Author: Californiacontrarian

Dalbir Bala, who lives in the Winnipeg area of Canada, wanted an environmentally friendly vehicle as owning one is “responsible citizenship these days.”

From Yahoo/Finance:

He bought a Ford F-150 Lightning EV in January, 2022, for $115,000 Canadian dollars (around $85,000 U.S. dollars), plus tax. Ford said the Manufacturers Suggested Retail Price (MSRP) on the vehicle is $77,495 U.S. dollars.

The vehicle compelled him to install two chargers – one at work and one at home – for $10,000. To accommodate the charger, he had to upgrade his home’s electric panel for $6,000.

In all, Bala spent more than $130,000 – plus tax.

Not long after the purchase, Bala got into a minor accident which, he said, required “light assembly” on the front bumper. Bala took the vehicle to the body shop and did not get it back for six months. He said no one from Ford answered his email or phone calls for help.

The limitations of the EV truck became even more apparent when Bala embarked on a chaotic 1,400-mile road trip to Chicago.

Fast charging stations – which only charge EV’s up to 90% – cost more than gas for the same mileage. On the family’s first stop in Fargo, North Dakota, it took two hours and $56 to charge his vehicle from 10% to 90%. The charge was good for another 215 miles.

On the second stop, in Albertville, Minnesota, the free charger was faulty and the phone number on the charging station was of no help, he said. The family drove to another charging station in Elk River, Minnesota, but the charger was faulty there as well.

“This sheer helplessness was mind-boggling,” Bala wrote in an online post. “My kids and wife were really worried and stressed at this point.”

There were no other fast charging stations within range of Elk River and his vehicle only had 12 miles left.

Bala ultimately had the vehicle towed to a Ford dealership in Elk River and rented a regular gasoline-powered vehicle to complete the family’s trip to Chicago. The family picked up the F-150 Lightning on their way back to Winnipeg.

Remember this nightmare started because Dalbir Bala wanted an environmentally friendly vehicle as owning one is “responsible citizenship these days.”

Bala’s closing comment, “I can only drive in city – biggest scam of modern times.”

9/12/23

Last week I read something that was very unusual for two different reasons. First it was totally nonsensical, and second it occurred in Alabama.

The headline from BlazeMedia:

“School suspends first-grader for pretending fingers were a gun during game of cops and robbers.”

“A school in Alabama suspended a first-grader for pretending his fingers were a gun during a game of cops and robbers with another student, according to reports.

Jarrod Belcher said his six-year-old son was suspended from Bagley Elementary School in Jefferson County, Alabama. The first-grade student was reportedly suspended for using his “index fingers as a gun” while playing a game of cops and robbers with another boy at school.”

I would think that those who work in an elementary school would be cognizant of the fact that six year olds have only a rudimentary concept of right vs. wrong. Even if we stretch the limit of rational thinking, pretending that your fingers are a gun while playing cops-and-robbers, is not a reason for school suspension.  A reasonable person might caution  first grader that playing with guns can be dangerous, but suspension … totally ludicrous!

The father, Jarrod Belcher  told WBRC, “I asked her, I said, ‘Well did he threaten anyone?’ ‘No.’ ‘Was there violence?’ ‘No.’ ‘Was there any indication of a current or future threat?’ ‘No.’ ‘I said, ‘Well this kind of seems benign to me, it sounds like two students playing,’ and she said it was but in this climate, this day and age, we have to take all incidents very seriously.”

Now keep in mind that this is a school administrator. This nincompoop is someone that we, as citizens, have put in charge of our children. To make this even more nonsensical is that this occurred in Alabama, where I have thought that old fashion common sense was prevalent. If this had occurred in California or in Portland I probably would have thought, “what would you expect from these liberal yahoos.”

What makes this entire senselessness even worse is that the other boy playing cops and robbers was also suspended, according to reports. Did the second little guy pretend that he had been shot? … or did he pretend bullet missed?

The school claimed that the “shooter” boy committed a “3.22 Threat” violation, which the Student and Parent Handbook for Bagley Elementary defined as making a threat or intimidation of another student.

Fox News reported, “Potential violations include ‘A threat to do serious bodily harm or violence to another student by word or act, cyberbullying, or intimidation that may induce fear into another.'”

In my book this is not a “3.22 Threat,” but this is called  “playing!” Perhaps if we had more children outside playing, we would engender more common sense in school administrators … not only in Alabama, but also even potentially in California and Portland!

9/11/23

On Sundays I pay tribute to individual who go the extra mile to help others. Elliot Middleton is such an individual.

Most of the following is from an article from Red State.

Here is the background.

Middleton’s father, Kevin Wayne Middleton Sr., was a gifted mechanic who taught Middleton everything he knew about automobiles and how to repair them. In 2004, the father and son started their own mechanic business and ran it together for 10 years. In 2014, Middleton decided to start a food truck, which was the genesis of Middleton’s Village BBQ in 

Along with converting the restaurant into a drive-thru and pickup to keep his fledgling business alive during the pandemic closures, Middleton began fixing and restoring cars, not just as therapy, but as a way to maintain a connection to his father.

Middleton said the idea to gift vehicles to people in need came to him in November 2019, when he organized a food drive to distribute 250 boxes of his barbeque.

When he ran out of boxes, he walked outside to see how many people were still waiting for food and saw a line two blocks long.

“That’s when I noticed most of those people just started walking back to the other side of town,” he said. “I caught up with some of them and found out they had walked three or four miles to get there to receive food, but couldn’t make it in time because they had no cars and they had to walk. I was very distraught to see that.”

“That was the turning point in my life when I made the decision to actively give my time and skills to give back to my community.”

For years now in his spare time, Middleton, the owner of Middleton’s Village BBQ in rural Awendaw, South Carolina, fixes up donated junkers to gift them to community members in need. Public transportation options are meager in the small coastal town, so having a car is essential.

“You don’t have a car; you don’t have a career. How will people who have no reliable buses, no Ubers, travel to the city, where they would be able to find bigger jobs at the port authorities or manufacturing centers?” Eliot told CNN. “They can’t walk 40, 50, 60 miles to great jobs— they have to settle for small-end jobs that pay well below what they need to survive.”

“Giving someone a car can change all that, and it does change all that,” he added. “I want to help everybody looking to better themselves when transportation is what’s holding them back.”

The above articles were written years ago. Since then Middleton is still going strong with his restaurant and his charitable mission. Thanks to these articles and other news outlets covering his generosity, Middleton’s barbecue business has been booming with customers, and people from around the nation and the world have reached out to donate vehicles or provide other resources to Middleton’s work. Middleton and his wife Desiree created the Middleton Village to Village Foundation to handle the donations and their recipients. As of late August, Village to Village has restored and given away its 98th car!

9/10/23

I just read something about Shivanthi Sathanandan. How many of you are familiar with this young woman? My guess would be that close to nobody would be cognizant of who she is, unless perhaps you happen to live in Minnesota. If your main source of news is the main stream media, then I would fell confident that you have not read about her lately. She is the DFL’s (Democrat Farm-Labor party) second vice chair, who was adamantly anti-police.

From C&C:

“Back on June 5th, 2020, a few days after George Floyd died on May 25th, 2020, Sathanandan posted “We are going to dismantle the Minneapolis police department.” Along with others, over the next three years Chairwoman Shivanthi would help defenestrate the Minneapolis police department.

As of this June, the Minneapolis Police Department had only 585 officers, down from 912 in 2019. As police ranks have thinned out by almost half, violent crime has soared.”

With a MPD decrease of about 36%, I guess that one might say that Ms. Sathanandan has been successful in her quest decrease the ranks of the Minneapolis police department (MPD), and thus, oh by the way, increase the risk of violent crime. As most of us are aware, “success” is a relative term, and on 9/5/23 it became a much more “realistic” term for Shivanthi Sathanandan. From CBS, Minneapolis:

MINNEAPOLIS — A leader of the Minnesota DFL says she was violently carjacked at her north Minneapolis home in front of her young children Tuesday evening.

Shivanthi Sathanandan, who is the DFL’s second vice chair, posted an image of her bloody face online along with her account of the incident.

‘Yesterday my children and I were violently car jacked in the driveway of our home in Minneapolis. Four very young men,…’

From X (previously known as Twitter):

“Multiple sources confirm Sathanandan was unhappy w/ police responding in 5 min. to the scene. She complained to 

@MayorFrey that it took too long.”

Posted by Shivanthi Sathanandan on Wednesday, September 6, 2023

Sathanandan says she suffered a broken leg, cuts and bruises after four young men carrying guns attacked her outside her home while her 4-year-old daughter and 7-year-old son screamed for help.

‘These criminals will not win. We need to take back our city….’

Sathanandan wrote on Facebook. “We need to get illegal guns off of our streets, catch these young people who are running wild creating chaos across our city and HOLD THEM IN CUSTODY AND PROSECUTE THEM.”

Hmmm! In order to “HOLD THEM IN CUSTODY” they first have to be found and then arrested. Who does Ms.Sathanandan want to do this, and how quickly? Perhaps if there were more police these thugs would be arrested in a more expeditors manner.

I wonder how many more innocent victims in. Minneapolis have never received justice because of Sathanandan’s prior rants. Could it be that because MPD is now only at 64%, that only 64% of similar crimes had been solved over the last three years. Would Justice be served if Ms. Sathanandan were to be told that because of the backlog of unsolved crimes, she would have to wait her turn? 

Furthermore if catching her assailants were to be taking a while, Ms. Sathanandan might comment to the police, “Don’t you know who I am?” At that point the only reasonable answer would be, “Actually, ma’am, we know exactly who you are!”

9/9/23

Recently one of my readers asked if I was going to get the new Covid booster. Because this is a family oriented blog, I politely said, ‘no,’ instead of something more descriptive.

Throughout this whole Covid hysteria, I have always like Dr. Marty Makary, a surgeon at John’s Hopkins University. Perhaps this was because he was a contrarian of sorts, not brown-nosing anyone, but rather expressing his own opinions.

On 8/30 Dr. Makary had an interesting piece in the Wall Street Journal, the title of which was “Biden Waves Through Another Covid Booster.”

The sub-headline asked, “He’s certain that it ‘works,’ but there’s no data. Is this how we approve drugs now?”

From Coffee and Covid:

“After disgustedly pointing out the last round of boosters was approved after only a “study” of eight mice, Dr. Makary noted this time there is even less safety and efficacy data. That obvious point was already nice to see in print somewhere, but then Makary dropped a hammer on jab risks, citing a study showing serious adverse events in 1 in 556 doses.

Makary continues:

“Advocates of the new Covid boosters point out that the annual flu shot gets approved without a randomized trial. But flu shots use a traditional vaccine platform that has withstood the test of time, and Covid vaccines have higher complication rates. The latter have a rate of serious adverse events as high as 1 in 556 doses, according to a study published last year in the journal Vaccine. They have also been found to cause myocarditis in young people at a rate six to 28 times the incidence after infection, according to a 2022 JAMA Cardiology study.”

According to my calculations 1/556 comes out to 0.18% which is certainly immensely higher than the Covid risk for the vast majority of individuals, especially the young in whom the risk of myocarditis alone should preclude any thought of a Covid booster.

Makary closes with :

“The novel Covid booster shot may be warranted for some high-risk patients. But pushing it hard for young and old alike without human-outcomes data makes a mockery of the scientific method and our regulatory process.”

Marty Makary … “I love this guy!”

9/8/23

This following was one of the recent stories on CBS8 in San Diego. One of CBS8’s reporters was bent out of shape because his 89 year old mother had to spend 6 hours in a ER hallway while being treated for a broken hand and abrasions sustained when she fell in her garden.

The news report went something like this:

“Overcrowding in the emergency room at UC San Diego Health’s La Jolla hospital is forcing patients to be treated in the hallways.

Nurses have been protesting the conditions for months.

A CBS 8 reporter witnessed the overcrowding firsthand last week when his mother was injured and had to be admitted to UC San Diego Health’s emergency department next to Jacobs Medical Center.”

From my perspective, this could have been the perfect opportunity for the reporter to compliment the hospital on the excellent care that his mother received despite the overcrowded E.R. conditions. Perhaps instead of CBS8 bellyaching about beds in the hallways, they could have acted like a real News station and asked, “Why is this occurring?”

A representative of UCSD said that 99% of the time, the cause for treating someone in an E.R. hallway is that there are no beds in the hospital, and at any one time, 70% are waiting for an available hospital bed.

I say “hurrah” to UCSD for keeping their E.R. open, and doing the best that they can. While “nurses may have been protesting the conditions for months,” I’m not sure exactly what they are protesting. Granted the E.R. nurses may well be overworked taking care of these additional hallway patients, but how does protesting open up additional beds in the hospital.

Keep in mind, it is only August and the paucity of available hospital beds is already an issue. Get ready San Diego, as the situation is only going to get worse when winter and the flu-season come.

9/7/23

I always try to keep up with the news. These days they’re many different, seemingly unrelated, stories that should be on the front pages of our news media, but are not. Most of us with a functioning brain understand that our liberal media does not like to draw attention to news stories that might put Joe Biden in a bad light.

Ergo, Biden’s floundering economy and Biden’s inflation are not front page stories, despite the fact that these are the major everyday issues for the vast majority of us. Burying these issues on page seven does not make the struggling economy and inflation any less important, just less visible to the suffering common man who just doesn’t understand the reason why gas is now costing him way over five dollars a gallon here in California.

In August while the unemployment rate unexpectedly jumped, a sign the labor market is finally cooling in the face of rising interest rates and chronic inflation.

Speaking of other things which are now costing more, is there anyone who doesn’t understand that organized retail crime (ORC) is effecting the profits of a multitude of companies, including Target, Dollar Tree, Foot Locker, Dick’s Sporting Goods, Nordstrom, and others. This is obviously  a major news story, as is Biden’s porous border, but until today, I did not connect these two issues.

From I&I:

“Turns out that, by throwing open the southern border, President Joe Biden has created a booming business for Mexican cartels ripping off U.S. retailers – although you’d never know it based on the media blackout of this trend.

Just last week, 50 criminals swarmed a Los Angeles mall and made off with $300,000 worth of stolen goods. A news report suggests that they were following orders from organized crime or gang members.

Why the sudden explosion in organized retail crime? When it covers this issue at all, the mainstream press usually just throws up its hands, or says retailers are exaggerating the problem.

But could it have anything to do with the fact that Biden opened the border and let millions of illegal immigrants flood into the country?

Immigration and Customs Enforcement  (ICE) sees a connection. In a statement released last June, it said: ‘Recent investigations have also identified organized retail crime schemes exploiting undocumented migrants forced to steal goods to pay back ‘coyotes’ who smuggle them across international borders.’”

So, even though I cannot recall the last time I shopped at Nordstrom’s, when our local Nordstrom’s is forced to close because of ORC, I will think of that empty building as a testimonial to the policies of Joe Biden!

9/6/23

For a long time I have been dubious about the computer models that predict disastrous global warming. The response from the extremists has been to follow the science. Okay! What do the scientists think?

On 8/14/23 a group of 1609 scientists and professionals, calling themselves the Global Climate Intelligence Group, came out with a signed World Climate Declaration. This group was indeed a worldwide group from countries alphabetically from Argentina & Bangladesh all the way down to Ukraine & Vietnam. The countries with over 100 signatures included Australia, Canada, France, Italy, Netherlands, and the U.K. with the U.S.A.leading the way with 321 signatures.

Exactly what did these 1609 individuals sign on to?

The title is  “There Is No Climate Emergency”

The main points are as follows ( in the original text each point is expounded upon in a few sentence summation):

1 Natural as well as anthropogenic factors cause warming.

2 Warming is far slower than predicted.

3 Climate policy relies on inadequate models.

4 CO2 is plant food; the basis of all life on earth.

5 Global warming has not increased natural disasters.

6 Climate policy must respect economic and scientific realities.

In the beginning and at the end they focus on somewhat on politics when they say, “It should be a point of emphasis is that climate policies should be less political.” and “Politics should focus on minimizing potential climate damage by prioritizing adaptation strategies.”

 Now granted I may have missed these ‘New Recommends’ of the ‘World Climate Declaration’ in the main stream media … but I doubt that I did.

9/5/23

Could it be that we are looking at this all wrong?

Form mrcTV:

“As of July, Americans are saving less – and more than half are living paycheck-to-paycheck – new reports reveal.

“61% of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck — inflation is still squeezing budgets,” CNBCreported on Thursday, 8/31, citing a new Lending Club study on July 2023 consumer trends.”

Just think about that statistic for a second … 61%! That is hard to imagine. What that implies is that only 39% of us could tolerate some unforeseen disaster that would cause them not to get a paycheck one week. Now perhaps there are some of you who think that missing one   

measly paycheck would not mean the end of the world for those 61% that are living week to week. After all if a paycheck were to be missed, then one could just borrow from his/her savings account.                                BTW, in general how are those savings accounts doing?

Again from mrcTV:

“Also on 8/31, the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) released its “Personal Income and Outlays” report for July, revealing that Americans’ average personal savings rate fell from 4.3% in June to 3.5% in July.”

So people are saving less … that will happen. Perhaps it’s due to individuals taking more vacation? Hmmm … Or is it possible that this reduced savings rate has something to do with who is running our country.

Actually, “July’s 3.5% savings rate is a mere quarter of its 13.4% level when former Pres. Donald Trump left office and more than twice the 7.2% savings rate recorded during Trump’s first full month in the White House.”

As Jeff Childress would say, “For those of you who live in Portland, this means that during the four years of Trump’s presidency, the savings rate increased by 86%, whereas during Biden’s 2+ years in office the savings rate has decreased by 74%.

Coincidence? … I do not think so!

But as bad as this sounds, could it be that we are looking at this all wrong?

As the Babylon Bee recently alluded, I guess we’re lucky that President Biden has taken 40% of his time in office as vacation, since if he had spent less time on vacation and more time in his office, the average personnel savings rate could well be as low as 1%!

Perhaps, we should look at the good side of it. 

9/4/23

I am sure that many of you are aware that on Sundays I single out an individual who is worthy of our praise. Today that individual is Connor Halsa. Connor is fourteen years old, and lives in Moorhead, Minnesota What makes this fourteen year-old so special surfaced because he likes to go fishing, and this summer he was out fishing with his family on Lake of the Woods.

From BlazeMedia::

“We were doing a walleye drift, so we stopped the boat, put some spinners on, and let the waves take us,” Halsa  WDAY-TV. Halsa got a nibble. Ready for a fight, the boy “set the hook really hard.”

The incoming freshman at Moorhead High Schotoldol came out victorious, but what came out of the water was no walleye. Rather, the 14-year-old had reeled in a billfold, packed with $2,000 in cash. An Iowa farmer, Jim Denney had lost wallet, stuck 20 feet below in the glacial deeps. The summer prior, Denney reportedly came up against rough waters and went overboard. Although he managed to bring himself out of the murk all right, Denney later realized when readying to pay his final bill at the resort that the pocket on his overalls was down one billfold and $2,000 dollars.”

So by pure serendipity Conner Halsa came across $2000. 

Finders keepers ?

 $2,000 can go a long way, especially for a 14-year-old, but Halsa explained, “We didn’t work hard for the money. He did. It was his money.”

“My dad said we should give it to the person, and I said we should too,” Halsa recalled.

After setting the cash out to dry, the family looked for some way to identify the owner. Eventually they were successful and the wallet made its way to Denney’s farmhouse in Mount Ayr, Iowa,

Denney traveled to Moorhead to visit Halsa, amazed by his luck and the boy’s virtue.

“I tell you what, I have the billfold in my hands, and it is still hard to believe,” said Denney.

The farmer reportedly offered to give the boy a reward, but Halsa refused. Denney then said, “I would take Connor as a grandson any day, and I would fight for him any day.”

I like what Jim Denney said, and I would hope that all of my four teenage grandsons would do the same as Connor Halsa did! 

9/3/23