don’t think so. But wait. It gets better. Check out Walmart’s massive Black Friday deal… for the exact same TV.

WOW! “You save $1102!” Talk about rolling back prices! Now, I will confess, I myself would camp out in a mall parking lot for a thousand dollars! But it’s the exact same TV!! I scroll a little further down my Google search results and find this same TV listed at CDW. It’s important to note that CDW does not have a Black Friday sale on this TV. This is the really and true “regular price.”

Yep. That’s right. $990. Which means that all three of the huge Black Friday deals above are exactly 10% off. And for $90, the price of a tank of gas and a nice dinner, people will camp out, fight, scratch, claw, and commit various felonies. For $90. Are you kidding me?!

It turns out that, other than a few loss leaders (Don’t know what that is?! You need to learn!), the “big deals” on Black Friday are minimal discounts on items that don’t sell well throughout the year. And in the mean time, the stores quietly raise prices on everything else. Once they have you in the store for the 10% off TV, they stick you with 20% increases on the other stuff you planned to buy anyway. Again, don’t believe me? See for yourself:

via Bloomberg Business

What you’re looking at here is the profit margins of the top ten US retailers. The black bar is the profit margin during the holidays. The lighter bar is the profit margin for rest of the year. In other words, this is how much all average prices go up beginning just before Black Friday. Macy’s prices nearly double! Maybe the Santa at the end of the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade should be wearing a a burglar’s mask!!

Oh, and in case you’re wondering, we didn’t get the GoPro at Cabela’s. There were probably 1000 people ahead of us in line. We did buy some .22 ammo (a definite loss leader) and paid full price for knife I already had on my Christmas list. The bulk of our Black Friday spending was at Home Depot. (I was pleased to see that their prices actually come down for the holidays.) I bought some batteries for my cordless tools that only go on sale once a year. (I know because I check all year long.) I got them for half price. Seriously!

[Ed: Sorry this is long, but you really should read the whole thing. Seriously.]

I’ve had a wide range of people ask me my opinion on the Syrian crisis; from co-workers to church youth. I don’t know why. But you know me. I give my people what they want!

First, as usual, history is everything. So let’s review.

The “Assad Regime” has been around a long time. Bashar Al-Assad is a leader of the Ba’ath political movement in Syria. (His dad Hafez was the party leader before him.) You probably know another former Ba’ath party leader, Saddam Hussein. Yes, Bashar and Saddam are old buddies. Both were “democratically elected” (That’s in quotes for a reason.) and both have a history of, shall we say, brass knuckle diplomacy.

However, unlike Saddam, Bashar likes to look like the good guy. He wears dapper suits instead of fake military medals. He studied in London, speaks English and married a Brit girl. He’s the Joe Cool of the Middle East. And as part of this charade, he likes to wine and dine Western diplomats.

Now, if you will recall, not long after U.S. tanks rolled into Baghdad, the peacenik Lame stream media started chanting, “Where are the WMDs?!” And, of course, there is a very logical and sound answer: Syria. When Saddam saw the writing on the wall, he stashed his goods at his buddy’s house. But, because they’re peaceniks and Lame and hate Bush more than they love the truth, this idea never saw ink.

Fast-forward about five years. Peacenik and Lame stream “Chosen One”, Bronco Bomber takes the reins. His foreign policy boils down to, “We suck and anyone we’ve ever supported sucks too.” This includes several Middle East dictators.

If you spend five minutes reading about U.S. Middle East policy, you’re realize it’s incredibly complicated and sometimes involves us propping up a bad dictator because he’s the lesser of several evils. This includes Egypt’s Mubarak, Libya’s Gadhafi, and Syria’s Asaad. But the Chosen One’s new policy encourages the overthrow of these (admittedly not angelic yet) fairly stable dictators. Great! Hooray for democracy! Except (as the rest of us know*) it’s not that simple.

Wacko extremist terrorist types, like Al Qaeda, thrive in instability. So as soon as Bronco’s “Arab Spring” breaks loose, democracy takes a back seat real fast. Suddenly Egypt’s “democratically elected” government turns into radical Islam’s Muslim Brotherhood slaughtering “infidels” in the street. Likewise, days after the good people of Syria took up arms to topple their evil dictator, the rebellion is taken over by Al Qaeda and it becomes an on-going terror attack.

The worse news is that Al Qaeda actually captured several Syrian cities and Syrian assets (quite possibly including some of Saddam’s old WMDs).

Now, Bronco Bomber (as usual) starts spouting uneducated policy threats, “fuzzy red lines,” that are (as usual) hopelessly undefinable and unenforceable. The “Un” (see also Un-Speak) announces that it’s going send people in to “observe” the civil war in Syria. A few days *AFTER* this announcement hundreds of civilians are killed by a WMD.

Bashar is smart; dangerously smart. It would not be smart to use you’re old buddy’s 20 year old chemical weapons on your own people DAYS AFTER the Un announced they were coming to inspect your war. (There is evidence that Assad explicitly rejected the use of chemical weapons.)

However, Al Qaeda is also smart and has a long running policy of killing civilians (no matter what side they’re on) to further its cause. Let’s just say that Al Qaeda did stumble across a couple canisters of weaponized sarin gas and just happened to be watching CNN when the Un made their announcement. Wouldn’t it be smart to gas some innocents with Assad’s own WMDs to push Bronco Bomber and the Un across the “fuzzy red line?” Wouldn’t that force the U.S. and the Un to take out Al Qaeda’s enemy? Pretty smart if you ask me; horrifyingly smart.

So now, Bronco Bomber is really screwed. He’s painted himself into a corner. His peacenik buddies won’t support a new war. The rest of us* are too smart to support an alliance with Al Qaeda. Mad Vlad Putin is maniacally laughing and wringing his hands as he watches the White House implode. There’s no way out for the poor Bronco Bomber. He’s going to look like the idiot he is no matter what he does. How in the good name of the Chosen One will the media bail out their Messiah?

The news comes out that Tuesday night, our great and glorious Bronco Bomber is going to address the nation. Is this going to be a “Shock on Awe” speech? Is it going to be a “Congress made me back down” speech? No one is sure. The only surety is that it will be the best tap-dance the Bronco has ever performed.

And then along comes John!

Yesterday (Monday) morning, Foot-In-Mouth Sec. of State John Kerry, spouts off a flippant attempt at condescension when a reporter asked if Assad had any way of escape from the wrath of the Bronco Bomber. Kerry said, “Sure!” Assad just has to turn over his WMDs!

Now the dominoes start falling faster than the Lame stream can type.

Kerry said this as a “Yeah right. Like that’ll happen” remark. The Lame stream instantly started backtracking Kerry’s idiocy as a “gaffe.” “He didn’t mean it like that!” But before the ink was dry, Assad and Putin pounced. The deal is struck. Putin sets himself up to sweep in and save the day. Russia will accept Syria’s WMDs to save Assad from the Big Bad Bronco.

Considering that Bronco was so hopelessly cornered, he takes this as an unexpected out! The Lame stream quickly changes tack. Now they say Kerry’s “offer” for Syrian disarmament was on the table all along. It was just “considered unlikely.”

In the mean time, the Bomber’s speech writers are burning up their keyboards to rewrite tonight’s speech. We will never know what sort of tap dance they had planned. That speech will never see the light of day. Instead, we get to watch a whole new tap dance in which the Bronco Bomber claims victory once again for his glorious diplomacy that diverted war. All hail our great and glorious Bronco.

But, my dear readers, the rest of us* know better.

* Throughout this post, when I say, “the rest of us,” I am referring to level-headed, conservative, intelligent American patriots, such as you, my readers. You are so smart! Smart enough to read this blog!!

…I would make a business of going from one Liberal-nut-job gun “buy back” to another. Next weekend, Niagara Falls, and Lockport, NY, will offer “$50 for working shotguns and rifles, $75 for handguns, and $100 for assault rifles.” At the same time, in a suburb of Palo Alto, CA, “a small-caliber handgun with a small magazine might fetch $100, for example, while a high-powered assault weapon with a large magazine would garner more, perhaps $200 or $250.”

There are similar events near Philadelphia, PA; San Jose, CA; Newburgh, NY; Conway, SC; and Santa Fe, NM in just the next two weeks!

Yessir, I’d park my truck across the street with a big banner: “Sell you gun here!”

At a gun show, depending on the caliber and condition, an AR or AK rifle is worth $800 to $2000. Even pistols are worth two to ten times more than these wackos are paying. Talk about a healthy margin! If I had the money to invest, I could turn a 100 to 1000% profit on each weapon. Meanwhile, my savings account is earning less than 2%.

Of course, I wouldn’t haul the weapons straight to a gun show. That’d be dishonest. In order to win over these brainless gun givers (Can’t really consider them “owners” can you?) I’d promise them the guns were for my private collection. They’d be “off the street” and locked up away from the bad guys… at least until the market stops climbing.

Actually… Sante Fe is not that far from here. Hmmm.

I get a lot of spam. I mean a lot! But it’s not so bad because I know how to handle it. My personal advice for anyone who connects to the interwebs ever is to create a spam email account. I use HotMail. HotMail has a feature that sends all emails to a junk folder unless I know and have allowed the sender. Then, whenever a website (even a website I trust) asks for my email address, I use darkmanwork@hotmail.com. See?! I’m so confident that I’ll put my email address right here in the blog post!! Because I know if a spammer gets hold of it, they can do me no harm. Their scams and junk mail will end up harmlessly sitting in my junk folder. Because I do, on rare occasion get valid emails to that address, every couple of days, I scan through the junk folder. Some phishing emails I report to the owners of the site being phished (like when a get a fake email from PayPal or eBay). But most of it just gets deleted.

I get a lot of these Nigerian style scams. I scan through a few of them to chuckle at the grammar. But this one was so bad, it was too good to just toss in the trash. I present “Urgent!”

A symptom of my blog neglect is the large collection of news links stacked on my desktop. Rather than try and write a post for each one, I’m just going to have to do a link dump. So, hold on to your bloomers. Here we go!

Dirty space news: Mysterious explosion on Uranus!! (Clicky clicky.)

Siberians share DNA with Neanderthals… OR maybe Neanderthal were actually humans… Duh. Read Genesis! (Clicky clicky.)

Insult to injury: Netflix customers (former and current) cut deep into earnings. Stock collapses. (Clicky clicky.)

Shamed ultra Liberal (and likely criminal) “community organization” ACORN is the driving force behind the “Occupy” movement. (Clicky clicky.)

After exposure, ACORN scrambles (but fails) to cover up “Occupy” involvement. (Clicky clicky.)

Hilarious: Mass of McDonald’s job applications dumped on “Occupy” protesters. (Clicky clicky.)

The parasites have parasites: Lice outbreak at Occupy Portland. (Clicky clicky.)

Walmart for rats: “Occupy” encampments are breeding grounds for dangerous disease including drug-resistant TB and truth-resistant socialism. (Clicky clicky and clicky clicky.)

Obama’s agriculture dept introduced Christmas Tree Tax to promote Christmas trees. Seriously?! (Clicky clicky.)

U.S. military kicked out of Iraq likely because Obama admin completely ignored the Iraqi gov’t for nearly a year! Turns out the “silent treatment” is not good foreign policy! (Clicky clicky.)

As a follow up to my rant on Netflix, Scott McKain, blogger at The Ultimate Customer Experience, posted a brilliant article dissecting the EPIC FAIL that is Netflix’s planned split. Here are some juicy bits to entice your clickage:

The problem is, Netflix’s letter — while well written — clearly displays a mistake of epic proportions.
…
Netflix isn’t a DVD-by-mail company, in the eyes of its customers. It’s not even a streaming-movies-on-your-computer-or-TV company. Netflix is where we go to get a movie.
…
Is there a difference between the business YOU think you are in — and what business your CUSTOMERS say you’re in? If there is…choose what THEY think! THEY are the reason YOU are still in business!

Now, go read the whole thing! DO IT!! (Clicky clicky.)

The old saying goes, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” Following that logic, “If you know what you did to break it, doing that same thing more won’t fix it.”

This simple logic seems too hard to understand for Netflix.

Netflix has decided that their online streaming service is more valuable than it’s DVD by mail service. Several months ago, they announced a price increase for the streaming service, previously included for free in their higher tier memberships (like mine). This amounted to a 60% increase in my bill. I changed my membership to avoid this price increase. About 1 million subscribers flat out cancelled.

When Netflix boss, Reed Hastings, started a press release this weekend with “I messed up.”, I had some hope. That hope didn’t last beyond the second paragraph.

Ultimately, what Hastings “messed up” was jacking up prices with no added service. The delusion Hastings expresses in his press release is that the mistake was in communication. Wha?! “I need to be extra-communicative. This is the key thing I got wrong.” What are you smoking, man?!

The “key thing” is a 60% price increase, plain and simple!! The “key thing” is that you are raising prices for nothing! Splitting up services for nothing. Making my membership more complicated for nothing! I don’t give a flying crap about your level of communication.

Instead of fixing the problem, Netflix is going to make it even worse. They’re splitting the DVD business into a new company with a new name and, presumably, a new website and price model, completely separate from their streaming service, which will retain the Netflix monicker. So, if your price increase and service changes broke the system, the solution is not to further change the service and keep the stinking price increase!!

I loved Netflix. I touted Netflix to friends, family and blog readers. I even defended Netflix when people talked about the problems (like poor selection, some titles becoming unavailable, and how slow Netflix adds new releases). But you’ll notice all of those are in the past tense. Frankly, I’m pissed at Netflix right now. And it’ll take a lot for them to win me back.

At this moment, my Netflix account is “on hold.” That means my account is still there, my DVD queue (nearly 400 titles) is still there, but I’m not paying and they’re not sending. I’m one small step away from just canceling my membership. I don’t want to cancel. I want to get my DVDs. I want to stream some TV shows once in a blue moon. And I want to do both from one service, with one queue and one library of titles at one simple and competitive price.

*sigh*

But, I guess that’s just too much to ask. I guess logic is just too much for some people.

A scientist whose famous drowning polar bears research armed global warming nut cases with their strongest, bleeding-heart, emotional and illogical claim has been placed on leave while the U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement investigates possible “scientific misconduct.” (Full story)

Meanwhile, NASA climate data shows that over the last 10 years or so, the dreaded carbon dioxide supposedly killing our atmosphere has had very little green house effect. “There is a huge discrepancy between the data and the forecasts that is especially big over the oceans.” (Full story)

So the polar bears are not drowning and carbon dioxide is not causing green-house-effect global warming*. But, I’m sure you won’t hear about any of this on CNN.

What will the next hysteria-inducing plot be? You know they’re probably already working on it. I expect it will hit the news sometime in the next five years or so. Check out this previous post and read the secret recipe so you can spot the next one.

*Carbon dioxide is not a green house gas. Nor is the freon that used to cheaply run your air conditioner. Nor are the CFCs that used to cheaply pressurize your hair spray and dry clean your clothes. All these have now been regulated or flat out outlawed by the eco-nuts and replace with more expensive, less effective options. But, of course, we know exactly why, don’t we?