I miss wearing my nice automatic watch…

There are a couple of reasons I don’t wear it.

I fought switching to a smart watch. I like my analog self winding watch a lot.

I like the simplicity, not having to charge it, and knowing that when I kick off, my Brother will probably be wearing it at my memorial service and it will serve him well. 

That being said, I finally caved on the smart watch thing, because I became concerned about getting mugged for my watch, after several incidents with people who couldn’t keep their eyes or hands to themselves. 

Once I made the switch, I liked a lot of the features that my Apple Watch put on my wrist. Now, I’m used to the health data being collected and while I have turned off a lot of the intrusive, and incessant messages, I feel like I’m missing something when that data isn’t being collected.

Damn you Apple!

Apple Watch Ultra lifestyle endurance 220907 1108200464.However, after Apple’s nothing event last year regarding the Apple Watch Ultra (Really? A color change, for $799,) and the loss of Blood O2 due to their patent dispute with Massimo, I started reconsidering the smart watch entirely. (Apparently, I’m not alone. Apple Watch sales have declined for 2 consecutive years.)

I’ve hung onto my Apple Watch Ultra series 1 because the Ultra 2 didn’t really move the bar, and Blood O2 was turned off. My Ultra includes the blood O2 monitoring because I purchased it before the Apple / Massimo spat.

The color change last year was a nothing burger. This year’s watch should technically be Generation 4 of the Apple Ultra. They’ll probably call it the 3.

From a practical perspective, I’m running a 3 year old smart watch. It will be 4 come September and the battery is starting to show signs of wear.

So, I find myself at a crossroads. Replacement of my smart watch will become necessary in the next year or two at the outside.

If Apple doesn’t significantly improve the Apple Ultra, I’m thinking maybe I’ll find an alternative.

For half the cost of an Ultra, I could go with an Oura 4th generation ring. 7 day battery life, no dings boops or notifications, in fact, no communication features at all.

So that might be a plus! Then I could go back to wearing a simple analog watch again, and still have all the health features.

Alternatively, going without the health features might not be a bad thing either.

I find that I’m looking at simple “real” watches more often. There are a couple of Luminox models that are beautiful. There’s the Omega I’ve been jonesing over for years. Then there are a couple of Bulova watches that are really nice.

Maybe I’m done with the fad of smart watches. Maybe I’m really just heading toward more simplicity in my life. Wearing a ring embedded with sensors is a way for me to have my cake and eat it too.

My Ultra, has pressure sensors, and can be used as a dive computer. The problem with that is, you have to pay for a subscription to Oceanic to use it. I haven’t enabled that function for a couple of reasons. 

1) I’ve had a go around with Oceanic. I had a number of dives that I’d entered on their site. In theory, Those dive records were supposed to be maintained as long as I had just a basic account. Oceanic was purchased by another company and these records were flushed.

2) I’d be willing to purchase their software as a One Time charge, as long as I could upload or download the data from their site, (see point 1). It looks like I can download from their site but that’s pointless if I can’t upload my existing data. I don’t want to have to maintain 2 independent record keeping systems.

I think the Mares or Suunto wrist computers are a better solution for diving computers. Both of them, talk directly to the dive log software I already own, without subscription BS.

Rep. Shri Thanedar just learned a lesson… As did PBS and NPR.

The hard way!

I almost feel sorry for him.

His impeachment paperwork met with a significant backlash and guess what?

His fellow signatories bailed on him.

Democrats being Democrats!

More fairly, it’s Politicians, being Politicians.

He may actually think that he’s justified, (who knows, he might be,) but he just found out that he’s nothing but a pawn. They had him float impeachment to see how it would play in the court of public opinion, and when the wind changed, they tossed him aside like he was nothing.

I’d say it’s 50/50 that he survives his next election.

He was obscure before the impeachment paperwork. After this, he’ll return to obscurity. Without allies or usefulness he’s toast.

Politics is tough.

What concerns me, is that now that he’s popped his head up with this impeachment stuff, suddenly there’s dirt on him in some corners of the media.

The Republican and Democrat parties are both full of politicians. You can count on politicians to be scum 98% of the time. So suddenly “Finding” that Thanedar left lab animals to starve in a lab he owned suggests to me that either this is a bogus story, or that there’s more to it. (He may have owned the lab, but did he run it?)

More worrisome is why now? Surely, someone had dirt on him for a while. How is this just coming to light, and why is the timing so convenient?

No matter what you think about Trump, or his administration. We should all be watching this stuff like a hawk. Otherwise we run the risk of replacing one shitty way of governing with another.

I have mixed feelings about Trump’s EO to cut funding for NPR and PBS. I don’t listen to either of them precisely because I find them to be so biased & liberal all they do is piss me off.

Even Jerry, who was very liberal, gave up on them. He subscribed to PBS for a year or two so that he could catch concerts, symphonies, and a couple of musical history shows. He’d turn them off the minute there was something “News” related.

For me, I used to listen to NPR sometimes while I was driving to work. Sometime in the Obama administration, NPR began to sound like propaganda, especially when there was anything controversial about the Obama Presidency.

I was looking toward them for balance, what I heard, was minimization of the issue and chronic blaming of Republicans for raising the issue. Hence my feeling they were nothing more than a propaganda outlet. In many regards, they sounded as radically left, as Patriot XM is to the right, (I also, as a rule, don’t listen to them).

I suppose I was looking for reasoned, balanced analysis of both sides of current issues. I wonder why we can’t seem to have that these days. 

When you get to it, all radio is public. As is all network television. So that begs the question for me, “Why does NPR get public funding?”

If NPR presented both sides of every issue in a thoughtful and well researched way… In other words if they didn’t view issues through the lens of political party at all, and reported just the facts, then discussed the pros and cons of a policy dispassionately, I’d be very in favor of funding them.

I’ve recently noticed that I really tune out if hosts and guests on any show start talking over each other, or raising their voices. This is particularly true if the hosts are women. There’s some indefinable point where two or more women talking over each other and raising voices to be heard, just sounds like fingernails on a chalkboard. (Not that young people really know what that actually means these days.)

I’d like to see a show with a format that took an issue like Tariffs, then explained what they are, why they exist, how they work, why some countries have them, and others don’t.

Then I’d like to see/hear a dispassionate pro/con debate. Neither side of the debate should have to “Win”, but they should be able to defend their position with logic and fact.

I’d listen to two hours of that because I’d learn something.

That’s what I think of about tax dollars funding something like NPR or PBS. They should be educational and informative, without attempting to sway the listener in any particular direction. It should be the listener’s responsibility to make up their own mind about the information presented.

That’s the up side, the optimal outcome.

Further, I think when that balance and education is lost, we shouldn’t be paying for it.

That brings to mind another thought. 

Perhaps it would be better for NPR and PBS to be completely decoupled from government funding so that they never fear government control. Obviously, if these organizations receive tax dollars, then can we really say they’re unbiased in their reporting? Might the apparent extreme left lean, be the inevitable outcome of funding sources?

How can you have unbiased reporting when you know if you offend someone on “The Hill”, it could affect your budget next year?

I sincerely hope that Trump cutting NPR / PBS funding & The sudden “Dirt” on Thanedar aren’t about retribution or revenge from the White House.

I’m a pretty vengeful person, I’m petty, and easily annoyed. I don’t want that in government from either party. 

Ya know, there was a time I’d never have thought like this. Much less wrote it.

Since President Trump took office I’ve been seeing more jobs posted.

I look at this as a good thing. Well, a good thing for me, anyway. I’m not above a purely mercenary, possibly even a Nietzschean view, when it comes to jobs.

After all I’ve been on the receiving end for a while now. If some idiot self deports because they’re scared mean old Trump is gonna pull their H1B1 or Green card I’m totally fine with that.

From a more Nietzschean perspective: In the pursuit of my own interest and survival. There is absolutely nothing wrong with terrorizing H1B1 or Green card holders into believing that “ICE is gonna get ‘em”, so they quit their jobs and self deport. Especially if I need a job, and they’re in my way.

I guess in a way I’m trying to move beyond the constraints that have held me back. I was, live & let live, I wanted to be liked, I wanted to be fair, I fell for the absolute bullshit that suggested it was in our best interests to train our replacements. Or that if we were nice, we’d get ahead too.

I was a moron. On its face, training our replacements, (and I’ve done my fair share of that stupid shit,) is the epitome of insanity. 

Pretty much throughout my career I stood quietly by, while incompetent coworkers were promoted due to race, gender, or sexual preference, over me, then I had to do their work too. (The irony of the sexual preference promotion isn’t lost on me either.)

Somewhere along the line I bought into the insanity this was somehow good, because… “It’s more fair!”

Well, those days are over.

These days, I’m asking, “Fair for who?”

Oh, make no mistake, I accept full responsibility for my mistakes. I should have fought tooth and nail against the bullshit. I even accept my part in the overall fuck up, that has reduced efficiency, quality, and superiority, of American businesses.

Online, I’m no longer saying, “You don’t have to worry about ICE arresting you in your place of business even if you have a Green Card.

In some online forums I’m agreeing with them. “Yes, Trump and ICE will absolutely deport you! They’re going business to business and just putting Green Card holders on planes to totally random places, then leaving them there with no money, no passport, and they even take their phones!!! Oh my god, it’s just terrible!” 

If someone is so stupid that they self deport out of fear, we don’t need them. If they can be terrorized into panic then, “See Ya!”

Yes, there are actually a surprising number of people that are claiming they’re leaving before ICE comes to get them. It’s hysterically funny. I’m not feeling any remorse in feeding their paranoid delusions.

It just creates more job opportunities for me and other Americans who have been fucked over for decades, displaced by the Kumbaya one world crap.

The funniest are the extreme leftists who think Trump will deport them over their political views, even though they’re citizens. Oddly these people all look very similar. Wild eyes, goofy hair colors, weirdly painted nails, tattoos that look like the tattoo artist vomited, enough metal in their faces that they’d be a hazard during an MRI, and they screech during their all too frequent TikTok rants.

Maybe revoking their citizenship & deporting them, would be good for the country. Lots of them are saying they’re going to Canada. 

Hasn’t poor Canada suffered enough??? “Apparently not, if their recent election is any indicator.

Well, I’m off to sow more chaos and terror.

Hey, I’ve gotta find fun where I can, and who knows? It might be patriotic to boot!

😘

It’s been several weeks since I enabled Apple Advanced Data Protection

Thus far, I’m glad I did.

The encryption is seamless. I’ve noticed no data speed drop. All my devices still access iCloud just as they did before.

The only question is, “Will Apple hold the line against the UK government?”

I find that I’m using “Notes” a bit more. “Notes” is handy for some things like a temporary password or what have you. I always hesitated to put anything of a critical nature in “Notes” mostly because of security concerns. 

If I was hacking into an iCloud account, “Notes” is the first place I’d wander through for interesting information about the person I was hacking.

I’m also more comfortable with some photos being stored in the encrypted iCloud. (Hey, we all have some photos that we don’t necessarily want out on the internet!) There’s no reason for us to be providing free thrills to some hacker. We wouldn’t want to cut into our OnlyFans account revenue now would we???

I also don’t think too much about documents being stored in iCloud as much as I did before. 

That was always a concern to me. The thought of having personal correspondence sitting unencrypted in the cloud was a big risk. That meant that some things I would only do on my computer and any saved documents were always saved locally, or to my network storage only.

But that also means that if the computer was lost, stolen, or destroyed, those documents would be lost as well, if they weren’t stored on my local network storage.

The setup process was remarkably simple. I chose to enable ADP from my computer. No particular reason other than with the larger screen, I didn’t need my glasses. I also knew that the recovery key was going to be a long string of numbers and letters, and wanted to be sure that I stored it in print and digitally somehow. 

What was interesting is that the encryption was pretty much immediate across all devices. There may have been a message saying that it could take some time before everything was available depending on how much information I had stored in iCloud, but if there was a time delay, I didn’t notice it.

I will be curious to see how iCloud handles me transitioning to a new phone, computer, or iPad in the future. But I’m looking at that as a bridge to burn later.

Thus far, the result is ADP is functional and I’m tempted to recommend everyone use it. 

My thinking is, if we’re all using it, then Apple will have more incentive to tell authoritarian governments like the UK to “EMusk” it.

a.k.a. “Go Fuck Yourself”

That interview Elon Musk did was epic! I think telling someone they can EMusk as a euphemism for go fuck yourself should be adopted.

Time to get on with the day…

Poked my head up, looked at the news. Everything is still nuts!

I did notice there was a Democrat who’d filed some paperwork for impeachment of Trump. The guy is Rep. Shri Thanedar.

Rep. Shri Thanedar.YAWN!!!!

I’m surprised that hasn’t been a Daily event.

Oh wait, I guess it’s hard to write articles of impeachment, if you’re protesting to bring a gang member back from El Salvador, or inciting Judges to make questionable rulings, or advocating for the mutilation of children, to pander to your wackjob base.

I know it sounds stupid, but my God, I just want stability!

I swear it’s like a never ending Carnaval ride. The car I’m in has one wheel with a bad bearing, another one with a chunk out of it, and clowns jumping at me round every bend.

I can see my Über Democrat stepfather nodding his head winding up for the, “See this is what you get when you don’t vote Democrat,” gloating. Until I finish the thought.

It’s been like we’re circling the toilet bowl since the Obama Administration. Okay honestly, Bush² may have been when things really started to go off the rails.

Now in Trump² it’s beginning to look like Democrat obstructionism, lawfare, and not having a better idea will continue.

But wait, there’s more! For a limited time, we can have more rioting and looting, incited by Democrat leadership. Yippee!

State Sen. Lola Smallwood-Cuevas.I want to be clear, I don’t regret voting for Trump. Had the Democrat party offered a superior candidate, I would have voted Democrat.

They didn’t. They offered Kamala Harris and a buffoon, who would have continued on with policies that weren’t working.

For example: Welfare fraud under $25,000 in California could be decriminalized due to Senate Bill 560, which was introduced by State Sen. Lola Smallwood-Cuevas.

Th 1863706216.Kamala Harris was a terrible AG for California. A do nothing Senator. She was a horrible Vice President and clearly out of her depth. Waltz, was no better. He might actually have been worse. (Hard as that is to fathom!)

Minnesota Walz 92383-748774340.That being said, my vote for Trump was a vote that I feared would likely result in 4 more years of the Democrat party showing their asses and obviously not getting the message.

We can’t continue on as we’ve been. Our spending is unsustainable.

Offshoring industries, likewise offshores jobs, (not everyone is suited to work a fast food counter,) we were spending too much money on illegal immigration, at the expense of our own citizens. I don’t care if illegals were paying taxes, they’d simply supplanted citizens who also would have been paying taxes but were now unemployed.

The underlying problem may well be corporate greed, but yelling about it, then increasing regulations, offshoring jobs, and not fixing the problem wasn’t improving anything. Nor was moving toward a globalist government or economic model under the direction of the WEF.

The WEF is not and likely, never has been, our friend. Looking at the larger picture, I sincerely wonder if they’re anyone’s friend. Many of their policies seem aimed at creating dependency. Particularly when smaller countries are examined.

There are a number of cases where productive countries who were feeding their people, and exporting their goods, (in other words doing okay,) joined or implemented WEF policies, and suddenly found themselves with people starving in the streets. What followed was insurrections and revolutions.

Yet the travails of the American People were ignored. The January 6 protest, (In Democrat Parlance, an “insurrection that was worse than 9/11″,) was the American people essentially asking, “What the FUCK are you people doing?”

That too fell on deaf ears.

Politicians choice to ignore the will of the American people led directly to Trump, both times!

The Biden years led directly to a large percentage of the American People demanding an accounting of just how much government corruption there was. DOGE is the result of that demand. 

The Democrat party is in disarray. Trump moving at breakneck speed as he has done, is about cutting the parasites out of government and keeping them so off balance that they couldn’t keep up with events enough to mount a defense.

At the risk of invoking NAZI imagery, Trump and his administration mounted a Blitzkrieg, not just against the Democrats, but against corrupt politicians in general.

Have you noticed how many Representatives and Senators have decided not to seek reelection? In the run up to the midterms, I think we’ll see a lot more from both sides of the aisle doing the same.

But now, as the first 100 days come to a close and the Blitzkrieg comes to an end, I suspect that my prediction about a second Trump Presidency will turn out to be true.

The Democrats, other corrupt politicians, organizations, lobbyists, and whatever cabal of corporations, have begun to regain their footing. They’re not off balance anymore.

Now they’re going to capitalize on the hatred they’ve created toward Trump and those who voted for him. They’ll engage in impeachment, and another summer of “Love”.

They’ll try to back Trump into a corner wherein he’ll have little choice but to deploy national guard to restore order and execute one of the primary responsibilities of the Government.

It’s in the freaking preamble of The Constitution of The United States.

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

The 35 words of the Presidents Oath of Office are;

I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.

If you read the preamble, and take it literally. The part about insuring domestic tranquility will most likely be where Trump goes.

The primary responsibility of the Government is to insure safety of the citizenry.

If/when the national guard rolls on the streets of Chicago, New York, Seattle, Portland, and Los Angeles. Trump will be labeled a NAZI, a Dictator, an Emperor,  then the corrupt politicians and their henchmen will take him off at the knees.

They’ll tie his administration up in endless hearings thereby deleting any benefit of his administration.

We’ll have 3 years, and 265 days of endless bullshit. The country will remain polarized, the economy will stall, and we’ll all suffer for it.

The corrupt will run out the clock, they’ll present someone with great hair, a winning smile, and a mouth full of honey.

That person will talk about unity, peace, better jobs, the homeless, the poor, the disadvantaged, and how evil Republicans are. They’ll appeal to emotions like revenge and retribution.

That person will “win” the next presidential election. Then, they’ll say, “We have so much unrest, we’ll need to keep the nation guard in place until things calm down.” They’ll blame it all on the Trump Administration and probably set up a “Tip” line, so that “Good” citizens can report insurrectionist speech, while extolling the virtues of weeding out the evil in our midst.

And then, we’ll be living in a police state. Or there will be a revolution.

My money is on Gavin Newsom as the Democrats choice.

So it’s with this running as a simulation in my head, that I say I want to go back to freaking stability!

I’d like to go back to the ‘80s or ‘90s where sure, there were problems and issues but at least I lived my life pretty simply. I literally never thought about the government except at tax time, or if there was some monumentally stupid thing happening.

I worked, I was generally happy, global issues were beyond my control or concern, and it was quiet.

Back then I couldn’t conceive of the insanity of today. Orwell, and Rand, were fictions. The sun was gentle, the beaches were clean, the ocean warm, and my culture, future, and country, were secure. Or so I thought.

I suspect I was running the simulation in my sleep. I don’t remember dreaming about any of this, but when I woke this morning, Jesse was cuddled up next to me with his head on my arm.

He doesn’t typically engage in that kind of cuddling behavior, he’s more of a, “We’ll sleep when we’re dead,” kind of dog.

But if I’m sick, hurt, or restless while sleeping, he tries to comfort me. I have to give him credit, he’s really a sweet dog, even when he’s a pain in my ass.

I hate like hell that I have no choice but to disrupt his life, and mine, with packing up and finding some other place that we can afford to live. I can’t compete in a job market where standing behind a counter running a cash register requires a fucking Master’s Degree. 

That is the level to which higher education seems to have been devalued. I’m seeing more and more simple retail positions here where Masters Degrees are required. I guess it’s the only way an employer these days can make certain you’re able to read, do basic math & count back change.

That’s another post for another time…