Let me preface this by explaining the reverence I have for Florida Power and Light.  I can BS you about how they are an amazing company, specially in Post Hurricane times and how they bust their asses making sure people gets connected again and how fast they respond to normal problems and keep you informed, but the truth is that without FPL plugging juice into my AC, I would have died of heat exhaustion many moons ago.

Just about over an hour ago, my door bell rings and since I paid for a door bell camera, I activated it:

Fella there informs me that he is from FPL and that he needs to do some checking on some wiring. I told the guy that I did not see a badge and therefore I could not know if he was who he was saying he was.  He told me that he had left it in his truck and that he was going to get it and he did. He also backed his truck so i could see it.

While he moved the truck, I went up front and opened the door <gasp>. It was then when things started to look funky. You can’t see it in this picture, but the truck is not one of the ones that FPL uses, nor it had the logo. Behold something I did not realize till then: You can’t get a lot of image detail in a smartphone’s plain image and screen.

And yes, I was carrying. Door was half open and I was bladed towards Mr. Phosphorescent Green here. He retorted once again he was from FPL and he needed access to my property to check some wiring.  I went NO!, Full Stop & Go Away.

He was not happy.

I figure your local power company is the same: They only have responsibility and access all the way to the meter and nowhere else, specially inside your domain. We had enough assholes pretending to be FPL and then doing nasty shit so the company keeps reminding us of that. And in the over 2 decades living here, I never had FPL dropping by unless it was a post-hurricane check on a transformer nearby.

Even though he insisted that he had to check wires, I explained to him that he was not dressed as FPL (hint there asshole) and his truck was not properly decorated with the FPL logos and paint schemes (hint 2 asshole) and closed the door.

And called the cops.

I did call the Non-Emergency number because it was not a life or death situation (at least not for me) explained what was happening and I was told officers would be sent.

In the meantime, I saw the guy was out of sight, took a stupid chance and stepped outside  to get a good picture of the truck.

You ain’t FPL for sure.

Texas? What the fork?

A few minutes after the call, a female MDPD officer arrives and I explain her what happened and why I was suspicious.  She goes to check on the guy.

And back up arrives right after that.

I could barely see them (guy glanced a couple of times my way and gave me the eye-fuck-you) but I heard them talking/arguing and apparently he finally fessed up, was checked out and was not arrested. The officers came over and explained that the guy was hired by a subcontractor for Comcast, not FPL and he was supposed to check some wiring that runs in the back porch of my neighbor’s yard, but nobody was home so we assume he was trying to see if he could do so via my house. And the officers confirmed that on plain sight, the whole thing looked suspicious, specially with a truck with Texas plate and the guy with an ID from Indiana. I thanked the officers and they told me I might be seeing the guy in the back of my neighbor’s home… and said nothing else. I figure it was her way of saying-not saying “Don’t shoot the asshole if you see him again” or maybe not that message…never mind.

Now, why he lied? My guess he knows/was told that if you say you are from the cable company and do not have an appointment, your interaction with people will be not so nice. But everybody down here will pay attention to FPL, again because we have our homes cooled. Also, he must have known I do not have an account with Comcast so I would have told him to go away.  Anyway, the lie was easy to pick and he ended up having to deal with cops for trying to be smart.

My mistake? Not using the enlarge capability of the camera app to check for the logos on the shirt and the doors of the truck. If I had done that, I would have not broken the seal and got out of the boat.

I know better for next time.

Bernie Sanders is going to be the Democratic nominee unless he gets Epsteined (fake heart attack) out by the DNC/Clinton Machine.

Here he is being interviewed by 60 Minutes after the Nevada Caucus.

Bernie Sanders defends his 1980s comments about Fidel Castro in an interview on 60 Minutes. https://t.co/ySqvQKoiBU pic.twitter.com/lTwuXWp9sA

— 60 Minutes (@60Minutes) February 24, 2020

This is a man who still finds a reason to praise Fidel Castro.

This is Cuba today.  This is what Bernie thinks is worth a literacy program.  It’s not just the authoritarianism.  It is the shortages of everything and grinding poverty of most Cubans.

Even if Bernie doesn’t become a Castro like a dictator, his policies will still destroy the economy.  That he has anything good to say about Castro is frightening as hell.

This is Mark Judson.  This is his campaign video for Congress in North Carolina.

Remember when I said I was worried that there was a class of military brass who were Leftist activists in uniform and wanted to create a Leftists junta in the United States?

Add Judson to my list of evidence for that.

He thought it would be a good idea to Tweet this from his official campaign account.

He’s not proposing policy, just sort of feeling out policy.  If enough people like this idea, he’ll propose it.

The fact that this idea even came to him is horrifying.

He is talking about a purge of the US Federal Government and the US Military of anyone and everyone who supported Trump, evidenced by their social media accounts.

This is, and I say this without an ounce of hyperbole – a Hitlerian and Stalinist idea.

Hitler and Stalin both purged their governments and militaries of anyone suspected of being disloyal to them.

Let’s say Judson did enact this as policy, what happens to everyone purged from the military.  I doubt he would want them to keep their post-discharge benefits, so he’d have to have them discharged under less than honorable conditions.  That will affect their ability to get jobs in the civilian world.  Especially any that are paid for from government contracts or municipal government jobs.

His goal is clearly to make a Federal Government and Military that is totally 100% loyal to the Democrat party and the #Resistance.

Can anybody say Junta?

He took this Tweet down, but that’s too little too late.  He let the mask slip and we all saw it.

For someone who thinks Trump is a dangerous authoritarian, this guy gives Stalin a hard-on.

The boredom and malaise of unemployment have caused me to become self-destructive.

No, I’m not drinking or doing drugs, but I have subjected myself to more episodes of Deputy.

It wasn’t terrible, for a little while, but then it veered hard Left.

In the episode from two weeks ago (S1E07 Search and Rescue), the Sheriff’s assistant/security detail was injured in a car accident.  At the end of the episode, she comes out as non-binary to the Sheriff’s wife, who is also the ER doctor who treated her.

Whatever.  Except, the doctor says “I know that there are more than two sexes.”  Yes, sexes.  Not genders, sexes.  Since sexual reproduction evolved 1.2 billion years ago, which lead to a greater increase in the diversity of life on year than in the previous 2.3 billion years of asexual reproduction, there have only been two sexes.  This claim is more than just Woke, it is a denial of evolutionary biology.

I’m not chalking it up to an accident.  Shows like this have a team of writers and editors, then the director, the actor who says the lines, post-production editing.  That dialog had to go through a lot of people who just accepted that as fine.

Nevertheless, I persisted.

Last week’s episode (S1E08 Selfless) was insane.  I am writing about it now because of Miguel’s post Liberalism Has RUINED California.

Here is the plot in a nutshell:

A murdered homeless Marine Corps veteran and addict is found in a tent in a homeless camp in LA.  The Sheriff’s best buddy deputy who was also a Marine Corps veteran and recovering alcoholic takes it personally and wants to solve the murder.

There is no twist or mystery to it.  The murdered homeless veteran was a “good guy” who was the homeless camp’s protector.  He was murdered for being a “good guy” by a security guard who worked for a local millionaire developer.  The developer paid the guard to murder the homeless veteran (not knowing he was a veteran) to give the police justification for clearing away the homeless encampment.  The encampment was making it impossible for him to build and was driving away potential customers.

The Sheriff makes it very clear that the developer is the bad guy for building housing that is too expensive, with building amenities like hot yoga studios and juice bars, and that the homeless are just victims.

He literally says “a tent city is just like any other neighborhood.”

The Sheriff refuses to clear the camp and insinuates that an elected city official that asked him to clear the camp is corrupt since he’s on the board of a development company.

During the Sheriff’s dressing down of this city official, he says in reference to a mural of LA’s history in the building, “the Spanish sent forty-four people to start this city, none of them looked like you or me.”

This is clearly implying that the white elected official wants the homeless tent city cleared because they are minorities and he’s a racist.

But more than that, how woke do you have to be to forget that Spaniards are white Europeans?

This is a portrait of Queen Isabella I – the mother of Spain.

When the forty-four Spaniards arrived to found Los Angeles, that was during the rule of King Charles IV of Spain, who was of the Bourbon line.  As in the same royal lineage as the French monarchy.  This is his portrait.

So I’m actually pretty sure that the Conquistadores and Monks who founded LA, were white guys like the Sheriff and the elected official.

It’s an insane bit of reasoning by Hollywood writers, that because they are used to hearing Spanish spoken by their brown Mexican maids, the reverse is true that everyone who speaks Spanish is a brown minority.

But I digress…

So in this last episode, we have been told that drug-addicted homeless vagrants in disease and filth soaked tent cities are our neighbors who are the victims of rich white developers, and people need to get used to the homeless living next door to their condos and shitting on the streets outside their hot yoga studios.  To think that is wrong makes you racist.

Of course, the writers and actors for this show don’t have to deal with this because the homeless live in Downtown LA where they don’t live.  The homeless are kept out of Malibu and Beverly Hills, so they don’t have to see them.

The closest they get is a bunch of paid extras to act homeless on a city street after the police cleared out the real homeless and a bunch of low-level studio workers power washed the sidewalk.

It’s not like the homeless are a problem for them.

Lastly, I’m bracing myself for future wokeness of an unbearable degree.

The Sheriff says to his non-binary assistant that he checked her file and called her former boss to find out why a former Pentagon Intelligence Analyst was in LA driving the Sheriff around.  The assistant was booted out of the Pentagon for some reason as yet to be explained, but the Sheriff wants to give the assistant a second chance.

Knowing how this show is, I’m expecting there to be a reveal where the assistant did something the Left would consider noble but Middle America would consider treasonous, stopping a drone strike on a terrorist cell or some shit like that.

Maybe I should take up heavy day drinking.  It would be better for my brain than this shit.

Caught this Chavista/Madurista talking about food in Venezuela:

The translation is somewhat weird, bur I will explain as I go.  Toddy in Venezuela is what we would call a chocolate-flavored powder you add to milk or water to obtain something that hints as a chocolate beverage.

t
Unless you liked the flavor (mostly because chocolate from Chuao was available at a decent price and that shit rocks) only poor people drank Toddy and the really poor people drank Taco which is God’s punishment for you liking chocolate.

The “diablitos” mentioned is nothing more than the good old deviled ham that we called “little devils”  for some branding reason. Again only if you had a liking for it, you’d eat that stuff (I like it, but I pay with heartburn of death so it is a yearly event.

So, during the pre-revolution times, any meal that comprised Toddy and diablitos happened in a poor household in the country. If you could not afford the pre-cooked cornmeal to make “arepas” (Venezuelan biscuit/bread) you went with cheap spaghetti which was sold subsidized for cents the pound.  “Espagueti con Diablitos” was the step above eating moldy day-old bread and then doing without food.

The Venezuelan Bernie Bro the says “The peel balls eat arepa with butter.” Lost in the translation, peel balls is literally “pela bolas” which in the Venezuela slang means be broke and poor, without coin. Here is what made me laugh about that line: Butter has always been expensive in Venezuela because it had to be imported  if you wanted to eat anything decent. We got butter from Europe that came in cans and was only to be used for the holidays and when you had people for dinner, Christmas and the such. The rest of the time, you had margarine.  Oh yes, we had locally made butter, but it sucked so bad, margarine (Mavesa and Nelly were brands we used at home) they actually tasted better.  To summarize: if you ate anything with butter back in pre-revolutionary days, you were making some money.

So our young idiotic revolutionary, managed to elevate the status of the dishes eaten by people in abject poverty and brand them as culinary delicacies only eaten by the dirty capitalists.

No wonder they have people going through the garbage trying to eat something.

[fbvideo link=”https://www.facebook.com/derekmke/videos/2306168229681533/” width=”600″ height=”500″ onlyvideo=”1″]

Someone in one the comments about my job box gun storage post said that Kryptonite bicycle locks could be picked with a Bic pen.  I had to look that up.  Apparently it’s a little harder than that, and it only works on the older style of barrel lock and not what I have.

I found a YouTube video that demonstrated it.

The YouTube algorithm did what it did and recommended me two more videos on lock testing.

First is that son-of-a-bitch the Lock Picking Lawyer.

I know about boron steels, it’s part of being a metallurgist.  Boron is a very powerful hardening element in steel at low concentrations, about 1%.  Boron steels can achieve a hardness of about 45 HRC, while still being ductile enough to be formable.  To get harder than that, you have to start adding very high carbon contents which make the steel more brittle.  Even in the annealed condition, hypereutectoid steel is hard to form.

Given the need to make a lock manufacturable and cost-effective, boron steel is a good choice.

So the Lock Picking Lawyer busts out with a $100 pair of hydraulic bolt cutters and breaks the lock.

Those are hydraulic bolt cutters.  The ones he has are listed on Amazon as having an 8-ton capacity.  That’s 16,000 lbs.

What the fuck does he expect the locks to do?  Even going up to tungsten and vanadium carbide tools steels, I doubt a lock will take 8-tons of load.

I know never say anything is impossible but given the design constraints of padlocks: the shackle size, the fact that people don’t want to spend $100 on a lock, etc.  I can’t think of a commercial material that would handle an 8-ton hydraulic bolt cutter.

Then there was this video from the UK.

Not just are they testing locks against 42 inch bolt cutters, but a DeWalt 18v angle grinder?

Again, not exactly sure what they expect to happen.  I’ve used wheels like that to cut through M3 tool steel broaches.  It takes a bit of time, but that is what Silicon Carbide blades are supposed to do.

I cannot stress this enough.

Nothing is impenetrable.  Every security system in the world can be defeated.  It is simply a matter of time and the tools used to do it.

Thieves can only be deterred.  The entire thought process of security is “make it difficult enough to steal that a potential thief doesn’t want to try because there are easier pickings elsewhere.”

Crime, like all other economic activities, is risk vs. reward.

But there is one other part of the deterrence equation that we’ve seem to have forgotten.

Punishment.

Maybe we need to ask ourselves why is it that criminals feel emboldened enough to carry around hydraulic bolt cutters and angle grinders?

Then I remember that Prop 47 passed in California and while you can go to prison for carrying a potato peeler in the UK, they won’t arrest you for moped theft.

Because the criminals know that they can carry around hydraulic bolt cutters and angle grinders and steal everything they want and not get in real trouble for it.

That is what we need to change.

You know what would make my neighborhood more secure than better locks?

The dissected body of the last criminal caught in the neighborhood hanging in a gibbet in front of the HOA clubhouse.

How about we go back to the 1800’s and start hanging horse thieves again?

The UK loves it’s Muslims.  How about they adopt a bit of Sharia law and start cutting off-bike thieves’ hands and feet.

Rather than put signs in the windows of their cars telling thieves that there is nothing inside to steal, the people of San Francisco hire some dudes to patrol parking lots, and if they see someone smash in a window, they go all Railroad Bull on him and beat him to within an inch of his life with an axe handle.

Let the store owner who just watched $950 worth of his merchandise walk out the door follow the thief into the parking lot and shoot him in the back with a shotgun.  Watch shoplifting stop dead overnight.

Maybe the penalty for stealing guns or being caught with a stolen gun is a mandatory death penalty.

Before I have to spend $20,000 on a security system, give me the right to defend not just my life but my property with lethal force.

I am getting sick and fucking tired of being told no matter how much I invest in security, it’s never enough because any thief who is willing to spend as much at a Northern Tool or Harbor Freight as they do on a pair of sneakers can defeat whatever you have.

I’m all for stop of frisk, and if you are caught with a bolt cutter or angle grinder down the leg of your pants, it’s 10 years mandatory, no parole.

Am I being cruel?  Probably, but clearly the criminals don’t fear the law anymore.

The ultimate deterrence isn’t a thief thinking “should I try to break into this safe or take the TV,” but “if I get caught, how much will it hurt before I die.”