Category: These Are The Crazy Years

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Frustrating.

The RFRA recently passed by Indiana is a bad law, but it’s a bad law the same way as the RFRAs passed by 19 other states and the Federal Government are bad laws.  There is no need for the RFRA if the courts recognize pre-existing religious freedoms and freedom of association.  There is no need for the RFRA if people simply let free markets work.  If you’re gay and your baker of choice won’t bake you decorated cookies with gay power slogans on them because he is a devout Christian who doesn’t support your lifestyle choice, that’s his right — as it is your right to go out to your community and tell people that he isn’t friendly to your cause and that maybe his business should be avoided because of that.  See?  Free market at work instead of a tiny minority of hyphenated Americans wagging the full force of the law dog to force someone to do something that goes against his or her religious belief.  In other words, the way things have been done in this country for years, at least until the Perennially Indignant came up with the idea that you could litigate someone out of business for the most ridiculous of reasons.

The sheer amount of lying on the left regarding what this law does is just about enough to make me tear out the rest of my remaining hair, and then start in on the beard.  And it’s just plain lies.  It’s not just misconstructions or insinuations or little white lies, it’s great big fucking whopper lies.  My own wife told me the other night that our RFRA is the only one that specifically targets gays.  Problem with that is that I actually read the statute, and it does nothing of the sort.  In point of fact, the law in Indiana has never identified the LGBT community as one accorded special protection, so the Indiana RFRA doesn’t even infringe on some supposed pre-existing accommodation.

The governor of Connecticut is banning state-paid travel to Indiana because of our RFRA.  Except that his state has one that is just as bad.

The GOP mayor of Indianapolis, who isn’t running for re-election, could have kept his piehole shut, but he had to speak out on the issue and declare himself opposed to the RFRA.  Well, Mr. Ballard, if you were running again, you wouldn’t be getting my vote anyway, but this just would have put the icing on.

All of this is a distraction.  It’s being done to knock Pence out of consideration for 2016 (although as much as I like Pence, I have never really considered him as presidential timber, at least not till after he completes a couple of terms as governor — and I am very disappointed that he signed rather than vetoed the RFRA) and to distract from the unConstitutional and extra-Constitutional actions of our traitor President.  It’s being done to suppress voter turnout among whites, who are more and more turning against Obama.  And it’s being done because it does not fit the narrative of where the progressive left wants this country to go.

Libprogs would prefer this country to Balkanize itself and become a fractured nation of ethnic and national communities that can’t agree on a damn thing.  They hate the idea of the melting pot.  They hate the idea of American Exceptionalism, they hate the idea of the Pax Americana, and they hate everything that this country stands for with regard to individual liberty.  They hate guns, they hate the military, they hate the rich (even though some of them are among the richest), and they want everyone but themselves to live beholden to the State.

Fuck them.  I am not a slave, I am a free man.  The State can go hang.

My ancestors, right up to my father, and a number of my own cousins and other relatives, did not fight and sometimes die in the service of their country in expectation that it would turn into a Communist/Statist/Nanny-State “paradise”.  They may have voted Democrat back when the Democrats were a party worth voting for.  But like Ronald Reagan, most of my formerly-Democrat relatives have found that the Democratic Party has left them for one reason or another.

I know people who say that Pence is going to be one-and-done.  I wonder.  Indiana is a very conservative state, deep down.  If you rile up the base sufficiently, they will rise up from their electoral slumber and vote for the man who signed the bill that at least purports to protect their religious freedoms.

Was this a bad bill at the wrong time?  Yes, it was.  Someone I was talking to the other day stated their opinion that the GOP should have waited a year, and taken that year to write a better bill and build support for it in the community.  Maybe.  Maybe they would have figured out in that year that they didn’t need the RFRA at all and that common sense ought to rule in the state and in its courts.  (Common sense, unfortunately, is becoming a very rare commodity — again, because that’s what the libprogs want.)

If there was ever a time that conservatives — or as I prefer to call them, “classical liberals” — need to turn Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals back on their progressive proponents, it would seem to be now.  Whether you like the RFRA or not, libprogs are telling stories about it that simply aren’t true.  It’s time to punch back twice as hard.  Punch back, in fact, hard enough that Alinsky’s grandmother feels it.

And make sure that your so-called conservative Indiana reps and senators know that you think they are damn fools for putting the RFRA forward and that it needs to be repealed tout de suite.

If this stance on my part angers you, fine.  Go away.  Unfriend me on Facebook.  And don’t come back.  I don’t need friends who believe in and propagate lies.

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Mourn the Constitution…then work to restore it

This president has folded, spindled and mutilated the Constitution before.  Last night he simply balled it up and threw it in the trash.

Worst president since Wilson.

The next Congress is going to have to man up and take on this usurper, this Emperor in his own mind.  This is not Rome, and he is not Augustus.  He is but a man, and with luck he will find out soon enough that the people of this country and their elected representatives aren't as stupid as he and Jonathan Gruber think.

On the other hand, if our elected representatives don't start working to repair the damage, the people may have to exercise their right to take matters into their own hands.

We're still at the top of this particular slippery slope, but we're beginning to slide.  Keep your powder dry.

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Just a bunch of HOAs.

I see in the local popular media that the Hancock County prosecutor is telling a local homeowners' association that they need to back down from telling a Korean War veteran that he can't fly a flag from a flagpole in his yard.  That's nice, right before the election…ought to give that fuckface prosecutor a nice boost for standing up for a flag-waving patriot.1

The problem as I see it, however, is that the HOA's rules aren't negotiable in court.  As the perennial argument regarding ham radio antennae in HOA-controlled neighborhoods goes, when you signed on the dotted line (the many dotted lines) to close on your home, one of the things you signed was your agreement to abide by the HOA rules.  If you didn't sign that document then in all likelihood you wouldn't have been permitted to close on the house (or, in my case some years back, condo).

So other than grandstanding, I don't see where this prosecutor is going to be able to do much more than rant and rave.  I agree with him that the HOA are being assholes here, but the problem is not the one little rule that says "no flagpoles in yards".  And yes, yes, I get that many years ago (in years that I was alive, in fact) there were plenty of "neighborhood associations" and "civic leagues" whose only real reason for existing was to keep blacks out of their neighborhoods.  The Civil Rights Act pretty much put paid to that little conceit.2

No, the problem is HOAs themselves.  HOAs are creatures of the general contractor and they are put in place to handle things that the city or county don't generally deal with and that the contractor doesn't want to be hung with forever after the subdivision is 100% sold.  For instance, snow removal, garbage pickup, general maintenance of common areas, possibly ownership of a clubhouse, that sort of thing.  As far as snow and garbage and road upkeep go, the subdivision might not even be in a city district to begin with, and the contractor may have received zoning approval only after agreeing to set up a HOA so that the city or county wouldn't have to worry about them.  These are legitimate reasons to have a HOA, in my opinion; it is simpler and often cheaper to negotiate neighborhood-wide contracts for services rather than each householder contracting his own, and of course common property needs to be kept in good repair.

However, HOAs generally come with a generic set of bylaws and rules that are oppressive and (in my opinion) effectively constitute a "taking" of your right to own and improve property.  While it may be appreciated that the association bylaws don't allow your hillbilly neighbors out back to run an informal auto repair and body shop in their garage and side yard (something that residential zoning rules generally frown on anyway), bylaws that disallow individualized lawn improvements such as flower beds, flagpoles, fountains, or even trees and mulching without association approval — which may or may not be granted — may not float your boat five or six years into your residence there.  Oh, and that boat?  Keep it in storage somewhere else, along with your RV, because it's unlikely you'll be allowed to park either of them in your driveway or back yard.  And we'll not get into the whole "ham radio antennae and your HOA" business, other than to say that if HOAs weren't unreasonable, there wouldn't be a booming business in so-called "stealth" antennae among the ham radio set.3

The fact is that the vast majority of HOAs end up being little fascist neighborhood soviets with their spies out just waiting for you to violate the rules.  It is often nearly impossible to vote the control freaks out of office, and even when you do that, it is usually impossible to simply let the HOA fold up and die.4  Because of that, it seems to me that the time is ripe not for prosecutors to be telling HOAs that they can't prevent veterans from flying flags, but for the state legislature to start legislating in favor of property rights and put the brakes on HOAs in general, spelling out in statute what they can and cannot do to their neighbors — who, after all, have a sizeable investment in property that the HOA is trying to micro-control.  Most folks who buy and live in HOA neighborhoods don't have the easy option of saying to hell with the HOA, I'm selling and going somewhere else.  After all, they have to find a buyer, sell, find a new place to live, often negotiate purchase of a new home "pending sale of other property" because you can't have multiple FHA mortagages…and believe me, I'm still trying to sell an FHA-financed condo after moving out nearly nine years ago, while still trying to buy the house we're living in (the move was not because of the HOA, but because we needed a bigger place after we got married).  Buying a house is not like buying a car and trading it every two or three years.  You are sort of stuck for a while, unless you are independently wealthy, or unless your friend who just moved back to town is looking for a place to live and your mother is moving into senior living and is willing to let you live in the house till you can purchase it from her.  The latter being our case.

Bottom line, the HOA problem isn't going to go away without legislation.  The Hancock County fuckface prosecutor can grandstand all he wants, but in the end, all he's going to get is a specific HOA to back down in this one single case — if that.  Our legislators need to stand up for property rights and put limits on abusive HOA behavior.

UPDATE:  Looks like the HOA backed down.  I read the prosecutor's letter, and more or less I suppose his position is tenable, but IMHO, and all things being equal, I think the HOA should have fought him in court — a judge might have seen a certain amount of prosecutorial overreach.  Now we have an unresolved issue that will continue to be unresolved until either the courts rule on a different HOA issue, or the legislature finally acts to limit the power of HOAs in such matters.

The assholes who wrote the anonymous hate mails are funny.  "Now that you have destroyed Fieldstone, are you going to pay my mother’s nursing care costs when she is unable to sell her home there?"  Yeah, right.  Try proving your initial proposition first, i.e., that one flagpole flying an American flag and a POW/MIA flag has "destroyed" the subdivision.  And, "You have caused immeasurable harm."  Prove it.

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1 See here for why I consider the Hancock Country prosecutor a fuckface, and hope people vote for his opponent next week.

2  To this day I refuse to join or even go to the meetings of the civic league in this neighborhood, because they approached my father back in the early 1960s about that and he said, "What is the point of your association?  What is your main reason for existing?" and they hemmed and hawwed and finally admitted that they were trying to keep the black man out.  He told them to get the hell out of his house and off of his property.
      While I understand that today's iteration of that civic league is more about neighborhood watch and that sort of thing, the very history of the organization prevents me from becoming involved with it.  The least they could have done was changed the name.  Anyway, it is not a HOA and can't tell me what I can and can't do with my property, so it can go fly a fucking kite.

3  And let's be clear here — by "unreasonable" I don't mean that they don't allow a guy to have an 80 foot guyed tower with a dozen different antennae hanging off of it, topped with a hex beam good to 80 meters.  I mean not allowing things like a 27-foot ground-mount vertical in your back yard, because your neighbor might see it and have a heart attack.  Or getting bent out of shape because you have some nearly invisible wires hanging in the air outside that run down to your eaves and thence into your home.  This is why there is a bill in Congress right now that seeks to extend the "reasonable accommodation" already made years ago for TV antennae and satellite dishes to include "reasonable" ham radio antennae.

4  Although I was talking to someone recently who told me about his defunct, abusive HOA that had been taken over and then left to rot on the vine for the five years or so of inactivity that caused it to be dissolved completely, when all of a sudden, right before time expired, one of his neighbors crawled out of the woodwork and started trying to find candidates to run for office.  He told her to fuck off, and so did the rest of the neighborhood who were happy to have the fascists off their backs.

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I know Jesus said that he was bringing a new law

but even he might be scratching his head about this one.

A friend "liked" a post on FB this morning that I couldn't respond to because I'm not a friend of her friend.  Which is another reason FB is fucked up, but that's for another day.1

The post was a picticle2 that said, "Sometimes the nicest people you meet are covered in tattoos, and sometimes the most judgmental people you meet go to church on Sundays."

Isn't that special.

I don't get the tattoo thing.  I mean even from a general cultural standpoint I don't get it.  The only people — other than sailors, who are a bit of a breed apart — who used to get tattoos were thugs, gang members, and prison inmates (I may be repeating myself), and now it seems that not only are young men tatting themselves up, but nearly every young woman under 21 (and many of them over it) proudly sports a tramp stamp somewhere.3  But the ones that truly get me are the ones you see where some young athlete has branded himself with crosses and other religious symbology and text…when we know that Jesus, being Jewish, would have been well aware of Leviticus 19:28:

Ye shall not make any cuttings in your flesh for the dead, nor print any marks upon you: I am the LORD.4

Yet today even Jewish young people are now inking themselves in this barbaric manner, which of course is why Jewish Scripture inveighed against it — the Philistines and the Caananites undoubtedly did that sort of thing to show how rough and ready they were, you know, being barbarians.  Plus, you know, the whole Auschwitz thing.  Although when I think about it, I doubt that many of the young Jewish people today have ever actually met a Holocaust survivor.

I do know perfectly nice people who have tattoos, but that doesn't mean I have to pretend that I think they're the greatest thing since sliced bread.  And being me, the folks I know who have tattoos are generally aware of my disapprobation of same.  Does that make me judgmental?  I don't think so, regardless of the attitude such people take that sort of goes, "If you don't do it, you can't understand it."  I understand it, all right.  I really don't need to walk a mile in your shoes to believe that it's goddamn foolishness to decorate yourself with ink that doesn't come off.5

The prevailing mindset these days is "anything goes".  If you like it, do it.  If it feels good, do it.  The old civilized culture that some of us still remember has been marginalized by the radicals who have taken over our schools and universities and newspapers and television.  The rot has even reached into our churches and synagogues because today's clergy are the product of the radical march through the institutions that has taken place since the late 1960's, with no end in sight.

If you think that because I don't like your tattoos, that makes me judgmental, too fucking bad.  I'm a representative of a better time and I say you are a barbarian.  Enjoy those tats when you get old and they fade and sag.  And don't come crying to me if you end up with hepatitis C from a dirty needle, or can't find a job because nobody will hire you due to your visible tattoos.

Meantime, if you notice me gritting my teeth a bit while smiling when you show me your latest inking, now you'll know why.

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1 Briefly, why does FB tell me that friends of mine have made comments on other people's walls when I'm not friends with the other person?  Do they expect me to click the "Add Friend" button mindlessly, even if I don't know the person and don't have any interest in being that person's friend?  God, I hate Facebook.

2 I'm operating under the thesis that a "picticle" is something like a "listicle", in other words, as a listicle is a bullet-point list that poses as an article ("Ten Weird Things…"), so is a picticle a picture with editorializing (or moralizing) text overprinted that speaks ex cathedra from the poster's navel, and stands in place of making an actual argument with actual words and actual people who disagree with you regarding the subject at hand.

3 Including one of my nieces, who found out too late that the tattoos she had precluded her joining the Air Force, because they were too visible even with clothing.  She's now a paramedic in training and I could not be prouder of her, but because of the tats, several years of her life were spent aimlessly between the Air Force refusal and her deciding to get into EMS.

4 Of course, in context, the next verse is "Do not prostitute thy daughter, to cause her to be a whore; lest the land fall to whoredom, and the land become full of wickedness."  To which I can only shrug, and murmur, "Too late…"

5 Well, not without some really expensive treatments, anyway.  I keep thinking I should open a chain of tattoo removal salons…in about 10-15 more years I'll bet they will be damn profitable.

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Mawwidge

Look, I don't honestly give a flying fuck about states being ordered to let LGBT people "marry".  Because I don't think the state ought to be involved in marriage, in any case.

The problem I have with non-traditional marriage — by which I mean anything other than one man one woman — is that there are people out there who hold traditional religious beliefs who should not be required by the state to change their attitude regarding same.  There is that little thing called the First Amendment, after all, and it means that the government has no say over your religious beliefs.  If you want to worship Satan, that's your kink, just don't wave it in my face.*

The counter-argument is made, of course, to the effect that the majority wave their sexuality and religious beliefs in the minority's face all day every day 24/7/365 world without end amen.  And yeah, that's true; before about 10 years ago, most folks producing popular culture understood that the 97% of us who are straight have little or no interest in major characters in every TV comedy and drama being gay and out of the closet.  Lately, though, you'd think gays were at least 50% of the population, because every show has a flamer or two who get a lot of attention.  (Modern Family, I'm looking at you.  Just as a 'f'r'instance.)

The counter-argument goes on to point out that there are straight couples out there who 1) don't have children and 2) even if they do, they can't manage to stay together and end up divorced.  I don't really consider #1 a problem, not just because my marriage fits that description, but also because the fairy-tale shit about finding your soulmate when you're in your 20s and young enough to consider settling down and starting a family doesn't always come true.  I did not find my wife until I was 40 and she was 42.**  We were not about to start a family at that age.  (Good thing, too, because we'd have teenagers now and be looking at putting them through college when we'd really rather be thinking about retiring.)

#2, divorce, is a real problem, but I think it exists primarily because the previous generation was quick to pull the trigger on ending marriages that ended up being "inconvenient" (mostly because the woman decided she didn't need the husband, just his money) and the courts were far too amenable to agreeing to let the divorces proceed.  I know a couple of women who had children and then divorced their husbands because their husbands, quite reasonably, expected them to take care of the children to the detriment of what they considered to be their career path.  Abuse was claimed (mental in all cases) but I suspect that what was considered to be abuse was simply an old-fashioned expectation of motherhood being more important than a career.***

Anyway, gays point at these two problems of heterosexuality in the modern age and clamor for the same right to marry (and I assume, to divorce) as straights.  If marriage doesn't require that the female have children, and if marriage can be dissolved at just about any time for just about any reason, then gays may have a point, even if it's ill-made.

What is truly sad about the whole situation, though, is that being married without children is a pretty big burden.  There is that little thing known as the "marriage penalty", and it's meant that my wife and I have had to pay the government thousands of dollars in taxes over the past decade and a half that we would never have paid had we remained single.  I keep joking, in fact, that we really need to get divorced for tax purposes.  My wife doesn't laugh but it really isn't funny, the moreso because it's true.

Because the actual benefits of what we call marriage today are primarily civil and not religious in nature, I would argue (as I have done at the beginning of this article and as I have done before, fairly consistently) that it is time for the state to get out of the business of sanctioning marriage.  Let all "marriage" simply be a contract between two people, sex-neutral, wherein responsibilities (including those of child-raising) of each party are defined, merging of assets is delineated, and provision is made to redistribute those assets should the contract be terminated (divorce).  This could be reduced to a standard form, similar to the Jewish ketubah (which does in fact include provisions for divorce).

Once the relationship between two people is reduced to a contract, which can be handled by lawyers and recorded with the county recorder for a modest fee, any ceremony of solemnization becomes optional (one assumes that the lawyers for both parties, as officers of the court, could be empowered to handle that) and the religious community is then off the hook and may perform whatever ceremonies that it sees fit upon couples who fit its requirements for same.  No longer would a priest, minister, or rabbi**** feel cornered or coerced into performing ceremonies that their scriptural constitutions forbid, and their congregations could rest easy in the expectation that the two gay boys (or girls) who wanted to be married in their place of worship had no case whereby to sue them into compliance with some politically-correct statute.

Mark me well — If your particular denomination smiles on gay marriage, party on.  That's your cross to bear, and you can defend it when you're called to account at the end of time.  The important thing to me is that you stop trying to tell MY particular congregation or creed that it MUST accept marriage between anything other than one man and one woman.  And the way to start putting an end to that is to remove marriage from the realm of government sanction and make it simply a legal contract between two people — not between two people and the government.

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* Don't start with me about peyote buds and ritual sacrifice and that kind of shite.  Civil code covers most of that.  Murder is still murder, whether or not it was done to satisfy some elder god or suchlike.

** Yes, for me, the answer to the question of life, the universe and everything was 42.

*** We could go into the whole idea of women seemingly dominating the workforce in a day and age when an awful lot of breadwinner-type men are out of work, but I know too many strong and independent career-minded women who would probably kick my ass if I bitched about that. So never mind.  But as has been said many times, the future belongs to those who show up for it, and choosing not to have children — particularly if you could have done when you were young enough to build a family — does potentially have consequences.

**** I've left "imam" off of this list because I can't think of anyone of LGBT status, even some of the more liberal nutbag gays, who would have the balls to walk into a mosque and ask an imam to marry them.  Which is another problem for another day.

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KidsSysAdmins today.

Customer writes in about using our utility that takes one of our encoded system files and translates it to plain text so you can view it.

When I try to look at them using [utility], they scroll by so fast I can’t read them. Is there a switch or something I can use to view one page at a time?

Apparently nobody knows how to use the DOS command line anymore.  There are at least two methods of handling this without needing a switch.  Either redirect the output to a file, or pipe it to MORE.

Jeez.  We are doomed.  It's like in the Foundation series, where the soi-disant technicians and engineers who ran the atomic power plants no longer knew anything about the technology behind them, and couldn't so much as replace a part if it failed.

They were back in the office and Mallow said, thoughfully, "And all those generators are in your hands?"

"Every one," said the tech-man, with more than a touch of complacency.

"And you keep them running and in order?"

"Right!"

"And if they break down?"

The tech-man shook his head indignantly, "They don't break down.  They never break down.  They were built for eternity."

"Eternity is a long time.  Just suppose—"

"It is unscientific to suppose meaningless cases."

"All right.  Suppose I were to blast a vital part into nothingness?  I suppose the machines aren't immune to atomic forces?  Suppose I fuse a vital connection, or smash a quartz D-tube?"

"Well, then," shouted the tech-man, furiously, "you would be killed."

"Yes, I know that," Mallow was shouting, too, "but what about the generator?  Could you repair it?"

"Sir," the tech-man howled his words, "you have had a fair return.  You've had what you asked for.  Now get out!  I owe you nothing more!"

Mallow bowed with a satiric respect and left.

Two days later he was back at the base where the Far Star waited to return with him to the planet, Terminus.

And two days later, the tech-man's shield went dead, and for all his puzzling and cursing never glowed again.

—Isaac Asimov, Foundation, p. 176

Old-time ham radio operators who still remember homebrewing their own equipment snarkily dismiss this kind of thing as "appliance operating".  While I think that may be a little harsh and overblown, when it comes down to someone who only knows how to manipulate Windows through the GUI, I do sort of get their point.

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Two item takeaway

OK, so there's a group trying to educate 'murricans regarding just exactly what Shakespeare meant when he put the line, "The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers" into Dick the Butcher's mouth.

Whether the Bard was trying to defend lawyers or not, I see two takeaways from this.

First, our schools are doing a shit job of teaching the classics if someone has to have this explained to them.  (Of course we've known that for years.)

Second, counselor, "thou doth protest too much, methinks."  If things are so bad that people are actually twisting the meaning of the line out of context against lawyers, your profession has other problems that won't be solved by explaining what Shakespeare really meant.

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Democrats are scum (but we knew that).

Do these people think that they are immune from the consequences of their idiocy?

Virginia Democrat Offers Reward For Nude Photos of Big Game Hunting Texas Tech Cheerleader Kendall Jones…

I noted on Facebook that I wished I were Ms. Jones's father.  Because Mr. Dick, er, Dickinson would be a dead man walking if I were.

To be honest, I'm kind of surprised that Dick, er, Dickinson would actually threaten to do something like this to a woman who, if she became irate with him, could probably put an arrow through him at a hundred yards and then gut him like the pig he is.

So, since he probably won't end up qualifying for a Darwin Award (because folks like the Joneses are probably far too polite to beat the life out of him as he so richly deserves), Mr. Mike "Little" Dick, er, Dickinson, receives the Tiger Taunting Award today for his inability to understand exactly when it's wiser to just keep your damn piehole shut.

 

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These are the Crazy Years.

I mean, I was thinking that earlier anyway, when I had to drive downtown and was listening to Rush go on about this bill in California that purports to give same-sex couples insurance coverage for infertility treatments. But that is, as they say, another story.

No, I’ve been seeing ads on blogs lately like this one:

fraud.jpg

Now, come on.  “Free Energy”, the great bugaboo of Evil Global Corporations, like the ones that stole the guy’s invention for making your internal combustion engine run on dihydrogen monoxide.  Yeah.

But I was looking at that thing and thinking to myself, “That’s a wireless/wired Ethernet module of some sort.  How is that going to make energy at all, let alone ‘free’ energy?”

So I googled “OPTO 22”.  (See the label on the bottom.)  And it turns out that the picture is of an “Energy monitoring unit with Demand Response capability”.  Which makes a certain amount of sense; it’s going to monitor your energy use and talk to other modules elsewhere in your system that could be shut down at times of high demand.  But there are two problems with this wonder of the modern age.

1) This is an industrial — not residential — control that costs over a grand, MSRP.  And it doesn’t operate in a vacuum; you’d need other expensive modules to control your home appliances, e.g., your air conditioner, your refrigerator, your freezer, ceiling fans, lights, etc.

2) Your local electric utility probably has a program to install something like this that turns your air conditioner off during the day during periods of peak load…and they’ll install it for free.*

So I deduce two things from this, and adduce something we already know.

A) Someone** is trying to sell you something you don’t need, that won’t actually do what they claim, to wit, “produce free energy for your home”; and

B) Power utilities, far from being scared of such things, actually LOVE them because they reduce peak load, which is a major problem particularly in the summer when everyone is running air conditioning.

C) Caveat emptor — because TANSTAAFL.

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* Mine does, and they bug the hell out of me all the time to let them do so.

** Likely not the controller manufacturer themselves, who appear to be more interested in selling to industry than to Joe Blow in the little bungalow down the street.  Someone is probably reselling this stuff and making a killing off of little old retiree types in Florida.  Admittedly I did not click on the ad, even though it was on a certain well-known Filipina journalist’s blog site and the link from there is probably mostly harmless.  Oh, hell, whatever — I did click on it, and it goes to some outfit called “Power4Patriots”.  Geez.  Why not just try to sell me gold for my retirement portfolio and be done with it?  I think the gold guys are more honest.