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Some people…

I used to care about people. I used to warn people away from danger.

I got tired of being cursed at, told to mind my business, frankly I got tired of people purposely leaving mounds of trash behind because I’d annoyed them. 

I only made comment out of genuine concern that they or their children would get hurt.

I don’t anymore.

This photo is of a father of the year!

This guy, and his children are playing in a flood control channel.

While the dog and I were making our way up the access road, the water had risen such that this guy moved his kids twice.

He was very busy having an animated conversation on his phone, so I suspect it didn’t cross his mind that the problem wasn’t his children moving into the water, it was that the water was rising and also gaining speed.

In my 45 minute walk down the access road nearest my home, down to a main road, then back up the other side essentially making a “U” where the bottom of the “U” shape is a paved bridge. The sound of rushing water increased quite a bit.

The dog at one point stopped and looked at the wash, cocking his head as dogs sometimes do when assessing a situation.

The rising sound of rushing water is one of those things you listen for, if you’re used to mountains and the “washes” that happen around their bases.

I suppose that would apply to any river prone to flooding. In our case, the wash tends to flash flood.

Typically this happens during a heavy rainstorm, but it can also happen with snow melt.

Snow melt is what we have today. 

We got about a foot of snow Wednesday & Thursday. The temperature was, at one point 26°F.

Today, the temperature hit 56°F and it was very sunny.

Riddle me this Batman; “What happens when all that snow melts? Where does the runoff go?”

For comparison sake, the photo with the dog was taken on the access road on Thursday. The dog is actually standing on a flat rock buried in the snow. He’d been about chest high in snow just moments before.

The photo at right is pretty much what the access road looks like today.

The water is rising in the wash. Perhaps by this evening it will be roaring.

What kills me about this Father of the year, is there are signs posted all along the wash saying it’s Dangerous, Do Not Enter, The county assumes no liability for your injuries, in the event that you come to harm.

And yet…

Even the dog and I don’t go into the wash except in the dead of summer after months of zero rain. Why? Because there is a lot of water making its way down from the mountain top.

But if I said anything to the genius with his kids standing dead center in the wash,  I’d have been the bad guy. It’s not just water. Sometimes, really big boulders roll down the wash channel along with the water.

I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s not worth my time or effort to bother trying to protect an idiot and his potentially mentally defective offspring.

It’s much less hassle to let Darwinism sort it out.

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Happy time change!

It’s just a single hour. It shouldn’t make that big a difference.

Yet, Seeing that it’s 9 am when the sun and my body are saying it’s 8 am really screws me up.

It’ll take a week or more for me to readjust and let’s not even talk about poor Jesse. 

He’s all about the sun in the sky and doesn’t appreciate his schedule being messed with because I’m obeying some numbers on a clock face.

I’ll spend the next month glancing at the clock and thinking I’m always late, not to mention what this does to my sleep.

I thought we weren’t going to be playing this game anymore. Didn’t California have some legislation pending, didn’t Trump promise to do away with this insanity?

I’m just cranky.

I’ve never been able to get a clear answer. AZ doesn’t swap DST/Normal Time. As of today in CA our time is the same as AZ time.

What is the real time? Did AZ put a stick in the ground one day and set Noon when the stick cast no shadow? Or is the other time that we just left, the real time?

Maybe I’ll put a stick in the ground and check myself!

Have a good day, is it a shorter day or a longer day? I’m so confused!!!

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What is up with X and their prices?

I don’t know what’s going on, but X is getting flat out weird. They’ve literally doubled their price in just the past month or so.

I purchased a blue checkmark last year. My intent was to dabble a bit in monetization via putting out a virtual “tip” jar, seeing how that went then moving into subscriptions. 

I wasn’t expecting to make a lot of money, it was more about gaining experience and trust in the backend payment processing services. There are a lot of these services, and many have terrible reviews and/or horror stories about getting payouts. They’re not very highly rated on the customer support side of things either.

I’m thankful that I took advantage of X’s yearly subscription special because when I signed up for “Premium+” it was about $100 for the year.

4 Months later, that membership is $340. I’ve seen 2 price hikes in 4 months. Oh and I wasn’t able to test the subscription stuff where X paid me for content. I’ve dragged my feet on establishing the “tip” jar because their “preferred” payment processor seems like they have a lot more “Horsepower” and expense than I’m looking for.

That being said, it’s probably all a moot point anyway, because I’m not going to be renewing the subscription.

After the first price hike I was questioning renewal. After the second price hike their fate is sealed. Based on their averages there will be 4 more price hikes before my renewal date comes up.

I’m sure that I can’t afford that. As it is, I’m looking for a new web host. My current one has gotten way too expensive and every bit of their sales/support team is offshore.

Do we see a trend here?

Prices increasing, value per dollar decreasing?

X is kind of interesting. Their AI is interesting. But the value for either is not worth the price unless the algorithm allows you a wider audience that is also blue check marked. Without that wider audience making money sharing “pearls of wisdom” is a bust.

It’s funny too, when I signed up, there were always posts about people getting their first contributor check, or folks being excited to begin contributing. 

Pretty much 5 days after I signed up, those happy posts were gone. Now those sort of posts are exceedingly rare.

What’s become more common over the past few weeks has been people posting they’re not renewing their subscription, (monthly, or yearly,) and apologizing to their followers who rely on verified blue check users to remain monetized.

To be honest I’m losing my taste for X and I can’t really say why. 

I’m having far more, (as X puts it,) regretted seconds than un-regretted seconds.

That means the ROI for the subscription is low, and dropping. X increasing prices just drives more people to abandon the blue checkmark.

It’s their business, they can charge whatever they want, but I don’t have to support it.

My blue checkmark will be around until November then I’m going the be just another one of the unverified riff-raff.

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I saw this on X today. It got me thinking.

Refuse MEME.Up until March or April of 2020 I was suspicious of our Government but still naively believed that they were mostly okay, and that corruption was not the norm.

We had a new President, a supposedly novel and little understood disease, (turns out it was neither since Covid-19 is apparently a chimera virus built in a lab,) and 14 days to stop the spread.

At the time I believed that President Trump had been falsely maligned for attempting to close the border and the Nancy Pelosi and other Democrats were out of their minds fighting him on the subject. Then, as now, I think their fighting him was about nothing more than abject, bitter, hatred.

Either they knew that COVID-19 wasn’t a real threat, or they were colluding with other world leaders to make sure the whole planet was exposed. I still find it hard to wrap my head around the possibility that these politicians hated Trump so much that they’d rather burn the world down, than admit he was right.

I say this because the logic of quarantining a region where an unknown disease has originated is irrefutable.

If a disease originates in a particular region, and is essentially confined to that region, you prevent travel from or to the region. That allows time for the medical folks to suit up in biohazard suits to minister to the afflicted without contaminating the rest of the world. In no scenario do you allow travel by air to destinations around the world. 

This is actually something we’ve known since the 1950s when nuclear and biological weapons were a real possibility and our military ran endless scenarios regarding the outcomes of either, based on prevailing wind patterns.

If things had ended there, I would have written it off as a series of poor decisions and chalked it up to morons being elected to Congress.

But then it went further. Suddenly we had a vaccine, but vaccines take decades of clinical trials or at least they’re supposed to.

We had doctors suggesting caution regarding the vaccine, who were then censored.

As the situation went on, it devolved. President Biden claimed it was a pandemic of the unvaccinated and painted all those folks as pariahs for choosing to exercise their right to bodily autonomy.

It was the first time in my life that I felt completely and utterly betrayed by my government.

Worse was the sense of betrayal I felt when most of the country turned off their brains and many would gladly have seen unvaccinated people thrown into camps.

People from all walks of life suddenly felt like potential enemies, and some places went so far as to go “fascist” demanding to see your covid shot record. The NAZIs did that regarding people’s IDs and travel permits. “Where are your papers?” Was used to terrorize citizens of occupied nations.

Hospitals refused to help cancer patients or perform some surgeries on people unless they were “Cleansed” by an experimental vaccine.

I spent these years feeling more alienated than at any point in my life. What was being forced on the American people and indeed the world was absolutely, undeniably wrong.

I still feel alienated. The schism created by politics, the BLM summer of “Love”, lockdowns, and all the rest has made me feel very disconnected. 

Add the revelations of widespread waste, and potential corruption, throughout the government and, well, as the late Jerry Doyle put it in the title of his 2010 book “Have You Seen My Country Lately?: America’s Wake-Up Call” 

Have you seen my country lately? I seem to have misplaced it. Whatever this is now, it’s not the country I thought I lived in. 

Granted, Trump, Musk, Bondi, Hegseth, Vance, Patel, and all the rest claim to be working to restore our nation. They may in fact be doing that in every way but one of the most critical.

The soul of our nation had been very wounded for a long time. Thus far I’ve not heard a plan to heal that wound.  I still feel very alienated and mistrusting of my fellow citizens and more so, our government.

I don’t think we should live in the past. But I do think we shouldn’t forget how wrong things went, or how quickly. There’s a cautionary tale here, and something important to be learned.

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Whew! Democrats still big mad & I’m still working through tax stuff.

Since I’m still working through tax stuff I have very little pity for the pissed off Democrats.

Their little stunt Tuesday night may have backfired horribly.

Even CNN & NBC reporters weren’t particularly kind. But more interesting is some of the “Man on the Street” interviews have folks claiming they’re Democrats and vowing never to vote Democrat again.

I take that with a grain of salt because people on the street can claim to be anything they wish. Nonetheless it’s interesting to think about the ramifications.

Did the leadership of the Democratic Party just put a large, or perhaps, final nail in the party’s coffin? Time will tell.

They did a fine job of alienating a lot of folks with their refusal to acknowledge even good things that universally everyone should have been able to get behind.

President Trump said it flat out, when he pointed at them saying something like; There is nothing I could do or say that would make these people smile or be happy. That’s sad…

Indeed it is sad because these are the people who for the past four years were talking about unity, democracy, and truth.

What they meant of course was compliance and acceptance of their “Divine Rule”. Then they negated democracy by installing Kamala after the people had already chosen Biden for a second term, then we find out they lied for years about Biden’s decline.

I find myself asking, what did they expect when all those chickens came home to roost? Did they think the American people would simply ignore, or forget these issues? 

President Trump could have pounded them a lot harder than he did. I laughed at some of the swipes he took because they were funny. I think his approach of stating the simple truth was far more effective.

My favorite was his comment about the border. “Biden said we needed new laws to address the border, turns out all we needed was a new President.” That one cracked me up!

My personal takeaway of the subtext President Trump delivered was, “I can’t please you no matter what, so I’m not even going to try.”

Which means he’s going to move on without bothering to consult the Democrats. They’ve become irrelevant and are nothing more than a nuisance when it comes to confirmation hearings or passing bills into law.

Honestly, that worries me. There should be a healthy balance between the two parties and they should be able to discuss subjects from two different perspectives. 

That the Democrats have beclowned themselves as they have, may not be a good thing in the long run. In the short term some good might come of it.

Good, as in term limits for Congress, laws against congressional stock trading, and much closer oversight into campaign financing.

I’d like to see some oversight into just how it’s possible so many congressmen get into congress with net worths of a few hundred thousand dollars and come out of congress with millions in 2 or 6 years. Congressional salaries are high but not that high.

I’m not saying there is any wrongdoing, but you have to admit, it looks odd.

Maxine Waters was on X claiming that Donald Trump and Elon Musk stole the election by manipulating the voting count. She claims that somehow Musk and his “Hackers” put Trump in office. That really cracked me up because when Biden was elected she was all in stating anyone who disputed the election results was deluded and a conspiracy nut. 

Ilhan Omar and the rest of “The Squad” may have screwed the pooch too, with what I and many Americans perceive as, at best divided loyalties, and at worst loyalties to other countries.

A bill has been introduced to impose similar birthplace requirements the President must meet, on Congress.

This is something I’m sure that a lot of Americans will see as a good thing. I’m not so sure. While I hate that Omar is always badmouthing America, and may have cheated the immigration system. I’m not sure that excluding naturalized citizens from congress is a good thing. I don’t think it’s fair to punish everyone over someone like Omar.

On the plus side, doing so now may stave off what we’ve seen happening in Europe where large numbers of people of specific religious or national origins are welcomed, then move into politics enshrining their customs or beliefs into law and punishing those who disagree, or even ask questions. 

See England for examples.

The down side is that welcomed, legal, immigrant groups may end up waiting a generation before they’re fully represented in Congress. At this point, that may be a non-issue, I’m not sure.

I saw one talking head suggesting this is xenophobic. I think that’s a bullshit argument. It’s not xenophobia, I think it’s more a kind of protectionism.

As an aside, If you want to talk about xenophobia let’s look at the members of Congress saying that Elon Musk should go back to South Africa even though he’s been a naturalized citizen for over 20 years.

Ideally, I think you want people in Congress to have deep ties to the country and their constituents. I’m not sure how to best meet these needs and exclude people like Omar, Talib, & AOC, who clearly seem to hate our nation, our people, and our history.

There’s another idea I’ve seen floated on social media suggesting that Congressional candidates should have to take, and pass, the same exam regarding The Constitution and rights that naturalized citizens take as part of their citizenship application, before their candidacy is valid.

That might be a good idea. Maybe adding cognitive testing should be part of the candidacy process for Congress and the Presidency as well.

It’s really interesting to note that 29 Congresspersons were born outside the United States. Of those, 25 are Democrats. That seems to be a rather skewed percentage.

There is a part of me that thinks Voter ID and paper ballots might change the balance. Incidentally, I believe that a national law requiring ID and paper ballots should be a top priority of the Trump administration and Congress.

That would go a long way toward putting an end to allegations of voter fraud. It would probably limit any voter fraud to an acceptable percentage of .001 percent. It would sure make me more willing to accept election results.

I’d like to see us go back to voting on one day. It might be a good thing to make Election Day a national holiday as some have suggested.

I’d even like to see mail-in ballots limited, and certainly not automatically sent as they are in California and some other states.

I think we should have to request a mail in ballot prior to each election. In other words, the citizens would have to be responsible enough to plan ahead.

Really, don’t we want engaged voters? You know, voters who actually pay attention and exercise their right to vote with purpose, instead of getting the mail and guessing about candidates in the voting booth?

The primary opposition to these sorts of things are always Democrats. They make excuses like not everyone has ID, or poor folks can’t afford ID, or deployed military folks would be excluded from voting. 

All of which could be easily addressed. Give everyone free basic state ID that has citizenship clearly marked, as the Real-ID act calls for. Make exceptions for deployed military members, although I’d bet you could have voting in person and tabulation at every single military base. I’d go so far as to believe the military results could be certified and reported by midnight.

Congress001_original 1.I’m very in favor of simple common sense changes being made that should make things better for everyone.

This is all stuff that’s been running through my mind while I’ve been searching for various documents with numbers on them to plug into various tax forms.

I’d probably be a lot less pissed off filing my taxes, if I had faith that our government wasn’t a hot mess of compromised officials.

Oh well, back to the document search.

Have a good day.