Category: General

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Good Golly!

The beat goes on.

The insane beat that is. New Orleans, Las Vegas, A New York subway where a woman is burned to death and a) nobody helped. b) the lady appeared to just stand there. Fog that people claim isn’t fog, unknown drones in the New Jersey sky.

New flu, Bill Gates still researching mosquitoes that can vaccinate, reports of people in hospitals given Covid vaccine without their consent while under anesthesia, reports of some kind of mRNA vaccine that is airborne & uses humans as a transmission vector, mask requirements are back in some places, some kind of weird respiratory affliction that is causing low level discomfort.

People looking up and noticing, apparently for the first time that planes sometime leave condensation in their wake. Although there are other bits of information that suggest this isn’t condensation but is instead some kind of chemical.

This is just a small sampling of the buzz on X.

At the rate conspiracy theories have been proving true lately, I’m not counting anything out. I’m a skeptic but I am starting to wonder.

Even the actual facts don’t make sense. One guy drives through a crowd for no apparent reason then gets out of his rented vehicle and starts shooting? Why?

Another guy rents a cybertruck, of all things, drives from Colorado to Las Vegas stops to recharge 8 times, taking the long way from point a to point b. Then shoots himself, and blows up the truck in front of a Trump hotel. Oh and the guy is ex military, and knows how to make a bomb big enough to have taken the front of the hotel off, instead, the explosion is confined mostly to the cybertruck and does only minimal damage to the hotel.

Then we find that the fire was hot enough to burn the body beyond recognition, & melt some of the weapons he was carrying, but that his plastic military ID and the data storage in his phone somehow survived?

An odd coincidence is that the vehicles in both cases were rented via Temu. I never heard of Temu before. My Sick side wonders if this was some perverse publicity stunt to get Temu on the map so to speak.

None of this makes sense and looks like people are just randomly losing their minds. Don’t even look at the way people behave on planes anymore.

We’re not even 5 days into the new year. It looks like this is going to be an interesting year.

There are those who claim that the world government, (whatever that is,) wants to kill us all and that our own government is complicit in this dastardly plan.

I’m not sure.

I’ve been contemplating the assertion that the “World Elite Government” wants us dead. If I accept that as true then I ask why? It doesn’t serve their purpose. Without the peons who will grow their food, harvest it, cook it, and be a slave to them catering to their every whim?

How will they keep the lights on, stay warm and comfortable in their mountain or beachfront villas? There is a singular truth proven time and again. Those at the very top of our society have very few real world practical skills. Without an underclass with knowhow they’ll be dead as soon as the food or fuel runs out.

How will they remain wealthy without tax revenues rolling in? There has to be a logic to wanting to kill everyone off. Remaining one of the comfortable elite becomes far more difficult without a population to oppress and control.

Alternatively, there have been rumors about some kind of UFO disclosure. I find myself wondering if the “World Elite Government” isn’t intending to actually kill us off. What would happen if an alien species had made a deal with the elites for food? What if all the chemicals and drugs aren’t to kill us, but are instead some kind of marinade? Like the old Twilight Zone episode To Serve Man.

I’d consider moving to another country. But it’s just as insane elsewhere as it is in America.

Honestly if I could afford it, I think I’d like to live in Norway Iceland, Greenland, or Sweden. Just a little cabin along a fjord. Some fields, maybe raising goats or sheep. A short ride to a smallish village and generally being left the hell alone.

An island, a forest, or practically anywhere would serve just as well as long as I didn’t have to deal with the nuttiness.

Hmm… Suddenly, I can see the appeal of the elites wanting to reduce the population…

I’ve always suspected Thanos from the Marvel Comics wasn’t far off base. He was morally ambiguous, but cutting 1/2 the population of the universe would insure enough resources for everyone.

Here on earth, one might accept that plagues like the Black Death, and Spanish Flu of 1918 were failsafes. A sort of natural population control. You might even view COVID as a failed human attempt at triggering a “culling”.

I’m turning off the news, and ignoring the communication systems for the next few days. This train of thought is dark and even though I feel better than I have for about a week. I don’t need any help finding myself on the path to a dark depression.

Have a great weekend. Fingers crossed nothing else crazy happens.

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New Years Eve

I hope that everyone has a safe and happy new years celebration.

I’ve got big plans!

I’m going to bed.

2024 can go, just like 2023 & 2022 before it. This new year will be much like the old year. The only question will be what the entertainment will be. We’ve had drones over New Jersey. Now we’ve got “unnatural” fog sweeping some areas of the country.

X is alive with people trying to up their engagement counts with spooky accounts of fog in their area.

I don’t know what the end game is. These events seem to be geared to create low level anxiety. It’s working in some people, in others it’s another big nothing burger.

Although, I do recall tales of un-natural fog in Europe during the plague. There are woodcuts depicting black clad figures in the fog and records of entire villages dead in just a few days.

Ancient Alien Theorists suggest that plagues associated with these fog events were aliens making modifications to the human genome. The fatalities were nothing more than collateral damage as the aliens improved upon the genetics of humanity.

Yeah, uh huh.

At this point I almost hope aliens are exterminating the vermin!

On Jan 20th we’ll either have a new president sworn in or a civil war. I’d say it’s even money at this point. Folks like Jamie Raskin out of New York are claiming that the Democrats will be able to disqualify Trump’s election. He claims there’s some super secret special handshake or something.

I think, him saying shit like this is irresponsible because when it doesn’t pan out, in their desperation, the lunatic fringe democrats will be apoplectic. Trump gets sworn in, the fringe left loses their damn minds and shit starts burning down.

I’m somewhat curious to see a crowd of leftist loons stomp around the capital or perhaps march through the capital attempting to disrupt the certification process, burning, looting, and destroying as they go.

I want to see the major news media spin their actions as different from Jan 6th 2021. That would be interesting. Hell, I’d pour myself a drink, make some popcorn and actually pay for cable just to see Joy Reed tie herself in knots justifying the lunatic left and demonizing the Racist MAGA Right!

I do hope the new year will be better than the last few. I’m not counting on it, but do have my fingers crossed.

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I can’t say the news of Jimmy Carter’s death was surprising.

When they hauled him out to support Kamala Harris, it was pretty obvious that he wasn’t doing well. May he rest in peace.

I felt really bad for him, he wasn’t the best president, but he was a decent man and he didn’t deserve to be paraded around like it appeared the party was doing. Especially not just to prop up a candidate. I thought it was very unseemly.

I wasn’t likely to vote for Kamala anyway, but I imagine that some folks were wondering if this was another example of the Democrat party simply being too damn old.

That’s not to say the Republican Party is any better. Mitch McConnell is obviously no spring chicken. I’ve written elsewhere in the blog that he should retire and go home to Kentucky.

As we wind down the year, I’m hoping for some peace and quiet. Maybe a week of just silence, reflection, and everyone taking a breath.

I know I’m pissing into the wind.

With the inauguration coming up, I’m positive there’s going to be massive insanity and after the inauguration there will be newer, stupider, levels of insanity. I hope that Trump can in fact do some good. Who knows? Maybe he will before the machine in Washington, (comprised of scum of the earth Democrats & Republicans,) manages to start thwarting anything and everything that he tries to accomplish. That’s predicated on Trump living up to his ad copy. I’m not sure, and have never been totally sure, about Trump or his reasoning in becoming president. The times I’ve voted for him were, in reality, votes against his opponents.

I’m hopeful of Trump and DOGE.

I have always thought that the United States government should be run like a business. The inefficiency and stupid regulations make everything in the government cost double or triple what it should.

Here’s a quick example of what I’m talking about. I once worked on a project where the government had specified the exact model of CPU and exact type of memory, down to the number of pins each chip was to have.

The problem is, technology advances, new chips are designed yearly, everything gets faster, smaller, and less power hungry. The project itself was supposed to run for 5 years, in reality it had been running for 10, and was likely to run for another 10 years when I joined it.

In the time that passed, the chips used in the project had gone from being leading edge to discontinued. The government, rather than update the specifications and adapt, chose to have the old chips custom manufactured, at 20 times the cost of current commercially available models which did the same thing faster and were 100% backward compatible.

This is one way that toilet seats cost $6000.00

I don’t know if there’s any truth to a story I heard about a government “Quality Inspector” who saved his job and lined his pockets, by “discovering” that the insulation on wire wasn’t the proper thickness.

Electrical insulation, like everything else is constantly improving. As materials science advances we discover new materials that work the same as, or better, than old materials. What supposedly happened is that the wire insulation in this guys project had converted from a rubberized vinyl to a teflon vinyl material. The latter being lighter, tougher, less prone to abrasive damage, and providing superior insulation qualities at higher voltages. It was also thinner.

At some point, 20 years before, when the project was being contemplated, some brilliant jackass had for reasons unknown, measured and then wrote into a specification, the thickness of the rubberized insulation on the wire the project was using at the time.

Our “Quality Inspector” protected his job and the jobs of others on the project by making a stink about the wire being out of specification. He neglected to mention the new wire was superior in every way. His findings were that the wire was out of spec and the project would have to secure wire that met the spec then rework all the machinery that incorporated the “out of spec” wire. This also meant that he & his brother in law could purchase a small abandoned wire manufacturing plant that just so happened to make wire with the right thickness insulation. They charged 3 times market price and their only customer was the United States Government.

This is how government waste is perpetuated, and why it costs $25 thousand dollars for a military radio with shittier specifications and capabilities than a consumer product for $500 dollars.

Trump & his DOGE department have a lot more to do than just slash their way through the bureaucracy in Washington D.C. I think their time limit is unrealistic too.

So much of the waste is literally written into what amounts to law within the congressional budget it will take years of effort to cut. I could see warehouses being filled with custom made, government issue, obsolete rotary dial telephones because of a line item in a budget from 1968 is still in force.

The kicker is, over the years, property might have been purchased, then new warehouses built to house the overflow of rotary dial phones that were no longer in use.

That’s the less obvious kind of waste that needs to be burned out of our government. I don’t think DOGE is up to it. I don’t think they have a clue what they’re up against, just how far the waste goes, or the consequences of severing the snakes head. For all anyone knows, government waste might be a hydra where cutting off one head gets you 2 more.

I may apply to work for them. Just for the hell of it, it might be fun. A man should enjoy his work shouldn’t he?

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Christmas Dinner was a bust, and not a bust…

Let me explain.

At Thanksgiving, the kind neighbors who invited me to their Thanksgiving & I got to talking. They’d had some family members show up and while their table accommodated us all, things were a bit cramped.

I suggested that we should have taken the food to my place and used my table since it is bigger and opens out to an even bigger configuration.

That led to the neighbor saying that Christmas will be at my place…

I accepted the challenge.

I spent the next month cleaning and making my home more like it had been when Jerry & I first moved in. The original idea was that the house would be uncluttered. Courtesy of the fire in ’08 we literally had nothing to clutter the place with. In our furniture selection, we tried to pick things that worked while preserving an “open” comfortable feeling to the house.

It worked very nicely, while Jerry’s instruments and music were at the church. When the church job ended the battle with clutter that had been more or less manageable suddenly became a major problem. I’ve been systematically going through and disposing of many of Jerry’s things over the past 2 years. Most of the items I’ve disposed of within the last 8 months. 

Clearing some things out of the dining area and then the kitchen area really opened the space up. It was a lot of work moving the stuff down to the garage. I re-tasked some of the cubbies that Jerry had relied upon for storage of his music, and bits of technology. This helped a little when It came to getting my tools organized in the garage.

At some point during this process,  I realized that I was smiling in the morning while getting my coffee.

The house, even with the Christmas tree was open, more free, more comfortable. I understood that part of this was me reclaiming my space. The pain of Jerry’s loss wasn’t so sharp. I was relaxing more into my own skin.

That spurred me on to more cleaning & sorting. There’s a lot to do in the office, basement, and garage but I’m pleased with the outcome this far. For however long this lasts I’m comfortable. That’s not to say that I was uncomfortable with all of Jerry’s stuff, but there were times when I felt like I was being squeezed out of this house because he kept adding more and more stuff.

Anyway by the time Christmas Eve rolled around, I’d cleaned vacuumed, scrubbed floors, straightened, & hand washed all the dishes and glasses that were to be used for the Christmas Dinner.

I went to bed Christmas Eve feeling pretty good. Jesse on the other hand, was sick to his stomach a couple of times during the night and I ended up cleaning the carpet (spot cleaning) at least once.

Christmas Day, Jesse & I went on our usual walk, came home, and then I started cooking Christmas Dinner. About 1:00PM, I texted my neighbors telling them dinner would be ready about 3. I didn’t hear back from them.

Dinner was ready by 3 and I kept everything warm until 4. When I still hadn’t heard anything, I went ahead and ate. I’d put a lot of effort into everything. I decided that even if they weren’t going to come over, I was going to enjoy the meal I’d prepared.

So I did. The ham was good, the wine was a nice pairing and the other portions of the meal were tasty.

I may have enjoyed it alone, but I demonstrated to myself that I know how to lay out a decent table if I’m entertaining. Moreover, I’m not dependent on anyone else but me to be happy.

I am very tired today and I’m not going to do anything. Hell, I may even take an old man nap. Sometime within the next few days, I’ll start taking the Christmas stuff down. The plan is to consolidate and repack the Christmas stuff, so that it’s easier to identify and perhaps move.

Tomorrow I’m planning to resume the job search and if I’m lucky perhaps I’ll land something that I can do remotely.

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Wow, Twitter is dangerous for me

Not really, but it is very easy to lose time with it.

Why is this on my mind today?

Long story short, I was reading the morning news, after reading today’s thought in The Daily Stoic.

A news article led me to a tweet, which I opened to read. That led me to the news that a nice person I’d interacted with via Twitter, in Canada died on the 6th.

He’d gone to the hospital a day or two before with chest pain and the hospital decided he wasn’t having a problem, therefore wasn’t an emergency and the hospital staff put him back in the waiting room. After spending 6 hours in the waiting room he said “fuck it,” and went home.

Apparently he died at home. He was 39.

I was taken back to Jerry’s death and the way the hospital here and our medical people treated him, then him dying at home. Which led me to doom scrolling through twitter. 

All of this ties oddly back to The entry in The Daily Stoic, which is talking about everything ending. Empires, to lives everything ends. It doesn’t do well to dwell on it, but it’s equally not good to ignore that time is a predator that stalks us all.

And that leads back to twitter/ X. Which is insidious in the manner in which it steals our time, while not providing a lot in the way of tangible benefit. 

I was right all though years ago when I walked away from social media. I’ll be walking away from social media again real soon.

I have other things that I want to do rather than pissing my life away engaging with almost nightmarish insanity that social media is, and always has been.