By Gordon Duff, Senior Editor
Like many from my generation, who are still alive anyway, we grew up spending with care and fixing stuff ourselves. As time has gone on, cars, motorcycles, power tools, appliances, computers, guns and guns, even restaurants and vacations, the internet has its own opinion on things and, in general, that opinion is fake.
I will make this short. Most review sites for everything are fake.
Added to that are the lonely idiots who write about things they will never own, based on fake things they read elsewhere. Bashing products, faking reviews is an industry, a financial game to blind do-it-yourselfers by putting out fake intel on everything.
Need info on a car problem? Go online, most of what you will read on your Toyota or BMW or Ford truck was underwritten by reptile funds paid to troll groups in Israel or Macedonia, giving you repair data that will destroy anything you touch.
Brand bashing is the same thing, from guns to bikes to wall ovens, all of it is fake, with negative posts carried over from fake review sites even to Amazon.
It it weren’t bad enough that faking good or bad reviews is now an industry, you have the idiots. Before VT opened a custom shop, Mike and I spent a few weeks on the gun boards. Yes, there are some bright guys, real shooters out there.
However, most are hopeless fools, fabricationists and fakes, reviewing weapons that they will never own. Then again, why do so many manufacturers build total junk, things that never work?
I take things apart, you don’t want to see the inside of a Chrysler automatic transmission, how much plastic is in there.
Then you have the super brands. Try buying a $300 toaster. It’s easy to do but a $10 Black and Decker will work better and last longer, better design and QC.
I just spent months ripping out a kitchen and replacing it. This put me in fake appliance review town, oh god, not only are they all liars but illiterate as well.
Some products, Blue Star, Wolf, a few others, are monumentally good. Others? Everything written about this is a lie.
Motorcycle crap is worse. Most who write about bikes, with the exception of high mileage Harley and BMW folks, and I have big respect for them, don’t ride at all.
Few ever get on a superbike and, for me anyway, it took endless hours to master pushing 600 pounds of 160 plus horsepower around city streets. These monsters are top heavy with horrible seats but, when let loose on the highway, dance like Fred Astaire.
You either ride every day, ride hard and fast, or need to stay the f. away from motorcycles.
But if you read about them in “blogs,” god help you. I live inside the motorcycle community much of the year, it is a lifestyle that supersedes politics, education and social crap. You are “bike people” or not.
The other “worst part” isn’t the fakery but the censorship. Real interest blogs, be it UFOs or refrigerator repair are delisted or shut down, replaced by the fakes. Check.
It gets even worse for snow blowers, lawn tractors, power equipment with a very few sites for professional grade users and consumers victimized by industry financed fake reviews on fake sites.
I live with snow, lots of it, trees, thousands of them, and have to play landscape guy or lumberjack way too much.
Past that, I keep a machine shop for gunsmithing, and am a Not so Advanced woodworker, hoping to improve those skills.
As much as I hate YouTube, it has been a lifesaver though it delisted me and VT years ago as “dangerous to the public.”
For those who know what they are doing and put out videos where they don’t say “Hi YouTubers!,” I give my thanks.
There used to be a time when any of us could pull the heads on our Ford pickup and change a headgasket, deal with an oil leak or pull a distributor. I remember changing a water pump on a Fiat 124 outside in the winter, a nightmare.
None of that is possible with today’s cars.
This reminds me of decades ago at the Rose Lake shooting range near Lansing, Michigan. From time to time I would hustle ‘pudknockers’ who thought they could shoot. Without a scope, few could cut a 24 inch group at 50 yards, even from a bench.
I had a couple of custom pistols that could do a bit better than that, perhaps much better. It was fun.
Have we become a nation of fakes, dilettantes and mama’s boys? Who can afford to hire anyone anymore?
Worse still, the crazy fake crap I read about politics and global events, so wrong its funny, is nothing compared to restaurant reviews and travel blog idiocy.
It seems that the whole idea is to create fake everything, everything you read or hear originates somewhere from people paid to lie to you.
Nobody knows where things come from and the same lies, the same useless craziness takes on a life of its own. It’s one thing voting for an idiot, it’s quite something else dropping a Buick on your ass in the middle of a failed brake job.
Then again, we haven’t begun yet, as I won’t even talk about food supplements, cancer cures and “financial services.”
Time to return to making only things real people can fix. Repair parts are impossible for so many things that were never made to be fixed in the first place.
I’ve got Mike Chester replacing a circuit board for a very expensive Dacor gas range, by “replace,” he has to actually make the board himself. Parts don’t exist, you are supposed to simply throw away 400 pounds of $2000, only a few years old, and for what reason?
Do we need to get into computers and mobile phones? How about operating systems?
Want to talk Facebook and Google, I warned the world years ago that they were designed to feed an AI, no other reason. Mostly, I am sick of buying things that need fixing right out of the box. I am sick of things that don’t work.
I am sick of being hustled, kitchen counter tops, polishing tools, lighting fixtures, that’s this week, nothing what it is supposed to be. I could get a job designing real power tools, so many out there are childish fakes.
Printers where ink costs more than the printer? Specialty saws whose blades cost more than the saw?
This is typical.
I look for comments.
Gordon Duff posted articles on VT from 2008 to 2022. He is a Marine combat veteran of the Vietnam War. A disabled veteran, he worked on veterans and POW issues for decades.
Gordon is an accredited diplomat and is generally accepted as one of the top global intelligence specialists. He manages the world’s largest private intelligence organization and regularly consults with governments challenged by security issues.
Duff has traveled extensively, is published around the world, and is a regular guest on TV and radio in more than “several” countries. He is also a trained chef, wine enthusiast, avid motorcyclist, and gunsmith specializing in historical weapons and restoration. Business experience and interests are in energy and defense technology.
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Gordon-
Kudos on the Meme! We Veterans need to expose the Hasbara Cyber Terrorists. We took an oath to defend the United States of America against enemies foreign and domestic.
Other Memes exposing Hasbara Cyber Terrorism can be found at:
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This is a very good observation. Business organized pillaging went on steroids then.
I ran out of black ink for my printer up in Mass this summer working on my mother’s house and called Staples, the only office supple store in my part of the county to see if they had them, which they did. I rushed down to get up with a smile on my face until he said, “That will be $34.95 with tax sir.” I said, “Excuse me…how much do your non-Brother ones cost?” He said “We only carry this one”. I said, “You guys want SEVEN times what the generic ones cost when you buy then from China anyway?” He said nothing. It was my fault for letting my reserve inventory run down, but when you are on the road and juggling too much this is when they nail you.
I drive a 93 M3 bmw, 30 mpg and a joy. It looks like total shit.
I am using mostly my x5 which has half a dozen WTF lights on, i no longer care.
I have an Alpina in the garage, oil leak now from sitting too long. It’s a 95 and cherry.
On bad days I use the Land Cruiser, which is Carol’s. It is the “respectable” vehicle.
My BMW supermoto gets around 45 mpg on the track, and up to 70 mpg on the street, while my twin Rotax BMW sport-tourer gets over 50 mpg when traveling fast on two-lane curvy roads.
On my X5 you have to drop the front bumper to replace a bulb.
We get fined for not wearing a seat belt, but brake lines dissolve in salt water and that’s ok.
3 glasses of rum get’s the truth better than torture or jury trials.
Remodeling the kitchen is a true test of a good marriage. To stay young and vibrant, never give more than 5 minutes advance notice before cutting the power and water. After a few decades of residential remodeling, I was unsure if I was a carpenter or a marriage counselor. I never write about either.
I dumped my 15 year old Nissan pickup (built in Tennessee) since everything (except the body panels) was rusting out from road salt, and would have been 2 to 3 times the resale value to fix up properly.
A friend’s friend had sold me a 1991 Suzuki GSX 1100g one of the last of the practical all around Universal Japanese Bikes with a detuned oversized race bike engine for almost nothing after he had failed to diagnose a electric fuel pump problem. After many failed investigations and useless part replacements, I found and fixed the problem. I started looking at new bikes that might have its performance or be more impressive. The “G-men” cult of the bike’s devotees made a good argument that the current production bikes from Europe and Japan are actually inferior. I noticed that much of what 15k to 20 k bikes were being reviewed over was the problem of getting fuel injection systems to respond with the precision required by a rider to push the bike to its limits. All complex computing and inferior digital approximations (i.e. “riding modes”) of what properly set up and maintained carburetors do magically and joyfully on two-lane twisting highways. My “G” was stolen this Summer.
I have now purchased for a few hundred dollars the earlier and even simpler 1980 GS 1000g. Reportedly parked for after 15 years after scaring its former owner in the way only a bike that can so easily do 130mph can. With only a few screwdrivers and wrenches, vinegar and Pinesol, along with Youtube videos by other riders doing the same tasks, I should have it up and running. Thankfully, there is no rich market for parts to justify paying disinformation services to protect
The Kaw 1400 is a great platform. You can hit nearly 200 hp with minimal mods, mostly fuel and exhaust.
Mine weighs in a 700 pounds and you still can’t open it up until 3rd. The traction control will shut down first and it lifts the front end any time you tweak it. Feeding it out in second then doing a full rpm, open throttle third, it lifts again there, is a rush. That happens at about 105 in under 6 seconds after rolling.
I do 100 miles a day or more, sometimes much more, 7 days a week. You can’t have enough motorcycles.
The older bikes ran better because they did not have to meet EU Tier and CARB emissions standards.
As for the ZX-14R (ZZR1400 in most other countries), a friend’s peaked at 205-hp on a rear wheel dynamometer after new exhaust and ECU reflash. Quarter mile times in the high 9 second range with trap speeds in the low 150 mph range.
Planned obsolescence is nothing new, and as unlikely to go away as compound interest.
Once one has a 3D printer the first job would be to build it’s replacement before it breaks, only bigger.
Today common sense seems it have an expiration date.
Good one Gordon !!!!
“Printers where ink costs more than the printer? ”
I chucked my HP LaserJet for a older model where the cartridge does not have the “You must buy from HP” chip. This HP business model is BS plain and simple.
With respect Mr Duff,
You should ride a bicycle.
Seriously an American industry to this day.
Those that ride them build them as easily fixed by anyone
The best of them the simplest with but one gear
Only the best cyclists ride them
Just an opinion
N
I have a Raleigh super concourse in my garage with sew ups. I am having my left knee worked on now, bicycles and knee injuries don’t work together well. I live on the Lake Michigan Circle bike trail.
One of my bikes and one of the trikes were made in a small shop in Minnesota, the other two trikes in small shops in Oz.
As for sew-ups, modern clincher tires are good enough I would not want the hassle of glue and sewing (to repair punctures).
Find Gordon a bike that can do over 100 in six seconds, even down hill, and he might be interested.
Unfortunately very few people can ride those bikes that do over 100 mph in 6 seconds close to anything like their capability except in a straight line (which as the saying goes a monkey can do) according to a crusty old retired racer who is a multiple FIM World Endurance Champion team member.
I went to change the plugs on my 2009 Nissan 1.6L Versa and found out they were beneath the intake manifold. Really?
Excellent article Gordon. We have become a disposable society. When it breaks we just throw it away and go down to the store and or online and buy a new one. I can’t help but think they deliberately make stuff this way to guarantee a constant turnover in product. Mass producing landfill daily for profits to satisfy shareholders and to justify exorbitant CEO salaries at the expense of our environment and our exploitation of third world countries labor forces. As you say “welcome to how the world really works”.
it is called “planned obsolescence”
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/obsolescence
Bit hard to ride a motorcycle every day in the Upper Midwest, but I usually get in about 10 to 15 commuting days a month December through March – the cost of BMW parts discourages me from riding on ice and snow. Saving the really “hard and fast” riding for the track where the only thing to hit is air-fence or the ground from a high-side fall.
I have a Raleigh super concourse in my garage with sew ups. I am having my left knee worked on now, bicycles and knee injuries don’t work together well. I live on the Lake Michigan Circle bike trail.
I have a car question: Can you recommend a good auto body shop that can mount a .50 caliber machine gun to the bed of my white Toyota pickup truck?
I know a guy in Haifa who has done a couple of thousand of them, they work great.
Thank You Gordon! Thank You Thank You Thank You. Thank You for calling out these Hasbara Cyber Terrorist.
I am so proud of you Marine!
Check out how they pretend to be Americans in the “Alternet” comment section.
https://www.alternet.org/heres-look-documentary-series-israel-lobby-does-not-want-you-see
Totally agree with you on this one Gordon. I see these guys at the range with their 9mm Glocks emptying their magazines at practically point blank range, then I back up to 95 ft. and shoot 6-8 in. groups with my 1851 Colt Navy. I can’t get greater range without switching over to the rifle range which is usually full and me showing up with a muzzle loading pistol tends to annoy them. I am having the same problem with parts for my “new” 4wd suv. Oh how I wish I still had my VW dune buggy! The computer killed itself, and it was like throwing a switch. One second a useful vehicle, the next a paperweight. I actually had to repo it from the dealer when I found out I knew more about the truck (I had copies of the dealer manuals) than their most experienced mechanic. Now I have to come up with the money to buy the programming interface to flash the replacement computer. I hope you or Ian have time to respond to my comment over in your Bush article. 73
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